Creations of AmstradHero

Level Design and Dragon Age 2

2012-01-30T23:15:00.000+11:00

It's no secret that on the whole I found Dragon Age 2's (DA2) level design to be sorely lacking. From my perspsective, it's one of the areas where it really shows that DA2 was forced out of the door before it truly ready.

The first major flaw is Kirkwall itself. It's a remarkably tidy city by any standards. You barely see any litter in the streets or bits of trash as you wander around. It obviously is home to the most diligent cleaners in the history of Thedas - and probably even puts modern cities to shame in most cases. This is a lack of "trash detail" that pervades much of the game. Places get dirty unless they are cleaned, and this should occur to some degree even in the utopia that is a fantasy world in a computer game. It doesn't need to be brown and mucky everywhere (as would likely be realistic), but there needs to be some mess, otherwise it's simply not believable.

Obviously all mages are forced by the templars to master the "tidy floor" spell

Kirkwall's second problem is the fact that it doesn't change. DA2 takes place over 10 years, yet Kirkwall is almost static in appearance during that time. No new buildings are made, none fall into disrepair, the same tiles are missing in the stone walkways, the same cracks exist in building walls. While it would not be intelligent (or feasible) to redesign the city repeatedly each time a few years advance during the story, the fact that virtually nothing changes is utterly ridiculous. This is particularly the case after the second act, where the city is home to a full-blown conflict in the streets. Yet a few years later when the story resumes, the city has been rebuilt to an identical match of its former state. This is sheer laziness in terms of level design, and does not lend credibility to the narrative at all. Good level design should help tell the story of a location just as much as words should, so to flagrantly disregard this opportunity and to disrespect the storytelling of the game is a hideous shortcoming.

The poor quarter was rebuilt perfectly back the way it was? Seriously?

The third, and most commented on issue by DA2's critics in terms of level design, is the gross amount of level reuse present within the game. There are a few stock areas that you travel maybe a dozen times in the game, perhaps with different sections blocked off here and there, maybe sometimes in the other direction, but most distinctly copied and pasted wholesale. When part of the critical plot of a game sees you go through and area you've already explored several times before as part of a random cave, the impact of the story and the sense of adventure are all but lost. This is without doubt one of the most telling indictments that DA2 simply wasn't given enough time to be developed. No, level design is not everything, but to come up short in such an obvious fashion that is terribly grating to the player is either a sign of a rushed product, or design staff who simply didn't understand the gravity of the problem for the player. I'd hope it was the former rather than the latter.

However, the news isn't all bad, so I do want to finish with one "good news story" that came out of DA2: Sundermount. This section of the game, or rather, the exterior areas (because the internals are part of the set levels used ad-nauseum) of it, are one of the highlights of the level design. Of course, there's the natural draw of "mountains are pretty", but while Sundermount does succeed aesthetically in providing good visuals, part of this is due to the technical design. Simply put, it reuses existing level design properly - it uses it as backdrop. The foothills of the mountain and the lower parts can all be seen as part of the vista that you can survey as you climb. This is intelligent area reuse, as it not only provides a sense of achievement (because you've climbed those bits before), but also helps to contextualise the player's position and current progress.

If you look carefully, you can even see people walking down below

So the news isn't all bad for Dragon Age 2 on the level design front, but unfortunately it tells us far more about level design through what it does wrong than by what it does right. If there's interest, I might try and put together a few points about when, where and how to reuse levels in a way that's less jarring to players.

Those little things

2012-01-17T17:20:00.000+11:00

Sometimes life gets in the way of modding. Between work, social, musical and exercise commitments, not mention the daily routine of making sure I'm eating well and not living in a pig-sty, things have to fall off my to-do list. Blogging tends to be the first cap off the rank there, hence why I've been a bit quiet of late. This is not to say that I haven't been thinking about game design or doing modding.

So when life gets in the way and I can't sit down for a long stint at the computer to mod for The Shattered War, I need small tasks that I can complete in short bursts. So this is where it comes down to leaving "the little things" in a list to come back to when I have 15-30 minutes to spare rather than an hour or more.

First item on this list is processing VO lines that have been sent from voice actors. The first step here is to make sure the volume is consistent with all other lines in the mod. Sometimes this means decreasing the volume of the recording, other times increasing it, and other times I may need to do both to increase or decrease the overall volume range of the line. Once this is done, there's frequently a soft pop or tongue click that's not very audible by default, but would be in the final delivery. Then there's clipping or inserting silence at the beginning or end of each line to make sure that each line isn't just running into the next one.

Even fast talkers have to pause between sentences

The next item is codex entries, and this is an important one for me. I know some people will never check the codex once to check out the backstory of people, places or items, but for me this is a vital part of the modding process. Sure, I'm playing within the existing world of Thedas, but I'm exploring territory not really covered elsewhere, so I have a little freedom to provide background on the locations the player will visit. Every place has its own unique tales and pieces of folklore, and locations in The Shattered War are no different. The same applies to characters the players will meet, and the unique items they could acquire.

Add a couple of dozen codex entries for locations alone...

More recently, I've been looking at the various bits of text you read during load screens. Whether it's an area transition or loading a save, players deserve to see bits of information relevant to their current adventure rather than just generic bits of information recycled from the core campaign. I want to make sure that players aren't disappointed when they are waiting on those loading screens and have something new and interesting to read.

Some of these are "little things" that many players (and modders) are often less fussed about, but I'm keen to make sure that these small touches of polish are present to make The Shattered War a more complete gaming experience. Are there any other things in this vein that players appreciate? If so, let me know those little things which really appeal to your sense of enjoyment and engagement.

Helping the player

2012-01-11T19:00:00.000+11:00

One issue I constantly battle with in the design of The Shattered War is how much to help the player and hand-hold their experience. This struggle comes due to many of the modern conveniences of current video games and the way they make things just "that little bit easier" for the player. While this might seem a somewhat trivial issue to ponder, the amount of help or assistance given to a player is a very important design consideration. A few simple tweaks can take a game that frustrates the player because they have no idea where to go or what to do, to one that annoys the player by telling them everything in minute detail. Striking a balance between these two extremes is very important for making an engaging game.

Firstly, we have things like that quest marker and quest helper. The exclamation mark to indicate a quest giver, and the question mark (or chevron in DAO, or equivalent symbol in other games) to indicate an objective or waypoint for a current quest. These are a great help for players and allow them to experience the game's content a lot more simply instead of having to talk to every single person with whom they can interact. Not every player wants to talk to a town's entire population, and sometimes players might have forgotten where a particular person is located in between play sessions. These markers assist the player in their journey, but for some they ruin the fun, removing the enjoyment they get from exploration and uncovering the gameworld on their own.

Skyrim encourages exploration, but Dragon Age could do so as well

In The Shattered War, I'm typically taking a middle road on this front. Quest givers will have markers, and key individuals for quests will be marked, but I'll be leaving off assist markers in most cases for quests with an exploration or investigation focus. Admittedly in Dragon Age this still often simply means that the player just holds down the "highlight all interactive objects key" (default: tab), but this still gives a better sense of exploration than running from quest marker to quest marker. Interactive objects typically warrant more interest than NPCs (the player might be able to loot them!), especially if the player has been instructed by an NPC/quest log to search items. If I wanted to make things particularly difficult, it would be possible to only make the objects interactive (and thus able to be detected by tab) once the player got close enough to them, but this would be a sufficient break from the player's expectations that it would probably be unreasonable to do so from a design perspective.

The issue is making sure that the player is given sufficient information and encouragement. In the side quest "An Admirable Topsider" in Dragon Age, the player is told to search for three parts of a sword in the Deep Roads. However, once they have retrieved these items, they are simply told to return them to a grave, but are given no indication of where they should look for this grave. Furthermore, it is found in an area the player has already visited and cleared. In Dragon Age, a cleared area is typically exactly that - there is nothing new to be obtained or explored. The fact that this quest breaks that expectation as set by the majority of the rest of the game means that effectively the quest helper is required in order to provide the player the appropriate level of direction required to allow them to finish the quest. It's used as a lazy means to provide the player with direction that could have been provided in a written form, which would have encouraged the player to think and explore intelligently rather than trying to search the entire map, or just looking for the map marker. This would have provided the player with a much greater sense of involvement and enjoyment because they wouldn't just be simply running from point A to point B.

Surely we can give better directions than relying on these?

The next issue is how explicit to be in giving the player instructions, particularly via the quest log/journel. Going back to games like Baldur's Gate and Morrowind, the player's journal was a lengthy and involved thing, including personal player character commentary, frequently with additional information. It was written more as prose rather than the modern equivalent, which tends to consist of simple and clear objectives. The modern school of thought on design is that when the player looks at their quest log, they want to see two things: what they have to do, and where they have to do it. "Meet Tolfdir at Sarthal" would be a quest log entry, as opposed to something like "Tolfdir gave me a lesson today on protective wards. In conclusion he decided that a practical test of my skills and that of the other students was necessary. He suggested we travel to Sarthal to put our skills to the test, so I will need to travel there should I wish to continue my training." I'm tending towards the latter approach with my quest log entries, but still attempting to avoid unnecessary information. That said, often additional information may be accessible via additional informational codex entries rather than the quest log itself.

My aim is to give players a short and succinct description of what they need to do, but without explicitly hand-holding their way through the entire experience. Players are not stupid, so don't deserve to be treated as such.

Testing and a Shout out

2011-12-18T21:55:00.001+11:00

I've been feeling less than 100% over the past couple of days, but still tried to get in some modding. I've been dealing with a swag of little issues as a result of playtesting:

A placeable not being interactive, companion attribute bonuses not appearing on the talent/skill (I think I may need to create entirely new custom abilities for this, however that is done), enemies not moving towards the player to attack (they spawn at a distance and are supposed to run towards the player), assorted scripting/tagging/plot logic errors, combat difficulty tweaking, fixing up codex entries for various items/areas/people, and a few other things besides.

The point here is to iron out all the issues in the opening few hours of the mod so I can potentially release a closed alpha/beta to a small group of willing testers in the near future. There's still lots of work to be done on the project as a whole (and there's still missing VO even in this prologue section), but I'd certainly love to here some independent opinion on the beginning of The Shattered War. Let me know if you're interested - an email to my gmail address (it's my "name" [the one in the graphic above] at gmail.com) would be fine - and I'll be in touch.

In closing, I thought I'd give a shout out to MiracleOfSound (aka Gavin Dunne) on the Escapist. Producing a new song every two weeks isn't a straightforward task, so when they're both pretty good, and game related, I can't help but love this work. Admittedly I was a fan ever since he told us we would never be better than Commander Shepard, but I really like his latest work, and like everything of late, it's all about Skyrim.

The Escapist : Miracle of Sound : Sovngarde Song (Skyrim)

Lessons from Skyrim (Part 2)

2011-12-13T22:22:00.001+11:00

In my last post, I talked about some of the areas where games could learn from Skyrim in terms of its successes. In this post, I'd like to discuss some of the game's shortcomings.

Wait, you can get HOW powerful?
This has been a problem with Elder Scrolls (arguably Bethesda games in general) since Morrowind. As you get higher in levels, you can become obscenely powerful. It's not just that you become better as a player (which will arguably have some effect) or that you get better gear (which you will), it's the manner in which you can improve or create gear or your skills to the point where you become unfathomably powerful.

It's possible to enchant items to reduce the cost of destruction spells. These enchantments will stack across multiple items, potentially allowing you to decrease the cost of destruction spells (to unleash fire, ice or electricity upon your opponents) by 100%. That's right, with a high enchanting skill, you can cast offensive spells for no mana. Alternatively, maybe you'd like to increase your smithing abilities so you can create better weaponry. Well, if you get your smithing up to maximum level and improve items, you can end up with incredibly damaging weapons at your disposal that can dispatch any enemy in only a few hits.

Sure, the player can choose not to pursue these skills, but if they decide to, they don't necessarily realise how broken and overpowered these options are until it is too late. Then once the player has created and named their own custom set of enchanted armor and weapons, they can hardly be expected to just "give them up" simply because the designers failed to balance the game to cater for players who chose these pursuits.

Creating this was an exciting achievement, but it makes fighting a straightforward bore

Freak opponents
There are scaling issues for the opposition as well, though I wonder whether these might be bugs. A few times I faced an occasional quirks where one enemy would be vastly more powerful than its counterparts with exactly the same name (and hence theoretically should be the same level and roughly the same difficulty). In one case, a Falmer skulker (a low level archer) would kill me in a single hit if my health bar wasn't on absolute maximum. Not too enemies later, I found another Falmer skulker than did negligible damage and I could have taken about 8 arrows from him before he died. Even in my low 40s I encountered a random bandit that launched fireballs with utmost haste and I was dead before I even managed to get a bead on where he was shooting from. Fortunately in the latter case, a reload resulted in his replacement enemy being "normal", but the Falmer Skulker proved to be a very tough and annoying enemy to defeat.

Even at a high level (52), I've faced a couple of opponents that killed me in one hit while decked out in full dragonscale armor, and I've got a bucketload of armor increasing perks. Now, while I appreciate the concept that there are still enemies out there who could potentially be a threat to me, it simply doesn't make sense for some random vagrant in a hideout presenting more danger than some of the named "epic foes" of the game.

Is this Forsworn going to one-shot me? Who knows?

The run around
The real joy of the game comes from exploration. When you reach the point where you want to just go around completing quests, the game becomes a little bit more tedious than the heights of excitement that it offers. Once you've explored vast amounts of the map and are just looking to complete some quests, it becomes a simple matter of "Pick up quest at point A", "Fast travel to point B to have conversation", "Fast travel to point C to kill a few enemies", "Fast travel to point A to complete quest". With the exploration aspect, quest completion often becomes a very straightforward process that doesn't hold a whole lot of surprises or intrigue.

The Elder Scrolls games focus on a massive breadth of content, and that is their strength. You have the freedom to explore pretty much anywhere and choose to do (or not do) what you wish. The problem is that while every player ultimately has a different experience because of that freedom, that freedom means that there is very little or no "small scale" freedom in determining how each of the "mini-adventures" play out. For the majority of quests, everyone will have the same experience in how the interactions and results play out, with the differences coming from the style of combat that the player chooses or the route they travel to reach their destination. There's no real replay value for individual quests, but merely replay value on attempting different combat styles, which as I've mentioned, you can potentially explore entirely in a single playthrough anyway.

I could go anywhere, but that is the only real choice

In same cases there are some minor choices which affect how things play out, but these are by far the exception rather than the rule. Even the dialogue roleplaying aspects are notably shallow, and your character is mostly a blank and shallow creation which has to follow many of the same lines regardless of personality. Given you are playing the voiceless dragonborn, it's up to you to inject personality into your character, because the game offers very little input into that aspect of roleplaying. You have a choice of what quests you will do in the world, but virtually no choice as to how you complete them.

World reactivity
One of the more notable problems relating to the immersion of the world is how it reacts to you. The problem here isn't that the characters don't react to you, because they do. It's that they don't react to you in a consistent manner. Town guards can notice me walking around with Azura's Star (a daedric artifact), yet Vigiliants of Stendarr (who hate daedra worshippers) won't bat an eyelid when I walk past them carrying the same daedric artifact, or even a daedric weapon from a daedra they consider to be (very) evil, even when I'm wearing armor from a different and also evil daedra. People from the other side of Skyrim will say "You're that made from College, heard about you", yet Farengar from Whiterun will keep telling me I should join the mages college if I have the aptitude, even though I've been the archmage for a couple of months. Or there's the guards that make fun of me being responsible fetching the mead for The Companions even though I've been their leader for even longer.

It's the inconsistency that gets to you in this regard, but also the fact that people seem to magically know things about you. The immersion breaker here is someone commenting: "so you're an alchemist then" or "I've always had respect for the school of restoration, Skyrim could do with more healers" even though they've never set eyes on me before, and I certainly haven't made a potion or cast a healing spell in front of them. By attempting to make the world react so much to you, it actually ends up feeling less realistic because the NPCs don't react to you in a believable manner. On the plus side, at least it does stop those guards talking incessantly about their old injuries...

I was going to do this post last week, then I took an arrow in the knee

These issues aren't entirely dealbreakers, but they are shortcomings of the game's design. Skyrim makes half-hearted attempts to address these issues, but as a result doesn't manage to satisfy the player in these areas. The balance is askew, choice is minimal at best, and the world has the bizarre situation of paying lip service to your actions without ever reacting to them properly.

Lessons from Skyrim

2011-12-07T23:36:00.002+11:00

My apologies for being a little quiet on the blog front lately. I should reassure those eagerly awaiting the release of The Shattered War that I have actually been putting some time into modding. It is time, however, to take a closer look at some aspects of design of the recent success that is Skyrim, and look at those things that did and did not work. In this post, I'll examine some of the design issues that other games can learn from.

Art Design aka "It's not all about tech"
There is no denying that Skyrim is a beautiful game. People are taking time lapse "photography" of the game because it simply looks that good. Now, while many will attribute this to the "graphics", which is the technical wizardry behind the graphics, this isn't why the game is so jaw-dropping. Compare it to Crysis 2, which technically is a gorgeous game, but from a design point of view there weren't a lot of those moments where you just stopped and went "Wow, that's gorgeous." Skyrim, despite not having all the bells and whistles of the best Anti-aliasing, shader effects, glorious reflections and refractions, real-time realistic shadows, DX11 tesselation, or the myriad of other features offered in some technically superior games, simply looks attractive. It doesn't have the highest resolution textures or the best level of detail distance gradient handling, but it just downright looks good.

The reason Skyrim looks so good is because of the effort made to create a beautiful world where there are particular artistic styles and themes throughout. The terrain covers alpine forests, rolling hills, badlands, swamps, rivers cutting through chasms, ice floes... there are so many different types of terrain but each presents a cohesive visual style and this is supported by the flora, animals, weather and even enemies that you encounter in those areas. This applies to the interiors as well, each of which adhere to a consistent style, but have their own unique elements. The Dwemer ruins in particular have some absolutely spectacular scenery; it's likely that you've never seen dwarven ruins that look this good in any medium.

It's a long way down...

Level Design
The aesthetics of level design are not the only aspects that should be credited here, but also the functional aspects of levels. Interiors, in particular is an area where levels have typically been designed very well. Backtracking is a problem that results in tedious gameplay of passing over empty areas when you force the player into an area within one way in and out. The obvious means to solve this problem is to have an exit when the player reaches the end, though this the designers must mean that this cannot be an alternate entrance to the area that an adventurous player could potentially find and short-circuit the entire dungeon. Skyrim does manage to do this, and it is quite effective.

Perhaps even more impressive and interesting is the manner in which many dungeons are created with only a single entrance/exit, but are created as a closed loop. The player follows a set path to reach the final boss/treasure room, but continuing after this will result in the player looping back to a location very near to the entrance of the interior. Even more successful is that this is done in a variety of ways, so it doesn't ever feel particularly stale or overly contrived. The "exit path" joins is blocked off from the entrance path by a number of ways: sometimes a barred door or unopenable gate, sometimes a secret door, other times a high ledge that is impossible for the player to reach. This loop system, in conjunction with areas that do have a separate entrance and exit, means that design of interior levels is both interesting and functional.

This is the entrance to a cave, and that ledge is shortly after the final room

Puzzles
Skyrim shows how puzzles in games can be done really well. These puzzles aren't minigames. They aren't alternative game mechanics. They're elements within the gameworld that are integrated in a fashion to present the player with a simple mental/visual challenge in order to proceed. Fairly early on in the game, you'll likely stumble across a door with three rings with symbols open them, which can apparently be opened by a claw. While this initially might seem like an issue of trial and error, you'll quickly learn that the claw holds the key to the correct sequence of symbols. This puzzle becomes trivial once you know the solution, but it's a near seamless way to include puzzles into the game.

Traps are visible and possible to avoid if you as the player are attentive, as opposed to a random die roll that determines whether your character can see them. While this isn't new, the traps are such that you actually do care about them because they can do a lot of damage or kill you outright, but also because you can quite easily use them to destroy unwitting enemies. This is a refreshing change from things like the paltry shotgun traps of Fallout 3 that were really of little consequence except for providing you with repair fodder/ammo.

There are symbol alignment/placement puzzles and lever switching puzzles that are also fairly easy to solve for the attentive and/or logical player, but the real joy is that you feel like you're interacting with the environment itself. There's no BioShock pipemania, no Mass Effect 1 Simon, no Alpha Protocol "findaword". It's simply a matter of observing the gameworld and interacting with it directly. It almost feels like a pity that the lockpicking mechanic is akin to those from Fallout, for this pulls you out of the gameworld in a way that the puzzles do not.

Symbols to align before I can pull the level to open the gate

Now, while these are aspects of Skyrim that I thought deserve a positive mention, there are some places where Bethesda still come up a little short. I'll be looking at a few of those areas in my next post.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - Beta Review

2011-11-27T22:18:00.001+11:00

There was a large scale beta stress test for SW:TOR on the weekend, and I was fortunate enough to be able to participate. Testers have been told they can "freely talk about their experiences this past weekend within the game, as well as post screenshots and gameplay videos of their testing experiences". So, with that in mind, let's just into an appraisal of my experience. This follows about a four hour journey of my testing.

After sitting through the excellent intro video that many people have already seen, I got presented with a server list... all of which were full. Picking one with the lowest wait time on the West Coast of the US, I did a few things while waiting to get a slot. Within a few minutes, I was logged on and ready to pick a side. After picking the Galactic Republic, I was treated to the "Hope" trailer before I got to select my class. Now, maybe it's just me, but I would have thought that anyone who is keen enough to participate in a beta will probably have already watched these videos, and even if they haven't they add little enough to the actual story of the game as it's presented to the player for them to actually matter. I might be nitpicking here over some nice eye candy, but as far as I was concerned, I didn't need to waste my time and download bandwidth on those videos.

Regardless, I fired up the character creator and got to select my class (Jedi Consular), race (Miralukan - like Visas Marr), and then the usual character appearance customisation. This defined body & face shape, skin tone, hair style/color, scars and my "mask" (seeing as Miralukans are physically blind). Unlike many MMOs it actually appeared as though this appearance would help individualise the character, as I didn't see anything items that I'd be wearing over my head or obscuring those choices completely. Now, of course, there is the potential that people will create identical looking characters, but there seemed to be enough variation that you wouldn't have everyone looking the same. With my character created, I was treated to the classic Star Wars rolling text over space before being presented with a cutscene of my character turning up on a Jedi homeworld.

In retrospect, I feel like I made a Jedi Guybrush Threepwood

First, let's talk about the visuals. It's not a mindbogglingly gorgeous game, and there were some texture issues like texture pop in dialogue/gameplay and generally low texture resolution. That said, it still looks okay, though I wouldn't be surprised if there are some improvements before the final release. The art design is clean and simple, going for a stylised appearance. To be honest, that's what I've come to expect of an MMO. Having to deal with high resolution graphics along with the overhead of an MMO is something that modern computers can do, but an MMO has to market to as many people as possible and targeting the enthusiast PC market doesn't mesh with that aim. I didn't really have any "wow, that looks awesome" moments in terms of scenery, but to be honest I don't think I've ever got that within the first four hours of an MMO.

On the plus side, the character animations are quite smooth, and it imparts some of the "yeah, I'm a real hero" feeling that is sometimes lacking from the regular "I throw a fireball", "I shoot a gun", "I hit the enemy with my fists" that feels flat and lifeless. It's no Ninja Gaiden or God of War, but it does feel a little more potent than contemporary MMOs. This is a little bit offset by the fact that it feels somewhat slow when you run, and the silly looking jump animation that looks like it's pulled straight from WoW. That said, my Jedi did do a nice looking tumble roll when he fell from a significant height, which was a very nice touch.

It's an MMO. Don't expect Crysis 2 tech here.

In general story-telling and quest flow, you can feel the "BioWare formula" coming through. It feels like a BioWare game, with the dialogue wheel, characters building you along the way, and leading you along the "individual journey" that their games typically manage well. This does come across a little strange I had people telling me "you're the most talented person we've seen in years" only to see other Jedi Consulars running along the exact same paths as me... this did shatter the illusion of my character being "special" as I was being told, knowing that all these other players were being given the same speech. Perhaps this problem was exacerbated by having so many beginners at the same time, but it felt as though it weakened the narrative a little. The writing still seemed quite reasonable, though I confess that once again I was put off the Jedi order by a "love is evil and leads to the dark side" sidequest.

That said, the voice acting is very good across the board, though I really do wonder how necessary it is. Some players were commenting how it drew them into the game a lot more and that they actually paid attention to the story, which is obviously what the designers were aiming for. I lost count of the number of times I was in a group in other MMOs were quest dialogue/overviews were skipped, and eventually I began ignoring them myself because trying to follow the story was already a lost cause. I briefly got to play in a group, which was a really nice touch, as each player got to say lines of dialogue (though I wasn't clear on how the game chose WHO would speak) within the conversation. This actually really made it feel like you were in a party and pushed that social aspect forward. The NPCs also emote and have the facial expression variance that has become a staple of BioWare's titles. While they're talking to you, the characters do a good job as virtual actors.

She looked and sounded concerned

Now the big one: gameplay. Well... it's an MMO. If you hate MMOs, this probably isn't going to change your mind. Combat is not automatic - if you want to attack, you have to push a button and keep pushing them until your enemy is dead. Living in Australia, I thought this might be somewhat problematic given a beta stress test weekend and having to connect to a server on the US West coast. I was pleasantly surprised to find that lag was not a significant issue at all, and that I could quite comfortably manage to play with only a couple of lag spikes. I seemed to be getting better performance than some other US players. To start with it felt like the standard "mash button until enemy is dead" gameplay of MMOs, but I did pick up a few abilities near the end to perform stun and lift (crowd control), so it did seem as though the variety of skills and tactics to use would increase as I increased in level. There was a sense of "I've been here before" that I couldn't quite shake, but it seems like the so called "advanced classes" will allow players to pick different roles (tank, healer, support, DPS) based on what is necessary for the group they're travelling with. It's hard to tell whether this will lead to people trying to be a jack-of-all-trades or pursuing particular specialised roles as characters reach higher levels.

The usual MMO problem of backtracking is no less present in TOR than any other MMO, although they have tried to lessen the impact through liberal use of "quick transport" options - speeders that will get you from one location to another for a minimal fee. This does help alleviate the dull "run back to the quest giver" chore that plagues many MMOs, but without removing it entirely. Creatures spawn regularly and populate the map in large numbers, but in some cases it is possible to pass them by without fighting if you're just trying to do a return run. Side quests also become available when you're about to head to a new area for your class "main quest", meaning that you easily polish off a few quests in one trip, making it feel more productive and heroic. Additionally, the classic grind quests of "kill 65,340,285 boars" are mostly relegated to "additional objectives" as part of other quests. This is a nice touch in that the grind feels as though it's optional, and for the most part you'll likely end up killing the required number of creatures as a matter of course in trying to achieve the core objective of the quest.

After adventuring in those mountains, I go to turn in three quests at once

As an overall experience, it seemed reasonably fun, though I do feel as though it would have been far more enjoyable with a group. It really did seem as though group play would feel a lot more rewarding, and going solo somehow made it feel as though you were missing out. I'd be interested to see how different the experience is in that case. The other issue is the concept of choice and the light-side/dark-side within the game. I didn't see any real consequences as a result of previous choices I'd made in my brief journey, but I'm not sure that I can necessarily expect that in such a short time frame. The light side points I kept gaining (yeah, yeah, I was playing a goody-two-shoes, deal with it) didn't really seem to have any great benefit. I was told by the in-game help that certain items would require me to have a certain level of light side points in order to equip, but if that's as far as the system goes, then it feels a little... "gamey".

So, Star Wars: The Old Republic - it's an MMORPG in the Star Wars universe with an increased focus on story. It had a feel similar to the Knights of the Old Republic games, and that's by no means a bad thing. How it will translate into a fully-fledged release will be interesting to watch, but it is definitely an MMO to keep your eye on.

Managing Difficulty Expectations

2011-11-23T18:57:00.000+11:00

Game difficulty can be one of the more challenging aspects for designers. Make the game too easy and players will complain about it being too simple, short or dull, but a game that is too hard will likely be called stupid, imbalanced or poorly designed. While I've discussed aspects of managing difficulty previously, perhaps one of the most vital aspects is to make sure that the difficulty matches the expectations of the player. In this case, I'm going to pick on the somewhat older title of Need For Speed: Shift. I'll say upfront that I've mostly enjoyed playing the game and its sequel, but it would be remiss of me to not identify the issues that they have.

I'm sure I've complained about rubberband AI in driving games before, before Shift goes one step further. It has several mistakes when it comes to difficulty. Firstly, in order to unlock new "tiers" of racing (ie new cars and races) you have to gain a set number of "stars" by achieving certain placing, point total (which you earn through certain driving actions: mastering a corner, overtaking, trading paint, drifting, drafting, etc), or another bonus objective. However, if you complete all of the stars from tier 1 and a couple of the associated "invitational events" that you'll unlock by doing so, you'll not only unlock tier 2, but also tier 3. That's right, before you've even done your first race in the second tier, you'll have already unlocked the third. Now I'm all for rewarding players for being thorough, but this is just ridiculous. To unlock the third tier so early is like dangling a carrot in front of someone on a 100m long stick. If someone is going through and doing all the events (and let's be honest here, a lot of players are going to do just that), then awarding them the third level of racing before they've even done the second is just ridiculous.

