Mind's Eye

The Devil Is in the Details of Action RPGs - Part Two: Leveling Up

2012-02-02T14:54:00.001-05:00

In the last part, I talked about the importance of loot as a motivator and game mechanic in action rpgs. The other half of the equation when it comes to character progression is leveling up. Improving characters through leveling has not changed all that much over the years. Probably because many designers copied Diablo 2's style, but that doesn't mean that it’s the de facto best way.

The challenge with the leveling up mechanic is how much should it affect the gameplay? Most action rpgs on level up, allow the player to improve their character's attributes and unlock/improve a skill. The attributes won't affect the gameplay but have an effect on what equipment is available. Skills are a big deal, as they affect the utility the player has.

One of the issues with designing skills is with the issue of scaling: where players will run through the game multiple times with stronger enemies. If a character has skills that do flat damage such as: "20-30 fire damage," those skills become noticeably weaker on repeat plays. In Diablo 2, each higher difficulty boosts the stats of all enemies which made set damage skills a waste.

To combat this, the most popular way is to implement skills that scale. Many action RPGs have skills that do: "X % of weapon DPS," where DPS stands for damage per second. Scaling allows skills to keep their viability and feeds back into loot as a motivator as now better equipment also equals more powerful skills.

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls also had scaling but it was done differently. In both titles, various weapons had an attribute that it would scale to. For example: magic wands with intelligence, or bows with dexterity. The respective attribute would also be graded on a scale of F to S if I remember right. The better the grade the more of a bonus that attribute would apply to damage. It's important to note that in both titles, there is a dropping off point of around 50 where the scaling will stop being as useful. This was probably done to prevent players from just power leveling through the game.

With that said, we can turn our attention to a few of the leveling formats used in action RPGs. Starting off with the most well known which is Diablo 2. Here, each character class has 3 completely unique linear skill trees. Each tree has the skills in order from top to bottom, or from lowest level to highest. While the final skill unlocks at level 30, players can continue leveling much further than that. Leveling up gives players 5 attribute points to distribute and one skill point. Skills can be improved multiple times with different boosts based on the skill.

The problem with Diablo 2's progression comes at how the skills are unlocked. Besides having a level requirement, each skill requires a point in a previous skill on the specific tree to use. Because of that, it leads to a lot of skills that are more or less a stepping stone for a better skill. For example, the Necromancer class has two skills relating to confusing enemies. The first one will cause one enemy to attack other enemies. The second one makes one enemy the target of all nearby enemies. Now in terms of utility, the latter is miles above the former, but you still need to waste a point in the former to get it.

This issue is even worse for the damage causing skills. Why would anyone use the bone teeth skill (level one necro attack spell) once they get access to bone spirit (level 30)? Interesting enough, Blizzard tried to fix this issue with a later patch that added synergy bonuses. Basically, some skills would provide bonuses to more powerful skills giving the player a reason to pump them up. While it helps, this issue is still one of the few problems with Diablo 2.

Torchlight, which was talked about in part one, fared better in terms of progression. Like Diablo 2, each character had 3 skill trees and received attribute and skill points on level up. However unlike Diablo 2, there were no prerequisite skills, instead only the player's level was the factor. This meant that as a player, you would not need to take any skills that you didn't want to in order to progress through the game.

There were still some skills that were better than lower level skills, but there was more utility offered compared to Diablo 2. What also helped was that many skills were built around scaling with fewer exceptions. The only real knock I have with Torchlight's progression is that several skills are shared between the three classes, which do cut into some of the diversity.

Our last example for this post and my personal favorite progression system comes from Din's Curse. The game begins differently in terms of character development compared to other ARPGs. At the start you can choose from either a predefined class or create a hybrid one. The difference is that a pre-made class comes with 3 skill trees, while the hybrid lets you choose any two that you want. So if you ever wanted to be an archer necromancer, this was your chance.

Each skill tree had two different types of skills. The first are proficiencies, which determine what equipment your character can wear, along with any special bonuses. Second are the actual skills you can learn over the course of your game. Like previous ARPGs the skills are arranged in order from top to bottom going from least expensive to most. The big difference is that there are no level requirements for skills, only money and skill points which are earned at level up.

Without any level requirements, it gave the player complete freedom in defining their character. Allowing them to either get several cheap skills starting out, or save up for an expensive skill. By not having to set strict limits on acquiring skills, gave the designers the option of creating more utility skills to make characters personalized. Some players may not even get the most expensive skill on their tree and instead favor improving skills from each skill tree.

Providing meaningful choices in leveling up is an important part of any good ARPG. For the last part I'll be examining downtime in ARPGs and money sinks.

Josh Bycer

P.S As a strange coincidence I got into the Diablo 3 beta on my birthday. The skill system is interesting, but without being able to see everything there, I don't want to include it in this examination.

Dusty: An Analysis of From Dust

2012-01-28T23:42:00.001-05:00

From Dust was the very long awaited next game from Out Of This World designer: Eric Chahi. Moving away from the plat former genre, From Dust was looked at as the latest attempt at the God Game genre. While it fortunately doesn't require divine intervention, it could use some Ambrosia.

The story is that you are "the breath": a spirit guiding a wandering tribe in search of an ancient people. Your quest will take you to numerous islands where you'll have to settle the land before moving on. Your main source of interaction with the world is being able to lift up and put down matter. This allows you to alter the lay of the land, whether that is using lava to create rock walls, or sand to set up paths across water. The physics engine of the game is one of the high points and I really liked how the elements flowed realistically. A high enough wall can dam up a river and create a lake, and it was a sight to behold watching lava flow.

You will also be able to direct your tribe to totems on the map where they'll be able to settle villages. Most maps feature natural disasters that hit periodicity which can destroy your villages. You can usually find a repel stone that will teach your villages how to block either lava or water which can be taught to your other villages. Each village also gives you a spell that can be used, which usually plays into completing the level.

Sadly that's all there is and where the issues with From Dust begin. Each level follows the same pattern of settling your villages and dealing with the token gimmick. The problem is that it doesn't feel like a God Game where each level has only one real solution but a puzzle game. The game also falls into one of the annoying traps of strategy games where the levels require trial and error to solve. Later levels will have the player getting hit with a disaster shortly after founding their first village.

The problem is that the player will have no idea how the disaster will affect the land until after it hits. Such as how the lava will flow during an eruption or where to set up walls to protect their village. A very annoying case in point being the second to last level, which hits the player with scripted events not allowing the player to prepare for it without knowing about it beforehand.

While the use of matter and the physics engine are great, the same can't be said about the other mechanics. When your tribe is moving across the map, they have trouble changing paths if you make an easier path. As the game goes on, the ability to move your villages along with special trees are introduced. However outside of a scripted event, there use is just unneeded. As the basic mechanics and village powers are more than adequate to solve every level. The final level is essentially sandbox mode, allowing the player complete control over the elements. But with such limited interaction with the mechanics, it doesn't feel as rewarding as it could have been.

Reviews also criticized the controls of the game. Playing the PC version, the mouse is used to move the breath, instead of having the mouse be the breath. This makes it hard to get fine control but to be honest; it wasn't game breaking for me.

It's a shame, as the core mechanics of shaping the land were fun. But the game feels more like an appetizer instead of a full course. I would love to see the base mechanics included in a game with more city building or strategy design. Imagine shaping the land to create a river or lake so that your followers now have fresh water, or creating a mountain so that miners can harvest iron for weapons. I'm surprised we haven't seen a strategy game go full God powers in its design. Like creating a tsunami to wash away enemy troops while you're dealing with a tornado. I would just be happy with a "release the kraken" button to hit.

Josh Bycer

God Games and the Superman Complex

2012-01-26T14:36:00.003-05:00

The God Game genre is one of those genres that have not had good luck transitioning to modern markets. Incidentally, city builders which share similar mechanics are also on the list. Last year, From Dust was the latest attempt at creating a God Game and got mixed reviews. Looking at From Dust and the genre as a whole, the problems are similar to the ones a certain "Man of Steel" has fought before.

The idea of a "God Game" is one of those all encompassing terms (which is the same as the term "God",) that makes it hard to set a basic list of rules for. The problem is that looking at the genre; it shares mechanics from other genres. Strategy games, city builders and sand box titles are the building blocks of a God Game. The issue is that the more genres a game is based on. The more areas that must be polished and properly balanced for the game to work as a whole.

Black and White was one of the first attempts at trying to combine all three genres into one experience in 3D, and it faced issues with the design. One of the issues is with power, specifically, how powerful should the player be? If the player can shape the planet to their whim and summon meteor showers, then where is the challenge? That problem is what comic book writers have faced with one of the most popular characters of all time.

Throughout the years, comic book writers have had a tough time creating stories for Superman. How do you write meaningful stories where your character can solve any problem by throwing it into the sun? There have been many "mcguffins" used to weaken Superman, from Kryptonite, magic, red sun radiation and many more, (my only personal knowledge is limited to the Superman cartoons.) This problem has also found its way into the games based off of Superman. If the player has no limits on what they can do, then you have a title with very little challenge.

Some solutions have been basing the threats of Superman away from physical, and more emotional. Such as trying to save the people, or fitting in on a strange planet. The problem for games though is that it's very hard to do emotional or personal stories in games. The attempted solution in Black and White was to base the character's power on the people and was a God game where the player could die. Limiting the player's power is the easiest solution, but saying that "God is Dead" (I had to work it in somewhere) just feels like it goes against the nature of the genre.

As the players got further into Black and White, the freedom of being a god became more restrictive. Players would find themselves limited by belief and force to do things like picking up a rock and throwing it around constantly just to extend their control. The game required a lot of busy work keeping your people fed and healthy while training your creature.

From Dust had the opposite problem, as the game goes on the player's abilities increases. The final level gives the player complete control over the elements, which while awesome, does get boring. Due to the player's only meaningful interaction in the game being said elements with little control of their people.

In a way, Spore may be the most successful attempt at a true God Game, combining all 3 genres into one. However, it fails in the regard that each system is its own sub game instead of providing all 3 at once. Once players reach the Space stage (sandbox layer), there isn’t any reason to return to previous stages with that creature.

Somewhere between strategy, city building and sandbox games, the God Game genre at its best sits. The problem comes down to a simple question: How do you give the player the powers of a God, while still providing meaningful gameplay? I wish I had a perfect answer for this but I'm still pondering this myself. If I can figure this out, I'll let everyone know by simultaneously ringing every phone on the planet.

Josh Bycer

P.S Let’s see how many people get that reference.

The Devil Is in the Details of Action RPGs - Part One: The Logistics of Loot

2012-01-22T19:50:00.001-05:00

While the title may suggest otherwise, I am not in the Diablo 3 beta. As I've been counting the minutes for either Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2 to be released, I ran through Torchlight 1. Playing it, I noticed several things that didn't seem right with the mechanics that I wanted to take a closer look at.

When it comes to the action RPG genre, any fan knows about the cycle: you fight enemies to get loot to help you level up and repeat. In other words, the magic phrase is: Fight, Loot, and Level. If any of those three are not represented correctly, it can bring the experience down. We're going to ignore "Fight" for this post, as everyone should know what is good or bad about it.

Loot is the big one, and is one of the main draws of any action RPG. With loot, there are two schools of design: set or random. Set loot, means that the designers hard coded every item, piece of equipment and weapon in the entire game. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are currently the best examples of this practice.

The advantage of set design is that by knowing every piece of gear in the game, it gives the designers freedom to get creative. In Dark Souls, each weapon type is unique in its feel and utility. This also allowed the designers to easily set up a general pace of getting equipment and balancing it out with enemy encounters.

There are two disadvantages to set loot design. First is that it has a cap, there is such a thing as the "best sword in the game" or "best piece of armor". Meaning, that eventually the drive for better loot disappears, which is one third of the pull of playing action RPGs. Playing Demon's Souls; I lose a lot of the motivation to continue playing new game +s as there is no new equipment to find.

The other has to do with PvP; set loot largely turns PvP into a race to get the best loot before anyone else. When I played PvP in Dark Souls, no matter how great I was at avoiding damage, all it took was one hit from someone’s high level weapon to kill me instantly. This forced me out of PvP until I could grab better weapons which would take awhile.

Randomized loot design which is used in most action RPGs, is that instead of defining set pieces of gear in the game. The designers set up algorithms for loot generations. If you look at Diablo 2, every item that has unique stats or bonuses comes with a prefix/suffix or prefixes, such as "burning" or "spiked". These adjectives defined what kinds of bonuses are attached to the gear and from there the weapon is given the amount of that type. That means that my "freezing, burning axe" could be different from your "freezing burning axe". Items are also graded in terms of rarity. This allowed the player to quickly see what equipment is more powerful and affects the bonuses from the adjectives. Diablo 2's loot table is still one of the best of the genre with all the variables that go into generating loot.

Obviously the big advantage of randomized loot is replay ability. You never know if that chest or enemy will drop some super piece of gear. New gear provides both a visual boost (better gear = shiner avatar) and of course the stat boost. With Diablo 2, the harder the difficulty level, the chance of finding rarer gear is increased further encouraging play.

The problems with random loot and where Torchlight fits into this post, is that there is more to it than just creating random gear. In order for loot to motivate people, there must be an ascending trend of power over time. Meaning the further the player gets, the better the loot they find.

In Torchlight the loot table is not as refined as Diablo 2 was. For example while playing on hardcore mode; I used a chest armor I found within the first 5 floors of the game, as my only piece of chest armor for the entire game. While the idea of being able to find any equipment anywhere in the game sounds good on paper, it does cause two problems.

First is that it breaks the flow of the game. Enemies are designed around the generalized loot in the area. Meaning, if the best armor in the area can only block 3 points of damage, then enemies shouldn't be set at dealing 30 damage per hit. If the loot table isn't balanced with the enemies it can lead to the player either demolishing everything, or barely able to survive. Not properly balancing loot and enemies also makes it difficult to determine where to introduce new enemies or strengthen existing ones.

That leads to problem two, having the randomized element of the game work against the player. In Torchlight, my first character on very hard difficulty did not get lucky finding new pistols and armor to use. I went 5 floors using the same gun and armor. When I arrived in a new area, I could barely kill anything and enemies were nearly killing me with each hit.

The problem with Torchlight is that the loot table is not ascending as much as Diablo 2. If I find a rare item on floor 3 in Torchlight and another on floor 5, there is a good chance the former is as powerful or stronger then the later. However in Diablo 2, finding a rare sword at the beginning of an act and at the end, you are practically guaranteed that the latter is stronger than the former.

Looking deeper at Torchlight one of the problem areas I saw has to do with the types of rarity. Ignoring normal or white weapons Torchlight has the following categories: green for magical, blue for rare, gold for unique, and purple for set items (items that go together.) The problem with this is that with only a few categories, it makes it harder to find better gear.

If you get lucky and get gold equipment early on, chances are you won't find anything to replace it for a long time (such as 4 or 5 floors or more). Likewise if you are stuck with a blue or green item, you're going to find plenty of them which may or may not be better then what you have. Due to the rate of finding blue items which most unique monsters drop, it lowers the value of green items outside of the very beginning of the game.

Another issue with Torchlight is that there is more quantity then quality with loot, some unique enemies and chests drop multiple pieces of the same equipment type all within the same level range. This makes it a crap shoot when it comes to getting new gear. Sometimes you'll find something that is miles above what you have, and other times you'll find 2 or more pieces of equipment equal to or worse then what you have. As an example while fighting level 11 enemies, I saw loot as low as level 8 dropping. If the quality of loot increased at a faster rate, that would elevate some of the issues.

Going back to Diablo 2 it had the following categories (not counting normal or low quality): high quality, magical, rare, set and unique. That's 5 to Torchlight's 4, meaning there is a greater spread of items to find. In Torchlight my chance of getting a unique item to replace a rare is low. However in Diablo 2, I have a much greater chance of replacing my high quality item with something better. Combine that with the quality of loot rising at a fast pace, makes the hunt for loot an enjoyable one and not an act of necessity.

The challenge of using loot as a motivator is that the player shouldn't be surviving from one piece to another, and at the same time, going hours using the same gear also doesn't work. That does it for part one, in part two we'll take a look at leveling and see if Diablo 2 still stands as the best in this area.

Josh Bycer.

Examining The Concept of the "Anti-Co-op" Experience

2012-01-19T14:32:00.000-05:00

Recently playing through FEAR 3, I saw a basic form of a concept that I've been playing around in my head for some time. I've played plenty of co-op games which all follow the same rule: "all for one and one for all." However, I've yet to see a game where players are working together... except they aren't.

This is where this concept of an "anti co-op" game comes to play. Where two or more players are working together at the same time they are completely opposed to each other. Now it's important to make the distinction that this is not about competitive games, as they are about two sides attempting to win over the other. "An uneasy alliance" is a saying that goes here.

Before I go further, it's important to talk about FEAR 3's system as it plays into this discussion. In the co-op mode, each player has a list of challenges that they can achieve during the level. The challenges are categorized into different groups based on what has to be done. Such as performing certain # of head shots or finding collectibles. At the end of the level, the game stores how many challenges were completed and which category they belong to for each player. While both players are working together to beat the level, they are also competing for the most points which are earned via the challenges. After the final level, the game tallies up who "wins" based on how they came out in each category. The winner gets to view the ending where their character comes out on top.

The two issues that Fear 3 has with my concept, is that it only deals with long term effects and the gameplay is not affected by it. For this idea to work, I have several elements in mind.

1. Asymmetrical Characters: Both players should be different from each other in terms of abilities and objectives to complete. One reason is that they should have to help each other, even if it is for a short while. Each player should be trying to focus on their goals while trying to complete the overall goal for the level. This is one area that FEAR 3 sort of worked. One player controls Point Man who has bullet time abilities, while the other controls Fettel who can possess enemies.

2. Player's Affecting Gameplay: In my mind, there are two areas of gameplay that the players should be able to alter: paths through the level and which levels to go through. The problem with FEAR 3 is that by only letting the player's alter the ending, it doesn't give any short term control to the players. By allowing the winner to affect the gameplay, it raises the stakes for trying to complete their agenda. I could picture the plot changing based on who wins each level and could bounce back and forth between each player.

3. Both Players Have to Survive: This one is important. If the players could kill one another or not care about the other player, then the game won't be any different than a competitive game. The concept is that the players should be working together for a common goal, at the same time that they are stabbing each other in the back.

4. Separate and Together: Tasks in the level will be split between ones that the players can go off and do on their own and ones where they will be forced to work together. Boss fights will always require the players to team up to take them down, with each player given a different task during the fight.

Now I would love to say that I have a 30 page design document finished for this idea, but I don't. Currently I have concept in my head for this but it still needs to be refined more. Co-op games have been getting a lot of steam these days thanks to the popularity of titles like Left 4 Dead or even League of Legends. However, we haven't seen too many games stretch the concept of working together. With the only other game besides FEAR 3, was Kane and Lynch 2's heist mode, but lack of positive reviews meant that not a lot of people tried it out.

It's always interesting to think up new game mechanics, and what better way to play with your friends, then with some good old fashion back stabbing?

Josh Bycer

Maddening For the Wrong Reasons- An Analysis of Alice: Madness Returns

2012-01-08T19:01:00.004-05:00

Alice: Madness Returns' title is apt for several reasons. It is the sequel to American Mcgee's Alice that came out in 2000. Since then, designer: American Mcgee has not had any other major successes. With the game: Bad Day in LA, one of the most universally reviled games to be released. With Alice, it is his return to his most successful brand. While Madness Returns is fortunately not as bad as previous endeavors, it could have been better.

The story takes place shortly after the end of the first game: Alice has been released from the insane asylum and now lives in an orphanage. She is trying to forget about Wonderland and is seeing a psychiatrist. However she starts hallucinating and returns to Wonderland to see it being corrupted by a strange force. Over the course of the game Alice has to figure out what is happening to Wonderland and try to keep a hold of her sanity and what's real and what's not.

Helping to pull the player in would have to be the visuals. As far as art design goes, Madness Returns is one of the best looking games I've seen in 2011. The environments in Wonderland look amazing and do a lot to showcase the damage and beauty of the world. The plot of Alice trying to regain her sanity in an insane world is an interesting one. With all that said however, the gameplay is not as inventive as the world.

Alice's gameplay is split between combat and plat forming with light puzzle solving, which is the same split seen in the first game. If you remembered the first game, the plat forming was very loose, and it was easy to misjudge jumping distances. For Madness, it feels like the designers over compensated when trying to fix that complaint. While jumping is still loose, now Alice can hover and basically do 3 mini jumps in mid air.

Combat has become more third person action based and overall is better than the first game. Alice has 4 weapons to use along with a dodge and a block. Enemy types are split between small, medium and large which the larger enemies are more along the lines of mini bosses. While Combat is a step up from the first game, it is several steps down from recent action games which I'll be coming back to very shortly.

Puzzle solving revolves around opening up doors and paths using Alice's "shrink vision". While shrunk she can see invisible platforms, clues on walls and hidden paths. Each chapter features a puzzle or scenario type unique to it which is the best parts of the game. However, probably coming second in strange complaints to my problem with Saints Row The Third, Alice suffers for being too long.

The main problem with the game is that the game is very repetitive. Puzzles, obstacles, and enemy fights repeat a lot. For example, every chapter has a section where Alice has to go down a slide avoiding obstacles, with the slide appears to be the same one each time. Alice's entire move-set with exception to weapons, is all introduced within the first chapter, leaving the designers with 5 more chapters to fill.

I lost count of the # of times where I had to use gusts of wind to navigate across a big room. Sections where Alice must navigate invisible platforms in shrink vision must pop up at least 10 or more times per chapter. Except that there is no discernible difference in testing the player.

All the huge environments, while pretty to look at, leave the game space very wide. It gets to the point of being a chore to navigate with so much of the content recycled. The developers tried to give the player reasons to explore with collectibles scattered around, but none of them do anything to serve the game play. Challenge rooms which can increase the player's health are unneeded, as I had more than enough health to beat the game without going through them.

With so many repeating sections, the game feels bloated. Especially if you were to compare Alice to Mario Galaxy or other current gen action adventure games. Mario's move-set is also limited, but the designers were able to come up with all sorts of challenges and mechanics around them. Whereas Alice just repeats the same areas over and over again. A similar complaint can also be said about the combat system.

Combat also suffers several issues. Battling small enemies isn't a big deal, but mid and large enemies require spending several minutes dodging their attacks and repeating the same process each time. Alice's defensive moves are a dodge and block ability, with certain enemy attacks are best avoided using one or the other. The strange issue is that the designers made it so that you can only block attacks when you use the lock on targeting. The problem is that locking on zooms the camera in making it impossible to track enemies to the side or behind Alice.

The challenge rooms which have Alice fighting enemy groups larger than the regular game are just an exercise in frustration because of the combat system. Since locking on exposes your back to constant attacks, it makes fighting larger enemies a major hassle. Alice can upgrade her weapons over the course of the game, but upgrades only affect damage potential and nothing else.

Alice is not a bad game by any means, but it feels over done. After the credits rolled, I saw that my total play time was just less than 10 hours. Looking back, if I were to just count the unique areas and obstacles, my play time could have been half that. Another disappointing area is the lack of boss fights, each chapter hints at a battle with one of Wonderland's residents, but nothing happens. There is only one boss fight in the game and even that doesn't feel like anything more than just another regular battle.

It feels like the art team and story writers wrote a check that the designers couldn't cash which is a shame. A more focused title dealing with exploring Wonderland and the line between fantasy and reality could have been interesting. In the end, Alice: Madness Returns is about 4 hours of great gameplay, all wrapped around filler.

Josh Bycer

The Two Faces of Brands in the Game Industry

2012-01-04T02:04:00.000-05:00

It has been awhile since I've had a good old fashioned rant about the industry. Recently the Spike VGAs have been more than adequate fuel for the fire for commentators about the show. Today's rant comes from the show but not about the show itself. During one of the many trailers, there was buildup regarding a new game from Bioware which fans would assume meant a new RPG. However, the actual announcement was for a new Command and Conquer: Generals sequel and that it's being done by a studio which is now known as Bioware: Victory. This is another example of publishers going for uniformed branding with their properties... and I hate it.

Branding is important in any industry, from mega companies like Nintendo, to even someone like me trying to establish his own brand. Brand recognition is worthwhile in the consumer industry as it allows people to know about a product by the company it comes from. There are preconceived notions about quality that come from a brand. Those notions are why many gamers will buy a game that has the name "Blizzard" stamped on the box without a second thought.

Now of course one product does not make a brand and it requires the company to have built up a little history first. Brand loyalty is the ultimate goal behind a brand: having a consumer buy your product or support you based on previous efforts. Very few video game companies have reached this level of loyalty as it requires a lot of work and delivering on quality products time after time. The worse thing any company can do is misuse their brand as it can appear to be a violation of trust by the consumer.

There are two sides to the misuse of brands, first is with the success of the company. Unifying game companies under a single popular brand helps with short term popularity, or with letting a new development studio share the wealth. This is what I'm thinking as to why EA renamed the studio Bioware: Victory. The problem with this mindset is that it makes it harder for individual studios to shine and they lose their identity. How many mainstream gamers are going to know the difference between multiple studios with Bioware in their name?

When Irrational Games had their name changed to 2K "something" (I honestly can't remember what it was.) The change made it hard for gamers to know that they were the developers behind the excellent Freedom Force series. The other problem is the phrase "putting all your eggs in one basket", what happens when a popular brand loses its luster and the smaller studios no longer have that brand as support? Game credit and recognition are vital in this industry, if a studio keeps having their name changed due to branding, it makes it harder for gamers to follow the studio and support them.

When it comes to successful series, most of you probably know the name: "Call of Duty". I'm curious though, how many people, both gamers and non gamers, know that at least 3 different studios have worked on the series? The studios were Infinity Ward, Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games.

Moving on, the other side of branding has to do with failures, and how branding can hide them. This point in the article is where my inner cynic takes over. Another way that publishers can use a centralized brand is to make it harder for negative recognition to happen.

Brand recognition is a double edged sword: good recognition will get people to support your products easier, bad recognition will drive them away regardless of the product. We've all read about the things that game companies do that drive away users: DRM, spotty support and so on. Negative brand recognition is a necessary evil as without it; companies that do harmful things to the industry could get away with it.

If a publisher has 5 or 6 smaller studios under its belt, each with the same prefix, would a casual or mainstream gamer know the differences between each one? One of those studios could release multiple horrible games without any signs of improving. Most people wouldn't be able to tell them apart from the other studios and that would give that one troublesome studio a safety net to continue putting out products. Now in this scenario, the overall brand won't be hurt too badly, if the other studios release quality games which would cancel out the negative impact. Now of course this is all here-say at this point in time and as I said earlier, this is the cynicism part of the post.

In most consumer driven industries, the most popular brands stay in the forefront, and smaller ones get absorbed and renamed. During my time at Comcast, I heard numerous stories about cable providers I've never heard of, who were bought and renamed Comcast to keep the brand unified. However, there is a major difference between the video game industry and other consumer driven industries. There are no pre-defined definitions of quality. Meaning, there is no de-facto perfect FPS, or RPG. No company can say that they make the best FPS and that you should only buy their games.

Just looking at the FPS genre for example, I could drone on about the variety of the genre, from Bioshock to Stalker. Because of the variety of content, it makes unified brands unwarranted due to each company having their own unique voice. We have seen amazing games from 2nd and 3rd party developers: Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Team Ico, Hal Laboratory and many more. We all have our favorite studios and condensing them all under a few banners would undervalue their contributions to the industry.

As the cost of creating retail games rises, publishers are looking to reduce risk and costs by drawing inspiration from other industries. Improving productivity and organization with better structure are noble goals, but it's a good idea to remember that the developers behind the product are as important as the product itself.

Josh Bycer

The 2011 Mind's Eye Award Show Presented By Josh Bycer

2011-12-31T14:45:00.001-05:00

It's that time of the year again where gamers all around do their best to list their favorite games and I'm no exception. Continuing my annual tradition it's time for the Mind's Eye award show, granted we don't have musical numbers or guest stars, but at least it can't be worse than the VGAs. For those new to the awards, a panel made up of me, myself and I have put together a list of our favorite games this year. Ten games will be going home with an award: 6 bronze, 3 silver and one lucky game is going away with the gold. As always, the show is heavily rigged and only games that the awards committee has played will be eligible. If you would like to dispute this, please send a generous bribe along with the game of your choice and we'll get to it sometime in the next hundred years.

The Bronze Winners are:

10. Payday: The Heist - It's not often when a multiplayer can pull my friends and I away from our Left 4 Dead fix, but Payday managed to do it. While the game does lack quantity, it makes up for it with frantic action and some interesting levels.

9. Bulletstorm - Of the arcade-like shooters that came out this year, Bulletstorm is my favorite. The skillshot system along with the unique weapon design won me over and I admit that I also laughed a few times from the writing.

8. Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together- This is how you do a remake right: keep the best elements but update it to bring it up to modern standards. Tactics Ogre also gets the nod for being the only game I really played on my PsP this year.

7. Bastion- Bastion joins this list along with other freshmen attempts from new studios. The twist on storytelling, art design and music does a lot to elevate Bastion over the crowd.

6. Deus Ex: Human Revolution- The challenge of giving the player multiple choices with character growth while keeping the game accessible has been a problem for designers and Deus Ex managed to achieve that balance. As a side note, Deus Ex is also one of the few games I've played where being stealthy didn't feel like an afterthought. Eidos Montreal definitely deserves praise for not only delivering a great game, but reviving a brand.

With that said however, Deus Ex could have ranked higher on the list, if not for the boss fights which did a lot to drag the game down. Some people would probably be able to overlook that but I can't. I blame it on my new found love of the cooking show Chopped. On the show the winner is judged based on all three courses they've made and the judges will not overlook one bad meal. Even though Deus Ex was a great game, I can't just ignore the parts of the game that didn't mesh will.

5. Dark Souls- Dark Souls had a lot riding on it, as a sequel to my second favorite game of 09 I was looking forward to it. While the first half of the game was enjoyable and the new open world system works, that can't be said for the last quarter of the game where it becomes a frustrating poorly design grind.

To me, Dark Souls ends after beating Anor Londo as the remaining areas seem to suck the joy from playing the game. While the latest patch has helped elevate some of the overarching issues with the game, it couldn't fix annoying design. With all that said though, Dark Souls on a bad day is still a great experience and you won't find anything else like it this year. Like Deus Ex, Dark Souls was going to rank higher up on my list, but after thinking about it more when I can't stand to play a quarter of your game, that's not a good sign.

On to the Silver Winners:

4. Anno 2070: Great city builders are few and far between these days so it went without saying that I snatched up Anno 2070. While the game builds off of previous entries in the series, the new meta-game system does wonders for replay ability and is a mechanic that deserved to be in the genre for a long time.

3. Dungeons of Dredmor: Another surprisingly solid game from a first time studio. Dungeons of Dredmor is one of the more successful attempts at creating a hardcore challenging rogue-like that can still appeal to newcomers. The game's writing is one of the funniest I've seen all year and acts as a one-two punch along with the skill system of pulling gamers in. Insanely priced at $5 at launch (and even cheaper with sales) gives an atomic bomb sized bang for your buck.

2. Batman: Arkham City- The #2 and #1 games were close this year. Arkham City was an amazing sequel to one of my favorite games of the last decade. Expanding upon the elements that worked and giving so much fan service to Batman fans. The combat and stealth sections are as entertaining as ever, with side quests that fit incredibly well into the game. Batman also takes the award for favorite boss fight this year, going to the stealth battle. In the end it came down to an amazing second game in a series vs. something that is brand new, and I had to go with the original title.

Before we get to the winner, it's time for a brief intermission to announce some other awards.

The 11 Place award: Portal 2- Portal 2 was originally going to be on the top ten, but remembering that Tactics Ogre came out this year bumped it off.

The “I wished that I had a chance to buy it before the end of the year" awards : Zelda Skyward Sword, Rayman Origins, Children of Eden, Shadows of the Damned and Mortal Kombat- Some games had to slip through the cracks and these games unfortunately did.

The " Maybe if I spent time with the game it could have gotten an award" award : Total War: Shogun 2- Shogun 2 reminds me of Gratuitous Space Battles as a game that I thought I would love, but just could not muster the mental energy to sit down and spend all my time learning it.

The "Not a snowball's chance in hell that it would get an award from me" award: Skyrim- I have a sordid history with Bethesda's games: I was mildly into Morrowwind, hated Oblivion and I did not enjoy Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so the chance that I would actually pick up Skyrim at full price is 0%. I don't care how much word of mouth praise I hear about it, I'll wait for a gift or $5 sale.

Most disappointing game of the year award: The Witcher 2- I have played many games in my time and I can usually find something in a game that keeps me playing, even for a little while. However, it's been a long time since a game has turned me off so strongly like The Witcher 2. As I thought about why the game did not pull me in, I realized that the answer was in my first published article.

In my article on skill abstraction I talked about games that had little abstraction and were focused on player skill (action games) and those focused on character's skill (RPGs). From there, I went on about designers trying to appeal to both groups of gamers.

In that article I posed a simple question: Is the Witcher 2 an action game with RPG elements, or a RPG with action elements? Looking at the Witcher 2 from both genres, I can see where the failings for me were. As an action game, the Witcher 2's combat is very clunky, especially when you put it side by side with other action games. Constantly having to stop and switch to the quick menu to select a bomb or sign breaks up the flow of combat. Multi-person combat is troublesome without adequate ways of defending or dealing with enemies.

If you look at Batman: Arkham City, there are multiple gadgets and special moves for the player to use, and they never have to stop combat to select them. The flow in Batman's combat system is one of the high points, and where the Witcher 2 is lacking.

Now from the RPG side, there are problems. There aren't any meaningful choices in the leveling system. You have three trees: sword, signs, and alchemy. The issue that I have is that no matter what choice you make you're still going to use all three of those skills and not by choice. This makes the decision for the player to select a tree a false choice and makes Geralt seem like a broken character that the skill trees are suppose to fix, instead of supplementing a fully realized set of choices. I don't like it when games have RPG leveling that effectively adds vital skills that should have been implemented from the start, such as Geralt's counterattack ability.

By trying to create a game that is equal parts RPG and equal parts action, the designers have created a game that does not appeal to me at all. This is such a disappointment as I really wanted to like The Witcher 2.

With that rant out of my system, it's time for my #1 game this year.

1. The Binding of Isaac- The Binding of Isaac may not be the deepest game, or the most expensive to come out. However, of all the games that came out this year, I spent the most time with it and Dungeons of Dredmor. Two $5 games hooked me more than all the big named games that came out this year, and that says something.

The reason Isaac edges out Dredmor is with the game design. Dredmor is a classic Rogue-like through and through, with a layer of accessibility. Isaac is an old school action game through a Rogue-like filter. The randomized item unlocks alter the player's play-style and forces them to adapt to the changes. According to a blog post by designer Edmund Mcmillen before the game was released, he wasn't sure on the inclusion of achievements. Yet, The Binding of Isaac turned out to be one of the best implementations of an achievement system I've seen in sometime. By rewarding the player with more items to possibly appear, it makes the game become deeper the more time you spent with it. As opposed to other rogue-likes, where each play-through is a closed off experience and nothing is gained in game.

