That's a Terrible Idea

Horrible Ball of Fire

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000-05:00

I've been playing EVE for over four months and really enjoying it. Although I only have a couple hours a night to play, I don't think I could handle more time with it. PvP and piracy can be intense, and living in low-security keeps me on edge constantly. It's emotionally draining to just travel around. The environment provides the exact grand emotions I originally sought, yet I admit I occasionally wish for more meditative gameplay (e.g. mindlessly farming mobs).

I've created a more informal journal for my EVE experiences and thoughts: Horrible Ball of Fire. The higher level design articles related to EVE or MMORPGs I will continue to post here on TATI, but any play session that I feel is story-worthy, no matter how inconsequential, I will record on Horrible Ball of Fire. I often video record fights so that I can review them later and identify mistakes, but I also post them on youtube to share.

My favorite article thus far is about my attempt to destroy a battleship with my tiny frigate: So a Wolf and Armageddon walk into an asteroid belt. My heart was racing and my stomach was full of butterflies from the moment I spotted the ship on scanner until the fight was over. It was the most emotionally intense experience I've ever had an in video game.

So if you are interested in reading more frequent and informal stories and analysis, then be sure to check out Horrible Ball of Fire. I try to keep the jargon down, but some times I forget.

World PvP: A Common Model

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

World PvP comes in many forms, yet there is a simple environment model that gets used over and over again. It can be seen in World of Warcraft, EVE, Darkfall, Dark Age of Camelot, and many other past and future games.

Rewards for engaging in PvP.
Risk associated with entering "PvP" areas.
Non-PvP content/rewards in those areas.

This simple list describes Isle of Quel'Danas, Tol Barad, and world bosses in WoW; low-security space in EVE; dungeons in Darkfall; Passage of Conflict in DAoC; and any resource node or choke point in any MMORPG with PvP capabilities ever.

Rewards include crafting materials, mob access, safe passage, money, abstract currency (Honor), and loot. Note that territory control is not a reward in itself--owning land for the sake of owning land is meaningless and players will not value that "resource" unless it gives them an advantage or creates wealth/value, including vanity (player houses). Territory control is often an objective in competitive multiplayer games, but at the very least players win the game by claiming control--most MMORPGs are not "won". Compare the difference in activity between the Zangarmarsh control points in BC WoW (gaining a +5% experience boost in the zone), to the Spirit Towers around Auchindoun (allowing bosses to drop Spirit Shard currency). [TC rant over...]

Risk is "exposing (someone or something valued) to danger, harm, or loss". Something must be risked to have infectious PvP. It could be as minute as lost time on a corpse run, or as harsh as the entire net progress of your character (permadeath). The severity of the potential loss directly correlates to the emotions conjured during those risky situations. The more the player risks, and thus the greater the consequences, then the more intense the emotions associated with PvP events (fear, thrill, fiero, agony, anger). Adrenaline can be addictive and binds players to the game (or makes them run in terror). "What a rush!"

People are risk adverse and are afraid of losing value. But the beauty of MMORPGs is that none of it matters! It's all make-believe.

Make-believe squid-monster riding giant eagle-horse.

The Non-PvP content in the zone attracts "grazers": players that are not looking for a fight, and will be tackled by a tiger if they don't pay attention. These players serve as content for the hunters (and the hunters provide thrilling experiences for the grazers--hooray symbiosis!). If this hunter/hunted paradigm is used, it is a good idea to include tools that allow players to evade or to truly hunt other players (foot tracks, dead mobs, chat, scanners, etc.).

Do not think that grazers are innocent victims. Players will alternate between hunters and grazers rapidly depending on what their immediate goals are. Also, longer term grazers ("carebears") who engage in risky behavior to amass rewards at an accelerated rate are the ones trying to cut corners. ;)

Assuming players are frequenting zones that follow this model, it is likely that World PvP will foster. The combat itself has to be vaguely interesting in order to motivate players to use it, so dull combat can thwart any attempts to create this environment. World PvP is an emergent dynamic and a powerful aesthetic of combat, aggression rules, and scarce resources. The fundamental mechanics need to be solid first.

World PvP Case Study: EVE Online

2011-12-23T15:05:00.002-05:00

During my definition of World PvP, I explained that PvP in an MMORPG is inherently unfair, and World PvP is simply a mindset. It isn't knowing how to attack, but when, and for what purpose. World PvP is less restricted, and involves nudging a situation in your favor.

I expounded on this concept with a look at WoW's history to help illustrate that world PvP is much more of an emergent behavior, sitting on the Dynamics layer. WoW uses rewards in particular to guide players, perhaps accidentally, in one direction or another.

A very different game with very different architects is EVE Online. World PvP in EVE is so encompassing, so defining, that it is difficult to dissect. Put simply: there are safer locations, but nowhere is "safe"; and your ship is forfeit as soon as you undock. The most popular mantra (warning?) of EVE is, "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose."

(It is important to change the way one thinks of "possessions" in MMORPGs when playing EVE: ships, modules, buildings, and commodities are all tools for content. If one becomes attached to these virtual items, it is emotionally difficult to risk and lose them.)

EVE has significant information warfare. Knowing where, what, and how your opponent is flying is paramount to success. Players must capitalize on this knowledge while not showing their own hand. It is a game of buffing, baiting, taunting, misdirection, and downright dirty tactics where players let the enemy think they have the advantage, only to seize it away.

Baiting is the act of letting the enemy think there are fewer ships in the engagement. When the bait is taken, players are prevented from docking or changing solar systems for 60 seconds. In that window, friendly ships undock, enter the system, or warp into the fight.

Solo vessels can also employ bait tactics: if a ship has some form of health repair, they could artificially sit at low health trying to provoke a target into attacking a damaged hull. Once engaged, the ships are prevented from docking/jumping, thus the ship repairs his health and kills the target that preyed on the weak.

Hiding half a fleet, using cloak, and "hot dropping" capital ships are all within the realm of possibilities. Undocking in "High Security" space with an expensive ship or cargo could get you suicide ganked.

A less "honorable" form of PvP is "gate camping", where unsuspecting ships warp to a gate, only to be surrounded by hostile players with fast-locking ships or warp disruption fields. In these situations, as soon as the player made the decision to use the gate, they lost the fight. EVE provides maps and intelligence tools (solar system statistics, directional scanner, and proactive bookmarking). Failure or unwillingness to use these resources is as fatal a mistake as not turning on weapons.

It could even be said that the economy and marketplace of EVE is a form of PvP. Arbitrage, undercutting, speculation, and many inventive scams exemplify a player vs player system where knowledge brings riches and haste is punished.

World PvP in EVE involves significant preparation; many fights are not won on the battlefield. EVE also comes with the expectation of PvP everywhere: assume a fight is around the corner. Pick any Sun Tzu quote, and it applies to EVE.

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

World PvP Case Study: WoW

2011-11-21T19:33:00.007-05:00

While WoW's PvP isn't the cream of the crop, it makes for an interesting case study since the capacity to engage in "world pvp" hasn't changed, yet the popularity of it has. WoW helps illustrate why World PvP is a presumption outside of the game mechanics.

Some of the best moments of leveling a WoW toon involve situations where players fight other players for access to resources. These resources are almost always quest mobs. A high level character "ganking" lowbies for the perverse thrill of exercising power is not world PvP, and actually leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the inexperienced. But that is a problem with game rules, not world PvP.

A brief history of PvP in WoW:

No honor system. Many people questing. Many people, including lowbies, engaging in open world town raids for the novelty of it. No lasting consequences.

Spontaneous Horde raid on Menethil Harbor.

World bosses introduced. Large scale fights to obtain boss loot. Scouting of enemy faction becomes paramount to knowing when to engage boss.

Old Honor system, but no Battlegrounds. Many fights between Southshore and Tarren Mill. Fighting to mutually gain Honor.

Battlegrounds. Much World PvP stomped out since Honor is easier to get in BGs. Without huge gear discrepancies yet, small pockets of world PvP still seen in Plaguelands. Blackrock Mountain has much PvP fighting over dungeon and raid access.

Blizzard creates "outdoor PvP objectives" in Eastern Plaguelands and Silithus, and iterates on them in Burning Crusade. These largely flop. Massive gear discrepancies and prevalence of BGs shatter world PvP expectation. Minor fighting around raid portals.

End of Vanilla saw bored raiders running 5-man PvP excursions while waiting for Arenas and BC. Ad hoc and arranged group fights while roaming.

Arenas are introduced in Burning Crusade to the lauding of "fair and balanced" PvP folks. Resilience is added as a gear attribute. "PvP" is now an official route of character progression, and thus everyone sits in instances to optimize their gear acquisition. World PvP is a dirty word equated to ganking.

Isle of Quel'Danas is added at the end of Burning Crusade to house Sunwell and a fresh batch of chores. This popularizes World PvP in WoW again. Players form parties for protection and fighting; they expect combat while questing. Isle of Quel'Danas implements a common model for World PvP that I will discuss later.

Achievement system is added; reward to kill world leaders is introduced. Cities are in faction-owned zones, and thus combat is opt-in. These raids are not very disruptive to the empty towns.

Wintergrasp experimentation with zone PvP with raid access reward. Like AV, Wintergrasp is just a larger Battleground. Vault of Archavon predictably and regularly changes hands between Alliance and Horde. World PvP is dead throughout Wrath, but accessibility is through the roof.

Blizzard repeats success of Isle of Quel'Danas with Tol Barad at beginning of Cataclysm. World PvP makes a slight comeback. But people quickly get their reputation rewards and leave.

It is fascinating to see interest in world PvP ebb and flow as Blizzard tweaks PvP progression rewards. WoW is very elder game heavy, and thus all the resource warfare is at max level: quest access, raid access, & tradeskill material access. Cataclysm seems to have eliminated many contested quests for Horde and Alliance, so any PvP experienced while leveling is ganking or in a Battleground instance.

I definitely believe there are players in WoW who enjoy world PvP very much, and they would engage in that type of play more often if the rewards were not stacked against them. In the current game, once players gain all the reputation or gear they need from Tol Barad, there is little reason to go back. No other location in WoW comes with the expectation of PvP, and thus there is no world PvP outside of TB.

Some of the comments on my Definition post called into question "influencing the world". While not necessary for world PvP (illustrated with WoW's world PvP: no one would say they hold influence over that world), it is a strong motivator and part of Risk & Consequences that change the emotions conjured by the game, but not the game itself. I hope to expound this soon.