I'm still almost two tiers behind this race...

If that's all the game did wrong in terms of difficulty, I'd be happy to leave it at that. Shift has mild rubberband AI, in that it is present, but it's not as blatant as exists in some other driving games, or even other outings in the NFS series. It instead falls into the trap of difficulty scaling. Having just gone through the process of winning every race in tier 1, I found myself with a substantial amount of cash. As such, I decided to put my money to work in buying a shiny new Porsche, top of tier 2, and invested in a few upgrades to put myself further on top of the newfound tier 2 heap. I jumped into a mixed (tier 1 & tier 2) event and expected this new wonderful car to breeze to victory. Couldn't be easier, right? Wrong.

Suddenly I was competing against people with equally fast and upgraded driving monsters, but I was the only one struggling to cope with the fact that this new car was a lot faster than the old one. Everyone else handled their new high horsepower beauties perfectly. Dismayed, I decided to shelve my new, shiny, uncontrollable Porsche in the garage for a spell, and spend a few thousand on some upgrades for my S2000 and see how it fared. At least if I lost to the competition, I could attribute it to their much faster and more powerful cars. So I jumped into the race with my old favourite... and found myself getting to the front of the pack with only a mild amount of difficulty.

Alas Porsche, back in the garage you go.

I thought I'd positioned myself to destroy my opposition by spending my money on a top of the line vehicle with a whole lot of bells and whistles, but all I did was get the computer opponents to scale up with me. Any sense of accomplishment was lost when they came right along with me despite me feeling like I should have a superior car. Dropping back to a worse car and seeing my opponents scale down with me turned me off my new car even more. What should have been a triumph instead ended up feeling like a tribulation.

This does present a difficult problem specifically for the racing genre, in that each race should be challenging (for whatever definition that might have based on the player's chosen difficulty level), yet in a career mode, the player should be given an increasing difficulty curve with manageable spikes periodically. Of course, it could be argued that any particular sequence within a level of an FPS/RTS/RPG. Would it hurt to let the player of a racing game have a rare romp where they blitz the opposition by a vast margin like some firefights in an FPS are straightforward, or to have one really challenging race every now and then like an RPG boss fight? Racing games quite often manage the latter, but very rarely give a player the satisfaction of the first.

As a closing note, I should state that Shift 2 does make an attempt to address these issues, but isn't without its own shortcomings. The main issue retaining the concept of assigning cars a class based on an arbitrary point value based on various handling aspects of the car. While this makes sense, it's possible to have two cars with the same point value where one is vastly inferior in virtually all circumstances to the other. Admittedly given it's pitched more towards the sim end of the market, that's arguably fair enough, but it still sometimes misses being fun..

A confession: Skryim review

2011-11-16T22:22:00.001+11:00

Yes, I have a confession to make. From last Friday until tonight, my modding efforts were completed put on hold due to one main reason: Skyrim. The latest installment in The Elder Scrolls series is nothing short of spectacular, and this incredible game and gameworld make for a supremely engaging experience. After 40 hours of playtime and I still feel like I've only scratched the surface of the game.

The game starts off in typical Elder Scrolls style with you as a prisoner, but of course that doesn't last very long. You're soon thrust into the role of the unwitting hero, and find yourself at the centre of more than one conflict. As I started playing, I encountered two interface niggles that suggested that someone had been playing the PC version so long that these "seem normal":
1. How do I close the inventory of the chest I just looted using the letter "E"? Oh, "tab". Right, how obvious. It would have been handy to have something on the interface tell me that.
2. Why am I assigning something to my right hand with a left mouse click (which pops up a little "R" symbol) and to my left hand with a right mouse click (which pops up a little "L") symbol.
Small complaints, yes, but they were annoying to contend with in my first couple of hours of the game. Despite this initial confusion, you do quickly get used to these and the world of Tamriel is more engrossing and believable than ever.

I was complaining about something... oooo, that's pretty.

One thing that Bethesda do very well is learn from past mistakes. Oblivion did away with Morrowind's horrible abomination of a journal, added fast travel ("purists" can complain all they want, but it does make the game more enjoyable) and overall reduced the inaccessibility of Morrowind by making it slightly easier to not get yourself killed with remarkable ease at lower levels. Of course, Oblivion wasn't without its own issues, but again Skyrim pushes the series forward. The levelling system is much improved, removing the asinine necessity to level up secondary skills in order to make sure you can increase your attributes. In fact, the only attributes you have to worry about are magicka, health and stamina. While this might seem like a simplification, the introduction of skill perk trees more than makes up for this change, and actually enables far greater depth of character development as you pick which skills you want to pick perks for. While the combat still feels a little clunky at times, it's definitely improved over Oblivion, and the ability dual wield weapons and/or spells is a nice touch. Also gone is Oblivion's creature levelling system - meaning you can encounter creatures that you can decimate... or those that can decimate you. There still appears to be some levelling in place, but the system is much more refined, and you won't suddenly find yourself beset by bandits decked out in full glass armor all the time.

There's nothing quite like the wandering and exploration aspect of an Elder Scrolls game, and in this aspect Skyrim delivers delivers in spades. It's hard to convey the sheer size and depth of content in this world, and you can quite literally spend hours wandering around getting sidetracked on one quest or another. As I was trekking towards a distant location, I happened across a pilgrim on his way to a shrine. He marked the location of this shrine on my map... despite that it was a significant distance away, I took the next turn on the path and decided to beat him to the shrine. The creatures also mean that the exploration is never dull, for you never know when you suddenly might be attacked by an angry bear, a troll, a group of mammoths and giants, or even a dragon. Better yet is that even if you're outmatched, you can still decide to run away and live to tell the tale. This only adds to the sense that the world is "real" and that while you might be a hero (or anti-hero), you don't have to try to stick it out against ridiculous odds... or load up that save in order to go somewhere else.

Why do I get the feeling that going into that cave is a very bad idea?

The individual stories and quests that you encounter are quite interesting, and there are plenty of them. You'll get dozens of miscellaneous tasks very quickly from just talking to strangers, and other sidequests are plentiful as well. There's 70 voice actors instead of the dozen in Oblivion, which is so overwhelmingly welcome. Though facial expressions are still lacking, characters come across as quite believable and you generally don't care too much when you're caught up in the act of exploring the world and the lives and troubles of everyone in it. The world feels so much more compelling than Oblivion, although it does feels as though it lacks the visual vibrancy and variety of Oblivion... though that might be in part because it snows so damn much, or at least is has for me. You won't, however, be trekking through dungeons and get that tedious feeling of "I've been here before" as you did with Oblivion. Other developers and games should take heed here - yes, Dragon Age 2, I'm looking at you.

Drawing another area where Skyrim excels (and Dragon Age 2 failed) is the continuity of the setting. This is something that the Elder Scrolls series and Bethesda are very good at delivering. Every previous game gets rolled into the collective history of the setting, with events sometimes set in motion due to previous games, or ideas and threats that are mentioned in previous games come to light in subsequent titles. The extensive library of books within the game carries over some titles that were present in past games, but there are still a joy for lore-loving players, old and new. You can read about the Nerevarine (Morrowind) or the Hero of Kvatch (Oblivion), and delve into the history of figures in those games or who have played roles in the history of Tamriel outside of the games. Despite the fact that hundreds of years have passed between Oblivion and Skyrim, the two games feel far more connected than the dozens of character cameos in Dragon Age 2 ever managed. Even a major character like Anders didn't provide continuity, and not just because Adam Howden wasn't as good as Greg Ellis. In Skyrim, you might be a hero, but you still get the sense that you're a hero in a vast and vibrant world. When a sandbox delivers that, you know it's done well.

The heroine Linaeryl contemplating her place in Skyrim and Tamriel

If you've never played an Elder Scrolls game before, Skyrim is an incredible place to start, and if you've tried previous outings, it delivers more than you've faced before. If you're looking for the freedom to explore a fully realised fantasy setting, there's nothing else that comes close to delivering what it can. While there can be some bland visuals (or the occasional glitch) and there are some quest bugs, it's hard to imagine that a game this size could come without them. It doesn't seem to deliver an epic story-telling masterpiece (though I confess I haven't finished the main storyline yet), but that has never really been the highlight of Elder Scrolls games. There have been some really nice moments, but where the series excels is letting the player tell their own story. It's about the player's collective experiences and tales as they travel through the world, and this is where Skyrim is nothing short of sublime.

If you at all have an interest in this sort of game, do yourself a favour and go out and get a copy. You won't regret it. Skyrim is not only the best RPG of 2011, it's the best game of 2011.

Michael-Bay Warfare 3

2011-11-13T15:03:00.001+11:00

With the final installment of the series, Modern Warfare has finally given up all pretenses and shown the true colours of its campaign "story-driven" experience. This explosion-packed ride doesn't let up for the few hours it'll take you to finish it, and ultimately still ends up falling short of the heights of the original game. It is an improvement over the utterly ridiculous MW2, and I think a little bit longer, as I polished off the campaign of Modern Warfare 3 on normal difficulty in a little over 6 hours.

I have to say that it was an enjoyable ride, but at the same time you love it in the same way that you love a trashy blockbuster action movie. It's lightweight, plot-negligible, with one-dimensional explosion after chase after fight continuity... but provided you're willing to switch off your brain and just enjoy the ride, it'll be a lot of fun reaching the end. As the post title implies, it's like a Michael Bay movie presented as a video game.

I found there were a few things that grated on my nerves, which is the reason for this blog post. There won't be any real spoilers here, but if you really want to make sure you don't spoil anything (you don't really need to worry though), then you may want to stop reading here.

Explosions!
When MW3 doesn't know what to do, it puts another big explosion on screen. When there's lots of action, people will overlook the absence of a plot, right? There never feels like there's any continuinity in the plot and that the loosely constructed story is merely a contrivance simply to provide a vague means to justify having explosions around famous cities. There's even a Team America moment where America levels the city that they're supposed to be saving. I'm not joking here. In what was most likely meant to be a serious "wow" moment or have some sort of impact on the player, I was laughing uncontrollably and found myself singing the movie's theme song.

The issue here is pacing. MW3 has a frenzied pace that barely lets up for even a couple of minutes, and even the most avid UT2K3/UT2K4 speed adrenaline junkie will potentially find themselves feeling overwhelmed by the constant action. Worse still is that fact that because of this pacing (or lack thereof) those moments that should feel like an amazing high end up just feeling like a regular part of the experience because the player is never given a reprieve from the guns, bombs, exploding buildings and dying protagonists. This isn't to say that it needs to attempt the "lull" sections that felt quite forced in Gears of War 1 & 2 to provide this necessary respite, but MW3 sorely needed something to break it up.

Not what I should be reminded of in a "realistic" video game

Another death... who cares?
As we've come to expect from Modern Warfare, characters die. Not just enemies or allies, but the characters that the player is playing. Just like with Modern Warfare 2, this happens on a fairly regular basis. There are fewer instances where you "almost die", which plagued the second installment in the series like a bad smell, but again the variety of characters means that you never care about any of the people you're playing. They're just as emotionless, faceless and lacking in character as the hundreds of enemies you slaughter on your way to victory.

There is only one death that actually matters, but even while I was lamenting that particular character's death, I realised that the only reason that I cared about them was because of their presence in previous outings of the game. That's right, MW3 does effectively does nothing to make you care about previous characters - it just expects you to come along with an attitude of: "you care about that person because they were in the previous games".

There's even one character who exists for only a single mission, and to make things worse...

Expect more pointless protagonist deaths like in MW2

Failing an objective as part of the story
You hit the button to complete an objective, and before anything else happens, "Objective failed" pops up at the top of the screen. Instead of showing you what is going wrong, you're immediately and definitively told "A Bad Thing Happened". The simple axiom of "show, don't tell" could not be more apposite here. Don't tell the player with a simple message that something went wrong, show them with the cutscene which is shown right after that message. Get rid of the message entirely, and not only would nothing be lost, but the scene would be a lot more effective. You still wouldn't care about the character's inevitable death, but at least the sequence would have some impact instead of none.

Contrast this with a later situation where you're trying to retrieve someone, and you see them taken away on enemy helicopter just as you arrive. There's no "objective failed" message here, just the sequence where you can fire at a few guards and then get maybe one or two rushed pot-shots at the captors before it flies off. That actually made you care about it and felt like it gave you some freedom, even though it didn't have any more than the previous example. It's not about what happens, it's about how it's presented to the player.

In closing...
As I said at the start, MW3 is by no means a bad game. I'm sure thousands of people are diving into the spec ops and multiplayer (though I must confess they don't quite hold exactly the same appeal to me), but given the campaign was being billed as a great adventure, I can't help but feel like the second and third games came up well short in trying to live up to the success of the first. The series is good for what it is, but you can't help but feeling that with a little more understanding about pacing, emotion and how to write a plot that makes sense, that the campaign across the three games could have been excellent instead of merely an enjoyable action outlet.

I must confess that since finishing it, I've sunk far more hours into Skyrim... which I might provide a few thoughts on in my next post.

News Roundup

2011-11-07T10:09:00.000+11:00

There's a few recent events I'd like to mention briefly without going into detail. I usually like to focus on design and general gaming issues, but there are a few things I just can't let go at the moment. So here we go...

Steve Jobs is the "most influential person in gaming"
Stop. Stop. Stop it. Stop it right now. This is rubbish. I will not argue that the iPhone has had a significant influence on the gaming industry in recent history, and has led to a vast increase in games on smartphones and other mobile devices (though remember it's not just iPhones now!). If anyone thinks that Steve Jobs was the most influential person in gaming, then they're an idiot, and I expect a more intelligent response from attendees at a gaming conference. I apologise for ranting here, but it really is that simple. Steve Jobs had a great influence on the technology industry, but his involvement in the gaming was indirect at best. If you want to applaud someone, applaud those developers that jumped on board and made products for smartphones, applaud the people who worked out how to integrate accelerometers and touch screens into enjoyable gaming experiences, applaud the people who are actually in the gaming industry and not someone who marketed products that others realised could be used for gaming. Macs were laughable as gaming devices for decades, and the iPhone only became a gaming device because of the work of talented and imaginative developers, so crediting Steve Jobs with this kind of praise is outright insulting to all the people who have dedicated their lives to the gaming industry. To all those who voted, I have one thing to say: shame on you.

Mass Effect 3 Beta Leak
An early version of the Mass Effect 3 beta was accidentally released to players for a short period. While this got people all excited, some of the options available disturbed quite a few fans: modes referred to as Action Mode, Story Mode, RPG mode. The essence is that "action mode" would see all dialogue occur without player input, and the Story Mode would make combat trivially difficult for those who have difficulty with the shooter gameplay and are just in it for the story. RPG mode would give "the definitive Mass Effect experience" in line with the content of the previous two games. As I declared my worry in a previous post, this seems as though it's trying to garner new fans, but can we really expect many people to pick something that effectively removes the aspect of choice or the combat gameplay when those two combined features have basically been the selling point of the series? It's too early to tell, but this seems to be an effort to "please everyone", which far too frequently ends up pleasing no one.

Ashley looks like she's had cosmetic surgery

Gears of War 3 DLC
Next is the news that the first Gears of War 3 DLC was shipped on the disc that everyone bought. Logically and from a business perspective, the argument for this decision makes complete sense. In a nutshell, the release date was pushed back by several months in which time developer of the DLC was finished, so to save players a forced download (because even people who don't have it will need it) they put it on the disc. Somehow this doesn't sweeten the deal for players who now know they already "possess" that content, they just have to pay in order to use it. I'd like to discuss DLC distribution and practices at length in a future post, so I'll leave that for now. For the meantime, imagine if Epic had decided to release this content for free to everyone. I'm not sure why the release was delayed in the first place (was it going through certification?), but if the only reason was to extend the life of the product, to force people to wait and then pay for content that was already sitting on the disc seems like a poor PR decision to me.

For starters, there's never a whole lot of people player GoW3 online, at least in my region. If I try to get a game, it's frequently filled with numerous bots and typically a handful of very high level players. I first tried MP a couple of weeks after release, and that's how small the online market was then. I imagine they will have already lost some MP players to Battlefield 3, and I wouldn't be surprised if they lose a few more in this coming week because of the release of some new titles...

Modern Warfare 3 Release
Yes, I suppose I have to mention "the most anticipated game ever" if you listen to Activision's hype. To be honest, I would struggle to care less. Modern Warfare 1 was an excellent title, but MW2 was overblown tripe that made me wonder how the same people could have been responsible for the two games. Killing off a protagonist in MW1 was one of the highlights of the game, so in MW2 they killed off multiple protagonists, and made you think that you'd died pretty much every mission that you didn't. It was as though the makers of MW2 were rabid fans of the first game who didn't actually understand what made the game great and just tried to make everything "biggerer and betterer and more awesomest than before". Instead of taking inspiration from classic movies, MW2 just copied them directly - leading to the shower/cellblock area that was effectively copied wholesale from The Rock. MW3 certainly looks as though it's continuing those trend with its Michael Bay-esque trailers filled with explosions and more explosions and landmarks being destroyed, which is a real pity, because I'd really hoped it would return to the heights of MW1. On the plus side, at least if you pick it up, you'll be well and truly finished the single player component before the release of the next big game...

This worked. Modern Warfare 2? Not so much.

Skyrim Release
Now this one I'm genuinely excited about. Having recently finished Red Dead Redemption, I might be on a bit of sandbox overdose, but The Elder Scrolls series are typically filled with so many little sidequests and story based diversions that it is still possible to gorge yourself on plot-driven gameplay. Players will be relieved to know there are 70 different voice actors for Skyrim compared to a mere 12 for Oblivion, so hopefully you won't be hearing exactly the same few voices over and over again. The little snippets I've seen thus far have looked promising, so I'm hopeful that it will deliver many hours of interesting and varied gameplay.

This will definitely jump to the top of my playlist for my gaming between modding sessions, I'll just have to be dedicated enough to make sure it's not the other way around.

Red Dead Redemption or: How I learned to stop complaining and love the grind

2011-11-06T19:43:00.000+11:00

I have a love/hate relationship with sandbox games. I love the unbridled freedom that a sandbox offers, and the ability to become completely immersed in and explore a setting. A well designed sandbox can frequently deliver a setting with more impact and depth than a linear story ever can. Yet this freedom is often a blessing and a curse, for that exploration can end up feeling like a chore rather than the excitement it should be. Having to spend lengthy periods of time "doing the commute" rather than just "having fun" often makes these games feel less enjoyable than they otherwise might. This is rather a double edged sword, because sometimes that commute can be the very thing that exposes player to random events within the gameworld that truly make it feel alive.

The potential increases vastly if you're one of those people who like to make sure they've "experienced everything" and try to go for those "100% completion" statistics. I've never bothered to even try for one of these. I never found any appeal in hunting for packages, pigeons, nirnroot, flags, feathers or any of the other countless tedious efforts that always seem to plague such endeavours. That is, not until Red Dead Redemption. For once, I found myself with the dedication to achieve that "100% complete" goal, and for the most part, it was actually quite fun.

Thanks for the ride, John Marston

What is it about Red Dead Redemption's "grind" to achieve this goal that made it seem much more attainable and enjoyable than previous equivalent outings? Simply put: variance. In order to obtain this completion, greater emphasis was placed on making the means to do so more varied and complex. Completing the core quests of the game will give you only about 60% of the "total completion" for the single player game, yet most players are likely to have more than that by the time they reach the game's conclusion. This is because the task is far more enjoyable than hunting down 100 pigeons in varies nooks and crannies hidden around the gameworld. It consists of numerous other tasks: obtaining rare weapons, completing gang hideouts, completing jobs, being a bounty hunter, story "side quests", exploring the gameworld, buying safehouses, obtaining outfits, winning minigames and completing "challenges". With this assortment of tasks, the player always has something different to tackle in pursuit of this goal.

Even better is that as the player progresses towards this ultimate goal, they are given numerous rewards along the way. The four "challenges" (hunting, survivalist, sharpshooter and treasure hunting) each provide the player with different bonuses at the halfway point and upon completion. Many of the 13 available outfits provide different advantages to the player. This system of continual reward gives the player a sense of achievement during progression on par with the best skinner box motivations used by MMOs and levelling systems. The player is rewarded along the way, giving them further incentive to keep persevering with the grind. In addition, some of the tasks required can be completed simultaneously, either directly or indirectly by facilitating completion of other goals. To unlock a particular outfit, you may need to win at one of the minigames, which will contribute to that aspect of completion at the same. Also, you may need to collect a particular flower, which is located in the same region as an animal you may need to hunt, or a treasure you have to find.

What a great way to score some hatshots!

Ultimately, RDR makes the goal of 100% completion seem not only achievable, but also as something that can let the player feel like they have "achieved everything", at least as far as the singleplayer component is concerned. There are a handful of achievements/trophies that will not be collected as part of this experience, but the player will definitely feel as though they've gained most of the game's virtual rewards as well. Providing a clear end point means that people wanting to pursue such a task will not be left with that feeling of "just a little bit more" that so frequently preys upon those playing MMOs. Moreover, it's not a stupendously inane task requiring an utterly barbaric level of dedication like Gears of War 3's "Seriously 3.0" achievement. Sorry Epic, but that's just plain stupid. There's no other word for it.

I don't imagine I'll end up any more dedicated to the task of 100% completion for future sandbox games, but if designers are looking for a method by which to motivate players to pursue these kinds of virtual goals, then Red Dead Redemption provides an excellent template by which to encourage this kind of perseverance.

Difficulty and narrative

2011-11-02T17:36:00.000+11:00

I've recently been laid up with an injury and been unable to sit a computer for more than an hour or so. As a result, I've spent quite a lot of time playing games on my XBox360 rather than modding. Among other gaming, this led me to finish my Mass Effect 2 insanity playthrough. This difficulty level requires a little more patience and skill than lower difficulties, and there were a few segments I had to replay more than once. Now, I have no problem with this, but it did get me thinking about how this difficulty level was affecting the gameplay experience.

If I'm tackling a boss fight a half a dozen, a dozen or even more times in order to defeat them, then I'm getting a great sense of accomplishment from the final success, knowing that my skill is sufficient to overcome the difficulty. The challenge of the battle and the triumph in overcoming that difficulty gives the player that empowering feeling of "Yes, I did it!" The thing I'm not quite so sure about is whether that actually helps the feeling associated with the end of the game and the climax that should come from the completion of the ultimate challenge to bring a game to its conclusion. Having recently finished Gears of War 3 co-op after numerous retries on the final battle, the victory felt both liberating and hollow given my friend and I realised we had come "this close" on a number of previous attempts.

No, this isn't the final boss. No spoilers here.

The issue I found was that it felt like the difficulty was clashing with the narrative of the story. Admittedly, the immediate counter-argument is "l2play n00b", but that's hardly intelligent or helpful. The sad truth is, it's probably accurate and the best solution to the problem. The more focus is given to the story of the game as progress between gameplay segments, the more each failure on the part of the player will "get in the way" and have the potential to negatively impact that part of the experience. Getting meaningful narrative into gameplay itself is extraordinarily difficult, so unless repeated failure is part of the gameplay or narrative mechanics, those gameplay failures translate into the story feeling weaker. Unless the player gets better, they're going to enjoy their achievements of gameplay success more than the story, because that's where all their effort and energy is being expended. Commander Shepard is a galactic hero... who has died several hundred times on the way to the end credits.

Yeah, that's the stuff of legend.

Counter-intuitively, the greatest feeling I got of being an epic hero was when I was getting through segments by the skin of my teeth. Barely surviving tense firefights, especially where I'd done something ridiculously brave and stupid but somehow managed to come out on top, that was the epitome of Commander Shepard's achievements - overcoming insane odds to save the day. Having a difficulty to punish you if you repeatedly do something stupid and incompetent was good, but not something that would bitterly punish every single mistake with near or actual death. I'd suggest that this is why games like Ninja Gaiden and Demons'/Dark Souls don't rely heavily on plot but on gameplay instead. If they did, everyone would go insane from the brutal difficulty, and/or end up ignoring the plot anyway because it would be delivered far too infrequently for most people to actually keep track of it.

You'll never be better than Commander Shepard

The thing is that I love the sense of achievement from beating ridiculously hard games. I'll fight hard to learn how to cope with those tough as nails fights in games, and spend hours of frustration trying to get past that next sequence. While I love an enjoyable romp where I can casually do ridiculous things and still dominate a horde of opponents (this is what makes the repetitive gameplay of Dynasty Warriors so mind-numbingly enjoyable), I'm happy to harden up and go for the tough battles, even if I eventually have to admit defeat. (Curse you Modern Warfare's Mile High Club) Is it possible to have a ridiculously hard gameplay experience that requires countless defeats sit well with narrative? In rare circumstances, it is. Both Planescape: Torment and Braid expect and demand failure in order for you to reach the end goal. These do, however, utilise very unique gameplay and narrative techniques to achieve this goal, ones that can't easily be replicated across different genres and settings.

I remember reading articles about people playing Dragon Age who felt they had to drop the difficulty to "easy" in order to gain enjoyment out of the game, because they found the fights too challenging for their party. This led to them feeling stupid and not enjoying the game because they were there for the story and their constant defeats were getting in the way. There was also the tale of another DAO modder who stopped playing The Witcher 2 because of similar difficulty woes. Such difficulty is hardly the way to get players involved in the complex setting, characters and plots of a story driven game.

L.A. Noire even went so far as to offer the potential for players to skip action sequences altogether if they failed repeatedly. Unfortunately, many players took this as a severe slap in the face, as though the designers/developers were telling them: "Sorry, you're really bad at this. Let's just pretend that you succeeded, shall we?" Many then spent persevered until they finally succeeded, just so they could have the pride of saying "I did it!" What if, instead, the game had just invisibly dropped the difficulty to allow the player to succeed? Then they'd have the feeling of accomplishment without feeling insulted beforehand. Or did perhaps proving that they were good enough make that pain worth it? That's a question I can't answer.

Mass Effect, multiplayer, and sequels

2011-10-30T21:11:00.002+11:00

So in case you hadn't heard, Mass Effect 3 will have co-op multiplayer, but I'm not going to discuss that. I could suggest that it just sounds like a less polished version of Gears of War's Horde mode but that sounds far more dismissive and negative than I'd like. I quite enjoy horde mode. I'd like to think there's some good potential for where they could take the idea - but I guess this multiplayer is a feeler to gauge potential interest in the idea, and I'm fine with that. Heck, I encourage it... but I digress.

What I really want to focus on is a line from Casey Hudson near the opening of the video: "If you haven't played a game in the Mass Effect series before, Mass Effect 3 is really a great place to start." Yes, it's one line, and it was potentially given to him by their marketing director David Silverman (who makes me cringe every time he says something about a BioWare game... that's another story/post), but this is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I want to hear from Executive Producer of the series. I'm going to be upfront here and point out that, yes, I'm taking way too much from this one line in order to create this post, but the overall message I'm going to convey here is one that I think is important.

Our sequel will be awesome because it will have twice as many "lasers".

Someone in charge of the production of the game is telling people that it's designed for new players. This is meant to be a trilogy, where decisions in the previous games have flow on effects for subsequent titles. Suggesting that new players are going to get the best possible experience is not what dedicated fans of the series want to hear. They want to hear that the Mass Effect team has the same guts as the team working on Lord Of The Rings did when they made the great effort to produce that movie trilogy. The second and third movie had absolutely no hand-holding when it came to the story. With virtually no explanation of events in the previous movie, or the characters or setting, they simply expected viewers to know what was going on.

Admittedly, the Lord of the Rings movies had so much associated publicity and a large fanbase that there was no way that anyone who was watching subsequent movies had missed the first. That said, Mass Effect 2 was a huge game with a massive audience and a very large number of people who have played it. While Mass Effect 1 might feel a little long in the tooth for some players now, it should be a reasonable expectation that anyone who is going to pick up the third copy in a trilogy should know or understand what has gone on before.

The funny thing is that exactly the same thing was said in the lead up to Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect 2 was "a great entry point into the series" in a lot of the promotional material. I'm not trying to paint myself into a corner and proclaim doom and gloom and that Mass Effect 3 won't feel like a true sequel merely because it's trying to offer the potential for new players. Technically, it's possible to enjoy Mass Effect 2 without having played the first, although if you think about all the things that aren't explained in detail, it can be seen that there is some expectation that players will have played the first game.

If you didn't play the first game, you won't care about meeting Garrus "again".

From a marketing and business perspective, having a product that new players won't feel is accessible unless they've played the previous titles is a double-edged sword. It's likely to engender some "brand loyalty" and encourage people to buy a previous game to get "the full experience" (just as some people jumped on the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter bandwagon part way through), there's also the potential to turn off people because of that same reason: "You mean I have to play the old game first?"