And that's 2011 in a nutshell for me. Barring any zombie attacks, alien invasions, asteroids or computer overlords, we should have another interesting year in the game industry.

Josh Bycer

The Impartial Analyst Of Game Design

2011-12-23T14:32:00.002-05:00

During this year's Steam holiday sale, I decided to spend $5 and pick up Duke Nukem Forever. While I was playing it, several of my Steam friends sent me messages questioning my sanity which I promptly ignored. DNF isn't the first bad game I've bought (on sale mind you,) and it won't be the last, as it's important as a designer to not just play the best games out there.

One of the common attributes of excellent games is polish. This comes from an acute understanding of the genre and smoothing out any wrinkles in design, with phrases like "stream-lined" and "accessible" as common praises for great games. The problem when playing nothing but good games is that you can't see the traps designers can fall into when designing a game.

From poor UIs, to technical issues and of course problems with the design itself, there is a lot to look for when playing a bad game. The feel of the mechanics is a huge deal, and is one of the defining aspects between good and bad game design. It's easier to see the differences in feel between a good and a bad game vs. looking at two good games.

Last year I bought Dante's Inferno knowing full well all the negative reviews for it. As someone who has played just about every major action title to be released on consoles, with my knowledge I was able to see the issues with control and design with the game and learned from the game and how it compared to titles like Bayonetta and Ninja Gaiden. With Duke Nukem, the feel of the weapons were off along with the controls when I put it side by side with games like Serious Sam 3 or Bullet Storm.

The other importance of playing bad games is that many bad or below average games have small areas of positive design. Whether that it is a fluke, or the designer's original intentions you can see what they were striving for and the problems that got in the way. It's a common occurrence that games that try to do something unique aren't the most polish. As when you are going into uncharted territory, you don't have a frame of reference. Games like Hinterland, Evil Genius among others were not highly reviewed due to issues with polish and design but did try to do something different. As a designer, you can learn from what they were trying to do and try to figure out ways to get around their issues.

Going back to Duke Nukem, I did like the concept of the Ego bar or regenerating shield, grow as Duke does manly things in the world. Was the mechanic fully fleshed out? Hell no, but it was a good idea that needed more nurturing.

One of the ways that I've developed my analytical skills is by playing a variety of games and looking at the mechanics and systems. If it's a game that I'm not enjoying, I'll usually play until I've see what the game has to offer and move on. I have even tried out games from genres that I'm not a fan of such as racing or sports games, just to see what they have to offer. Game design inspiration can come from any source and it's important to not automatically discount a game's usefulness due to negative reviews.

Josh Bycer

Sinning: A Saints Row The Third Analysis

2011-12-21T15:59:00.000-05:00

The Saints Row series has had an interesting timeline, at first it was made to compete directly with GTA by delivering open world gameplay set in a satirical world. As Rockstar moved more towards a loose realism with greater storytelling, Saints Row went in the completely opposite direction. Now with the third game in the series, Saints Row The Third is more in line with Just Cause 2 and in one of the strangest complaints yet, for a game that goes off the deep end, it doesn't go far enough.

The story definitely takes the cake as one of the most off the wall experiences this year. From leaping off of flying fortresses, a tron style cyber battle to insane stuff that you need to see for yourself. For those that felt that the GTA series have become too focused on plot, Saints Row will be a reprieve.

The actual gameplay hasn't changed all that much from Saints Row 2; you have a city to explore and three rival gangs to take out mission by mission. Side missions and area takeovers litter the map and as you take over the city, you can now use your phone to transfer the money to your account. As you complete missions and go on shooting sprees, you'll level up which will unlock possible upgrades from more health to even infinite ammo.

And that's actually all there is to the game and where my problems are. While the missions are just insanely over the top the actual world is very bare bones and feels like a step back from Saints Row 2. In the last game, there were more side quests available with actual rewards for completing them such as upgrades to your character. With leveling up now the only way to upgrade your character, there are fewer reasons to complete the side quests.

As mentioned at the start, Saints Row The Third takes it’s over the top cues from Just Cause 2 and suffers with very little growth through the game. Very early in Saints, players will already be flying helicopters and using RPGs and not until the final few missions will you see any major upgrades. The best way to explain this issue is with someone eating nothing but cake, sure it's sweet but you can't just eat cake everyday and you'll get tired of it.

Just Cause 2 suffers from this issue as well, but it does work a little better with the various ways of getting around and side quests. Ultimately, Saints Row The Third feels like eating at a buffet, there's a lot of food, but it's really just empty calories. The developers have already promised new mission DLC in the works and I hope that they can inject some much needed variety into the game.

Josh Bycer

Games That Just Missed it: Hinterland Edition

2011-12-19T13:04:00.001-05:00

In past blog entries, I've brought up the game Hinterland as one of my favorite games to play, but I don't believe I ever sat down and actually wrote up an analysis of it. Hinterland was developed by Tilted Mill and was their second game I believe to be released. Like Children of the Nile before it, the game tried to do something different and while it succeeded in some areas, it also failed in others.

The plot is that you have been tasked by the king to take a land filled with all kinds of monsters and make it habitable, while keeping up with the demands of the king. Before you start playing, the map is randomly generated, but the player can determine how easy or hard it is (with a higher score bonus for harder maps.) Lastly, the player chooses their class from a variety of options, which affects starting equipment and some other factors.

Gameplay is split between basic city building and Diablo 1 style exploring. Every few minutes a group of immigrants will show up at your town hall looking to set up shop. Each person has a profession which determines what they'll do in your town and a level which affects their stats in the field. Everyone in your town (excluding you,) requires food daily from farmers. When you go out to explore you can take up to 3 of your villagers out with you as your party, whomever you take will of course not be providing services back at your town.

While you are out adventuring, you'll have to take care of your party. If someone takes enough damage, they'll try to flee back to your town to recover, but if they get surrounded by monsters they could die. Once someone dies they are gone for good and they'll house will become open to someone of the same profession. The reason you want to keep someone alive, is that having someone level up will provide greater stats compared to just getting someone of the same level to settle down.

As you explore the world you'll find items that can boost the capabilities of professions back at your town and rare resources that can convince new professions to settle down. Each person in your town is taxable and is another source of income besides finding it off of monsters. Every few days the king will demand a tax and if you fail to provide the money, you'll be evicted.

What I loved about Hinterland was that it used a dual progression model in which the player's town affects their supplies and people available for questing. While questing provides the needed resources to expand and improve your town. Very few games go this route and the ones that get it right are considered some of the best around, like Star Control 2 or X-Com UFO Defense. Unlike those previous games, Hinterland provided randomized resources with its map generation, while in X-Com you follow a general path each game, Hinterland allows the player to mix up what resources are available each game.

Even with how much I liked Hinterland, it doesn't blind me from seeing the numerous problems with the game. The sad thing is that all the problems of the game stem from one simple fact: the game was designed for a budget release. It's funny how much things have changed with the perception of budget games in such a short span of time. When Hinterland was released in 08, a budget game meant not spending a lot of time on the game and not delivering a lot of quality content. Contrast that today where we have amazing games like Dungeons of Dredmor, Space Pirates and Zombies and The Binding of Isaac, which were all priced very low but delivered with amazing content.

Looking back at Tilted Mill's timeline, it's pretty obvious why they choose a budget release. Children of the Nile which attempted to take the city builder genre in a different direction didn't become a huge hit. With Hinterland, they didn't want to risk spending a lot of time and money on an even more unique concept and have it fail on them.

The problems with Hinterland are across the board, starting with graphics. I'm not even going to sugar coat it, the graphics did not look good at all, and there was a very muddy look to everything with very little detail. At launch there were technical issues with the game crashing which I'm not even sure if they were all caught before Tilted Mill went under.

Gameplay is where the problems really hurt. The dual progression model while interesting, is very simple. City building amounts to just plopping down buildings in empty plots of land. Improving your city is very linear, as buildings take the same upgrade path every time with no differentiation between buildings of the same profession. The designers attempt to mix things up with the possibility of finding rare items while questing which unlock unique professions, but the problem is that by the time you find them you should already have a powerful enough questing party to finish the game.

Further adding gameplay problems are balance issues with the professions. Buildings that provide defenses from enemy assaults are not worth the time as you are given adequate time to get back to town and fight. While several professions can craft items, none of them will match the quality of equipment you find once you start clearing out higher level areas.

The truth of the matter is that Hinterland was an idea that should have been given the time and development of a fully priced PC game instead of cutting corners with a $20 launch. I've talked about my dream project before and essentially it is a fully realized version of Hinterland with depth to both combat and city building. Since Hinterland, very few games have gone the route of dual progression, with the last game that comes to mind being Little King Story on the Wii, while good, had the same problem of not going far enough with the systems.

Hinterland is sadly yet another example of a great concept that deserved more time in the oven, or a hindsight aided sequel to fix the issues.

Josh Bycer

A Bat Slam Dunk- An Analysis of Batman: Arkham City

2011-12-10T19:59:00.002-05:00

Batman: Arkham Asylum was one of my favorite games in 09 and rose to the top of my favorites that year along with Demon's Souls. Now, two years later, we have both sequels out with changes in each. Earlier this year I wrote about Dark Souls and how it felt that the designers moved away from what made Demon's Souls great due to the design changes. Arkham City doesn't share the same fate and you can just feel how the game is bursting from the seams with new content, for better and worse.

Continuing the story of B: AA, B: AC kicks off shortly after the first game. With the island no longer usable, the inmates of Arkham have been moved into the slums of the city and kept locked away from the citizens, which Batman isn't too fond of. After some important plot points that I'm not going to spoil, Batman finds himself knee deep in Arkham City and forced to find out what is going on.

Now, I could once again talk about the excellent voice acting and how great it is to hear Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, but the stand out for me was Nolan North as the Penguin. If I didn't read that he was doing the voice, I would have never known it was him and he did a great job of making him sound menacing.

The motto behind B: AC’s development seems to be "go big" as every aspect of B: AA has been built on for the sequel. Side quests are more prominent thanks to the game space being opened from the start. As Batman explores the city he'll find cases that involve more of his rogue's gallery for him to solve. The cases do a lot to bring the city to life and finally give us a good Batman game that lets us patrol Gotham. Perhaps the biggest enhancement is the Riddler challenges which play out as their own full side story this time around. The Riddler has set up all kinds of puzzles and death traps around AC for Batman to solve and his challenges play into unlocking more content and puzzle rooms for the Dark Knight to solve.

Stealth has become more challenging this time around as the enemies have picked up new tricks including being able to disable detective vision. The AI reacts more random this time and it never gets old frightening harden criminals by taking out their friends without being seen. Like the first game, Batman is not bullet proof and a few hits from a gun will take him out. This time Batman is armed with his trademark smoke pellets which can be used to disorient and act as a safety net for stealth areas.

The one main fault of B: AA which was the boss battles, have been touched up for B: AC. They are more varied this time around and less focused on Batman just wailing on someone. One of my favorite battles is an actual "stealth fight" which I'm not going to spoil who it is with.

Overall B: AC is an excellent game, but it's not without problems. Looking at the design the problems seem to stem from how the designers built their new game-play on top of B: AA. The beauty of B: AA was in how everything was designed to work with each other and was balanced that way. By building on top of the design, B: AC doesn't feel as refined compared to B: AA in a few areas.

The combat system in B: AA was one of my favorites due to how accessible it was and at the same time complex with the quick gadget use. In B: AC, the # of moves available to Batman has been increased dramatically: more quick gadgets, special moves, aerial attacks, beat-downs, special combos and ultra stuns. The problem is that all of these moves have been added to a primarily one button combat system and it feels convoluted compared to the first game. There is no in game logic for the player to follow why square-triangle is the weapon break move or X-Circle is the multiple take down move. Enemies armed with special gear now require specific attack combos to hurt them. It feels like the simple combat system from the first game is being stretched in multiple directions.

Not helping the combat is the camera system. I lost count of the # of times where an enemy would begin his attack animation off screen to then move into focus as he's attacking, leaving me with no way to avoid it. The camera during combat is stuck in this awkward position, because of the increase of enemies per fight. The camera is too close to get all the enemies on screen, yet too far away to make it easy to see enemy attack tells.

During movement in the city the camera has a habit of getting stuck on objects in the environment. In the first game, the design of the levels was very wide to keep the camera from getting stuck in places. With the increase agility of Batman and narrow areas, the camera has trouble keeping up sometimes.

In regards to the Catwoman DLC, she plays like a quicker version of Batman. I do like how her movement across the city is more horizontal with her whip compared to Batman. In terms of content, Catwoman has her own 4 mission story arc along with Riddler challenges set up just for her. During stealth sections she can climb around on certain ceilings which lend a different feel to Batman. The only problem I have is that her "thief vision" doesn't show enemy vitals like Batman's and it can be hard to see from a distance what equipment enemies have.

Even with my complaints, B: AC is still an amazing game; Rocksteady have shown that they are not a one hit wonder with B: AA. I'm very curious to see how they will try to top themselves with whatever their next project is. B: AC is a clear definition of a successful sequel by keeping what made the first game special and improving upon it.

Josh Bycer

Thinking Green: An Anno 2070 Analysis

2011-12-05T23:16:00.003-05:00

I've always been a fan of the city builder genre, as I've enjoyed the multi-tasking and the splendor of watching a fully developed city. These past few years however have not been too kind to the genre with no information about a Sim City 5 and the closure of Tilted Mill have left us city builders with few options. With Anno 2070, not only is it one of the most polished city builders I've seen, but the changes under the hood do a lot to make it rise above other games in the genre.

From start up, the game's setting and plot are integrated into the menus. As the title states, it's the year 2070 and global warming has lead to the polar ice caps melting and the world has begun to flood. Many coastal cities have already been submerged and the ecosystem is changing. You control a ship called an Ark, which has the technology and tools on board to create settlements for the human race. There are three groups vying for control: The Eden Initiative, Global Trust and S.A.A.T and how you build your cities help determine the state of the world.

As in Anno 1404 (or in the US: Dawn of Discovery,) Anno 2070 comes with the usual suspects of game modes: Campaign, continuous, scenario along with multiplayer. The difference is how everything is wrapped into this global meta-game. Every few days a global vote takes place to decide what group's plans is enacted and every player gets a say. The agreed upon plan becomes a global modifier that affects your city building in either scenario or continuous play. Daily missions pop up that allows the player to make career points for a specific faction, which plays into unlocking rewards on your profile.

As for the actual gameplay, things are both new and familiar in 2070. First, here is a quick primer for those completely new to the franchise. The Anno series is about managing economic growth with the use of trading. At the beginning of every map you have access to the lowest tier of buildings and the lowest class of citizens. As you meet their needs and more people move in, at certain population points, new buildings are unlocked. Once you have unlocked and met every need for that class of people, you can then upgrade their homes to the next tier, which also unlocks new buildings. The higher the class, the more they need to be happy, while still requiring the basics from previous classes.

Trade comes into play with how you have to move resources around. Many products require resources from multiple sources to be produced and effective supply chains are the name of the game. You can set up trade routes to transfer resources to and from your colonies which becomes a necessity as you go up in tier.

Playing into the future setting, Anno 2070 mixes things up from previous games. Besides worrying about your people and income, power and the environment are now factors in the world. Every non housing structure on your island requires power, and if you go into the red you'll suffer a productivity penalty until you create more power generators. Structures also have an effect on the environment and if the quality of the land goes down, your farms can suffer. However, you can build structures that positively affect the environment which in turn can give you bonuses in production.

Each faction has its own affect on the world. Eden buildings take up a lot of space, but hurt the environment less and their farms receives bonuses based on the environment, while the Trust using smaller more efficient buildings that do greater harm. S.A.A.T or the tech faction is the analog for the Orient faction from 1404 and are used to support the highest class of citizens of the previous two factions. Their buildings are mostly underwater based and players can set up mining colonies under the sea.

What sets S.A.A.T apart, is the concept of research, as you go up the tech tree for their faction, you'll unlock research buildings that allow you to spend money and resources to perform research projects. The projects range from providing you with warehouse buffs, to timed duration bonuses and even upgrades to your Ark which act as global bonuses.

As you can tell, there is a lot in 2070 to do and the inclusion of the Meta game helps tie the game elements together. As you play continuous games, any ark upgrades become stored on your ship and can be taken with you from game to game. This will allow you to get a head start with future games or make things easier for you. Research projects also persist across games allowing the player to keep their progress with unlocking them. With everything that needs to be digest I wish that the game went a little more towards helping the player learn.

The interface for 2070 is one of the most streamlined UIs I've seen for the genre; however this means that a newcomer will have to figure out all sorts of little icons and graphics to make sense of the game. The game's campaign is essentially the tutorial, but it doesn't feel like it does as good of a job as 1404's campaign did.

What made 1404's campaign work, was how it was focused on only showing the player a few mechanics each level to not overwhelm the player. At the start of a new map, the player is usually given a base city that has all the previously learned mechanics already established for the player, so that they can focus on what's new.

2070's campaign switches between the three factions throughout the missions making it harder to understand how progression works. The campaign is separated into three groups of missions, and within each group the player's city is transferred from map to map. While the concept is commendable, it can leave the player in a situation where they have developed their city in such a way that makes progressive maps harder. The help screen isn't as intuitive compared to 1404's help panel on the bottom right of the screen and takes the player to a separate screen which makes it harder to follow how the tips relate to what's happening in game.

As an example of the unintuitive nature of the campaign, the first time the player is introduced to drilling for oil, is the last map of the first group, where they must set up refineries using the tech faction. After that map, oil is not re-introduced until the 2nd map of the third group and this time the player is asked to use the Trust faction. The problem is that the game does not explain anywhere during that mission that the Trust can drill for oil on islands and where to check on the UI to make sure that it is possible to drill there. When the game asks the player to build more power structures or affect the environment, there is no mention on screen why the player should be performing those actions.

The other problems with Anno 2070 are the same ones that are inherent with the series, first, is that the game is sloooooooooooow (yes I had to spell it that way.) This is a game where the easiest scenario can take at least 8 hours to complete. For people looking for a game where they can just hop on and play for 15 minutes a day and make some headway, Anno 2070 is not for them. For all the complexities and depth of building your city, combat still doesn't feel as fleshed out as it could be. Anno 2070 introduces air units through the tech faction, but combat still feels like a side dish compared to the city building instead of being fully integrated.

Still, the campaign is just one part of an excellent game and the other issues fans of the series have looked past. Fans of previous Anno titles should snatch this one right up. For newcomers, I would suggest either trying out a demo or watching gameplay footage on YouTube so that you can have an idea of what you are getting into. The dynamic of introducing a Meta game of connecting progress and settlements together was a smart move by the developers and does a lot to expand upon the sandbox nature of the game. While the thought of the polar ice caps melting is not a pleasant one, I do look forward the time where we all have corn powered robotic servants.

Josh Bycer

A Puzzled Look At the Adventure Genre.

2011-11-30T18:18:00.003-05:00

The adventure genre is one of several genres on the PC that have been declining over the years. The days of Myst and the Lucas Arts era of developing games are behind us. Telltale Games met success with the Sam and Max revival and a lot of gamers were hoping that they would help revive the genre. However, while last year they had a hit, this year saw a downward turn with negative reviews of both games based off of Back To The Future and Jurassic Park.

Reading reviews of BttF, one common complaint I kept seeing was about the puzzles. Having played both the Sam and Max seasons and BttF, I tried to remember if the same puzzle design was featured in both and why one was praised and the other scorn. As I thought about it, it seems like puzzle design is one of those elements that has not grown as much compared to other genres.

Looking at the concept of a traditional puzzle in a video game, the components of a puzzle can be represented simply as a locked door. The door represents the goal, the lock represents the obstacle, and the key represents what has to be done. Disregarding story and writing as player hooks as another reason to play adventure games, there are several aspects of puzzle design that we can examine.

1. Trial and Error: To me, one of the defining elements of bad puzzle design is trial and error. Trial and error can occur from two situations, first is by design. Personally, I think this is where a lot of people's complaints about Telltale's games come into play. A lot of their puzzles are based around going through dialogue options to find the one that will set up the solution, or trying to figure out how something works by playing around with switches or buttons, which is a throwback to classic adventure design. The second situation is when you have no clue of how to solve the puzzle, and your only option is the brute force method. Raise your hand if you ever had a number-pad puzzle that you just sat there for a few minutes trying every combination imaginable.

The problem that I have with it goes back to my favorite puzzles to do. As a brief tangent, I love doing Picross and Sudoku puzzles, but for the life of me I can't do cryptograms while my mom is the exact opposite. The reason I like them is that the solution is right there, you just have to decipher it and there is a feeling of accomplishment for solving it.

Puzzles built around trial and error design do not rely on thinking or player skill to finish and can feel more like busy work. Compared to a puzzle where the player has to solve the puzzle using their own thought process, there is less satisfaction with a trial and error type puzzle.

2. Puzzle Environment: Puzzles fitting into the game-space have also hit a snag in terms of growth. In the old days, the size of a puzzle section took up multiple screens with puzzles placed around. The player would not know where to use certain items, or even what puzzles to do in what order without spending a lot of time wandering around. Sometimes an item would be picked up, that won't be used until further in, leaving the player to guess what it is supposed to do.

Recently with adventure games like Amnesia and the Penumbra series, the game space has become more hub based. How it works is that when the player enters an area, there is one main problem stopping the player from moving forward. In order to fix it, the player will have to go through several areas that are specified to find items, or activate devices that will open up the way forward. The difference between this design and past adventure game design is that each area is closed off from each other in terms of items: if the player is in area A, they will not need to find any items to help them with area B.

The advantage of this design is that it removes some of the trial and error nature of adventure games. You know when you enter an area that everything you need is right there and you don't have to worry about missing an item that will come back to bite you later on. The disadvantage is that you lose some immersion to the world and exploring in the process. The player knows that whenever they enter a new area, that there will be at least 3 doors leading to puzzle areas.

3. Esoteric influence: Another throwback to the adventure games of yesteryear, are puzzles with unrealistic solutions. While giving the player the ability to feel like MacGyver is cool, bending the rules of reality to do that is not. This issue also feeds back into the trial and error problem, as players will have to go through their inventory item by item to find the one that works.

One other part of this is using real world knowledge or skills that everyone may not know, for example, having a puzzle based on chemistry or understanding Norse Mythology. Whenever you want to include real world information in your puzzles, it helps to leave notes or clues that explain what you expect the player to understand. For instance, in the Penumbra series there is a puzzle that requires the player to create an explosive and right next to the chemistry set is a note detailing what exactly that entails so that even if you are not familiar with chemistry, you can still figure it out. Physics based puzzles have become very popular as everyone understands how gravity and weight works, leaving the player to figure out how to use them to solve the puzzle.

4. One Way: Designing amazing puzzles is a great feeling, however the more unique the puzzle is the less freedom there usually is in solving them. There probably is another game design debate here on the subject of adventure games as interactive stories or games. One of the major pulls that designers use to get people to play adventure games is the story; it's one of the reasons why so many people jumped at the latest Sam and Max games. What this means is that once you played the game once, there is very little reason to replay it other than coming back to watch the story again.

Some designers in the past have tried ways of having replay-ability or multiple solutions in their games. In Portal 1 and 2 with how physics can play a factor in the design, it is possible to find unusual solutions to many of the puzzles, and there are expert variants of the puzzles available to try.

Another game that attempted multiple solutions was Zack and Wiki on the Wii. In the game the player is graded on how they solve each puzzle in the level, with many puzzles having a "good”, “better", and "best" solution. The best solutions usually involve getting a puzzle right on the first try, or using the tools in the most optimal way and the end of the level, score is used for unlocking bonus features.

The idea of using randomized puzzle layouts and design is an intriguing one, and it will be discuss in the next section.

5. Living Puzzles: The last point for this post has to do with the concept of integrating puzzle design into the world. One of the best examples of this is with the final section of Portal and part of the second act in Portal 2. During these sections the player is not confined into a set space with a specific goal to achieve. Instead they have to find their way around using the same tools that helped them in the puzzle chambers. The game, Limbo is another example, the game flows seamlessly from one puzzle to another and while it is technically segmented, the illusion of the world helps.

What this comes down to in my opinion is the actions the player has available in the game. For this post, the term "actions" will be defined as: the ways the player interacts with the world. For example, in Grand Theft Auto, the player's actions involve shooting, fighting and driving vehicles. The more actions the player has access to, the more the world opens up and this idea of letting the world become a puzzle takes shape.

In the Assassin's Creed series, the player's main interaction with the world is through movement, just about every edge can be used to climb up and help the player get around. With so many actions available, the world becomes a living puzzle with how the player can figure out how to move around the city in the best ways possible. The only real shortcoming of the first two games (I have not played the latest two and can't comment on them,) is that there isn't more freedom in performing tasks, such as having missions where enemies and targets are randomized instead of being in the same place every time.

I've been playing around in my head with the idea for an adventure game with a randomized world. The concept is that there is a murder mystery and all you know is who died and where. As a detective you have 24 hours to figure out the rest and each time you play the details of the case are randomized. The game is played in quasi real time, every time the player performs an action time moves forward a little bit and eventually time will run out and you'll have to present your evidence.

A few months ago there was a great piece in PC Gamer looking back at some of the more unique adventure games that came out in the late 80s and 90s, like Maniac Mansion and The Last Express. Creativity and uniqueness are not strange concepts to the genre, but the challenge is figuring out how to implement them without falling back into old patterns of design.

Josh Bycer

Games That Just Missed it: Children of the Nile Edition

2011-11-25T19:07:00.001-05:00

I've been recently getting into the Anno series which is a complex economic city-builder and it got me thinking about another city-builder that I wished that it would have taken off. Tilted Mill was a company formed from former Impressions Games employees. Impressions Games made a variety of city-builders including Pharaoh and Zeus (which are their more recognizable brands) and at the time were the alternatives to the Sim City series. While Tilted Mill was around, they created several games, but none of them achieved mass success, with the game Hinterland being one of my personal favorites. However, today I want to talk about their first title: Children of the Nile and how it could have redefined the genre.

Children of the Nile take place in ancient Egypt and cast the player as the pharaoh who must build a successful city within various scenarios. CotN did several things differently from other city builders at the time. One common mechanic in the Impressions series was how vital attaching everything to a road was. People would wander through your city using the roads and if they carry products or resources, unless they walk by a building, no one in the building would get access to it. This made early city builders very inorganic and was the first big change in CotN.

Anyone in your city could go anywhere, with or without roads, but roads would speed up their movement. Another common system in most city-builders was how the player only needed to care about the macro level of their economy, meaning as long as the city is making money for the player and people were happy, everything is good. CotN changed that and was one of the few city-builders to attempt to create its own economic system.

CotN's economic system was based off food, as there was no paper currency during the time of ancient Egypt. Harvesting food is based off of the seasons of the land, first farmers will plant their crops after the Nile recedes, then harvest them next season. Afterwards the Nile floods the farm lands to make the land fertile again and the pattern repeats. During the harvest, the food is divvied up to the different classes of people in your city.

The lower class is the farmers who live on land leased by the upper class. They keep some of the food and give the rest in the form of taxes. The middle class is split between shopkeepers and government workers and the difference is how they get food. Shopkeepers sell their wares to everyone and whatever food they earn is used to support them, while government workers receive food from the city storage thanks to their services. Lastly the upper class or nobles give a portion of their food supply to the city which becomes your source of currency, the # of nobles you have determines how many farmers you can have employed.

Throw in children going to school to become educated, allowing them to work at specialized buildings, and the challenge of setting up mining colonies and building monuments, and CotN stands apart from other games. Out of the various city builders released, it is one of the few that tried to create its own ecosystem and getting a city running successfully is a major accomplishment. However, the price of doing something new is that you don't have a frame of reference for any potential problems, which CotN did have.

Because of how each group relies on the other to survive, it's very easy to start a downward spiral of losing people due to missing or unable to fix any issues in the city. With shopkeepers, you won't know how much of their stock they have, only vague clues of: "almost out" "tons in stock" etc. Without exact numbers, it's difficult to determine how they are meeting the needs of your townspeople and this becomes even more complicated when you have to set up colonies to mine.

Any good city-builder is about managing escalating chaos and while CotN definitely has chaos, the game makes it very difficult to manage it. Most city builders escalate needs based on the size of the city; CotN does it by game length. At random points in the game, an alert will pop up signaling some kind of event that will cause your citizens to want something else, for example, a bad harvest may want them to pray to a different god. The problems are twofold, first is that advanced buildings require educated workers and your stock of them are limited. The more prestige your pharaoh has will attract some, while the rest comes from sending children to school.

However what usually happens is that you just assigned your worker to one job, when all of a sudden an event may pop up requiring a hospital, but you don't have any more workers right now, leaving your people unhappy. The second issue is that everything in the game takes time to be built which makes issues last longer. The process is that first the materials must be transported to the site, and then the actual construction begins. All this eats into more time that your people are unhappy, and people remember issues in your city for some time which affects their overall happiness. When a group of people become angry, they may either strike or just move out of your city, which going back to the Eco-system starts a downward spiral that is difficult to climb out of.

The randomness of city events and the lack of hard numbers when it comes to certain resources leave the game in a cluttered state. Contrast to the Anno series, where the player can see exactly how much of each resource they have along with how more challenges are introduce, makes it easier to build and understand. Blind luck is not something you want in your city-builders, especially when you are trying to learn the game.

One of the hallmarks of a player "getting it" in a city-builder is getting their city to the point of being self sufficient, or being able to run itself without any further input from the player. When you play CotN, it is very difficult to reach that point, as while you are trying to build all the necessary structures, the random events will occur to change everything up. Looking at Anno 1404 on the other hand, it is very easy to get your city to the point of being self sufficient, the challenge comes from keeping it self sufficient while balancing out income, growth and trade.

The advantage of reaching the point of being self sufficient early is that it allows the player to see very easily, how their additions and growth affects the city and learn from that. Whereas in CotN the player is required to make choices without being able to see if they will have the intended results if an event happens.

To the game's credit, CotN did go where most city-builders don't venture to with the concept of an eco-system. CotN reminds me of another flawed gem: Evil Genius in how the game had a lot of great ideas and hindsight along with a sequel could have done a lot to improve the mechanics.

Josh Bycer

The Contradiction Of Design In MMO Endgame content

2011-11-16T15:36:00.000-05:00

DC Universe Online joins the very small list of MMOs that I managed to reach the level cap and got to see the endgame. While DCUO tries to do something different beyond just going on raids all the time, it still falls into the same trap that I see happen to every MMO, that the design falls apart for me when I reach the endgame.

For those not familiar with MMOs, the end game consists of raids. A raid is a mission designed for a larger than normal group (for the regular content) of players. These missions usually involve fighting enemies of a higher caliber then the regular foes, with bosses that have pumped up stats to go toe to toe with the group. Beating the mission rewards the group with access to the best gear in the game, and for games with PvP gameplay, is usually the edge people use to win.

There are two main problems that I have with endgames in most MMOs: Progression and Gameplay. Starting with progression, one of the main hooks in any MMO is constant progression. It's why the leveling treadmill works so well in keeping people playing and why you see so many bars used to show progress. No matter what the player does, there is always some measure of visible progress on screen showing players that they aren't wasting their time.

However, when the player reaches the level cap they lose one of the main sources of progression: experience points. Now, progression is very black and white, either the player finds better gear after a long string of fights, or they get nothing and that time was wasted. DCUO did do one thing clever regarding this problem; they allowed players to continue improving their character's stats past the level cap.

DCUO's version of achievements or "feats" are based on a variety of goals and each time the player completes a feat they earn feat points, with harder feats giving out more points. For every 100 feat points the player earns one skill point, which is used for boosting skills in the weapon and movement type categories. For each weapon type there are skills that boost the character’s attributes further, and with more skill points, make the character innately better.

While DCUO does allow progression past the level cap, it still requires a massive grind for end game gear. DCUO's group based missions are separated into alerts (4 player missions) and raids (8 player missions.) During either type of mission, boss enemies can drop rare gear that the group can vote for who gets it; beating the mission awards "marks" which are used to buy the best gear at the player's home base.

The problem with this system is that there are multiple types of marks, each used for a different category of endgame gear. The player only receives a few marks for completing a mission and it will take multiple runs to get enough marks to start outfitting your character. Once again this leads to a black and white progression system as the player will only gain marks for completing these tougher missions and can still end up wasting their time if they are unable to beat the mission.

Moving on, another problem with endgame content is that the designers are forced to stretch their combat system further to make it work for group encounters. Most MMOs are based on character growth and not the player, with success determined by the attributes and gear of the character.

Going back to my action game background, I prefer games where the player's skill is the main factor for success. The problem that I have with MMO design is that it's not really creating challenging gameplay, but just lowering the safety net for the player. Because everything is abstracted by the character's skill level, it's easy to just create enemies with higher stats and call it a day.

I don't find it challenging or engaging when an enemy who is equal to me level wise, really has 15 times my attribute values and can kill me no matter what I do if I take it on solo. Boss battles in raids amount to just whacking the thing for 10 minutes straight and making sure your healer and tank are doing their job.

I find the concept of a traditional endgame in MMOs to be a contradiction of game design. The reason is that any video game inherently has a point where the player has gotten everything out of it and will stop playing. Endgame content in MMOs doesn’t add anything new to the design but just inflate what's there to begin with. With each new expansion to an MMO, the level cap moves up ever further, which is just an excuse to pump up attributes of gear and enemies even more. The player is doing the same gameplay each time, but the attributes of everything is different.

If the content was actually different, or the game focused more on player skill, then this would be fine by me. I'm going to say it again, if someone created an MMO in the style of Demon's Souls, I would play the hell out of it, and buy whatever expansions the designers make to try even crazier dungeons and enemies. I recently read a preview of the new Star Wars MMO and a comment that combat is focused on hotkeys was the nail in the coffin for my interest in the game. As that tells me that's the same song and dance I've seen before, but replace swords with light sabers, although I'm curious about having to fight an "elite jawa."

Josh Bycer

Great Game Design Debate: MMO Leveling Edition

2011-11-11T22:24:00.000-05:00

Two things that are synonymous with MMOs are leveling up and an endgame. Most gamers argue that during the leveling up time, the player is in training for the main event, and the endgame is where the real game starts. Based on that philosophy, most MMOs have a high cap on their levels which also serves as a way to keep people playing for months and get them ready for the endgame.

Yet some MMOs have experimented with caps that can be reached in days; Guild Wars had a cap at level 20, and DC Universe Online was set at 30. With a low cap, it allows more of the fan base to experience "the real game", now with that said, is one form better than the other?

Let's start with a large cap, which has several key advantages. First is that it has a clear progression model, someone who is level 5 won't be doing the same things as a level 70. These games are designed with a "treadmill" mentality in mind, to keep the player interested and to keep playing to reach the cap. Another way to keep the player invested is with side activities, like crafting to give the player a diversion while still rewarding them. Since the player is going to spend so much time in the world, these side activities help branch out the gameplay.

With all those levels to climb, also means that there has to be a lot of places to visit. For those looking for worlds to explore, games like World of Warcraft and Ever quest 2 can fit that bill. A huge world also helps with keeping griefers somewhat in control, as with all the different areas to go to, means they can't focus on one area and attack low level players as easy.

