Slow going

Recently I feel as though I have been discussing mods more than actually modding, and to be honest, that's probably correct. This has been in part to attempt to address a major problem for Dragon Age mods - publicity and visibility.

In short, it simply isn't there.  Many players are convinced that mods simply consist of: sex, nudity, overpowered items, lore-breaking content, or any combination of those four things.  This couldn't be further from the truth, yet getting players to understand this and then to actually try out some of the content that is available is an extremely difficult task.

Modders can't get good advertising

Some of the suggestions made by players to advertise mods are already in use, but apparently not visible enough to be seen and provide the spark of encouragement for players to try them. As time passes and Dragon Age 2 approaches release, it seems that modders will need to undertake some serious advertising efforts in order to get publicity for and awareness of their work.

Still, it seems the best publicity around is word of mouth. Thus I would implore any players to spread the word amongst your friends about the mods available for Dragon Age. Modders make them for you, now we just ask that you help others to find them as well.

Who is the audience?

Recently I was posed an interesting question by a player: "When you created Alley of Murders, did you think of yourself first when creating this mod and then decide to let whoever else wished for your excellence to enjoy as well as yourself?" This was a very interesting question, and raised questions which I had answered almost without thinking because of my mindset in creating Alley of Murders. However, I did explicitly deal with this question when I was working on Fate of a City for Neverwinter Nights 2.

I had originally planned for the mod to revolve entirely around dialogue with perhaps some problem solving aspects. The idea was for it to be an entirely roleplay focused module with a vastly branching story. I felt that such types of adventures were sorely lacking when it came to user released content for NWN2, as I found the majority of them to be extremely combat focused.

As I continued to work on my mod, I came to realise that while I found it an enjoyable experience, it deviated too far from the in-built expectations of the NWN2 player community. Many of these players are longstanding fans of the D&D ruleset, and have a great passion for building characters and fighting against monsters in combat to test their mettle and skill in designing a new build. In wanting to create something that did not exist at all, I realised that I was making a niche mod that would lack appeal for many players.

Everything is better with zombies, right?

As a result, I had to rework some of the content I had already created in order to fit with a new vision for the module which would both cater to my desire to make a heavily branching story but maintaining the strong ties with the D&D ruleset and universe. My mod made heavy use of D&D's in-built alignment system in order to deal with the players actions and use key decisions in concert with their alignment to produce vastly different outcomes both during the game and its climax. Admittedly some players still had issues with the system, but I've addressed that previously. Regardless, this change allowed me to not only produce the type of game that I wanted to make, keeping it on track with my vision of creating a choice-dependent player experience/story, but also to appeal to the desire of the player base at large.

Choice: my favourite RPG drug... when it's there.

However, as I said at the start of this post, I did not explicitly consider this problem perhaps as closely as I could have done when creating Alley of Murders. But that is in part because I had answered it by default through my three goals for creating it:
1. Learn how to use the Dragon Age Toolset with a small project.
2. Demonstrate to the Dragon Age community (both modders and players) that creating quality modules with full VO to integrate seamlessly into the game was possible.
3. Create a "Dragon Age" story befitting the style and tone of the main campaign.

As someone who has been making levels for games even before Doom came out I know I have matured significantly as a modder. In my earliest days of modding, I did not even have an audience beyond myself and arguably a few friends with whom I could give my work to via floppy disk, as I had no internet (or even bulletin board) access at the time. Since that time, I have been increasingly mindful of the purpose of my mods, and identifying that mods are for the players.

Players wanted more for their Warden to do. Alley of Murders provides that.

As a modder, I love the creative process of producing a piece of work that players can enjoy. I love writing stories, dialogue, creating levels/visual effects/cinematics, scripting and even playtesting. I love that act of creation, but at the same time I know that I must keep in mind the fact that I am creating something for players, and in many cases, I am playing within a pre-defined world that people love and have analysed (and over-analysed) at great length. Knowing this, I feel it is my responsibility as a modder to conform to that world that has been created and to match it in tone, history and style. This is even more important when creating mods that add to the main campaign of the game.

As a modder I am telling a story that is uniquely mine, but if I am creating a story within a pre-defined world, then I must respect that setting. Before Dragon Age was released, I had many ideas for quests (both sidequests or main plot lines) that I had a desire to create as mods. After I played the game and read all the lore contained with the codex and other official sources, I realised that some of these stories could not be told within the Dragon Age world because they simply did not fit the image of Thedas as created by BioWare. Maybe one day I will get a chance to tell those stories, but as a modder I will did my utmost to ensure that Alley of Murders matched the vision of the official Dragon Age world.  I intend to do exactly the same thing with The Shattered War.

A little less conversation, more vegetation please

Conversation writing has taken a little bit of a backseat to the level design process over the past couple of days. I've individually placed and adjusted over 4100 trees, shrubs and grass tufts, making sure that none of them are floating above the ground and all of them are "just right".  So here's the requisite "show-off screenshot" to demonstrate a small segment of the now fully-decorated level.