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill with this statement? Sure. The real issue demonstrated here is that game companies do not feel confident enough with their products that they are willing to say "you can't come in part way through a series." It seems that games remain apart from other story-telling mediums in this respect. People don't expect to be able to pick up a book trilogy at the third book and have everything make sense, nor join a tv series towards the tail end and understand the ramifications of events or the intricacies of the characters and their respective personalities.

Why can't we respect storytelling in games as much as we do in these?

When I first heard Mass Effect was going be an ongoing trilogy with decisions that would affect each game and the long term outcome of the trilogy itself, I expected the same kind of continuity as I would get from a novel or television series. You missed out the first game? Tough. You'd better go back and play it, because otherwise the sequels aren't going to make sense. I know that the likelihood of any company taking a risk like that, particularly with what was billed as a AAA title from the beginning, is effectively 0%. It's not going to happen. That's not going to stop me from wanting it, because I want to see games that have that kind of story continuity. At this point, people could almost argue that Mass Effect is being outdone in that regard by Assassin's Creed, which is far less about the story than it is the gameplay if you compare both series.

I want to see games that tell players "we have a fantastic story to tell and some great gameplay to go with it, and if you want to enjoy that properly, you're going to have to come along for the whole ride." Maybe that's something that's better delivered as "episodic content" rather than sequels if business concerns are fully considered, but if companies are going to create sequels, don't players deserve to be given "real" sequels? For the most part, gamers get franchises, games loosely connected to one another with flimsy plot devices and some common game mechanics. If games are becoming a story-telling medium, let them tell epic stories spanning multiple titles. If the only addition to a game's title is a number on the end, then that number should mean something.

Unfortunately, the drawcard of a name like "Halo" or "Call of Duty" mean that this practice is not going to die any time soon, because those two franchise names sell games to the tune of millions of copies before the game even hits the shelves. This isn't necessarily to say they are bad games, or don't deserve to sell millions of copies, but the fact is that they do sell inordinate amounts of pre-orders and day 1 copies based on the name and nothing more. If gamers don't demand more of sequels, then we will end up with Final Fantasy 25 and Call of Duty 16. I think both developers and players deserve better than that.

Game Journalism

2011-10-26T18:01:00.002+11:00

Game journalism is a sensitive topic for many people, with rumours of forcing high review scores to keep publishers happy, people being fired due to bad reviews, attempts to selectively distribute early reviewer releases, or even misrepresenting review sites, it's no wonder that gamers get disillusioned.

I've complained about IGN on numerous occasions previously for many separate flaws and shortcomings, because they consistently prove a lack of knowledge and integrity. Inaccuracies and deliberate misrepresentation in their comparison of console versions of Mass Effect 2, or issues where they have ignored key points of a game, such as not reviewing the multiplayer component of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, when multiplayer has pretty much always been the strength of the Battlefield series. This isn't to say that IGN is universally bad, or that their reviews are wholly inaccurate, but more that it's impossible to rely on them because of the many articles that do fit those criteria. Some of their reviews/articles are good, but some of them are utter rubbish, and thus they're simply not a reliable source of information.

I already complained about this mediocrity

Then we have another one of my hated game related video series: the Jimquisition on the Escapist, which features some of the worst argued and illogical statements I've encountered in years. Rather than construct a reasoned argument by providing evidence to prove his statements, Jim Sterling instead attempts to undermine the most radical of opposing viewpoints to his own, and even frequently fails at doing that convincingly. For example, he recently did a three part series on "why used games aren't evil". To put my cards on the table here, I completely agree. It's true that video game developers and publishers don't make any money off used game sales, but this doesn't mean that they're bad for the game industry as a whole. However, in a little under 20 mins of video, Jim Sterling managed one or maybe two points that were actually reasonable and well argued. The rest was little more than whining or inaccurate hyperbole, and even demonstrated a gross misunderstanding that video games are "licensed" not "sold for gamers to do whatever they want with them". This is someone who is paid by several gaming sites, and he doesn't even understand one of the most rudimentary concepts about what he is purchasing with his money. The fact that he has also attacked IGN and GameSpot for their own poor knowledge or lack of research is utterly laughable.

Of course, it's not all bad, and there are a few good examples I'd like to mention here:

While not strictly "game journalism", per se, Extra Credits is one of the more interesting series on video game development and design kicking around. I don't agree with everything they say on the show, but they offer some really good viewpoints and insights into gaming, game design, and the potential for gaming to become more than it currently is.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - A great site with good writers and intelligent articles. More surprising is that occasionally even the comments from other readers don't immediate delve into trolling or mindless bickering as normally occurs on equivalent sites, but that's still a rarity. It's definitely a site that's worth checking out if you don't already.

I'd like a colour map of good game related sites please

I have also found Kotaku to be one of the more reliable sources for information, particularly from the Australian writing contingent. As an Australian, I'll concede that I am probably biased here, but they've proven themselves reliable in my opinion. For example, their reporting on the R18+ classification issue in Australia has proven almost universally interesting, informative and accurate as the saga has played out. Admittedly, it typically doesn't provide reviews in the "classic" form with an (artificial) number tacked onto the end of the review, but their commentary and appraisals are well-thought out more often than not. It's always fun to see people writing about games with a bit of wit. I'm going to give particular kudos to Tracey Lien here, who injects a good sense of humour into her writing as well as being interesting. Maybe she could do an article on Aussie game modders? :)

As an aside, I'd like to say that there appears to be an inherent sexism present in game journalism (and potentially the game industry at large) which is unnecessary and stupid. Isn't it a bit ridiculous that Jessica Chobot's (who works for IGN but provides better content than others there) breakthrough came as a result of her licking a PSP? I'm sorry, but it's pathetic that her popularity came as a result of her looks rather than her talent or knowledge. While I'm on this subject, I should also mention Meghann O'Neill (aka Firky on BioWare's Social Network), who writes for Aus PC Powerplay, who in additional to reviewing games, was also kind enough to champion DAO mods, including my very own Alley of Murders. So there are three talented females who do video game journalism who deserve respect for their talent, and I'm sure there are plenty more. Gender doesn't make someone less or more competent as a game reviewer; the days of "girls don't play video games" have well and truly passed, so let's grow up and get with the times.

No, there's no picture here. That's deliberate.

Game journalism isn't lacking in integrity as some nay-sayers would have you believe, and there are some excellent writers out there if you go looking for them. Not everyone is as ill informed and biased as Fox News. Of course, dear readers, this is a matter of opinion, and it's possible that you might vastly disagree with my comments here. If that's the case, or you feel I've missed any examples of gaming related websites that you feel should be promoted (or shamed), feel free to drop a comment and let me know.

Modding: The future?

2011-10-22T19:32:00.001+11:00

In this series of blog posts on modding, I've looked at the current Dragon Age scene, and some of the history of mods in gaming. One thing you may note about many of the mods and games I mentioned in my last post is that they were predominantly focussed on FPS games. This isn't to suggest that the only good mods are for FPS games, far from it. However, FPS modding is where many of the "biggest" mods come from for a number of reasons:

1) A level design focus means it is easier to create new content that gives an immediate sense of something new for the player and visually demonstrates to the modder their progress.
2) Ease of modifying gameplay - it's simple to modify how an FPS plays by modifying gun mechanics - how fast it shoots, how much damage it does, accuracy, damage spread, etc.
3) The flexibility of existing engines today means that it is a lot easier than previously to adapt something like the Unreal Engine for use within a new FPS.
4) The PvP aspect means a focus on balance/gameplay rather than getting "bogged down" in creating involved cinematics, dialogue, AI, scripted sequences, etc.

Multiplayer FPS games don't need this storytelling

Of course, even this kind of modding is reducing in popularity to some degree. Arguably, the shift towards consoles is partially responsible for this, where for the most part it is not feasible for player created content to be accessed on consoles. There are some notable exceptions to this, perhaps most importantly Little Big Adventure - but even the modding scene for this game was somewhat underwhelming. Unreal Tournament 3 also allowed for the export of levels to the PS3 version of the game and gamers did take advantage of this to produce some good content, but this is a relatively rare phenomenon. There were rumours that the upcoming Skyrim would feature a marketplace allowing mod authors to obtain money for their work, but these appear to have dissipated. Todd Howard from Bethesda has gone on record saying that they would like to try and make it possible for mods to be made accessible to those on consoles, which is a potentially promising development for modders. Whether this suggestion is actually something they can deliver given difficulties with licensing and quality control issues for Sony and Microsoft remains to be seen.

The lack of "quality" content was and remains one of the most common gripes levelled at user made levels or mods, and this only seems to be getting more and more noticable as time goes on. This is not surprising given the continually increasing standards of games released by major studios. It's verging on impossible for modders to meet the "quality" standards of players when it comes to AAA titles, so expecting levels of the same quality as those produced by Epic, Infinity Ward or DICE is frequently an unreasonable for most level designers. When you add onto this mods that require more than simply level design, and thus need people with skills in writing, scripting, cinematography, etc equivalent to those being paid in the game industry for these talents, the pool of modders becomes very small indeed.

An increasing availability and prevalence of free or cheap development kits for games that have many of the basic features available to budding creators may see a transition of groups of such talented people from modding to the development of their own IP and game titles. Once problems such as working across disparate timezones and setting up server infrastructure to allow for remote collaboration on a game are solved (which is most definitely possible given a bit of technical know-how), it is entirely feasible for a team of developers from different parts of the world to work together on a gaming project. Unity, Torque, or even the Unreal Engine are excellent choices for developers, and there are plenty more options out there.

Indie developers can reap the rewards from the advances made by others

Furthermore, the improvements made to digital distribution, particularly on the PC platform mean that ability for such development teams to get their work out to potential players has dramatically increased over the past few years. The support that Valve has provided to indie game development through Steam has been undeniably fantastic for developers and gamers alike. By providing a common distribution platform used by a very large number of PC gamers, Steam has provided visibility to titles that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, and moreover allowed them to be purchased and downloaded with ease. While I'd sometimes say that Valve receive a little too much credit for their (limited number of) game releases (even though they are usually quite good), their overall contribution to gaming, particularly PC gaming and indie development, has been a massive boon to gamers and game developers alike.

So is the future of modding going to turn to indie game development? Perhaps not exclusively, but I can't help but see a trend towards modding becoming entirely based around cosmetic changes or slightly tweaks to mechanics. The increasing number of games featuring DLC to provide additional content is seemingly (and almost counter-intuitively) leading to a decline in the interest of mods to do the same, as the rising bar of quality means that mods for AAA titles are increasingly time consuming.

I don't imagine mods will ever disappear completely while gamers can still get access to the tools and components of games that allow them to modify the games they purchase, but I definitely see the past-time becoming more and more niche given the increasing possibility for gamers to create their own content in their own setting. This is without doubt still a more challenging prospect than modding an existing game, but as long as developers set their expectations at a reasonable level, the dream of people being able to create their own game and have an audience of happy players seems closer than ever before.

Modding: A journey through games

2011-10-19T22:32:00.002+11:00

The last time I talked about modding, I discussed the current state of Dragon Age Origins modding. I'd like to look at where modding is going in a general sense, but in order to do that, I think it's important to see where we've come from in modding, and some of the influential mods that have been released. I'm only going to focus on a few select areas here, as covering the total history of modding would be a fairly involved task. So I'm going to mix in some personal experiences of playing and building to cover territory.

My first "real" modding experience was with DEU and DeHackEd - mod tools for Doom. DeHackEd was a simple editor that modified the Doom executable file itself - allowing modders to increase the speed or damage of weapons/monsters, or even make barrels move and automatically explode. It effectively allowed basic mechanics to be changed. DEU (Doom Editing Utilities) was used to create new levels for the game - allowing players to create their own maps for a new singleplayer or multiplayer experience. Doom was a relatively "simple" FPS with a level layout that could be conveyed perfectly via a 2D map - e.g. it is not possible to create a bridge which the player can go both under and over. This made the level design process quite simple; if you could sketch out a layout on a piece of paper, then translating that design into a functional level was not significantly harder.

The first custom level for many people involved lots of these guys and BFGs

Moving into a more complicated realm, Descent 1 & 2 featured a "true" 3D environment, and also promoted a somewhat healthy level modding scene. The increased difficulty of creating "real" 3D maps took quite a lot of getting used to for many, particularly given the way that the environment had to be created out of "cubes" (technically convex hexahedron). However, this was one of the earliest cases that I personally recall of developers actively supporting and promoting their modding community. The "Levels of the World" was an add-on that contained all of the entries from a level design competition held by Interplay in 1995, and selected ones to receive a "top 10" award and some honourable mentions. At this time, Internet access was poor for many people, and as such the company made it available on CD, and even included it as part of "Descent: The Definitive Collection."

It would be remiss of me to fail to mention Warcraft 2 and its popular and accessible map editor, but perhaps more important is the impact made by Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 featured many new and creative mods, but arguably the most influential has been the Defence of the Ancients (DotA) mod. The popularity of this mod is substantial (there was even a "popular" song about it) despite the game being notoriously brutal for newcomers and the community having a reputation for one of the most abusive of any game out there. People who are doing poorly are liable to be abused quickly and harshly by teammates, who would rather play down a player than with someone incompetent. (To be fair, in many cases they would actually be better off, but that's a little beside the point) The popularity of this game has led to a slew of "clones" such as Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, and Darkspore, among others, not to mention DotA2 which is currently being worked on by Valve.

DotA gained devout followers and plenty of fanart

Of course, no discussing about modding history would be complete without talking about some of the most influential mods ever released, which would probably come down to the triumvirate of: CounterStrike (CS) for Half-life, Team Fortress (TF) for Quake, and Desert Combat (DC) for Battlefield 1942. Like DotA, these mods eventually gained such a following that they effectively spawned their own sub-genre of gaming. CounterStrike took the world by storm for tactical "realistic" team-based play, Team Fortress pioneered the popularity of the class-based multiplayer FPS, and Desert Combat is probably what gamers can thank for FPS games moving out of WWII and into the modern era. The effects of these three mods can still be seen in the games that are being released today.

I've missed mods for Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, Oblivion and probably several other games here. But when compared to other mods of their time, where do such mods stand? Can you name other mods that can compete with DotA, CS, TF and DC in terms of their lasting impact upon the gaming industry as it stands today?

Without Desert Combat, this might never have been released

With that in mind, in my next post I'll look at where the future of modding might lie...

New Shattered War shots

2011-10-16T10:05:00.000+11:00

I know I promised my next post would be about the history of modding... but I realised that I hadn't yet posted about the recent images of The Shattered War that I've produced

There's a new wallpaper of the companion Taraz, and also this action shot from part of encounter I recently finished working on.

A much needed burst of healing

Stay tuned for more screenshots in the coming months!

Modding: The Dragon Age Scene

2011-10-15T17:30:00.002+11:00

In a recent discussion with a fellow Dragon Age Origins (DAO) modder, I was asked about my impression of "the dying DA modder race". While I could deny that such a thing exists, it would be folly to attempt to do so. It seems likely that most cosmetic and gameplay mods that are likely to be made for the game have already been completed and released. The number of additional adventures made for DAO has always been quite limited, and for the most part somewhat lacking in quality. The majority lack voice acting to make them fit in with the DAO experience, and even those that do have varying quality of VO within them (my own Alley of Murders included).

If we look to those mods that are still being worked on, of those that I'm aware, there's the Hidden Circle and Dark Times, The Rose of Eternity (a non-DAO setting), and "Temple". If you're aware of others, please let me know. (Edit: I've also been told about Sanguine Sunrise since first making this post).

Crown of Creation was recently released, though is a standalone adventure not set in the DA lore. I've played part of it, although it doesn't match DAO for quality, it does seem like there is scope for roleplaying. There's ongoing Quests and Legends mod, which while ambitious in size, suffers from a significant case of "quantity over quality" due to design failings (overpowered items, hordes of enemies and traps, and a failure to adhere to DAO lore) and fails to mesh with DAO in a meaningful fashion but turns the game more into a hack and slash fest. There's also the "Sapphos" series of mods, which focus almost exclusively on "sexual experiences" for the player with practically anyone in Ferelden. This causes people to behave completely out of character, and is hardly what I'd call a meaningful gaming experience, unless your aim is to watch your Warden sleep with everyone in sight.

I don't play an RPG for titillation

Looking at this list, one can't help but notice how small it is. From the visibility I have, the modding scene is small and appears to be close to stopping entirely once those projects are completed. Given there are still dedicated modders for both Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, which are games in a similar vein to DAO, the question that must be asked is: Why is DAO modding dying?

There are numerous potential causes. Firstly, the entry barrier to modding is very high. For someone with no experience in modding, the time and effort required to even learn how to get around in the toolset is significant. To create a meaningful adventure is even more difficult still. Secondly, even with the required perseverence to overcome this high entry barrier, the skills required to create an adventure are many and varied. Story and dialogue writing, level design, scripting, and cinematics are just some of the skills necessary to create something. To find an individual or even a group of individuals with the necessary talent is no mean feat.

The area editor is probably the easiest aspect of the DAO toolset.

The amount of hours required to produce a quality adventure, or even a well-playtested FPS map is significant. Game studios have dedicated level designers and then testers ready to put a level through its paces while it's still in basic shell form. Many maps released by professionals have been played and refined with default texturing everywhere and simple lighting just to allow navigation and gameplay. Modders simply don't have access to those kinds of playtesting resources to make sure that their levels are well designed before they're released. Given that it can take a very long time for modders to produce something of "good" quality, what is their incentive to keep working on the project during that lengthy development period?

The question is how to keep a team of people with these not inconsiderable skills dedicated to producing a mod over a period of several months, if not years, in order to produce a product to be released for free. This aspect is not exclusive to DAO modders. Few mods to AAA titles have resulted in the creators making money as a result, though some notable exceptions do exist: Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942 and Defence of the Ancients both eventually ended up netting monetary payback, though this was by no means an immediate payoff. For the most part, modders (apparently) do it for the love of the craft, and/or potentially as something to add to a resume in order to break into the gaming industry.

My total monetary profit from Alley of Murders: $0.00.

DAO modding does not seem to be alone in a slow decline of modding popularity, particularly for AAA titles. "Simple" modding to tweak appearances and "numerical" aspects of gameplay (e.g. health/damage/ammo values) are still around, and even custom maps are still made (although again fewer than in years gone by), but the idea of additional playable content in mod form is becoming more and more rare. To follow this trend, we should look at the history of modding - which is what I'll be covering in my next post.

Dialogue, animation and camera work

2011-10-10T09:41:00.000+11:00

Recently I've being playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution between my modding sessions, and found reason for all the effort I've been putting into dialogue integration within The Shattered War. Rather than attempting to explain what I mean, it's far easier to show it with a video:

Now, I'm using Deus Ex Human Revolution as an example here simply because that one conversation demonstrated both good and bad ways to use animation and camera angles. I could have quite easily used another game to demonstrate these flaws - the Dragon Age franchise is certainly guilty of over-animation on more than a few occasions, as is virtually any game featuring "close up dialogue".

A lot of non-verbal communication cues are given through body language and facial expression, two aspects that are difficult to convey on a virtual actor. This is a big reason why video games resort to more "animated" characters with more hand, head and body movement than a normal person or an actor on-screen. The problem is that when these go too far (as demonstrated in the video), it ends up hindering the dialogue rather than helping it. Just as overacting on the television or movie screen harms the quality of their media, so too does virtual overacting.

The take home message here is to make sure that when designing dialogue (or cutscenes), someone has to watch the work to make sure it looks believable. It's a time consuming process, especially as the amount of dialogue increases, but if the virtual actors are going to be convincing, it is necessary. If a player is paying attention to the movement of the character rather than the lines they are delivering, it's too much.

Hacking minigames: Lessons learned

2011-10-02T20:10:00.003+11:00

In my recent post on minigames, I discussed hacking minigames within BioShock, Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2, Alpha Protocol and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. With varying strengths in style, aesthetics and gameplay, these five titles demonstrate good and bad aspects of mini-game design. There are a few specific points on which they help demonstrate how "good" minigames can be made.

Fallout 3's hacking demonstrates why a minigame should not be logic-based. For any minigame, the problem space is going to be relatively small (hence why it's a minigame), and it will be repeated a number of times. Given these constraints, it will not take the average player long to determine an optimal means to succeed and hence effectively remove any challenge it poses. At this point, the minigame no longer presents a challenge, but merely occupies time - it becomes "filler content", a chore rather than enjoyment.

If players wanted to grind, they'd play an MMO

Deus Ex: Human Revolution doesn't quite present a logic puzzle, but it is a strategy based minigame. However, the strength of its strategy is weakened by the strong role played by random chance. Strategy games such as Total War do not rely so heavily on randomness (though it does exist), because a primary reliance on chance as a deciding factor only serves to aggravate the strategist player. Worse still, as the player upgrades their hacking abilities, devices with lower security ratings become trivial to defeat, while higher rated devices exacerbate the random nature rather than skill because of the rapid pace with which they will trace the player and cause them to fail the hack.

This brings us to several key elements of a mini-game:
1) A minigame should not rely on logic.
2) A minigame should not rely primarily on chance.
3) A minigame should not be trivial.

So now having identified things a minigame should not be, the question then is what should it be? First and foremost, it must be simple. A minigame is a small mechanic, which should be simple to grasp. Secondly, it should require skill to succeed rather than luck. It must be up to the player's judgement and/or reflexes that primarily determines their success, not an invisible random number generator. I imagine there are some people that might argue that they have favourite minigames that do not follow these tenets, but for the most part, these two simple rules should suffice.

Rockstar realised that even poker should have a "skill" mechanic added

Why? Because they're the hallmark of popular web-based and mobile games; the casual gaming market. That's right, professional game designers on AAA titles have something to learn from indie, mobile and web game designers. These games have simple mechanics that are easily understandable, repeatable, and are enjoyable to boot. I'm not suggesting that I want to see Angry Birds in Mass Effect 3, but Mass Effect 2 already had a simple "turret defence" minigame that was infinitely more enjoyable than planet scanning. Tried and true "classic" gaming mechanics adapted to new settings and designs are what will make for engaging mini-games.

This might seem to suggest that I'm stifling creativity here and suggesting games not advance in style or invent new mechanics. I wouldn't advocate that for a moment. But, if you consider your game as an overall package, where do you want to push the boundaries of creativity and flair? Is it in the mini-games, or the core mechanics of the gameplay itself? If you're aiming solely for the former, then perhaps you're designing the wrong type of game. This isn't to say that minigames can't be original, and indeed, new games and minigames are created all the time; but if you're looking to create something new, these classic mechanics are where you should look for inspiration.

The Shattered War: Teaser Trailer

2011-09-26T23:59:00.002+10:00

Today's post is an announcement for The Shattered War!

There's a new high resolution (720p) teaser trailer out to whet your appetite for the adventures in store for all players. I've set this post to display in a resolution of 480p by default, but please increase it to 720p if you want the best possible view!

Enjoy and spread the word!

Hacking minigames

2011-09-26T00:30:00.000+10:00

A well executed mini-game is a great way to break up the gameplay patterns and introduce variety into a game for a player. If done well, it can add to the player's immersion and offer an additional small set of mechanics or strategies to master to complement the overall game. However, a mini-game that stylistically and aesthetically matches the overall tone of the game and the theme of the mini-game itself is excellent.

To that end, let's quickly analyse a few "hacking" minigames across different titles. While hacking by necessity limits itself to titles involving technology, there is still a wide variety of games and mechanics that have been implemented by developers. In a break from my normal tradition on analysing game design, I'm going to grade each out of 5 on three elements:
Style - How much it matches the "theme" of hacking. Do the aesthetics and gameplay make it feel like the player is "hacking"?
Theme - How well does it match the overall theme and aesthetics of the game? Does it feel like a coherent part of the overall game?
Gameplay - How do the mechanics of the minigame play out? Does it provide the player the opportunity to break up regular gameplay and master a (set of) game mechanic(s)?

Some of the numbers I provide might be a little controversial, but I'm including them as my personal subjective measure of the success of various components.

BioShock
Here is a mini-game that demonstrates an superb connection with the overall aesthetics and style of the game. The pipemania style mini-game to connect the start node to the end node matches the water themes of the game with commendable skill, and provides an enjoyable (and arguably proven) game mechanic to keep people interested. Player upgrades to increase the skill with hacking augment the connectivity with the overall game without hindering the core gameplay of the minigame.

Its main weakness is that this immediately recognisable mechanic does little to ingratiate itself with the idea that the player is "hacking" a machine. The player is quite clearly playing a "connect the pipes" game rather than anything that has a clear connection with the idea of hacking a device. The other weakness in the gameplay of the minigame is because of how repetitious and tedious it eventually becomes. However, this is technically not a failing of the minigame itself, but a failing of the game for the number of times it makes you perform the hacking minigame.

Style: 1/5
Theme: 5/5
Gameplay: 5/5

Fallout 3
Fallout 3 gave us "mastermind" as a hacking game. If given a group of words, pick the correct password over a series of guesses, where the player is told the number of letters they have in the correct position after each guess.

Initially, this seemed like an excellent mechanic, but it did not take long for it to break down. While the presentation was quite good and help impart the feel of a broken civilisation with broken computer terminals, the construction of the minigame itself was shallow and quickly predictable. Players quickly learned how to approach the fairly simple problem and could almost guarantee success every single time. It had all the repetitiveness of BioShock's pipemania without the associated skill requirement or time limit.

Style: 2/5
Theme: 3/5
Gameplay: 1/5

Mass Effect 2
Mini-games are one of the weak aspects of the Mass Effect series, and ME2's hacking mini-game doesn't really do much to buck this trend. It's simple symbol matching exercise on a scrolling grid, with a time limit and "danger squares" that can hinder the player's progress.

Aesthetically and stylistically it matches the overall feel of Mass Effect 2 quite, and potentially gives the player a vague "hacking" feel. However, it's a fairly lacklustre mechanic on the whole. There is a small degree of skill in its execution, but nothing that feels terribly taxing or engaging. Admittedly it's better than the bypass mechanic or (yuck) planet scanning, but those really don't offer a lot of competition.

Style: 2/5
Theme: 3/5
Gameplay: 2/5

Alpha Protocol
Alpha Protocol presents the player with a large "find-a-word" where they must locate and "lock in" two sequences of characters within a large character grid within a time limit. The trick is that all the characters on the grid periodically change except for the two sequences within the grid. However, should the player take too long, these sequences can "relocate" once during the hack. The difficulty can be surprisingly deceptive, but it can be good challenge.

On a console, each thumbsticks controls the location of one of the two sequences; move the left thumbstick to move the left sequence, move the right thumbstick to move the right sequence. However, if you play on a PC, prepare to be infuriated by a poor control system using the keyboard and mouse, as the reaction of the controls is sluggish and can frequently result in an "incorrect lock-in", which results in a time penalty. This is one case where the PC is vastly inferior in its controls, and I'd deduct 1 (possibly 2) marks from the gameplay score because of this problem. Apart from this issue, this minigame matches both the overall tone of the game and imparts a good "hacking" motif.

Style: 3/5
Theme: 3/5
Gameplay: 4/5

Deus Ex

The aesthetics of the hacking in Deus Ex are superb, as it gives you what effectively appears to be a network layout. It is up to the player to analyse the best options to reach a target node (or multiple target nodes) in order to succeed at the hack. The unfortunate weakness of the system is the arbitrary nature of the gameplay due to the chance element of "detection". Every action within the minigame brings a risk of "detection" by the computer's security system, which immediately imposes a timelimit on the player's actions before they are detected and fail the hack. Nodes can be optionally captured that will assist the hack or provide external benefits to the player, forcing them to weigh up the pros and cons of risking "detection" against rewards like additional money or experience.

The problem with the detection mechanics is that it introduces the problem that there is no (or very little) player skill involved in the success or failure of the hack. Once the player is detected, the minigame degenerates into a click sequence that inevitably plays out exactly the same way each time. A hack can result in guaranteed failure if the player is detected upon their first action, whereas a retry could result in a straightforward success if the percentage chance of detection happens to go in the player's favour. There is an attempt to address this problem through the introduction of "stop worms" (which momentarily stall the detection countdown and hence player failure) or "nuke viruses" (which automatically capture a network node with chance of detection), not to mention player upgrades that increase the character's abilities which are necessary to hack "more secure" systems. Despite this integration that reinforce the concept of having to balance resources that runs through the entire game, these are still band-aid solutions that don't really solve the problem of an arbitrary difficulty.

Style: 5/5
Theme: 4/5
Gameplay: 2/5

While the appraisal of these different hacking mechanics might be an interesting enough topic in and of itself, I'm going to use it as a pre-cursor to a discussion about mini-game mechanics in general. That, however, will have to wait until another blog post...

Encourage players towards mastery

2011-09-09T21:09:00.001+10:00

In my last post I talked about the game Darksiders and some of its shortcomings in relation to gameplay. One area that I thought the game was quite fun for the most part was in its fighting mechanics. As a beat-em-up game, it is mandatory that these mechanics be enjoyable. However, there is one significant deficiency in how the combat plays out that fails to capitalise on a potential means to improve it: the game does not provide incentives for players to master of the fighting mechanics.