Now the problems with a high cap, because most MMOs are based on character progression and not player, means that the player will usually figure out the game before hitting the cap. However, since it doesn't matter how skilled the player is, they will still have to level up before starting the endgame, sort of like being forced to eat your vegetables before getting to dessert.

Because content is spread out across so many levels, it makes designing a variety of content difficult; if you've seen one fetch quest, you've seen them all. With so many areas to fill with content, it would take a very long time to create unique content for every single section, which for game launch; designers normally don't have that luxury. With so much space to design content for, it can lead to two situations where gamers can quit.

During the early days of City of Heroes, the designers ran out of content for the time spent playing between levels 35-40; forcing players to grind on regular enemies for 5 levels before they can do any new missions. The enjoyment factor of the game took a nosedive for that part which is a shame, as there was some interesting content after the hump.

The second scenario is when the treadmill no longer provides a hook. Spending months doing the same tasks before "the game begins", can be as maddening as running out of content. I played World of Warcraft back during the launch year for about 6 months. During that time my highest character was only level 50 and I really stopped caring about progression around the 40s. I grew tired of the same tasks and how the content was so generalized and stopped playing.

Huge level caps also make it very hard to try new characters due to the time commitment required to level just one character (with exception to the hardcore players.) Since the first impression is important, content at the lower levels are usually more varied as it eases new players into the game and their classes. However, once the player leaves the starting area, they are usually taken to a more generalized area where everyone has access to the same pool of quests.

Moving on, let's talk about low caps. Because of the lower cap, it allows gamers to reach the cap, and endgame, around the time that they have figured out the mechanics of the game. With less content needed to level up, it frees up the designers to create more varied content at the endgame, as they know that the majority of their audience will get to see it.

PvP is usually more focused and built around the game better, once again going back to more players being able to experience it. With Guild Wars, the game really became PvP focused once players reached the cap and could start experimenting with their skills and get into matches.

Creating different characters is also easier as the lack of a serious time commitment allows players to try out a variety of classes without having to spend months grinding them back up. Speaking about classes, one similarity between games with lower caps is that the designers try to do something different with the gameplay compared to high cap games. Guild Wars featured a collectible card game like system, of designing your skill bar from a variety of options, with rare skills obtainable from quests. While DC Universe went for a more action game like combat system and a different way of rewarding gamers for completing quests which will be the subject of another entry.

Now the problems, the main one has to do with content, but of a different subject compared to high cap games. Because more gamers are going to hit the cap and play the endgame in lower cap MMOs, it also means that the designers are going to have to design a lot more content. Since lower cap games don't have a lot of side activities, it's going to take a continual implementation of end game content to keep people playing, in other words like constantly feeding a coal driven locomotive engine to keep going.

The lack of content is one of the aspects that really hurt DC Universe Online right out of the gate. With everyone reaching the level cap within a week, the designers were put on the spot to live up to their promise of putting out content monthly. Unfortunately as we all found out, they weren't able to keep up which was one of the points that led to the game going F2P.

Lack of rewards is another big deal. Being able to see your character become powerful over the course of the game is a powerful draw for high cap MMOs. By the time the player hits the cap, they’ll have a huge pool of skills to draw from and a variety of equipment. However in low cap MMOs, you don't have that luxury in rewarding players. The problem with most endgame design is that it's built around raids (high level content requiring larger groups of players to succeed.) The purpose then becomes, completing raids to get more gear so that you can do more raids and this repeats until the player gets bored.

DC Universe Online attempted to get around this with various solo, duo and raid content at the endgame, but it all feeds into the same process of getting gear. While I'm enjoying DCUO, after reaching the level cap, I'm still baffled as to why the designers originally thought that a subscription model would work, as I don't see this game being worth it in terms of content. Guild Wars knew that it didn't have enough content for a subscription model and designed it from day one with that in mind, something that DCUO would have benefited from.

That last point is interesting, the lower cap MMOs I've seen either start out as F2P, or transition into it and I think content is the big deal. It's far easier to create generalized quests that can fill 70 or more levels of gameplay, as oppose to 30 levels of completely unique content.

As for me, since I've gone on record saying that I like F2P design in the past, my preference is for shorter level caps and having the chance to try more skill based gameplay is always a plus. When you look at both sides of the argument it comes down to where the experience lies, for high cap, it's in the journey and for low cap it's the ending.

Personally, regardless of level caps, I do feel like the traditional model for an endgame needs to be revised. Doing raid content for the sole purpose of getting the gear to do more doesn't sit right with me. Endgame content should be the most diverse that the game has to offer and should give out more tangible rewards then just shinier pieces of loot. After-all as many gamers put it, it's "where the real game begins."

Josh Bycer

The Tricky Transition of Payment Models in MMOs.

2011-11-07T18:44:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago I posted an entry talking about my thoughts on why subscription focused MMOs are falling by the wayside, in favor of Free-To-Play payment models. Since then, I've been trying out the F2P version of DC Universe Online, while looking at all kinds of charts and diagrams from various MMOs on how the switch has changed their design. Besides getting a small headache trying to figure it out, I noticed that a lot of designers are still scrambling to rework their game into a new model and maybe missing the point of what makes F2P work.

1. Content and Progression: The first question when going into a new F2P game is always: "How far can I get without spending any money?" The reason is if you are required to constantly spend money each month to make any progress, then you are once again paying a subscription for a game.

I've said it before, but Riot Games with League of Legends was one of the smartest developers when coming up with their payment model. You don't have to spend one cent playing LoL to be able to see all the game content, granted it's going to take you longer then someone who spends money, but it will happen eventually.

One of the worse design decisions you can make either creating a brand new F2P game or transitioning into one is tweaking the mechanics to force people to spend money. World of Tanks made the grind to get new tanks so long with the added cost of losing in game money in many battles that it can become maddening to unlock higher tiers without spending real money. Gold ammo which does increased damage must be bought with real money by the round, requiring constant spending to keep your supply up. Locking leveling upgrades or important gear behind a payment model is akin to punishing players for not spending money and can drive people away.

Age of Empires Online hits a new player over the head with locked content from the get-go. So much of the game requires the player to upgrade their Civilization that it feels pervasive with how many times a player gets a pop-up asking them to spend money. The problem is that the game's supposed main RPG hook of upgrading your units with shiny pieces of equipment can only be fully utilized by spending money. What's worse is that quest rewards and special buildings are also locked, and for free players means that they'll have items taking up the already small inventory space.

While getting money is important for a F2P game to stay afloat, the designers have to make a concession and give content and features away for free. The beauty and point of a F2P game is that the player doesn't have to spend money to experience what the game has to offer.

2. Locking Players Out: One staple of any MMO making the switch to F2P is "the chart", detailing what exactly you get for paying varying amounts of money. For your viewing pleasure here are the charts for Lord of the Rings Online(click on details tab) and Ever Quest 2; see how long you can read them without getting a migraine.

The common theme is how a lot of basic quality of life features are locked behind spending money: inventory sizes, ability to chat, technical support and many more. The problem I have with this goes back to the first point, you should not have to force people to spend money to play your game. Locking QOL features leads to a slippery slope of having features that gamers are used to getting normally, now unavailable. World of Tanks prevents friends from playing together unless at least one person spends money to gain premium access.

Designers know that one of the more popular aspects of MMO play is the social side, which is most often why guilds are usually locked from free players. I find this counter-intuitive, as the point is to get people to play together and spend more time in the game so that they'll spend money to buy stuff they can use together. Players should want to spend money for additional content, not to gain access to features that other games give for free.

3. Subscription Woes: Another tell-tale sign that a MMO was not designed originally with the F2P model in mind is the option to pay a subscription fee each month. To me, this is like a recovering alcoholic who spends every night hanging out at the bar, the point of switching to the F2P model is usually that a subscription didn't work.

My chief complaint is that most often all the subscription does, is just give players access to what the game was before the switch was made. In my opinion this is one of the worse examples of "having your cake and eating it too" as players will still have to spend money on additional content in the form of micro transactions. Designers seem to be missing the point that quality content should be the reason to spend money, not getting what you had before.

This is why I'm not a fan of continuing subscription fee plans in F2P games, as it misses the point. To me it's like having content and features as a hostage, which the player must continue to spend money each month or else it's gone, as opposed to just buying the content and having it permanently associated with the account. Once again I like the League of Legends model, besides boosts that work for X amount of matches, everything else once bought is yours forever, and the game has enough quality of life features that it doesn't feel handicapped compared to other games.

4. Keep it Cheap: Micro transactions are the money makers when it comes to F2P games thanks to gamers wanting to support the developers and being inexpensive enough to be close to impulse buys. However designers transitioning from subscription to F2P, need to realize that the point of micro transactions is that they are micro. Monetizing out every little aspect may sound bad, but it allows gamers to pick and choose exactly what they want, and spend however that is on it and nothing else.

The problem that I have with Age of Empires Online premium civilization content is that they wrapped too many benefits into it and released it at a high cost. When it comes to micro transactions, every dollar matters, as gamers know full well what they are purchasing. The problem with AOEO is that instead of spending $20 up front for a bunch of benefits and features that people aren't sure about, they should have pieced it out. If someone just wants to play AOEO for the upgrades to player equipment and doesn't care about the other benefits, then let them spend 3 or 4 dollars just on that feature and leave the other options open for the future.

Bundles and promos are very effective marketing tactics and can push gamers even further into buying more content. Every week Riot Games usually has a sale on champions and skins for that exact purpose. The combination of a limited time offer and pushing prices even further into impulse buy territory can convince many gamers to spend money.

People are more willing to spend money on micro transactions and additional content when they feel like they're not being pressured or forced to. As more MMOs are released or developed around the F2P model, designers need to understand the differences between models and that some things either need to be cut or completely rework for the transition to go through smoothly. Designing a game for the F2P or micro transaction model from the start is better than having to transition from one model to another. The reason is that the designer can develop all the content and features from day one around the specific model and gamers will know exactly what their dollars and cents will get them.

Josh Bycer

A Big Score- A Payday: The Heist Analysis

2011-11-05T14:15:00.004-04:00

One of the biggest contributions Left 4 Dead has given to game design was resurrecting small group co-op design. Since then, we've seen more games being developed around playing with your buddies and Overkill Software's Payday: The Heist is no exception. While it may look like from the outside as a re-skin of Left 4 Dead, there is more to look at under the mask.

The basic plot is that you are a part of a squad of robbers who are looking to hit it big, along with your NPC handler you'll have to pull off various heists. Each heist takes place in a different circumstance, from robbing a bank to escaping a job gone wrong and standing in your way is the law. Like L4D, your opposition comes in several forms, from beat cops to FBI, to Special Forces who each want to put you behind bars.

The first change is that there is a leveling progression. There are three skill trees to go up: assault, sharpshooter and support. While selecting a class has no affect on your actual playing ability, it does determine what unlocks you earn at level up. You can switch classes at any time during play, and yes that also means right before leveling up. As you go up in rank, you'll find your equipment options will grow and you'll be able to create your own equipment load out based on the options from the three trees.

While Payday doesn't have competitive vs. like L4D, it does come with an advantage. By keeping the multiplayer co-op, it gave them the luxury of designing unique heists both in their objectives and layout. One heist has you crossing all over a city trying to get to the getaway vehicle, while another begins as a stealth mission in a skyscraper. Because the missions are more varied, it also gives them a more dynamic feel compared to L4D.

In L4D every map is structured mostly the same way (not counting the first and last map of a campaign.) During play you have three main threats to deal with: the already spawn infected, the special infected and a mass group of infected called a horde. Because the basic objective is to just push forward, means that average to advance players will encounter the enemies at roughly the same point.

Payday is different, as you're not just running from one end of a map to another. Sometimes objectives require you to stay in one place for several minutes to complete them. Once the initial objective has been completed an invisible timer will begin counting down to when the police will begin their assault on your group. During an assault, the Police will continue to attack along with the Special Forces. If someone runs out of health they'll be knocked to the ground and a countdown appears. If another player can revive the player then they'll be all patched up, but if time runs out the player will be arrested and knocked out of play.

If the remaining players can survive the assault wave, afterwards they'll be given a chance to release one of the hostages they took to get a player back in the game. Regular officers will still be attacking during this phase which will require your team to be on alert. After a few minutes another assault wave will begin and this pattern continues until the players either win the map or are all locked up. In most cases, it's better to hunker down while an objective is being completing during an assault wave, and to keep moving when you have to get somewhere.

The change up of fighting enemies who can fire back gives the game a different feel compared to Left 4 Dead. The concepts of providing cover and group dynamics are more pronounced in Payday. While the "Rambo style" wasn't applicable in Left 4 Dead, it was possible for one really good player to effectively lead the team and be the linchpin for success. However, in Payday, with police attacking from all angles and the need to perform objectives one person really can't do it all alone.

While all this sounds good so far as they say, there is no such thing as a perfect plan. Payday also borrows Left 4 Dead's lack of in game tutorial or manual. The importance of shooting out cameras, how upgrades work and getting police officers to surrender is not explained in the game. While the game does feature a single-player mode, at this time the AI will not perform any objectives leaving the player to do all the work.

Police spawns can make or break your run on a heist, and sometimes the "gamey" way they spawn breaks immersion. On maps where the players are mainly hold up in specific buildings or areas, the police will spawn off camera or behind inaccessible areas. However, two of the current maps require the players to keep moving forward to complete objectives and because of this, enemies tend to spawn out of nowhere.

On the heist "heat street", there were plenty of times where a SWAT van will spit out dozens of officers like a clown car, to only be completely empty when you get close to it. If the players try to take on the police first before moving on, they'll most likely end up fighting unending waves of officers. With ammo limited to one time deploy-able bags and dropped from killed enemies, it's very easy to get stuck in a bad situation.The best (and unrealistic) solution to these areas is to push as forward as you can to get past the spawn trigger then turn around and deal with the remaining enemies.

Last issue is that while the game does offer a lot of bang for your buck, there are some polish issues. Enemies will sometime clip through objects and the graphics are somewhat basic looking (there is an advance graphics feature coming in an upcoming patch.)

Payday has managed to pull my friends and I away from Left 4 Dead, which is no easy feat. The only concern that I have with the game is that without additional modes or heists, that the game's replay ability is lower then Left 4 Dead. The developers have already promise more content coming in the form of DLC which I think will make or break Payday's lasting appeal. Still, there is a lot already in the game and with some great design; for people looking for another co-op fix, Payday is a great fit.

Josh Bycer

The Difference between Fear and Tension in Game Design

2011-11-03T18:33:00.001-04:00

Better late than never I always say, I couldn't come up with a horror theme post in time for Halloween, but you can always find inspiration if you look hard enough. One comment I hear whenever we bemoan the lack of great horror titles these days, is people saying that difficult games can be scary. A lot of people have said that they were scared while playing Demon's Souls due to the challenge and penalty of death. However, during my entire time spent playing the game, I never felt even an iota of being scared and I think people are confusing the feeling of tension with fear.

Tension in games usually comes from the feeling that you are being tested beyond your skill level and forced to brave through it. If you have ever played a challenging game where you can just feel yourself sweating on the controller and your heart racing, that is tension. One of the reasons why we get a feeling of accomplishment playing difficult games is that we are rising up and overcome a challenge. Now, sweaty hands and increase blood pressure are also prevalent in horror titles, but the reasons for these feelings are different.

Good horror is about uncertainty and forcing the player to ask questions like "when am I going to be attacked?", "can I survive the next fight?", "what's behind that door?" and so on. If you noticed, that 2nd question is also in challenging games and is one of the prime causes of tense gameplay. However, challenging games are about a constant assault, leaving the player with no time to reflect or feel fear.

Horror titles work best at building up to horror and surprising the player and the main difference between the two comes down to the results. After surviving a tense battle in a challenging game, the player feels happy and has that feeling of accomplishment from earlier. In a horror title however, the player should still be feeling nervous and questioning their resolve at continuing, any sense of accomplishment should be small and overwhelmed by the knowledge that there is more to come.

Recently while playing The Binding of Isaac, I had what could be described as a tense moment. I had one of the strongest upgrades in the game from the new patch early in the game, but at the cost of only having one heart of health total. Meaning that once I hit the 75% mark I could only take one hit from any enemy and then it would be game over. I didn't think that I would beat the game but continued anyway and through close calls I made it to the point where I was lucky enough to find two health upgrades. Still with enemies doing one full heart of damage I was getting hurt and when I reached the final, final, final, final boss I only had one heart left and a boss with a full health meter to kill. Somehow I managed to win and afterwards I felt my heart beating again.

While I was tense, I was not scared at all during my time with Isaac, as I knew what had to be done, but wasn't sure if I was capable of doing it. Tension is the byproduct of being scared, but tension alone does not make a situation scary. Ultimately, the success of a great challenging game should make the player puff out their chest with accomplishment and feel awesome, while a great horror game should make them huddle in the corner in a fetal position.

Happy Belated Halloween,

Josh Bycer

Avoiding Filler in Game Design

2011-10-29T15:41:00.003-04:00

Anime has been one of those mediums ingrained in gamer culture; a suitable fit as many gamers’ first exposure to games came from Japan. It may surprise you, but I don't watch a lot of anime these days due to the issue of filler.

Most mainstream anime is based off of an existing manga (Japanese comic book,) and it is usually created at the same time that the manga is being written. What happens however is that the anime development overtakes the manga, leaving the studio producing the anime in a position where they have to wait for the manga to continue before they can continue the story development of the anime. The thought of going a month or so without any new episodes is not a good prospect, so the writers create a filler episode. Filler episodes have no plot or character development and most often, there is nothing actually gained from watching these episodes.

There are usually three tiers of filler, an episode, movie and the worse: a filler arc. If you ever watched an episode dealing with a flashback, clip show, or everyone stopping what they're doing and go shopping, that is a filler episode. A movie in an anime usually involves the same pattern:

1. A new character/characters and setting are introduced that once the movie is over, will never be seen again (unless there is a sequel.)

2. Characters will not use any new powers or knowledge, if there is a case that they'll use something new, it will be a onetime use and not used again.

3. The status quo is always restored by the end of the movie.

If you have watched any of the Dragon Ball Z movies then you know what I'm talking about. I've sat through four of them which the basic summary is that," Goku gets beaten up , then hits the bad guy one time and wins at the 59 minute mark"

Filler arcs however are the worse as they combine the qualities from a movie, but go on for far longer. Another name for these is a "side-story", but they still do nothing towards development. Naruto is perhaps one of the worst offenders of this and where I first heard the term filler hell. What happened in the series is that at the end of the main story, there is a five year gap story wise, between when the second big arc starts. However the manga was still being written, so the anime writers made around 100 episodes of filler. Think about that for a second, that's 50 hours that nothing happened that would ever be referenced or used again. For those wondering, yes there were filler episodes within the filler arcs, transforming into some kind of filler squared situation. By the time the second arc officially aired, I was so sick of the anime that I stopped watching all together.

Before we get started I do want to make one point, the same kind of filler does exist within many animated series in the US as well. The difference is that most cartoons are not created with a serialized story line, as the majority of their episodes (except for two parters,) are standalone.

Now, after what could be considered a filler intro, it's time to talk about how this relates to game design. Filler in terms of game design can be anything that adds tedium to the game and there are a lot of examples to go by. Essentially, whatever keeps the player from the main gameplay in the design can be considered filler, such as in a RPG, having to stop after every battle and go through several inventory screens to heal your party. Most acts of filler in game design are usually in the UI and innocuous, but the more the player is expose to it, the more it can take a toll.

If you ever played a game where you are just tired of dealing with it and turn it off, that is when tedium sets in. The act of tedium also goes back to an earlier entry, when I talked about how games have about 15 minutes to hook me before I lose interest. Finding any tedium within that time is usually the nail in the coffin for the game for me. Now the big question is how do you reduce filler or tedium?

What works for one genre doesn't necessary work for another. In my article on skill abstraction I talked about how different gamers expect different elements in their design. When I'm playing an action game, I want information to be as clear as possible, and found easily. However, if I'm playing a game where there are a lot of stats, I want that information to be detailed, yet easy to thumb through. The trick is to understand the main focus of your design, and try to figure out what elements in your game distract from it.

If it's an RPG where turn based combat and exploration is the focus, then anything that keeps the player from those two elements can cause tedium. Going back to the health recovery example further up, one way to make that painless is simply have the option to auto use enough health items or skills to recover your group at a push of a button, or just auto heal after the end of the battle. Now, the concept of tedium and automation go hand in hand, as the designer is adding automation to reduce the tedious actions the player has to deal with. However like all things, there is a line to watch out for when reducing tedium.

While automating actions is a great way to keep the player focused on the game, having too much automation can lead to another bad scenario, a game that plays itself. The first sign that something like this is happening, is when there is automation built into the focus of the design and not the elements that distract it. Dungeon Siege, which was an action RPG several years back allowed players to preset commands for their AI partners and their character, putting them into a situation where they can just sit back and watch the combat play out.

The second remake of Prince of Persia from a few years ago met similar criticism, but with a different design. In the game, the player could not fail any jumps or platforming maneuvers, as the AI partner would rescue the player each and every time.

Now in both examples, what happened was that too much automation was added to the focus of each game: Combat in Dungeon Siege and platforming in Prince of Persia. You don't want to downplay what gamers have bought the game for, or in other words, order a pizza and get a cheeseburger instead. The Zelda series since Ocarina of Time has automated jumping by making Link just jump whenever he runs off an edge, and that's fine because the gameplay pulls in the Zelda series are combat, exploration and puzzle solving.

Of course, some tedium or player control can be a good thing. In games that give the player the option to automate climbing up ladders or even adjust tax rates in a strategy game, sometimes you want to be able to control that. Automation's biggest advantage is that it allows players a chance to learn the game piece by piece, but sometimes expert players who have a greater insight compared to novice gamers, will want to act on their own.

The last concept of tedium for this entry is one of the hardest to nail down: progressive tedium. Sometimes mechanics that started out fine become tedious as the game progresses due to more things to examine or deal with. For example, managing one city in Civilization 4 was fine; managing 10 cities was another story. While examining the early game content for tedious mechanics is important, designers also need to examine late game play to see if there are any hang ups. UI features like auto-sorting and detailed screens may not seem that big of a deal in the early game, but they can be used as a way of preventing problems down the line.

Tedium is one of those traps that designers have to watch out for and being able to differentiate between a tedious action and a meaningful one is a challenge. More gameplay mechanics doesn't always make the game better, as hiding gameplay underneath tedium is never a good thing. The same goes for most animes as well, usually ones that have less than 70 episodes are pretty tight, which is not what you can say about the ones that are 200+ episodes. While the thought of having 100+ hours of game is an appealing one, the question however, is how many of those hours are actually meaningful?

Josh

Denouncements- A Concept of the "Anti-Achievement"

2011-10-24T16:00:00.002-04:00

For those that don't know me, one of my constantly played games would be the Left 4 Dead series. Between the two, I have at least 1000 hours of combined play time. A few years ago when L4D2 came out, one of my friends set up his own server so that my group could have our own stomping ground. To makes things interesting, he set up unique server achievements for us to go for, with one being who can kill me first in a map (and the people who got that still talk about it.) While we were joking around coming up with new achievement names, one of my friends had an interesting thought: what about implementing "anti-achievements," used to tell someone that they are playing the game wrong?

The server was eventually shut down, but the thought has stayed with me and I've been thinking about the pros and cons of having such a concept. First, let's change the name to "denouncement" to keep it completely separate from achievements. As many of you know, when playing team based games you are only as strong as your weakest player. In a game like L4D where it's just the four of you, having a bad enough player makes it feel like your team is only three people strong.

Because L4D doesn't feature a manual or tutorial, players will spend a lot of time learning by playing or watching better players. The problem is that there are a lot of little details that expert players know that they don't have the time to explain in the middle of the game. One of the worse learning experiences I see in game is when a novice player does the wrong thing with a special infected (such as spawn the boomer 30 feet away from the survivors,) and still manages to hit the survivors by a stroke of luck. The reason is that the player did something wrong, but was rewarded for it in game sending out mixed signals, so they'll keep doing the wrong thing because that one time it worked.

That's where the idea of denouncements come into play, with the advantages based on my thinking is that they can be used as a learning tool. As mentioned above, many times players will do the wrong action and being hit with a small slap on the wrist can help them learn. Another use is as a form of anti griefing, as many of us know, some players just want to ruin the fun of everyone else; most of the time, doing the same things that would show up on a list of denouncements. Seeing that someone has the entire list of denouncements on their profile would be a strong indicator that this person doesn't like to play the game right.

However, I can't help but think of the problems with this kind of system as well. First is just how much of a learning tool do we have? The beauty of a well designed achievement is that they should give two things to the player, first, recognition for doing something good and second, knowledge and skill with an advanced mechanic. Several of Left 4 Dead's achievements were for pulling off tricky maneuvers, such as shoving a hunter in mid pounce, stopping its attack. The problem I can see with denouncements is that the player will only learn that the action is wrong, but not get the correct mechanic.

Second, is just how long should they stay active? I can just see someone who is new to the game and before learning the game, get numerous denouncements and feel like they should quit before they get any more marks on their record. Maybe have them on for a week and then any denouncements are cleared from the profile, allowing them to remain on but not be permanent.

Before anyone says it, I do know of some games that have "dummy achievements" for not being good at the game such as with the Dead or Alive games, for losing so many rounds. The difference is that these are things that you should strive not to get and that message has to be made perfectly clear. This is actually why as I think about it, that they shouldn’t be permanent as you just know that the completest out there will play the game intentionally bad to get them all.

The idea of implementing anti griefing tools directly into the game design is interesting to me. With Dark Souls, while the designers want to promote a cooperative experience, many gamers do play it to track and kill other players. One of the items you can pick up allows you to view a list of all griefers online and another item allows you to invade their game to take revenge on them. Another title that has a similar result is World of Tanks, normally there is a penalty on your stats for killing a team mate , but if someone keeps team killing enough, they'll be marked with a different color on their name, making it ok to kill them every time.

This is one of those entries where I'm interested in opinions, as achievements sometimes have a polarizing affect on gamers, can the "tough love" approach be applied to something that is normally a reward?

Josh Bycer

Some Good News At Last.

2011-10-21T13:21:00.000-04:00

Hello everybody,

For those not following me on Google +, yesterday my first feature article was published on Gamasutra. The article was on the abstraction of skill in game design. This is the first of two articles confirmed on Gamasutra, with the second going up in a few weeks. I'm feeling good, not only being recognized, but knowing that my opinion holds a higher weight now. Fingers are crossed that this is the start of something big for me, but only time will tell.

Josh Bycer

The Problems With Strategy Guide Game Design.

2011-10-19T13:54:00.004-04:00

Two things that go together like peanut butter and jelly would have to be RPGs and secrets. If you have played just about any RPG within the last two decades then you have probably ran into (or not,) hidden side quests so obscure that the average gamer would never find them. This has been one of the reasons to pick up the strategy guide for the game (or go to gamefaqs,) next to needing help to continue. However, this raises a design problem and a major mistake that some designers make: designing content that only people with outside information of the game would know.

Having content that the game gives no information about is just lazy design and feels out of place. Good game design should give the player everything they need without having to resort to help. Even if random NPC #20 casually mentions that throwing a turkey into a fountain will do something good, that is still better than having the player just guess to find any secrets. One of the more infamous examples of this is from Final Fantasy 12, in the game there is a secret item that the player can find by opening treasure chests in a specific order. However, nowhere in the game does it tell you that order or even hints at this side quest, that information is reserved for the strategy guide. I believe in a few rules of design and in this post I'm going to share a few with you, starting with this one:

A player should not require any outside information to finish your game.

To define finishing the game is simply, beating the normal content in a game. I don't care if you are designing a game as easy as Sonic The Hedgehog or as hard as Ninja Gaiden, the rule stands. The player should be given all the information they need from either the manual or in game to succeed. The point of contention is if the player can understand the information that they are provided which I'll be coming back to later on in this post.

One of the complaints I had with Dark Souls was on the lack of bonfires allowing the player to effectively "checkpoint" their progress. Looking at guides online showed several bonfires that are hidden behind walls. That to me is a huge no-no and an arbitrary way of inflating difficulty. There was no reason to explicitly hide these from the player; several of which are behind walls that look like every other wall in the area which is just adding salt to the wound.

The core mechanics and systems of your game are vitally important and should be explained as thoroughly as possible to the player, which leads to this rule:

If the player cannot figure out the base mechanics of your game either through in game or the manual, then you have failed at your job of being a designer.

Something is very wrong if after reading the manual that someone can't figure out how your game works. Granted, in today's age the quality of printed manuals have degraded somewhat, but that's why we have in game tutorials or tips. A player should never have to turn to a guide or the Internet to answer questions about the basics of the game. In Dark Souls, two of the new basic mechanics: humanity points and kindling bonfires are never explained in manual or in game. For the longest time I thought that being human affected the drop rate, but it turns out that I was wrong after having to look it up online.

Now while this post has been largely negative towards guides and saying that you shouldn't need a guide to play a game, but that doesn't mean that guides are useless, which leads to several caveats where a guide can be beneficial to the player.

1. Walk-through: Let's face it, we've all had a point in a game where we were hopelessly stuck and no amount of playing the game would fix it. These are the points where the next step is simply giving up and quitting the game. Sometimes we just need that one push in the right direction to get us over the hump and that's where a game guide can become useful. As I said further up, the game should give the player all the information they need to succeed, but for the times that we can't find that information, a guide can be useful.

2. Statistical Information: When it comes to more complex titles like RPGs, there is a lot of information to keep track of: equipment attributes, enemy information, what each shop keeper sells and so on. Some games are decent enough to give the player easy access to this information, however there are titles where there is just too much for the designer to catalog in game, case in point, all the information in a Nis America SRPG.

Having a one stop spot for all this information in the use of the guide can be helpful to cut down wasted time scouring for the information and helps players make informed decisions in game. I read the sections in the Demon's Souls strategy guide about equipment information and enemy drops more than the general walk-through.

3. Advance Play (AKA Post Game Content): I'm a believer in saving post game content for the times when "the gloves come off". This is where it is best to save all the toughest, game tester mind breaking content for. Some games feature very advance mechanics designed to work with the post game content. Going back to Nis America, their SRPGS are famous for having complex mechanics and systems that aren't needed for the regular game, but are used for the post game "super grind."

While the player can find out this information on their own, having a guide nearby can trim a lot of the fat of digging through the mechanics to find what you're looking for. Each Double Jump guide for Nis's SRPGs has a section detailing the exact ways to use the mechanics to completely overpower your characters and the formulas for how all this works. Reading these sections gave me a better understanding on how the interplay of the various systems works.

Now there is a caveat to this caveat, post game content should still be accessible without turning to a guide. If you want to hide an entire dungeon requiring the player to solve five puzzles, three math problems, translate a phrase from Latin to English and have the character run in place for one minute, then there better be clues in the game to tell the player to do all that. This is one area where Disgaea slips up; one of the post game mechanics involves attaching NPC monsters called "specialist" to your weapons. Each specialist enhances the weapon in a different way, with the better ones very important for the post game grind. However, nowhere in the game does it mention the difference between the various specialists.

Going back to that famous Sid Meier quote that a game is about a series of interesting decisions, in order to make said decisions, the player must be given adequate information. That is the point of in game help and manuals, to give the player the knowledge they need to play the game. The best game designs don't tell the player what the choices are, but let them find out for themselves. For the times where the player wants to find out about the choices, that is where strategy guides come into play. While game manuals are getting smaller, there should be no excuse at shrinking strategy guides. A good measure of a strategy guide should be how much damage you can inflict on someone with it, and with the Disgaea 2 guide from Double Jump, you could probably give someone a minor concussion with that beast.

Josh Bycer

Cutting Through the Fog of Dark Souls(Part Two.)

2011-10-12T01:46:00.007-04:00

(Warning: the following post is a closer look at the areas of Dark Souls, this entry will be spoiler filled and discussion can include spoilers, don't read unless you have beaten the game or don't care about spoilers.)

I've reached my boiling point with Dark Souls and can no longer play it without feeling my blood pressure rising. When I first wrote about the game I was about 30-40% done the main game, not counting optional areas. At this point, I'm close to 70-80% finish and can see more of the big picture of the game.

When Dark Souls works, it is a great experience, unlike anything else this year. However, the times that the design fails, and it does multiple times, it keeps the game from reaching the same heights as Demon's Souls. Before I begin, you should read my last post on Dark Souls, as I already covered some of the problems with the design there.

Let's start with how magic works. In the last post I talked about how building a pure caster build was almost impossible due to the limits of how many times you can use a spell. Getting further into a game I want to edit that to say that it is completely impossible to be a spell caster in Dark Souls. Basic spells that cast somewhat quickly do too little to be effective, while the decent spells leave you wide open for at least 4 to 5 seconds, which is a very long time when a boss is charging at you.

Originally I was going for a similar build that I had in Demon's Souls, which was a magical samurai. However, it never felt that magic was worth it in Dark Souls. By the time I created a weapon from a boss's soul, it was doing more damage per second then my strongest spell, and safer to use.

I know why the designers changed how magic worked, to force people into close combat more. However, I would argue that removing a potential option from your game does more harm than good. If someone wants to spend the time becoming a mage, they shouldn't be punished with systems designed against them.

Another point I want to talk about are my issues with the lack of shortcuts. As I got farther into the game, the amount of shortcuts open improved dramatically. Sen's fortress has a huge shortcut that literally drops you back at the start of the level from near the boss's chamber. However it remains to be answered why there are so few shortcuts in the world itself. I spent plenty of time doing nothing but running to and from bonfires. Blight town is a clear example of this. Even though there is a back and front way into the area, there are no shortcuts making the place a pain in the ass to get around and to get out of.

Eventually you do unlock a minor warping ability, but it only lets you warp between three bonfires once it is originally unlocked. This means that you still have to spend a lot of time running through areas you already went through because of the lack of bonfires and shortcuts.

Speaking about the level design, one problem that I had was that the graphics and art made the levels look aesthetically busy. I had plenty of times that I couldn't tell if I was looking at the right way, wrong way or about to kill myself. In Anno Lundo, I was lost for about thirty minutes as I couldn't find the way out of the starting area. The Duke's Archives seem to be about repeating the same room structure and feels creatively flat. There were plenty of times in the game that I got lost by the sheer amount of visual content in the levels, hiding the right way to go. The crystal caves was a nightmare for me, as I killed myself several times thinking that the crystal below me was the correct path when instead I slid off to my doom.

Going through darkroot gardens, I completely missed the path to the butterfly boss several times because I couldn't see the way due to how the camera was pointing. The level design seems like it was design for visual quantity instead of quality.

Once again going back to Demon's Souls, the levels seemed to flow a lot better than in Dark Souls. Each area in a level had a different look and feel to it allowing you to figure out where you are by the environment. I rarely got lost in Demon's Souls, with exception to 5-2.

Moving on, the boss fights in Dark Souls were one of the worse parts of the game for me, especially coming from Demon's Souls. In one of my many posts on Demon's Souls, I talked about how every boss in the game was designed to provide a unique challenge, for example, you couldn't fight Man-eater the same way as Flame Lurker.