Defining World PvP

2011-11-18T11:38:00.007-05:00

I am a huge fan competition in video games, both direct player vs player and cooperative competition. Competition creates efficiency; it catalyzes and motivates the exploration of a game system. It is through contention that games become e-sports, that dungeon crawls turn into speed runs, and players employ clever uses of game mechanics.

Player vs player conflict can also conjure immense emotions such as fiero and agony, which make lasting impressions in memory.

I consider Go, TF2, and Aion to all contain direct, explicit player competition. PvP is a broad category. However, there is clearly a distinction between Battlefield 3 matches and PvP in EVE. It boils down to fairness. Games of StarCraft begin and end; each player starts at a strategically balanced state; and it is through the game rules that deviations occur in power until one player succumbs and is defeated.

PvP in an MMO, specifically "world PvP", is inherently unfair. One or more players have an objective, quantifiable advantage over others. One side will have higher levels, better gear, or more participants. Any game with persistent character progression will have this imbalance manifest. A fair fight can occur coincidentally, but it is certainly not something to be expected.

MMO PvP happens within a larger context, thus world PvP transforms into more than a simple combat affair between two parties. PvP starts as soon as the player logs in. Events preceding the actual engagement ripple through the world and can affect fights. Actions that happen before, after, and during combat make world PvP an unbounded arena spatially and temporally. Without borders, players scout, hunt, run, hide, and most importantly are vulnerable before and after the actual combat.

A simple analogy: Fair PvP is a cock fight, and world PvP is the African Savannah.

World PvP requires players to be mindful of the environment. Not just navigable terrain, safe spots, and avenues of retreat, but also the entire possibility space of events. Does the enemy have backup? How many? How long until they arrive? What are my chances?

This is clearly an all-encompassing mindset of playing. It is more than action-oriented twitch combat, and more than efficient resource management; it is expecting the unexpected through planning and preparation. World PvP is an expectation in the minds of players.

Different mechanics can be layered on top of that expectation to change the level of risk and consequences, and thus the intensity of emotion the game provides. There are also many forms and implementations of world PvP.

I did a very brief and informal survey--"What is world pvp?". These were some of the answers:

unrestricted warfare
being able to pvp throughout the entire "game world"
you walking around and someone ganks you
using environment to your advantage
cooperation
unknown, different factors you control, rather than just being fair
no rules
not worth my time
waiting until situation is in your advantage

What is world PvP to you?

There's Something in the Water

2011-11-05T13:21:00.006-04:00

We don’t want level-85 players to have a reasonable shot at level-90 dungeons and raids (or PvP opponents) just because that content is balanced for gear that isn’t much better than what the level-85 players have.

--Ghostcrawler

What a truly baffling sentence. Ghostcrawler is reflecting on the exponential attribute power progression in WoW, and I think this sentence says, "We don't want level 85s doing what is designed for level 90 characters." He never goes into the reason this is a design mantra for WoW, but I can't help but think of the movie Idiocracy:

It's got what plants crave!

Unquestioning and steadfast in their decisions, the WoW designers make seemingly contradictory choices. Why doesn't GC want level 85's to do higher level content? I could only assume it's so players do the leveling "content" first. Yet they constantly assault the leveling game, "The amount of experience needed to gain levels 71 through 80 has been reduced by approximately 33%." That's a patch note from the recent PTR, and those keeping score will know that they've already reduced that experience curve before.

It's almost as if Ghostcrawler trusts no design of WoW-past, not even his own. Only the current design and content is relevant to Mr. Street.

The article goes on, discussing various methods which could bandage WoW's broken attribute system, and then he unloads this gem: "If your answer is that stat budgets don’t have to grow so much in order for players to still want the gear, our experience says otherwise." Silly plebes with your naive remedies; I have data to dismiss your predictable suggestions!

Ignoring the arrogance, what metrics could they possibly have to discredit this simple solution? They can't use data from PTR, because that has bitten them in the ass before (There are huge discrepancies in motivation between PTR and live realms. Honor item costs had to be adjusted after players were getting them in a few hours on live realms.). They can't compare vanilla raiding to BC raiding because there are way too many variables. The only timeframe that I think they could refer to would be the beginning of the Burning Crusade, when after much bitching by players, they increased the attributes on T5 gear to make them more "worthwhile" than T4. (Aside: People don't know what they want, often desiring the opposite of what they say.)

But even this event isn't in a vacuum. Let's assume that after T5 attributes were increased, Blizzard saw a huge swell of players entering T5 raids. Ghostcrawler would like to say this was caused by an increase in reward value. What if players simply finished the T4 content and moved on the T5? What if players had every intention of doing T5 for the marginal rewards, obliged to work their way there slowly by using T4 as a stepping stone? With the margins highly increased, raid leaders rightly assumed T4 was useless and skipped it. Blizzard is in the business of making content obsolete as quickly as possible.

Get your Story out of my MMO

2011-10-25T11:09:00.004-04:00

With all the WoW and SWTOR news, something just hit me. I knew this was true, but it didn't really set in until now. It's been seven years since WoW released, and SWTOR is about to launch as the same exact game!

The same black and white, two-faction faux war with safe and "contested" zones; the same action combat with the same pace, hotbars, and skills; the same solo quest grind with the occasional dungeon run; the same poo-pooed crafting system that has little consequence to players; the same "hyrbid" classes which really aren't hybrids at all, but rather 3 min-maxed role specializations that are the Holy Trinity through and through.

And then, as if lack of innovation isn't enough, Bioware is going to completely eradicate players stories. The "fourth pillar" already existed in MMORPGs: there wouldn't be countless blogs devoted to retelling events that players experienced if "story" didn't exist (and unsurprisingly, Eve has the most numerous and varied story blogs I've ever read).

Let's assume Bioware is the leader in crafting video game stories. They create the most compelling canned stories anyone has ever written for a video game. They are still Bioware's stories! They are not player stories. Stories are born from extraordinary events. What would a SWTOR story blog look like? "Last night I had this really humorous and emotional dialog scene with these NPCs. I chose this light side option that resulted in an awesome cutscene!" The comments will read: "me too". What is worth telling if everyone experiences the same thing?

By the way, developer story has been done numerous times before; Bioware isn't doing anything new. Speaking from experience, FFXI had fun in-game cutscenes with your character in them and told some really amazing stories. But contrary to SWTOR, FFXI also put players in challenging situations and let extraordinary events transpire that morphed into player tales.

Developer stories, like graphics, are a selling point, but not important once the playbrain takes over. Games are systems. Choices are identified, outcomes are weighed, predictions are made, and then the brain gets a little shot of endorphins if it guessed correctly. MMORPGs are immensely layered and complex systems with an added layer of socialization. The interaction with other, irrational human beings spices the systems to the point of addiction. Humans crave knowledge and social interaction. Developer stories are an initial motivator, a driving force, an excuse to start down the path of playing a game, but they are not an ends of a game.

That's a lot of tall talk, but look at the numbers: "Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions." As expected, once the game system is mastered, the vast majority of players don't care about the "story" and see little reason to continue playing.

If SWTOR has the same systems we've all mastered seven years ago, and everyone is trapped in instances not experiencing extraordinary events around which to socialize, what is the point of playing? This seems like a way to charge $15 per month for KOTOR 3.

Mojang up, Minecraft down.

2011-10-03T13:51:00.000-04:00

The success of Minecraft severely damaged its development. When minecraft went viral and became a cash-cow, Notch decided to make Mojang into an honest-to-goodness software company. Mojang would make less money from rapidly improving Minecraft than from creating new products and selling them to new markets--markets which are augmented by the existing Minecraft fanbase.

The community would've done Notch's work for him if he let them. He could have started shifting the development of Minecraft to a model where the base game is a sandbox into which content makers can plug in different kinds of mechanics. But Notch didn't do this, he implemented a few nice, bigger features (like biomes) and a lot of piddly stuff (like more flowers, dyes, and such). Contrast Minecraft's content level with Terraria's: Terraria has been public a small fraction of the time, yet is continually adding new content and significant outstrips Minecraft in most meaningful measures of content.

Here's an example of where business gets in the way of game design and fun when it could have just as easily stayed out of the way. Here's where what is short-sightedly best for a company is not what's best for a game.

It also highlights the fading "games as platforms" trend. Notch could've turned Minecraft into a great platform for mods, but instead he has spent a significant amount of time implementing features that could've been designed and implemented better through the work of the modding community. The Minecraft community is large and the number of modders doing great work suiting the game towards different playstyles continues to grow. People have done all this work before Minecraft even had a real modding suite--these people had no sanctioned tools for modding, yet they did work of higher design quality and with fewer bugs and issues than the new content implemented by Notch himself. Imagine what they could do if they were given the full support of development tools and APIs specifically for their use. Minecraft would be a platform for a myriad of amazing games. Now people are doing that anyway, but the progress is significantly slower and Mojang actively impedes this progress through implementing more features that only a fraction of the community care about.

Minecraft passed up on the long-term business decision of becoming a platform upon which hundreds of good and fun games rely and instead opted for the short-term route of continuing Minecraft development conventionally and deallocating resources from it to work on other projects. The damage this does to Minecraft's future is palpable and frustrates me every time I play.

Bethesda Copyright Nonsense

2011-09-29T15:27:00.002-04:00

This Bethesda v. Mojang "Scrolls" lawsuit is completely ridiculous. I didn't know Oblivion was actually titled The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion until this nonsense started to appear on Notch's tumblr.

Not related to the lawsuit, but I also didn't know that Modern Warfare is actually titled Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare until a week ago. I always thought that they were two separate games.

Granted I don't play any of these games, but this still seems quite frivolous.

I wonder if Wargaming.net is going to get a knock on the door from Blizzard...

TF2 Screenshot of the Year

2011-09-20T11:33:00.004-04:00

Posted from our server, I don't think I've ever seen a more majestic screen shot. It captures the essence of TF2: one man with deer antlers wielding a pickaxe sailing towards another man wearing a samurai Kabuto and a pickaxe of his own--their destiny yet to be determined.

Credit goes to Tai.

Biting the Bullet

2011-09-19T23:40:00.004-04:00

This weekend was wholly uneventful in EVE which is 100% my own fault. EVE requires players to actively engage it, and that's what I did tonight. I convinced myself to pick a fight (and most likely lose it). There is no use sitting on all this ISK if I'm not going to spend it.