The immediate and knee-jerk retort to this criticism is that the incentive is "not dying", which is accurate. However, this ignores the vast potential for improvement in the form of player-defined challenge. This is whereby players set themselves goals above and beyond what are enforced by the mechanics of the game itself. In stealth games, it may not just be to survive the level, it may be to do the entire level without being seen. Or it could to an entire level and to leave everything exactly how it was before the player entered - every door opened is shut, any light turned off is turned back on, any item (barring that which the player intends to steal) is returned to its rightful place. Other genres might see the player attempt a "no-reload" challenge, or a speedrun to finish the game in the shortest time possible, among many other possibilities.

It's possible to finish Morrowind in under four and a half minutes

These examples push the boundaries of what most players might do, and in the case of speed runs often "break" the normal mechanics of the game. However, the concept of providing players with self-governed challenge above that provided by the game is not only a great way to encourage players to replay a game, but also to improve their skill in the mechanics of the game. For an example, let's compare Batman: Arkham Asylum (B:AA) to Darksiders. In Darksiders, upon defeating an enemy, you claim "souls", typically blue souls, which represent the currency in the game used to buy items and upgrades. In B:AA, you gain experience from defeating enemies, which allows you to level-up and "buy" items and upgrades. The core difference is that B:AA actively rewards you based on how well you have mastered its combat system. Furthermore, it directly tells you what aspects of that combat system you have mastered.

These two games (as with many beat-em-ups) feature a "combo counter", keeping track of how many hit you've strung together in a sequence without missing or taking a blow. However, B:AA rewards the player who has a high maximum combo counter, using more challenging moves, and also for using a variety of different moves throughout the fight. It shows a separate message for each of these in an unobtrusive manner to show to the player how well they did in a particular fight. Furthermore, the "combat challenges" outside of the main story campaign push this concept even further, giving the player a points score based on their success, and allowing them to create a "leaderboard" of their scores and that of their friends.

How well did you do? Arkham Asylum tells you.

Darksiders on the other hand does none of this. There is seemingly no benefit from generating large combos, and the game provides you no feedback about how well you are doing in combat besides the life meter of your character. It's not even clear whether "instant-kill" moves that the player can do offer any additional benefit aside from killing an enemy quicker than they otherwise might. It does incorporate fighting challenges into the main game, which offer additional souls based on your performance, but it never makes it clear exactly how much that bonus is - the player is merely left to guess how well they may or may not have done. These feel more like "training exercises" to teach the player particular basic mechanics and strategies rather than real "challenges". While this is appropriate given they are a mandatory part of the campaign, they lack the "challenge" of those in B:AA. Furthermore, they can't be repeated as individual challenges outside of the main campaign to allow the player to practice mastering a particular fighting technique or scenario.

Do I instant-kill or not? I don't know; the game doesn't tell me!

B:AA encourages players to master its mechanics, to practice and learn to excel. This sort of encouragement results in greater player engagement, because while they can just "muddle through" with enough talent to get by, most players will want to achieve and gain the rewards that come from increased skill. The key is to tell players what they are doing right, and assign them a clear and tangible benefit from doing so. Simply saying "bonus" without saying why, or worse, invisibly rewarding the player, does not provide them with any incentive to "do well". Additionally, also make sure that this is done in an encouraging fashion. Don't penalise players for doing something wrong, but instead reward them for doing something right.

This encouragement will keep players coming back for more, make them want to improve their skills, master the mechanics of the game, and ultimately make them more engaged with the game - and an engaged and engrossed player is a happy player.

Don't Forget Fun

2011-09-05T23:26:00.000+10:00

A while ago I played through Darksiders, a beat-em-up where you play the role of "War", one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Now, while the writing most definitely fell into the mediocre category, the game on the whole was quite fun. However, there were design aspects that meant the game fell far short of what it could have been.

Part of the problem with Darksiders is that it cobbles together a whole bunch of ideas from different games. Platforming and puzzles have become standards in the modern beat-em-up, and the Prince of Persia series was great for mixing these aspects together with beat-em-up combat. Darksiders does okay in this regard, but its shortcoming is that the game is schizophrenic in its presentation and design. You have completely new abilities and mechanics dumped upon you as the game progresses, but few of these mesh well together. You get a gun, then a horse, then a grappling hook, then a portal gun, then "see invisible" mask, and a few other goodies besides. All these things might be interesting in their own regard, but they simply don't work well together and force you to engage with new mechanics which are used for a period and then largely abandoned.

Copying portal was out of place, and generally not a good idea

Worse still, some of these mechanics become tedious. Playing portal in Darksiders for the most part requires little thought or puzzle solving, for all the portal locations are predetermined, leaving the player with few possible options to solve a problem. Worse, the game counter-intuitively has the mechanic such that it is possible to shoot a new portal through an existing portal, yet at no point is this actually explained to the player, which resulted in many players engaging in intentional suicide/respawn patterns in order to establish a portal in what seemed like an otherwise unreachable location. Movement mechanics and particularly the "see invisible" mechanic led to backtracking that added very little to the game except extended playtime.

Players should not need to come to the same location over and over again

This was one of the contributing factors to the game's main problem: it stopped being fun. The backtracking of the game meant players were going over old territory repeatedly, but even worse, they were dealing with enemies that became increasingly less fun to fight. This was through the introduction of single enemies that could deal a large amounts of damage and required a largely defensive strategy in order to defeat. Considering much of the fun of the combat of the game (as with many/most beat-em-ups) is the challenge and skill involved with stringing together combos in order to defeat a large group of enemies. Staged boss fights are the icing on the cake, but the bread and butter is the defeat of enemy hordes - a recipe that the Dynasty Warrior series understands implicitly, as that is the entire point of the game.

As the game progressed, the introduction of enemies such as Wraiths, Grappleclaws and Undead Shield Lords forced the player into more defensive fighting strategies, undermining the fun of the fighting activities the player had experienced early in the game. As Darksiders continued, its combat became less fun, and its gameplay more repetitive. Darksiders is one of those rare cases where it would have been much better if the game had ended half a dozen hours earlier. A shorter game would have cut out the additional repetition introduced by the tail end, not to mention the more tedious fighting sequences in the game. While it's an enjoyable romp, Darksiders will ultimately leave you feeling a bit irritated by the time you reach the end because of these shortcomings, and the fact that the boss fights become progressively easier until the fight battle feels wholeheartedly underwhelming.

These were dull and annoying to fight

The take home lesson from Darksiders is to not forget what makes your game fun. Good design is not about trying to pack as many different mechanics into a single game as possible, even if you're taking them from games that are very popular. It's not about making the game as long as possible if it's at the expense of the quality of the gameplay

Focus on one gameplay mechanic within a game (probably three at most) and make sure it is fun and has depth in order to make your game as enjoyable as possible. Try to make a gameplay mechanic easy to pick up, but difficult to master. Make it possible for the player to succeed, but if they wish to succeed at a higher degree of difficulty or earn some recognition of increased skill from the game (e.g. via a points system), they will have to learn and practice mastering the mechanic.

Make your primary mechanic fun and make sure the player can enjoy it for the entire length of the game, and you will have avoided the mistake that Darksiders makes.

BioWare and the irrelevance of the RPG

2011-08-27T21:31:00.001+10:00

I noticed recently that a few people jumped on a quote from BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk about the RPG genre in a recent interview.

While most of the article focuses on selling The Old Republic, there was an interesting comment in response to a question about BioWare's status as "the" RPG studio.
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Greg: "we had the RPG panel breakfast at GDC yesterday – and what was interesting about that was that we had the conversation about ‘what is an RPG’ and it’s a blend. The genres are blending right now, you’re getting lots and lots of progression and RPG elements in shooters – online persistence and so on.

It’s funny because the RPG in the context of the current world is – well, it’s not specifically irrelevant, but it’s becoming less relevant in and of itself. It’s more a function of ‘hey, this game has a great story’. For us having that emotion but also having other great features like combat and persistence of character progression and stuff."
---

As stated by many others, "RPG elements" have become increasingly pushed into other games, which has merely exacerbated the fight over "what makes an RPG?"

People have called BioShock an RPG because of the choice posed in that. I'd argue that it isn't because the choice is entirely moot. People praised The Witcher, but I found it a horrible game because I was handed a predefined character and personality and while I got to make choices, I was never roleplaying because I was always assigned Geralt's reasoning and rationale for any choice I might have made. People hated Dragon Age 2 and said it wasn't really an RPG because of an inability to affect the outcome of key events.

You can complain all you like, but you can't tell me this isn't an RPG

The story was the staple of the RPG for a long time, but now stories are common across many genres. Not all of them are great stories, but some RPGs have some pretty mediocre stories as well. Then you could argue it comes down to choices, but you occasionally get those in other games too. What about number based combat mechanics? Nope, they exist in other games as well.

The question this raises is at what point do the combinations of "RPG elements" make a game "an RPG" or "not an RPG"? As a blanket statement, I'd say that provided I can define the personality of my character and carry out actions and select dialogue that supports that character, the game is an RPG. However, under this definition, the Witcher isn't an RPG, and hence all its fans will burn me at the stake. And where does this leave games like the "action RPG"... or heck, even things like the old gold box games, or Eye of the Beholder, or Dungeon Master? RPGs ain't RPGs.

I can't say The Witcher isn't an RPG because it has a protagonist with a set character

The difficulty of a definition is something I've discussed before, and the past year or two have done nothing to assist in defining what defines an RPG. I'll frequently see people complain about the death of the "real RPG", attacking modern RPGs like Fallout 3/New Vegas, Dragon Age 2 or Mass Effect 2, while in the same breath praising their favourite old games. The hilarity of these are when these people attempt to define their rules for what makes an RPG. Recently I saw someone comment that Dragon Age 2 wasn't an RPG because its first act forces the player to do sidequests to collect money, an argument that falls flat because the same idea was used in Baldur's Gate 2, which is held up by many as the pinnacle of RPGs. Another claim was that any game where you're given a set character isn't an RPG, but The Witcher (1 & 2) would fail that test too, and I've seen more than a handful of people declare them the "last bastion of the real RPG".

Given this issue, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it's not the RPG that is irrelevant, but the definition of what is and isn't an RPG is irrelevant. Most genres can be fairly clearly defined: People know a first/third person shooter when they see one, or a stealth-em-up, an RTS or a puzzle game. But these genres relate to specific aspects of gameplay. If these games start including "RPG elements" (whatever they are), at what point do they switch genres and become an "RPG" or an "RPG hybrid"?

Deus Ex: Shooter? Stealth-em-up? RPG?

As for how Greg's statement reflects on BioWare's reputation, I think it's merely stating something that should have been fairly evident to people for a little while now.

BioWare have definitely been trending away from "classic" RPG mechanics for combat. There's a movement away from having a character's success determined primarily by the numbers of the character's stats and the players high level strategic direction, and a movement towards having a primarily reflex/controller-eye coordination based combat. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but without some level of control, it takes away the feeling of character progression that has effectively been a mainstay of the RPG genre since its inception.

There are some issues with "hybrid RPGs" at the current point in time, most notably the tendency towards a reduced number of enemy types. If all the enemies you are fighting look exactly the same throughout your entire adventure, regardless of the deluge of new and deadly skills and powers you can unleash upon your enemies, there's still a feeling of a lack of progression. In an RPG, enemy variety matters - which is part of why enemy scaling makes the combat of some newer games potentially seem less epic than some older games that would start by pitting you against rats and eventually have you working your way up to fighting golems, giants, dragons and demons. I'd suggest this may be one of the major contributors to people thinking that they "don't feel like an RPG" in such games.

Turning into a golem to kill a dragon, now that feels like progress!

I think BioWare have some careful ground to tread in terms of managing the expectations of existing and new fans. I make no secret of the fact that I'm a huge fan of their games, but there are signs that give me pause for thought. The development of the Dragon Age franchise concerns me a little in that there seems to be a push to "tell the BioWare Dragon Age story" while at the same time telling players that "they get to create their own Dragon Age story." I have no issue with developers writing the story that they want to tell, but they must be upfront with the player about how they will be able to affect the story. If major choices are going to be "ignored" or "manipulated" to make things exactly the way the developers want them to be, then it's poor form to suggest to the player that their choices matter.

But this comment hardly signifies "the death of BioWare" as some have claimed. If anything, it's just reinforcing BioWare's trend to push the RPG genre towards a more action-oriented market that's more accessible for people who don't have the patience to mull over hundreds of different character builds and don't want to read swathes of text while playing video games. Anyone who declares this to be a bad thing doesn't really love the RPG genre, because they don't want to share it with others that find it intimidating and overwhelming, but merely keep it stagnant and isolated to a dedicated niche market.

The RPG isn't becoming irrelevant, it's becoming more commonplace.

The Shattered War: Dialogue Update

2011-08-21T21:40:00.000+10:00

It's been quite some time since I've done a Shattered War update, so I thought I'd let people know what I've been working on.

Dialogue has been the primary focus of my modding efforts in recent times, writing conversations involving the major characters in the mod. Now, while this may seem a little strange, given how long I've been working on the mod, and how much of the mod is done, but I find this approach works better for me. While in many cases I've already outlined the content of what will be included in these conversations, the actual spoken lines are usually not written until I'm happy that the overall content provides sufficient character depth and development.

However, in addition to writing dialogue, I've also received recordings for a number of characters from several of my voice actors. These wonderful people are offering their time for free, and helping to bring the people within the mod to life.

Part of a finished dialogue

Even this process of voice integration adds significant time to the production of a mod in order to make everything look right. The choice of camera shot, when to cut from one camera to another, what gestures the character should use, how they should stand and their facial expression all must be reviewed before a conversation can be considered "complete".

Neutral facial expressions or gestures that don't match with the line result in a disconnect with the dialogue, because it no longer looks "real". Players can and will pick up on abnormal movements, which will distract them from the true purpose of the cinematic dialogue in modern games: developing a believable scene in which the character can become emotionally invested. Characters whose facial expressions, gestures and tone of voice match to deliver an emphatic line help to give the player a reason to care about the adventure they are experiencing. It is up to the designer to make sure all those elements combine to give the most engaging scene to a player - and that is a responsibility that I take very seriously.

Developing a protagonist (Part 2)

2011-08-14T00:56:00.000+10:00

In my last post I discussed the tendency of games to provide players with choices that were either good or evil or fell into "categorised" choices of personality. One potential issue with such "choices" is that the player is not ever having to think about their protagonist's true character or how they would react in particular circumstances. These people are effectively metagaming, with only one option that they can pick during dialogue when making a decision, and that is based on a choice about the mechanics presenting the available personas to them. Such characters don't have the depth of a protagonist in film (or even in some games where the player gets no choice in terms of dialogue) because they operate on a predefined set of rules that can be very cleared outlined from very early on in the game. If we're taking a good/evil dichotomy (as is common in many games), the delineation is simple:

Good: Selfless, will give up rewards, protects innocent people, hunts bad guys, etc, etc.
Evil: Selfish, will threaten/bully/kill to gain rewards, doesn't care about innocent deaths, kills anyone who gets in their way, etc, etc.

These two opposite ends of the spectrum don't offer a whole lot of depth in terms of personality. One's a rampant goody-two-shoes, the other an egotistical psychopath, and never shall the two meet. Of course, this isn't to say that players can't decide to create a character with more depth that might provide a mixture of both personalities, but they need to be provided with reasonable choices in which to do so. Blanket black and white choices don't and can't provide this depth of character, even for the player who is trying to create it. We're frequently given choices equivalent to rescuing a stranded cat in a tree (and potentially breaking a limb in the process), or setting the tree on fire to incinerate both it and the cat. These aren't challenging choices that make for interesting or complex protagonists.

Rescue the innocent girl or "harvest her for power" isn't exactly a complex choice

Why should writers care about this? After all, flat characters can be a part of entertaining movies, and some of the best selling video games have featured some fairly uninspired and one-dimensional characters. However, this comes down to whether the writer wants to convince the player to take on a predefined stereotype persona, or help them create a complex and meaningful character as they go through the game. If players are presented with choices that don't neatly fit into Good/Evil or Paragon/Renegade (and don't have gameplay mechanic implications associated with them) then they are more likely to analyse the choice they are about to make and try and develop a rationale behind their decision. The aim is to stop players from going "I'm being good" or "I'm being evil" but actually have them engage with the game to the extent that they are creating a multi-dimensional protagonist of their own imagining.

If we're dealing with a roleplaying game, should the writers not attempt to get the player to create a character equally as complex as a protagonist from other storytelling mediums? Should the designers not only facilitate but actively encourage players to create a fully fleshed out and realistic protagonist with a believable personality? The player may start the game with a shell of a protagonist, maybe even one of the three basic stereotypes listed above. But by the end of a story with well-crafted decisions, they will have developed a character with a set of morals and values every bit as complex as the most fully realised characters within the game.

Faith really didn't gain any personality in Mirror's Edge

It should also be considered that some people play their protagonist as a virtual avatar - they "are" the protagonist within the game world, and make all decisions as though they are the main player in the story. Arguably, these players offer potentially the greatest reward for a writer: the ability to teach the player something about themselves.

If a player is forced into a true dilemma where they are forced to pick between two very hard choices, then they will potentially learn something about themselves. Would they risk lives by letting a criminal go free and tracking him to potentially catch a bigger fish in the pond, or would they bring them in straight away? Would they allow a mother to sacrifice her life to save her son's, or would they risk both of their lives in an attempt to save them both?

Save a friend/ally/lover or the lives of strangers... now we're getting warmer.

The protagonist should be the most important and complex character within the story. This axiom is commonly used when determining the overall worth or emotion or long-lasting impact of a film. Given this is such an important aspect of storytelling in film, theatre and prose, why is it such a frequently neglected aspect of storytelling within computer games? Gordon Freeman is a blank, emotionless, silent slate: it is up to the player to "be" Gordon and provide him with their thoughts. War from Darksiders has little personality, and along with Marcus Fenix from Gears of War, is practically a static character despite the events within their respective games. Even Alan Wake, a story about a writer, has a personality that's almost as flat and lifeless as they come.

In part, this flat nature may be because these characters never really progress beyond the basic traits that are shown to the player in the earliest stages of the game. They're never forced to develop or show what they are made of besides the straightforward collection of stereotype traits because they're never placed in a situation where they have to make a tough choice. If the protagonist can be placed into a true dilemma, where there is no clear "right" or "wrong", then just as with other story telling mediums, they must display their true character and their values through this choice. These choices are where protagonists from other mediums really shine and mature as characters in front of the audience's eyes.

Games that feature defined characters where the player does not make key game decisions can and should evolve through the story. The protagonist is a willful character that the player is taking through the events of the game, so they should be placed into situations that will demonstrate their true personality and values to the player. This will let the player see more than just surface characterisation, and show a deep and complex protagonist. In Assassin's Creed, Altair goes from being self-centred and arrogant to a more humble and understanding hero. In Thief 2, Garrett leans to trust a former adversary and even laments her death. These characters retain the core personality introduced very early on in the game, but grow and mature throughout their storytelling.

Garrett didn't let Viktoria die for nothing

If the player is defining the personality of the game's protagonist, force them to make situations that are truly dilemmas. Force them to pick between the lesser of two evils, or alternatively the greater of two goods. They might moan afterwards that they "had to play through the game twice" or "it didn't make that much difference" or "why couldn't I do both??!?", but ultimately this kind of choice makes the protagonist of the game more complex. This forces the player to examine what their character (or they themselves, if they are playing a "virtual protagonist") would do when placed into this situation.
This is practically the ideal situation for a roleplaying game, as the player is truly forced to adopt a role.

However, there are two very important caveats when dealing with these types of choices. Make sure that these "true dilemmas" are not hamstrung by heavy-handed "alignment" systems that assign a "value" to each decision. If you have a good/evil scale (regardless of what your chosen axis/axes might be) do not modify it because of a player's choice in a "true dilemma". Doing so immediately assigns a value judgement to each option within the dilemma, which means that it is no longer a dilemma and hence the immense value of the choice is lost.

Why did Mass Effect 2 have to dish out paragon/renegade points?

The second caveat applies to all video game choices, but it is even more important when it comes to dilemmas: Don't have a protagonist say "why" they acting the way they are. For one, it sounds unnatural. Only the most poorly written characters verbosely explain the rationale for their actions, because people don't act that way in real life. Secondly, the player is the one making the decision, complete with their own rationale. There is no possible means for the designers to think of every possible rationale that players might have for making a decision, and attempting to do so will only annoy the players that have come up with something you haven't thought of. And that will probably happen in more cases than you would care to imagine.

Designer should be able to get players emotionally and mentally involved with protagonists by giving them true dilemmas to deal with. Let them evolve, grow and show real character and personality throughout the game, and you'll have a more interesting hero for your players to empathise with as they take that journey.

Developing a protagonist (Part 1)

2011-08-10T19:14:00.000+10:00

Writing in video games is a unique challenge. While elements of writing, structure and story are common across writing, theatre and film, each have their own idiosyncrasies and challenges that demand different styles and approaches. The same is entirely true of video games, for while writing in this medium certainly shares many basic elements with these other forms, the video game writer has to deal with problems not faced by other writers. One of these key issues is that the player is the protagonist of the story - the player is taking the actions that will drive it to its conclusion as opposed to the being a passive viewer watching a defined character progress through it.

In many cases, this allows the player to project some degree of their own personality (or another desired personality) onto the protagonist character, whether it be through gameplay (e.g. a fastidious hero who meticulously searches every area for whatever supplies he or she can), or directly through persona-defining actions (e.g. picking a course or action or dialogue style). This can happen to an extent in other media, whereby people have slightly different interpretations of a character within the bounds of the scenes and events presented to the reader/viewer, but rarely is there the level of freedom granted in games, particularly when dealing with RPGs that allow great variance in defining the protagonist's persona. Since it's easier to work with the extreme case to illustrate a point, I'll focus this discussion on roleplaying games. Admittedly it's my favoured genre of video game because of the strong story-telling elements and the player's ability to define their protagonist, but the ideas that follow can to some extent be applied to all video games.

We don't want games to have protagonists with as little depth as in this movie

However, it is important to take established principles of story-telling from these forms and examine their usage within video game writing. One such principle or idea I was presented with recent struck a great chord with me and its application to video game writing. The idea was simple: The choice between good and evil is no choice at all.

As this idea was presented in terms of theatre or film, the issue is presenting a character with a "dilemma" in which the established character can only logically make one of the choices without completely undermining their established persona. It's where a character is presented with a choice that effectively provides no choice, because they cannot make any other decision apart from the one that the audience expects. The argument that follows is that the only interesting decisions are where the character must wrestle with their own morals or values in order to make that decision. The interest frequently comes from characters that make a decision that is difficult and shows the character undergoing a great change.

District 9 climaxes with the growth of a character's persona

This isn't to argue that these foregone conclusions can be uninteresting in and of themselves. James Bond never has to make a decision as to whether or not he will save the world, but the Bond films never lack in drama and excitement. Pirates of the Caribbean sees Jack Sparrow wrangle his way to getting his hands on The Black Pearl and double-crossing Barbossa after striking a deal with him. There is very little drama or interest in their actual decisions, but there is a great deal of excitement and interest generated by the events that result because of those actions.

Of course, the question to ask now is: "How can this principle be applied to games?" How many times have you played an RPG that provides dialogue options like:

Sure, I'll help you.
Only if I get paid.
You must die!

The problem with this is that it typically doesn't actually present the player with a difficult choice. There's no wrangling from the player in trying to work out what they will do. We have responses based on three character archetypes: the hero, the mercenary, and the evil-doer. Many players will decide upon a particular type of character that they want to play and will merely pick the relevant choice based upon their chosen persona. This means that the player generally doesn't really care about the dialogue, because their choices are largely predetermined based on the chosen archetype they've picked. They might care about the character and story and be involved with how the plot develops, but ultimately they've gone down one path that was chosen from the very beginning.

Which archetype: James Bond, Jack Bauer or Jason Bourne?

First off, I should say that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I know many people who have played the Mass Effect series in this way - always picking the paragon option or always choosing to act like a renegade. They've still had a lot of fun playing the game, potentially even going through with both options in two separate playthroughs, and have come to really like their character, even though they're a very simple character in terms of the depth of their personality.

The trend towards voiced protagonists can accentuate this tendency, as the player builds an "image" of a particular personality because of their protagonist's spoken dialogue reinforcing one of the chosen archetypes that the character can portray. Unvoiced protagonists may offer the player more nuance and variance in how the player imagines the exact delivery of the line, which may increase the likelihood of them not neatly fitting into a predetermined archetype. Of course, this is speaking in generalities, and players can still make complex characters even with voiced characters.

From personal experience in Mass Effect, I constructed a mostly paragon character, but one who wasn't afraid to stray into renegade territory where conflict was inevitable. However, mechanics like the paragon/renegade scale mean that players will almost certainly focus predominantly on one such path because of the vast gameplay advantages obtained from doing so. As much as this type of mechanic is pushed as a means to enhance roleplaying it frequently ends up detracting from it instead because the player can end up more concerned with being able to receive the rewards that only come from pursuing one path exclusively rather than walking some kind of middle ground.

I'll discuss the ramifications of these types of choices and how we can work towards more developed protagonists in my next post...

DA2 analysis: A lack of agency

2011-08-03T23:04:00.000+10:00

I think it's time I delved into some analysis of DA2. It's been a while since the game was released, and as such, I'm going to be pulling apart some aspects of the game to explain where I felt the game did well, and where it didn't do so well. To this end, I'm going to go into some fairly significant spoilers of both Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2, so if you've not played these games and don't want to have the plot ruined, tune out now.

The first issue that I want to discuss about DA2 is the lack of player agency in the plot. Firstly, it might be wise to describe exactly what this means. To take an academic definition: "player agency is an attributed, contextualised power to effect meaningful change". Put more simply, player agency is the ability of the player to affect their game world and their gameplay experience. It allows the player to make the key decisions and actions that push the game and its story forward. Unfortunately, this is one area where DA2 falls remarkably short.

I loved playing Emelie Hawke, but felt like I was being taken for a ride rather than driving it

Many players mistakenly attribute the shortcomings of DA2's writing upon the lack of the chaos of the blight and the darkspawn as in the first game. However, the intrigue of DA:O wasn't generated by the darkspawn threat. The blight was the catalyst and the driver of the plot, but it lacked the punch of the individual stories that drove the four cornerstones of game.

Those cornerstones were the stories through which the player gained their four armies in support to defeat the blight: A poisoned Arl with a son possessed by a demon, an ancient curse fueling a conflict between a Dalish tribe and interlopers, internal conflict between feuding mage groups, and a dwarf obsessed with a power that was buried for a reason. These were the drivers behind the core stories of interest that made people enthralled by the game.

Isolde's guilt and Connor's possession were more interesting than mindless darkspawn slaughter

The darkspawn were merely the "big bad evil" threat that was needed to fulfill the common need of players to have some big threat that they can keep in mind as something to defeat. It wasn't until you had the conflict of Awakening that they actually became an interesting entity in their own right. While having an antagonist is frequently an important factor to an intriguing tale (hence my "antagonists" series of posts), as long as there are ongoing sources of conflict to drive the plot and the player towards a goal, there is still plenty of scope for interest within that story.

DA2's core problem with the writing is that the player can often feel like they are dragged along for the ride rather than actively pushing the events of the story forth. Hawke is a key player in a plot that evolves around him/her rather than being the protagonist who makes the plot happen. This means that the player doesn't really get a sense of agency in making decisions, because many of the key events occur outside of their control, and they merely are there to "clean up the mess".

Did the Qunari have to go on killing spree over a book?

The effect of DA2's story on the world of Thedas is far greater than DAO's, with Morrigan's disappearance and child being the only thing with the potential to carry anywhere near as much weight. So why is it that the story feels so much weaker to so many players?

The crux is the problem is that the writers forced particular outcomes for the development of the overall story arc of the Dragon Age franchise. As a result, Hawke is forced into situations throughout each of the acts and has no power to prevent or control the development of any of them. In Act 1 Hawke is betrayed by Varric's brother for the mysterious red crystal. In Act 2, the Qunari attack the city of Kirkwall to retrieve their stolen Tome of Koslun, and this seemingly incites the potential for future Qunari violence even if their Arishok leader leaves instead of being killed. In Act 3, the ongoing conflict between the mages and templars explodes (literally) as Anders blows up the Chantry and subsequently causes all mage circles across Thedas to rebel.

Anders should not have more power than the player in driving the story

It does seems that the separate stories conveyed through DA2 are a build-up that should pay off in subsequent titles. However, because these events always plays out in exactly the same way no matter what Hawke does, the player feels railroaded. Imagine if the player player could use diplomacy and tact to head off the crisis with the Qunari and prevent their attack entirely. There could have still be a strong sense of animosity pushed through this encounter, or alternatively the Qunari could have merely chosen to kill the Viscount to make an example of the nobility and leadership and the retribution that was necessary due to their inaction before leaving. If multiple options for instigating open conflict between the mages and templars had been implemented, this would have similarly left the player feeling as though they wielded the power to change the story.