Running in a winter wonderland

In other development news, I've completed another significant portion of the main quest line of the game. This was a particularly time consuming task, as it involves numerous choices which can greatly affect the way events can pan out. My current rough progress for a few key items looks like this:

• Level Design: 45%
• Main Quest: 35%
• Side Quests: 30%

As such, there's still quite a way to go, but there's already a lot of content and material for players to experience. Keep in mind that this includes many decisions that can be made which have a real and powerful effect on the story, its characters and the ultimate conclusion and aftermath. Death, betrayal, love and triumph may all play a part in The Shattered War, but it will be up to you to determine how these events play out and whether you will pursue a path of kindness or vengeance.

Shoryuken bear

I'll leave you with the above gem that I took while trying to grab a screenshot to showcase my vegetation placement. It doesn't really show off the level that well, but it does show the intrepid hero in a little bit of a trouble...

Professional failures

Modders sometimes draw outrage for not producing content that is quite "up to scratch" when compared with commercial games. However, sometimes I feel like professional developers need to do a bit better. With the recent bonanza of steam sales where games have been going on sale for ridiculous prices, I've made a few purchases. There are two titles that have raised my ire.

The first is Prince of Persia 2008. I'm not going to complain about the disconnect with the Sands of Time Trilogy, the new art direction, or anything like that, in fact I'm not actually qualified to talk about that, because I've barely played it. My complaint is technical, pure and simple. I fired it up and was presented with an entirely invisible world.

That's the prince in front of a cliff... supposedly

None of the textures appeared. They were all invisible. Having a Radeon 4850 with 512Mb DDR3, I was a little confused, as it should have more than enough texture memory to be able to cope with anything the game could throw at it. However, the shameful thing here was when I went searching for technical support. Ubisoft's support section had no articles whatsoever associated with the game. None. I've never encountered a game with no bugs, so I was more than a little surprised. So I sent a message to their technical support to find out how to rectify the problem.

Aside from the usual "update drivers/DirectX" suggestions (which I'd already addressed in my request) I was told that the game was not officially supported on Windows 7 (though it is on Vista) and that I should try to fix the problem using compatibility mode. It didn't work, but really... Windows 7 unsupported? I eventually "fixed" the problem by turning anti-aliasing off and dropping the graphical quality to "medium" instead of high... I'd be curious to know what differences that makes to the quality of the graphics. I suppose at least I can play it now, but I'm more than a little disappointed.

The other game I need to level a complaint at is Burnout Paradise. This one is simple. Let me exit the game. Pressing the ESC doesn't bring up a menu that allows me to quit the game. It brings up an information window. I don't care if you're porting a game or not. When the player hits the ESC key, they should get the main menu of the game, allowing them to do things like:

• Resume the game
• Save/Load the game (if applicable)
• Configure controls
• Configure sound/graphics options
• Quit the game

Instead Burnout gives you this:

Huh? Where is my menu?

So based on that screen, you have to somehow realise that pressing F1 and F2 will rotate through different screens - apparently the small arrows next to the F1 and F2 keys are supposed to indicate this. Nevermind that you get a message down the bottom saying "F2 Burnout Store" as though hitting F2 will always take you to the Burnout store. It also takes at least three key presses to get to the "real" main menu, and you have to wait for each new screen to flip and display completely before you can move to the next one.

Yes, these are small things, but they add to the failings already present to cause some moderate aggravation. Navigating a UI should not be time consuming. It should be as quick as possible so that the player can get back to doing what the designers should want them to be doing - playing the game. I'm afraid I don't see any acceptable excuse for UI design this bad. Hitting ESC should give you a main menu. It's that simple.

An IGNoble disgrace

Regular readers of this blog will know that I hate console wars or console versus PC zealotry. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, and using individual games to compare them (and say "this one is the best!") is something I generally consider to be a sign of fanboy postulating. So when I saw a "professional game website", which IGN claims to be, doing a (please don't click this link, for reasons I will explain) head-to-head video comparison of Mass Effect 2 on XBox360 and PS3 and sparking a raft of "PS3 is so much better" claims across various other websites, I was a little disappointed.

A still from the video (PS3 left, XBox360 right)

You can click the two images in the post for a higher resolution image. But, just taking a quick look at the above shot, it looks like the PS3 version has better contrast and colour saturation. That was my overall impression from watching the video, which struck me as an odd thing. Now, there might be some graphical differences between the two consoles but I knowing the Unreal Engine and its precalculated lighting for static surfaces, I wouldn't have thought the differences would have been quite so noticable as they are in this video. I would have attributed to the game being run on a different television, but I would hope for IGN's sake that they created the two videos using the same television so as to remove such bias.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that I can even give them that much credit, because their comparison seems to be wholly unreliable. Check out the screenshot below.

What is that? (PS3 left, XBox360 right)

Now, aside from the slight difference in the position of the frame for both the screenshots here (that's right, they're slightly out of sync), there's some serious frame-blurring present in the picture on the right. If you take a screenshot from a game, it shouldn't end up blurred - and particularly not to the great extent that can be seen in this shot. Go pause a gameplay video from a console game and see if you get blurring. If it's a high quality video, you won't. If it's not... well, guess what can happen?