There are a few systems known for their PvP. One of which is Amamake. I hopped into my Tech-2 fit Rifter and charted a route.

The last time I was in lowsec, I found myself dying in a Gate Camp. This time I was extra cautious--I inspected the systems for kills on the Star Map and even warped to nearby celestials so that I could scan the gate before approaching it. This is how things are learned in EVE: you die in a horrible ball of fire and then try to minimize that occurrence.

I got to Amamake without incident, warped to a bookmark I had in the middle of nowhere, and started to chat up local. I like playing the Mildly Naive Optimist: it's a nice foil for all the Internet Tough-Guys.

After a few minutes of banter, I warped to an asteroid belt to see who would bite. Eventually a Vexor shows up on scanner. I know it's a Cruiser, but I do a quick Google search to make sure; yep, a Cruiser. "Ok," I think, "I know I can beat Cruisers with this Rifter." The Vexor lands, and I begin approaching using a manual orbiting technique like a pro. My heart is pounding throughout all 150 KMs.

We get in range of each other and start the dance. Lock, scram, Confirm this Dangerous Act (take a standing hit), web, orbit, guns. My 150mm Light Autocannon IIs are eating through her shields like butter.

I bet a lot of EVE vets can guess what happens next.

Five Hobgoblin II drones appear. They begin attacking me. I turn on damage control, but it is just too much. I don't even have drones on my overview; I'm trying to manually target them, but no luck. I pretty much smile and concede defeat at that point. I last a few more seconds; pop.

I warp off to a station (and immediately pray that the station won't fire at me since I was the aggressor. Thankful it did not). We talk a little in local; I'm her first kill :) Apparently I'm not the only newbie in EVE.

I consult the notes I took from the Rifter Guide, and lo and behold the #1 ship listed under "RUN AWAY" is Vexor. Primarily because of their drone capabilities. Horrible ball of fire. Minimize occurrences. Thus I won't trying to fight Vexors next time ;D

What a rush! It was unbelievably exhilarating, and I cannot wait to load up a few more Rifters and head back. These ships cost about 5 million ISK, and I can easily steal that in 15 mins. Every time I think I'm drifting away from EVE, I do something incredibly risky and end up loving it again.

Back in the EVE Saddle

2011-09-15T21:35:00.004-04:00

A month ago I began my third trial of EVE Online after reading a convincing article (part 2, part 3). I decided to jump in the deep end and stir up trouble. Previously, I had fallen into pitfalls or made up reasons why I discontinued playing. Friends of mine will cite the same excuses for not playing, so I decided to enumerate and debunk them.

"I can't fly the ship how I want."

Players often expect avatar control to be transferable across games. WASD is the de facto control scheme for any game in which the player assumes a character. Players expect familiar interfaces. How a planar movement model would work with three dimensional space is an unaddressed question. If not WASD, players expect something akin to a flight simulator or Tie Fighter.

The issue really stems from the simplification of the controls. In EVE a destination is selected, and then the Approach/Orbit/Warp button is pressed. Manual flight is as simple as double-clicking anywhere in space. Players' ship controls are abstracted to the point where player agency feels stifled. Fumbling over controls to move from A to B can be frustrating.

This awkwardness can be overcome, but it feels like relearning to walk. While the tutorial does have content to help the player move about in space, it takes several sessions to get accustomed to it. It becomes second nature eventually.

I should also point out that EVE is not a space flight simulator nor a shooter--don't expect the game to meet those genre criteria. The game must be approached with an open mind; it is unlike anything else.

"I have no idea where I am."

This attitude also derives from the control abstraction. Players move about with what seems like lists of planets, stations, and warp gates. How all these objects relate to each other spatially can be a mystery.

There are two tools in game that I think can be helpful: the Map and the Mapbrowser. The map (F10) defaults to the Star Map of the whole galaxy and can be confusing. In the World Map Control, there is a button labeled "Solar System Map". This is a navigable view of the current solar system. It displays all the planets, stations, and warp gates in positions such that players can understand where these objects are.

Additionally there is a Mapbrowser (F11) which displays 4 panes on the side of the player's screen (Universe, Region, Constellation, and Solar System). Only the bottom, Solar System pane is useful: it displays a flat representation of the system as well as a white cone showing the direction the player camera is currently facing. It helps to put celestial objects in perspective.

The maps at Dotlan are also very helpful.

"Combat is boring."

I agree that solo combat against mission NPCs is boring, which is why I don't do missions. But EVE is not really a fast-paced action game. It is slower and tactical. Where, when, and how to approach a target is paramount. Knowing when to activate, "pulse", and overheat modules assures victory against smarter or better-armed opponents.

It is also worth noting that there is no such thing as a fair fight in EVE. PvP in MMORPGs is about exploiting advantages, cheating, using every trick up your sleeve to win the day. This is what "world PvP" is, and exactly what Battlegrounds and Arena are not. An unwritten rule of EVE is "always assume your target has friends". Kill him before they arrive :) When I want a fair fight, I play TF2 or a board game.

PvP is emotionally charged. This is the sole reason I gave EVE another chance--the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat after my heart races and my mind defends that which could be lost. I can analyze and read literature explaining the exact effects and chemicals that I am experiencing, but adrenalin and fear of loss are visceral, and I want to be swept away by my animal instincts.

"I can't be competitive."

Since training is all time-based in EVE, players assume that they cannot catch up to the veterans. While they may never catch up in raw Skill Points, they could catch up in a singular role. EVE is very wide, and veterans can fly a variety of ships, but only one at a time. As long as players set their sights on a single ship and fit, they get get there quickly and be competitive. And skills are often prerequisites and stepping stones for more powerful modules and ships.

To give you some numbers (for PvP):

Within a week, you can fly a throw-away Cruiser.
In a week and a half, you can fly throw-away Battlecruisers.
Within 2 weeks, you can fly a tech 2 fitted Frigate.
In 5 weeks, you can fly a tech 2 fitted Interceptor or Assault Frigate.
In a month an a half, that Cruiser and Battlecruiser can have tech 2 modules.
In 3 months, you could be sitting in a very formidable tech 2 Cruiser (AKA Heavy Assault Cruiser).

Cruisers and Battlecruisers are staples of small gang PvP. Even though newbies won't be packing much heat without tech 2 guns, they are still an asset to the fleet. These ships can get really cheap, too, which helps when players are learning the ropes. I calculated that the Rupture cruiser I bought cost me 8,836,500 ISK. Insurance pays out 6,875,000 ISK, meaning the total loss would only be 2,360,500 ISK. That is practically free. (I would equate 1 million ISK to 1 WoW Gold.)

Players can easily earn more money than they can spend if they leave the beaten path and try things other than missions. Within a few hours and in cheap frigates, a fresh character can make 40 million ISK an hour from ninja salvaging and hacking. Or you could scam your way to trillions.

"I don't have the time."

Some players think that they need to invest vast amounts of time or know everything about EVE in order to play. Null-sec territory wars might require players to log in for 6 hours at a time while a station is being attacked, but small gang PvP can be very spontaneous and take only an hour block.

If long sessions are few and far between, there is plenty to do solo in and out of game. I spend half my EVE time reading about EVE. That includes fits and modules, planning training, how wormholes work, can I fight a ship belonging to a certain class, and miracle stories of raid fights. EVE is as much a context for my learning about EVE as it is a game. I am enjoying the whole package.

EVE really is about finding the fun. The game will not deliver fun-cakes to you, but instead give you ingredients to bake your own, or a machine gun to steal someone else's. Other players are my content, and I am content for other players. Players who are willing to learn and are open minded about the game will find it to be a treasure trove.

Within a month: I've roamed around lowsec looking for fights that never happened; stole millions of ISK from players running missions; lost ~10 frigates; was podded in a gate camp; joined a player corporation which received a Declaration of War a week later; and prepared for war that ended in 2 days. And all of it was really fun.

Plus all my ship names come from the Space Mutiny episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Congratulations on the insurance on your ship. A very wise choice indeed. This letter is to confirm that we have issued an insurance contract for your ship, Stump Beefgnaw (Rupture) at a level of 100.0%.

You Don't Talk about FF14

2011-09-01T09:14:00.003-04:00

Final Fantasy XIV has been undoing many changes over the last year. It is slowly letting itself become... *dramatic pause* ~~Tyler Durden~~ FFXI.

Most recently in development has been an official Job System, with unlock quests and everything. It has moved away from the convoluted Physical Level and Job Rank nonsense into a more traditional Level and Experience system. It's added Chocobos and Air Ships (albeit not unique to FFXI). They've removed the poorly designed Stamina combat system and replaced it with a more traditional cooldown and autoattack system.

Something unique they are working on is a Materia System (related to FF7's Materia only nominally). Use weapons, convert 'experienced' weapons to Materia, socket Materia on to new weapons.

The combat system chances are on-going, and it will take at least 2 more patches until things are "balanced". So maybe the game will be worth playing right when SWTOR arrives on the scene to steal its thunder.

The Power of External Rewards Compels You

2011-08-11T09:02:00.002-04:00

This seems like the quickest way to make sure no one reads your painstakingly created cut scenes and dialogue trees.

I don't listen to my friends' stories unless they entice me with candy.

Time, Money, and the Journey

2011-08-02T21:52:00.003-04:00

A discussion of the Diablo 3 $AH took place on our TF2 forums, and someone commented:

it all just seems silly to me.. why play the game if you're going to buy your way to the end result? I've spent $4 on tf2.. and I still look at it as a waste.. items will come and go, and there is always trading.. same goes with diablo3, why pay for pixels that you can obtain yourself and they're obviously going to continue releasing bigger and better weapons that you're going to replace said weapon with, and I see it happen in WoW all the time.. people pay for gold, buy the new shiny off the auction house, and the next day they win a drop in a raid thats better.. $20 down for a days' virtual satisfaction. Its all fickle to me lol

The following was my response.

Diablo, like other action-focused computer RPGs, is designed to be very Achievement oriented. The heavy Goal-Oriented-Play coupled with high-accessibility (and very few set backs, i.e. punishment) fosters an environment where the ends of playing the game are the achievements themselves. For many Achievers, there is no longer any fun in the journey--they want as many vacuous trophies as quickly as possible. There is nothing wrong with getting your jollies from virtual shinies, but here is where the contention lies.