If more variance had been introduced such that final conflict could have eventuated from different circumstances based upon Hawke's choices, as opposed to the choices of NPCs, then DA2 would feel like a far better game, because the player would feel far more empowered and as though they were playing an active role in the story rather than a reactive one. In this way, the player would have felt that Hawke was a true "Champion of Kirkwall" rather than a "Champion of circumstance".

Bad Game Writing: Homefront

2011-07-28T22:58:00.001+10:00

Homefront is a by-the-numbers first person shooter. It's got a modern setting with a wide variety of weapons, the usual 2-weapon system, regenerating health, cover-based (non wall-hugging) firefight mechanics, slow-motion "quick-time" events, a stealth level, rail-shooter segments, and the almost obligatory helicopter/UAV mission. It clocks in at around 3-4 hours, so is horrendously short even by FPS standards, but it's a fairly enjoyable experience in terms of actual gameplay. However, the game has one fairly severe and confronting deficiency: its writing.

Now, I know people don't play FPS games for the writing of their single player campaign, if they did, Modern Warfare 2 would have tanked horribly due to its incoherent plot and hideously sloppy attempts to evoke emotion. Any FPS with more depth than "aliens/zombies/Nazis invade" is normally a step ahead of the curve, even though the genre has had some movement towards meaningful and powerful narratives over the years. But there's some rather glaring problems with Homefront that warrant particular attention.

Racism
Let's deal with the elephant in the room straight away. Homefront comes across as a game steeped in racism, right from the opening where there's conflict in the middle east, and North Korea starts expanding and attempting to conquer the world. Now even putting the content aside, the delivery it what begins to grate on the player. As part of the opening sequence you see two parents executed in front of their child, who is then abandoned by the soldiers responsible to cry over the two corpses. This somewhat disturbing scene sets a precedent for the the content that continues throughout the game. Civilians placed into mass graves, the mass bombing of suburban areas and a raft of equivalently distasteful scenarios make the game paint the North Korean soldiers as a combination of the most violent, bloodthirsty and heinous war criminals throughout history.

The point may have been to paint a stark and brutal reality, but the way in which it is carried out smacks of manifest racism on the part of the writers. The Korean soldiers are pretty much depicted as remorseless and emotionless killers as a single unit, bent on hunting, killing and otherwise doing anything to subjugate all of America. Simply put, it reeks of manifest racism to the degree that it's almost offensive to watch. Moreover, the game continually reminds you that you're fighting "the Koreans" just in case you had forgotten the name of this overwhelmingly evil nation responsible for all the atrocities committed during the game.

This depiction of mass murder is confronting in more ways than one

Furthermore, it seems that the writers realised how bad this looked as some stage, and so they introduce you to Hopper the "Korean" squad member. Aside from the fact that I didn't realise he was meant to be of Korean heritage until one the characters you meet is a racist jerk towards him, and that it's never really brought up again make it feel like this was shoe-horned in to combat the writing throughout the rest of the game.

Another moment of self-awareness is when the game sees you end up in a village of "survivalists", who are painted to be every bit as savage and brutal as the Korean enemies. This time it's a group of backwater hicks who are shooting unarmed Korean soldiers in cold blood, while the people traveling with you make comments about what terrible people they are. However, when the racial slurs coming from these "survivalists" feel as though they could quite easily come from the mouths of your squadmates, the sanctimonious "racism is bad" preaching they deliver feels fairly hypocritical, especially given two of these characters have gone into a "kill 'em all" rage in reaction to events that occurred previously in the game.

"Don't worry, we're not as bad as they are!"

Presentation
Exacerbating the issues above is that Homefront's writing and voice acting don't really match the setting that they're trying to depict. For something that's played as a straight shooting, gritty representation of war, it comes across with some seriously ham-fisted delivery. The aforementioned mass graves scene starts off rather brutal, with the mechanical and cold reality of the scene hitting the player, but this is utterly destroyed when one of your teammates responds with utter rage. While this might be an understandable reaction for a person, the voice acting and their lines makes it feel overblown and overacted. The impact of the scene is not only lost, but is practically made to seem like an over-the-top action movie sequence, which almost turns the whole escapade into a terrible and poor-taste joke. Instead of feeling something disturbing as you would from visiting the killing fields in Cambodia, you're given a scene that inspires discomfort at how poorly it was managed.

As if this wasn't enough, the writers get self-referential at one point at started poking fun at themselves for the unimaginative ways in which the scenarios are forced to progress. At one point the other characters comment to the player that "that's the fifth thing you've survived falling off". If even the writers are making then you know that your scenarios are a little contrived. This one, however, I can potentially give the writers a free pass for, if they weren't involved in the process from the start. In many games, the plot is developed as a bit of an afterthought, tacked on to string gameplay scenarios together. I'm not saying for certain that this is what happened in Homefront's case (though it could explain a few things), it's practically impossible for writers to fix problems inherent from a repetitive "Michael Bay explosions first" mindset to "cinematic set-pieces".

Yep, you fall off this bridge

The problem that when all these elements combine, you're left with an unpleasant mix of atmosphere in your mouth. The handful of references that suggest that the game is aware of what it is presenting are at odds with the overall package. Homefront appears to be playing all its drama straight, when it really comes across as though it should be at least part parody. You half expect there to be a Team America "OH HARRO!" homage performance from a token Korean leader at some point, but it never arrives.

The poor writing, self-righteous "sympathetic" characters and the presentation of the North Korean troops as brutal murderers all produce a game that can come across as fairly offensive. I doubt this was an intentional thing, and it almost feels as though there was a recognition part way through the development of how its content would be interpreted, and there were a few band-aid attempts to salvage the situation. Developers and writers really should be mindful of the impression that they will be conveying through their game, and in this case that impression is not a good one. Which is a bit of a pity really, because despite the shortcomings of its writing and the very short length, Homefront's single player campaign is actually a fairly fun experience. Unfortunately its reputation and the overall feel is tarnished by the manner in which it is delivered.

Party NPCs: Interaction Mechanics (Part 2)

2011-07-19T22:35:00.001+10:00

My last post on NPC interaction mechanics focused on interactions initiated by the NPC's themselves. Interjections and time-based dialogues would result in the NPC starting the conversation with the player rather than the player choosing to talk to the NPC. In today's post I'll cover two common mechanics used to control conversations and NPC relationships where the dialogue is initiated by the player.

Event-based
This is an easily understood mechanic that is used in many RPGs. When the player talks to an NPC, the responses they can give and the questions that the player can asked are based on the current events of the plot. If the player has just met the NPC, they will likely be able to ask them about how they came to be here, or their current situation. As the game progresses, they might be able to ask them about previous victories or upcoming events.

Instead of having conversations based purely on specific events, the event-based option can also progress in a phased approach, as per Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2. In this case, it is often possible to be able to "progress" your personal (and/or romantic) relationship with a character after completing certain missions within the game. In Mass Effect, after every "core" mission, you can "do the rounds" and find out more about each of your party members. In Mass Effect 2, the progression is not quite so clear cut, but you can regularly return to find out more about them... provided they're not "busy".

Enough with the damn calibrations already, Garrus!

There are definite advantages to this kind of phased approach. For one, it allows the developer to space out the development of the relationship with the NPC. This prevents the possibility of the player exhausting a character's story arc or personal development in the early stages of the game by dishing it out at specified intervals. It is still the player's choice if they wish to find out about the character (unlike interjections or timed conversations), but it is done in such a manner that their character development can much both the actual and implied relationship between the player's character and the NPC. The direct relationship is the player's interactions, but the implied relationship is that suggested through the dialogue: e.g. passing mention of events that never actually occur within the game and the development of a relationship from being in close proximity to someone over a time in terms of the reality of the game world. These are things that the player infers would naturally happen; if you're traveling with someone for weeks and potentially months (or even years) on end as most RPGs tend to, it is natural that some sort of relationship (whether friendly or antagonistic) would form. The event-based mechanic implicitly plays upon this natural development of relationships.

Another positive is that the relevance of a discussion to recent or upcoming events helps to reinforce the consequences of past actions or increase the stakes of upcoming quests/missions. This is an excellent means to keep the tension and player motivation high. If a party NPC whom the player likes is telling them how important a particular quest is to them, then the player will be more likely to do it. Of course, the counterpoint is true also, if they don't like the party member, they might delay doing the quest until the latest possible moment out of spite. Provided that the character is being disliked because of the character's personality - rather than the lack thereof, poor writing, poor voice acting, or something similar - then this is still a positive outcome. Even if the player doesn't like the character, they've still had an emotional reaction which increased their engagement with the game. The player might begrudgingly complete the quest in the end, but in the meantime they've gained enjoyment from not doing so, and in some cases they might choose to not do it at all.

Some people wanted to kill off crew members

The major drawback to this approach is the visibility of mechanism. It's frequently obvious to the player what is happening. In Mass Effect 1, it quickly became obvious that the player could only progress a relationship after a "core" mission. In Mass Effect 2, the progression was less clear, resulting in annoying situations where the player would talk to everyone only to be given a stock line indicating the NPC had nothing new to say. Garrus' "Can it wait? I'm in the middle of some calibrations" line was so frequently repeated due him typically being one of the first crew members to be collected, and having a relatively small number of dedicated conversations.

The blatant nature of the conversation mechanic means that it can make the relationship feel artificial. Without some supplemental conversations in other areas, it can feel extremely mechanical and forced, meaning that it loses much of the emotional impact or connection with the character. This isn't to say that it is impossible, but it the player is acutely aware that the only reason for the culmination of the relationship (particularly if it's a romantic one) is because the final battle is just about to start, then it will likely feel less important.

Approval based
The mechanic relies on an existing "approval" system being built into the game's logic. This kind of system has been built into many games, where the player's friendship with an NPC is given some sort of numerical value dictating how "friendly" the relationship is. This number might not ever be explicitly shown to the player, maybe just as a measure on a scale or possibly not even shown at all, but it the key that drives the conversation mechanic. This played a key part in development of the relationships within Dragon Age: Origins, and the nature of the relationships within Dragon Age 2.

Friendship or Rivalry: which dictates your NPC relationship?

The key issue here is that it is the approval rating value that provides access to new conversation options. Much like with the event based system, new conversations will not open up until the approval reaches a set point. This has the advantage of feeling much more organic than the event based system, as approval may increase through the player's decisions with the player in the party, providing gifts (as per Dragon Age: Origins) or other external factors. This makes the relationship feel much more believable, particularly when the player is traveling with the party member and performing actions on which the NPC approves of, as it gives the impression the the NPC is "opening up" to the player character because they trust them more and more.

At a first glance, this seems like a fantastic system, until some of the ramifications and dependencies are analysed. For starters, this implies that the player is going to have a relationship such that the NPC's approval moves a large amount (in either direction) across the course of the game. Without this change in approval, additional options are never unlocked, and the character feels flat and lifeless. Players who perform actions which both anger and please an NPC run the risk of not seeing of their character at all because the approval rating stays at a fairly neutral state. Furthermore, it will likely be necessary to write a lot more dialogue to account for the potential that the NPC may hate or mistrust the player, or alternatively trust them or love them entirely. These cases should require vastly different dialogue for a well written character, particularly if the player is pursuing a romance.

Are we talking love-hate or love-love?

Another potential issue is the ability of the player to short-circuit the relationship early on in the game. If the player has access to gifts, then it is potentially possible to increase the approval rating of an NPC to a significant extent early on in the game, opening up all the conversation options as a result. This can quickly develop and subsequently exhaust all the conversation options with a character very quickly, having them declare their undying love for the player near the very beginning of the game. This is more artificial and undermines the believability of the NPC far more than the event based system ever could.

This is also a potential problem when dealing with the natural gains of approval throughout the game. Often an NPC's approval will be modified because of a player's actions, but only if the NPC witnesses it first-hand, i.e. they are in the player's traveling party at the time. Metrics collected from RPGs have suggested that most players tend to have one specific party for the majority of the game and rarely deviate from that group of players, at least for a first playthrough. Despite this, there will typically be enough approval points dished out throughout conversations such that the party members will reach maximum (or minimum) approval part way through the game to account for party variation (among other factors). As such, even without gifts, it may be possible to exhaust the relationship "too early" within the game.

Leliana: from guarded companion to lover in six simple chantry relics

Lastly, there is a problem for the player in determining "when can I talk to the NPC next?" Without some clear indicator, the player has to periodically "check-in" on their NPCs to see if they have anything new to say. This potentially runs the risk of being every bit as annoying as getting "calibrations" lines in an event-based system.

In closing...
Party NPCs are arguably the most important characters within an RPG, so any time dedicated to making them and their relationship with the player seem more realistic is time well spent in order to increase the player's level of engagement with the game. Having addressed the need and importance for such relationships, and the mechanics to do so, I hope I've given people some food for thought on the subject. I'm contemplating a final post on this matter, covering up a few issues regarding mechanics and general ideas for designing NPC relationships that I've not addressed along the way. If readers are interested in these, let me know and I'll do a final wrap-up.

Party NPCs: Interaction Mechanics (Part 1)

2011-07-11T23:18:00.000+10:00

In my past two posts, I've been discussing the value of NPCs and their interactions with the player. So having addressed the value of such interaction, it's important to look at the means by which the personality of an NPC is conveyed to the player. Here I'm referring to the specific mechanics of conversation and how they are used to have the NPC interact with the player and other NPCs within the game world.

As such, I'm going to try and present a number of different categories of conversation or dialogue style that are used to facilitate this interaction, analysing the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Interjections
At the simplest level, NPCs should provide their own opinions on situations that they might feel strongly about. This need not actually be an interaction with the player, but merely the NPC making a comment to give an insight into their personality. This is a straightforward means to educate the player about the NPC's character by showing their reaction to specific circumstances. If the player has brought the character along, then they make a comment befitting their personality.

Not only can the NPC's knowledge or opinions can be used to develop the depth of their character, but it can also be used to enhance the player's understanding of the scenario, or to increase the emotional stakes of the scene. For prime examples of this, see any of the loyalty missions within Mass Effect 2. These missions involve a deeply personal aspect of the party member's life, which is used to push the plot events forward, give great insight into the history and behaviour of the character, and subsequently raise the tension of the scene through their reactions.

The consoling paragon Tali hug - your option during one of her scenes

One key shortcoming of this type of interaction is that the player has no "agency" in starting the interaction. That is, it is always up to the NPC in question to initiate the conversation, regardless of whether the player wants their input or not. If the player disagrees with the character, this can lead to them becoming annoyed with the NPC in question and potentially wanting to leave them behind. Obviously this is exactly the opposite of what you want as a writer, and can end up weakening the game and reducing the player's enjoyment instead of adding to it.

The other issue is that the player must bring a character along in order to get to know them. Arguably, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it provides a degree of realism. If the player never travels with an NPC and shares the adventure with them first-hand, then they are unlikely to become as close to that person as opposed to someone with whom they are entrusting their life. Going in a party with someone means that you get to gain that first-hand insight into their personality and behaviour, just as you would in real life. However, if this is represents a significant portion of the dialogue used to show the depth of a character, then any NPC that the player does not travel with will likely feel stale and shallow.

Timed interactions
This type of interaction was best show-cased in the romance dialogues of Baldur's Gate 2. In essence, the game required a set amount of "real-time" to pass before an interaction with the player's love interest would occur. Approximately every 30 minutes or so, the timer would reach its "end", and at the next "available" time, a romance dialogue would trigger. These would never occur in dungeons, in combat, and occasionally certain other conditions would have to be met (e.g. the party was about to make camp), but this was a means to keep a somewhat regular series of interactions occurring between the player and their love interest.

Jaheira's romance line was huge

The fantastic thing about this mechanism is that it allows for a "real relationship" to be built up with the character and the player because there's a sense of repeat and on-going interaction. The conversations occur frequently enough that the player can begin to feel a connection with character and personality of the love interest, which makes for a more believable relationship to be formed. This involved a lot of dialogue in which the player became exposed to the many intricacies of the NPC's personality: their struggles, their fears, hopes, history, past romances... in short, they were presented as a complete and complex character with whom the player could empathise, understand, and care for. When dealing with characterisation, the amount of content can directly correlate to the depth of the character presented, and the volume of content for the romantic interests in BG2 meant that these well-crafted characters were presented to the player with all their strengths and flaws.

However, one issue with this is the sheer amount of work required. The amount of dialogue required for the numerous romance conversations was massive, and in a modern game with full voice acting, would be prohibitive both in time, money, and storage space when it comes to console games. In games where the player must read all the text (or only has the opening line voiced, as was common in BG2), this option is more viable, though it still has the cost of writing all that dialogue.

Anders and company were never going to be given as much dialogue as text-only characters

This approach also bears two of the same problems as interjections in that it gives the player no agency in initiating conversation - they are always forced to wait for the timer to count down before the next one will trigger. It also forces the player to travel with the party member in question again, which may cause gameplay balance issues in games with smaller party sizes. If the player's desired love interest fulfills a similar combat role to the player themselves, they may struggle to prevail in combat if they wish to pursue a romance. While it could be argued that this is a good thing in terms of forcing roleplaying and giving the player a choice between combat prowess and having a romance with a party NPC, this is likely to be unpopular with many gamers. This kind of potential exclusivity or gameplay versus roleplay choice is one that must be considered carefully by the designers and writers involved as it potentially represents a triumph of "hard-choices" and "realism" over player enjoyment.

So there are two options for exploring party NPC character development. In my next post, I'll look at two more interaction mechanics, discussing their advantages and disadvantages.

Party NPCs: Development

2011-07-04T18:58:00.000+10:00

In my last post, I discussed the importance and value of party NPCs. However, in order for benefit to be gained from these characters, they need to be well developed characters. As with many elements of writing for video games, basic tenets of writing should be observed. There are some specific areas that should be addressed, because there are concerns that are unique to video games.

Complexity
While complexity is important for many characters, it is almost essential for party NPCs. These characters will frequently fill the role of player character's friends within the adventure, and thus it's useful if the player is able to develop some sort of connection with the NPCs. A shallow character with lacking depth or real motivations will usually feel like a hollow shell or cardboard cutout very quickly. It is good for characters to have some defining characteristic that makes them immediately interesting to the player, as this makes the player want to find out more about them. Keep in mind that if the character is one-dimensional and relies solely on that attribute, they will often be discarded because they are dull or uninteresting.

It is important to note that sometimes there are extreme exceptions to the rule - in this case one of the most memorable party NPCs of all time was amazingly one-note: in the form of the overwhelmingly single-minded violence loving character of HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic. His character revolved around the desire to kill and/or assassinate, but the eccentricity of the character, not to mention the hilarity that ensued from the majority of his conversation, meant that he was a hit with players.

HK-47: One of the best robots of all time

NPCs should grow
Characters generally should not be static during a piece of writing, and games are no different. Characters should be affected by the situations they are placed in: they should react, learn and grow based on what happens to them in an adventure. This may result in slowly exposing more of the NPC's personality to player, but it also can modify the personality traits that they have already seen.

More importantly, in a video game the player has the opportunity to make decisions, and those decisions could potentially affect a character's outlook on certain subjects. This is where character growth differs from other mediums, as the player can potentially be given the chance to direct an NPC's development. When used correctly, this is a powerful tool to truly empower the player and make them feel like they have a meaningful relationship with the character. When a player's relationship with an NPC could actually result in different events occurring in the main story, the player gains a real sense "changing the landscape of the game world".

A "hardened" Leliana or Alistair can behave very differently

Forming an emotional connection
Players should be given a reason to care about a party NPC. Whether they save their life, have some personal investment in their safety, or perhaps they are essential for the plot, the player should be given some rationale behind wanting or needing an NPC around. Ideally this should ultimately come about because the player finds the character interesting rather than having some forced justification for their presence.

Strangely enough, it should also be considered that the player need not actually care about a character in order to like them. It is always important to note that a character that inspires any sort of strong emotional reaction from the player, provided it is to the personality of the character itself (rather than poor writing or the like) can be considered a good thing. In my first playthrough of Dragon Age 2, I found myself detesting the character of Fenris, yet at the same time forced to acknowledge it was the character's personality that I hated - which indicated good writing, not bad writing.

I couldn't wait to kill Fenris

HK-47 also forms a great example for me in this case as well. In my first playthrough I never liked taking him along with me because he would inevitably cause havoc and death that my peaceful Jedi protagonist didn't want. However, I would talk to him whenever I had the opportunity, simply because he was so hilarious. My character could not have disagreed with him more if he'd deliberately tried to be antagonistic, but the unique nature of HK-47 meant that I as a player had to talk to him.

Romance
For many gamers, BioWare started this trend back in the days of Baldur's Gate 2. It has only become increasingly popular as games develop a more cinematic approach with increasingly complex and visually appealing (both aesthetically and graphically) characters. Some players may have struggled to care about a character that was little more than a small portrait comprised of a few hundred pixels, but a voiced acted NPC with a full range of emotions and a wide gamut of non-verbal expression through their face and gestures can provide a powerful entity for developing an emotional connection.

People formed emotional connections with these

This is in some ways the logical extension of the above two points, as a romance not only allows the player to exert a force on the NPC, but it also enables the formation of an emotional connection with the character. Going back to Baldur's Gate 2, many players were outraged when their love interest was forcibly taken from them and their life was in serious danger. This provided a powerful incentive to push forward and rescue their "virtual loved-one", and made the victory in battle over their captor significantly more rewarding.

The fervent adoration for characters, not to mention the keen interest in announcements of love interests within RPGs only goes to demonstrate the popularity of type of character development. It is unlikely to disappear any time soon, but provided it is done well, it adds a great deal of depth to a character, not to mention provides the player with a potent reason to be engaged with their gaming experience.

Having defined the importance of well written party NPCs, and the means by which meaningful characters can be written, the last key issue to address is to define how the mechanics of the interaction between the NPC and the player will work. But I'll leave that discussion for my next post.

Party NPCs: Importance

2011-07-01T22:26:00.001+10:00

The concept of the party NPC has been around in RPGs for quite some time. These are characters who join the player for their own reasons, and have their own thoughts and opinions. As the genre has matured, these characters have been increasingly complex (at least in those games which provide party members), and can offer a great deal to the game when constructed well.

Party NPCs are typically the player's companions on their journey. Frequently they exist from the start (or fairly early on in the adventure) until towards the very end of the game. Obviously there are exceptions to this where they may only arrive late in the piece or be killed off part way through for dramatic effect, but usually they provide the ongoing character support during the game. They provide constant assistance in combat, dole out advice, and potentially play an important role in story events. They can serve the atmosphere by reinforcing the danger of a situation, or by providing levity to lighten the mood and amuse the player.

Have you ever licked a lamp-post in winter?

Party NPCs should be strong characters because they have the potential to be with the player as they experience the events of the game. They are not the mentor NPC waiting patiently for the player to return to talk to them. They are not the antagonist waiting for the player to seize the opportune moment and kill them. However, they can fulfill the vital role of acting as the player's window into the world. As the player frequently needs to be educated about the events or locations in the story, the party NPCs can take on the role of the knowledgeable advisor, telling the protagonist (and hence the player) the vital details they need to know. As ongoing companions, they can dole out the information in small chunks throughout the game, rather than forcing the player to sit through lengthy exposition within a single conversation.

More importantly, many players will seek some sort of emotional connection with the gameworld they are playing, and this primarily comes through the characters within the adventure. The party NPCs are the prime candidates to play this part within the drama, and if written well, many players will come to think of the party NPCs as their friends, truly fulfilling the role of companion during the game.

"Talimancers" are among the most devout fans in gaming

This is no small contributing factor to the development of romances in RPG games, as allowing a romance to play out with a party NPC only serves to heighten a player's emotional connection with a game. The amount of fan adoration of characters within games may at times be slightly concerning, but this only demonstrates how powerful the ability to create an emotional connection with these NPCs can be. The player that does everything they can to protect the life of their virtual love interest within the game is very strongly invested in the game - it is engaging in a way that it would not otherwise be.

It is evident that party NPCs present an excellent means to help produce a more engaging story and gaming experience for players. However, this is reliant on the player being able to form a connection with these characters and be able to think of them as realistic entities within the game. Thus they must be constructed such that they are presented with believable personalities, and allowed to interact with the player in a meaningful fashion. However, those are topics for another time...

Learning from Gears of War (Part 2)

2011-06-24T22:19:00.000+10:00

In my last post, I promised I'd talk about some of the good aspects of Gears of War. So, here are some of the things that the game does well.

Thematically Consistent Aesthetics
While I lamented in my previous post about the boring nature of the appearance of Gears of War, this is mainly because of the colour palette. However, despite the fact that the aesthetic artistry is somewhat lacking, the technical side of things is fantastic. I'm not simply talking about the fact that the Unreal Engine looks really good and that there's a great deal of fidelity in the visuals, even though that's perfectly true. The success of the art is how well it fits the overall setting and theme of the game. The setting of the game is a world torn apart by ongoing conflict, destroyed but the locust horde and also by the humans themselves. Despite that the levels aren't pretty to look at, they fit the setting of the game perfectly. The painstakingly created levels and environments all reek of a planet torn to pieces by conflict, and this constant reinforcement creates a cohesive and realistic backdrop for the game itself.

Gameplay variance
Really and truly, when it comes to a shooter, the important part is the gameplay and this is an area where Gears can and does deliver. Cover based fighting, run and gun, flanking, defense segments, rail shooter pieces and bosses that need specific tactics.... they all combine into a complete and diverse package. Sure some of these segments can get pretty darned annoying at times, but they add variance to the gameplay to make it interesting. Even though they sometimes raise the player's blood pressure through repeated dying at certain points, having set pieces does make for a more engrossing gameplay experience. Variety makes the game more interesting, even if at times it is frustrating. Of course, such variation should not go down the Dead Space route of having turret sections that are so randomised that it makes success more an issue of luck than skill, but fortunately Gears doesn't do that.

Getting something that you can't kill to chase you makes for an interesting time

Co-operative mode
This may sound weird from someone who is such a huge fan of player choice and story-driven games, but I love co-operative gameplay. Playing a game with your friends and getting the sense of achievement together of overcoming challenges is superb. This has been the case all the way back since the days of Doom. The fact that Gears allows you to "pick up" your buddy who has "died" further promotes the sense of teamwork that all co-op play tries to instill. Overcoming a goal on your own is fun, but doing it together with a friend is even better. I heartily commend any FPS (or any game) that allows players to work together to win - any game that offers this as a seamless part of the experience is offering good replay value.

Seamless mini-game mechanic
Gears of War's "active reload" mechanic deserves a mention all of its own for how it adds a new mini-game into the typically mundane task of reloading. For those not aware of the mechanic, while reloading, a small gauge moves along a line which is the default time taken to reload. However, along the gauge there is a specified range in which the player can hit the reload button again in order to reload faster. If they hit it at the very beginning of this range, they not only get the fastest possible reload, but also gain a temporary damage boost. However, should the player hit the reload button outside of this "sweet spot" range, they will actually take longer to reload than if they had done nothing at all.

The active reload gauge

Aside from making the process of reloading inherently more interesting, it also forces the player to decide their approach to the mechanic. If under pressure during a firefight, does the player want to try and get the damage boost? This presents the risk of pressing the button too early and putting them out of action for longer, whereas they could simply wait a fraction of a second longer and almost certainly guarantee a faster than normal reload. This is a perfectly integrated mini-game that even provides the player with a small degree of choice that affects gameplay. Mechanics like this serve to make games more interesting and fun.

Gears of War isn't the best game created, but it is an enjoyable shooter romp. If you enjoy a game and find it fun, then it has definitely succeeded on some level, and Gears certainly fits that bill in my books.

Learning from Gears of War (Part 1)

2011-06-21T21:51:00.002+10:00

I realise I've been quiet for a little while, but I have been busy with various things. I also haven't come across as many thought provoking discussions on game design in the past week or two as I frequently do. If anyone has a topic that they think would be interesting, please let me know. However, in something a little different from usual, I'm not going to discuss RPGs in this post. I've recently been playing Gears of War (yes, the original) on XBox360, both single player and co-op. While I could write a full review of the game, there are already plenty of those out on the Internet. So instead I'm going to look at some of the design negatives and positives - in today's post, let's look at the negatives.

Eliminate unskippable sequences
Please, if you're in the game industry now, or ever are involved in it, adhere to this simple rule. Make cutscenes skippable. It's that easy. Don't force the player to sit through a scene over and over again where they have limited or no control over their actions while they wait for it to end. This applies double if the game has checkpoint saves. If the player dies in a subsequent combat section, they're forced to sit through the rigmarole of the sequence again.

What if the player is replaying the game and already knows what happens in all the cutscenes? They just want to play for the action. If you (as the designer) are worried about the player accidentally skipping cutscenes, force the player to press two separate buttons in order to skip it. If all else fails and you absolutely must have an unskippable cutscene (though I'd really expect you to have a damned good reason as to why), save the game automatically afterwards.

