Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Source!

The versatility of the Source Engine has long stood as one of its greatest selling points, so much so that it’s kind of old hat to even mention it. But recent events have brought this to the forefront of my thoughts about gaming. Long term readers will recall that Defense of the Ancients, or DotA, is a game near and dear to my heart, and that DotA clones are a hobby horse of mine. Most recently DOTA 2 began releasing massive amounts of footage and information to the public in the form of a fascinating and incredibly lucrative invitational tournament where the finest teams in DotA-dom beat the shit out of each other for our entertainment. This would be impressive enough on its own, but DOTA 2 and its smooth, efficient play is all coming to us courtesy of the Source engine.

It’s not the first top down game to come out of the Source Engine, sure. But it is the first RTS game to use Source’s venerable tools to bring its play to bear, at least that I’m aware of, and it’s a testament to the versatility of the engine that it is absolutely indistinguishable from all of the other DotA clones. I’m sure that some unique element from the Source Engine will make itself known during play, some sort of operational physics perhaps, or improved arbitration of DotA’s many obtuse rules. I can’t wait to see just how DOTA 2 makes the Source Engine work for its needs.

This comes on the heels of my finally playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, another genre bending game that totally defied all of my expectations. For the uninitiated, Might and Magic is a venerable real time strategy title that has a bunch of generic fantasy stuff in it which I have been informed is actually described by an elaborate canonical underpinning. It’s mostly about armies of orcs fighting armies of people and people usually winning. Dark Messiah is a first person shooter set in that world, filled with might and maybe a little magic if you level your character up properly.

It’s a fascinating first-person-slasher, a melee combat oriented first person shooter that also occasionally allows you to cast spells, use physics operable objects and shoot bows every once in a great while. It also has jumping puzzles galore, key hunts, switches that you’ll pull to make things happen, weak cutscene-ish story asides and everything else first person shooters bring to bear. Coupled on to all of this is a leveling system that allows you to purchase skills for your character which dramatically change the way the game plays, eventually shaping your character into a role falling between or into one of three traditional fantasy classes: fighter, mage and thief.

It’s a middling game with an interesting concept and a lot of repetition (by the end of the game you’ll be a little sick of ramping up your attack of choice and letting it loose on every enemy you see). The leveling system actually does a great job of encouraging specialization while permitting a little bit of multi-classing, and the product as a whole hangs together wonderfully, even if it does drag a bit by the end. Cyclops will transform from exciting bosses to lamentable chores later on, and the final boss fight is more annoying than interesting or challenging. It has pacing problems, like most shooters, issues with its own learning curve, level design and voice acting. The writing is sloppy, even if it does switch up a few classic bits of the “chosen one” trope that video games love investing themselves in so much.

Aside from its overarching concept, it’s not even really worth discussing as a game. It has all of the problems that middling examples of all of its various genres have, and it shapes them into a competently executed product worth about fifteen to twenty dollars, depending on how much you like seeing new game play concepts executed. Thief did the sneaking, slashing and exploring from a first person perspective earlier and better, and Deus Ex did being kind of an RPG better. Deus Ex did boss fights way better, which is saying quite a bit considering how frustrating so many of its fights were. The only thing that nets Dark Messiah a place in a thousand word piece instead of a place in a two hundred word piece is that it showcased the versatility of the Source Engine.

That’s right, all that wacky blending of genres I just defined was accomplished entirely within the generous confines of the Source Engine. All of the leveling, all of the exploring, all of the fighting, the environmental manipulating, the crazy little jumping puzzles and the magic, all of it worked in Source. And all of it worked seamlessly, without loading screens of breaks. Even Bioshock’s amazing alteration of the Unreal Engine needed loading screens and menus to separate out its leveling and character development from the rest of the game, but the Source Engine accommodated all that and more in Dark Messiah. As a work of game design it’s middling in every way, but as a feat of engineering Dark Messiah is fantastic. It showcases the power of an engine which, at its inception, was considered just a fantastic means of delivering real-time physics to shooter game play. It took the Source Engine and shaped it into something new.

This is the power of the Source Engine, the power it shows through both middling games like Alien Swarm and Dark Messiah as well as amazing games that have long subsisted on in terrible engines such as DOTA 2. It gives people the power to make their ideas shine, to bring their art and concept to life. It gives designers untold opportunities, remarkable versatility available to a far greater breadth of people than most tools they’d use. It’s so incredible it makes me see beauty in things I’d otherwise write off as meh experiences. So raise a glass to the Source Engine, to the remarkable things it is capable of and the wonderful games it’s bound to present us with for years to come.