Traditionalist gamers have been, I believe, vaccinated from these psychological lures. They have seen leaderboards and Skinner boxes for decades. If they play a game, they enjoy learning the system, assuming that system is complex enough to hold their interest. If they play strategy games, they enjoy complex resource management. If they play RPGs, they like the journey. They are OK with gating content, with stratifying players into Haves and Have-Nots.

They have been trained to believe that Time and Skill equates to Power. To Traditionalists, games are a great equalizer. The Real World does not leak into their synthetic worlds, and each player's reputation (and Power) are built via in-game means only. This is a fallacy.

The person playing the game has a certain amount of real world resources and real world dexterity. Resources come in the form of Time and Money. Dexterity is both Mental and Physical. Different game genres tap these 4 attributes differently. MMORPGs typically require Time. TF2 takes Physical and Mental dexterity, as well as practice Time. What we are seeing in the Game Industry is the incorporation of Money resources.

This transformation is occurring because many Traditionalists are opting for other responsibilities: jobs and families. They no longer have 10 hours a day to throw at Everquest or StarCraft. They can't wait around for 2 hours to get a game started; they need high-accessibility games. Lowering the barrier to entry is also allowing brand new players to enter the scene. This is the explosion of Casual and Social gaming. These players have Money, but no Time. And quite a few of them are willing to trade their Money for Power. Believe it or not, there are markets that enjoy Paying to Win. This makes Traditionalists exclaim, "WTF ARE YOU DOING?!"

The Time-rich no longer have the upper hand, and that makes the status quo feel as if their time isn't as valuable. And they are correct: with the inclusion of Money, it inflates the resource supply. Buying characters, power leveling, and gold was and still is seen as cheating in various online games primarily because it devalues the achievements (i.e. Time) of players.

To more directly answer your question, "why would someone drop $20 for such an ephemeral trophy?" we really have to answer why humans trade resources for ANY status-signalling good. Fashion, competition, self-worth, belonging to a group: all of these are deeply rooted social instincts. The next time you do a farming run for a piece of loot, ask yourself why are you trading your time for these synthetic goods. And then ask if you'd rather trade money instead. If the goal is the trophy, it really doesn't matter how you got it. If you value the story attached to the trophy, then hopefully the journey is worth taking--and that is something money can't buy.

Farmville's merits as a game do not matter.

2011-07-06T11:48:00.003-04:00

What of heroin's merits as a drug? Does it do a great job of expanding people's minds and letting them see mundane experiences in new and interesting ways? Does it bring people together to help one another? Can it help people who have legitimate medical problems by reducing their suffering?

People don't do heroine because of its abstract, broader merits as a drug. They do heroin because it feels good and because doing heroine makes you want to do more heroin. We don't analyze heroin in the hopes of discovering how to make commercial drug products more addictive and deride heroin for being "not a drug."

Farmville is an effective social parasite and advertising mechanism. The game is designed directly to extract money from players. Analyzing it as only a game is pointless, because its manifestation as a game is just the very blunt tip of a sprawling iceberg. Analyze it as a business. Compare it to direct mailing, viral videos, and banner ads.

Farmville is the ultimate sign of the commoditization (not really the traditional sense of the word--the mass marketization is more what I mean) of gaming. The games industry is maturing. "Make games we want to make and hope we get paid for it" has been replaced by "make games that we will get paid to make." The same happened to the music industry--and will happen to any art-based industry as it matures. The business model now drives, not the content. The cascade of free-to-play games and nickle-and-diming DLC are the first steps large steps down this long road. Sequelitis is merely a symptom. We can't go back to the good old days (if they even existed), we must recognize the shape of this beast and confront it directly.

This is another reason why I have stopped playing MMOs.

[EDIT: Made some corrections thanks to an anonymous commenter who apparently deleted his comment...]

Investment Hurdle

2011-06-29T13:56:00.003-04:00

I stopped playing Vanguard the day I wrote my previous blog post. I chose to partake in some other activities, and by the time my friends and I had an evening together to play, none of us cared anymore. Not even off newbie island, I didn't feel like investing more time into the game.

I always seem to reflect back and compare MMORPGs to FFXI. That game requires even more investment than Vanguard, and I've always warned people that the first 10 levels are the worst, since they are soloed. (With the addition of solo kill quests, I'm sure the first 20 levels are now awfully boring.) I played with friends, and the majority quit before level 5. Why did I put up FFXI? Was I naive? Did I illogically try to recuperate the sunk cost of the retail box?

Even World of Warcraft sucked me in, but later instantiations of it (AoC, LotRO, WAR, Aion) had no draw, no power over me. I paid for boxes for some of those games, yet didn't want to invest in them any further.

Do MMORPGs need to be shockingly different for me to want to play them? If that were the case, I would have fallen in love with EVE or Darkfall.

Maybe I need long-term goals. I remember wanting to be a Summoner/Dragoon in FFXI (which is completely ridiculous, but drove me to get over the investment hurdle). I was in love with Infernals ever since WarCraft 3--I played Undead for that very reason--and I played a Warlock in WoW just to have that ability.

I am curious if you remember your first long-term goal in your MMORPGs of choice. Was it a story arc, an ability, a feature? Do you find yourself running into brick walls after a few hours with a new MMORPG? Would seeing a cool looking sword or amazing spell effect persuade you to continue?

Measuring Micromanagement In Design

2011-06-26T12:38:00.000-04:00

I have been struggling with how to actually quantify micromanagement in strategy game design. Which designs lead to more required micro and which kinds eschew micro for broader strategic manipulation and planning?

I still hold to the concept that strategy games should be about testing your planning capabilities against an opponent's. There are games in the "strategy" genre that focus on execution more than planning, astute observers usually refer to these games as "Tactical."

This post will summarize a number of factors involved in determining how much micromanagement a game design will require of its players.

Mechanical Scope

The scope of a game acts as a multiplier for individual unit micromanagement requirements. A game like Company of Heroes has a severely limited scope. You have perhaps ten manipulable units on the field at the height of an average game. Note that we don't care about the literal soldiers on the battlefield here, we care about manipulable units. What the manipulable unit consists of doesn't matter--all that matters is that when you issue orders, you must give them to the entire unit.

Scope can be confusing to think about, because Company of Heroes and Men of War share the same metaphorical scope--that being less than ten squads of infantry and less than five vehicles. If you examine mechanical scope by thinking about then number of manipulable units, you'll see that Men of War has a wider mechanical scope because each individual soldier in each squad can be manipulated, whereas you can never subdivide squads in Company of Heroes.

Orders per Unit

Once you have figured out how many units players handle when they play the game, you then have to examine what each of those units can do. In turn-based games, this is easy because you can look at possible orders per unit per turn. In real-time games the calculus becomes a bit more difficult because you must look at the number of orders that can be given to units as well as the number of units that may demand attention at once. (I'll address the issue of unit count variance throughout matches at some later time.)

How many kinds of orders can you give to units on a given turn? In Tactics Ogre, you can move, attack, and turn each of your units in each turn. Silent Storm, in comparison, allows you to do any combination of moves, attacks, turns, pose changes, and aiming actions in a turn. Clearly units in Silent Storm require more micro-management. In a turn-based game this affects how fast the game can be played. Games with a lot of micromanagement should have battles resolved in a relatively low number of turns, lest the player tire of the endless manipulation of his units.

We can also look at the number of kinds of unit actions in an RTS as well. In Men of War, you can give your units a wide variety of orders--there are easily over ten kinds of orders (ex. attack, attack-move, move, change stance, reload, change ammo, lay sandbags, lay barbed wire, lay mines, rotate, change weapon, manage inventory, etc.) Men of War has a wider mechanical scope than Company of Heroes, and Company of heroes has fewer than half the number of kinds of orders. Generally a unit in CoH will be able to attack, attack-move, move, change firing mode, and use one or two special abilities. We can therefore categorically say that CoH requires less micro to play effectively than Men of War does.

Complexity of terrain also plays a role. If terrain is very complex, like in Men of War where each wall, building, and piece of debris can be used as cover from any side, the fine-positioning of units matters which causes the player to have to move units more often and with more precision.

Analyzing individual orders

Playing a strategy game consists elementarily of multiple players (some of them may be AIs) giving orders to units. We've examined the nuances of order volume and how it effects micro-management, but we must also examine how the game designer defines the game world and how orders interact with it. We must examine the nature of orders and note how much attention they demand and how much physical precision on the part of the player they require.

In Men of War, you have to take line of sight and line of fire into account whenever you position a unit. You need to make sure there isn't some small rise in the terrain between your unit and what you want it to shoot at.This means that you have to minutely tweak the movement of individual squad members so that they will stand in a optimal-enough position. The difference between a decisive victory and a terrible defeat can be as small as a machine gunner standing slightly out of cover or being in the wrong stance and not having line of sight on an area. There's a lot of micro required when even issuing individual orders in Men of War.

In Company of Heroes, you move an entire unit and its members decide where to stand. Line of sight and line of fire are pretty easy to intuit based on what the map looks like. Rarely are there small hills that will maddeningly block your line of fire without being immediately noticeable. You also know that the simulation isn't terribly precise in Company of Heroes, so if one guy is standing out of cover but you still have the green shield next to your unit's icon, the unit is OK and you don't have to make more adjustments. When giving movement orders in Company of Heroes, you need to do less work--there's less micro--than when giving movement orders in Men of War.

As we've seen, strict simulation can lead to a signficant increase in micromanagement requirements.

The amount of tweaking you have to do to each unit also is greatly effected by the interface. Men of War gives you no particularly good way to check the line of sight and line of fire of your units, so you have to press a number of keys to check to see if your machine gunner can fire over this overturned crate or if they'll just stand there staring dumbly at it as the enemy mops up the rest of his squad.

Too dumb to leave alone?

In RTSes micromanagement requirements also stem from poor or non-existant AI. If you have to constantly babysit your units in order for them to survive, as you do in Men of War, the micro-requirement balloons. RUSE has a lower requirement for micro, though, because units will make attempts to kite enemies who have shorter range and generally try to fire at the most important targets first.

What else?

Please leave a comment if you think I've missed something. I'm sure I haven't touched on all the factors--I've primarily focused on combat.

The Game Criticism That I Care About.