If you ever played the Two Thrones, you probably hate the twin boss fight and its unskippable cutscene

Can we get rid of checkpoint saves already?
We're no longer scrimping and saving hard drive save, so let's do away with checkpoints and allow the player to save whenever they want. You can limit it so that the player can't save while they're in combat, and that'd be fine, but don't force the player to redo whole sections simply because that's where you wanted to break it up. There's really no need for this kind of design, as it really doesn't add anything to the game.

Combat in tight spaces and third person shooters don't mix
Third person shooters don't work in close quarters. It's pretty much that simple. You don't have the fine grained control of a first person shooter, and your screen is partially filled with your character. If you start cluttering up the space with walls, pillars and other obstacles, pretty soon the player is going to have an extremely limited field of vision which serves little purpose except to obscure and frustrate. Even worse, when you're trying to move quickly, you frequently end up sticking to cover or a wall because you get to close to it.

More colour please
There's no denying that the colour palette is largely a see of drab brown and grey. There's no vibrance in the game's appearance, and the most regular splashes of saturated colour you get are when the screen is sprayed with blood, either your own or that of your enemies as you chainsaw them to death. The visual fidelity of the graphics are good due to the Unreal Engine, but you rarely spend time gawking at the scenery because of the drab colour scheme and largely uninspiring visuals.

Marcus and Dom would like some colour saturation, please

Instant death isn't fun
Admittedly this more applies on the higher difficulty levels where players are pretty much expected to nail everything, but it's still relevant. Punishing the player with death simply because they popped their head up just as the enemy decided to fire a rocket or a torque bow arrow doesn't really add to the challenge in a meaningful fashion, but it does add to frustration. One mistake shouldn't kill the player, at least not unless it's a really stupid one.

A decent story would be nice
When I'm playing a shooter, I don't expect fantastic writing. People are playing the game for the gameplay, not the in-depth narrative. But does that really mean that the characters have to be fairly shallow stereotypes, and the plot an almost completely predictable and straightforward tale? This criticism could be directed at so many shooters (or games in general for that matter), because narrative in games still hasn't moved past basic tropes for the most part.

Of course, Gears of War wouldn't be popular if it didn't have some good aspects... but I'll leave those for my next post.

Dungeon Siege 3 Demo

2011-06-10T16:40:00.000+10:00

The other night I eagerly downloaded and fired up the Dungeon Siege 3 demo. I quite enjoyed the first game, and while the second dragged on and was tedious at times, it was still a fairly enjoyable action RPG clickfest romp. Blizzard's Diablo series still reigns supreme in this genre as far as I'm concerned, but the two Dungeon Siege games have been some of the more entertaining competitors. And no matter what happens, the first Dungeon Siege was still a great achievement for the continuous world / "no loading screens" approach it showcased.

When I heard Obsidian were looking after the third installment, I was a little excited. I'd generally say I'm a fan of Obsidian's work - their titles are frequently let down by technical issues (engine, lighting or modelling), or having some of their content removed because the studio tries to bite off more than they can chew in terms. But on the whole, they produce interesting games with reasonably solid game mechanics, and typically have excellent characters and writing. KotOR 2 was great until the horrendous ending, Mask of the Betrayer is one of the best roleplaying adventures I've had, and I'd consider Alpha Protocol one of the most unfairly maligned games of the past few years. I like Obsidian, hence why I was eager to try this new demo. Then they turned around and slapped me in the face as though I'd called them something unpleasant.

If you thought this was badly made, wait until you get a load of Dungeon Siege 3...

The Dungeon Siege 3 (let's shorten that to DS3 from now on) demo gave me the option of picking a sword wielding male, or a fire-wielding female "archon" (some kind of half-human, half-fire-spirit). I confess that I have a soft spot for mages in action RPGs, so I picked the archon and jumped into the fray. Controls were explained: basic movement, attacking, blocking, dodging, special ability use. The controls seemed simple enough and at a first glance seemed like they would make for an enjoyable game. It soon dawned on me that I couldn't have been more wrong, not even if I'd predicted Quake Wars would be the best online FPS. DS3's simplicity equates to fewer tactics than whack-a-mole, and unfortunately for it, a lot less fun.

The game quickly gets into combat, which is pretty much the bread and butter of the action RPG genre. If you're playing one of these games, you're here to take on hordes of enemies in fun, RSI-inducing, keyboard-killing, mouse-destroying combat. It's the endless combat with good mechanics, and the ever-increasingly powerful loot that you use to obliterate your enemies with ever-growing power and ease that keep people coming back to play. Now DS3 may have the chops when it comes to delivering items - it's hard to gauge that from the demo, but there definitely seem to be enough statistics for the game to offer a colossal variety of items. However, that's possibly the only bright point in a title so drearily bereft of sparks of inspiration that it feels like a black-hole sucked out anything that might threaten to cause you to enjoy yourself.

This is not fun. It might look like it could be, but it isn't.

For starters, I've never been so comprehensively confounded by a control system in my life. The controls, particularly the camera, are hideously clunky. There's no easy way to move your character sideways without using the mouse, making any sort of tactical movement as pleasant as a particularly angry hemorrhoid. The camera is also tedious to control, with only two arbitrary zoom levels meaning you're stuck between having limited visibility of the battlefield, or not struggling to predict the attacks of individual enemies. I frequently found myself having to rotate the camera a full 180 degrees using the keyboard, which is on par with missing mouselook in an FPS.

Enemies usually come in groups of at least 3, but frequently 5 or more. As such, you're usually bound to starting off with the "group stance" first. As an archon, this means getting up close and personal with enemies, whereas her 1v1 stance is a ranged mode where you really don't want to be tangling with enemies in melee. As such, you're forced to operate the combat in the opposite of what would be logical: getting into melee range where you can get beaten up substantially before backing out and finishing off the stragglers at range. While I endured a second run-through to determine that the warrior was designed by someone with at least a modicum of intelligence, the combat design for the archon is akin to something you'd expect from a poorly implemented budget title.

Even with a warrior... nope, still not fun.

These flaws are compounded further by the fact that the enemies do enough damage such that you merely can't just engage in the standard click-fest fare once enemies are in sizeable groups, which they almost always are. That's right, adhering to the "group stance" combat mode is typically what will get you killed faster than taking on a dragon with a putty knife. While I applaud the aim to remove the mindless hack and slash fest of continual attacks with something else, there's a need to make the replacement more engaging and exciting than the repetition that is being replaced. Once again, DS3 fails miserably, as it attempts to require incessant use of block/dodge in order to avoid taking this damage, which quickly becomes a laborious exercise that merely prolongs the battle through a series of dodge/attack beats.

The special attacks do serve to help you clear enemies quickly, but tactically appear to add little to no depth in the overall scheme of things. In essence, combat devolves into a series of left/right click swapping in order to succeed, and the majority of the combat is spent trying to avoid enemy attacks rather than dealing damage. Alternatively, you can use a character's inbuilt "defensive ability" aka an ongoing heal (activated by the wholly unintuitive Space & 1 key combination) to enable to reduce this tedium and largely allow you to just beat away at your enemies as per standard fare. You're not playing the biggest hero in the Land of Ehb, you're playing someone who prevails through a countless stream of ninja rolls or magical teleportation punctuated by the odd attack. Apparently the most vital skill of the legendary 10th Legion was gymnastics classes from the age of 2. Well, that and innate magical healing skills.

In terms of character development: you get access to 9 skills, each of which can be "empowered" to make them better; 2 "specialisations" for each skill providing different bonuses to these skills; and about a dozen "talents", each with 5 levels which provide varying passive benefits during combat. However, the relationship between these three things is muddy at best, as is the details of how the combat system works. Even the character/quest/inventory/equipment screens are poorly designed and difficult to navigate. The "equip" menu shows you your inventory, but only those items that you can equip. The "items" menu shows only the items that you can't equip, and clicking on them in this screen will ask you if you want to "transmute" them - this allows you to "sell items in the field" as it were, but for less gold than if you hauled them to a shop. I'd hate to think how much or a nightmare it would become when managing a party of characters, as navigating the menus is headache enough with a single character let alone two or more.

You guessed it... this isn't fun either.

The graphics upon starting are nothing jaw-dropping, though I wouldn't call the game unattractive. Animations are smooth and fluid, and switching stances for a character changes all their motions significantly, which is a nice touch. Visual effects were flashy and suitably fire-infused for my character, and were quite good elsewhere. There's a reasonable amount of detail in the game world and individual creature models, as is show-cased through the various dialogue scenes which get a little more up close and personal with them. On the whole, this aspect of the game is fairly pleasant.

The writing itself here appears to be fairly standard action RPG fare. Again, it's hard to judge this from a demo, but I'd say the writing really didn't seem to be up to the sort of quality that you would typically expect from an Obsidian game in the writing department. Generally writing is the one area where Obsidian nails a game, but their efforts seem a little off here. The dialogue wheel is clunky due to the fact that your mouse doesn't actually have to hover over a response for it to be selected. Your mouse cursor traces an invisible line from the centre of the "wheel" and whichever dialogue option is crossed by that line is the "active" line. It also doesn't deselect unless you move over another dialogue option. (Leading to silly situations as per the screenshot below) This might sound like a really small gripe, but it makes the system feel unresponsive, which is bad considering you're already overwhelmed with that feeling due to the awkward combat mechanics. The solution is simple: Unless the mouse is hovering over a dialogue choice, don't have it selected. This is pretty much GUI design 101, and really not a mistake that should be made by a developer who says they are creating AAA titles.

No, I shouldn't be selecting a dialogue option right now. Look where my cursor is!

These quibbles might merely be annoying, but the real travesty was when I heard my character speak. I have no issues with having a voiced protagonist; I'm playing a pre-determined role, so I'm happy to have the standard "paraphrase and hear the full line" dialogue model. That wasn't the issue, my character's voice was. Evidently someone felt that an "archon" should not merely sound like an ordinary female, but should have some kind of "otherworldly" element to their voice. Stylistically, I have no issue with this, and to be honest, I think it's a somewhat interesting and valid idea. But the way they implemented it is utterly awful. It's difficult to tell whether the person providing the voice was an inherently appalling actor, or if it was the sound processing which destroyed any human qualities and emotion they were putting into the performance, but the end result is something that sounds more robotic than your average speech synth. I almost felt compelled to click through my character's dialogue, except for the sheer "staring-at-a-train-wreck" voyeurism of hearing how truly terrible it was. I'm afraid to say that the sound designer responsible should be out of a job, and there really should be some serious questions raised with whomever listened to it and considered it acceptable.

You also never get to see your character, as your camera is fixated firmly upon the character you are talking to. If the game has a voiced protagonist, the player really should be able to see their character while they are talking, it's slightly disconcerting that you can't and it breaks what little immersion the game has. This problem also occured when I picked up a party member, who interjected his thoughts into the conversation while the camera remained firmly fixated upon the NPC that had started the conversation. I guess the game can't pull the focus away from the well endowed female NPCs that you're meeting...

Maybe exaggerated anatomy is supposed to sell the game? Gameplay sure won't.

Overall, I'm astounded by the DS3 demo. I've never before downloaded a demo for what is supposed to be a blockbuster AAA that was so comprehensively riddled with glaringly obvious flaws, poor design choices and hideously bad control systems. DS3 appears to be a case study in developers getting so familiar with their own game that they can't see its weaknesses, particularly since these shortcomings are a core part of the game rather than something that can be fixed in a short time-frame. For a game that I thought would be reasonably fun to pass some time, I'm now exceptionally glad that I didn't click that "Pre-Order" button on Steam. If I want my action RPG fix while I'm waiting for Diablo 3, I'll fire up Torchlight, and I'll be steering well clear of Dungeon Siege 3.

Quick Progress Update

2011-06-09T17:21:00.000+10:00

Frequently when I post on The Shattered War, I'm covering significant milestones, difficulties, triumphs, discussion of features or design choices... basically only discussing "big things". I generally keep fairly quiet about the small things that just keep ticking over in the background to contribute to the creation of the mod. But to give an idea of the type of things I don't mention, I'd like to give a run down of the various things I've been doing over the past week or so:

Finishing off dialogue for one of the main quest lines
Dialogue for several key scenes in the main plot
Proof reading & editing existing dialogue
Ambient dialogue
Finishing off dialogue for two separate side quests
Adding companion interjections into conversations
Plot/journal entry entries
Scripting for several side quests
Several face morphs
Creating short bios and character descriptions for VA (Voice Actor) work
Contacting potential VAs regarding roles
Exporting dialogue lines for recording by VAs
Design/decoration/lighting tweaks on a new exterior level
Building terrain collision for new exterior level
Sketching out another new level using pencil and paper
Taking screenshots/video that may be used for new wallpapers or video trailers

That's one week of work, and I've been somewhat busy the past week, so have probably been less productive than usual. Admittedly some of that lost productivity is due to a little bit of gaming (Deus Ex, LA Noire and Gears of War), but even gaming teaches me more about good and bad game design. So even if I'm quiet about development work, rest assured that a substantial amount of effort is going into creating The Shattered War.

Mis-manipulation

2011-06-05T00:28:00.001+10:00

I was struck recently by a similarity by a character and scene in my first major mod, Fate of a City, and Dragon Age 2. This came as a result of a discussion of the emotional impact of Dragon Age 2, where the issue of Hawke's family was brought up.

As anyone who has played the DA2 demo knows, one of Hawke's siblings dies in the opening sequence of the game, killed depending on the class choice of the player. If the player is a mage, then the sister Bethany (also a mage) dies, but otherwise, the brother Carver will die. Hawke's mother is overwhelming distraught, and Hawke also gets to utter a few words to his/her mother in an attempt to console her. Many players found this sequence forced and trivial, because they did not care about their dead sibling at all. They had known them for a matter of minutes, and had formed no real connection with them whatsoever because of the lack of interaction. On my first playthrough, where Carver died, I did not care a whit for him. In the short timeframe I had known him, all he had done was complain about my every decision. I wasn't really sad to see him die at all.

Hawke's family: Who's expendable now? Hrm, I guess it's Carver.

Comparatively, in Fate of a City, the game starts off with an attack on the city of Darthall. The player meets their apparent friend Meylana, who gives a brief run-down on the circumstances and situation. She provides the immediate setting in an interactive fashion rather than having it carried out entirely through a non-interactive cutscene (though you get that afterwards to show it play out as well). After the invasion, the player meets up with another friend/acquaintance, who informs them that Meylana has been killed. The player has the option to respond as though they cared (or didn't) and the dialogue continues and the friend provides the player with information they need to get in contact with people trying to fight the new rulers of the city.

Some players critised my approach saying them simply did not care about Meylana because they didn't know her. I've also seen exactly the same criticisms leveled at your sibling's death at the start of DA2. In Fate of a City, I never expected players to care about Meylana. If they wished to decide for roleplaying purposes that they did, I gave them that option, but I gave them intermediate options that either indicated a lack of connection with her, or effectively ignored her death completely. I never had any expectation the player would form a connection, but used her as a means to motivate the NPC that they were talking to. The player already had impetus to fight against the invaders: revenge, imprisonment, wealth, safety, or a number of others reasons. Meylana's death was used as a means to provide motivation for an NPC.

The defenders didn't do so well here...

Similarly with DA2, your sibling's death cannot really have any major emotional impact on you. Hawke can deliver a line of a fittingly consoling nature to your mother, but the scene is not about Hawke's emotions, it's about Hawke's mother. The impact that their death has upon your mother is significant, and reiterated numerous times throughout the game. I'm certain that the writers were fully aware that the player wouldn't have time to form a meaningful connection with their sibling, which is why the focus of the scene is on the mother and not Hawke. The fact that your mother has lost one of her children is something that has a significant effect on her character, and thus on her interactions with you at key points in the game.

Given the raft of players who complained about this in DA2, and those who took issue with it in Fate of a City, it appears that it may be a bad design choice. Part of this is due to the fact that players are constantly told by games that they are the most important person in the game. Now, to an extent, I'd have to say that I agree, as the player should be the one driving the story and making events happen. If everything is being driven at a high level by NPCs, then the player feels somewhat powerless to control their own destiny. Oddly enough this is completely true, because (in almost all cases) the player has to play through a pre-defined story with set events. When the player does not feel like they can control their path (even if that control is merely an illusion), they feel railroaded down a path. But of course, it is an illusion: in DAO you always defeat the blight, in Crysis you always defeat the mothership, in Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, Arthas always overcomes Illidan, etc, etc.

The curiosity here is that sometimes players take their expectations too far and almost seem to demand that no one else can have any reaction to events because it impacts upon their experience as the protagonist. This mindset appears to be more prevalent in the RPG genre than other genres, and that's no doubt a product of the focus on providing player choice in this genre. The more you allow the player to be in control of their story and also try to effect them through emotional scenes, the more they will feel that they should be the only character for whom such scenes are made.

Villains get the limelight, why can't others?

To be honest, I might argue that's a failing on the player's part, particularly in an RPG. RPGs are designed to be built on the context of a believable world with believable characters. If those characters cannot be allowed to have their own (strong) reactions to situations and have the attention sometimes focus on them as opposed to purely on the player's character, then that believability is immediately lost. No, the player should never take a back seat for too long, but if the designers (and players) do not allow NPCs to occasionally take the limelight and develop and showcase their own emotions and reactions to situations, then the world becomes inherently less interesting and realistic.

So how does this fit with your sibling dying in DA2? Is it a fault of the designers for not telling the players "actually, you're not meant to care here, but if you choose to for roleplaying purposes, that's fine"? Should designers expect that player will have a desire to care about someone that dies that their character supposedly knows well, and thus give them a chance to know them properly? Many people cared about their father dying in Fallout 3 (though that's possibly because Liam Neeson is awesome), yet there had been very limited opportunity to build any sort of relationship with him. Many people were sad to see Duncan die in DAO, again even though there had been little meaningful interaction with him.

Some players loved Duncan as much as Alistair did

All this said, I'm still not confident that either Fate of a City's or DA2's scene relating to the death of your friend/sibling were wholly effective. Players felt that they should be feeling something, when arguably they weren't expected to. But we can have scenes that elicit an emotional response from an NPC but doesn't demand one from the player - typically when the friend of the random stranger we are helping dies in some fashion due to an unfortunate series of events. Quite often in this case, the player doesn't care about the dead NPC, but can empathize with the character who is feeling emotion regarding their death. In this way, the player actually gets the emotional impact via proxy - they don't necessarily care that someone is dead, but they can actively see that someone else is distraught as a result and this will elicit an emotional reaction.

The issue appears to be where the NPC is someone the player "feels" they should have a connection to, like someone who is supposedly their friend or sibling. In this case, natural human psychology appears to come into play and the player expects that they should care, and thus becomes frustrated when they don't because they have no connection to the character who has died. In this case, the game is too powerful for its own good, demanding a natural human reaction when one cannot be given because the lack of that connection.

The take-home message appears to be to not kill off a family member or "friend" of the player character unless the player has been given the chance to know that person. Otherwise the player will expect that they should feel something, even though they won't.

Praise and criticism where due

2011-06-01T19:31:00.001+10:00

I was rather stunned when I watched a recent video on the Escapist entitled "Defending Call of Duty" by Jim Sterling, who apparently is a professional reviewer for destructoid (among other gaming credentials). For me, I consider the series a bit of a mixed bag. Call of Duty 2 and particularly 4 (aka Modern Warfare) both had some really great moments. However, Modern Warfare 2 represented a massive step backwards, and Treyarch never quite seem to be able to live up to the standard set by their Infinity Ward counterparts. I've attacked poor writing, design choices and sales practices of some of the games, but I don't go for the irrational hatred sometimes directed at the series. This irrational hatred is what Jim tries to address in this video, but in doing so does nothing more than come across as a one-eyed fan of the series with no objectivity, who lacks even the most basic understanding of game mechanics and design. (Warning: the video contains some profanity)

My first thought upon watching this video was "How does this guy get paid to do this?" Jim Sterling tries to address the preposterous nature of some of the Call of Duty hate through his "pseudo-intellectual parody" where he exaggerates criticisms to the point of ridiculousness. While exaggeration is a valid tactic for satire, such an approach undermines the validity of an argument when it fails to address strong criticisms of the series he is trying to defend. No one expects Call of Duty to be "art", and anyone who does has about as much critical credibility as Statler and Waldorf. His attack on this point appears to be an attempt at humour, but I'd say it falls well short of the mark.

His discussion of the perk system implemented by CoD is one area where his argument falls hideously flat. He covers some of the benefits of CoD's style of play compared to the Quake/UT, but fails wholeheartedly to even recognise that there are negatives. Declaring that there is no difference between a player who has learned the layout of a quake level to a player who has lots of perks in Modern Warfare demonstrates how oblivious he is to concepts of game design. In Quake, the disparity between players comes from the skill of using various weapons, knowing the layout of a level, and the tactics as a result of player movements, current weaponry and the flow of the game. All these factors apply equally to the Call of Duty series, but then players with more experience have the added advantage of having more powerful weapons available to them upon spawning, not to mention perks that enable them to do things like take more damage, move faster and carry more ammunition. To argue that this does not exacerbate the inherent disparity between old and new players is utterly ridiculous.

New player? Too bad, you can't have this

Jim also fails to recognise that Call of Duty's approach provides players rewards through perseverance rather than skill. If you play for long enough and rack up experience through kills, assists or other means, you will "level up" just like in an RPG and gain access to better weapons, perks and advantages over new players. Even taking the example of players who start at the same time, better players will raise in rank faster, thus giving them access to better gear over their less skilled adversaries, which will widen the gap further. He even fails to address killing streak bonuses that further push the balance of the game in favour of the more skilled or winning player(s) during individual matches.

Even his primary argument against the Quake/UT style of play is steeped in ignorance. There are disadvantages to having everyone run to the same powerful weapon on a level, but the fact that he makes this argument shows that he does not realise that not all players will run for that one weapon. Any level designer with a modicum of talent for such games will make a level such that more powerful pickups are be balanced by having them placed in more precarious positions to retrieve. Not everyone runs for the rocket launcher, because others will run for the sniper rifle and pick off the people attempting to grab the rocket launcher.

If you want this, you're going to have to go somewhere dangerous

As for his opinions on the single player campaign, I couldn't disagree more. The criticisms of Modern Warfare's campaign are few and far between, and typically revolved around the mechanics issue of the player being forced to move forward with little to no support from their squad, and the never-ending stream of enemies should they fail to do so. However, these are perfectly valid issues to be raised as they were a cause of consternation for many players. But again, his failure to recognise the weakness of the subsequent two titles in comparison to Modern Warfare apart from saying "they get a little far fetched at times". To neglect the raft of weaknesses of Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops in comparison to Modern Warfare suggests that he doesn't even realise they exist.

The only real point that actually carries any sort of weight is the criticism directed at CoD players simply for being CoD players. Yet much like the "Call of Duty is not art" argument, this is so shallow and juvenile that it barely deserves the dignity of a response. Anyone making this argument is unlikely to possess the intellect or objectivity to actually listen to a reasoned rebuttal, and unfortunately for Jim, this is the only point of his video where he actually manages to do that, at least until he makes himself sound like something with a chip on his shoulder because he's been called a "CoD lover". At least he does express his disdain for the $15 map packs of the series.

Given that Jim Sterling apparently does work for a lot of game sites, maybe I'm picking a fight here that I shouldn't. But in this case, criticism where criticism is due, as he's not demonstrated even a basic level of understanding of FPS game mechanics. As far as I'm concerned, being unable to construct a solid argument on why CoD is a good series (which it is) shows an amazing lack of insight, and that's coming from someone who will happily declare that MW2 is one of the least inspiring and over-hyped FPS games delivered in the past few years. I'm beginning to think it's time I put in for a position to write articles or videos for the Escapist, Destructoid or other game websites.

Are we that juvenile?

2011-05-27T00:31:00.001+10:00

It seems we've reached another low in gaming history. Duke Nukem Forever, that game for which we've been waiting forever, released a new trailer... where Duke throws faeces. That's right, as part of the promotion material for the game, the developers thought it would be fun and encourage people to buy the game by demonstrating that you could throw faeces and that Duke would comment about it.

Really? Are games that lacking in creativity that they need to resort to that kind of advertising in order to gain attention? Sure, the "Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2" campaign was bad enough, but now we're forced to endure garbage like this? Surely games as a medium have more credibility than that? Let's just consider the history of Duke Nukem for a moment to realise how stupid this truly is.

You just flushed your credibility down the toilet.

Duke Nukem 3D was released in 1996, and was rated 18+ in most countries. Even if we consider that the youngest players might have been around 10 years old when it came out, those same people would be 25 years old now. Do the developers honestly think that this kind of toilet humour is going to win over a faithful audience of 25 years or older? If we're going by people who were legally allowed to buy the game when it came out, they are now 33 (or 30 in Australia) years old. To me, this video is a prime example of the kind of hideous mis-steps that developers, publishers and marketing teams are making when creating games. I, for one, will not even remotely consider a pre-order of Duke Nukem Forever now because of this video. In fact, I imagine that I'll probably wait until it drops significantly in price before I bother buying it, even if the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. How can I expect to be treated to a fun and witty gaming experience if this is what was chosen as "good advertising material"?

Of course, I can't let this pass without lambasting IGN for their comment when posting this video... "The insane shooter game Duke Nukem Forever may have a Mature rating, but this trailer shows the fun things you can do with poop." There you go, IGN approves of this marketing and declares this gameplay to be "fun". Neither "absolutely disgraceful" nor "utterly shameful" come close to accurately describing the situation.

Perhaps they are trying to capitalise on a different market? Maybe we need more promotional material like the brand-new super-exciting, put-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat, "No-way!-It's-going-to-be-the-best-game-ever!" trailer for Modern Warfare 3. I loved MW1, thought MW2 was a serious step backwards, and based on the trailer, I'd say that MW3 looks set to continue that downhill trend. Given the incredible hype, I almost wondered if I'd watched a different trailer. All I saw was something that looked like it was trying to imitate the "non-stop action" and "cinematic excitement" of something like Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The methodology appeared to be to cram as many famous landmarks as possible in the video and blow them up or have exploding vehicles near them and watch the fans go crazy.

MW3: Has a higher protagonist death toll than ever before!

Yes, I'll admit that I'm exaggerating (though only slightly) to demonstrate a point, but I feel it's something that simply doesn't seem to be gaining much credence in the biggest AAA franchises. As someone who loves video games I'm ashamed by the large number of developers selling big name titles that resort to this ridiculous over the top attitude, cheap-tactic marketing campaigns, or purile attempts at humour in order to get attention. What worries me more is that in many cases it seems to be working. The frenzy over the MW3 trailer was phenomenal, and the Duke Nukem juggernaut appears unstoppable riding on over a decade of "Are we there yet?" waiting.

Where are the intelligent advertising campaigns? Where are the games that are actually trying to be bigger and better rather than simply trying to break a new "explosions per minute of gameplay" record? Where are the games that are actually trying to be funny instead of making bad attempts at toilet humour? They're out there, certainly, but they're overshadowed at times by uninspiring material like these two examples.

More importantly, why is the gaming population pandering to such behaviour? Why are we not telling publishers "we deserve better" when terrible marketing campaigns (or games) are shoved in our faces? Or am I as a gamer that far removed from the pulse of the general public that I no longer accurately represent that biggest market segment that publishers are trying to get to buy their product?

There have been some truly great gaming titles that not only provide some fantastic gaming experiences, but also give us something to think about long after we've put the controller down. We've played games that have given us amusing quotes or lines just as powerful as any book, movie or tv show. Gamers have grown up. Games have grown up. Can't advertisers and developers get on-board and deliver the type of experience that our favourite entertainment medium deserves?

Are mods cheats?

2011-05-24T21:19:00.000+10:00

Recently I was involved in a discussion regarding cheating in games. During this discussion, one player declared themselves to be the equivalent of the game developers, thus the arbiter of all rules within a game, and consequently assumed that using console commands to do things like giving themselves extra gold was not cheating. While there was little point in belaboring the issue, it did raise an interesting question for me about the nature of modding official adventures from game developers. The question is: at what point do mods become cheats?

In Dragon Age or Oblivion, it is a "simple" matter to include additional content in the main single player campaign or to even modify the mechanics of the game. Adding extra quests, weapons or armor, new creatures, changing creature AI, or even abilities and levelling curves are all possible. All these things result in a different experience than was created by the developers of the game, so at what point are we considered to have "cheated" by using these mods? If someone pulls down a console window and gives themselves an extra 50 gold, almost anyone would call it a cheat. But say the player installs a mod with a large and expansive quest line, and by the end of completing that quest line, they've gained 50 gold, not to mention a bucketload of experience. Is this cheating? The end result is the same, in that it has the same (or at least similar) effect on the character as far as the "original" game is concerned, but in the latter case the player has had to "work" for their benefit rather than receiving it instantly via a console command.

Is Alley of Murders a cheat?

In both Dragon Age and Oblivion, gaining extra experience is not as much as an issue due to their level scaling of enemies (I've already discussed the pros and cons of that, so let's not cover old ground), but the additional resources of gold the player gains may allow them to buy additional equipment that would make them more powerful that they should be as part of the normal course of the game.

