It has been a long time since a game has captured my interest beyond its initial playthrough (Planescape: Torment and the Baldur’s Gate series aside), but King’s Bounty has done it; more specifically its sequel King’s Bounty – Armored Princess. When you begin the game you are met with your character creation screen. You can choose between a warrior with emphasis on killing others with a huge army, a paladin which functions as an intermediary between the warrior and the mage, and finally a mage which puts emphasis on using spells to subsidize its small army size. The choice between the three classes is relatively easy to make with or without prior knowledge to how each class fairs within the game. But there is one last section that you have to fill out before you are let loose into the game world and that is the level of difficulty. These range from default being normal downwards to easy and upwards from normal to hard and impossible. What is interesting about this is that King’s Bounty – Armored Princess is not a particularly hard game. It does take some time to get used to the idea of limited resources (in contrast to its cousin Heroes of Might and Magic) and strategy options, but once that is over it is a relatively smooth ride. The AI is predictable and battles, though they appear random, are actually predetermined from the start in terms of damage, AI choice of attack and critical percentage. So what do I to make the game more interesting? I increase the difficulty. But that’s not enough. Not nearly enough.
I ramp up the difficulty.
A visit to the game company’s website, 1C Company, gave me some pretty interesting results. Upon visiting the forum boards, I spotted several threads with a derivative formula which went like this:
“Impossible [x class] no loss”
Upon clicking these threads I discovered methods put up by other players as to their accomplishments of beating the game without suffering any army loss on the hardest difficulty with a particular class (mage is regarded as the hardest to play due to small army size). Seeing other players accomplishing this and feeling that normal mode was too trivial, I decided to follow in their footsteps and began a impossible mage no loss playthrough. Within the first minutes of play I noticed the difficulty of the task. This required careful planning. The selection of troops to choose from is limited to the lowest level – no real firepower. This meant that each troop does poor damage when in low numbers. This would result in high troop losses and without the appropriate resources it would be, true to the namesake of the difficulty, impossible to complete the challenge. It proved harder to finish the game than I realized and so I went back to the forums to clearly understand what exactly these players had done to accomplish this insurmountable feat.
A Wise Man Once Said…
My second visit to the forums gave me a crucial piece of information in relation to my dilemma of using low level creatures. These players had visited the areas within the game where higher level creatures were offered. They had then used these creatures to combat the lower level creatures found within the first areas of the game to gain experience, level up their character and increase their army size. They would remain two steps ahead of the level range in the given areas and once they would enter high levels areas containing the same monsters they had previously recruited, their army size would more than enough compensate for the equal level of creature power. It sounded fairly simple, but as always there was a catch. To reach these high level areas, I had to obtain a map chart which was guarded by a high level creature – well above your level (and even more so due to the increased difficulty). So how would I get past? The answer was kiting. For those that may not be familiar with the term, kiting refers to the act of luring an object away from its original position. There are many applications of this such as doing it to gain terrain advantage, pull one monster away from a horde so you only fight one at a time or to gain access to something the monster is guarding. In my case it was the latter. After much trial and error I succeeded in getting enough map charts to reach the high level areas and come back with high level equipment and monsters making the monster fights very easy. All went well and I completed my impossible mage no loss run two to three weeks later. But upon completion, I asked myself some questions.
Too many questions, not enough answers
Why did I choose impossible mode and complete it the way I did? Why did I choose to resort to kiting the guards from their respective posts instead of just fighting them? And finally, why did I get the sense of me having exploited the system to complete it a certain way? All these questions were related to the feeling that I had perhaps utilized the system in a way in which it was not meant to be used. Consider these instances:
1) the act of kiting is a valid tactic as it can be performed on any normal monster encountered within the world. However, the guards had had their “detection” radius significantly lowered to the point that you figuratively had to stand on top of them for them to respond to your presence. This has led me to the belief that the possibility of kiting the guards through rigorously save/reloading when the attempt failed was not a feature intended by the developers.
2) The guards had a substantially larger army compared to other monsters in the same area. They required more resources to take down. If we assume that the easiest solution to progress in the game is to defeat monsters of equal or lower level, then players would naturally resort to defeating and removing obstacles within their limit. From a game design perspective this would make sense as the guards would mark the end of interest in the area and the reward would be to progress to a new area and reinitiate the process over again.
The most obvious answer I have to these questions is surprisingly also the simplest one: I wanted to beat the challenge. The challenge was to complete the game on impossible mode as a mage while incurring no losses in combat. I succeeded in the challenge. How I succeeded was not of relevance until the above questions appeared. Did I exploit the system? Did I play in another way than the developers had intended? Could I essentially be compared to a cheater who had given himself the mightiest army in the game and still completed it on impossible as a mage while occurring no losses in combat? Essentially, why do I want the game to hit me, but not too hard? Why do I exploit the system if the challenge proves too great?
To that, I have no answer and I do not think I ever will. It seems to go beyond the scope of a game related question and more into the nature of what it means to be a human. The challenge could be analogous to a challenge given in the real world. It could be an exam or it could be a football match. Would I still exploit the system to achieve the results I wanted? No, I would not and never will. To do so would forfeit the point of completing the challenge. To that answer, you can ask the question: then why is it okay within the video game to exploit the system? The answer can’t be “because it is possible”; cheating is also possible at an exam or performance enhancers are also possible to use to boost your output in a sports event.
I think I will stop here as my questioning only leads to more questions and less answers. Ultimately I can only say that I do not know why there is a distinction between the real and virtual world in terms of behavior and attitude. I can only guess that it has something to do with the presence of the artificial that makes me assume that some things do not carry the same amount of weight as they do in the real world.
Hagen Productions 