2011-06-13T19:21:00.000-04:00

Too much "game criticism" comes in the guise of art criticism. The critic rips merrily into the hermeneutics of a game, discussing how broad social issues like race or gender are portrayed. The critic makes grand pronouncements about deeper meaning and what affect these portrayals have on the player's psychology.

"What is this game Telling us?" seems to be the central question. "Telling" has a capital "T" because the critic aggrandizes it through writing gravely and intensely. Everything's meaning is exaggerated in order to match up to the stature of other arts that the critic thinks are deserving of respect. "We need to discuss these points in order to be taken seriously" you may hear--but seriously in what regard?

Games aren't paintings or novels or books of poetry. They aren't static entities set in print or pastels. Games are dynamic. Games are an interactive medium in the strictest sense. Games are participatory event in themselves--we need look no further than sports to see this proven.

Games have plenty of static content, but what makes them different and worth caring about is not that static content, it's the act of play. You don't go to a movie because the act of focusing your eyes on a screen captivates you. Games may be composed of static art in part, but their whole is greater by far.

Game criticism can contain the criticism of the static art the game presents to the player--I do not challenge the validity of such criticism. I find such criticism wanting, though, because the real meat of what makes games interesting is not that they can show us art just as a movie can, but because we can actually play them--we can generate novel experiences that themselves generate novel experiences. These experiences are unique to each individual in a way more profound than the unique experiences different people may get out of the same painting or movie. Games allow their content to be molded to the player and her behavior; we should examine this molding deeply because it is what makes games worth playing. Games are not just a cheap substitute for a movie or album or painting. The more that we treat them as if they are nothing more (and confine ourselves to criticizing them in the same way), the harder it will be to show people that games are worth analysis and study. Why study inferior wanna-be movies?

I'm interested in analysis of game mechanics and other elements with an eye towards their effect on the experience of actually playing the game. I hope I can provide (and have provided) that on this blog.

Vanguard: Wait What?

2011-06-10T11:11:00.004-04:00

Even though Evizaer is a fuddy-duddy, and even I took a long break from MMORPGs, I am back at it! And of all things, I am playing Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I'll tell you why:

Classes and the adventure game at large are designed around groups. While it is possible to solo your way to level cap (some classes are more proficient at this than others), large parts of the game will be skipped.

There are no instances. (Ok, SOE added a raid instance, but that's the only one.) Dungeons you happen across will be filled with terrible things you cannot possibly solo and other players! I might actually have to talk to someone and group up with them to explore something!

Crafting-centric economy with complexity akin to Star Wars Galaxies. You can build a house. In the non-instanced world. And let everyone (or some or none) inside.

There is a unique "sphere" of gameplay called Diplomacy. It's not the most deep nor complex turn-based strategy game, but I enjoy playing it. I also love it as a vehicle for story/dialogue as I find myself actually reading the NPC text (which is wholly irrelevant to the strategy game itself).

Adventuring is dangerous. If the inference wasn't clear from the dungeon/group points above, mobs will kill you. People die at level 4 and 5. You don't start losing XP until level 10.

I am missing quests because I am not talking to NPCs. WoW and her children have trained me to just look for Quest indicators on tops of NPC heads (which do exist in Vanguard). But some quests only become available after you talk to NPCs.

The factions are not Us vs Them. At level 3 Diplomacy, I've already experienced a more nuanced and grey story than anything I've ever seen in a Blizzard product.

It is very difficult if not impossible to min/max your character. Attributes are too complex. Here is a quote from a TenTonHammer guide:

The attributes in Vanguard are also complicated, making pretty hard to limit yourself to 3. Try being a tank who chooses to min INT. You'll have a hard time telling who has aggro from that add. For once, it looks like we have a game that tries to discourage the min/max build approach.

As a reference, this is all of what Intellect does:

Spell Damage: Intelligence adds to the damage of all spells. The number revealed by the tool tip for INT is a percentage relative to 100% (the normal power of your spell), and casters will almost certainly want to take advantage of this statistic

Identify/Recognize: INT increases your chance to identify what spell a mob is casting and to recognize the tactics applicable to the battle. The tool tip does not provide a numerical value for this effect. The sooner a player can identify that a spell is being cast, the sooner she can attempt to counter it. This will help casters and healers. Recognizing tactics permits a player to take advantage of a mob's weaknesses. This helps all classes.

Detect/Perceive: INT raises your chance to detect opponents under stealth or invisibility and to perceive what opponents are doing during combat. This will be tied to skills measured on maximum potential versus a mob of an even level. Detecting stealthed or invisible mobs is critical for everyone. Perception reveals who has aggro, a crucial effect for tanks and healers.

Counter: INT heps your chances to counter a spell. This will be tied to your counter skill measured on maximum potential versus a mob of an even level. Casters and Blood Mages can counter spells.

Resist Counter: INT ensures that a player's spells will more difficult to counter by mobs. This is essential for casters.

Even though the newbie island is very much On-Rails, I am told that the world really opens up after you leave (at level 10).

The world is huge, but there are waypoint/teleporters to help people get around. Different grades of ground mounts. Flying mounts can be rented. Players claim that the game has years of content.

Just to air the laundry, I will paraphrase the development history of Vanguard. Developed by original Everquest devs under the guise of Sigil Games, Microsoft poured a lot of money into the company, and eventually Sigil brought SoE on board as co-publisher. VG launched in 2007 right as the Burning Crusade did. The game was massively hyped with features that just were not complete at release, and there were stability issues. SoE bought all the rights to the game after the failed launched, patched up the bugs, added some newbie/accessibility features, and then shelved the game. There hasn't been a content update nor patch to the game in over a year. Vanguard directly competes with EQ2, so it makes sense for SoE to let it rot.

I've been playing this past week with two (soon to be three) friends. We are still on the trial/newbie island. I am playing a Cleric (with plate, Ferrel :P). I definitely think there is cool stuff in store, and I can't wait to journal it here.

Why I have moved on from MMOs.

2011-06-08T15:33:00.000-04:00

I've given up on MMOs for the near future, especially free-to-play ones. Here's why.

1. MMORPGs are community-focused. Community is the real problem, and communities for popular games are always poor. MMORPGs are based around having large communities that are too large to effective self-police. This problem is unsolvable.

2. MMOs are bad strategy games at their heart. Execution of strategies is trivial. The content is so easy 90% of the time that developing strategies is unnecessary or trivial. The only part of the game that isn't trivial is PvP, which is often trivialized by loot differentials caused almost exclusively by differences in time played. Raids are trivialized by guides that players are expected to know before doing the content.

3. Maintaining a guild in an MMO is more challenging than actually playing the game. The community is bad. Maintaining a guild is outside the scope of game design, though a game can have some features that help with this. When the most difficult problems presented to the player by a game have nothing to do with the game, I lose interest.

4. MMOs are most likely to be unhealthy games to play. They require time commitments that are pretty ludicrous if you want to see any remotely challenging content without making actions artificially induce difficulty.

5. MMOs tend to be bad for the rest of gaming because they consume all of players' gaming time and some of their personal time. Players play MMOs instead of any other game.

6. MMO business models tend to reward developers for producing very addictive content at the expense of everything else. A big selling point for spending money on free-to-play games is that the game is made less bad by paying. This is not the kind of business model I want to endorse.

There are a lot of other games to play--I can't spend time playing these games that offer me so little actual fun but stand to ask for a lot of time.

RUSE: The Positives

2011-02-22T22:05:00.001-05:00

I’ve played over 200 RUSE matches since the game was released last September. RUSE is definitely my favorite RTS. The game does some very important things right. In this post, I’m going to walk you through a few of the highlights. I’ll assemble a list of criticisms over the next week or two.

(I lost a few posts in a hard drive failure a couple of weeks ago, that’s why I haven’t put out much more than a post a week, and it’s also why I haven’t put out the first real part to my series on the fundamentals of games.)

Low APM requirement

I believe that RTS games should be about comparing your planning, perception, and prediction skills against your opponent's. Great RTSes make the act of implementing plans as intuitive and easy as possible--why get caught up in implementing a plan when the real fun is it actually testing it against your opponent? RUSE does this right: you don't need to have more than 20 APM to play the game well. This shows that RUSE is about planning, not about clicking around constantly in a struggle with the interface to make your units behave reasonably. I could write an entire post on how this is accomplished and how great it is, so I'll leave further elaboration for the future.

Active Counters

Spamming isn't an effective strategy in RUSE unless you've already won the game through resource supremacy. If you spam a unit, your opponent can recognize this and build fractional amounts of counters to effectively deal with the threat. The game's score is based on units killing a higher value in opposing units before they die, so the cost effectiveness of counters causes your opponent to suffer a severe setback by throwing countered units at you. Because the tech tree is flat, these counters are easy to build if you recognize the strategic situation is ripe--you can also be forced to counter the wrong thing through use of ruses and unorthodox strategies, which adds depth to what might otherwise be a simple "build counters to win" game.

A Broad Strategy-space

Some strategy games have a few narrow strategies. Such strategies are sequences of optimal actions understood by the community to be optimal. If you stray from these paths, you are playing poorly--you may win a couple of times by surprising an inferior opponent, but going outside narrow strategies won't get you much farther than that.

Contrast this with a broad, but flatter strategy space. You have a large number of options at any one time and many of them will get you an acceptable distance towards your strategic goals. The optimal choice becomes so dependent on the currently game state that you can't accurately deduce optimal strategies. This lends the game a certain dynamism: only a minimal amount of mechanical logic can be generalized from match to match, you must build each strategy fro the particular situation as it arises.

Short Matches

RUSE boasts large battlefields with sufficient room to maneuver, yet matches can be played competitively in 30 minutes or less on average. The scoring mechanism allows timed games to work well--players can make decisions based on the amount of time remaining, which leads to a further blossoming of possibilities. Though units are generally "slow" in the context of the whole map, unit production is fast. This allows players to produce units for decisive battles without it taking too much time. The relatively slow unit move speeds are balanced by the ability to produce units quickly, which leads to the game being paced properly for an enjoyable 20 minute 1v1 match or 30 minute 2v2 match.

Why Global Agenda’s Loot System Fails

2011-02-13T15:18:00.001-05:00

Like character advancement, the advancement engendered by loot can be seen as vertical or horizontal. An item that vertically advances your character has flat-out better stats than your previous item, but does nothing that the previous item didn't do. Horizontal loot advancement comes from new abilities granted by items, or different kinds of damage dealt, absorbed, mitigated, etc.

