Cheating, a design decision?
by Tim on Mar.16, 2009, under Games, Hobbies, Rants
I recently started trying to finish up Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (CotW) in anticipation of the release of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. I’ve been looking forward to Galactrix (Galactrix) since they announced it, but now I’m not so sure it’s as highly anticipated as it was. In finishing up CotW, I remembered why I stopped playing in the first place. The fact that upper level characters always seemed to get exactly what they needed, long cascades , and extra turns.
It seems that in creating a difficulty curve for CotW, Infinite Interactive decided to give the computer the advantage by allowing it to influence the outcome of the AI moves. In essence, the computer cheats. Instead of giving higher level NPC’s enhanced stats to compensate for the player improving, they allow the game to cheat. All but the final boss do the same amount of damage as the first rat you encounter. The final boss however has the benefit of improved stats, much higher hit points, AND it still cheats.
This has some battles coming down to luck, and leaves the player feeling frustrated when the computer gets turn after turn of good moves and then they are left with turns that don’t give them anything they can actually use.
I’m disappointed that more time wasn’t spent in designing the NPC’s so that cheating isn’t necessary. I’ve heard that the PC version of Galactrix suffers from the same problems although the game has been designed to alleviate it a bit. It doesn’t remove the cheating but allows the players more tools to combat it. That’s not much better, and now I’m not sure if I want to give my money to a company that feels it is okay to cheat the customer.
March 17th, 2009 on 12:55 am
You’ve got a good point, but I’ll probably still end up picking it up…flawed or not it’s still a lot better than most of the crap on the marketplace…and I should know since I have 53 arcade games…
March 17th, 2009 on 7:36 am
I’ll probably end up getting myself, as long as they don’t run the price through the roof. The sting of watching the computer get break after break while I got got squat was still fresh as I wrote that. After a couple of weeks, and some time with Peggle I should be okay again.
March 18th, 2009 on 12:19 pm
heh…I find Peggle more frustrating than Puzzle Quest, but I guess that’s what Carcassonne and Worms is for…
March 18th, 2009 on 1:51 pm
Yeah, but at least Peggle is fair while it’s being frustrating. If I miss a peg it’s because I aimed wrong, not because the peg moved at the last second. Oh well, the Puzzle Quest is one of the better games/series on XBLA and it does give a lot of play time for your money so I can’t complain too much.