I'm also forced to think about a mod I installed on repeat playthrough of Oblivion that changed the levelling and skill system. Instead of magically levelling up and selecting attributes to level based upon which skills you levelled during your adventures, your attributes and levels dynamically rose in the wild, just like your skills do. Upon raising your level in a particular skill, the relevant attribute would be raised by an appropriate (fractional) value and would increment a value that was used to determine your current level. You could customise both the amount each skill contributed to your attributes and level, such that it was possible to implement a balance that effectively mimicked the original levelling system in the game without potential desire/need to metagame skill advancement to facilitate attribute increases.

It's night, so be a good player and go to bed so you can level up

To be honest, I found it a far more useful system that allowed the player to play freely without worrying that the game would become extremely difficult at later levels had they not done some metagaming to increase their attributes by significant amounts for at least part of the game. This playthrough followed a similar difficulty curve to my first playthrough, yet I found myself liking the modded levelling system a lot more than Bethesda's because it felt more immersive by taking away the arbitrary "you levelled up so now get to increase your attributes based on what you did".

So given the experience was more or less the same as an unmodded playthrough, could it still be considered cheating? At what point do mods become "cheats", and at what point does that matter in being able to make objective judgements or reviews on the game that players are given by developers or modders?

The Shattered War: Initial Casting

2011-05-21T21:04:00.006+10:00

While there is still much work to be done for the Shattered War, there are certain areas where I have made significant progress towards completion. One of these areas is the writing of dialogue, as a large portion of the main plot has been written. As a result I have put out my first call for voice actors for some of the parts for the mod.

This only represents a small section of the adventure - there are many more roles (both male and female) still left to cast, but I thought I would attempt to cast roles in an ongoing fashion rather than having an open slate for every single character in the mod. I realise that the female roles in this initial audition are very limited, but rest assured there are a numerous important female characters that I have still yet to cast.

However, as of yet, the response has been very limited, as evidence by the post having dropped back several pages on the forum as of the time of writing. So I'm asking for your help, dear readers. If you are interested in voice acting, know someone who may be interested in voice acting, or even know of somewhere else I should look for more voice actors, please let me know. I have a sizable cast to fill, so if any readers are able to render assistance in any form, I would greatly appreciate it. Helping me find voice actors will help me deliver a more polished and engaging adventure for you, and I want to make sure that adventure is of the high quality possible.

The Shattered War: Overview

2011-05-19T23:07:00.001+10:00

While I've been doing development on The Shattered War for quite some time, I've actually released very few details about the nature of the plot or the adventure that the player will be undertaking. As such, today's post is going to cover some of those details. While I'm going to avoid spoilers that will impact upon people's enjoyment of the of mod, I will give away some details of the main plot. If you want to go into the mod completely blind, I would suggest you tune out now...

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The Shattered War places you in the Frostback Mountains, as a member of the militia of Fort Velen. This is a Ferelden militia, sent to investigate rumours of darkspawn attacks in the region. As a respected officer and capable soldier, you are given the important task of finding out whether this threat is real. All too soon, you find yourself in the midst of danger, and realise that the rumours are all too true.

Everything you feared is true...

Yet you are not without allies, for the campaign against the darkspawn sees the formation of an uneasy alliance between Ferelden and Orlesian troops. The templars also have a presence at Fort Velen, though their leader's hard stance towards mages results in its own tensions within the ranks of the warriors. Even a Grey Warden seeks to join the fight to uncover the nature of the threat in the region. Fort Velen is not an impenetrable stronghold, but as home to these brave warriors, it is the sole bastion of hope within the Frostbacks as towns, villages and travelers all live in fear of the growing darkspawn threat.

It falls to you to lead the efforts to rescue the people of the region, to restore the towns such that they might be able to fend off the attack that they will inevitably face. But signs point to a more sinister force at work, someone aiding the darkspawn to bring chaos and death. Amidst such rumours the shadow of betrayal looms to cast a light of uncertainty on shaky allegiances, and you must become the leader who will make the difficult decisions needed to stop a slaughter.

An artist's impression of Frostback Peak. Will it claim your life?

The Frostback Mountains, so often shrouded in snow and fog, now hide secrets that could bring a war to both Ferelden and Orlais that will shatter a short-lived peace. Will you be named hero or villain once your part is complete in The Shattered War?

Where we lost some soul

2011-05-16T20:29:00.001+10:00

Buying games isn't what it used to be. This isn't some nostalgia driven wish for the return of the "good old days" when we used to have PC speaker bleeps for sounds or low resolution images where our mind filled in the blanks. I'm talking about going into a shop and getting our hands on a game we want to play. That aspect of gaming no longer has the appeal it once used to have. To demonstrate what I mean, I'm going to showcase the physical packages from two different games: Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age 2.

The goodies of the Baldur's Gate box

The first thing the player sees is the box. The Baldur's Gate series was metaphorically book-ended with narration, as though it were a written tale being told. To this end, even the box that the game comes in supports this metaphor, with a cover flap that the player can open, and one side (and the top and bottom) of the box having art indicating a thick leaf of pages between the two covers on the front and back of the box.

There's a double sided map, one showing the city of Baldur's Gate, the other showing the wilderness of the Sword Coast in which the game is set. There's a quick reference card identifying various commands, icons and effects. The 5 CDs on which the game came were each printed with CG images taken from the pre-renders developed for the game, all in a nice folding covering matching the motif of the outside box. Finally we have the manual, weighing in at 160 pages, providing the basics required to play the game (approx 30 pages), around background and setting information (around 30 pages), and then details of the rules and mechanics behind the D&D mechanics used by the game (approx 90 pages). The remaining 10 pages are index, credits, etc.

When you bought the physical game box, you got more than the game. The whole experience of the game started with the box and everything inside. Everything supported the experience that the game was attempting to give the player, and you really felt as though loving effort had gone into every aspect of its creation. If we compare this to modern gaming counterparts, the difference is very stark indeed.

The offerings of the DA2 Signature Edition

What a contrast! We get a jewel case with slightly fancy artwork; it has a black cover instead of white like the manual (with the silhouetted people being likewise inverted), and a silver dragon instead of red. It comes with three cards: one of which is purely advertising for Dead Space 2 and Bulletstorm, another with the codes for two pre-order bonus items, and then a third which serves as the codes for the Signature Edition content as well as advertising for the Mass Effect 2 DLC "Arrival". The manual has a paltry 40 pages (and that is fairly large by modern standards) and provides only basic information on how to play the game and its mechanics. That's it.

Now, maybe this is all we can expect from our games these days because gamers don't care and thus are happy to just download a digital copy of the game. Or is it that gamers don't care about physical copies of games because this is all we get? Which came first, the chicken or the empty game box? I remember getting stickers with the game Zool, a slew of journal entries of events from the game (and some that didn't exist) with gold box games, and even a keyring with the original Dungeon Siege. Purchasing a game was more than just buying the game disk(s) in a case, you were buying into the experience that the game offered from the moment you opened the box.

I imagine some players don't care a whit for all this sort of stuff, and that all they want to do is get in and start playing. Then of course, someone at some point in time worked out that players would be willing to pay for this kind of material, and thus we see things like Oblivion's collector edition (proud owner) with a 112 page "Pocket Guide to the Empire" and a Septim coin , Assassin's Creed Black edition (proud owner) with an Ezio figurine , or the Modern Warfare 2 prestige edition (proud non-owner) with night vision goggles. Then we have the trend of not offering these things at all, but instead opening up the options for franchise merchandising. Played the game? Read the book, buy the comic, wear the t-shirt, purchase the action figurine, play the board-game, own the artwork, watch the movie...

Because video game to movie translations have worked so well in the past...

The commercialization means that it's no longer an experience for the player, it's a franchise to be showcased, advertised and hyped as a world-wide phenomenon to attract more people to the ever-growing behemoth. This isn't to say that I'm unhappy about the increased popularity and acceptance of gaming within mainstream society. I love the fact that playing video games no longer carries the social stigma it once did - sure, it's still there to some degree, but gaming is gaining credence as an acceptable past-time and its popularity keeps rising.

It seems that now games are now just another form of entertainment, placed next to a DVD/Blu-ray/CD and simply used in their immediate form. Why would a publisher spend money on a manual that very few players will bother to look at? Most players won't care about seeing a map of a game location included, nor would they contemplate using a new keyring that bears some motif from the game. Those players who do can buy them from the merchandise store.

It seems that in this case the "good old days" are gone for good, and I lament their loss. That we as a wider audience cannot appreciate the effort, creativity and indeed artistry that goes into so many elements of creating the form of entertainment that so many of us love is regrettable. Perhaps even more so that those of us who choose to do so in all likelihood don't end up directly benefiting the wonderful creators of that artistry, but instead hand over much of our money to the controllers of the franchise.

So next time you buy a game, think about what you're getting in addition to the disc you bought. Consider the effort and art that went into it, and spare a thought for the days when you got to share in a little bit of that of that creativity when you went to your store and brought home a gaming experience as opposed to just a jewel case and printed game disc that truly feels like part of the mechanical production line it came from.

The ugly truth of price inequity

2011-05-14T21:07:00.000+10:00

Some readers might be aware of the gross inequities in computer game pricing across different countries. Coming from Australia, I've been used to paying around an extra 1/3 on top of US counterparts due to the relative value of the two currencies. However, over the past couple of years, that difference has disappeared, yet Australians are still forced to pay the same premium for their games.

The evolution of digital distribution should have surely solved these issues, as the distribution can be centralised and thus cost the same regardless of where the player is coming from. The market leader in this area (at least for the PC) would have to be Steam. The developer/publisher gets a great advantage here as they can just take advantage of Steam's existing network for limited additional cost. Yet even via Steam, there are vast difference between the price I pay in Australia and the price someone pays in the US. The fantastic website http://www.steamprices.com/ can quickly demonstrate some of the regional differences (both rip-offs and bargains) in Steam pricing.

Let's take a few examples:
Witcher 2 - Australia: $67.49, US: $44.99
Duke Nukem Forever - Australia: $71.99, US, $44.99
Brink - Australia: $89.99, US: $59.99
Crysis 2 - Australia: $69.99, US: $49.99
Call of Duty: Black Ops - Australia: $89.99, US: $59.99
Let's keep in mind that as of writing, the current exchange rate is $1 Aus = $1.0655 US.

High prices? Take it, baby.

This is a digital distribution medium, so there shouldn't be a significant difference in price. The differences here are largely made by publishers to appease distributors who send out boxed copies of the game. Steam/Valve is not the one who sets the prices for individual regions - they're just taking their cues from the company that gave it to them. These boxed copies obviously present additional costs to the supplier and the retailers, and then you've got the mark up from retailers themselves to pay for store space, staff wages, etc. Obviously we'd expect those prices to go up a little from a digital distribution.

Well, let's consider actual boxed games here as well, as they are priced direct from a retail stores. While I was recently in Singapore, I did a quick scout of a few games, so I could do a comparison of prices of boxed PC games. I'll give a range for the PC games here, as I've seen multiple prices across different retailers. By comparison the few stores in Singapore I was were fairly constant.
Dragon Age 2 - Australia: $69-79, Singapore: $55
Crysis 2 - Australia: $79-98, Singapore: $52
Call of Duty: Black Ops - Australia $89-100, Singapore: $45

The exchange rate in this case is $1 Aus = $1.3204 Singapore. Also note that Singapore is very harsh on software pirating, and hence all these are legitimate copies of the software, unlike some other countries you might visit in the Southeast Asia region.
The first thing to note is that Singaporeans are actually getting a darn good deal here. Given how immensely cheap it is to buy games there, and that it's a relatively short hop from Singapore to Australia, why is their such an exorbitant mark up on so many games here in Australia? The short answer to that question is "because the sellers can get away with it." People still buy games are their over-inflated prices, because people were willing to pay those prices when the exchange rate was far less favourable.

The main problem is that there is very little that the Australian consumer can do to combat this situation. If we choose to save money by purchasing from overseas retailers and having them send a copy of game (which even including shipping costs is quite frequently cheaper), then local distributors/retailers sell less copies and thus must make more of each individual copy in order to make a profit. Distributors may not realise the quantity of sales they're losing from this avenue (or are still making enough that they don't care) and as such don't drop their price. There's also the issue of region locking if you're dealing with XBox360 games. (Of course, I could complain that region locking is a barbaric and outdated practice that needs to be completely expunged, but that's another issue)

Even worse is that many of these games are upped in price as they approach (or reach) their release date. Witcher 2 and Brink are two recent examples that had massive price jumps for Australian customers. This means that if you're in Australia, you're likely to pay significantly more for a game unless you pre-order the game. If you want to pay an equitable price compared to your overseas counterparts, you have to make the leap and purchase before you've read any reviews of the completed product. I should note here that the developers/publishers of The Witcher 2 are trying to do the right thing by Australian customers, and are offereing credit at their online store http://www.gog.com/ to offset the increased price of the game. I applaud this move, but they shouldn't be forced to have to do this in the first place!

Witcher 2: Special Price Gouging Edition

Players can benefit from cheaper (and fairer) prices if they're willing to wait or order from overseas, but this doesn't really do anything active to stop the issue from occurring in the first place. Why should gamers pay such significantly different prices for exactly the same product?

More importantly, how can gamers from all countries make their voice heard to raise the issue of game pricing and strive to make everyone pay an equitable amount? It's about time that this kind of behaviour stopped. It's about time that companies stopped gouging players with exorbitant prices. I would be happy to walk into and support my local store if I wasn't paying a $30-50 premium for that privilege.

I love games and I love game companies, and I likely to treat them fairly by buying their games and giving them respect (or derision) based on their individual merits. I'm asking publishers to treat their customers with the same respect. To this end, I have one simple request: Don't rip us off.

Once isn't enough

2011-05-11T22:03:00.000+10:00

Having come back from my break, I've started modding again for The Shattered War. I decided to get back into the enjoyable task of level design, working on one of the wilderness areas high in the Frostback Mountains. I thought I'd done a moderate amount of work and there'd be some basic sculpting and then it'd be the lengthy process of decoration with props and vegetation.

Taking a break from something and then coming back to it later is a great way to spot the faults in a level. I hadn't realised just how much work that the level needed in terms of additional sculpting to bring it up to an acceptable level. On reflection the level had been done quite some time ago as a basic draft to get the shape of the level and see if the basic concept worked, but somehow along the way I'd decided that it might not have needed too much work. A quick look told me this was most certainly not the case.

It's a bit jagged there

Now, I hadn't touched this level in quite some time, and the draft was done up in a matter of maybe 4-6 hours. However, while the rough shape was done, after some closer examination I realised that the terrain needed to be tesselated to a far greater degree in order to give a proper organic look that I would expect. Now, while there's some degree of sharp and jagged edges that you can "cover up" using props and vegetation, I realised that wasn't an option in this case. If I'm to give a sense of perspective, the narrowest section is about two-to-three people wide, and the low-outcropping is slightly higher than the height of a human. As such, those very angular edges would be extremely up close and personal to anyone walking through that section of the level.

So I undertook a fairly serious resculpting of the level, fixed jagged edges, abrupt angles and anything else that simply looked abnormal. Even now I could probably increase the tesselation another level in large patches of the level, but issues with the lightmapper in the DAO toolset mean that this is likely to cause insightly black spots due to some errors in the way it precalculates lighting effects. There's always a trade-off between effort and aesthetics, so I felt I was able to strike a reasonable middle ground with the reworks I've made thus far. I even managed to get some of the vegetation in for the level, though I've kept it clear from this picture to give a clearer difference shot between before and after.

A less jagged look

It's still not a perfect look by any means, and there's still some softening and adjustment I'd like to do, but overall there's a lot more rounded terrain and less obvious triangles sticking out from the edges of the landscape. A little more effort is still needed here to give more character and variance, even though most players probably won't pay that much attention to this small part of the level. As a side area, this level was unlikely to ever give the player a "wow" moment that would make them gawk at the gorgeous landscape. However, I could not let it pass without still giving the player a sense of the brutal but beautiful landscape of the Frostback Mountains.

Sharp triangles are hard to soften with vegetation, but that area (and the entire level) is now a lot easier to make look like authentic terrain by using a health dose of grass, shrubs and trees. The more interest you can create with the base mesh of a level, the better the level will look once it is fully decorated and populated with everything else that ultimately brings it to life in the game.

A Dragon Age 2 Gripe

2011-05-05T23:05:00.003+10:00

For those who haven't finished Dragon Age 2, you may want to tune out now. I'm going to give some fairly significant spoilers about some events within the game that some may not wish to hear. If you've finished the game, or don't care, then by all means keep reading.

Dragon Age 2 is not a game without flaws. In fact, it's got some pretty glaring ones at times, but on the whole I still found it a very enjoyable experience because I felt that it was a well crafted series of events where your decisions are actually had an effect on the outcome of the game and the lives of the characters you encountered. This was one thing that was pushed by BioWare in Dragon Age: Origins, and they reinforced that those decisions would matter with the "import" function they included to allow your decisions to carry over from that game into the sequel.

However, where this came crashing down horribly was the handling of one character: Leliana. Apparently the love for the red-haired bard from the original was so great that BioWare felt like bringing her back... even if you killed her in the first game. Leliana appears in the game a few times in what is little more than a cameo appearance, yet somehow the writers felt that this justified her being alive.

Apparently she was too sweet to stay dead

David Gaider, the lead writer for the franchise, had the following comments on the issue (taken from this forum thread) were as follows:

"Because the option was there as a reaction to your choice to defile the Urn of Sacred Ashes... not as a "you will never have to deal with this character again". We're not saying what happened in that chamber never occurred... in fact, we're not saying anything yet, with regards to Leliana. You're free to make all the assumptions you like, of course, but if what you're insisting on is "I think X is dead so I should never see them again no matter what"... well, prepare to be disappointed.

What happens isn't always going to be what you think should happen. It will, in fact, pretty much always work out the way we think it should-- and that includes bringing characters we like back. For those people who are just going to stamp their feet and insist that it should be what they want instead, I can guarantee that there's no amount of explanation that will convince them it isn't some offense to their idea of how our universe should work..."

Unfortunately, I couldn't disagree more with this line of thinking. Maybe we'll get to see what the "master plan" is when Dragon Age 3 is inevitably released, but what possible cause is there for Leliana to be so vital to the plot that her role couldn't be filled by another character? Her persona appears to have changed from how she was represented in Dragon Age: Origins and even its DLC Leliana's Song, so why bother "reincarnating" her?

Admittedly, Flemeth is brought back regardless of whether she is killed in Origins, but at least she has a legitimate excuse and is a crafty old crone who had planned it from the start. As a powerful character within the Dragon Age lore, it's also potentially justified in terms of her impact on the world. It makes sense given the scope of what the player has been presented. But Leliana has no such justification for the treatment she is given, and while it might potentially be presented in the third game, players should not be left with such a huge gaping piece of the puzzle missing when BioWare are effectively breaking the contract they have made with the players: "Your decisions matter."

Flemeth being alive... well, she at least explains how

If the player makes the decision to kill someone, they should stay dead. If they do not, then the player must be given a very clear and tangible reason why this is not the case. Flemeth has that, Leliana does not. Now, I realise it could be said I'm speaking with somewhat of a sense of entitlement here, as Dragon Age is not a story that I have written. David Gaider and other writers have mentioned this concept before, in that some players have a sense of entitlement that they think the game should turn out exactly the way they want it to. Unforunately, this isn't exactly one of those cases. The writers have given us an option: to kill off a character. However, the subsequent writing has stripped the players of that decision. Dragon Age may not be written by the players, but they are making their version of that story by playing the game.

By stripping players of their version of the story, the artificial nature of the reality presented to us is exposed in one of the harshest ways possible. Effectively the players are being told "No. You did a bad thing that we don't want to happen, so we're not going to rewrite your reality and say that didn't happen." Limiting a player's options by not allowing them to take a particular action is a necessity of video games. No development team can cater for every possible action that the player might wish to do and make all actions possible. If you're playing a Call of Duty game, you can't find a Samurai sword and start decapitating people. In Grand Theft Auto you can't weld two assault rifles to your car and shoot them while driving. There are a limited number of ways to interact with a game, and players expect that. However, when you give a player a means to interact with the world, then later ignore all consequences or results of that interaction, the player feels cheated.

Unfortunately, this left a bitter note at the end of Dragon Age 2 for me. Knowing that choices had been taken away from me and that there was nothing I could do about it. Then again, potentially in Dragon Age: Awakening Anders could die and Justice might never survive... which destroys so much of Dragon Age 2 that it isn't funny.

As a closing remark, I should say that in my one full playthrough of Origins/Awakening that I didn't do any of these things: The Warden romanced Leliana, Anders survived, as did Justice. But I potentially could make alternate decisions. Knowing that those decisions wouldn't be respected effectively ruins the whole point of being able to make them and import them into the second game in the first place. Funnily enough, the solution would be as simple as "Don't allow an import". This makes each game their own self-contained adventure and leaves the writers free to write whatever they wish. Players might complain that it's not giving them the same option as BioWare's other flagship game series, Mass Effect, but if the writers never make the "promise" that the player's decisions will be carried over to the sequel, the players can't expect them to do so.

Temporary Hiatus

2011-03-17T23:41:00.000+11:00

As a public announcement, I'm heading off on holidays and won't be making any more posts or working on The Shattered War until early May. My sincere apologies to my regular readers and those people waiting eagerly for The Shattered War to be finished, but I'll be leaving my computer at home for a long overdue break.

Rest assured that I'll be putting in some significant modding hours upon my return, and I intend to deliver a great roleplaying experience to everyone as soon as I can. I'll also be looking to release some new teaser material when I get back... so stay tuned for more information in May!

Dragon Age 2 Spoiler Free Review

2011-03-14T15:30:00.012+11:00

After finishing the game a few hours ago it's time for a Dragon Age 2 review. Despite the cries of some declaring the game a travesty or a "dumbed-down console experience", it's actually a great game. However, there are a number of issues that mar its delivery and execution that people might find disappointing to varying degrees. For those interested in playing the game, I will not be giving spoilers in this post, so if you haven't finished it, reading this won't ruin it for you. However, it is a massive review because I cover a lot of ground.

Plot and Setting
The protagonist Hawke's personal choices and plight play a role in the story, and these are delivered well enough such that the dialogue can evoke some emotion in the player. In fact, I'd suggest that the player that goes through the game without some sort of emotional reaction either has a heart of stone, or is simply not interested in investing in their own immersion. Hawke's rise to power plays out through a series of acts, recounted as a story by a dwarf named Varric to a "Seeker" Cassandra from the Chantry - the dominant church in the land of Thedas. Varric's recounting of the story happens infrequently enough that it doesn't feel as though it has much of an impact on the game overall, but it does allow BioWare to "skip the boring parts" as it were, and jump the story forward a year or three. However, these interludes also serve to frustrate instead of entice because Cassandra's allusions typically relate to events that the player is not aware of, and will not understand until a lot later. Thus any tension or curiosity that might have been inspired by her words when they were initially delivered has long been lost. Unfortunately, despite the way that BioWare lauded this "framed narrative" technique, their implementation leaves a bit to be desired and in the end it feels as though DA2 might have been better without it.

Cassandra's inquisition comes across a little flat

The game sees Hawke's rise to power in the city of Kirkwall, in which Hawke arrives a beggar and eventually becomes a powerful champion. The Qunari (a race of giants who have a rigid society), the Chantry, and the plight of mages (who are locked up by the Chantry) all feature heavily throughout the game and you'll often find yourself questioning what is the "right" option. For those who found DAO a little too black and white, DA2 is refreshingly grey. Even better, it's grey without the overwhelming bleak and depressing overtones of The Witcher. If you find yourself being able to respond to choices without question or without hesitations, I'd contend you're either metagaming, or playing a character with an unbelievably rigid and narrow sense of morals. This is a game where you can get choices that will (or at least should) seriously make you think about the situation and hand and the full moral ramifications of your choices. Choosing between, life, death, imprisonment, sanctioned murder, or letting someone commit suicide is not uncommon. The themes covered in the game have some real weight to make the game a meaningful experience that give the player pause for thought and not just their character.

This tends to be the primary focus of the extension of the existing world from DAO, and unfortunately much of the other lore is recycled from the first game. Many codex entries from the first game reappear with little to no modification, which is fine for new comers, but for the old players who are looking to learn more about the world and the setting, you begin to feel a little short-changed after a while. There are some concerns with some undesirable lore inconsistencies between the two games and the content with in DA2, suggesting that a little more care should have been taken, but arguably many of those points aren't going to be noticed except by people interested in it. The reappearance of a few old characters, or mention of your Warden's actions from the original game was a welcome piece of continuity for a player's own personalised experience, except for the many trivial cameos. Some of these unfortunately reek of fan-service rather than serving to enhance the development of the world, but there are some notable exceptions that are well-written characters.

The core of the stories within the game are fantastic, but you really do get the sense that everything in the city of Kirkwall is focused on Hawke and Hawke's immediate mission and concerns. This breeds a lack of atmosphere that makes the world feel less rich than it should be, which detracts slightly from an otherwise superbly crafted experience.

I started here, then the world began to revolve around me

Another minor complaint is the new variant on the much loathed "quest board" of DAO (which also make a minor reappearance). The new style sees you acquire an item and then simply deliver it to the intended recipient, but I really don't feel that it's much improvement. A filler fed-ex quest is still a filler fed-ex quest, and while removing the first tedium of accepting the quest in the first place is welcome, it still feels like a cheap way of "extending" playtime by rewarding simple deliveries. I understand the need for the designers to reward the "explorer" player and reduce the quantity of meaning trash loot, but it feels a little unsatisfying to magically know which person in or around Kirkwall wanted their lost rum/book/shawl/cat/medieval toaster. There are a few quests that rely on you visiting a time during the day or the night, but the game uses a great mechanic whereby you can select day or night. There's no need to rest or wait, you go to the map and select day or night, and then the desired area. Thus the player gets the feel of dynamic world you explore in day and night without the associated inconvenience of timing hassles, nor the technical and performance impact of implementing full 24 hour lighting cycles.

Roleplaying and dialogue
This is one area in which the game excels. In addition to the decisions in which the player can make, conversations feature a lot of roleplaying decisions to give flavour to their interactions. These offer three styles, diplomatic/altruistic, sarcastic/charming, or blunt/aggressive. The viability of playing a character that is neither altruistic nor psychotic is something that has been sorely lacking in RPGs for years. Actually being able to deliberately play as a wise-cracking hero who occasionally does the right thing and occasionally does the selfish thing and not being punished for doing so is superb. While you did three viable conversation style options in Obsidian's Alpha Protocol, the fact that the dialogue writing for Michael Thorton was below their normal standard let that game down. DA2, however, delivers brilliantly in terms of the main character's dialogue. The icon system augments the text brilliantly, and even though you're not picking the exact line you deliver, you almost always know the intent and tone. In this way, it unquestionably outperforms Mass Effect's wheel.

Icons improve the wheel

The conversations are well written, almost universally well-acted, but that the is top-notch work players have come to expect from BioWare. Unlike in DAO, I'm not playing with subtitles on. For me, that is as a high a recommendation of the cinematics, dialogue and voice acting that I can give. The "dominant personality" system where Hawke responds based on your favoured tone (as determined by which of the three roleplaying styles mentioned previously you pick the most) presents a great deal of width in terms of responses. There are times where Hawke was unquestionably speaking with the same sarcastic wit that I'd told her to indulge on a regular basis. This means your character feels like a consistent character, even when you do something that would normally be "different" to your standard approach. In this regard, the roleplaying aspect is superb. As are the consequences and ramifications of the decisions you make, as many later come back to help or hinder you.

The problem is that these choices and the dominant personality combine to provide a great breadth of lines. As a result of that, it feels like BioWare had to cut the amount of "flavour content" present. You are only able to have a decent conversation with your companions in their "base", non plot/quest related conversations are virtually non existent. If you can't have a "proper" conversation with an NPC, it's likely that they'll have a single line they'll deliver over and over. If you're lucky, they might have two. There is some "ambient" dialogue delivered by the populace, but unfortunately it feels a little dreary and emotionless much of the time.

So many people to talk to... and hear one line

Lamentably, one of the largest problems in this area is the lack of communication with your companions. You occasionally get called to talk to them, and some of the discussions you can have with them are fantastic, but there just doesn't seem to be enough of them to necessarily have the deep relationships you develop with them. The game actively encourages the player to use their own imagination to "fill in the gaps" of the conversation you don't see, which was present in DAO to a degree, but delivered more effectively in DA2. However, when you do have conversations writing is much improved, as you don't end up with actual opinions and emotions rather than factual exposition.

Strangely enough, character depth for your companions is one area where the ambient dialogue shines. The amount of banter and comments that party members have seems to be increased significantly over DAO, so the quantity of dialogue is probably about the same, but now it is merely you listening to them rather than talking with them. This is possibly exacerbated by the long first act where the characters are not developed a great deal, meaning that you end up making lots of decisions that they agree or disagree with, but you're not quite sure why. On the plus side, the ability to develop a healthy and respectful rivalry with your companions is a wonderful improvement over the "agree with your companions or they hate you" system that has been used in the past.