Vertical loot is only exciting if it represents a big gain. Horizontal loot can be more exciting more often without necessarily advancing the character, because it can afford the player more interesting options to try out as long as the metagame is not in a moribund state.

The real question is: What effects can an item have? The more you restrict this, the more boring the system will be. If you go too far, you risk imbalancing the game due to the slot machine taking over and player skill being no more than a secondary factor in gameplay. This isn't a problem in most MMOs because such games are no more than social environments with slot machines that require mostly-thought-free manual effort to pull the lever by killing mobs, opening chests, and completing quests. In a(n ostensibly) skill-based game like GA, a prevalent slot machine turns what otherwise is a fun PvP system into an awkward environment where time-based play and skill-based play clash.

The universe of possible useful pieces of loot in GA is too small. It's exacerbated by the fact that the sole way of progression available, vertical progression to higher bonuses, caps out at 21% with an exponentially lower chance of getting loot of higher qualities once you get above the base 10%-ish. Boring, linear vertical progression with no horizontal opportunities is not fun. If I know what I want and feel like I'm just waiting for the random number generator to swing my way, I'm having less fun than if there is a reasonable chance I may find something cool that I hadn't considered.

The number of useful pieces of loot that you can possibly find starts out small and only gets smaller. Because GA is skill-based, players set their skill specs in stone and know exactly what they want to make it work optimally. Because gear is primarily vertical in variety, the player knows exactly what he needs at any given time for his spec if he has even a minimal knowledge of how the game works. there is no chance of a serendipitous drop--only for drops that either give the player a "finally" feeling, or drops that are useless to the player.

You only get loot in GA when you win missions or PvP matches. In PvP, particularly, your chance of victory is largely dependent on the skill level of the rest of your team. Only the top 5% (or less) of players can carry any team to victory—and even they can’t successfully do it every game they’d like to.

Global Agenda’s loot system is a boring, naked time-sink. The best that can be said of it is that it provides an object lesson in how not to design a loot system.

Games From the Ground Up: Introduction

2011-02-03T20:41:00.001-05:00

(In this series, I plan on writing a series of short posts about what I believe to be the basic features and motivations of videogames. Why do we play? Why are we looked down upon by many for playing? I’m going to try from the ground up to describe my theories of the basics of gaming. I look forward to hearing your reactions and discussing these topics further.)

When you play a game and enjoy it, you are allowing yourself to be fooled. You let the game hook itself into those basic parts of what makes you human. Games are pattern-recognition porn, pretty/shiny pictures, and reward addiction mechanisms.

Games draw you in with interesting metaphors. For the typical gamer market (18-30 year-old males), this usually involves war in some form. The metaphor drags you into a set of game mechanics that the tool-maker/tool-user in you inherently finds appealing. You quickly feel your way around this new world through whatever interface available to you much the way a newborn feels out the confines of his new body and the world around her. This innocent, real consequance-free learning is rarely afforded to adults and older children, so you immediately immerse yourself in the opportunity to indulge in pretense and leave real-world cares at the door.

Games work well when they allow you to fully buy into a self-contained system that seems meaningless on the outside. Most play in children is mimicry of the future roles they'll take on as adults. The pretense of play dissolves as the child grows older and actually has to engage in the behaviors they've been play-acting. Likewise, adults view playing most games, be they video or otherwise, as childish activities--playacting for behaviors that appear, on the surface, to be useless.

But we live in a world of useless. Most gamers live in a world of relative luxury where survival is nigh guaranteed. Entertainment, instead of being a marginal aspect of life, has graduated to a state of constant presence. Even when at work, many people spend much of their time seeking or reading about entertainment on the internet. Instead of watching television, reading, looking at pictures of your friend’s cat farm on facebook or otherwise “uselessly” passing your time, you play games instead. The interactive medium allows you to do so many interesting things that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, so why not engage with it?

In order to keep the player hooked into a closed system of pretense, games use the feedback loops of tool development and learning. Games are tricks—they hijack parts of your brain that commonly were applied for other survival-related purposes but now sit underused most of the time.

Next: Pattern recognition porn.

Torchlight

2011-02-02T21:30:00.001-05:00

I played Torchlight for six or seven hours before I realized that the game is nothing but polish. The graphics are reasonable and consistant, the sound is good enough, the gameplay is quite smooth and appealing, but when scrutinized the mechanics are subpar. The problem I have with Torchlight isn’t that it is derivative; my problem is that the individual game systems are middle-of-the-road, uninteresting, and do little to cover the flawed reward-chain it is at its heart.

Action RPGs are interesting to me because they combine loot and character advancement along with a progression of different enemies with odd abilities that cause you to vary your tactics. I do not play action RPGs to be intellectual stimulated, but keeping these systems interesting for as long as possible lies at the core of the action RPG experience. The combat itself is often trivial—the real game lies in picking between loot and getting that little shot of dopamine when you find an awesome item or acquire that next game-changing ability.

Loot

Torchlight’s loot system was boring. Few items, if any, had unique and interesting effects on gameplay. Items presented a bland optimization problem instead of leading to interesting decisions where the player has to choose between two very appealing, distinct mechanics to harness. These kinds of decisions are what made Diablo II such a great game in the genre. A chance of casting Frozen Orb weighed against life leach and improved attack speed is a much more interesting decision than +20 fire damage vs. +15 Ice damage and +5 Poison damage. Torchlight does allow items to carry spell effects, but the game’s abilities are generally as uninteresting and lack innovation as well.

Advancement

The character advancement system was boring. Skill trees are small compared to Diablo II. A disproportionate number of skills are passive or are reskinned buffed versions of other skills.

Tactics

You could play well using trivial strategies that were no fun. As a summoner, you should have no trouble butchering your way through the game unless you play at a high difficulty. You don’t even have to worry about mana much, because you can simply dual wield wands and do constant, credible damage to augment the punishment your pets provide.

What makes an action RPG exciting for me are abilities that I have to choose between depending on the situation. The decision has to be non-trivial. If I’m doing no more than maintaining some summons and shift-rich clicking to cast wand spells, the game rapidly bores me. If an action RPG can’t pace loot and advancement along with enemy power, it has failed at a basic level and there’s little reason to continue playing it.

In Summary

There was just enough polish that the game didn’t immediately give offense to my game design sensibilities.

Torchlight was an ego-tickling reward treadmill that gave just enough stimulation to players to keep them blithely clicking and button mashing their way to inevitable victory. A game doesn’t need to be hard to avoid this fate, but it does have to present the player with a variety of interesting decisions, not just the same kinds of decisions with bigger numbers attached to them.

Chokepoint Hell: A Strategy Game Staple

2011-02-01T19:30:00.001-05:00

Everyone loves chokepoints! They vastly simplify the decision-making in an RTS and often lead to epic-looking battles. The average player who does not want to micro and does not want to think gobbles up chokepoint maps. Most players want to expend no more than this meager amount of effort so every strategy game that makes any mainstream attempt will include a chokepoint-hell map.

These are not good maps. They severely limit strategic possibilities with ground units. This is worse in Company of Heroes than in RUSE, and matters even less in Supreme Commander games, because of the availability of air transport for ground units. The more units you can transport with ease, the less the layout of the terrain matters, so the restriction of available land routes has less of a constricting effect on the shape of the strategic space on the map.

To some extent, simplicity is preferable over complexity—but only if the complexity provides false difficulty. It’s preferable to have 10 units per faction and have 8 be viable than to have 50 per faction and have 9 viable. In the former case, the number of viable combinations of units is only slightly smaller than in the latter case, but the player is forced to trudge through a lot more information to decide which of the fifty unit types he wants to build, whereas when most of the units are viable the player has to wade through much less noise to develop sound strategies.

Chokepoint-hell maps do not simplify to eliminate false difficulty; they dumb-down gameplay and limit depth. This is fine if you’re designing maps for the early stages of a campaign, but in competitive play these maps are simply inferior.

On the left: “Vire River” from Company of Heroes.

On the right: “Above the River” from RUSE. (h/t BattleStrats)

A Look at FFXIV

2010-09-13T21:18:00.008-04:00

I've spent some time with FF14 in its open beta over the last week. The game is very reminiscent of FFXI in that it isn't going to hold your hand through anything, and I am perfectly OK with that if that is type of game SE is pitching. But they are hyping this casual-friendly, non-punishing, happy-go-lucky MMORPG where everyone gets their nose wiped and bad times are a thing of the past. Whoever approaches FF14 with that predisposition is going to experience something completely disjoint from their expectations.

UI and Controls

The most significant and show-stopping issues with the game deal with the interface and controls. It is as if they pinned up a keyboard sketch and bound functions to whatever keys the dart happened to land on. As of this writing, there is no way to officially remap keys. The controls were so obstructive that my first few sessions were only 10 minutes long, and I had to log off in frustration.

In FFXI I could play without the mouse because I used the numpad for movement, menus, targeting, and confirming actions; the arrow keys for camera and item selection; and used my left hand to perform skills with alt/ctrl+#. SE decided to keep the familiar numpad binds, but not the arrow key camera controls. So I need to use IJKL or the mouse to control the camera. A WASD/mouse scheme would work well except that the mouse is rendered on a software layer and thus is unresponsive to the point of unusability. I've been getting by with using a full keyboard setup: movement with numpad, camera with IJKL when I need to.

Some of the FFXI slash commands are in FF14 except for their shorthand aliases. E.g. instead of /cm p to change default chat to party, I must type out /chatmode party. I did not discover a PM reply shortkey or slash command; only after I type out the character name in a /tell does ctrl+r auto-populate a reply for me. These are just minor annoyances.

Combat

The basic resource in combat is Stamina which operates exactly like WoW's Rogue Energy mechanic or Global Agenda's combat: each ability depletes some amount of Stamina, but Stamina refills fairly quickly. There is no auto-attack. Prior to realizing that I had another skill at my disposal, I was simply hitting '1' over and over again, and cried with boredom, "This is it?"

With the aid of my friend (and the audience around the Aetheryte Crystal I pissed off by bitching about the game in spacial chat), I found out that jobs get new skillz every even level. And in fact once a player completes the intro scene (and subsequently hits Lv.2), they should have at least 2 skills. This makes combat slightly more interesting (although as a Gladiator, my Lv.2 skill requires MP; and MP doesn't refill unless you return to the Crystal...).