In Dark Souls, the majority of the bosses follow the same pattern of having a lot of health and requiring you to keep attacking until they die without any other real strategy. One big issue I have is that a lot of the bosses were designed to be fought with a 2nd person, as when you are in human form, there will be a summon sign outside of the boss room even when you are offline. This is a big issue for me and a huge departure from Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, you could fight every boss solo, but if you were online you could get a helping hand if needed.

What this meant was that the bosses were balanced and designed for single player fighting only and their stats were adjusted accordingly. In Dark Souls, bosses like the duo fight in Lundo, the spider boss in Blight town and the gargoyle fight at the parish pretty much require a second person by design. Fighting more than one enemy at once shows one of the main problems with the Demon's Souls style of combat, which I'm come back to further on. With the spider boss, she attacks so quickly and has so much health at that point of time, that you need someone to take the heat off of you to fight it.

Some of the later bosses seem like they belong in the Monster Hunter series and not Demon's Souls in how they are designed. They are slow moving creatures that rely on you spending 5 to 10 minutes hitting them to deal with their huge health bars, where they can kill you in 1 to 2 hits. The only boss fight that felt like a return to form was the Pinwheel fight in the Catacombs, as the boss produced copies of itself and you had to find the right one (like the false idol battle of Demon's Souls).

The Capra Demon is perhaps one of the worst offenders of bad boss design in the game, as it systematically hits every bad point of Dark Souls design. We have a boss in a narrow environment for the camera to get stuck on, able to attack with wide attacks making it hard to avoid. Who also has two fast moving enemies as back up keeping you from focusing on the real threat. The only way I saw how to beat this thing was to cheese it while standing in an area he can't get to.

The main theme of the issues that I have with Dark Souls and what I mentioned in the last entry is how Dark Souls seems to capitalize on the problems in Demon's Souls without improving them and being imbalance. About half way done the game, it was no longer exciting finding enemies who were placed in the blind spots of the camera forcing me to always keep my guard up; it just felt lazy at that point. Having to fight more groups of enemies while dealing with the poor collision detection without any fixes to the engine was bad form; worse, is when you head into the ruins and have to fight ghosts who not only have no collision detection to begin with, but can attack you through walls and floors.

On my first run in the ruins, I was stun killed in a narrow hallway by six ghosts who attacked me through the floor before I could raise my shield or see them. I also noticed far more technical issues present in Dark Souls compared to Demon's Souls. Slowdown occurred more often making it hard to react to attacks. I was also knocked through the floor in one area by a special attack and the only way out was to kill myself. Larger enemies are so big that the camera gets stuck on them every time, making the auto target more of a death sentence then being useful. Along with the control issues mentioned in the first entry, makes Dark Souls less polished compared to Demon's Souls.

Playing Dark Souls I had to "find the fun" more often than I did in Demon's Souls. Sure I got frustrated in Demon's Souls plenty of times, but I always felt like the game was fair with how I died. In Dark Souls it felt like the game's own mechanics were out to get me and while that is a challenge, it is a different kind of challenge compared to Demon's Souls. The concept of wandering around a vast, dangerous world was well done and I have no complaints about the overall regular enemy design. However, one of the mainstays of creating a proper sequel is to get the foundation set and fix any issues present in the first game. Dark Souls feels like someone built a 2nd floor on their house without making sure that the first floor was completely stable.

At this point I've lost my remaining desire to play the game and will probably shelve it for now. Maybe a patch or two could fix my issues, but I'm not holding my breath. It's very discomforting to me how one of the games I was dying to play has disappointed me to such a degree. For people new to the series as a whole, I still recommend Demon's Souls as an amazing title that still holds up and I would say to wait on Dark Souls so that it doesn't kill your wallet as much as your character.

Josh Bycer

Cutting Through the Fog of Dark Souls(Part One.)

2011-10-06T16:14:00.008-04:00

Dark Souls, the spiritual sequel to 2009's Demons' Souls has been released. If you have been following me at all over the last few years, then you know that I have a huge manly crush for Demon's Souls. In 2009 it was my 2nd favorite game of the year and you can probably guess how much I couldn't wait for Dark Souls. With all the rave reviews coming in you would assume that I would fall right in line with them. However, as it pains me to say it, I think Dark Souls is worse off than Demon's Souls.

The beauty of Demon's Souls' game design was in how balanced the game was. Similar to the rogue-like genre, most deaths were at the fault of the player requiring them to improve their skills. Because of this, the difficulty of the game straddled the line between being challenging, and being cheap. The issue I have with Dark Souls is that it crosses that line into cheap territory and keeps going.

The problems with Dark Souls are not in your face compared to other games. There isn't one huge red flag that upsets the balance of the game, but numerous small design decisions. As such, it makes doing this analysis that much trickier. For the first time in doing these analyses, I'm going to have to assign some homework. In order to understand the issues with Dark Souls and how they compare to Demon's Souls, you need to have played the first game, or everything that I'm going to complain about could fly right over your head.

I wasn't sure if it was even possible, but the story of Dark Souls is even more depressing then Demon's Souls. In the world, there are people marked by a strange curse that turns them into the undead, which eventually leads to becoming hallowed, or insane. In response, the people of the world decided that the best thing to do is to round up all the cursed people and lock them away. You are one of those people who have been imprisoned, when one day you are given a chance at freedom and take it.

Dark Souls basic theme remains unchanged from Demon's Souls but there are both major and minor changes to the formula. The first is that the game is not level based anymore. Here, the entire world is open to the player in similar style to Metroid, with each area having a name and theme. Like in Demon's Souls, there are shortcuts scattered around once activated, will save you the time going back to some of the more remote locales.

With the Nexus gone, bonfires are now the safe havens of the world. When you stop at a bonfire you'll fully recover your health among other things (will come back to this in a little bit). Most importantly, resting at a bonfire will revive all dead enemies with exception to boss and mini boss creatures.

Magic has been drastically altered as well; in Demon's Souls every character had a magic pool that allowed them to cast a variety of spells. Instead of having magic points, in Dark Souls, spells are limited by # of uses before the player can't use that spell anymore. The only way to replenish your quantity of a spell is to use a bonfire. The consequence of this is that a pure spell caster build is almost impossible due to the limits of spells.

The last big change is with the removal of the world tendency mechanic which has been replaced with humanity points. At the start of the game, you are considered undead and look like a corpse, as you play the game you'll gain humanity points over time, or by using special consumables. You can use humanity at a bonfire to turn you back to being human (until you die,) which raises the drop rate and raises your resistance to curses. You can also spend one point to enhance the bonfire which in turn will give you extra uses of the healing bottle that replaces the grasses from last game.

With all that out of the way it's time to talk about problems and I have a lot to say here. I'm going to start with my biggest complaint and that is with progression. Enemies from the very start are a lot more dangerous than the early hours of Demon's Souls. Within the first area you'll meet normal enemies carrying shields that the player can't attack through. They can also block magic attacks wasting your limited supply of shots. Like in Demon's Souls, your equipment is the prime factor in your combat capabilities; the only real way to increase your damage is with better gear.

The problem is that true upgrades to your gear come few and far between. While enemies can easily tear you apart with their weapons, you'll have to attack then several times more to do the same damage. Upgrading weapons at the blacksmith returns, allowing players to enhance their weapons, but the cost to do so is expensive early on which I'll get back to further on.

Making progress in the world also feels like taking two steps forward and one step back. In Demon's Souls, the levels were designed with specific shortcuts that once unlocked would allow the player to skip a huge chunk of the level. Here, bonfires are placed far and away from each other, requiring the player to trek back through areas filled with enemies since using a bonfire revives everyone. There doesn't seem to be as many safe shortcuts compared to the first game, since every level is connected to each other as opposed to just warping around.

What that means is that any safe progress you make is simply erased at the bonfires. Which I could understand if the bonfires were also near potential shortcuts(which the majority I've seen aren't,) or if you could just simply teleport between them which at where I'm at in the game is not possible.

In Demon's Souls, every inch you get through feels like a milestone, especially once you have unlocked a shortcut, knowing that the previous ordeal is past you. In Dark Souls, it feels demoralizing when after making progress to realize that there is no shortcut to avoid sections you've been to, forcing you to repeat them with the same dangerous enemies again and again. Now, in Demon's Souls more enemies meant more souls which were used to level up and buy new items, but that presents another problem.

The risk/reward for fighting enemies is weighted too heavily on the risk side, as enemies drop negligible amount of souls. To put things in perspective, most regular enemies for the first several hours of the game drop at most 100 souls and raising your soul level once you are in the double digits quickly ramps up into the thousands. Compared to Demon's Souls where the amount of souls ramps up to the dangers of the world.

Bosses don't drop anywhere near the same amount of souls that were in Demon's Souls. As a side effect, it makes losing your souls due to dying twice, even harder to recoup. Yet while it is harder to collect souls, it is far easier to lose them in the first place. Enemies hit a lot harder this time around and fight in groups more often and without the aid of staying hidden as a phantom, means that you'll be stuck fighting more enemies at once. The designers have given the enemies even nastier tricks, such as being able to riposte your attacks and follow up with a counter-attack of their own.

Since the world is now open, you have to take your chance whenever you cross into a new area to make sure that you are even able to survive there. Some areas are filled with enemies that you literally cannot kill with your basic equipment, but they can kill you in a few hits forcing you to hopefully retreat. What annoys me about this is that it takes the player's skills out of the equation when exploring. No matter how good I am at avoiding damage and counterattacking, what's the point if I can't even kill the enemies?

My final complaints are returning elements from Demon's Souls that the designers either did not catch or ignored. The camera still gets caught very often on the player in tight areas making it hard to see what is going on, and in a game like this that can be deadly. The auto lock on feels very sluggish and there were plenty of times that I couldn't switch between nearby targets no matter how many times I pushed the stick.

Speaking about sluggish, controlling my character felt less responsive this time around. Adding insult to injury are the new attacks done by pushing the analog stick forward and attacking at the same time. There were plenty of times that the attack would not go off, getting me killed in the process.

The most annoying technical issue involves group fighting. Due to the collision detection in the engine, enemies will attack through each other when bunched up. This makes fighting groups of enemies painfully annoying as you can't attack the guy in front at close range without the ones behind getting free hits. With enemies attacking in groups more prominent compared to Demon's Souls, this issue rears its ugly head more often.

At the point where I finally threw my hands up in disgust, I had to face enemies who could poison without being able to buy items to cure it, enemies who could curse reducing my total health until it was cured, and a boss that not only attacked in a narrow area but also had minions fighting at the same time. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was fighting my way through a sewer to reach a boss who killed me in one hit while I was trying to get the auto target to work to use my spells.

Now not all the changes were bad in Dark Souls as I do like how they changed leveling up. In Demon's Souls, putting a point in an attribute would raise a few attributes along with your total health. Now, when you raise any attribute it will improve all your main defenses and leave health alone, unless you raise your vitality attribute. What that means is that while in the short run, you won't notice a big deal in surviving; over the course of the game you'll be able to absorb more damage than in Demon's Souls.

As I once championed Demon's Souls for providing a difficult, but fair challenge, I condemn Dark Souls for being a cheap frustrating experience. To summarize this rant up, the reason why Demon's Souls worked so well was how all the elements were balanced with each other. Difficult enemies were balanced with suitable rewards in the form of souls, and challenging level designs were balanced with sufficient short-cuts. With Dark Souls, the designers built upon the framework of the first game without properly balancing the new mechanics and challenges.

At this point, my inner masochist will push me to continue to play Dark Souls, but it is definitely no longer in the running for my game of the year. As the saying goes "there is a fine line between love and hate" and with Dark Souls, I don't know if the developers want to marry me, or have me killed and thrown into a ditch.

Josh Bycer

This analysis was written about 30-40% through the game. To be concluded in part 2 which is from closer to the end of the game.

Unbound: An Analysis of The Binding of Isaac

2011-09-30T04:01:00.002-04:00

You can't say that Edmund Mcmillen is resting on his laurels. After designing the brutally difficulty throw back to old school plat forming with Super Meat Boy, his latest game, The Binding of Isaac, is a mash up of Smash TV and the rogue-like genre. Beneath the twisted visuals and story there is some excellent game design present and an example of one of the best uses of achievements I've seen in some time.

The story will no doubt turn some heads: Isaac has been locked up in his room by his overly Christian mother who is hearing the voice of God telling her what to do. One day his mother is told by God to sacrifice Isaac in its name and she obeys but before she can kill him, Isaac escapes into the basement to try and find a way out. Once inside the basement, he'll have to fight monsters and lost relatives who stand in his way to freedom.

There is definitely a discussion here, but I am by no means the one who is going to delve into it, so we're going to leave it at that and move on.

Isaac controls using a combination of WSAD keys and the arrow keys, the former controls movement while the latter attacks in that direction. The rogue-like elements come into play with how the levels are built. Bosses, the map and what items are found are all randomized at the start. The randomized levels are the main attraction and combined with the items are what make Isaac special.

While the maps are randomized, there are a few staples that will be on every floor. One of those is a treasure room that requires a key to get in. Each treasure room holds one item; some will be special items that can be used with the space key while the rest will modify Isaac and change his appearance. There are too many items to list here and each one has a different effect, from increasing damage, to changing his attack to a charge up move.

By the time you are several floors in, Isaac will not only look radically different, but play differently each time. Some games will find your attacks are weak, but you have increased range or multi-shot, while others may find you doing massive damage, but with slow attacks. Scattered around each level, you'll also find consumable items that like in all good rogue-likes could help or hinder your game. Boss battles are challenging, made even more so due to the random items. You start the game with only one life and a set of hearts, and running out of hearts means game-over, but this is where the achievements come into play.

As you play the game, you'll unlock achievements, some for beating bosses, while others are for finding specific items. Each achievement unlocks something new in the game, from new characters, items, enemies and even bosses, are added in to the randomization. What this means is that the more you replay the game, the more content becomes available.

This is a brilliant design decision and works perfectly with the rogue-like nature of the game. Most rogue-likes are replay-able by how difficult the game is, forcing the player to keep playing. While Isaac is also a difficult game, it also rewards people who keep playing the game. Even if someone gets lucky and beats the game on their first try, there are still plenty of things to discover in the game. For once, we have a game that not only has those extra difficult "experts only" achievements, but actively rewards the player for being crazy enough to attempt them. This is one of those games that scream for DLC and it has been announced that there should be more content coming for Halloween.

It's hard to find any real problems with the game that aren't inherent with the genre. Obviously the randomization is going to affect how easy or hard the game is and like other rogue-likes it is possible to be stuck in an unlucky streak. The control scheme is a point of argument, using the keys for movement and attacking only allows you to use the cardinal directions. As it stands, for people who prefer to aim with the mouse, they will have to adjust to the different control scheme. The only nitpick I have is that there isn't even a soft save system, allowing players to take a break, but not abuse the system, such as in Dungeons of Dredmor.

The Binding of Isaac joins Dungeons of Dredmor as an excellent five dollar game and easily a huge bang for your buck. I really hope that the use of achievements in the game will inspire other designers to better implement them into their design.

Josh Bycer

Lurking In The Shadows: Examining the Mechanics of Stealth Games.

2011-09-28T22:17:00.000-04:00

For the longest time, I've never been a fan of stealth mechanics in games and to shock everyone, I've yet to play Thief 1 and 2. Recently however, games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum has made me enjoy the act of sneaking around. As I thought about these titles and why I enjoyed them, I started to think about what goes into making a good stealth game.

Avoiding Detection: The mainstay of stealth games is giving the player ways to avoid being detected, with line of sight as the first mechanic, from there each game usually introduces another mechanic that acts as the unique hook. Both Thief and Splinter Cell had lighting and Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4 had camouflage.

To me, only having a few ways limits the design. The more options open to the player, the better. Batman had the following mechanics:

Hiding in vents or grates
Grappling up to gargoyles
Batarang distraction
Explosive gel distraction

Assassin's Creed 2 has:

Smoke bombs
Hiding in objects
Hiding in crowds
Using groups of people as a distraction
Going across rooftops.

Lastly Deus Ex has:

Stealth generator
Throwing objects to create distractions
Rooftops or using elevation
Going through vents
Breaking through walls

Looking at games I didn't like, Hitman, besides line of sight had disguises and the last game added in throwing a coin to create a distraction. To me, it never feels realistic to only have a few options of avoiding detection. I can't wait to see a stealth game combine the unique mechanics of multiple stealth games into one experience.

Having an "out": The other problem I have with a lot of stealth games is that stealth is the only option, as being detected spells doom and one of my first painful memories of this kind of stealth design , was with the game Syphon Filter for the PS1. Near the end of the game, the player is required to sneak through a level with no gear, if they are detected the mission ends.

Not having some kind of offensive ability goes back to a thought I had about the horror genre regarding "fight or flight". If the player's only option is to run away or hide, it makes the game more predictable as the player knows that if they get caught, the game is over.

What was amazing to me, from playing Assassin's Creed and Batman, was how powerful the player was and that they could deal with groups of enemies. With that said though, there has to be a limit, or you just have an action game with minor stealth elements.

That was the problem with Assassin's Creed 2, due to sword counter attacks; it really trivialized the need to be stealthy, unless it was for a mission. Batman had two main types of enemies: unarmed and armed, unarmed enemies could be dealt with without having to sneak, but enemies with guns would kill Batman quickly if they catch him. That set up the dynamic of having sections of the game that were pure action, while still providing areas that required stealth.

The issue with AC2 was that they set up the main character to become a complete bad-ass, both as a fighter and sneaking around. Because of that, no enemy could really stand toe-to-toe with the player. Deus Ex HR: had security drones and turrets, which conventional weapons would not work on them. Only EMP grenades, rocket launchers, or hacking them would work. Now, even though these enemies are best handled by stealth, the designers still gave the option of just fighting them.

Failing Stealth: Building on the last point, one mechanic that has annoyed me about stealth games is that being detected instantly destroys being stealthy.

Chances are if you've played a stealth game then you ran into the following situation: The second someone sees you, every guard on the map instantly knows where you are and comes running. While I like having a way to fight back, I still prefer having a way of becoming hidden again. What I liked about Assassin's Creed 2 was that guards had a few seconds questioning the player's appearance before sounding the alarm, allowing the player to either hide or try to take the guard down.

Personally I prefer to see guards becoming alarmed more realistically, such as: if a guard sees you who don’t have a way of alerting their friends, they'll either try to take you out or run to alert everyone. The farther stealth design moves away from guards with mental links to each other the better.

Less Segregation in Design: This section essentially sums up everything mentioned. One of the main ways that has improved stealth design in my opinion is moving away from having "action levels" and "stealth levels" by combining both elements into the same design. In Deus Ex: HR, with exception to one side mission, the game never forces you to be stealthy. Of course, getting into a fire fight outnumbered is going to be tough to get through, but it's not an instant failure.

Having said that, I know that Batman: AA breaks this point, but in a sense it does work. Giving the player a limit to being aggressive can be beneficial, allowing players to decide how long they should remain hidden before the crap hits the fan. Level design moving from pure linear set pieces to a more open setting has also helped here. Before, getting detected meant that you're only option is to go straight through the enemies to your objective, now you can try to run and hide and get around them another way.

Thinking even further back, The Mark of Kri for PS2 while predominately an action title, did combine stealth elements into play. On each level there are alarms set up that will trigger guards to attack the player if they are detected. The player is more than capable of handling themselves in a fight, but it is easy to be overwhelmed. That way, levels are set up for both stealth and fighting without being separated into specific sections.

One of the main areas that game design has evolved is designing games around more than just one main mechanic. Some of the best games developed have combined elements from different genres to create something new. Batman: Arkham Asylum, succeeded because it wasn't just an action game, or just a stealth game, but a Batman game. With successes like the Assassin's Creed series and Deus Ex, it will be interesting to see how they affect future stealth titles, like the upcoming Hitman game.

Josh Bycer

The Coming Downfall of Traditional MMOs.

2011-09-20T13:12:00.001-04:00

Times seem to be changing for the MMO market. With the recent announcements of Star Trek Online and DC Universe Online moving to a F2P formula, along with World of Warcraft which has changed their up to level 10 trial, to a 20 level F2P model. The time of the $15 a month subscription model appears to be fading away and looking at the genre, it seems like MMOs are facing pressure from within and outside to make this change.

Let's start by looking inward at the genre. MMO design is different from other genres, due to the size and cost of development. Most singleplayer games are aimed at 8 to 10 hours of play, MMOs want gamers to play for months and that requires a lot of time developing content. Putting out a MMO that flops can be the death of a company due to the enormous cost of development. Because of the investment, the gameplay in MMOs has not evolved as much as other genres.

When you look at the action genre for instance, we've gone from the days of Double Dragon, to God of War and Devil May Cry. With the MMO genre however, the majority of MMOs aim to be like WoW, which was aimed to be like EverQuest. WoW's success was not at inventing the wheel, but building a better mousetrap. Blizzard streamlined the design and made it more accessible to everyone, along with being at the right place at the right time. Because of those factors, WoW became the 800 pound gorilla it is today. This is why many MMOs are trying to be like WoW instead of doing something different, why fix something that wasn't broken? The times that we do see original game design, like Star Trek Online or DC Universe, it doesn't make the same money as WoW.

MMOs have been trying to mix things up by providing more content for the subscription fee and many promise content every month to players to keep them paying. Let's be frank here, when a developer says that they can put out expansion quality content once per month and continue to do that for the length of the game's life-cycle, THEY ARE LYING. Unless they have been working on all that content while developing the base game, or have their entire development staff working round the clock, it just won't happen.

DC Universe fell into that trap, they did have content for the first two months, and then after that it started to dip. Star Trek Online played it smart and instead of promising huge content, they instead put out new story arcs for players to do every month, which is far easier to develop then brand new content.

Arena.net at the time, were perhaps the most forward thinkers on the market. Instead of trying to take on WoW with Guild Wars, they instead went the expansion model route. Meaning, there was no subscription, instead gamers who wanted content could buy expansions at $40 a pop. That way, people could choose what to buy and didn't have to worry about spending money without having new content.

From within the genre, we have a case where everyone was trying to do the same thing, and when that happens, only one or two MMOS came out on top. With other genres, there is diversity within the genre giving players reasons to play multiple games. With the MMO genre however, how many people actually subscribe to 2 or more MMOS at the exact same time?

Moving on let's look outside of the genre and how MMOs have fallen behind. Going back to the late 90s when EverQuest came out, there weren't games that allowed people to socialize while playing. Multiplayer games like shooters didn't give players the options to hang out, just frag your friends. Because of this, MMOs fit into the community niche and people were willing to pay a premium to be a part of that. Another side of this was the continued support by the developers, with rare exception, once a game was released it was done and no more would be added to it with exception at the time to MMOs.

However, times have changed and MMOs existing in the bubble of social interaction has popped. Developers have seen how fostering a community can prolong the life of the game and how worthwhile it was to continue supporting it. Valve with Team Fortress 2, is still going strong with an influx of new content. It's no longer about making a multiplayer game that will only last a short while. Activision is banking on Call of Duty: Elite to keep people playing COD all year long. As developers are adding value to their games, it is taking value away from MMOs.

The standard subscription to an MMO is $15 a month, with a yearlong cost coming out to $180. With Call of Duty: Elite coming in at $50 a year you can see the difference in price. When you can have your social interaction, with new content at more than half the cost of a subscription based game, it's hard to justify spending the fee each month. What has been even worse for MMOs would have to be the rise of the F2P market.

F2P games have been coming into their own, with mass successes like League of Legends. More and more developers are embracing this model, with F2P games both standalone and on social networking sites. The biggest advantage to F2P games is that it allows gamers to play what they want, spend what they want and not be pressured to keep paying. The success of this market has really forced a lot of developers to look at design differently, such as with Age of Empires Online, or with Valve working on DOTA 2.

F2P games have honestly knocked the wind out of the MMO genre's sails. With a very low barrier of entry (0 dollars,) along with the social features one would have found in an MMO, there are fewer reasons to be playing a typical MMO today then 5 or 10 years ago. Perhaps the biggest evidence of the F2P model working is how it has been used to revive the same MMOs that have had trouble in the market.

Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online, have both found success once they switched off of the subscription model. With STO and DCUO making the switch soon, I predict that they'll find success after the change. The reason is that a well designed F2P model works better for someone like me. I've always hated having to pay a subscription for a game, as with my constant switching between titles, I never felt that I was getting my money's worth. With F2P games, I can drop in whenever I want and if I'm enjoying myself, I can spend money for more things to do.

A long time ago I joked about WoW dropping their subscription as a snowball's chance in hell, today, I'm not joking. WoW's numbers have been slowly slipping (still high but slipping,) and I think there will come a time where WoW will become F2P. As one of the few remaining MMOs with a subscription based model, in a sea of games offering content at a lower cost, it will be interesting to see what Blizzard will do to keep people playing WoW.

The MMO market is undergoing a shakeup, much like the transition we're seeing of the move from retail to a digital format of buying games. As other genres continue to support their games and offer players reasons to stick around, traditional MMOs are finding themselves no longer standing out from other genres. With Star Wars: The Old Republic looking to be the next fighter in the arena and perhaps more importantly, one of the few properties that could take on WoW, it's going to be interesting to watch these two duke it out for subscribers.

Josh Bycer.

The Great Game Design Debate: Persistent World vs. Static Progression Edition

2011-09-16T17:58:00.000-04:00

It's time for another design debate. The last one regarding regenerating health brought some interesting discussions and hopefully we can have a similar discourse here. RPG systems for the longest time were designed around the world being a static progression, meaning that players will find little rats outside the starting town, and dragons halfway around the world. However as RPGs became more open-ended and other genres adopted their mechanics, there has been a push for persistent world design. This is when the world is built around the player's level, at the start, the player will find nothing but weaklings, but once they level up, those weak enemies will be replaced by stronger ones.

Perhaps the most recognizable example of a persistent world was The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Since then, this debate has grown and it's time to talk about it here.

To begin with let's look at the pros and cons of each, starting with persistent. As a way of providing a balanced experience, persistent works by keeping enemy levels either equal to, or close to the player's level. You don't need to worry about wandering around and running into an enemy who can kill you in a few hits. On the flip side, it also means that you don't have to worry about grinding weak enemies for experience to level up, as every fight will be against an enemy of average strength against the player. This also has the side effect of making it easier to play with friends, if the world scales to the group, then you don't have to worry about bringing in a lower level friend and having them useless for the game.

(As a quick side note regarding: allowing friends to play together. City of Heroes’ utilized the "side-kick “system. Here, if you are playing with a friend who is a lower level then you, they can become your side-kick for the mission, raising their level up to yours, but not learning any new skills. This allowed them to be a part of your group without weighting it down.)

There are a few disadvantages to persistent world design. First is that the balance has to be just right or it's very easy to break the system. In Oblivion, the enemy scaling worked off of the player's experience level. However, the game determines that level differently from other RPGs, at character creation, the player assigns primary and secondary character attributes. Leveling up primary attributes will go towards raising the character's level, while secondary attributes will not.

What that means, is if the player chooses non combat related attributes for their primary skills, there is a good chance that they will level those up before leveling up their combat skills. In other words, they'll be facing higher level enemies before they have the combat skills needed to win. On the other side, crafty players could do this on purpose and spend all their time honing their combat skills, thereby keeping the enemies weaker and just walk all over the game.

Another part of balancing the game is that to provide challenge, there needs to be a lot of enemy variety. The reason is that if the world is scaling to the player there needs to be variety to keep things from becoming stale. In Dead Island, there are 7 types of zombies (2 common, 5 uncommon,) that scale with the player. The problem is that once you fought one, you then know how to fight every other enemy of that type, since the only things that change with leveling up, are the amount of health the enemies have and how much damage they do.

One solution to this is if you're going to only have a few core enemy types, throw in unique modifiers that start to show up when the player gets to a high level. Going back to Dead Island, there could have been zombies that can jump and tackle the player, or zombies that can't be stunned with electricity or kicked.

The second issue is that it kills that thrill of exploring for unique challenges or the feeling of wanderlust .Because every enemy and piece of gear are tailored to the player's level, it means that they won't be able to find tougher challenges or powerful gear. Also this gives the world an artificial feel to it as new enemies magically appear where weaker enemies once were. Going back to hard challenges with the power to now beat them easy, shows players just how much they've gotten stronger since getting stuck there, which is a feeling that doesn't work in a persistent world.

Moving on, static progression has the following advantages. First, it gives players an easy to understand progression. The further you go from the start, the more dangerous things are going to get. It's easy to understand if your character is level 10 and an enemy is level 20, who has the advantage.

This also makes sense from a world building point of view, dragons and other powerful monsters aren't going to move right next to the starting city, likewise it also helps motivate people to explore the world, as you never know what you'll find in a dungeon somewhere.

In terms of enemy variety, while the more enemy types the better (as with all games,) it's not as vital compared to a persistent world. The reason is that even basic enemy types, when pumped up to a higher level can still be a threat to a player.

Now the problems with static progression, game balance is still important, but it is a different type of balance compared to a persistent world. The key detail is: what exactly does leveling affect? Different games will have the level of the player mean different things, for instance, in most JRPGs, leveling up will improve the base attributes of your character, while in other games it could only affect your health. In RPGs with turn based combat, this is ok, as the attributes of both sides will affect the outcome. However, when you have real time or skill based combat, this can present a problem.

Borderlands had this issue, the game was all about twitch base shooting as in a normal FPS, but it also had RPG leveling. Whenever there was a level disparity between the player and enemies, the lower level character will do less damage to the higher one. When the level difference is one or two, it's not a big deal, but when the player is three or more levels below an enemy, they'll find that their bullets do negligible damage. At that point it doesn't matter how good the player is when their best shots are only doing one or two points of damage.

This also feels like an artificial way of challenging the player, and it removes the need for skill. While having enemies grow stronger along with the player breaks the immersion, so does having your bullets from the same gun magically do five to ten times more damage to an enemy because you are now only two levels below it instead of three.

An interesting solution is to downplay leveling, the Disgaea series from Nis America is an example of this. While characters have levels, their attributes however are the key factor in combat. Giving a low level character, powerful items can overcome being a lower level then the enemy. Power leveling comes into play when characters can restart at level one, but with enhanced stats. What that means, is after enough restarts, a level one character could have the stats of a level 50 character.

Demon's Souls also downplayed the priority to level. Every time the player levels up, they will gain a little more max health (more if they increase their vitality attribute.) However, the actual stats and damage that affect combat come from the weapons themselves. Being a high level in Demon's Souls won't help you kill bosses quicker, if you're still using the weapon you started the game with. While the player's attributes do dictate what they can or cannot use, it's the actual equipment that does the work.

With everything said so far it's time for me to share where my preference lies. I prefer static progression to persistent for several reasons. First, is that I like to explore and see what dangers and surprises I can find and knowing that every encounter out there is going to be even to my level kills that thrill. Second is that I've always been a numbers man, as I like getting into the details to see how much power I can squeeze out of my characters, which is also the reason why I love the Disgaea series. If I spend the time power leveling, then I want to see my characters utterly dominate lower level enemies, while still having ultimate challenges to face.

RPG elements have been finding their way to other genres and as such, are forcing designers to find the best ways to implement them and progression is a big part of that. Defining how a player becomes more powerful in a turn based game with attributes is easy, but when you are dealing with real time combat and the player's skill level has to be factor in, that causes complications. With the line between RPG and action titles blurring, we are going to be seeing more games that will bring this discussion back up.

Josh Bycer

What's Red and Red and Red All Over?- A Splatterhouse analysis.

2011-09-14T13:04:00.002-04:00

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, the Splatterhouse series brought us B movie levels of gore and succeeded at a time where no one else was doing it. Namco, decided to try to bring the brand back with an updated game last year, with all the blood, profanity, and nudity you would expect from a horror movie. Unfortunately, the game was panned by a number of critics. Having played through the game, while it is far from perfect, there were some moments of greatness in the design.

I was interested in Splatterhouse, not from being a huge fan of the original, but because Bottlerocket Entertainment was developing it. They were the designers behind The Mark of Kri, which was one of my favorite titles on the PS2. In fact, it was a source of inspiration for me when I was writing my action game design document. During the development of Splatterhouse, Namco pulled the developers off the project which led to the studio being closed. The game was finished by another studio, along with members from Bottlerocket that were hired to help.

The story is a remake of the original: bad guy steals girlfriend, boyfriend mortally wounded, puts on supernatural mask and goes on a killing spree. That's pretty much all you need to know. The graphics are good looking, when the screen isn't covered in blood. Voice acting is decent and Jim Cummings as the mask steals the show, although his one liners repeat a lot over the game.

With combat, you have three main attacks: fast, smash and grabs. Each button's use can be further modified by holding the run button. The player also has a "necro bar" that fills each time the player attacks an enemy which is used for special attacks. Instead of finding health items, they can use one segment of the necro bar to siphon health from nearby enemies, the more enemies in range, the more health is recover. Later on the player unlocks other moves that do more damage and restores a little health.

The last use of the necro bar is to transform into a monster that acts as a panic button, allowing players to go crazy against the enemies. I like how the necro bar was set up, as it presents the dynamic of balancing the use of stronger attacks vs. having the ability to regenerate health on standby.

The combat system has a fluidly to it in how responsive the character is. Players can go from one combo attack to another very quickly and the options of fast, smash and grab attacks gives the player options. The upgrade system further adds to this.

Killing enemies gives the player blood that can be used at the upgrade system. There are a lot of upgrades here, that gives the player more combos, or enhances attacks. Some upgrades make it easier to chain attacks together such as after doing an evasive roll. Some of the upgrades do seem to straddle the line of being less optional and more required, such as the health and necro bar upgrades, also being invincible while dodging. Still, I like how the upgrades for the most part, avoid the standards like "+10 damage". When combined with the combat system, I was enjoying my time bashing monsters around. However Splatterhouse does have its share of problems and having finished the game, I can see why it was panned by critics.

Let's start with technical issues; the camera has a hard time keeping up with the action. Sometimes it will track the player accordingly, while other times it will require the player to control. There was several times where it would get stuck on the player or environment which can be rough during a tough fight.

Loading times are quite frankly horrible to the point that they can drive people away from the game. On start up, the game takes about 15 to 20 seconds from the main menu to the actual game. When the player dies or goes to a new level, the game then takes 20 to 30 seconds to reload. This can become an ordeal during sections where there are death traps or tough battles, as it is possible to spend more time loading then it is actually playing.

Moving on there are some gameplay issues to discuss. Splatterhouse attempts to bring back some nostalgia for the original trilogy by having 2d sections, which in a way reminds me of the Ratchet and Clank game that had 2d areas for captain quark. However, while RC designed a different system for those sections, Splatterhouse uses the 3d engine and it doesn't work.

The problems are that the controls work for a 3d environment, but are too loose for 2d. There is a noticeable delay from when the player pushes the control stick and when the character starts moving. The hit box for the character is hard to grasp which makes it hard to gauge when to jump and there are a lot of bottomless pits to avoid; both running and dodging leave the player motionless for one second, which makes it very hard to use them while maneuvering through traps. Combining how easy it is to die here with the long loading times, makes these sections less of a reward and more of an ordeal.