She hates me at times, but we still respect each other

Combat
This is one area where DA2 shines head and shoulders above its predecessor. If there were to be an area equivalent to the Deep Roads in DAO, I probably wouldn't fear it as much in DA2, because the combat is just so much more fun. It's fast, action-packed and can all be managed on-the-fly in a slight frenzy that keeps you busy. There's not the tedium of DAO where you could sit there waiting for your warrior/rogue cooldowns to reset, or simply leave hands hovering on the keyboard and mouse while you watched your characters without any stamina or mana slowly beat their enemies to death. Moreover, the pause-and-play aspect is still there, so if you want to ramp up the difficulty, take full control and give yourself a bit of a challenge, then that option is there for you.

Flashy combat doesn't detract from the game

I'd say that the combat is definitely easier on "normal" than it was in DAO. This may be the cause of some of the "dumbed-down" arguments that detractors are flinging at it. That said, if those players desire a challenge, they can always put the difficulty up to nightmare and test their mettle. Giving the players the option to have an action-oriented experience on normal difficulty is not a bad thing. RPGs shouldn't only be for elitists who want lengthy tactical battles for every encounter. Even in the old gold-box games or Infinity Engine games, there were times when you'd just want to fling a ridiculously destructive spell (or two or three) and obliterate the enemies in a single salvo. The ability to have this kind of variety is a good thing, not a bad thing.

The combat system also utilises "cross-class combos" whereby classes can stagger, disorient or make an enemy "brittle", allowing of the other two classes exploit this weakness with a skill to do massive damage. My only problem is that I feel the cross-class combos are infrequent or limited enough that it's not easy to exploit them without conforming to specific party make-ups or character builds. There are quite a few combinations possible, but unless you deliberately choose to pursue character and party builds to create them, you can end up with little ability to have your party work together in a "special" manner until quite late in the game. It's possible that I'm asking for too much here. They also introduced the "commander" mechanic, whereby enemy "commanders" boost the prowess of their minions unless they are disabled (knocked down, stunned or otherwise incapacitated) in some manner. This adds some much needed complexity to DA2's fights, whereby it actually becomes necessary to manage your assault between the tough leader and his/her minions, rather than simply rapidly dispatching all the weaker foes as was possible in DAO.

There are some boss fights or set-pieces that RPG purists people will likely find over-the-top, and to an extent, I agree. That said, taking the complexity of fights from MMOs and translating to the single player experience serves to make the combat more interesting, even if I was torn between thinking how impressive it was and how it had ruined my suspension of disbelief.

That has to hurt

Unfortunately, once the combat is over and you loot, the shortcomings of the loot system can be seen. Sometimes I picked up less coin from a boss than I did his weak underling, and there are far too many cases where you pick up new gear that is inferior to that which you already possess. It's still extraordinarily disappointing to disarm deadly traps and lockpick near-impossible locks and get trash loot. Given the general advancement in combat, the loot needs to be on par.

Graphics
The flippant comments of a CD Projekt Red developer regarding the quality of their graphics compared to Dragon Age and The Elder Scrolls sparked heated debate among RPG fans. The ridiculous thing about these comments is that it's akin to comparing something like Final Fantasy: The Spirits within to a Studio Ghibli film. A stylized art direction does not mean a reduced graphical quality. I'm running on a PC and am utilising the high-resolution texture pack, but I don't have a high-end graphics card, so can't use DirectX 11 on Very High detail, but even on High quality the game still looks very nice.

DA2 is not unattractive, it simply has a style

The bizarre thing is that the stylized graphics are at odds with the effort put in to creating realistic looking facial appearances for characters. Seeing a fully expressive person against the background of the rest of the game is a little like putting a photograph on top of an oil painting. It's the lack of consistency that makes the game feel slightly schizophrenic in appearance, but it's not overly distracting in the scheme of things. The icons for equipment, while keeping with the art style of the ability icons, also fail to deliver. Simple coloured backgrounds and plain and clear armour icons with virtually no variation provide no individual character to the equipment. The varied appearance of equipment makes Hawke look great, and even the individual companion outfits are very nice, but you never know whether that new green background armor is going to look different to your current green background armor.

The real problem that does exist with the graphics is the varying degrees of texture quality. Much like the contrast of realistic faces against a stylised art style, the presence of high resolution textures for the face and some parts of the clothing serve to highlight that weaknesses where the texture resolution is poor. Whenever you talk to a templar, it's possible to notice the varied texture quality on their outfit. Or you ruffled mage robes with varying degrees of texture resolution that just stick out like a sore thumb.

Those shoulders are what doesn't look good

Level design
This has to be undoubtedly the weakest part of the game. From the drab and repetitive appearance of Kirkwall to the almost inexcusable over re-use of areas, you do get the feeling that this particular aspect of design was sadly overlooked. When I saw this interview where David Silverman, the Marketing Director talked about how unnecessary all the books in the Circle Tower in DAO were because they went unnoticed by players, I was a little worried about this aspect of DA2. Unfortunately, some of my fears were realised in a remarkably horrible way.

The lack of clutter and character for levels is very stark, particularly in Kirkwall itself. The vast stretches of plain, unbroken tiles give Kirkwall a staid and stale appearance that the limited number of NPCs walking around cannot overcome. The city of Kirkwall feels very empty and lacking in terms of its population, giving the impression of an empty box for the player to run through. Lowtown and the Docks offer a little more variety in terms of their appearance, not featuring endless tiles off into the distances, but Darktown is the only area that begins to feel like a real environment, though it still lacks the foreboding appearance or atmosphere suggested by its name or the lore surrounding it.

The problem with level design clutter is that you only notice it if it is absent. People NOT noticing the subtleties of level design is typically the hallmark of a good designer, not the mark of wasted time. Many PS3 owners hold up Uncharted 2 as an example of superb graphics, but in many cases what they actually should be commending is the level design. It is not the graphics that make the game look good or realistic, it's the well crafted levels that are filled with all the rubble, rubbish, rocks and foliage that you would expect in the environments the player goes through. Kirkwall in particularly is sorely lacking in this regard, which is a significant problem when you spend so much time in it.

The tiles of Kirkwall. Get used to them, you'll be seeing them a lot.

Area reuse, particularly of interiors, is arguably the worst sin in this aspect of the game. Having areas that are used as part of a core plot reappear to be used for a relatively generic encounter, or worse, having a generic area reused for a pivotal plot, destroys the uniqueness of the experience. This is a terrible shortcoming to have, as the thought "I've been here before" utterly ruins the emotional impact and epic feel of a story's key events. This is unacceptable in almost any game, but inexcusable in a game proclaimed as a AAA title. DAO had some area reuse, but not to the same extent as DA2, and certainly not for key plot areas. The decision to release DA2 with these failings is terribly short-sighted indeed, and should never be repeated again.

The reason that this is so disappointing is that there are some great examples of level design within the game. Quite a number of the exterior levels have a good degree of clutter, provide branches for the player to explore as well as giving "corridors" for a series of encounters. There are levels that are definitely visually appealing and make you appreciate the effort that went into crafting them properly. It is unfortunate that these tend to be the exception rather than the norm.

But thankfully, the rather limited colour palette so heavily infused with brown (which even the characters in the game joke about) in the first game is gone. DA2 is much more vibrant in its colour, and the game is much more aesthetically pleasing because of that.

No more endless Deep Roads of brown

Music and Sound
Given I didn't feel that DAO's soundtrack was Inon Zur's best work, the fact that huge strides weren't made in this area is a little disappointing for me. The main theme still appears to be the pick of the tunes, even though it is reusing parts of the original DAO theme. There are some good original pieces here, but there's not as much musical impact and emotion as I was expecting. Unfortunately, a number of the tracks are even remastered tracks from the original game. While I was playing it felt like that was the majority of the music I was hearing, but there the Signature Edition I bought came with the soundtrack (though I'm unsure if it's the complete soundtrack) of 29 tracks spanning 1 hour and 15 minutes

However, comparing the huge improvements made between the first two titles of BioWare's other flagship, Mass Effect, I feel that DA2 didn't do enough to mature in the music department. That said, the musical cues at important points in conversation and the story do deliver and frequently with significant punch, it's just that outside of these that the music tends to feel a little underwhelming.

The sound apart from that is reasonably good, character and background sounds are fine, although more ambient noise would definitely help to overcome the feeling of emptiness present in many areas. The main problem is that just like the level design in many cases, there's a lack of a deep atmosphere. The richness of sound isn't as strong as it should be, being merely serviceable instead of exceptional.

The sound isn't as rich as the environment

Lastly, I don't know if the lack of music after the game finished and the credits started rolling was intentional or a glitch on my computer, but it left me feeling rather flat to have the game finish with a silent whimper. It might be trivial, but the ending sticks in players minds and can have a significant negative influence on a player's perception of the game if it's badly delivered.

Conclusion
Ultimately, Dragon Age 2 comes across as a flawed masterpiece. It features some very classic influences, but these are blended with more modern sensibilities to try and evolve the single player RPG. What DA2 does, it does it well, but its shortcomings stem from what it doesn't do. It is without doubt a great game and a marvelous roleplaying experience, but is marred by things that players really don't expect to be present in a release from a veteran developer like BioWare. Its various elements combine to make a thoroughly enjoyable game, but in the end, that game leaves you wondering just how good it could have been if its development cycle had been a bit longer.

Two tidbits

2011-03-08T22:59:00.000+11:00

Some people might be enjoying Dragon Age 2, but due to the archaic system of staggered release dates despite the fact that distribution networks allow for games to be in people's hands before the official day of release, I'll still have to wait a few days before I get to play. In the intervening time, I will be modding, which tonight involves putting the finishing touches on the dialogue for one of the sidequests for The Shattered War. I really should put a few more posts about the work that has been done for The Shattered War, but a lot of my recent effort has been into the conversations, so I don't have screenshots of gorgeous new areas to show off.

However, I recently was linked to two interesting bits of information. The first is the release of Mengtzu's "Broken City" module, finishing up the stories started in Fragments of Ferelden and Dirge of Coldhearth. I'd say that Mengtzu's module development focus lies more towards combat than my own, I'd definitely recommend them to people looking for something a little bit different within the Dragon Age Origins engine. His skills have definitely improved with each release, and I'm looking forward to making the time to play through his latest work.

The other thing of interest to me was a link to a blog called The Rotted Rose, covering the development of a DAO module, and general discussion regarding RPGs. There are some interesting posts here, and I'll be having a look through his backlog at some point. However, the point of interest is his discussion on writing RPG dialogue. I was contemplating writing a few posts on the basic elements of conversation design and writing, but those three posts have covered off on many of these elements quite well - there's no need for me to repeat what has been said there.

Games: Serious Business

2011-03-06T21:11:00.000+11:00

Here's something I was linked from my regular favourite viewing Extra Credits - it's from a series called Rev Rants, and entitled Fun Isn't Enough.

This video talks about how gaming can represent more than merely entertainment, how they can be more than simply fun. Now, while I'm all for pushing the advancement of gaming as an art form, Anthony Burch seems to be under the false impression that fun is mutually exclusive to serious content. For all the comparisons to films and all of its different genres, he's seemingly ignoring all those films that manage to not only make an enjoyable ride, but also give us serious food for though. Action films that give us pause to think like The Matrix or Inception fit this bill, The Dark Knight is effectively a character piece about the potential for noble heroes to fall, and even Terminator 2 has a message to deliver about humanity's hubris and capability for self-destruction.

Certainly, it's possible to ignore the deeper messages present in these films (or any film for that matter) but simply providing entertainment does not preclude them from having greater meaning and giving us a deeper insight into our own character and the world around us. Why is it perceived that any game that involves killing your opponents offers little more than a juvenile distraction? A shallow layer of entertainment and special effects doesn't destroy any underlying meaning inherent in a particular piece.

Sorry Miranda, your gun and cup size mean you can't be "serious"

Merely by making this post, it's possible that some people would interpret me as having exactly the knee jerk reaction that he's complaining about, the people "who want games to not be fun" are "cowards" or are happy to let games be "squandered on one thing." I don't insist that games must be fun, but I do insist that they must have some appeal as an entertainment or artistic medium.

People wouldn't necessarily classify watching a horror film or drama movie as fun, but they'd certainly find it entertaining or engaging. Are there are people who are convinced there are no games that currently fit this bill? Do we seriously believe that there are no games around that can pull at our heartstrings or make us really consider a point of view, or even cause us to question the basis of own judgement or morality? Given the potent power of storytelling in games and its increased prevalence in modern titles over the past few years, the industry has made huge strides in addressing this issue. Even games over a decade old have posed some very interesting questions for those who paid attention...

What can change the nature of a man?

Certainly there is much more that can be done so that games can be taken more seriously. But dismissing anything that provides fun as lacking the potential to provide some "deep insights into the human condition" or ignoring that any medium needs to give a mechanism to be engaging for its consumers is as equally shortsighted as demanding that "all games must be fun."

The combinatorial explosion

2011-03-03T21:12:00.000+11:00

Does anyone remember Bethesda's promotional material about Fallout 3 before it was released? Does anyone recall the claim of "over 200 endings"? Now, this claim stemmed from the fact that there were "unique" endings in so much as a different slideshow was displayed to you to accompany the variations in voice-over based on several key decisions. The main reason there are over two hundred endings is because the choices, and thus various segments of the ending, are independent of one another.

By simple mathematics, the number of possible endings can be determined by multiplying the number of choices in each decision together. Pick one of two options, and one of three options - you've got six endings. Add in another choice with three options... 18. Each decisions referenced in the ending rapidly causes the amount of unique endings to increase rapidly. Of course, for today's games this frequently means recording VO describing the outcome of each decision, and presenting this in a modular form, so that each decision is discussed in turn.

I imagine some of you might be curious as to why I'm discussing this concept. It's because I'm happy to tell you that due to the decisions present in The Shattered War, and their effect on the epilogue given to the player, there will be several thousand different possible endings. Your decisions, the way you treat key NPCs, your choice of who lives or dies will all combine to give you a unique ending to your adventure. If you're looking for the power of choice, The Shattered War will deliver.

Game difficulty (Part 8) - Case Study

2011-02-28T18:24:00.000+11:00

In discussing various RPG fights, I've realised that I've not actually put forth many options on how to many fights interesting or manage difficulty. As such, I thought I'd discuss an idea I'd previously had for a particular boss encounter. This particular encounter was created with a high-level Neverwinter Nights 2 module in mind, so may not directly translate to other rule systems, but there are still merits to discussing it as a case study. Plus this way I don't spell out any encounters from The Shattered War in full! If you're not interested in encounter design I'd probably suggest you skip this post. I get down into the weeds a bit discussing various mechanics and impact of various effects on the encounter, and this post is a massive wall of text.

On the off chance you're not familiar with some basic terminology, here's a quick rundown:
DPS: Damage Per Second. How quickly enemies/players do damage.
HP: Hit Points. How much damage enemies/players can take before dying.
CC: Crowd Control. Killing or incapacitating large groups of enemies.
Tank: Player who able to absorb or avoid enemy attacks, and is the target of most (if not all) attacks from an enemy.
Kite: To run around with monsters in tow, preventing them from hitting the kiting player or any other player.
Adds: Enemies additional to the main boss.

The particular encounter was set in a catacomb of six rooms arranged in a linear fashion. The player encountered the boss in the very first room, and could initiate the fight. However, at the start of the encounter, the room would fill with adds, making it difficult to reach the boss. These adds had moderate DPS and HP, and served as a shield to prevent the melee DPS warriors reaching the boss.

The boss would launch ranged attacks at the party from behind his protective wall of adds. After the boss takes 10% of his total health in damage, or all the adds were killed, the boss would flee into the next room. Regardless of why the boss fled, the player was unable to pursue until all the adds were dead. However, as soon as all those adds were dead, another wave of adds would spawn in the next room and the sequence would repeat.

Upon reaching the last room, two kinds of adds would spawn regularly. High HP and low DPS adds would spawn close to the boss (to continue to serve as a shield) while a larger number of low HP and high DPS adds spawned from the back of the room. If no character was engaging the boss in melee combat, he would launch damaging area of effect spells on the entire party. In melee combat, he was significantly less dangerous, and could be tanked fairly comfortably.

This encounter forced players to pace themselves through the various stages. Ideally, the party would attempt to cause the boss to flee from each room by making him take 10% of damage in health. This made the final and most dangerous stage of the fight (where the high DPS adds were spawning) could be finished more quickly. This forced them to manage their resources throughout the first five rooms, but also be judicious in their target choice during that period.

The final room forced the players to divide their attention between multiple threats - concentrate on the boss in order to end the encounter, make sure that the number of shield adds did not get out of hand, and quickly dispatch the groups of high DPS adds. One thing that is very important to note is that if the player was diligent and aware, it was possible for them to pick up information regarding the behaviour of the boss, the nature of his various adds, and that there were six rooms he considered his inner sanctum. As such, the player received knowledge in-game that gave them some indication of how the battle would play out.

If we look at implementing different difficulty levels within this encounter, it is not straightforward. My first thought I was to decrease the boss' retreat percentage to 5%, but this is actually a very bad idea, as it limits the player's ability to use strategy to produce an advantage. This takes away the player's ability to use tactics rather than forcing them invent new ones, which is the opposite of the desired effect. The solution I ended up devising came about through the adds in the fight.

In the preceding rooms, the moderate DPS/HP adds would be increasing replaced with high DPS/low HP adds. While this potentially results in a similar effect of reducing the boss' health flee percentage (because he flees once all the adds are dead) it forces the player to manage their strategy throughout these rooms. If they do not concentrate enough on the boss, the final room will be significantly harder, but if they do not kill the adds quickly, they might run low on health and healing resources for that final stage.

In the last stage of the encounter, harder difficulties would change the spawn mechanics of the adds. Rather than simply spawning them every 20 seconds or so, the high HP/low DPS adds would spawn in large batches, and the low HP/high DPS adds would spawn frequently. This amplified the danger presented by each group and forced changes to the most common way to deal with them.

Low HP/high DPS adds are prime material for crowd control (CC) spells or abilities - a whirlwind or fireball frequently can dispatch multiple such adds. However, if these adds spawn frequently enough that the player would run out of resources (mana/spells per day/whatever), then this forces the player to rethink their strategy. They potentially have to get a party member to kite or tank these adds and wait until they form a large enough group justify the use of such an ability.

The high HP/low DPS adds do not present much of a threat in low numbers, which is why spawning them in a group makes the encounter more difficult. If the tank is unable to cope with the damage from the boss and these adds, they will die and the player will be overwhelmed. As such, the player will either need to dispatch part of the enemy group immediately to prevent that from happening, or attempt to wipe out the group as a whole using CC. Keeping in mind the potential tanking/kiting of the low HP/high DPS adds, the player would have to manage their timing so that they did not need to CC both the high HP and low HP groups at the same time.

Again, the key here in changing this design was not to force the player to abandon tactics or force them to use on single tactic. Ultimately, it comes down to something that I always advocate for RPGs - giving the player choice. Taking the above example, players might try different options based on their party make up. If the party had a warrior, rogue, mage and cleric, they might proceed how I've described. However, a party with high burst damage (say, warrior, two mages and a mage/cleric) might attempt to simply focus all the fire on the boss in the hope of eliminating him quickly before cleaning up the adds.

The designer can implement encounters such to force a particular strategy, but encounters that force the players to determine the best possible solution for their party makeup.

RPGs and Reflexes

2011-02-25T22:06:00.000+11:00

Following on from my post regarding difficulty in RPGs based on the fact that they are not reflex based, I think it's time to take a look at some exceptions to this rule.

The first example is The Witcher. The Witcher does rely on reflexes in order to succeed in combat at a very basic level. Combat revolves around "attack sequences" which you can "continue" provided that you click to attack at the right time during your current attack. This effectively enables the player to perform better provided that the master the click timing. Unfortunately, this is the limit of the complexity of the reflex element of the combat - it's a series of quick time events where you click the mouse button to attack at the right time. This simplicity meant that it added little, if anything, to the game.

Second off the rank is Risen. This game has a click based system that also improves the player's performance with proper timing - press the attack button within the appropriate time window and the character will make another swing. However, as the character's (as opposed to the player's) skill improves, additional moves become possible. Counter attacks become possible (though again requiring timing), but the player can also defend, either by using a shield or by rolling out of the way. There is potential for this combat style to become tedious after many fights, but the variety of offensive and defensive moves available to the player means that they have choice in their approach. The player can choose to defend and wait for an opening to attack, or attempt to attack wildly and dispatch the enemy without giving them a chance to retaliate.

Click timing fighting plus strategy

Lastly, consider Mass Effect 2. This took the third person cover-based shooter mechanics popularised by games like Gears of War and adapted it to an RPG. Add in the choice of classes and companions (and the skills of each), and there's a significant amount of complexity in both the reflex and knowledge based aspects of the combat. In addition to this, the familiarity of many players with the shooter genre offers the potential to implement set pieces requiring specific strategies yet still remaining accessible to most of the player base.

However, Mass Effect 2 does have shortcomings in its design. Particularly on higher difficulties, many enemies have protection (in the form of shields or armor) that render many skills useless until this protection is removed. Now while this is potentially a good thing in terms of forcing the player to implement different tactics on higher difficulties, the problem is that there are too many skills rendered ineffective against these protections. Worse, once enemies are unprotected, the damage required to finish them off is often quite low, meaning that those skills offer little benefit over simply shooting the target a couple of times with a gun.

Any armour or shields renders this skill useless

The key difficulty in implementing these mechanics in an RPG is striking a balance between the relative strength of reflexes and character build. If a player picks their character's skills poorly, then they should be expected to function with appreciably less power than a character who is optimised for combat. The Witcher relies on reflexes in order to function, but does not engage the player, and thus relies more on classic RPG approach of using the character's base skills to determine success. Mass Effect 2 handles this issue by having a limited range of skills for players to choose from within a class, making it very difficult to create a "bad" build, which is far more feasible in more complex rule systems. Risen appears to tread somewhat of a middle ground between the two, but still sits towards the side of lacking depth in possible character combat skills.

Determining a happy medium between reflexes and character builds is still a work in progress for even leading game designers and companies. I'm looking forward to seeing how it is handled in the major RPG titles to be released this year.

PS I've just finished the Dragon Age 2 demo on the PC (I wrote this post yesterday), and have to say that it goes a long way to introducing reflexes into Dragon Age. While the pause and play system is still possible, the changes in combat making the encounters a lot more active for the player. No longer do warriors and rogues spend lots of the fight doing very little except auto attacking. I have to say that from my perspective, the new combat is a welcome change over DAO by introducing a more active fighting style.

Game difficulty (Part 7)

2011-02-20T23:09:00.001+11:00

As mentioned in my last post, RPGs frequently have to deal with difficulty in a different manner to many other games because of their mechanics. A significant portion of player skill is determined by knowledge rather than reflexes. Knowledge of how to build a character, knowledge of powerful skills and abilities, and knowledge of enemy weaknesses. Furthermore, in games like Dragon Age, it is possible to pause the game, allowing the player time to plan their tactics in great detail and not have to be concerned with their reaction time at all.

If a player is failing to succeed in a particular encounter, then a quick read of a guide or walkthrough will provide them with the necessary knowledge to prevail. Implementing the strategies within general does not require a high degree of skill or mastery of the game's controls, meaning that the player can "improve" and overcome any challenges without becoming overly frustrated, which could lead them it stop playing the game entirely.

One cheap tactic and this fight becomes incredibly simple

Now, in certain circumstances, this can actually improve the accessibility and playability of the game. MMO raiding relies fairly heavily on this type of setup for many guilds. Once the leading guilds who break the new ground and work out the strategies for overcoming the encounters, this information is typically available from one or more websites, and then other guilds follow in their footsteps. A raid leader (or perhaps all members of the raid) will read about the encounter and the strategies required to defeat it, and then attempt the raid with an appropriate group possessing the relevant skills/gear. In this case, the ability to break down the tactics needed to succeed makes the game easier and more enjoyable for many players. Admittedly there is potentially some element of reaction and/or timing in MMO raiding, especially when compared to RPGs where you can pause, but even an MMO does still not require reflexes to the same extent as an FPS or fighting game.

Despite having some advantages, there are drawbacks to RPG difficulty. For starters, it can be very hard to produce a "difficult" encounter for players truly wanting a challenge, as optimal character builds will often be able to breeze through the game without issue. This makes producing a challenging game for min/max players especially hard to do while still keeping the game accessible to the average or amateur player unless severe increases in difficulty are implemented. Further exacerbating this problems is that many RPGs rely on simple factors to increase difficulty, like multiplying enemy damage by 2 (or more). As discussed previously, this frequently does little to increase the challenge for the player in an enjoyable fashion, and sometimes fails to increase the challenge at all.

Dragon Age suffers from "double enemy damage" syndrome

Further compounding this issue is that guides frequently nullify any challenges faced by the player, removing any difficulty they might face. In an FPS, even being told explicitly where enemies are does not necessarily help if the player does not have the skill to line up a shot and kill those enemies before they do the same to the player. In an RPG it is potentially possible to "bypass" a challenge without learning the necessary skills that obstacle was trying to introduce to the player. Because the player has followed instructions to get past a challenge, it is possible that they have not learned from that event, and thus may get frustrated again if a similar circumstance arises again in the future. Of course, the player can theoretically just refer to their guide again, but if a player is constantly following a guide in order to succeed, it is likely that they are having less fun than if they were just able to work it out for themselves.

So when designing encounters for RPGs, it is vital that you consider the possible power level of the player's characters. Furthermore, when dealing with encounters that require specific player knowledge or require them to implement specific tactics, provide hints or resources to the player to allow them to not run into the fight blind. If a thorough player could find out that a particular enemy is vulnerable to fire, then this rewards the player who goes to the effort to find that out... though ideally they would find information from the game rather than the Internet.

Breadth of choice and a constant baseline of power are at opposite ends of the scale when dealing with RPG encounter difficulty. But if dealing with a game that features absolutely no dependency upon reactions, then a character build and player tactics are the only means by which to differentiate the skill level of players.

Game difficulty (Part 6)

2011-02-16T23:09:00.001+11:00

When dealing with game difficulty, the RPG tends to be somewhat of a "special case" compared to many other games. In most games, much of the skill of the game and the prowess of the players comes as a result of their reaction time and finesse in using the game's control system in order to succeed. In an FPS, a better player is quicker at aiming and getting a headshot. In an RTS, much of the game revolves around the player's ability to micromanage their units in battle and multitask building, expanding and attacking.

In an RPG, the player's choice of skills play a very significant part in their combat effectiveness, and doubly so when it is not possible to change these choices part way through the game. In effect a significant portion of their skill level is determined by their ability to calculate how to maximse their character's effectiveness, typically by maximising their DPS - Damage Per Second. This isn't to say that player skill doesn't play some factor in determining skill level, and in MMOs there are definitely players who excel at PvP (Player vs Player) combat which requires the ability to quickly adapt to the actions of the enemy and counter them. This is somewhat different to the mostly ordered experience from PvE (Player vs Environment) raids, where the player (or group of players) must use their skills to deal with a series of scripted encounters where the computer controlled enemies behave mostly the same each time.

Another key issue is that even though there may be some skill involved in playing RPGs, this is somewhat undermined by the fact that RPGs feature a levelling system that means that lower level characters are always weaker than higher level characters. After playing for long enough, the player's character grows in power by levelling up, getting access to new skills and abilities that can eventually combine in order to help them prevail in situations that they could not hope to succeed previously. Thus the increase in the player's power comes as a result of perseverance rather than an increased level of skill of mastery of the game's controls. The player is given a sense of achievement and increased sense of power and prowess, despite the fact that their skill level in terms of handling the game's controls and understanding its mechanics may not have increased at all. There is a false sense of reward in that the player is given increased power through their levelled up character, when all they have done to achieve that increased power is simply to persevere with playing the game.

Even the most skilled player in the world cannot defeat Onyxia at level 1... or even level 30.

A significant number of RPGs don't require a large amount of active player skill in order for the player to prevail. Knowing which mechanics provide an overwhelming advantage or which abilities combine to deal significant blows to the enemy is much of the differentiation between player skill levels. Games with turn-based or semi-turn-based mechanics are still popular, although they have been slowly losing ground to real-time games for many years. Big name turn-based strategy games are sparse when compared to their real-time counterparts, and the closest you'll see to a turn-based first person shooter is VATS in Fallout 3/New Vegas.

However, this having a calculation/knowledge-centric difficulty is not necessarily a "bad" thing, but it is definitely something that people involved in dealing with the difficulty of RPGs must bear in mind. Many RPG fans like that their success in the game is not determined by the speed of their reactions, but how they can utilise the skills they have in order to succeed, using tactics to identify the weaknesses in enemies and how to use the powerful abilities at their disposal to overcome challenges. The potential problem for the designer is that the player can increase their skill level through reading a guide rather than the practice of playing the game.

There are potentially good and bad implications for this, but I will discuss those in a subsequent post...