Explaining to players that they have new skills and how to find/equip them are obviously not priorities at SE. I leveled several jobs to around Rank 4 before I even realized that I acquired new abilities. In the Abilities menu, there should be a drop down box on the right. It defaults to nothing (which is completely moronic); if you select a weapon from the list, then equippable skills will be shown.

Where to find abilities in FFXIV's GUI

Upon hitting Lv.6 I got a skill that required only Stamina and TP, so this actually did add choice during fighting. The skill was also AOE, and since we were duoing mobs without a problem I started to engage and pull them near each other in order to make things go a bit quicker.

My two-player party was out in the field just killing mobs without any real guidance. Guild Leves (AKA quests) will not fill up a complete play session unless that session is very short. Expect to kill mobs without a quest prompt telling you to do so.

I'm not entirely sure how the mob relative strength gauging works. We were primarily killing blue-con mobs, but we tried to fight a blue monkey once and got killed quickly. Also, like its predecessor, FF14 doesn't indicate what mobs aggro (and perhaps how they aggro).

The first time I died, my body lay on the ground for 5 minutes while I awaited a GUI popup with some options. None such message was displayed, and I eventually found a "Return" option in the main menu. This teleported me back to the Aetheryte Crystal.

I found the death penalty to be contradictory. Returning to the Crystal waypoint debuffs the character with "Weakness". This status effect reduces its HP, MP, and Stamina regeneration rate. So the player is pretty much just waiting around for this to wear off before setting out again. For an MMORPG that is supposed to be catering to the casual crowd I find this mechanic to be defective. Displacing the player is already a loss of time; why make them wait around even further?

Crafting

I didn't experience all the Disciplines of the Land (AKA Gathering jobs) first-hand, but I am willing to bet they all operate the same way.

Gathering professions can equip some skills that help players find resource nodes, giving distance in "yalms" and a compass direction. One ability even provides a sprint buff if the player is far away from the closest node.

Nodes aren't "claimed" as they are in WoW. Anyone nearby or late to the show can walk up and start gathering from the same node. Each player get a personalized Attempt count. Once a player runs out of Attempts, she's gotta move on. The node itself seems to have a global Attempt counter and will deplete eventually if enough people gather from it.

The act of gathering is a simple pattern matching hot-cold guessing game. Players get 3 or 4 guesses along a meter. An indicator moves back and forth along the meter and hitting Confirm places the guess. The game responds with text clues indicating if the guess is way off, going in the wrong direction, close, or very close. If a very close message is presented, guessing the same location again seems to still produce an item. It is possible to guess correctly on the first try.

This gets old fast.

Before the minigame starts, the gatherer indicate "where" they would like to gather. It is a height meter indicating, for example, the depth at which you want to fish. I have a hunch that it skews the probabilities of receiving certain items. I seem to find Copper Ore near the top of the meter, while I often strike Tin when mining near the bottom.

Synthesis in FF14 is very similar to that in FFXI, except there are some additional options. The familiar 8-cell grid for materials is present, and players still have to discover recipes.

The UI is extremely slow; a single synth took 5 mins. The game even froze for 2 seconds (looked like blocking network i/o to me) each time the materials grid was displayed.

I have a feeling all the crafting professions are very tightly coupled. So players are expected either to level multiple Disciple of the Hand jobs (lol), or to pay out the nose for refined materials. And with no Auction House, things might get a bit frustrating. I didn't get past rank 1 Armorer and cannot fathom how someone could level a Crafter primarily.

Conclusion

When information was first breaking about some of the systems in FF14, I feared it would fall flat on its face. But now I see that it does carry on the FFXI legacy, and all those players will enjoy it very much.

However, I don't understand how seasoned and AAA game developers can completely neglect UI and controls. A game is its interface. A sluggish or cumbersome UI just makes the game unplayable, and FF14's UI will delay my purchase until it is remedied. (I am told that the game plays like a dream with a controller, but when a PC title launches 6 months before its console version, the PC controls better be just as intuitive.)

I'm willing to bet that the instruction manual goes through a lot of the basics (like how to equip skills and to accept defeat). It would be nice to have in-game guidance, especially in a post-WoW MMORPG--pop-ups, tutorials, some form of assistance on how to use the UI. But once again those are GUI concerns, and that department doesn't seem to exist at SE.

Vision and Direction

2010-09-04T22:33:00.001-04:00

Players are bad at far-mode game design decision-making. People, in general, are bad at far-mode thinking. People live in the here and now, and they don't want to think too much. They may know that they aren't happy, but they can only take almost-random guesses at why. Most people do not care enough to figure out what is wrong. They just know something is wrong and someone should make it better. When they try to articulate what is wrong, they run into a twofold problem: first, they actually do not know what is wrong; and second, they couldn't communicate well enough to convey the problem effectively if they knew the problem.

Would you blame people for not thinking? Thinking gets you into a situation like mine: I'm at a point where I feel like game design is borderline a hopeless endeavor and that we are doing no more than flailing around in semantic mud by talking about it as if we know anything. If I didn't think about games, I wouldn't be here. I could enjoy whatever I happen to enjoy, write love notes on the forums, and leave the blogging to more qualified meddling mages than myself.

People who are smart, thoughtful, and good at reasoning have trouble deciding what is wrong with complex interconnected systems like games. Taste can wash out reasoning about games easily, leaving a designer feeling like there is no anchoring point for making decisions. Without a logical framework from which to make decisions, a game designer would be no better than some guy off the street. You can only get so far by thinking really hard about fun--or even just thinking really hard about what you, in particular, find fun.

People tend to reason through emotion, not through logic--and I am also guilty of this, as is everyone made of biological matter that I've ever talked with. This means that we'll prefer that game mechanics and interfaces work a certain way, and this preference will have no backing in logic. We'll dig for reasons, but in the end the reasons aren't the source of our preference, they're just an attempt at post-hoc justification. Whatever mechanic or interface will simply feel right to us. It's hard to have valuable discussion about such matters, but we desperately try.

The odds are stacked against meaningful and useful discussion. When a designer sets out to create a system and tune it, he's set adrift in a rolling sea where waves of subjectivity splash incessantly at every odd angle and nothing remains as it was for long enough to be appraised and understood. In this environment, designers are left reaching desperately for some kind of raft, some surface that remains stable in the roiling undulations.

What can a designer do to make something of this intractable situation?

One possible solution is to rely on other people to validate the big picture. Unfortunately, other people just won't get what you're trying to do. If you don't have some kind of idea of why you're making a game, then don't make a game. If you do have such an idea, the advice of arbitrary other people will uniformly be useless if not damaging. Asking the right people for advice, though, can greatly help, provided they understand your vision (not a safe assumption under the best of conditions).

The solution isn't to drift aimlessly in the eddies of popular opinion, clearly, because there is no direction there.

Direction comes from establishing some theory and then trying to test it. To make a great game, you need a (mostly) unified and consistent vision of the boundaries of the game systems and some relatively particular idea of what you're trying to accomplish. Some players can help on small matters, like fine-tuning and balancing within existing frameworks (though players' feedback will almost always be garbage), but when designing the basic concepts of how a game will work, there's no substitute for vision.

Even if parts of the game fail, a designer with vision has something to fall back on: they can ammend their theory to account for the failure, or simply come to the realization that a core idea just does not work and move on. Following popular opinion, the designer will simply get lost and have to thrash about if something larger fails because he has no framework within which to make a profound, solid judgment of what has actually happened. "My source was wrong," is all he can say, "and now we need to come up with something else to try." At this point, you might as well be designing your game by adding random features and sticking them together as quickly and easily as possible.

Even a "follow the leader" mentality fails without vision. You can't choose the right mechanics to copy if you don't have a reasoned way to pick mechanics. Picking at random will only get you so far in game design because games are not collections of independently operating mechanics and their metaphors, but are instead systems of highly dependent systems of mechanics whose results are often greater than the sum of their parts.

Without vision, the chances of success greatly decline, the value of success declines (because you chose at random and cannot reproduce success through reapplying reasoning), and the value of failures is almost nothing (because the only alternative to choosing certain random elements is to choose certain other random elements). So when someone asks me why a dev isn't doing what the players want, I respond "maybe they know what they are doing". And if the devs are thrashing about and demonstrating there's no vision guiding them, I know it's time to abandon ship.

Woeful Post of Doom: "Selling Out" Edition

2010-09-02T20:18:00.000-04:00

MMORPGs are games that should require and thrive on a large number of concurrent players. In order to keep players logged in, the game needs to go one of two routes: Massive numbers that ensure that the servers seem busy even if everyone plays only 15 minutes a day; or requiring existing hardcore players to play the game for long stretches in order to the get the kind of rewards that hardcore gamers love.

Clearly the casual market is the easiest market into which to grow an MMORPG playerbase. Being casual-friendly is not far from "going mainstream" and "selling out", though. Casuals are generally non-gamers--in order to appeal to them, game designers need to assume less and less knowledge is at the disposal of a new player.

A designer can take two paths here. The hard and "right" path: he can do his best to design the game well by keeping mechanics simple but deep and by designing interfaces that are easy to learn but powerful. The other path--the "easy" one--involves stringing together the cheapest, most addictive proven gameplay mechanics on the market and wrapping them up in an inoffensive and relatable shell, replete with social tie-ins and micro-transaction money sinks.

Casual players will not have developed tastes in gaming. Cheap tricks can keep naive players entertained for a surprisingly long time. The number of naive players is so high that even if a naive player gets bored of a cheap hook within a few days or a month, there are enough naive players around to cycle through the system that there won't be much of an issue making more sales and keeping servers busy.

Regressive design preys on the naive casual gamer. We see this with the retro game resurgence--new generations of players are growing up in a world where their first game experience is in a 3D, multi-ten-million-dollar blockbuster game like Halo, Modern Warfare 2, or Mass Effect; game mechanics ancient, tired, and overdone in the eyes of experienced older gamers are novelties to the younger generation. They will play these games and give a market for the regressive and inferior. Of course some games can do justice to the old ideas, but most--as is the case in almost every arena--such games are crap.

Recycling the same tricks in better wrapping seems to make plenty of money. This is disheartening to me as someone who cares about games and enjoys seeing game design evolve towards radical new directions.