Next is that the enemy design was unusual, one one hand it is very repetitive but it does feature some poorly designed unique enemies. The basic enemies can be broken down into light, medium and heavy enemies. Heavy enemies usually require the player to perform a QTE driven finishing move to kill, which due to the colors on screen, makes it hard to see the analog stick prompts.

There are two enemies that seem out of place, the first are these blue enemies that will hit you for all your life in one hit reducing you to one point of health left. If they attack fast enough, you can be killed before you know what hit you. The strange part is that not even the bosses do this kind of damage and the enemy seems imbalanced. The second type was red zombies, which seem to be immune to all your attacks except for weapons and charging up a smash attack. Fighting them slowed the pace of the game down dramatically.

My biggest complaint about the gameplay, and what keeps the combat system from achieving greatness, is that it doesn't have any advance mechanics to reward expert players. In other words, it had width with the upgrade system, but lacks depth.

When you look at a game like Devil May Cry 3 or Bayonetta, there are advance mechanics in place to take the combat above simple combos. DMC 3 has several: ground to air transitions, unique combos for every weapon, styles, ranged attacks and switch between two weapons at will. Incidentally, these mechanics were also one of the reasons why DMC 3 is considered to be one of the best action games to come out. Splatterhouse however doesn't which is a shame since the foundation was really good. I like the interplay between the necro bar and the special attacks, and the responsiveness was there, but it doesn't take off and evolve.

I'm somewhat surprised with how much I enjoyed Splatterhouse, it feels miles above Dante's Inferno as an action title, but the gameplay and technical issues prevented it from reaching the heights of Devil May Cry. Personally I'm really curious as to what parts of the game were finished by Bottlerocket, and which ones were finished by the second team, as there were some points where the quality of the level design dipped a little bit. Seems like with all flawed titles, they like to tempt me by having an ending that indicates a sequel, however I wonder if we're going to wait another 17 years for it.

Josh Bycer

The Interplay of Fear and Power In Horror Games- Or, How To Make Manly Men Cry.

2011-09-11T23:40:00.004-04:00

We're one month away from October, which can only mean one thing: discussing horror elements in games. In the past I've talked about horror design in games, such as examining why "Fight or Flight" needs to be around. With the recent release of Warhammer 40k: Space Marine, it reminded me of another game in the Warhammer universe. Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, which came out for the 3d0 in the 90s and as I thought about it, the game is an excellent example of how to do fear while giving the player power, which led me to thinking about the guidelines for how to do this.

1. Player Has To Fight Back At All Times:

While I enjoyed Amnesia: The Dark Decent as an adventure game, I don't consider it scary for one reason: the player cannot defend themselves.

Going to back to an article I wrote awhile ago, the fight or flight response is part of human nature, as our brains have to make a split second decision in a dangerous situation to either stay and fight or run away and release the corresponding neurotransmitters. When you remove half the equation, it restricts the options the player has. In Amnesia, I didn't even bother running away when I was caught by a monster because I could just let it kill me and try again. There was more work involved with running away then just retrying.

By having both fight and flight as available options, it forces the player to make that decision. This was one area where Alan Wake succeeded, as the player is constantly outnumbered by the enemies in the game, forcing the player to decide if they can take them on, or try to run to the next safe area.

Another side of this is games that allow the player to fight back, but only at specific times. In Haunting Ground, the player for the most part, is chased by an enemy who wants to kill them with no means to hurt them. At the end of each area there is an actual boss fight where the player has to find a way to put them down.

The problem with this is that the game is still exemplifying one response at a time. Flight during the adventure segments, and then fight at the boss fights. In order for the responses to work, the player must have both options available at all times, if you lock the player in a room with a boss, then it's no longer a horror game but an action game as the player knows that their only option is to fight.

In Space Hulk, the general plot is that you part of the Blood Angels, a group of space marines whose task it is to keep aliens from taking over planets. In the game, your main foes are the genestealers, aliens who infect races with their DNA to cause their species to grow. From reading the basic plot that was in the manual, the space marines are the kind of people who take on any challenge no matter how suicidal and fight to the last man.

The player is always outnumbered by the stealers and with squad members persistent across maps, they have to decide when to keep moving, or when to stay and fight. While it is easy for the player to survive with a full squad as backup, getting everyone back alive is a completely different story.

2. Enemies Have To Fight At A Different Level Then the Player:

One of the basic rules of horror is that you should be experiencing something that you are not accustomed to. While horror games get this right to a degree with weird monster designs, many miss the point that enemies should not fight from the same rulebook as the player.

Tell me, why is it that Gears of War is considered an action title and Dead Space is a horror title, when both games have the protagonist fighting otherworldly enemies with advanced weaponry? The difference is that in Gears of War, the majority of the enemies fight the same way as the player, using guns and grenades. While in Dead Space, the enemies are completely different from the player, both in how they attack and how to kill them. With Dead Space, the monsters or necromorphs can only be killed by severing their limbs, as they will just regenerate from body or head shots.

In Space Hulk, the player's squad is heavily armored and uses powerful weapons to stop their enemies. The marines’ standard load-out includes a ranged gun and a power glove for close quarters. As a marine, they have the advantage of ranged attacks, and in a one to one fight against the genestealers they will win.

The stealers on the other hand, are quicker and better at close quarters due to their powerful claws. If they attack a marine from behind, that marine is dead before he turns around. The stealers also move through vents and can appear behind the marine group, even with a motion detector the player has to be on the lookout. The last, and most dangerous advantage, is that the stealers will always outnumber the marines and in many levels, they will infinitely spawn.

As you can see, Space Marine is about asymmetrical balance, both sides are completely different and how the player reacts and fights, is not the same as the enemy. Going to Fatal Frame 3 for a second, the player is at a constant disadvantage when fighting ghosts, as they can disappear and reappear while going through walls, floors and ceilings to attack the player.

One problem I had with the Silent Hill series is that while the monster designs were unique, the majority of the enemies followed the same attack pattern: get in close to do damage. Since the player's main weapons are close range, both interactions are similar (with the pyramid head fights of Silent Hill 2 the exception).

3. Linearity Should Be Avoided:

One of the biggest ways to remove horror in your games is to have linear attacks, as once the player knows that the game is setup this way, it removes the tension.

With F.E.A.R, the game is split between action and horror segments. During action, the player is attack by the enemies, while in horror; they wander around while creepy stuff happens. The problem is that nothing scary happens during the action segments, and there is no danger while the horror segments play out (until the very end of the game.) Instead of being scared, I was more relaxed while the game was trying to scare me as I knew I was in no immediate danger.

When you can make the players guess, as to when the next attack is, it increases the tension and horror. The reason is that constant feeling of “when am I going to be attack?". That buildup is an excellent source of fear, but it has to have a breaking point when the player is finally attacked. If they go through an entire area and not be attacked at all, then the buildup was for nothing.

In Space Hulk, the player's only way to tell that there is danger is their motion sensor. Similar to the movie Aliens, it beeps louder as something dangerous gets closer. With Space Hulk, there are times that the sensor will go off, and there won't be an attack, other times the player will have to defend themselves. This keeps the tension high, as the player doesn't know when the next attack is coming, only that there is one on the way.

In order for the horror genre to get out of its current rut in my opinion, it has to take a cue from rogue-likes and implement randomized enemy positions and attacks. The faster they move on from "monster closets", the better for the genre. I would also like to play a horror game, where the enemies won't always attack the player, like in Space Hulk, making the player question if this situation will turn dangerous.

4. If The Player Evolves, So Must the Enemies:

Becoming more powerful gives the player a feeling of security and can lower the tension of the game and can be used to provide the player with an area that is toned down as they can now fight back effectively. The problem with horror games is that they forget to ratchet the tension back up, and the best way to do that is to have the enemies evolve.

Alan Wake suffers from this, as the game goes on the player is introduced to more weapons and grenade types, however the enemies never change. Some enemies may require more light to weaken, but the process remains the same from beginning to end.

In Dead Space, the player will get new weapons and armor as the game progresses and the designers did implement new enemies to challenge the player, including two fights with an enemy who could only be wounded by their weapons, not killed.

The moments in Silent Hill 2, where the player encounters the pyramid head monsters are scary, as this is something different from the normal enemies the player fights. Getting up close to one is suicide when they start swinging their over-sized swords, forcing the player to either fight from afar, or run away.

As the player progresses in Space Hulk, they will be promoted with new weapons, including ones that grant the player an advantage in melee combat. As the game goes on, the player will fight new types of genestealers, along with chaos marines, which are the evil version of the player. Later enemy types include stealers who have psychic attacks, such as pyrokinesis, or making your weapons act up. The point is that while the player becomes more powerful, the enemy is growing in their own way to challenge the player.

It's important to note for this category, that if the player doesn't evolve then the enemy doesn't have to. In the Fatal Frame series, the player will be using their camera as the only means to defend themselves from beginning to end. The camera can be upgraded to do more damage, but that coincides with fighting stronger ghosts that have more health. Later ghosts do have different attack patterns, but the way to defeat them remains the same.

5. Give the player downtime:

Going back to randomizing attacks to keep the player tense, there should always be a period of rest or safety to wind things down. The reason is that if the player is constantly being bombarded with horror, they'll become desensitized to the situation. Even though I didn't find Amnesia scary, I do appreciate the fact that the designers did give the player periods of safety, where they can focus on the puzzle solving and nothing else.

Of course giving the player a safe zone can be used against them at some point. One of the best moments of fear in Fatal Frame 3, was how the period of safety slowly trickled away as the game went on, I don't want to say anymore as it would ruin the event.

If you want to challenge the player to figure out what is going on or make important decisions, they need time to process the events of the game, where they aren't running for their lives or fighting against strange creatures.

Space Hulk has an interesting way of doing this. Once the player reaches the point where they can give squad members orders, they can use the pause screen to view a map of the area to accomplish this. A meter at the bottom of the screen slowly drains, representing that time is currently frozen, allowing the player to think and command in safety. Once the meter runs out, time starts again and the player will now have to command while enemies are attacking. As the player is controlling their character, the meter fills back up again allowing them more time to think.

We all have different degrees of fear, that's just human nature. However, I think that the points in this entry can serve as a focal point, which will scare any player. One of my design goals is to create a game that gives the player all kinds of weapons: shotguns, rocket launchers, flamethrowers etc, and yet is still completely terrified of the dark and unknown. With that said if I do make that game at one point, I have one bit of advice for you: be afraid, be very afraid.

Josh Bycer

Need a Vacation From the Vacation: A Dead Island Analysis

2011-09-10T00:31:00.004-04:00

Dead Island has had one hell of a launch week, from releasing the Xbox candidate version for the PC, a controversial skill name and turning off the multiplayer servers for two days. Now that things have settled down, it's time to do some vacationing. Dead Island tries to emulate Darksiders' success, by combining mechanics from several popular games to create something unique; however it doesn't go far enough to establish itself.

From looking at the mention of "4 player co-op" and the word "island" in the title, most gamers would think that Dead Island is similar to Left 4 Dead and Just Cause 2. However, from playing the game, it takes its cues from Borderlands and Dead Rising 2. The story is zombie game standard: zombies have broken out on an island resort and you are one of the few people immune to them, which leaves you to do all the dangerously stupid interacting with the undead.

The game is open world, as each act takes place in a huge piece of real estate. Quests involve players going from point A to point B and either killing something, using something, or taking something back to point A. As you can tell, there isn't a lot of variety in the missions. Weapons take the form of everyday items like hammers, knives and later on, guns.

Taking a cue from Borderlands, weapons have levels attached to them which determine their base stats, a level five paddle is worse than a level ten paddle (I guess they use better wood.) As you explore the world you'll comes across items ranked in terms of rarity, which means eventually using your super rare purple hammer to fight the undead. Weapons deteriorate with use; forcing players to keep a supply of weapons on hand, with bladed weapons seem to break quicker. Besides weapons, you'll find random junk and money all over the place. Money is used along with junk at upgrade benches as well as at traders to buy items.

The upgrade bench is where a bit of Dead Rising 2 comes into play. Weapons can be repaired and upgraded at the bench, for a cost. Rare weapons cost more to upgrade, but will of course be more powerful than their regular counterparts. You can also combine weapons with the junk you find to create new weapons from blueprints that are either found or rewarded. These weapons have even higher stats and using a very rare weapon as the base can give you one hell of an edge.

Now while all of this sounds good so far, Dead Island runs into some issues with the implementation of the game mechanics. First is with leveling up, as you kill zombies and complete quests, you'll gain experience which will eventually give you a level up. With each level you can assign a point into one of the three skill trees (each character has the same three trees, but different upgrades on them). The problem is that this does nothing to change the game play.

Each character is proficient with a type of weapon (bladed, blunt, firearms, and throwing), but no matter what skill tree you go up, there is no real change to the gameplay. The only exception is the "fury" skills which are unique abilities that each character has, the rest of the skills are small modifiers like "+5 to durability" or "+ 10 to damage". As characters level up, they may unlock other abilities, but it doesn't do much to change their interaction with the world. You are going to be slashing and bashing zombies in the same manner from level 1 to level 50. Further adding to the sameness of the gameplay are the weapons themselves.

While the developers tried to emulate Borderlands with the variety of weapons, it doesn't work here. Besides the weapon mods, there is no real difference between how weapons of the same type behave. A level 10 hammer and a level 50 hammer will look, animate and attack the same way. In Borderlands each type of weapon was further differentiated by the fictional gun manufacturer. Each manufacturer had different variations of weapons, one pistol may have a built in scope, and another may have rapid fire. This meant that no two guns were alike and this helps give a lot of variety to the weapons.

Also, for a game that is about scavenging items to survive, I was really surprised that the developers didn't take the RPG elements further with being able to fashion other equipment like armor or enhancements for weapons. Anything to allow players to further personalize their characters would have helped the game out.

Melee combat is unsatisfying, especially having been spoiled by Condemned 2. In Dead Island, your actions in combat amount to: one type of swing, fury mode, throwing the weapon and your kick attacks. The only interesting element has to do with stamina, which depletes when you are attacked or when you are attacking. Run out of stamina and you won't be able to attack and you'll be knocked to the ground when injured. This makes fighting groups of zombies very dangerous and a good way of providing tension when running around.

It's a shame that the melee combat lacks depth, as the developers’ implemented location based damage. Hit a zombie enough times with a blunt weapon to break a limb, or with a bladed to cut it off. This becomes a potential strategy when dealing with larger zombies (which are like mini bosses), to make it easier to finish them off. Watching zombies fall apart from your attacks is cool, but it would have been more satisfying with a deeper combat system.

The game tries to mix things up when guns are thrown into the mix, but ranged combat is just as unsatisfying. Guns also have levels to them and no discernible difference other then the stats. Be prepared to run around to each dead enemy after a firefight to see if their pistol is any better than yours. Gun control is more on the arcade side of things and due to ammo limits, keeps you from relying solely on guns. Zombies also take more than one shot to the head to bring down, meaning that you will go through ammo fast.

While the zombie models are varied, in terms of size and shape, there isn't a big difference in fighting them. The as mentioned larger zombies sometimes appear, but due to the simple combat, don’t give the player a lot of options for fighting them. Another design mistake has to do with leveling up. Besides the weapons, zombies also have levels to them, which are unfortunately tied to the player's level. What that means is that the world levels with the player.

This hurts the game as the only difference between levels is the damage and health of zombies. It also kills the sense of exploring and running into a higher level zombie, or coming back to an area after leveling up more. Speaking about leveling up, because of zombies leveling up with the player, it also means that the player will level up faster as the game goes on as the experience grows with higher level zombies. It took more time to level up from 1 to 2, and then it did to go from 2 to 3 for instance. Because the world levels up with the player it also kills the chance of finding higher level items as chests will only spawn items around your level (unless you join a game with a friend who is a higher level.) For a game that tries to add RPG elements to the design, they did not get it right.

The final set of problems comes from the game being developed for the console first, PC second. The interface is cumbersome, mouse controls aren't fully utilized and push-to-talk is nonexistent. One poor example of the UI is that if you pull up the map, in an area where there is no map information, the mouse pointer disappears, preventing you from clicking to other sections of the inventory. While not a huge issue, it's just more proof that the game was designed for consoles first.

Ultimately, Dead Island has some good ideas with the damage model, world and 4 player co-op, but the rest of the foundation is shaky. The designers tried to follow in the same shoes as Borderlands with its "Role Playing Shooter" elements, but where Borderlands gets it right, Dead Island stumbles around (pun intended.)

Josh Bycer

Signs You Have a Bad Console Port

2011-09-08T14:19:00.002-04:00

As consoles have become significantly more powerful over the last decade, more and more developers are capitalizing on this by releasing games on both the console and PC. Unfortunately, this has led to many games being released on the PC, significantly worse for wear compared to the console. Many gamers see this as the developers creating the game with the console in mind primarily, leaving the PC in the dust. This problem leaves PC gamers annoyed at developers over issues that any self respected PC gamer would have caught. The following are some of the taboos that designers have made with multi-platform games.

1. Forgetting the Mouse: When it comes to PC games, the keyboard and mouse is the most recognizable control scheme. One of the biggest tell-tale signs that the game was a port is the mouse not being utilized such as, when a game asks players to use the arrow keys to scroll down a list, as opposed to just clicking and dragging and that raises a major red flag. Basic functionality like drag and drop, double clicking, scrolling the mouse wheel and using the right mouse button should be implemented in the game.

What is even more annoying is when the game sometimes uses the mouse, and sometimes not. In Borderlands for example, the mouse is used on just about every menu screen, except for quest details. To scroll down while looking at quests, players have to use the page up and page down keys. Same issue was in Bulletstorm, where the main menu is mouse compatible, but the in game shop system isn't.

2. Wrong Control Scheme: This issue, I've only seen once as a PC Gamer (although it could have appeared in other games,) but it was so blatantly wrong that it needs to be made its own category so that developers will never do this again.

When you’re in game menus, control scheme and tutorials only reference console controls and not keyboard and mouse, I saw this in the game: The Last Remnant by Square-Enix. You have no idea how fun it was to decipher control commands when the game tells me to press the right trigger on my keyboard or the A button on my imaginary 360 controller.

3. Forgetting you're on the PC: There are two elements to this category, first are PC preferences. One of the biggest advantages (and disadvantages) for PC games, is the variety of PC configurations available. Some people having the latest and greatest, others have dual monitor setups and so on. As PC gamers, we like to make the most out of our specific hardware and adjust the settings just right and when developers leave out the ability to alter the settings of the game, forcing gamers to adjust a game file, that’s just a major mess up.

Second are hot keys, one the best advantages to having a keyboard, is having all those extra keys available for additional commands. Being able to get around a cumbersome interface by having hot keys is great. When developers just move the console UI over and forget about the keys, it becomes very annoying. Another side of this is not allowing gamers to reconfigure the control scheme to their personal preference.

4. Voice Options: This one annoys me a lot as it seems like something so simple that it would be hard to forget: not having push-to-talk as an option. I prefer to use push-to-talk, as the room where my PC is, is right next to the hallway where my family walks and talks around; I don't need complete strangers to hear what my family is talking about. Some people are going to say that I should just buy a headset, but when every other PC game I like features push-to-talk functionality, it shouldn't be a big deal to implement.

When all these issues are combined, the term "consolized interface" is used. As a designer, you don't want to hear people saying this about your game. The issues mentioned in this article should be as basic as making sure your game has save functionality, yet so many developers either slip up or just ignore these points. The sad part is that I didn't even mention the games when ported, feature technical issues like: slowdown, crashing, or graphical issues that aren't in the console versions.

Developers who continue to exclude PC gamers like this will find their PC sales diminishing , the part that really pisses me off, is when I see a $10 or $20 game, get all these points right, while a $50 game completely flubs it. To me, this shows a lack of quality by the designer and if it's that much trouble to release a PC version of the game that has these points, then just don't release it, as you'll be doing more harm than good to your fan base by putting out an inferior port. Gearbox (the makers of Borderlands) has promised that the PC version of Borderlands 2 will be made for PC gamers; hopefully they get a chance to read this entry.

Josh Bycer

Random Thoughts on Randomization in Game Design.

2011-09-06T18:40:00.001-04:00

When it comes to game design, randomization is one of my favorite words. When used properly, it enhances a game's replay-ability dramatically. Classic titles like X-Com and Diablo 2 make excellent use of randomization to keep gamers playing, and the rogue-like genre is famous for its use of randomization. Recent indie titles: Dungeons of Dredmor, Din's Curse and Space Pirates And Zombies each use randomization and are examples of the pros and cons of it.

Before we talk about the pros and cons of randomization, it's important to define the degrees of randomization that can be implemented in a game. The degrees are not ranked in terms of preference, but just the ways that a designer can have randomization.

Low: Just equipment placement and probability of finding them. Action RPGs usually have this degree of randomization. Note, you can still have important items in set locations and have common items and equipment randomized.

Medium: Enemy placement along with the low category. There are two ways of implementing this, first is with having "unique" enemies. In Diablo 2, there was a chance of running across an enemy who had a name, these enemies looked different from their cohorts and had a unique modifier such as: increase damage, fire resistance, etc, and the other way is randomizing enemy positions as well.

High: Everything in the last two categories, along with world randomization. Rogue-likes fit the bill here, but this category is not mutually exclusive to rogue-likes. Space Pirates And Zombies allows players to create a random Universe from the get-go. TBS games like Civilization also allow players a chance to play on a randomized world, or preset map conditions.

With that out of the way, let's move on to the pros of randomization. First, is that randomization is a great way to have replay-ability in your game. You'll never know what that treasure chest will have, or what is behind the next door, and that can be an excellent motivator to keep playing. The more elements that are randomized in the game, the longer the experience will stay fresh.

While talking to a friend about Rogue-likes he told me that to him, they were like a slot-machine. In a way he is right with that analogy, you never know if you're going to get lucky and get all the equipment you need and blaze through the game, or if the odds are going to be stacked against you.

Randomization can also be used as a difficulty modifier, allowing the game to generate a smaller or easier world for newcomers, or a larger more challenging world for experts. This is something that Din's Curse does well, as players can choose the levels of the enemies, how big the world is, among other factors.

With that said, there are some cons to randomization. Going back to the slot machine analogy, while the lure of a jackpot can be motivating, losing thirty times before you get there can be demoralizing. In Dungeons of Dredmor, playing the game at the hardest difficulty setting, it felt like 9 out of my 10 runs ended before I even got off the first floor due to unlucky enemy and equipment placement.

Depending on the degree of randomization, it's very easy to generate maps that completely screw the player. Going back to Din's Curse, there were plenty of times that the game spawns hordes of enemies at the entrance to the dungeon that overwhelmed me or having a boss appearing on the very first floor with the hardest modifiers attached to it. Din's Curse also features modifiers to the world that makes things harder; getting stuck with the worse modifiers at the beginning can be a big hole for the player to crawl out of.

Next, is that when it comes to randomized levels, most often quality takes a hit. Creating a randomize level using functions and basic assets is easy, creating a level that not only looks aesthetically pleasing and is crafted well is another story.

The perfect example of this would be Demon's Souls, while you could argue that randomized levels would have helped the game, no one can say that the levels weren't carefully designed. Each level was developed with a specific challenge in mind to the point that each level had its own mood and style. From the vertigo inducing heights of stage 3-2, to the poison gauntlet of 5-2, you could tell that the designers went to great effort to design the levels.

The first poor example that I had with randomized levels was with Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast. In the game, every dungeon's layout was randomized, but the game only had a few room assets per world. What this meant was that every floor had maybe 4 different room models and that's it. The level design had a very "Frankenstein" feel, in the way that the level design felt like it was just stitched together from various elements. That is also something you want to avoid when creating randomized levels as there should be a sense of cohesion in how the world is set up. The first retail build for Dungeons of Dredmor had door assets show up where rooms were supposed to be, and it brought the quality down somewhat.

The second problem is that the more game mechanics you have in mind, the harder it will be to create a decent system. The reason is that, the more mechanics the player has access to, the more variables will have to be programmed and implemented into the engine. In Mine Craft, on each new game, the world is randomly generated for scratch and it works because the only interactions the player has is putting a block down, interacting with objects and attacking.

Let's say that someone designs a randomized level for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in order for that level to work, the engine must be able to create a randomized setting that must also allow for the variations in play-style, meaning it must have breakable walls, vents, areas to reach and terminals to hack. If it doesn't have all these elements and have them presented in a way that allows progress, then players will become very frustrated if the game gives them a level with a solution that is impossible for their build.

To create a randomized system that works, it has to be built on top of a layer of linearity. What that means, is that for every random element, there must be something guaranteed. For example, in Dungeons of Dredmor, while the world is randomized each time, enemy types are limited for the most part, to specific floors. You will never see an enemy who appears on floor 5, on floor 1 and vice versa.

Same goes for Din's Curse, on every floor no matter what; there will be a way up, along with a portal back to town. In terms of enemies, the enemies will progressively get stronger the further the player descends into the dungeon based on what level the player set as the starting level at world generation.

Going back to Mine Craft, while the world is completely randomized at creation, the same basic rules apply to each new world: better materials are found deeper underground, enemies spawn in darkness and the player has complete freedom of where to go. With these three constants, the player still experiences the world fresh each time due to the scale of the randomization.

For one of my game ideas I envisioned the game taking place in a randomized world. Where ever the player is placed, the world will be built in a sense around that position. Incredibly dangerous areas would be further away, while easier areas will be closer. The majority of the buildings will be randomized, while special buildings that act more like dungeons are linear in their design. This will allow players to experience the game differently each time, but still have a sense of progression that they can base their play through on.

A well designed randomization system can be the cherry on top for your game design, giving players added value. However, like all good mechanics, it must be properly designed and implemented.

Josh Bycer

The Machine Needs Some Fine Tuning- A Deus Ex: Human Revolution Analysis

2011-09-03T01:03:00.005-04:00

The PC is home to a number of classic and amazing games: Star Control 2, X-Com, Thief and so on. Deus Ex came out of nowhere to deliver a player driven gameplay and story model that other designers to this day are still playing catch up with. The sequel however, wasn't the amazing success we all hoped it would be and the franchise was put on the back burner. Eidos: Montreal took the challenge of revitalizing the brand . The big question on everyone's mind is: did they succeed? From my time spent, while it's not a grand slam, it is definitely a home run.

DEHR is a prequel/reboot of the franchise. The story begins at the start of the augmentation craze as mankind finds itself at a turning point. The cure for physical limitations is just a surgical implant away and the argument between remaining natural or modified is on. While heading security at one of the major manufacturers of augments, Adam Jensen is nearly killed in an attack and is forced to become augmented to survive. After recovering, he begins the long process of finding out what happened and uncovering a good old world wide conspiracy.

There are several elements to the gameplay. Like previous games in the series, there are multiple paths through the game. From finding vents, blowing up walls and more, there is never a point in the game where the player only has one option to progress. Further exemplifying choice, is the use of augmentations or augs.

Past the intro, the player will be able to choose how Adam upgrades his abilities. Praxis points, that can be bought, found or earned, can be used to unlock new abilities or enhance ones. The designers limited the amount of points in the world, meaning that the player will have to choose what upgrades to get, and which ones to ignore. The upgrades fit into the various solution paths the player has through the game and because of how open the world is; there isn't one upgrade that is required to beat the game.

The level design is built around giving the player a wide berth. If a door is too advanced for the player to hack, there is probably a vent nearby or a pass-code the player can find. Walking straight through a crowd of enemies, while possible, is usually the last choice for the player. One side effect of this design, is that the levels feel a little unfocused to me, as sometimes the players will find multiple paths through the level without really trying, and other times they'll have to spend awhile going through each room to find that one errant vent that they can crawl through.

My favorite game mechanic would have to be the "conversation battles". At key moments in the game Adam will have an argument with a major character and it will be up to the player to decide how Adam will respond to the person. The player will have to listen to the character and then respond with the right phrase and emotion to convince the character that Adam is right. Succeeding will unlock new information or make things easier for the player.

I really love this, as it reminds me of Alpha Protocols' dialogue system, but HR takes things a step further. Characters will say different things if the player repeats the conversation, requiring the player to go by what the character is saying instead of pre-can responses. I really hope that this mechanic takes off and that other designers throw in non violent mechanics for getting around problems.

When HR is firing on all cylinders, the game is amazing, but when it's not, and the player sees "the man behind the curtain", it really drags the game down. First issue is that while the AI is adequate, I noticed that it was a little finicky when it came to stealth. Sometimes I would do something that got me by undetected, to only be seen when I tried it again. There were odd times when someone would hear me kill someone with a silenced weapon and other times I could kill without any worry. Characters would sometimes become hostile at me for reasons unexplained, which doesn't bode well when you are suddenly thrust into a firefight.

Second is with the gameplay itself. I wish there was a little more variety with the augs available, such as more ways of avoiding detection, something to give the player more choices. Energy usage feels like an arbitrary mechanic. To use certain augs or perform melee attacks, the player uses up energy cells. For some reason, only the first cell the player has will recharge not any others the player unlocks through aug upgrades.

My complaint with the energy model is that it punishes players who went with strategies that use a lot of augs at once. Granted the use of the cloaking aug can be overpowered, but at the rate it drains would keep the player from using it constantly. This reminds me of a design complaint I hear from JRPGs, that players would limit their strategies away from using powerful items as they didn't want to be caught in a situation (that never comes) that they really need them. If you're going to give the player all these different tools to play with, at least give them the opportunity to use them.

My last two complaints are the biggest ones I have with the game. The boss battles are just horrible and completely go against the spirit of the game (with exception to one spoiler fight that I won't mention.) Each boss fight is a "bullet sponge" battle where the only strategy is to put enough lead (or explosions) into them to win. For players who went the non violent stealth route (like me,) they will be in for a world of hurt here. As I struggled with each fight, I had flashbacks to Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines which did the same thing. Bloodlines offered players non violent abilities, and then proceeded to force the player into violent situations with the boss fights.

I wish that the designers would have spent more time coming up with solutions to the bosses, other than just blasting them. This is one area where Epic Mickey excelled in, providing different solutions to the boss battles. In HR, the boss battles just bring the carefully crafted experience down.

Lastly, while the game gives players choices to make, I wish they had more of an effect on the world. One element from Alpha Protocol that I thought was amazing was how everything the player did in the game would factor into the story and how characters view the player. If you play stealthy, people will comment on it, or if you go Rambo all the time, some characters will not like you for it. These touches made the story more personal and gave weight to how people play the game.

In HR however, past the first mission, players will find that their choices don't mean that much in the world. It doesn't matter if you blast everyone with a heavy rifle, or sneak around undetected. Only the player's final choice will determine the ending. This seems like a wasted opportunity, considering how much the designer's want the player to follow their own path through the game. Because of these issues, I don't see myself replaying the game as often compared to Alpha Protocol.

Regardless of my comments here, I enjoyed Deus Ex: Human Revolution and as an attempt to bring the IP back, Eidos: Montreal definitely succeeded and it's good to see a game that goes for this kind of player choice design to succeed so well,compared to games like Alpha Protocol or Bloodlines that were not reviewed positively or had technical issues. Hopefully, this will be the start of more games in the series, or in the same vein that can offer choices and personalization, while avoiding being bogged down by other issues.

Josh Bycer

Reexamining Replay-ability

2011-09-01T15:20:00.000-04:00

One of my first popular entries I posted was on the Tenets of Replay-ability. In that post I outlined five key points that effect how replay-able a game can be. One of the points that some people commented on was customization and how they also felt that being able to personalize would be another tenet. As I've been playing games like Din's Curse, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Space Pirates and Zombies, the concept of personalization has been brought back to the front of my mind. This is why I wanted to write this addendum to that post and talk more about the differences between personalization and customization.

Personalization, in a way, is the next step after customization and further increases the replay-ability factor. Before I talk about examples of both, let's define these two terms for this entry:

Customization: Giving players gameplay choices and allowing them control over what to use.

Simply put, every action RPG ever released has this degree of replay-ability. In Diablo 2, players can choose from a number of unique classes. The important point to understand is that the player is selecting from choices by the designers. In Diablo 2, I can't be a pirate-ninja-witch doctor because that doesn't exist in the game. This leads to defining personalization:

Personalization: Allowing players to modify choices by the designer to suit their preferences and stand out from other players.

While Diablo 2 doesn't allow players to create unique classes, it does let players personalize them. There may be thousands of Necromancers running around in the game, but each one is different based on what skills they took, along with their equipment.

There are different degrees of personalization and customization in games, which in turn affects the replay-ability. In the game, Demon's Souls, there is a set limit of what equipment is in the world, allowing players to customize their characters. Personalization comes into play with how the player can choose what attributes to upgrade.

Personalization does not only mean gameplay choices, many MMOs allow players to customize their gear, either with different styles or color patterns. These serve no gameplay purposes, but they allow players to be different from other players, which is the ultimate goal of personalization.

As I look back at games that I enjoyed, they each had a degree of personalization to them. Din's Curse has been one of my favorite games in some time and one part of that is how much I can personalize my character. Not only can I decide what equipment to wear, but I can also create my own class out of any two skill trees in the game.

The important part to understand is that personalization is different from customization. Just having upgrades and choices are not enough, the player must have a way to alter those choices to their own preference. In Space Pirates And Zombies for example, there is a lot of customization in terms of equipment, hulls and specialists, but very little personalization. I know that when I use a level 3 beam weapon that it will handle the exact same way no matter what ship uses it. Upgrading different technologies has some personalization, but is largely about customizing. When I'm level five in armor, there is no difference in ability between other players who have the same level.

Another example is with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, there is a lot of customization thanks to the augmentations, but very little personalization. If I equip the increase jumping augmentation, I will jump the same exact way as every other player who takes it every-time. Same goes for stealth, there are dedicated paths through the level for playing stealth and there is no difference between how one player uses the mechanics and how someone else uses them.

Games that feature Collectible Card Game (or CCG) mechanics are made for high degrees of personalization. The customization comes into play with the amount of cards available and the player can personalize their deck based on the cards they want to use. Age of Empires 3's home city system, allowing players to customize their nation with unique shipments, was the first time I've seen CCG mechanics in a RTS.

Previous examples have been related to game-play; however there is one example of this in storytelling. Alpha Protocol's biggest success in my opinion is how far the designers went to allowing players to personalize the story. Not only do the player's choices affect how the story plays out, but also how the player acts in missions. Avoiding detection, or killing everyone will not go unnoticed by the other characters and it's surprising how many different story variations were set up in the game. The degree of personalization in Alpha Protocol led to me replaying the game three times and the lack of personalization is why I'm debating on if I should even replay Deus Ex a 2nd time.

There are a few pitfalls to watch out for when creating personalize content that affects gameplay. First, is like with customization, you want to avoid setting up choices that are just better then everything else. One of my less than ideal memories of World of Warcraft was how people devised the most optimal talent selections for each class talent tree. If you didn't pick the right talents, you would be worse off than someone who read a guide for it. I also saw this in League of Legends as well, the further you move up into competitive play, and the more important it is to follow optimal builds for masteries and rune selections.

Second, one of the challenges with personalization is that in order for a player to feel unique, there needs to be a lot of options available. The more equipment, abilities and clothing options available equal more development time to create and fine tune.