This "comparison" appears incompetent at best, and blatantly biased at worst. It appears that these are two videos of different quality placed side-by-side in a console comparison - if IGN demonstrated that they produced these videos on the same television using the same video resolution and compression, I'd happily retract this post. But as it stands, their video appears to be nothing more than a shameless attempt to garner website hits by provoking a console flame-war.

I expect more from gaming sites that claim to provide "video game journalism", as should every person who relies on these sites for a supposedly unbiased and objective analysis of games.  Shame on you, IGN.

Narrative needs more than gameplay

So before reading today's blog post, I'll direct everyone to watch this video.



Done? Okay, now I have to say that I pretty much disagree wholeheartedly with their argument.

Admittedly I was fairly young when I played missile command - I believe I actually played one of its clones on a BBC Micro rather than the original game itself, but the mechanics were exactly the same. Now, the creator might have intended the game to be a reflection on the futility of nuclear war, and impart the gravity of the situation on the player, but I didn't get it at all. And funnily enough, I could go back now and have exactly the same reaction. If that was the intention of the creator, then all credit to him, but I'm afraid it didn't work.

As far as I was concerned, I was protecting moon bases from being blown up from alien attack. There was no moral dilemma inherent in the game of me deciding between whether to sacrifice the lives of the few versus the many or protecting civilians versus missiles bases. The game for me was reduced entirely to an arbitrary defense game that had no grave moral implications or story, and certainly didn't make me go away feeling emotionally beaten at the harsh reality of fighting a losing battle. I typically came away frustrated because I'd lost or failed to shoot down a particular incoming missile. That was it. Any stress or tension was only borne out of the mechanics themselves rather than any narrative behind them.

I don't argue that narrative can't be assisted by gameplay mechanics, but I would argue that it is impossible to provide good narrative solely through gameplay mechanics. Gameplay does not tell a story, it allows a player to tell their own story - which may be vastly different from the story that the designers had in mind. Obviously there were vast technical limitations in Missile Command's day that meant that it wasn't possible to deliver the same level of storytelling that we can today. But could we read a similiar amount of story into Asteroids? Geometry Wars? How about Minesweeper?

I maintain it is not possible to deliver a consistent narrative purely through mechanics. Without some supporting evidence, creator is providing a framework for interpretation, not a narrative. What is the narrative of The Mona Lisa? Or the Venus de Milo? How about a photograph of Omaha Beach?

This might tell a story, but a different story for everyone

If a "narrative" is delivered by gameplay alone, the designer is not telling a story, they are letting the player tell their own story - and this is an important distinction. While the latter situation could potential make the player feel more involved in the game because they're using their imagination to make it more personal, this is not because of the designer's skill in delivering narrative - because that's exactly what they aren't doing. A designer can't tell a consistent story without stating some things explicitly.

A player can fill in a lot of gaps in a story, and generally when the player is told less about a story within a game they'll "fill in the blanks" more between the pieces of the story they are told. The human brain loves stories, and likes to string events together using them, but in order for this to happen the players must be told some story. This must be done if the designer wants a solid and consistent narrative to be delivered to their audience. Without any sort of explicit narrative, the player is just playing a game to achieve goals rather than as part of a story or more cohesive experience, which I'd contend is just about as far away from art as one can get.

Sharing is Caring

One thing about creating mods for games is that it really heavily relies on the game's player and modder community. Without players, modders would not exist.  It's that simple. Most modders love the creative process of modding, but if there is no player base to experience their content, then the endeavour will ultimately feel flat.

But a modding community also relies heavily on the modders themselves sharing and supporting one another.  By providing support to other people attempting to create content for the game, they often discover possibilities that the designers themselves may not have explored, or workarounds for issues that may or may not have been present in the original workflow of official designers.

Barcode trees. I bet BioWare didn't have to deal with these.

They can also help advertise and support the publicity of other modules - some modding communities have modders attacking or openly criticizing one another, which typically just ends up fracturing the community and resulting in lower quality modules being released. I believe the adage goes: If you hate something, tell the creator, if you love something, tell everyone.

It also allows people to share content to help modders create their own works.  This has been the case with Semper's level pack, which contained several level areas ready for modders to use.  Having previously released my own hillside village for the first Community Contest, which has since been used in the Dirge of Coldhearth module, I'm a strong supporter of helping other modders.  Semper's level pack is a fine example of this, and his village level immediately took my eye as something that I could potentially use for The Shattered War... it meshed beautifully with some ideas I'd already had for one area.

So let's get down to the bit that everyone wants to see... it's screenshot time!

Exploring the modified town

I've done a substantial amount of retooling, modifying structure, appearance and the general layout and accessibility of the level, but still spent far less time than what I would have had to do if I'd made the level from scratch. There's still some additional work to be done, and I haven't really added the population of the town as of yet, but it is definitely a great addition to The Shattered War.