Lastly, as a designer, you want to avoid linear character progression as much as possible when developing personalized content. It's hard to feel like you're creating a personalized character, when you have to get the same exact abilities, in the same exact way, every time you play. Diablo 2 both has this issue and gets around it with their talent trees. Advancing up the trees is linear, but the player is free to mix and match talent trees whenever they can.

One way you can balance content, while still giving player's freedom is using a point based progression system. In Din's Curse, every skill in your skill trees is available from the start. The only things stopping the player are the number of skill points and money that each skill cost. The better the skill, the more of these are needed and it allows players to choose between getting lower skills quicker, or saving up for the more powerful skills at the cost of being weaker now.

Now that I've thought about it, I would amend my list of the tenets or replay-ability to include personalization. Even though it is similar enough to customization, the differences between games that just offer customization and those that offer personalization are huge and are a strong motivator to keep players coming back for more.

Josh Bycer

The Collectible Conundrum

2011-08-30T22:21:00.002-04:00

What do feathers, cocaine, orbs and skulls have in common? Each one was a collectible in a popular open world title. Collectibles act as something the player can look for while exploring the world and a reason to go off the beaten track. However, designing a good collectible system is more than just plopping objects randomly in the world, and more about motivating the player to find them.

1. A Reason To Search: First, there has to be some game-play purpose for collecting them, above going for 100% completion. In Assassin's Creed 2, feathers once returned to the player's mansion will increase the amount of money earned, however at some point this becomes worthless, once the player has bought everything.

One area that should be avoided, is only giving awards after a group of collectibles has been found. In Grand Theft Auto 4, the collectibles were in the form of shooting pigeons, in which the player will only receive an award for killing them all.

If you can tie the collectible into the gameplay that will motivate the player more to seek it out. In Infamous, finding enough "blast shards" will increase the player's energy supply allowing them to use more special attacks at once. While in Just Cause 2, to upgrade your health, weapons and vehicles, you need to find supply crates hidden all over the place. The best example of tying collectibles to gameplay would be from Crackdown.

In Crackdown, there are agility orbs scattered around the city and collecting them gives both a short, and long term bonus. Each orb picked up, will increase the player's maximum jumping height and over time, the experience earned will improve the player's agility level, allowing them to run faster and jump even higher.

2. Push the player in the right direction: Hiding miscellaneous doodads is all well and good, but you have to give the player some way to find them. In Assassin's Creed 2, feathers can only be detected by looking at them, requiring the player to scour around for them. Likewise in GTA 4, picking out a pigeon is very hard to do and there aren't a lot of indicators as to where they are.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Just Cause 2 has two mechanics in place to help the player find everything. First, is a signal reader that appears when the player is in the general vicinity of a crate and grows bigger the closer the player is to them. Second, every major area in the world has a % completion that tells the player if there are any more items nearby or if they can move on.

With Crackdown, besides the visible green glow, orbs make a distinctive hum when the player is close, cluing them in as to where to find them.

3. Make the player work for it: In order to give a sense of accomplishment with finding collectibles, there should be some sense of challenge to get to them. In Crackdown, this was in the form of requiring the player to find the best way up buildings, bridges and more to reach the orbs. Coupled with the immediate reward for finding the orbs did a lot to motivate people to continue collecting. As opposed to Just Cause 2, due to how agile the main character is, there really isn't any challenge in collecting them, other than finding them in the first place.

Batman: Arkham Asylum had an interesting system. In each area there was a map hidden that would reveal the general location of all collectibles in the area. Even though it made things easier, the player still had to find the map in the environment.

There is a fine line between making the player work for the collectible and creating an outright challenge. One of the complaints in Crackdown 2 was with agility orbs would run away from the player forcing them to give chase. The purpose of finding and interacting with the collectible should be enough of a challenge. The lure of finding collectibles is that it's a way to "zone out" in a sense, instead of focusing on missions or side challenges. If you want to design something to challenge the player with a specific task, make it a side mission in the world.

The best indicator that the designer has succeeded is when players decide to blow off missions in lieu of wandering around looking for collectibles. Personally, I've done this in Crackdown and Just Cause 2 plenty of times. I spent so much time exploring in Just Cause 2, that I unlocked every story mission in the game, before I started doing them.

There are different mindsets for participating in the different activities of an open world game, some players will want to go through every mission and side quest immediately, while others will want to explore around and take in the scenery. Understanding the differences between the two and designing content around them is a must for creating an excellent open world game.

Josh Bycer.

"Once upon a time": A Bastion Analysis

2011-08-28T15:33:00.000-04:00

Bastion recently made the move from XBLA to the PC and after reading the glowing reviews I picked it up. While Bastion's main gameplay is somewhat basic, it is easily one of the most stylish games I've played this year and backs it up with some interesting mechanics.

The story is one of the best parts of the game. Players will assume the role of a nameless survivor of a calamity that has destroyed his world. The only parts that are left are fragments of land that are floating in the sky. At the start, the player learns that the Bastion is the last refuge on the planet and that he has to make it there. Joining the player in the adventure is the narrator which does a lot to bring life to the game.

Just about every action and choice the player makes in the game will be commented on by the narrator. From hanging around to kill enemies, to choosing specific weapon combos, the narrator will have a remark ready. While this doesn't serve any real gameplay purpose, it adds a unique twist to the hack and slash genre.

Gameplay is pretty basic; you'll be running around the beautifully stylish remains of the world, fighting your way through each level. There is a sizable weapon variety, from a hammer, to a carbine rifle and more. Players can take any two weapons, along with a special skill with them into battle. Each weapon can be upgraded multiple times and as an interesting mechanic, each upgrade level the player will have to choose one upgrade from a set of two. What I like is that the upgrades are not just damage, but also can add utility to a weapon. For example one choice for the hammer is between allowing it to go through armor, or giving it a stun effect.

The other unique twist to the game mechanics is how the game handles leveling up and difficulty. Each time the player levels up; they unlock a slot in the distillery. At the distillery the player can select what tonics to apply to the main character and each one provides a unique benefit. The tonics themselves are not restricted by level, only the amount the player can have active at one time. This allows the player to mix and match benefits for a more personalized feel. Leveling up takes a long time, but how difficulty works in the game can help out.

Another building the player finds at the hub is the shrine. Here, the player can set idols that represent the various gods of the world. Each idol will bestow a unique modifier to the enemies. For example, one idol causes enemies to drop bombs that explode upon death causing the player damage, while another one gives enemies a chance to nullify damage against them. For each idol the player activates, the experience earned for beating enemies will be boosted, and with all 10 difficulty idols on can give the player a huge increase in experience.

Being able to effectively alter the difficulty of the game at any time is an interesting mechanic and reminds me of The World Ends With You for the DS. Bastion takes things a step further with having different modifiers and not just altering stats. The game without any modifiers on is on the easier side giving players a way to just experience the story, while having risks and rewards for those that want to go further.

I do have a few complaints about the combat. While the main character is somewhat agile, there is a certain "floaty" sense to fighting. Because the game is played from an angled isometric view, it's hard to gauge sometimes where the player is in relation to the enemies. There were plenty of times that I swore I was attacking the enemy to only have my attacks hit air.

Each weapon has its own utility, but the actual use of them is simplistic, no advance combos past hitting the attack button repeatedly, which seems like a waste of having all these different weapons. The biggest issue with combat is with defending. The block command is the same as the lock on command for ranged attacks. While there is a manual aim option for ranged attacks, there is none for blocking.

When going up against a few enemies, the lock on feature is adequate. However, when the player is surrounded, they'll find that they will keep blocking in the wrong direction and without being able to manually turn the character, their only option is to run away.

Bastion reminds me a lot of Braid: a unique game that isn't for everyone, but still something you should at least try to see what the fuss is all about.

Josh Bycer

Fifteen Minutes of Game

2011-08-24T23:39:00.000-04:00

If you ever attended any talks on breaking into the games industry, you may have heard the concept of the "elevator pitch", where novices are asked to distill their game ideas down to 15 seconds, or an average ride in an elevator. The purposes of this are to help designers’ fine tune and condense their game ideas, as well as focus their thoughts on the best elements of their games.

Taking this concept further, I've noticed something about my play-style recently. A game has about 15 minutes for me to get into it, or the chance of me finishing the game is lessen. The reason is that if I run into something that is either bad design, or annoys me that early into the game, that means I'm going to be dealing with it for the remainder of my time.

That doesn't mean that I should be completely enthralled by the game, just that nothing should be bugging me within the first 15 minutes. In most cases, you can see any UI issues, design flaws and technical problems early. If I run into a situation where I do get annoyed, such as with The Witcher 2, then I usually play the game until I see enough. Even though The Witcher 2 was on my must play list for some time, because of the issues I had with the UI and combat, I stopped playing after starting chapter 2.A more recent example of this would be with Fallout: New Vegas, I was annoyed early on with the design (a discussion I'll save for another time,) and after a few hours of playing I had enough.

I find that if I do run into issues further into the game, I'm more likely to push through them to finish, such as when I got stuck playing Catherine but eventually got through it to beat the game. I think part of my response has to do with my analytical nature. All the analysis and design entries I've written have made me very critical on design. Barring any final stage design changes, I don't need to play an entire game to see what it has to offer. I seem to go through game content like a lawnmower chopping up grass, if I spend too long on just one game I get bored; in one day, I will play anywhere from 3 to 5 different games.

Because of this mentality, whenever someone asks “if you were stuck on a deserted island with just one game, what would it be?" I couldn't answer that. The thought of just playing one game, even one of my favorites for a long time would drive me crazy. This kind of thinking also leaves me as having the completely wrong mindset for MMO games. I can never feel like I'm getting my money's worth with subscription based MMOs as I might play 30 minutes to an hour a day, and then skip several days when I start to get bored.

These days, it's becoming rare for me to finish games as I find myself playing enough to get all the information out of the game then moving on. On one hand, with each new game I play, I get more knowledge that helps me with my analysis and design. Still, it would look from the outside that I don't enjoy these games as I don't finish them. I do enjoy the games I played, but I digest content a lot quicker than most people. Another thing that helps is that I've gotten pretty good at playing games and it is rare that I get completely stumped in a game.

One last thing about my play-style is that I like to come back to games after enough time has passed so that I can experience it fresh again. Games like Shadow of the Colossus or Killer 7, which aren't known for their replay-ability, I have played several times over the last few years.

While I doubt that everyone also follows the same play style, there is still some knowledge here. As a designer, look at how newcomers play your game for the first time. Being new, they will have the freshest eyes on if there are any problems with the UI or understanding the design. While not everyone is going to finish your game, you can at least make sure that they will be satisfied a little longer.

Josh Bycer

Just Missing Ninjas: A Space Pirates And Zombies Analysis

2011-08-19T14:29:00.002-04:00

From the title, Space Pirates And Zombies appears to be a checklist of what gamers enjoy and SPAZ tries to combine multiple game elements together in an attempt at modernizing older game design. While there are a few issues, there is definitely a lot of potential here.

SPAZ, like older games doesn't hit you with a huge story. There's treasure in the center of the Universe, you're a pirate, put two and two together. At the start, the game will randomize the universe allowing you to choose how big or small you want it, along with the overall difficulty. Once in game, fans of the classic: Star Control 2 should feel right at home.

At the start, you'll control one ship, but will quickly get a small fleet of ships. While your fleet will follow you around, you'll only control one of the ships at a time leaving the others to the AI, but can switch between any active ships at will. Upgrades are aplenty in SPAZ; space stations can have blueprints which can be used to outfit your fleet with new equipment.

As you destroy enemy ships, they'll drop data which acts as experience along with their blueprint, once you've destroyed the same type of ship enough it will become available to be built for your fleet. Leveling up allows you to choose different areas to upgrade, such as better shields or subsystems, this in turn affects their stats and determines what equipment you can outfit your fleet with.

Each system in the galaxy has the same basic schema, the civilians and the government forces are fighting each other. As a pirate you are free to choose which side you want to support which will determine who will open fire on you in that system. Attacking ships and completing missions will determine your relations. Being liked enough will allow you to coast right into a space station where you can buy blueprints. Each system has warp gates to adjacent systems, which are operated by the government. You have two options to get by them; either blow up all the ships at the gate, or bribe the government space station to let you through.

Combat is fast and frantic, as your fleet will go up against the enemies in the sector. Ship defenses are determined by their shields, armor and hull. There is a loose rock paper scissors formula at work: beams beat shields, shields beat cannons, and cannons beat armor and hull. If one of your ships is destroyed, you can build another one as long as you have enough REZ (in-game currency). There is a decent variety of weapons available and each type of ship has a different load-out possible allowing you to design your fleet how you want it. While the randomization helps out a lot with replay-ability, it does present the problems with the game.

First is that having all equipment blueprints set randomly in the Universe, gives the player reasons to explore, but the Universe can be a fickle mistress. You may get lucky and have the blueprints you want within a few systems of the start, or you may be like me and spend hours trying to find the upgrades. While the Universe is vast (as a Universe should be) there isn't a lot to do at this point. Missions are of the "blow stuff up" variety and every system operates in the same way. There are side missions you can find that mix things up, but for the most part you'll find yourself blazing through systems to reach the ones you want. My biggest complaint though has to do with progression and that it goes against the randomization of the game.

The main point of progression in SPAZ has to do with your mother ship: the Clockwork. As the ship improves over the course of the game, you'll be able to store more resources and have a bigger fleet. Fleet size is king in the game, as smaller hulls lack the defenses needed to survive combat for long, forcing the player to use the larger ships. Unfortunately while the player is free to explore, if they want to progress, they'll need to follow a linear path through the story. After every few story missions the Clockwork will be upgraded and at this point, there are no other ways to increase your fleet size.

The problem is that this puts the player into an awkward position. Their research level will be high enough to use the components they find, but because their fleet is so small, their ships will be focused down and destroyed fast. Players who want to stick with smaller ships will be at a huge disadvantage, as each hanger can only hold one ship, regardless of size. As mentioned earlier, the smaller ships just don't have the defenses or the numbers to survive in battle against enemy fleets.

Because progression is linear, it forces the player to follow the story to stand any chance of surviving in the game. Just Cause 2 while not set in a randomize world, did find a way around the problem of story and progression. Upgrades for your weapons, vehicles and health, could be found while exploring the world and completing the actual missions don't provide any benefits other than progressing through the game. This gave the player a reason to explore and rewarded them so.

Even the big twist involving the last word in the title doesn't offset how repetitive the game gets. From the main screen, the developers are planning on adding more content which should hopefully alleviate my main problem with the game.

SPAZ reminds me of another favorite indie title: Din's Curse which also took a modern spin on older game design and succeeded. While SPAZ is not quite there yet, it does come very close to scratching that itch I got from Star Control 2.

Josh.

One Man War: Examining Single Player RTS Design.

2011-08-13T13:45:00.006-04:00

This is a continuation from my previous entry on why RTS games need to stop developing titles for the e-sports craze. One of those ways is looking at the single player campaign and how to improve them. Honestly, most RTS single player modes... suck. The reason is that designers try to use it to teach the player about multiplayer which doesn't work, as an AI is not a good substitute for a player (with rare exception.) Over the years, the structure of mission design has changed and can be broken down into several categories.

1. Skirmish: The oldest and still used form of mission design. Essentially this is a multiplayer battle minus the multiplayer. The designer may spruce things up such as giving the enemy a bigger base, or a unique advantage, but the player will be performing the same actions here as they would when playing online.

2. Puzzle: These missions are battles where the player must complete a specific objective that is different from a normal map. Missions where the player has to collect X amount of resources or create X amount of troops are examples. Some missions may have the player only controlling a limited amount of forces to accomplish a goal. The covert ops missions from the Command and Conquer series are a good example. These missions are less about strategy and more about figuring out what the designer wants the player to do, but they can be refreshing after a long string of normal battles.

3. War: A newer type of design, these are games that try to tie the battles into a larger scale. Instead of having a strict end point to the campaign after X amount of battles, here, the player has to conquer a world map or complete a specific objective. Many games that go this route, tie the available units and abilities to the map mode, such as having to conquer an area before gaining access to it.

Games like Battle for Middle Earth and the last Star Wars RTS are examples of this, as well as one of the expansions for the first Dawn of War. Rise of Nations took things a step further, giving the player different map scenarios that took place at different periods of time like: The Cold War, French Revolution and so on. These different scenarios changed the context and rules for the map mode, but did not affect the RTS mode, but each time the player choose to fight, they would be given different missions.

In a sense, the line between turn based and real time blur with this category, as to succeed the player has to be familiar with both modes and the Total War franchise could also fit into this group.

4. Story: The rarest and arguably toughest way to design is developing missions that combine elements from puzzle and war into something else. Missions are part of the plot and while the player will still be using a base, the situations are different then in a multiplayer game.

Starcraft 2 is a recent example of this type of design. While plenty of the missions involve the player building a base, as they would online, but the conditions for the maps were radically different. One map required players to deal with lava rising up at specific times, destroying anything caught in its path. Some of the maps were pure puzzle style, requiring the player to control a small group of units to complete an objective.

The story allowed the players to choose what order to tackle certain missions as well as making decisions about who to side with. This determined what units and researches would be available. Many of these upgrades that were available in the single player campaign were not put into multiplayer for obvious balance reasons. All the maps were tied to the overarching story of the game which lends some weight to the missions.

While Starcraft 2's story was on the cheesy side, the campaign was still better developed then most campaigns out there. By not having to rely on multiplayer conventions, the designers were free to experiment with a variety of mission structures. However, even though the missions were not the same as a multiplayer match, the choices made during play still followed the same mindset as multiplayer. This meant that while the player can't use all the tactics they learned once they switch to multiplayer, but they could use their understanding of the mechanics and UI to make the switch easier.

The same could not be said of Dawn of War 2's campaign. The campaign and multiplayer were radically different. The single player campaign focused more on individual units and had an action-rpg feel to it. While the multiplayer was more in line with Dawn of War 1's style or Company of Heroes. My complaint with this is that unlike Starcraft 2, where the player has at least some knowledge that would transition between single and multiplayer, here there was none. The first time I tried a multiplayer match, I had no idea what I was doing or what anything was and felt overwhelmed.

Awhile ago, I started thinking about how I would design a purely single player RTS. I came up with several ideas, one being a”choose your own adventure” style, where the player controls a military adviser in a fictional world. The player has to decide what sides of major conflicts to lend their talents to and this in turn affects the outcome and development of the world and future battles.

There seems to be a drought of good single player RTS campaigns. Many designers create their games exclusively for the multiplayer component, leaving the rest in the dust. The first step in creating a good single player campaign is getting as far away from multiplayer as possible. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't have your cake and eat it too, as Starcraft 2 is a perfect example. Personally, I would like to see someone design a RTS without worrying about multiplayer and go crazy with developing the mechanics. Which I'll once again reiterate my desire for a Rise of Nations 2.

Josh

Too Much Suffering: The Design Mistakes in The Suffering 2

2011-08-11T18:57:00.002-04:00

In my post about Dead Rising 2, and while I was at the Philly Game Loop earlier this summer, I mentioned The Suffering 2 as an example of bad design. However, I'm not sure if a lot of people understood the reference. While I was at the Game loop, I gave a presentation on game difficulty and the entire room looked at me confused when I brought up the game; if they are reading this, they should be ashamed of themselves :)

The Suffering 2 was an action horror title a few years back. In both the first and second game, players controlled Torque, a man who was convicted for killing his wife and child. Depending on the player's responses in the first game, that crime may or may not have been framed by someone else. Both titles used the concept of executions to define the enemies; each monster was a representation of a form of execution.

Torque had the ability to transform into a monster form in both titles; this would make him do a lot more damage and made him more resistant to attacks. To use his monster power, Torque would have to do enough damage to fill a bar up and then he could use it at anytime, making it more like a panic button. Keep this thought in the back of your mind, as it is part of the problem with the game.

The first game was an interesting mix of profanity, action and horror which was successful enough to warrant a sequel. However, the horror aspect was downplayed in favor of more action in the sequel, Torque could carry more weapons and the designers made the mistake of altering the use of the monster mode.

In the first game, there were no enemies who could stand against Torque while he was a monster, which as I mentioned earlier made it a panic button for the player to use. In the sequel however, the designers introduced a new class of enemy: metal coated. These enemies were immune to all conventional weaponry and could only be hurt when the player was in monster mode. If the player didn't have their bar filled, their only option was to keep attacking the enemy to fill it up while the enemy was attacking them. Right there, brings up a critical mistake the designers made, by trying to balance the game using the panic button, they instead imbalanced it.

Forcing the player to waste ammo on an invulnerable enemy, while they can hurt the player is not a fun time. When the player goes up against ranged metal enemies, who can take pot shots at the defenseless player, it just adds to the frustration. For the majority of the game, the metal coated enemies appeared a few times, but never in mass. However, things went off the deep end for the final boss.

(Spoiler Warning)

The final boss fight was with an enemy who like the metal coated enemies, was immune to all of Torque's normal weapons and it could only be hurt by monster mode. The boss would keep spawning metal coated enemies to fight Torque and to be used to fill the rage meter. When Torque transforms, he is able to kill the enemies and damage the boss, however the boss has one attack that no other enemy has in the game, and it can knock Torque out of monster mode. The boss shoots some kind of projectile that if it hits Torque while in monster mode, will drain the bar and force Torque back to normal, requiring him to fill it up again.

(End Spoiler)

Let's count the mistakes in the design:

1. Taking what was supposed to be a panic button ability and designing enemies around it. Effectively punishing the player through lost of ammo, and possibly health if they didn't keep their bar full at all times.

2. Taking invulnerable enemies and putting the player into a situation where they will infinitely re-spawn. The final battle would have been less severe if the boss would just summon normal enemies, allowing the player to still refill their bar but not be overwhelmed.

3. Waiting for the final boss in the entire game, to introduce a new mechanic, this was being hit with an attack to knock the player out of monster mode. The problem is that it catches the player completely off guard and it's really late in the game to change the rules this drastically. In a way, I'm reminded of the first God of War title which for the 3 part final boss fight, part 2 was a "guarding" mission and part 3 had players using a completely different weapon.

Reviews criticized the game for the uneven difficulty, citing the final boss fight as a frustrating experience. A few years back while I was at the VGXpo, I met one of the designers of the game and he agreed about the lack of polish on the final fight. At this point, it looks like we won't be seeing a third game anytime soon which is a shame, as I felt that the first game had a decent balance between action and horror.

Finding new ways of challenging the player can be difficult to design. Going back to what I said in my post on Dead Rising 2, there is a difference between creating something that is a challenge that tests the player, and something that is a challenge because it goes against the design of the game. A panic button mechanic should not be taken into consideration when balancing the game as its purpose should be for emergencies. What an emergency is considered should be determined by the player, not by the designers forcing an emergency. A similar situation happened in the game Metroid Prime 3, which having typed that, means I may be posting about that next :)

Josh.

Digital Distribution Dystopia

2011-08-09T14:08:00.005-04:00

One of the bigger news pieces recently, is the removal of some EA games from Steam. One part supposedly over DLC, the other most likely has to do with the recent launch of EA's distribution platform: Origin. This entry is not about that argument, but something that I feared would happen a long time ago around the time Impulse was launched. That the use of distribution platforms is getting a little out of hand and that games are affected.

Right now I have accounts to the following distribution platforms: PSN, XBLA, WiiWare, Steam, GFWL, GamersGate, Origin, Impulse, UPlay and Good Old Games. Each one has my personal information and a library of games attached to it. As more platforms are released, developers and publishers look for the best deal to get their game out there. What happens is that when the publisher wants a better deal, or doesn't support the game fully on specific platforms, gamers are affected.

People right now are talking about Dragon Age 2 being taken off of Steam, but this is not the first time that a game was removed from Steam. One of Ubisoft's titles: Dawn of Discovery was taken off of Steam's store. The story from what I've heard is that Ubisoft is refusing to release patches for the Steam versions of these games, while releasing it on other platforms and countries. In response to Ubisoft not updating their game, Valve removed Dawn of Discovery and the expansion from the service.

There is no such thing as a perfect, bug free PC game. You know it, I know it and of course publishers and developers know it. When a publisher withholds patches that fix technical issues, not even new content, from distributors that pisses me off. Recently, I re-bought Dawn of Discovery when it was on sale on Impulse, as that appears to be the only online US version that got all the patches.

As more platforms are being released, with many of them trying to take the crown away from Steam, I can't help but feel that this situation is going to become uglier. One of the fears that you hear from detractors of digital distribution, is that you don't own the copy of the game in the same way as a hard copy, and that you can lose access to the game at any time. With the recent removal of games from Steam, some of those fears have been realized.

Looking at the Origin terms of service, one point that stuck out that has been mentioned by people, is that if you don't use the service at least once within a 24 month period, they will cancel your account and any games you had are gone. While that is a very long period of time, even the mention of having a point where they can remove someone's account like that raises a red flag. I know with GFWL, I rarely use it and the same goes for Impulse. The only service that I use on a daily basis is Steam, as that is where the majority of my games are and the software that my friends use.

Being forced to use a service for no other reason than to keep my account active doesn't sit right with me and my inner cynic says that there's always the chance for them to update the TOS and chance that time limit and make it sooner. This brings up a very interesting situation; both EA and UBI Soft are the first major publishers to adopt distribution platforms. Technically at this point, we can say that Valve is a publisher thanks to Steam, but Valve doesn't have multiple studios under their belt like EA or UBI Soft.

Publishers are not only trying to beat Valve at their own game, but also want a full share of the profits. It's only a matter of time before more publishers go this route. With each publisher dictating their own prices for their games, sales won't be as plentiful, as they won't need to compete with anyone as you have no choice but to use their service. Jokingly, I started thinking about the future in the game Syndicate, where the world is being controlled by powerful corporations.

Digital distribution is here to stay and everyone knows it, especially publishers. When I first started thinking about using digital platforms, I saw it as a way of keeping a digital library of my games for storage. Now, as more software is released, my game library is splintered across all the digital platforms. As more companies look to developing their own software, gamers will once again be the ones affected. Having to use multiple distribution software to run one game is arbitrary and does more for annoying the fans then helping them.

I can’t shake this feeling that even as more publishers try to jump onto the digital distribution bandwagon, it won't make life easier for gamers. I just know that someone is going to release a game that requires Steam, another software and still has some other form of DRM included just for kicks.

Josh

The Rising Cost of Free To Play.

2011-08-06T15:55:00.001-04:00

Earlier this month I got into the Age of Empires Online pre-release program, meaning that I'm playing the Free To Play version of the game before release. The first thing I noticed was that I no longer had access to the premium content from the beta and could now see exactly what spending money in AOEO is for, and how it feels to play the free version of the game.

To buy just one premium civilization (which I talked about in my beta analysis, here) costs $20. To me, that is way too much money and presents a problem with the F2P or micro transaction attitude. Developers are still clinging to the notion that these mechanics exists in a vacuum compared to retail titles. However, as more companies are seeking a piece of the pie, they have to realize that they are not competing with just other F2P titles, but with retail games.

Instead of spending $20 buying a part of a game, I could use that money to buy a full retail game on sale. Hell, I could buy several games off of Steam during its sale. For $10 more, instead of buying both civs, I could buy Starcraft 2, with all the single and multiplayer content that comes with it. Monetizing content may seem like the wave of the future for developers, but they have to understand that they are still in the present.

The clearest advantage to micro transaction vs. retail is that it allows people to buy only the parts of the game they want. However, for the fans who want to experience all the content, this isn't helping them, they're still spending "new release" price on a game, but instead of $40 at once, it's through several transactions. Because the content is tied to the game itself, and not a retail setting, it also means that the chance of a sale is slim to none, unless it comes from the developer.

Personally I feel that some designers are using the wrong mentality when thinking up purchasable content. The difference can be seen if you compare something like League of Legends or Team Fortress 2, to a game like World of Tanks or Age of Empires Online. In the former, the player can experience everything the game has to offer without spending one cent, but the option to spend money is there for those that want it. In the latter, there is content locked behind a price barrier and there is more that is being offered to those that spend money then to the free customers.

The secret to micro transaction success in my opinion is not forcing the player to spend money, but have it either as an additional option or keep it cheap to the point of impulse buy. I'm comfortable spending a few bucks here and there for champion skins in League of Legends, because I know that they will not affect the game-play in any way and that I only have to spend what I want and that's it. In Age of Empires Online, I know that there isn't going to be a set limit on content being offered, so if I want to experience it, that means spending more money.

World of Tanks goes as far as having a subscription model on top of micro transactions, with the advantages from both becoming more and more needed the further the player gets in the game. One thing that should be avoided at all cost, is locking game modes or features behind transactions, as that just gives the feeling that the player is paying a ransom for playing your game. Everywhere I look in AOEO I see content with a lock on it telling me to spend money.

I've said it before about micro transaction content, and I'm going to say it again here: upgrades should not be purchasable, as it leads to an arms race between players where only the players with the most money will win. From my first post about AOEO, the improvements earned by spending money are huge, but they were smart enough to keep ranked PvP away from the free to play crowd as that would be too unfair. The amount of upgrades and advantages that can be bought in World of Tanks was so great, that it was one of the reasons why I stopped playing.

I mean no disrespect to Gas Powered Games or to Robot Entertainment, but I can't help but feel like I'm watching a train wreck in slow motion with AOEO. I want the game to succeed, as I want more RTS games out on the market. Personally, I would have set the civs at $10 a pop, and give both Civs and maybe even a free content pack with the retail key (costs $20.) That way buying the game will give a player the basics they need so they don't feel forced to spend money, which will make it easier for them to buy the smaller packs.

Developers need to understand that there is a difference between a F2P title and a retail game broken down into a F2P game. With the former, the gameplay is designed to hook the player first, with money second, while the latter hits the player with as many micro transactions as possible by keeping the game locked away. More developers these days are looking to the micro transaction model to keep their profits up, and existing developers will have to realize that they are not the only game in town anymore and will have to price their titles accordingly.

Josh

(Un)Dead tired of it:The Failure of Design Behind Dead Rising 2.

2011-08-05T18:28:00.002-04:00

Going through my backlog, I came to Dead Rising 2. Having played the first one I was interested to see what the new developers did to improve on the sequel. While the general controls have been given a tune-up, the designers missed (or ignored) one of the main problems with the Dead Rising series that almost made me give up.

For those not familiar, Dead Rising is an action game where players have to survive for three days (in game time,) in an area infested with zombies. They can use anything they find as a weapon as they try to balance rescuing survivors, with finding out the story. Boss battles in the game are fights with other humans who have been driven insane by the situation. The design flaw is that the game was not designed for said boss fights.

The new mechanic in DR 2 was the ability to combine certain items to create new weapons, such as gems with a flashlight to create a laser sword (I don't know how just go with it.) These weapons not only do more damage than the standard items, but they also provide the player with a greater experience bonus for using them. Allowing players to level up faster which in turn improves their attributes. The majority of the combinations are all close ranged, which is alright for dealing with zombies. However, this becomes an exercise in frustration when the player has to fight bosses.

Moving the main character around is tricky, the character moves slowly and performing any kind of attack leaves him stationary for a few seconds. There is only one defensive option in Dead Rising 2, which is rolling out of the way, but that requires the player to level up first to unlock it. The problem is that for the lack of defensive and offensive options, the bosses have plenty of both.

Bosses cannot be stunned by most attacks and can easily hit the player while they are trying to attack. Just about every attack from a boss will stun or knock the player down leaving them in a bad position and can sometimes be attacked while on the ground. Many enemies have frames of animation where they cannot be damaged at all and due to how responsive the bosses are, the player will have a hard time doing anything but get into a slug fest with them.

You would think that ranged weapons are the way to go, but the game design is balanced away from ranged weapons. Normal ranged weapons, like guns are hard to come by, and the few you get will not do anywhere near the damage you need to kill a boss. The few ranged combinations are more or less, specialty items for dealing with zombies.

This exposes one of critical design issues that designers have to pay attention to: creating encounters or situations that are beyond the scope of the design. The boss fights that I did managed to get through, were completed in two ways: either finding AI exploits to render the boss easy, or just kept attacking them and healing until either the boss or I die. Neither solution gave me much satisfaction, as having to use brute force was the wrong kind of challenge.

If the fight is difficult due to the design of the game and not testing the player, this leads to a frustrating time. Beating the bosses in Dead Rising 2 is like trying to win a sword fight with a fork, it's difficult, but for the wrong reasons, with the final boss being the worse example.

(Spoiler warning for final fight)

The final battle takes place on a roof with no ranged weapons nearby. The boss is on an elevated platform that requires the player to climb up to reach, while the boss shoots at the player with its gun. Once the player gets to the boss, they find that it is an expert on hand to hand fighting, with punch combos that do a lot of damage to the player. Like previous bosses, it can't be stunned by attacks and it can also knock the weapons out of the player's hands. Almost every attack the boss uses will knock the player back, with a good chance of knocking them off the platform, doing more damage. The player's dodge roll requires careful aiming, as the platform is so small that you can easily roll off it. The boss also has a dodge roll that gives it a few extra frames of invincibility, preventing players from attacking as it comes out of the roll.

As the fight goes on the roof will get hit by bombs, leaving random holes in the floor. Falling down one will take the player one story down requiring them to climb back up while dealing with zombies again. This battle is similar to the final boss in Dead Rising one, however in that fight, the enemy didn't have moments of invincibility and the player couldn't be knocked out of the boss area.

(End spoiler)

After about ten tries, I finally beat it by exploiting the AI by repeating the same attack until it died. The final boss brought back memories of The Suffering 2, which also had a poorly designed final boss that I couldn't finish. An important lesson for designers is that there is a difference between designing a challenge that tests the player, and a challenge that goes against the design of the game.

This kind of thinking goes back to a concept I came up with for action games, which was developing a "base-line," or the maximum amount or type of enemies that the player can deal with using a basic skill set. The purpose is that it will help the designer understand what kind of gameplay the design is built from and not to create something needlessly frustrating.

Overall, I liked Dead Rising 2, but the issues with the boss design left a black mark on the design. I know that things aren't supposed to be realistic, but I expect someone to do more than just flinch when I hit them with two chainsaws attached to a paddle.

Josh

Counting Sheep: A Catherine Analysis

2011-08-02T17:07:00.002-04:00

Catherine, the latest game from Atlus, was an unknown entity for some time. Early trailers from Japan had gamers guessing and there was a point that no one was sure that it would be ported. With the game finally released, I can definitely say that Catherine is not only one of the most unique games to come out this year, but could easily be the most unique game to come from Atlus.

Catherine's gameplay is split between puzzle solving and light adventure. The only part of the story I'm going to talk about is what has been released and put in reviews. Players will control Vincent, an early thirty-something slacker software developer. He is in a long term relationship with Katherine and has been enjoying life so far. However, Katherine has begun talking about taking things further, such as having kids and marriage. Vincent likes things the way they are, but before he has a chance to talk more about this, someone new enters his life.

While drinking one night, Vincent meets Catherine, a blond bombshell who is as easy going as him. The next morning he finds himself in bed with Catherine and in the middle of a love triangle. Now, if this was a soap opera, their relationship issues would be solved by long pauses and dramatic music. Since this is a game from the Persona team, you know that things are going to get weird.

Every night, Vincent finds himself in a nightmare world with all the other cheaters out there, now transformed into sheep. To survive, Vincent must climb up an ever collapsing tower to reach freedom. If Vincent fails to reach the top and dies in his dreams, he'll join the list of men who have been found dead in the morning.

If you haven't guessed by now, Catherine is not your usual game; the story is one of the more interesting ones I've seen in some time. Vincent isn't out to save the world, he is just trying to figure out what to do with two lovely ladies in his life, and the situation grows out of control fast.

Let's talk about the gameplay, starting with the adventure side. Every night before he goes to sleep, Vincent hangs out at his favorite bar with his friends. There are a variety of things for the player to do such as talking with the patrons or having a few drinks. Vincent will occasionally get text messages on his phone from both women, which the player can decide how he responds back. The choices will tilt a law/chaos scale that determines Vincent's responses in cut-scenes and the ending of the game.

There is also an arcade game that is essentially the nightmare puzzle solving, minus the time limit, allowing players a chance to improve their skills. Each time Vincent talks to someone, time moves forward and people may leave the bar, or new ones will show up. Eventually, Vincent will have to go home and sleep and that's when the nightmare starts.

The puzzle solving looks simple at first, but there are a lot of factors for the player to deal with. Vincent has to push and pull blocks to create a way up the tower. He can only climb up one block high walls, requiring the player to make effective stairs. Blocks connect to each other at their edges, allowing Vincent to create paths with the blocks suspending in thin air. Complicating matters are the various types of blocks Vincent will encounter along with the tower collapsing from the bottom up, take too long and Vincent is done for and the player will lose a life.

Figuring out the optimal path up the tower is where the challenge of the game is. Players are graded by how fast they reach the top and at the end of the night will receive an award based on their performance. The awards are used to unlock bonus materials like additional songs in the jukebox. Each night is made up of various levels, after the player beats a section they'll be taken to a landing where they can converse with the other trapped men.

During these breaks, the player can save their game and watch tutorial videos showing off new techniques for climbing the tower. Money, earned from climbing the tower can be used to buy an item, but that will lower the player's chances at getting a good award at the end. Each landing is concluded with the player being asked a morality question that will tilt the law/chaos scale from earlier.

To complete a night, players will have to get through a boss battle. Here, not only does the player have to figure out how to climb the tower, but they are also chased by a manifestation of Vincent's current fear. Each boss will either affect the blocks or attack Vincent, or both, requiring the player to pay as much attention to it, as they do to the puzzle solving.

If you have been reading any reviews on Catherine, one common mention is on the game's difficulty. Having started on hard, got completely stumped and dropped to medium, then considered going to easy I can conclude that Catherine is hard. The three difficulty levels (with a somewhat hidden very easy mode) each have their own puzzle layout. On normal and below, players can redo their actions to a certain point allowing them to erase a mistake or try a different option. The difficulty is going to turn off a lot of gamers, because of how different it is from a traditional game.

In other games, such as action titles, there is always feedback that lets the player know that they made a mistake. Maybe they blocked when they should have dodge, or watched the enemy pattern more. Feedback allows the player to see what they did wrong and improve for next time. However, with Catherine being a puzzle game above all else, there is no feedback to let the player know if they're doing fine, or if the last block they pulled has put them into an unsolvable situation.

There are no new abilities for Vincent to learn, with exception to the items, all progress is based off of the player's skill. The quicker you learn the patterns to look for in block placement and what to do, the easier the game will become. However, if you get stuck, without any feedback as to how you’re playing, things can become impossible.

Which is what happened to me, I got stuck at a puzzle and had no idea how to get through it. Without any feedback, I was banging my head against the wall for an hour. Finally I had to turn to YouTube to watch the solution.

Besides the difficulty I have a few design issues with the game. First, is with having a "lives" mechanic. In Catherine, you can replay a puzzle as many times as you want as long as you have enough lives to do that. However running out of lives just means restarting at your last save point, which you can do before you start a puzzle. This feels arbitrary to me and an excuse for the player to watch the "game-over “screen. On normal, at one point, I had at least 80 lives, the only time I ran out of lives was during my first attempt at hard mode, but it still felt like an arbitrary mechanic.

The controls take some getting used to and even at the end of the game; I was still having some problems with them. The issue is that Vincent's movement is based on his relation to the camera, when he's standing, left moves him left and so on. However, when he's hanging on the side of blocks or moving behind the tower, the controls become reverse. This becomes troublesome when Vincent is behind the tower as the camera doesn't shift to show that view, which has a good chance of getting the player stuck there.

I wish that the developers spent more time with giving the player training videos, or maybe even an actual tutorial. The videos can only be viewed on the corresponding landings, meaning if you forget how one went, you're SOL. Having access to more help and information would help reduce the difficulty curve.

With the difficulty and unusual subject matter good reasons for gamers to avoid Catherine, I hope that a lot of people try this game. The art style was amazing, especially with the later levels. Going back to the story, having finished the game and got one of the many endings, I found this to be one of my favorite game stories in some time. Even with the nightmares and sheep, this is still a love story and Vincent isn't a super hero or whiny teen, he's an adult stuck in a very sticky situation. For gamers clamoring for something original, Catherine easily fits that bill, but make sure that you know what to expect before jumping in, or you may find yourself heading for a long fall.

Josh.

Because Adequate Mickey Isn't As Catchy: An Epic Mickey Analysis

2011-07-25T14:31:00.000-04:00

Epic Mickey had a lot riding on it. This was an original story on one of the most beloved cartoon characters of all time, with veteran game designer Warren Spector at the helm. Previews had gamers excited for what was supposed to be an excellent third party title for the Wii. Unfortunately, instead of garnering universal praise, Epic Mickey was a polarizing experience. Having finally got my hands on it, I can say that it's not a horrible failure, nor is it a perfect success.

The story of Epic Mickey is one of the best parts of the game. Mickey, before he rose to popularity entered a magic mirror one night and stumbled into a wizard's home. There, the wizard was creating a world for forgotten characters using magic paint and thinner. After going to bed, Mickey decides to play around with the paint and creates a monster called the Phantom Blot and accidentally unleashed it on the world, causing untold destruction and creating the wasteland. Many years later, after Mickey has become the star that we all know, the blot returns and pulls him into the wasteland and now must escape.

For a story based on Mickey Mouse, this is one really dark story. Wandering around the wasteland, Mickey is constantly exposed to the damage he's done. When he meets Oswald, who was Disney's first big hit before they lost the rights to and created Mickey, Oswald hates his guts because of how popular Mickey became. The world is falling apart and while there are characters living here, Mickey doesn't have to care about their predicament, and this is where the choice system comes into play.

Mickey has the power of both paint and thinner at his disposal. Spraying paint allows him to reconstruct destroyed structures and can be used to convert some enemies to Mickey’s side. Thinner, dissolves objects and is use to destroy enemies. As Mickey explores the world he'll have opportunities to use both substances during quests, and getting around the levels.

The concept of having morality choices in an action-adventure title is interesting. Similar to Deus Ex (Spector's big hit), some choices will come back to effect Mickey later on in the world he's in. One thing that I really liked about this has to do with the boss fights. Instead of having Mickey choose at the end of the fight whether to be good or bad, his actions to beat the boss determine that.

(Spoiler alert: To discuss an example of this I will be spoiling the first boss fight in the game. If you don't want to know then skip the next paragraph.)

The first boss is a giant clock tower. The good way involves painting both arms to pacify them, allowing them to carry Mickey to the clock face to paint it and making it friendly. The arms, once stunned by paint will recover, requiring the player to paint a little of both at each time. The thinner way, requires the player to thin out the wood supports on the arms, so that when they crash down they break causing the arms to fall apart and the clock tower is destroyed.

Having morality choices actually factor into the gameplay is something that I want to see more of in game design. Besides combat, there are multiple collectibles for players to find, with some restricted by the player's choices. For the perfectionist, they will have to play through the game at least twice to get everything. Unfortunately, when it comes to playing the game, that's where things start to break down.

The elephant in the room would have to be the camera system; quite frankly this is one of the worse camera systems I've seen in a game. There are times when the camera can't be controlled when you want it to be, and then there are times when you want it to stay still and it moves. The camera would also get stuck on either Mickey or the environment, which can be a killer during plat forming sections.

The camera also causes trouble with aiming. To use either paint or thinner, the player has a reticule that is used for targeting. Because Mickey's direction is not taken into account, it makes it very hard to aim paint due to the camera. There were times where I wanted to paint something above Mickey but because the camera was viewing the action sideways, Mickey kept shooting paint to the left of him. Trying to hit something below Mickey is also a pain, as due to the camera views makes it hard not to shoot at the floor.

The camera also interferes during combat. Mickey's main form of offense is either converting enemies with paint or destroying them with thinner. This is all well and good for the beginning, but past the first quarter of the game, Mickey will run into enemies that can't be converted. These enemies require a two step process of covering them with thinner, then hitting a weak spot. The camera makes it hard to get a consistent burst of thinner on the enemy while trying to avoid their attacks.

While not as damning, the game also has a few design issues that need to be said. In order to move from section to section, Mickey enters a 2d plat forming section inspired by a classic Disney cartoon. When you’re in one of the worlds you only have to do this one time to move from area to area, however to travel between the central hub to the start of a world, you'll have to repeat the same section over and over again. This becomes painfully repetitive doing side-quests that require Mickey to travel back and forth between the worlds.

The checkpoint system also adds to frustration. The game uses checkpoints which also act as saves whenever Mickey turns in a quest or moves to a new section. The problem is that in the same section, it will only checkpoint after Mickey turns in the quest. If the player dies on the way back to the quest giver, they'll lose all progress with the quest and start from square one again.

The final complaint I have has to do with the stage design. Every section has one exit, but multiple ways of unlocking it. This is based on either using the solution involving paint (being good) or thinner (mischievous). The problem I have with this is with having multiple solutions in the level, it makes things unfocused in my opinion. There were some stages that without knowing it, I found two ways of opening the exit. It's hard to know at the start what actions will lead to the good or bad way, as thinner is used to clear objects from your path for both options.

With these complaints mentioned, the camera is still the biggest deterrent to playing the game. This is a shame when the worse problem a game has is technical. From the animated cut-scenes to the excellent story, you can tell this was a labor of love for the designers. Getting a mature Disney title these days is rare, with exception to the Kingdom Hearts series and hopefully this won't dissuade developers from trying again.

Josh.

Why Sports and Strategy Games Don't Mix

2011-07-22T12:22:00.001-04:00

As I'm playing through Civilization 5 and not falling in love with it, I felt an urge to play a RTS again. I could feel my blood pressure rising over the thought of playing Starcraft 2 again. In these last few years, I found myself drifting away from the RTS genre. As I started to think about one of my favorite RTS games: Rise of Nations, I started to realize why I've felt this way towards one of the first genres I enjoyed, and it has to do with E-Sports.

One of the key foundations behind Starcraft's popularity came from South Korea. The game's tight balance and the need to be fast at the keyboard, made it the perfect competitive game to be adopted by the World Cyber Games. In South Korea, Starcraft became as big as professional sports in the US. Professional teams were created, gamers became celebrities and the whole thing took off. Since then, it feels like the majority of RTS designers are chasing the dream of having their game included in the craze, and this is where my problems lie.

To me, making your RTS "E-Sports worthy" takes away from the design instead of adding to it. With RTS games aimed for the E-sports market, there is a definite pattern to their design. These games seem to be more about being designed for someone to watch, rather than for someone to play. This also figures in to their less then useful UIs, because they want experts to have to get their APM up (actions per minute).

Concepts like: flanking, unit promotions, territory and so on, have become a thing of the past. Instead of having battles with massive armies, the RTS scene has moved to smaller skirmishes. The only recent RTS I can think of that went for massive scale was Supreme Commander 2 and it turned out to be a surprise hit for me. I just downloaded R.U.S.E and getting into that. The part that really pisses me off is what this has done to UI design.

Instead of developing UIs that aid the player and leave them free to focus on the game, many designers create less than adequate UIs which force the player to concentrate on it instead of playing. One of the best design mechanics I saw in a RTS UI came from Rise of Legends, when they implemented the ability to set the rally point for unit constructions directly to control groups. After using this in ROL, I expected every RTS game from that point to feature this functionality, except they didn't.

I know it can't be a matter of complexity after all this time, instead it's because that would take away from having players focus on the UI and their APM. In Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, every unit has a secondary attack or use that has to be activated through either a mouse click or hot key. This meant not only having to deal with activating multiple abilities in the middle of combat, but also having to find the unit on screen at the same time. There were no ways around this, such as in Warcraft 3 with being able to toggle some skills to always be used.

I'm tired of playing RTS games as click-fests. What I want is to command my army and focus more on the macro level instead of having to quickly bounce between my army and base to set up rally points and making sure I don't have any idle units. What I'm saying is that I want to wage wars, not skirmishes.

Rise of Nations was not perfect, but it did so much right for the genre. The big reason was that developer Big Huge Games, adopted TBS concepts into RoN's design. Mechanics like supplying units in enemy territory, cities becoming self sufficient once full of citizens. Making it play more like a real time version of Civilization, even with how the game changes once you hit the modern era and oil becomes a needed resource.

I'm really getting tired of RTS designers trying to design the next great e-sports game, as that just means copying Starcraft 2, which in a sense is copying Starcraft 1. In other words, someone please f#(king make Rise of Nations 2 so that I can cross that off of the list of "things that I can die happy from". I've gotten to the point that if I see anywhere in a game's preview the mention of "e-sports" or "cyber games", I know to skip it.

To be fair to Starcraft 2, it did feature one of the best single-player campaigns I've seen in a RTS, simply because it made no attempt to teach the player multiplayer through it. Good RTS campaigns are hard to come by and that is a blog entry onto itself.

Lastly, to be fair to smaller scale RTS games, I did enjoy Company of Heroes. Even thought it was about skirmishes, it did have those concepts I mentioned above such as flanking and unit promotions. Although I tried Warhammer Dawn of War 2 and did not get into it, the UI really bugged me for some reason.

Strategy games have been put on the back-burner lately with the only two big name games I'm aware of being the next Starcraft 2 expansion and Stronghold 3. For the genre to advance, designers have to stop thinking in terms of how people will watch the game, and instead how will people play the game.

Josh.

The Great Game Design Debate: Regenerating Health vs. Items edition.

2011-07-20T16:15:00.002-04:00

There are many video game related arguments out there: Console vs. PC, CRPG vs. JRPG, and Old-School vs. New-School to name a few. Tonight, it's about regenerating health and its affect on game design. Thinking back, the first game that popularized this mechanic was Halo. Since then, the mechanic has become a major staple in First Person Shooters. However, many gamers argue that by removing the need to find health items that it has hurt game design.

There is a now famous screenshot showing FPS map design back in the 90s and today that gets mentioned every time someone brings up this discussion. The point that gamers bring up, is that FPS map design has become simplified due to not needing to find health items anymore. When I talked about old-school difficulty, I mentioned that we need to examine why the games were hard in the first place. That same kind of examination I'm going to apply to this matter. If the only point to explore the world was to find errant first aid kits, that doesn't sound like good design to me. You can still offer players hidden areas and secrets without the need to heal. In the Condemned series, every level has collectibles for the player to find, or objects to break that contribute to game completion.

Personally, I'm for regenerative health, especially in action titles. The reason is that it frees up the designer to create insane situations without worrying about the player not having enough health from a previous battle. However, I can see why many gamers don't like it.

The problem with regenerative health in most games is that it feels like the odd man out; a mechanic that is just plopped into the game without being thoroughly integrated into the design. For instance, is it ever explained why in the Call of Duty games, that someone can take twenty lethal shots to the chest, and is fine after sitting behind a wall for ten seconds?

Most games that feature regenerative health leave it completely out of the player's hands. The player knows how long it takes to heal and how long before they are in danger. When regenerative health works best, is when it is a part of the game design.

The first good example in my opinion comes from the Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. Here, the player's health bar is represented by several squares at the top of the screen. Each time the player takes damage, a square will begin to drain out, when it completely runs out; the next square in the line begins to drain. Once the player is out of danger, the square that still has filling will regenerate. For those that were emptied, the player has to find a healing station to recover.

What makes this work is that it offers the best of both worlds. The player can regenerate health, but it is capped requiring the player to still play well to succeed. For games that want full regenerative, integrating it into the game mechanics can make it more rewarding.

In Infamous, the player will recover health slowly when not in combat. When the player recharges Cole's energy supply by draining electricity, it also rapidly heals him. This sets up the dynamic of fighting enemies near sources of power to have emergency healing on standby.

Recently with Bulletstorm, I was surprised that the designers couldn't find a way to link restoring health to making skill-shots, and instead went for the "hide behind the wall" style. If the designers went as far to explain how making skill-shots fit into the reality of the game, why couldn't they take it a step further and use that as a form of healing?

When I did my analysis on Bulletstorm, I started talking about an idea I had for an open world version of it. For that idea I thought up how regenerating health could work better tied to skill-shots. I even went a step further and figured that the player could "over-load" their health be constantly performing skill-shots to take their health bar over 100%.

The more control you can give the player over regenerating their health the better, and there are so many more clever ways of implementing it that we haven't explored thoroughly yet, for instance, a game in which the player can take painkillers to restore their health, but if they constantly take it, they'll become weaker due to damaging their body.

If the game has the player choosing from different classes/powers to build their character, why not have different models of regeneration based on that? Such as, if the player is imbued with fire, allow the player to recover health by standing in flames, such as ones caused by grenade explosions from your enemies. Or if the player uses water, they can jump into bodies of water to heal, or carry inexpensive water bottles that they can drink to rapidly recover their health.

Regenerating health is like any game mechanic, when used properly it can add depth and make the game better, but used improperly, and it can drag the game down. Besides, it makes just as much as sense as being able to eat fruit or use a first aid kit to patch up hits from rocket launchers or having a fireball hit you in the head.

Josh.

Impressions of Age of Empires Online Beta.

2011-07-12T16:54:00.002-04:00

Age of Empires Online has lifted the NDA meaning that I can now do an analysis on it. I've been in the beta for the last 2 months and have been chomping at the bit to write this up. There are several mechanics here that I find fascinating for the RTS genre, however with that said I think some of the design does clash with the AOE formula.

After Ensemble Studios was closed following the release of Halo Wars, former employees got together and formed Robot Entertainment and got a chance to rework the AOE formula into a free to play game. As it stands the framework and base systems are finished, and now the game has been handed to Gas Powered Games of Supreme Commander fame to continue with support and adding new content.

In AOEO there are two main systems here: the RTS side and the Capital city. I'm going to start with the RTS side as that is the most familiar to fans. Even though the art style is more cartoon like compared to previous games, this is not "baby's first AOE". The challenge of micro managing villagers with multiple types of resources is still here. With that said however, people looking for AOE 4 may be disappointed as there are no new innovations to the formula.

In terms of game-play take the different sides of Age of Mythology and throw in the concept of guardians and treasures of AOE 3 and that is a rough description of the overall RTS game play in AOEO. Two details that have been removed are hero units and the myth units from AOM.

The UI is so-so and could use some improvements such as being able to rally to control groups, an easier way to garrison units and a few more. Unit stances are surprisingly absent from the game which makes it a pain in the ass to keep units from running off. With the game still in beta there is a chance that the UI will be updated again before launch.

Moving on let's talk about the capital city as this is the biggest change from previous AOE titles. First some back story, the capital city is an extension from the home city system in AOE 3. In AOE 3 when you start playing online you choose which nationality you want to play as, and that unlocks all the basic units and techs for that side. As you win matches online you'll gain experience points and once you earn enough your home city will level up.

This in turn gives you points that you can allocate to different shipments that can be sent during your match. The shipments range from additional units and resources to unique tech and units that can only be acquired through shipments. What I loved about this mechanic was that it gave a sense of personalization to the RTS genre, similar to a Collectible Card Game where each person's strategy is dictated by what cards they have.

In a sense the capital city takes two steps forward and one step back in its design. In AOEO the capital city is an analogue to a character in a MMO. You'll receive quests from people in your city, that take the form of a RTS mission. Completing the quest gives you experience and once you earn enough your city will level up. At each level up you'll get three tech points that can be distributed at your main building.

You have three tech trees available: economy, military and utility. Each item on the trees has a point cost and an age requirement; you can't start putting points into age 3 researches until you unlock that age. Whatever you unlock here will be available during the RTS matches, either available on age up or have to be research during play.

The capital city offers a lot more customization and personalization compared to the home city. You can build decorative buildings to dress up your city along with buildings that produce materials used for various things. One of the biggest changes to AOE's formula comes in the form of items. Items can be bought, produced or rewarded for completing quests and have a huge affect on the game.

Everything that you can produce on the RTS side can be equipped with items from the capital city, such as better construction materials for your buildings or new arrow heads for your archers. Like in a RPG, items are graded in terms of rarity, green being the least rare and purple being uber rare. The lower quality items don't offer too much but very rare items can give substantial bonuses to your units.

Looking at some of the high level items on sale I saw items that boosted unit stats by more than 15% along with those that increase resource gathering rates. Items are level restricted so you can't give a new city the best stuff, but keep this in the back of your mind as I will be coming back to this in a few paragraphs.

Advisors act as age up upgrades, and are grouped by what age they can be assigned for. When you age up whatever advisor you have assigned to that age will take effect. Some advisors give bonuses and others unlock unique units. Just like items they are tiered in terms of rarity and level requirement.

The final point of customization comes from defining specializations in your city. You can define two fields for your city to focus on, such as archery or construction. This allows you to use materials to craft items relating to it, with recipes found from quest rewards. I really like the idea of being able to customize your side and it gives the game a lot of flavor. However there are two glaring problems with AOEO that could be deal breakers.

First is that to be frank, the game is boring as hell starting out. Because all the units and researches are tied to the leveling system, it means that the player is going to spend a lot of time not doing much on the RTS side. Expect to find your only strategy is building nothing but spear-men for several levels. You can't even use siege equipment until level 10 meaning that early on your only option for taking out defensive structures is to just send wave after wave of infantry until it goes down.

Whenever we talk about strategy games we have to paraphrase Sid Meier's view that they are a set of interesting decisions. In AOEO the majority of said decisions are locked behind several hours’ worth of leveling up. This is not like a MMO where your character earns more skills as they level up but they don't completely change their utility. Imagine if a Mage once they hit level 50 unlocks the ability to wear battle armor and can now fight like a warrior.

Once you hit the level cap which is set at 40 this problem goes away, however I don't know if many RTS fans will be able to deal with all these limitations to get that far. Limiting the design can work if you have unique mission set up. Starcraft 2's campaign is all about having unique missions with access to specific unit types and it worked out well. AOEO's missions do branch out as the player goes up in levels however due to the slower nature of its design you will be doing the same base building in a lot of missions. Because of the repetition of the same build order required I can only do a few missions at a time before I get bored.

The AI during missions also seems tweaked a bit too far against the player. There are times that the AI is able to build a massive army out of nowhere or replenish their army several times faster than me. When I get to their base they usually have three or more copies of each unit producing structure. What I don't understand is how they have enough resources to pump units from all their buildings. Another logic flaw with the AI is that attacking its villagers sets the AI to "destroy mode" as it starts sending every unit it produces straight to your base.

There are several challenge missions that require the player to gather X amount of resources or produce so many units in a set time. I liked these missions for the change of pace however some of them I don't see a way to beat them without having benefits from advisors or items already in place.

Now the second problem involves how AOEO is set to make money. When you start up AOEO for the first time, all the developed Civs are available and free to play. Playing a Civ in free mode gives you access to the following:

Single player quests and PVP.
Can equip green tier items.
Can unlock the majority of the researches available.
Upgrade their city with various buildings.

Now at any point you can spend money to buy the Civ (or as it's called in game a premium civ). This in turn gives you access to everything the free version has and the following extras:

Assign advisors to your civ.
Equip any tier items (Level restrictions still apply).
Can unlock all researches available including "star techs" which are techs that are always on during a RTS battle.
Build structures that can craft materials to be used in your city

There should be a red flag being raised after that. The bonuses combined from items, advisors and tech will give a paying customer a huge advantage compared to a free one. This could be a tough pill to swallow especially with other F2P games on the market.

Looking at League of Legends for a second, I can be competitively viable without spending one penny next to someone who spent fifty dollars or more in the game. Everything that actually affects the game can be unlocked through regular play. I have only spent five dollars in game and that was to buy a character skin on sale, plus since I have over fifty hours played I figured I should give some money to Riot.

Back to AOEO currently there are only two sides available to play: the Greeks and the Egyptians but there are more sides coming. The developers have announced that new sides will start at level twenty and won't have to do the beginning missions. Along with that, players can also buy content packs that have new quests, or challenges to do.

Overall I find AOEO intriguing coming from enjoying the home city concept. However I don't know if RTS fans (especially AOE fans) are going to enjoy the hoops they're going to have to jump through to unlock basic content.

Last comment I need to make is to remind everyone that this analysis is based on the beta; there is no guarantee that my problems will be in the finished product.

Josh

A Look At UI Design Part 1: A Quick Examination.

2011-07-11T19:51:00.001-04:00

As I worked on my analysis of The Witcher 2, my inner designer was screaming out loud over all the UI issues I had with the game. Since you can't call three pages of rants at game design a review, consider this my form of venting.

No matter how great your game is or how good looking, if it has a horrible UI, it could be enough to ruin your game. One difficulty of talking about UIs is that every genre has its own style and information to convey. For this entry, I'm going to talk about some general dos and don'ts and talk about two genres that I'm the most familiar with when it comes to UI design: RPGs and strategy/city builder.

The first thing as a designer that you have to think about when coming up with the UI is, what is the most important information to the player? The reason is that you want this information to be as easily found by the player as possible.

With RPGs and strategy games, they make use of having multiple screens of information. You want to avoid having your information strewn across multiple screens of information. There are 4X strategy games out there that have the player going through at least three screens to see how their economy is and if they are losing money. Burying your information like this makes your game harder to learn and can make your UI convoluted.

You want to try to keep relevant information together and it is fine to repeat information in several areas if it will be used there. For instance, in The Witcher 2, the player can only see how many ingredients they have for alchemy in the inventory, not when they are on the alchemy screen. As a designer, when you are testing your game, if you find that you have to switch between multiple screens to accomplish a single task that should raise a red flag. With older RPGs, the game may not show the attributes of new equipment from the equip screen, forcing the player to go back and forth between their inventory to make sure that their new gear will actually improve their characters.

Strategy titles are known for having numerous pieces of information for the player to understand. This is where the concepts of a good UI can clash. It is not possible in most strategy games to have all the information present on one screen without overloading the player with information. Instead you need to find a happy medium between keeping things clean, while presenting information to the player. Series like Total War and Civilization have been working on this.

Both games have the main screen, where the player will see the most important information such as: happiness, total gold, unit position and so on. By keeping their mouse pointer or single clicking on a city, they can get a little more information about what's going on. Finally, they can double click on the city to get all the data there is. The main advantage to this style is that it allows them to keep the main screen from being cluttered by information.

One negative to this open design, is the use of small icons that are either commands or links to other screens. While it keeps the screen clean, it also makes it a pain to find what you're looking for. The first time I tried Civilization 4: Colonization I was greeted by a bunch of little icons with no idea what they were for. If you are going to go this route, tool tips can help players understand what is going on.

Also it is important to realize that there is such a thing as a "too open" UI. If the first thing the player sees is a main screen that shows nothing, with all information hidden behind mouse clicks and multiple windows, that can raise the learning curve dramatically. As evident by my time spent trying to play the Dominions series.

Another concept I saw recently in The Settlers 7 was the use of dynamic information windows. How this worked was at the top of the screen, there was a resource display window. When the player does not have anything selected, it shows the most important resources to your kingdom: population, tools, food and gold. Whenever the player clicks on a building or is about to build something, the panel displays relevant information to that building. For instance, a bakery requires water and flour to produce bread, when you select a bakery, you'll see exactly how much of each resource you have available. If the player wants to view all their resources, they can click on the resource window at the bottom of the screen.

Creating a good UI is a very difficult task, what the designer may find easy to understand, could be completely esoteric to the player. This is by no means a complete look, as mentioned at the start; every genre can have its UI analyzed. That does it for part 1, in part 2 I'm going to pay tribute to the Nintendo DS and what dual screens did for UI handheld design , in part 3 I'm going to tackle why one of the best games of all time, has one of the worse UIs of all time.

Josh

The Best Substitute Ghost Buster- An Analysis of Luigi's Mansion.

2011-07-06T14:39:00.000-04:00

When it comes to the release of a new console, the launch line-up has always been a big deal. These are the games that are going to define the console. When it comes to Nintendo, some of their biggest games arrive at launch: Super Mario World and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for example. However, when the GameCube was released, fans were surprised that instead of getting a new game in one of Nintendo's popular franchises, they got an original title starring the less utilized Mario brother: Luigi. While some gamers weren't too happy with this prospect, Luigi's Mansion turned out to be one of my favorite games from Nintendo.

The story was simple enough, Luigi finds out that he won a sweepstakes and the grand prize was a mansion. Unfortunately, it turns out the mansion was haunted by ghosts that kidnapped Mario. After meeting with a local ghost expert, Luigi gets a modified vacuum cleaner that he can used to capture the ghosts.

The main objective of the game is to capture all the ghosts in the mansion and rescue Mario. Each room of the mansion is haunted by multiple types of ghosts. The trick is to use Luigi's flashlight to stun the ghost when they get close and then use your vacuum to suck them in. Boss and mini-boss ghosts require Luigi to do something extra to stun them before he can proceed to capture them.

The game is split between 4 areas, encompassing the four floors of the mansion. When Luigi enters a new room, the lights will be off and ghosts will appear to attack him. After a room has been cleared, the lights come on signaling that Luigi is safe. Most often the reward for cleaning out a room is a key that will unlock the next room Luigi has to go to.

There are several things I like about Luigi's Mansion, first is that the progression of the game is easy to get into, but has that "one more turn" feel to it. The rooms only take a few minutes to clear out and offer a quick way to see how far the player is. This was also one of the few games to attempt a Ghost Buster style of game-play. While the story isn't going to win any awards, there is one aspect of it that was done better than any other Nintendo game up to that point: character development.

Nintendo has always been good with designing game-play, but to be fair they've never gone far with developing their characters. For Mario and Link, besides knowing that they're brave, good guys, what else is known about them? With Luigi's Mansion, Nintendo gave Luigi some personality, and that is making him a giant chicken. Luigi for the majority of the game is terrified by the situation that he's in and the designers go to great lengths to show it.

As he wanders around the mansion, he has a look of terror on his face while trying to hum the theme song of the game (which gets stuck in my head easily.) Whenever Luigi goes to enter a new room for the first time, a zoomed in view of the door shows Luigi's hand trembling in fear as he reaches for the door. Now, granted this isn't Pulitzer winning character development, but it does give Luigi more personality then other Nintendo characters. This would also be used in later Mario games such as the excellent Mario and Luigi RPG series.

I also found the graphics to be very good and hold up well today. Mainly due to how well Luigi's model animates, from how he moves and reacts to the environment. While I was replaying this, I was also going through the first Gears of War on the 360, and I found Luigi's Mansion looked better to me then Gears of War.

Even with me gushing over the game, there are a few problems here. The main issues are that not only is Luigi's Mansion an original title, but it was also a launch title. Launch titles rarely use all the power and technology the console has to offer. Later games like Metroid Prime and Wind Waker got a chance to really show what the GameCube could do.

As the first game in the series there were several refinement issues. The length being a big one, the game is only a few hours long and other then playing through a harder version, not much replay-ability. Using the C-stick to move his flashlight around presented some navigation issues as it seemed to move differently then Luigi's movement.

In this regard, Luigi's Mansion reminds me of another original Nintendo game: Pikmin. The first game wasn't that long. With the sequel, the developers added in new Pikmin along with randomized dungeons to go through. From E3, it looks like Luigi's Mansion will get a second chance to shine with a sequel announced for the 3DS.

While many gamers were excited over the Ocarina of Time remake for the 3DS, Luigi's Mansion 2 may be the system seller for me.

Josh.

The Inaccessible Nature of Accessibility In Game Design.

2011-06-28T16:07:00.000-04:00

This past generation has given us new ways of promoting accessibility in games, in no small part thanks to the Wii and Nintendo DS. The Wii has given us motion controls, while the DS has the stylus and touch screen. Since then, both Sony and Microsoft have followed suit with the Playstation Move and Kinect respectively. These devices have given rise to more accessible content, thanks to offering an alternative to button combinations. However, with the recent release of the 3DS, I'm starting to realize that in creating new forms of accessibility, designers may have created something inaccessible to me, and perhaps others.

Being able to use a controller to manipulate a character or action on screen has always worked for me, as it takes the majority of physical action out of the equation. The problem is that by introducing physical actions into game design, I find myself in some cases physically unable to play games. I suffer from fine motor control issues in my hands, whenever I try to do something very fine or intricate, and my hands begin to twitch. For games that require the player to perform very specific gestures, the constant shaking of my hand gets in the way unless I concentrate more on that then playing the game.

The whole dancing genre is forever out of my grasp, which is alright as I hate to dance to begin with. I have nerve damage in my right leg and foot, and have little use of them. There is no way in hell that I could stand for long periods of time, much less perform dance moves. Learning how to play the drums in Rock Band became a painful exercise using my right leg, which required me to shift to my left leg. While these last two examples are broad, on the DS I have been effectively shut down from playing two of the biggest games on it.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, both make use of the DS's unique functionality in their game design. In Phantom Hourglass, there are spells the player can cast by drawing specific symbols on the map, and several doors that require a symbol drawn to open. The problem for me was that Nintendo made it so that the symbols had to be drawn close to perfection for the system to register it.

For me, due to my twitching hands I could not draw the symbols how the game wanted to move on. Another thing I noticed was how some symbols had to be drawn in a certain way, such as from left to right. Since I'm a lefty, I found it easier to go from right to left with some of the harder symbols, but the game was not accepting it. In order to keep going I had to grab a family member to draw the symbols on the DS for me, a first in my life of having to get someone to play a game for me to progress.

Unfortunately, with Spirit Tracks I wasn't so lucky. The game makes use of the DS's microphone to have the player play an instrument by blowing into it. Besides my physical issues I also have horrifically bad allergies, which leaves me with a semi stuffed nose at all times. For the life of me I could not get the game to recognize that I was playing the notes correctly. I spent roughly two hours attempting this to the point where I started choking, because I was running out of air trying to make this work; eventually I had to give up.

For the first time, I had to stop playing a game, not because I was stuck at a difficult challenge, or a boss fight, but because I was physically unable to play it. The prospect of not being able to play video games due to physical limitations is a scary one to me. There is a sense of irony that by creating tools to make games more accessible to casual gamers, that it has made them inaccessible to me, and perhaps others.

Thinking about possible solutions, the margin for error should be given a wide berth for people having trouble. Going back to Spirit Tracks for a second, I wonder if people who have asthma ran into the same problems I had. Having multiple options for performing the task would work as well. This would need to be handled on a game-by-game basis depending on the controls and actions required. Even having an option to take these actions and map them to a controller input in extreme cases could work.

Making games more accessible, has been a constant challenge for designers. From subtitles for hearing impaired people, to visual modes for color blindness, there are a lot of things for a designer to think about. As game design moves more into a realm where button presses are not the only form of input, designers will have more limitations from their fan-base to consider.

Josh

Balls (and Everything Else) To the Wall Action: A Bulletstorm Analysis

2011-06-27T02:20:00.000-04:00

I consider myself a multi-faceted gamer, there are days that I want to play a complex, challenging title that has me pouring over stats and information to make every second count. Then there are days that I want to blast monsters with giant guns, while explosions go off in the background orchestrated to the music of Black Sabbath or Queen. Bulletstorm is for those latter moments and in many ways what I like (and don't like) about the game reminds me of Mad World.

There isn't much to talk about with the story in Bulletstorm. Expect to kill a lot of guys and hear every kind of dick joke you can think of. The writing is definitely low-brow but got a few chuckles out of me. You can tell that the voice actors were having fun reading some of the crazier lines in the game.

What Bulletstorm lacks in mature writing, it makes up with graphical prowess. The backgrounds and environments look amazing, with just about every scene looks like something off of a painting. Later levels that take place in destroyed areas have a sense of awe from seeing how much destruction happened. Chances are however, you won't be concentrating on how pretty everything is when the fighting starts.

The real meat of Bulletstorm's game-play comes from the "skill-shot" system. Skill-shots are creative ways of killing enemies, either using your weapons, or the environment. Why just blast an enemy with a shotgun, when you can blast an enemy with a shotgun that splits them in half and send the top half into a giant cactus. Performing skill-shots earns you points that can be used to buy ammo and upgrades for your weapons.

The weapon design in Bulletstorm is great, which comes as no surprise given People Can Fly's (the designers) track record with Pain Killer. Each weapon has an alternate fire that changes the dynamic of the weapon. For instance, the assault rifle gets a super shot that can obliterate enemies and can pass through them. The alternate fire requires the player to spend points on charges and is most likely going to be where the majority of your points go. The only real complaint I have with the weapon system, is that the player is limited to only holding three weapons at once

Chaining together multiple skill-shots requires practice and a lot more thinking that is normally required for these types of shooters. Helping out, is how maneuverable the player is. Besides running, you also have the option to slide across the area which not only knocks enemies in the air, but gives you time to regenerate your health. However besides sliding and skill-shots, the coolest mechanic in Bullet Storm would have to be the leash.

Basically, it is an electric whip that can pull enemies and objects to the player. While the enemy is floating in mid-air, this gives you the perfect opportunity to set up for the harder skill-shots. Later in the game, you can purchase the "thumper" upgrade that gives the leash the ability to blast all nearby enemies’ straight up into the air. When all these different factors come together, Bullet Storm can be a fun game, however, like a certain other ultra-violent game; I have some issues with the design.

Linear stages, while nice to look at, are not the best format for games like Bulletstorm or Mad World. The reason is that there is only so much you can do in a linear environment before it gets repetitive. Because of the linear layout, there isn't too much experimentation with the skill-shots. You can only do so much in each area and environmental deaths are the easiest to get a high score from. Every level is essentially a long corridor, with exception to a few turret sections. Due to the linearity, I could only play Bulletstorm for a few hours at a time before I had to put it down from being too repetitive. While the skill-shot system is fun, there isn't much to gain other then ammo for your weapons.

Besides the single-player story, the game offers score based challenges in the form of "echoes". In this mode, the player will replay sections of the single-player campaign to rack up as much points as possible. You are graded on how long it takes you to complete the section, along with how many different skill-shots you made. Distilling the levels down to score runs was a good idea and reminds me a little of The Club, that was released a few years back. However I think there is something better that can be done and it comes from the extreme sports genre.

One of the best design changes in my opinion from games like the Tony Hawk series, SSX and Skate, was transitioning to an open world environment. This is where skill-based games are at their best in my opinion, as it allows gamers to try out different things and see what they can do. You can still have linear events set up in the area, such as the races in SSX 3.

Now picture a game like Mad World or Bulletstorm, in an open world setting. The player is free to equip different weapons at their leisure and go around trying to perform the craziest attack combos they can think of. Points earned are used to open up new weapons and upgrades, along with boss events or linear sections.

Another way that this can help is making the combo system more fluid. In Bulletstorm, only the last few hits you do to an enemy count towards skill-shots, I would love to see the system transition into a more fluid combo system, allowing the player to rack up multiple skill-shots as long as they keep the body in air or not destroyed. In other words, give me Skate but replace skateboarding with guns, killing and explosions.

Lastly there is a multiplayer mode that has people working together to earn enough points to win. From descriptions it looks really fun; however like my time with Kane and Lynch 2, I couldn't find any friends to play with and did not try it out.

Bulletstorm is definitely not for everyone, from the crude writing to the simplified level design. However, there is a glimmer of greatness here that I would love to see them expand upon with a sequel.

Josh

Throwing My Pile Of Hats On The Ground Over Team Fortress 2.

2011-06-22T17:28:00.001-04:00

Team Fortress 2 is one of Valve's banner titles and is still going strong since 2007. With that said, I can’t play it anymore and no matter how many hats, guns, replay editor, in game store and tutorials will keep me playing.

I started playing TF2 when the Heavy update was released in 2008 and played it consistently until Left 4 Dead was released. Since then my time spent has declined gradually until this point where I'm giving it up. Originally, I thought I was the only one who felt that way, however the more people I've spoken to the more I hear about long time fans quitting the game as well.

As I thought about Team Fortress 2 and compared it to other multi-player games I've played, it dawned on me as to what the problem was and who to blame for it. Team Fortress 2 is a victim of being too open to customization and the influence of a Meta game, and the blame is split between Valve and you, the fans.

I know that many fans are into the whole Meta game of getting items, but for me the game-play has to hook me first. My problem is that while Valve has gone to great lengths to improve the Meta-game but have done nothing to fix a problem that they let get out of control. The actual game-play has devolved into nothing but imbalanced death matches and the inclusion of a meta-game has further pushed this over the edge.

When Team Fortress 2 was first released, maps were supposed to be played with a fix number of players. The primary reason was to keep the game from being imbalanced. The map design falls apart when you have a huge # of players. Just about every map has bottlenecks or one way areas where all it takes is a few extra demo men or engineer turrets and the area becomes a death trap. When that happens the only options are to get multiple medics with uber-charges at the same time or wait for time to expire.

To give players more freedom with their options, Valve allowed people to set up their own servers and to alter settings at their leisure. Unfortunately as it turns out, gamers weren't interested in balance. The majority of the servers available have re-spawn timers set very low and usually have a twenty plus player limit. This kills any kind of team strategy and devolves matches into meat grinders at bottlenecks. With the reduce spawn timers even if one team makes any head way, the other team will be back in full force in seconds.

Sadly Valve has made this problem worse with the inclusion of item drops. Valve designed the system to work on time spent playing ,which at first led to the idling problem which was soon corrected. The issue is that this kind of system rewards the wrong type of play. Instead of rewarding players who help their team or work together, it rewards that mindless game-play that I didn't like before. Every game I join amounts to me running to one area, getting killed by seven rockets and six grenades and then replaying it three seconds later.

When items were originally introduced, they were a reward for getting so many achievements for a specific class. I agree with Valve that limiting items to achievements only was not a good idea. However with so much design spent on the meta-game, nothing was done to make sure that it integrates well with the actual gameplay. Currently with crafting, dueling, recipe formulas and the in-game store, the meta-game has become more complex then TF2's actual gameplay.

Putting on my designer's hat for a minute, here are the changes that I would implement. First, I would either remove the ability for servers to alter spawn timers and player limits or only allow items to drop on servers using the default settings for these. Second, I would keep the same item drop system in place but add the following additions. The team that wins the current round of play will have a positive modifier to their drop chance rate. On the other team the top three players for that round will also receive a modifier but smaller then for the winning team. Lastly on multi-map games, if a team wins every round they will automatically be rewarded with a random item.

These changes, while still giving some rewards to the people who just want to death match all day long will reward people for contributing and being a team player. The actual game-play should come first and not the Meta-game, as the former is supposed to hook players and the latter should keep them around. The more people I've spoken to, I hear the same story of how their departure from TF 2 began with the introduction of items.

There is a reason why in Left 4 Dead that you don't see many servers that allow more survivors or special infected at a time, because the maps are not balanced for any less, or any more players. Why Valve has let it get out of hand with Team Fortress 2 is beyond me. In the past, I thought how cool it would be if Left 4 Dead had a similar Meta-game style as Team Fortress 2, but now I wonder if that would ruin Left 4 Dead for everyone.

The concept of Team Fortress 2's Meta game looks good on paper, but when it comes down to it, a good meta game should be secondary to the actual game-play. If the designers mess up, we'll have a situation where the Meta game takes precedence over playing the game when it should be used to supplement the gameplay.

Josh.

Building a Better Video Game Award Show.

2011-06-19T23:44:00.003-04:00

It's not often that I comment on other blogs or videos on game design but I'm going to make an exception today. One of my favorite series on The Escapist is "Extra Credits." Each week they talk about game design and the industry as a whole. Many of their thoughts on design are the same that I had, and it feels good to hear that there are like minded individuals out there. One of their recent topics was on the issue of why we don't have a legitimate video game award show in the US. Even though they have beaten me to the punch of talking about it, doesn't mean that I haven't been thinking about this for some time. Incidentally that began after watching the first Spike TV award show.

Over the last few years I've been dreaming up how I would create a mature show honoring video games. Before you read on, I suggest you watch the Extra Credits video I linked in the first paragraph, as many of my thoughts echo theirs. I agree that having celebrities for the sake of celebrities is wrong, I think we could drum up charismatic people in the industry to present and talk, like Ken Levine or Tim Schafer.

The big issue and question has to do with the awards themselves. For a legitimate show, we should avoid joke awards like "best head-shot" or "best breast physics in a game". Out of a sense of morbid curiosity I watched part of the MTV movie awards and hearing categories like "best kiss" or "best hook-up" cemented this thought for our award show.

Another issue is how do we classify our games into the award categories? Movies can easily be categorized by their genre, like romance or action. However, games these days (especially the better ones) meld different game-play genres together to create something new. Uncharted 2 for instance, has plat-forming, adventure, puzzle-solving, multiplayer and shooting elements all mixed in. From previews of the latest Mass Effect game, while it still has some RPG elements, the designers are putting a greater emphasis on shooting and combat.

With that said, does that mean that a game like Mass Effect 3 would be eligible for "best RPG" and "best action game?" Personally, I think that a game should only be eligible for one "best of" award. Not only to have more games nominated, but also to diversify the list of winners. Besides having a "game of the year" award, I would also have a studio of the year as well.

Here is a list of all the awards I think would work in our award show:

Best Action Game
Best Strategy Game
Best Adventure Game.
Best Puzzle Game
Best RPG
Best Shooter
Best Multiplayer Game.
Best Sports Game.
Best Indie Game.
Best Handheld Game.
Best Writing In a Game
Best Sound Design In a Game
Best Original Game
Best Graphics (Realistic)
Best Graphics (Surrealistic)
Game Of The Year
Studio Of The Year
Game Designer of the Year

I'm conflicted on that last award, mainly because as we all know, a video game is a collaborative effort, with rare exceptions. However as the Movie industry has an award to the best director, I think to legitimize our awards, we do have to honor people who stepped up to create something amazing or never before seen. Also that list of awards is not set in stone, while typing up this entry I reedited the list several times as a new idea came to mind.

Video games have become a mainstream form of entertainment and being able to say that we have our own award show on par with the Oscars in the US, would be further proof of the effect the industry has on the World.

Josh.

P.S: No musical numbers.
P.P.S: Unless we get Video Games Live to perform.

A Weary Witcher: A Witcher 2 Analysis.

2011-06-16T15:07:00.000-04:00

(My deal with publishing this review on another site has fallen apart, I'll save that for a rant later on, here is the review in its entirety.)

In 2007, an unknown developer by the name of CD Projekt made a game that should have flopped in the US: The Witcher was a challenging action-oriented CRPG based on a Polish fiction series written by Andrzej Sapkowski where sex and violence abound. Despite these details, the game took off and became a surprise hit in the US; for me was one of my favorite RPGs to come out in some time. When a sequel was announced, I knew I couldn’t wait and pre-ordered several months in advance. I really wanted to fall in love with The Witcher 2, but after some initial playtime, I couldn’t help but be tempered by some critical, and not-so-critical, issues.

The Witcher 2 takes place one month after the end of the first game. Without spoiling things too much, Geralt is now employed by the king he saved at the end of The Witcher and finds himself pulled into a conflict. From there, things go from bad to worse as Geralt is implicated in a grand plot that has him escaping capture to prove his innocence.

The story and world of The Witcher 2 are well made. Like the first game, this is a dark fantasy world, where racial tensions between the various species are a constant undertone for the events in the game. Geralt’s journal, narrated by his friend, the bard Dandelion, fills in the blanks behind the world and the characters in it. There is a level of maturity here that is not normally seen in RPGs. What I like the most about The Witcher 2 is that there is rarely a “good or bad” choice. Everyone, including Geralt himself, exists in that grey area of morality, where they must deal with all the repercussions of their actions.

One returning element from the first game is the use of choice in the game’s plot. There are no morality sliders to judge Geralt’s actions; instead, the plot will change based on the player’s choices throughout the game. Choices range from deciding who lives or dies, to simply answering a question or two, with all decisions having repercussions - both short- and long-term. The game boasts 16 different endings and there is no doubt that no two playthroughs will be the same.

The most noticeable changes to the design come from the new combat system and character progression. In the first game, while the combat was real time, it was still more about stats and dice rolls. The only things the player could control were what style to put Geralt in (style affected damage potential) and clicking the mouse button in rhythm to the combat to create combos. In The Witcher 2, styles have been removed and the game has moved more towards an action game. Geralt can now dodge, block, use different bombs and signs (magic attacks) and his sword attacks have been simplified to a light and strong attack.

All these changes amount to combat being quicker and more demanding on the player. Unlike other RPGs, Geralt’s health and vigor (which controls how often the player can block or use signs) are regenerated after a battle is over without having to use recovery items. This allows the player to focus more on moving through the game, instead of slowing down to heal after each fight.

Progression has been altered, allowing the player to customize Geralt a lot more compared to the first game. There are four skill trees: Training, Alchemy, Magic and Swordsmanship. Every level, Geralt gets a talent point that can be applied to these trees. Training is the first tree and requires the player to spend at least six points on it before the other three unlock. The skills available radically change Geralt’s options in battle, such as enhancing your signs or unlocking the ability to counterattack. Each skill tree also offers a special attack that can be used once Geralt has accumulated enough adrenaline through combat.

I find having Geralt’s progression split this way offers a greater sense of customization compared to the last game, where there were certain skills that were almost required to have a chance at beating the game, such as the various styles , after leveling, increased their damage and combo duration. The further you go down your chosen skill tree, the more options open up for you. One other change I like is how all of Geralt’s signs are available from the start, instead of unlocking them gradually; this allows the player to integrate them into their combat strategy earlier in the game. From the beginning the player is tasked by the game to make use of all of Geralt’s talents, however, the game has a funny way of “teaching” the player about combat, and that is where my issues with the game begin.

Starting out, the game is tough for the wrong reasons. Geralt lacks ways of easily dealing with crowds of enemies and your signs don’t do much due to vigor restrictions. As the game goes on and you level Geralt up, the skills earned drastically reduce the difficulty of the game. Depending on which skill tree you focus on, you’ll either be able to slice through crowds easily, blast them with magic, or use your stat-enhancing potions and bombs to make life easier.

The backwards difficulty curve of the design does not help matters. From the start, the game constantly pits the player against groups of enemies without adequately explaining battle tactics. Nowhere in the game’s tutorial or manual does it explain how to deal with shield-wielding enemies and leaves the player to die figuring it out. Quick, one-paragraph blurbs pop up in an attempt to teach the player, but it’s hard to concentrate on them when most of them come up during a battle. One of the best examples of this design is that the first tutorial screen regarding leveling up does not mention the fact that the player has to rest to distribute the much-needed talent points.

Across the board, there is this general feeling of a lack of polish throughout the game. For instance, you can’t see how many of each ingredient you have when doing alchemy or how many items you have in reserve on your quick menu. The mini map doesn’t have a compass to help the player figure out which way they are going. The menus are obtuse with no way to sort items in your inventory. During combat I ran into plenty of situations where Geralt would not attack the person directly in front of him because the targeting cursor was stuck on an enemy further away. Certain areas require Geralt to avoid detection, using a less than adequate stealth mode. While none of these issues alone condemns the game, pooled together they create a frustrating environment that chips away at the quality of the experience.

There are several issues with the combat system that I noticed the more I played. One example is how some enemies will only engage Geralt if the player crosses an invisible threshold, and will automatically retreat when you move away from it, and come running when you move past it again. The decision to tie the attribute: Vigor to blocking, and start it very low (two points) was a poor choice. At the beginning of the game, where the player is assaulted by multiple enemies, they will run out of vigor within a few seconds of combat and be forced to take damage while trying to understand the combat system.

There is a basic combo system here: left clicking will launch Geralt at the targeted enemy after which you can chain attacks together. This is not mention in either the tutorial or manual. Geralt can only loot enemies if there are none nearby; however, once Geralt kills everyone, the game takes an additional 10 seconds to confirm it, dragging things down further. The combat flows well during fights with just one enemy or boss, when the player doesn’t have to worry about targeting and the loose controls; however, you rarely have these fights.

Another game-play complaint revolves around the use of potions to enhance Geralt. In the first game, you could drink potions at any time, with the only limitation being how much poison was present in Geralt’s body. This time, potions can only be used while mediating, meaning you can’t use them while in combat. I’m not a fan of this as it removes the element of being ready unless the player stays constantly intoxicated. It also feels like an unnecessary decision to slow the game down, requiring the player to stop what they are doing to take a drink.

I also ran into technical issues while playing the game, including a game-breaking bug. On my first playthrough, I decided to focus on making bombs; however, when Geralt would try to throw, the camera and controls would freeze. As this became more frequent, it made the game unplayable for me. After the first patch, the performance became so bad that I had to restart, losing about six hours of play and being forced to sit through the lousy prologue yet again. The recent patch has also brought about an increased issue with framerate dipping. These technical and design issues remind me of the first Witcher, which also had numerous flaws and bugs at launch, and the game didn’t hit its stride until the developers released “the enhanced edition.” The developers have been releasing major patches to the game; the first one removed the DRM in the retail version. With patch 1.2, combat has been given a fine tuning, along with the tutorial.

It’s a shame that the game has so many issues, because once you get past the first chapter and start to go up your preferred skill tree, the issues with difficulty begin to disappear. The opening battles in chapter 1 were more challenging then the first big fight of chapter 2. Mainly due to having Geralt’s signs improved allowing them to hit groups of enemies. At that point, I could finally stop feeling frustrated by the game and enjoy the story. I can see the glimmer of an excellent game; however, there are just too many issues for me to overlook to rate it that high. Hopefully, it won’t take long to fix the issues present with The Witcher 2, as that would turn a good game into an amazing one.

Josh.

(I'm also curious as to any impressions from this analysis ,as this was going to be my review).

Distilling The Elements of Old-School Design.

2011-06-15T14:22:00.003-04:00

I find it funny when people use the term, "old-school" when talking about game design, as it is the only one I can think of that can be used both positively and negatively. Some titles strive to deliver that old-school feel, while others are condemn because of it. This leads to the point and question for this entry: what mechanics or design are considered old-school?

Several months ago I talked about how game design has become more streamlined and accessible over the years. During that entry I briefly touched on the theory that some elements of old-school design were in my opinion, either bad design or arbitrarily raising the difficult level of a game; for instance, a bad control scheme or hard to follow UI. Another example would be games that had no in game map whatsoever. I know that there are plenty of older gamers who are going to disagree with that last one, growing up with CRPGs that required graph paper to draw maps. However, this is going to be a point where we'll have to agree to disagree.

With that said, I'm going to attempt to distinguish some of the positive mechanics of old-school design. First, is simply non linearity, whether that comes from progression in the story or available tactics to the player. Games like Demon's Souls and Etrian Odyssey, give the player a variety of available options on how to progress in the game. In EO, there is no perfect party composition, and this is helped by having utility skills split across classes. While in Demon's Souls, the player is free to improve their attributes however they wish and have three viable combat options with close, ranged and magic combat.

Depending on the type of gamer, challenge could be considered either good or bad for old-school design. Most games designed for that old-school feel, have enemies that are more than just a minor annoyance. In Ninja Gaiden Black , even the first enemy type you run into on normal can still take out the player if they aren't paying attention. With Etrian Odyssey, mini bosses are scattered around the various floors with some so powerful that the player can't take them on until returning to the floor several hours later.

With those high points mentioned, let's talk about some downsides. Obscuring information comes in several forms with old-school design. It could mean anything from not telling the player what items or skills do, to hiding important information behind screens of text. There is a fine line between letting the player figure something out on their own and forcing them into a scavenger hunt for basic information.

Knowing how much information to give the player is always a challenge, as there are times that you don't want to tell the player exactly what everything does. In the game: King of Dragon Pass, the player is required to make decisions base off of information, but is not told exactly how their choices will affect the village. This gives the game a unique feel to it, forcing the player to think like they are in the village instead of as a player using spreadsheets of information to determine the optimal route. This concept definitely deserves its own entry and I'll be coming back to it at a later point.

The UI is a big deal when it comes to design; many older games use archaic UIs that make it hard to follow what is going on. I'm not going to spend too much time on this point as I'm already writing a separate entry on this.

As I lurked around the Internet after playing The Witcher 2, I kept seeing the same defense people threw out whenever someone had a problem with the game. That it was trying to capture that old-school charm with a bad UI, unresponsive controls not having a proper tutorial and so on. To me, that's not having charm, that's just simply bad design. Once again, an excellent example of this marriage between old school design and accessibility would have to be Demon's Souls.

I know that I've been harping on Demon's Souls for a while, but it is that good. For designers who want to see how to balance difficulty with accessibility, it is one of the best. My final example for this entry is a quick comparison between two RPGs.

Recently a new Wizardry game was released on the PS3 via PSN. For those like me who never played the series, it is another long lasting old school CRPG. I thought that I was going to enjoy it, much in the same way I loved Etrian Odyssey. However upon loading the demo, I found out that when they said "old-school" they really meant "old-school".

The demo had no manual, no in game map, to create each party member I had to fiddle with stats until the game told me that I could create that character. The shop interface was obtuse and the final nail in the coffin came from a slow battle system. This was a game completely set in its ways, compared to Etrian Odyssey, which took the best parts of old-school design and tried to remove as much fluff as possible.

As game design continues to evolve, I can't help but feel that the term "old-school" will begin to define more and more game mechanics. Who knows, perhaps someday, hiding behind cover to regenerate health, will be considered too old-school for the shooter market.

Josh

A Steamy DRM Discussion.

2011-06-09T17:49:00.002-04:00

This past weekend I started playing The Settlers 7, which I have a feeling a lot of gamers know it more about its DRM (Disc Rights Management) and less about the game. The DRM is in the form of Ubisoft's launcher that loads with the game and requires a constant Internet connection to play it. The rage around the Internet was strong with this, from customer reviews to the Steam forums; people did not like the restriction. This also serves as a problem of getting accurate reviews, due to people focusing on the DRM much in the same way they did with Spore. With all the flaming going on it's easy to miss the fact that The Settlers 7 is a decent game which leads me to the point of this entry: Talking about DRM.

I know that the next statement has been said to death, but it needs to be reiterated for this entry: Steam is a form of DRM. It has the same restrictions that Ubisoft's DRM carries, both need to be on for a game to function. Yet one for the most part is praised and the other scorn.

Simply put, Steam rewards the player for using it unlike most DRM services. With Steam I have a unified friend's list, a store where I can buy games on sale and I don't have to worry about game patches among other things. This is the same practice that designers have been talking about for years to combat piracy, providing services that reward the player for buying their game instead of punishing them.

Another point of contention involves Internet access and this is where I do see the point against Ubi's system. While both services require Internet access, Ubi's requires a constant connection (I have heard that it has been changed for some titles to an "on start up" check), whereas Steam can be launched in offline mode to play the single-player games on your list. Some of us are not blessed with 100% stable Internet access and having your entire game library tied to a secondary service puts a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

Arguably Steam at this point in time is the lesser and most popular of the DRM evils and it has generated another side effect. Publishers have been turning to Steam (or specifically Steam-works) to use it as their form of DRM instead of other services. Once again this goes back to its popularity, more gamers have accepted Steam then those that don't. Why should a publisher risk angering their fan base with an unpopular form of DRM like Securom or Star-Force, when they can use one that is on the majority of their user base's computers?

One area that a lot of publishers still need to understand is that Steam is a form of DRM. I know I said that a few paragraphs up, however there are still games being put on Steam with another DRM included and this can really piss off gamers. For instance Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2 required both Steam and Games For Windows Live running at the same time for the game to work. This annoyed a lot of people including yours truly, as it feels like a completely arbitrary move that doesn't reward the player for buying the game. With recent expansions, Relic has gotten the clue and has removed the GFWL requirement for their latest titles. Another example is how Borderlands' base game has no protection on it, but two of the DLC packs have Securom attached to them

I know that there are many gamers out there who fight against Steam. When Civilization 5 was announced that it would carry Steamworks, many fans of the series blew their top. Lurking on forums and review boards, a lot of fans have never even heard of Steam before the announcement. I thought that it was funny that so many gamers did not know what Steam is, but then asking around my job at that time, many people didn't know about it either.

With more digital retailers using their own created platform to sell , such as Impulse there is one area that I'm amazed that none of these places have ventured to: Advertising. I see advertisements and commercials for brick and mortar stores all the time, yet I have not seen one yet showing off specifically Steam. I know we've all seen the advertisements for Portal 2, Left 4 Dead and The Orange Box. However, I'm surprised that we haven't seen anything showing off Steam itself to consumers.

The beauty of Steam is that it does the same thing doctors and parents for years have done to get kids to take their medicine: Mix in something sweet to hide the bitter taste.

Josh.

The challenge of separating the designer, from the reviewer.

2011-06-06T12:40:00.001-04:00

Over the last few years, I feel that I've proven my ability to analyze game design. I've been posting my analysis on games both on my blog and on Gamasutra. Recently, I've started writing for a game website, doing both reviews and critical pieces, which I'll be linking from my blog once my work goes up. However, I'm starting to realize that while my talent at analyzing games makes me a great reviewer, at the same time it makes me a poor reviewer.

I have trained myself to be critical when it comes to game design and in a short period of time, I can see just about everything a game has to offer. Because of this I like to keep switching between games so I don't become bored with playing just one. In a normal day I may play five to six hours of games, but that may be split between three or more titles. While this is all well in good for being a designer, I am running into problems with writing reviews.

My first big review is of The Witcher 2, which overall I found it to be a good game but flawed. I could stop this entry right now and spend the next page listing every little design and UI issue that I came across while playing the game. While that is great for doing an analysis, it gets in the way of reviewing the game. In my first draft of the review I said what I wanted and gave it an average score stating that while the game was good there were so many little problems that got in the way. The other people on the site were confused why I gave the game a decent score when they said it sounds like I hate the game.

The problem is that I don't look at games like a typical fan, everything I play I analyze. I bet that if I posted every issue I had with The Witcher 2 in the review( and trust me I left a lot of it out of my review), I would be flamed for being too judgmental and anal. To a regular gamer, the issues that I had would either be easily ignored or just dealt with. For me, each one is like scraping nails on a chalkboard in the back of my mind. When it comes to problems with games I have an extensive knowledge from every game I've played on how they dealt with it, or made it worse to draw from. If a shooter has bad combat, I can think of other shooters that did it better and cross examine them.

If I'm going to continue reviewing games I have to find a way to separate my inner critic from my inner designer. When a game is great I don't have any problems gushing over it, however the more bugs or issues I see, I start to break the game down to see what else I can find. In my opinion being a designer requires thinking differently from a competitive gamer standpoint, or from a reviewer standpoint. As the former just plays one game and the later has to be able to look past issues to educate the reader on the game.

Josh.

Two days of thinking about Call of Duty.

2011-06-04T13:43:00.005-04:00

This week on Steam, there was a free play weekend for Call of Duty: Black Ops' multiplayer. I decided to test it out as the last Call of Duty game I played was the original. I also wanted to see if all the hype I've heard about COD's multiplayer was warranted. Where I used to work, the three games everyone wouldn't stop talking about were: World of Warcraft, Madden and Call of Duty. Having spent enough time getting to level 14 I have to ask the following question: Did I miss something here?

Everything just felt horribly bland, with people running around shooting everyone. With how quickly people re-spawn and low health makes death or, any kind of team-play meaningless .All the different perks, weapons and attachments feel like a waste of time because of this. With so many kinds of guns it just seems that the only two people need are either long range weapons or close range shotguns. There are some mechanics I like, such as how players can upgrade perks by completing specific objectives or setting up their own goals for additional points. However, all this feels unneeded in the grand scope of things.

To me, this feels like a poor man's Team Fortress 2 and I'm not even playing that anymore. While TF2's game-play has become somewhat troublesome due to a focus on items over game-play (which I'm writing an article for another website about), I can at least appreciate the class diversity and the side-grades from items. In COD everything felt incredibly simplistic and no amount of items or clan tags would fix it.

This goes back to my question, is there something hidden here that makes the game rise up out of mediocrity? Thinking about Starcraft 2, which is another popular game that I don't play. Even though I suck at the game, I can at least see the depth there from watching tournament level play and from my own attempts at learning it. That's why I'm hoping that someone can explain to me the love affair gamers have with this series. From what I saw while playing Black Ops there was nothing interesting about the game-play to be seen.

With the recent announcement of the Elite subscription service, I am more confused than ever about why this game has gotten so big. The people at my old job would not stop talking about how much they loved COD and that they couldn't wait to get home to play it for a few hours. A part of me wonders if Valve didn't have the patching issues with trying to update the 360 version of TF 2, would it have taken off instead of COD. I'm not going to share my opinion on Elite here, as I'm saving that for another article where I'm going to look at the big picture of this kind of subscription service.

I will say that one positive from this whole experience, is that I totally get that parody that was mentioned during the Bullet Storm commercials now.

Josh.

Reversing the difficulty curve in game design.

2011-05-31T13:07:00.002-04:00

One of the basic rules of game design is that as a game goes on it should become harder. However there is an exception to this rule in which the difficulty of the game starts out hard and becomes easier as the game progresses. When done right this can give a game an added twist, but it is very easy to mess this up. Along with looking at this concept further I'm going to also talk about three games that use this where one succeeded, one failed and the last one may be a surprise to everyone.

Reverse difficulty works best in skill based games simply because they require the most player input to succeed. A year ago I posted an entry on the design elements behind action titles and I said the following:

"Because of the skill level required to play action games, the overall difficulty curve of the game should actually decrease the further the player gets, as their skill improves they should be able to handle fights easily. For example I had a friend over once who tried Ninja Gaiden Black on normal and couldn't even get past the first boss fight. When I play NGB I cannot play the game on normal anymore after playing it on very hard because I find it too boring."

When I posted this some people were confused and thought that I was saying that the designers made Ninja Gaiden Black easier as the game went on. That wasn't it, what I meant was as I found my skills improving at the game it became easier for me.

Because of the importance of player input with reverse difficulty it is harder to pull this off in RPGs, or games where progression is time based. Other then selecting commands there is very little input done by the player; it doesn't matter how fast you respond when everything is based on stats and dice rolls.

There is one area where designers slip up on with reverse difficulty and it has to do with handicapping the player to promote difficulty. For instance, forcing the player into a situation or enemy encounter that the player simply is at a huge disadvantage due to the design of the game, such as the enemy is resistant to the player's attacks or a multi enemy fight where the player does not have good crowd control. After dealing with the situation or later on the player is then rewarded with a skill or weapon to make those previous difficult situations moot. This just feels like a slap to the face in my opinion as the encounter isn't hard because the player wasn't skilled, but it was hard because the designers were effectively tying the player's hands.

With that said, it's time to talk about the examples of this design. Demon's Souls for the Ps3 pulls this off extremely well. Anyone who has played the game knows that this is a difficult game from start to finish. There is never a point that the player can let their guard down and the bosses were designed to challenge the player in a variety of situations. As time goes on the player will get the timing down for avoiding attacks and knowing the right time to strike and the game will become easier.

While the player does get improved weapons and gear they are not a substitute for skill. The hardest parts of the game may become a little easier thanks to the player doing more damage and taking less, however without the player learning the pattern and strategy for the fight they will not be able to win. The final stage in the game is a gauntlet of enemies that can kill the player easily, a fire breathing dragon and several mini bosses that have to be killed. Then after all that comes the final boss who can kill the player with a few hits.

Our second example is doing it wrong and it belongs to The Witcher 2. At the start of the game, players will have a hard time dealing with crowds of armored enemies without having any effective crowd control. Leveling up in the game allows players to focus on three different skill paths: swordplay, magic, and alchemy. Each path offers skills that radically enhance the player's options during battle. For instance people who choose swordplay can unlock counterattacks and group hitting attacks. While magic users will find that their spells do more damage and can target multiple people.

Adding to the difficulty is the design decision to restrict both blocking and spell casting by the same attribute: Vigor. At the start of the game you only have two points of it and you will be fighting at least four enemies at the same time in most fights, you can see where this will cause trouble.

Naturally this makes the game easier as it goes on but this is not good design. Forcing the player into situations that are difficult because the game hasn't given the player the tools to win is bad design. Playing The Witcher 2, gamers will get a good grasp of the mechanics and game-play early on and then will have to deal with this handicap while trying to level up ASAP.

In Demon's Souls the game is only as hard as the player makes it, for instance after beating Demon's Souls over a year ago I started replaying it again and found that I forget all the timings involved in combat. Because of that I was dying left and right until I started remembering again. If I come back to The Witcher 2 it means that I have to spend the first several hours dealing with an in game constraint that I'm not looking forward to.

My last example is another game that does it right which I don't think you would see coming. Mario in all of his plat forming incarnations is a great example of this design, with the 3d games better examples. The beauty of Mario's design is that his entire move-set is available from the start, with exception to the power ups such as spring Mario or cloud Mario. All the game's challenges are designed around the available moves Mario has. There are no Mario games where after a certain amount of progression a new move is unlocked.

Starting out new players may have trouble with challenges because they haven't gotten accustomed to Mario's different abilities. Because the difficulty of the game is based on the player's skill level there isn't anything the player can do in the game to get pass a tough section other then improving at the game. Compared to a RPG where the player can spend time grinding out levels. As the player continues to play, they will become better at controlling Mario and previous difficult challenges should become easier for them.

Now another genre that may seem like it is built on reverse difficulty would be the rogue-like genre, however I would argue that isn't. The main reason is that the game isn't hard at the start because the player isn't skilled at the game, but because they haven't been shown all the game's unique rules and enemies to fight yet.

By setting up a game to have reverse difficulty, the biggest advantage to the designer is that it allows them the luxury of challenging players and not worrying about someone not understanding the game mechanics as anyone who can get past the initial hump will be skilled at the game. However it can be very hard to both balance and design the game this way. Distinguishing between what is difficult due to player skill level and what is difficult by design is key and a trademark of a good designer.

Josh.