MMORPG design is falling into the same degenerative pattern that players of MMORPGs fall victim to: always taking the path of least resistance at the cost of long-term fun and success. It's worse in MMORPGs than it is in other genres, though, because the cost of putting an MMORPG together and running it dwarf the same kinds of costs for other games. And players have come to expect ridiculous amounts of polish and content from each new MMORPG. Expectations are in the wrong directions and far outreach almost every single development team's capabilities.

Where do we go from here?

To players: I'd suggest leaving the MMORPG scene and finding better games to entertain you. Or just stick to a polished and successful game like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online or enjoy a niche game that suits you like EVE, Darkfall, or A Tale in the Desert. Give games with alternate payment models (not F2P or P2P) a shot--like Guild Wars 2 (are there others?). Don't waste your time and money playing games that seek to exploit you instead of provide you with consistent fun.

To developers: Ditch the approaches where success will cost you upwards of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Make smaller, well-crafted games. Try new things on the cheap. Try different business models: don't fall into the micro-transaction conflict of interests and don't try to charge subscriptions which encourage artificial content extension. Or maybe just give up on MMORPGs all together and try to branch out into a different kind of MMO that may have a better market at the moment.

Immersion and Realism

2010-08-25T08:56:00.001-04:00

Realism is one specific path towards immersion. It's neither a necessary condition of immersion, nor is a game's level of realism at all correlated with how immersive an experience it can provide. Realism is nothing more than a game's resemblance to real life. Real life has an open, impossible to fully articulate (as far as we've been able to, anyway) set of rules, while games have their own sets that are generally self-contained, fully-definable, and self-sufficient. When we're immersed in a game world, it's not because it is real, though strong realism can aid in immersion; we become immersed because we buy into the systems and metaphors of the game. This buy-in requires that the systems and metaphors be smooth to our mental touch. Awkward metaphors, obvious technical issues, and broken game systems can open gaps in the closed system and force us out of buy-in. Other activities outside of the game itself can also hinder buy-in, too, like a crying child, feeling ill, a headache, or just being in a bad mood. When immersed, you and the game are communicating smoothly. Any break in that communication or unwillingness on either side to communicate has a significant chance of breaking immersion.

Game design is communicating interesting problems to the player and then giving him the tools to communicate back solutions that the game then somehow tests and gives feedback on. Game mechanics are communicated through metaphors that reference fantastical or conceivably real objects through the simulacra of sprites, models, textures, and sound. The most obvious way to communicate with a player is to use a "language", or set of metaphors, that they already know: such a language is how-the-real-world-generally-works. This is a shortcut to immersion. Of course no game is truly realistic, but we don't mind that because the exceptions to realism in an immersive game are generally mechanically and metaphorically consistent and make the gameplay better. Games that don't aim to be realistic still use the real world as a basis for the metaphors that pull the player into the game. Realism isn't necessary for immersion, but the game does need to provide the player with ways to relate to the game world.

All games have a base level of likeness to the real world. Realism beyond this point has no correlation to the game's ability to provide an immersive experience.

Does Anyone Actually Play an MMORPG

2010-08-23T10:36:00.004-04:00

Chris at Game by Night brought to my attention the current WoW raiding scene. I am wondering if this is a winning scenario for Blizzard.

Back before Burning Crusade, before badge gear, raid progression was set in stone. Players went Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj 40, Naxxramas. Zul'Gurub and AQ20 were mixed in occasionally to get a few odds and ends. If a guild was fresh to the raid scene, they went to ZG and MC.

In Wrath, this insertion point progresses with the aid of badge loot. Naxxramas and Ulduar are obsolete, and subsequently see little action. It seems like the vast majority of fresh raid teams try their hand at ToC (after acquiring their mound of badges).

This is what players wanted. Raiders in 1.x cried foul when Naxxramas was released, claiming that they would never see that content (never mind that they still had parts of BWL and AQ to see). Now the newest raid is but one stepping stone away, but this stepping stone can be pretty mighty for unseasoned raiders (as Chris points out).

I would be very curious to see some numbers comparing these two systems. This is completely speculative, but let's say that the percent of players who "consumed" part or all of raids was something like: 40% MC, 35% BWL, 20% AQ40, 12% Naxx; while with in Wrath: 35% Naxx, 30% Ulduar, 30% ToC, 25% ICC. In terms of content consumed, I think the Wrath system is better. Sure there are some players who are late to the game and won't see Naxx and Ulduar (because they jump right to ToC), but those same players wouldn't see AQ and Naxx in 1.x. At least now they could potentially go back to the obsolete raids to see the pretty lights.

In terms of gameplay though, I think the former system is superior. I don't think either is particular good, but as a friend of mine points out, "[Guilds] could still go in [to AQ] and feel like they accomplished something. Now you are just silly if you go to Naxx to get gear."

Observing these two systems, I can't help but wonder if playing an MMORPG is really "play". CrazyKinux linked a very good article about a psychologist's definition of play, and this stuck out to me:

To the degree that we engage in an activity purely to achieve some end, or goal, which is separate from the activity itself, that activity is not play. What we value most, when we are not playing, are the results of our actions. The actions are merely means to the ends.

In play, however, all this is reversed. Play is activity conducted primarily for its own sake. The playful student enjoys studying the subject and cares less about the test. In play, attention is focused on the means, not the ends, and players do not necessarily look for the easiest routes to achieving the ends.

This is in relation to play in general and not just games (play with goals), but it seriously threatens the notion of playing an MMORPG. Don't think about "fun"; fun is an illusion, a bag of tricks to keep you entertained: random item drops akin to slot machines, leaderboards, etc.. When was the last time you actually played an MMORPG? Used your character to perform some action for sake of that action itself? Visited a dungeon you liked not for an Achievement and not for a piece of loot? Or even just fought a monster to play around instead of consuming it like a resource?

When there isn't actually any play involved, raid content dies. Naxx and Ulduar will be forever empty like ZG, BWL, and AQ with its enormously entertaining C'Thun fight. The "carrot on a stick" design mantra of WoW is great for entertaining users, but later on players will painfully grind reputation and badges.

Don't think I'm picking on WoW; the entire genre is like this. And it is very unfortunate.

Lanchester’s Laws and RTS Design

2010-08-22T17:06:00.001-04:00

(I’ve been playing a lot of World of Tanks lately. I can’t talk much about it because of the NDA, but as soon as the open beta rolls around I will make a post about the game.

I have a few other articles I’ve written this month that are awkwardly close to completion. Hopefully I’ll get them up soon. Here’s a short post to tickle your brain while I put together more substantial content.)

Predicting casualties is easy when two even-skilled sides are fighting in melee, says Lanchesters' Law:

In ancient combat, between phalanxes of men with spears, say, one man could only ever fight exactly one other man at a time. If each man kills, and is killed by, exactly one other, then the number of men remaining at the end of the battle is simply the difference between the larger army and the smaller, assuming identical weapons.

But what about when units with ranged weapons engaged? The same simple model can no longer hold.

With firearms engaging each other directly with aimed fire from a distance, they can attack multiple targets and can receive fire from multiple directions. The rate of attrition now depends only on the number of weapons firing. Lanchester determined that the power of such a force is proportional not to the number of units it has, but to the square of the number of units. This is known as Lanchester's Square Law.

This fact is of critical importance for RTS design. Games that mix melee and ranged combatants can face strange balance issues that arise because of asymmetric forces of melee and ranged combatants combining in different ways. Ranged units may be balanced against one another, but when melee units are added the balance is damaged more than the addition of another ranged unit would have.

In games that consist entirely of ranged units, like Company of Heroes, balance is a fickle thing. When developers make even a small change to a unit’s capabilities, the squared effect of that change can cause ripples through the entire metagame and cause certain crazy strategies to become viable (pioneer spam was one such issue in CoH).

This fickleness applies to both unit strength and the cost of units. Adding to a numerical advantage by cheapening a certain unit for one faction in an RTS can cause very severe issues if the other faction isn’t also adjusted, because the asymmetry will cause a much larger effect on the battlefield than most anyone will expect.

No Bore Core

2010-08-11T15:52:00.003-04:00

I have a very bottom-up approach to game design. I like to think in terms of fundamental, atomic, core mechanics, and build them up in layers to produce a cohesive system.

After making those minigames for my cancelled Facebook MMORPG, I am fairly confident that there are 2 types of "core" mechanics: mathematical and pattern matching. My evidence is purely anecdotal, but after observing players for several months, I believe that pattern matching is a superior mechanic for video gaming. I attribute this to the amazing subconscious pattern matching and recognition facilities in the human brain.

Pattern matching as a mechanic is usually coupled with input device mastery. Two prevalent forms of PM are shooters (click the button when a target lines up with the reticule) and rhythm games (click the buttons in sync with an auditory cue). Both these games involve some sort of prediction, e.g. leading targets, interpolating target location, and maintaining musical beat/rhythm.

To help understand the difference between pattern matching and straight up input device mastery, think of any implementation of Whack-a-mole (any WoW addon for a support role will work). The mole surfaces at random locations (debuffs are placed on random raid members), and the player hits the mole (clicks the grid to decurse the target). There is no prediction, pattern, rhyme or reason to where the moles will appear. The player simply invokes muscle memory to move the mallet to a location and swings her finger.

If we examine the shooter mechanic stack a bit more, the very next layer on top of pattern matching in most shooters is resource management (which is a mathematical mechanic). Ammo, weapon clips, reload time, and health--these are all resources that are managed by the player.

I thought this would be an interesting template for RPG combat, and thus I arrived at "ability clips". The entire system would be mirrored from the standard shooter weapon system: the player primes spells in much the same way that weapons are reloaded; when the player depletes a clip, they must reload using a reservoir of mana; each ability has its own reload time, clip size, mana cost, etc.. Players can only have 1 active ability in the very same way that players only have 1 active weapon. The game becomes a third-person shooter with guns that shoot health buffs and movement snares.

There are already a few games that play with functional abilities on weapons. Global Agenda was one. Many of the devices in GA were some sort of non-damaging spell, e.g. speed boost, restore health, stun buildings, and forcefields. Its combat was great; it could have been an amazing example of what I advocated above if Hi-Rez decided to pursue the shooter side rather than muddy the gameplay with hollow additions like persistence, progression, and gearing.

Team Fortress 2 is also an unlikely example of an ability shooter. The interface for swapping weapons isn't as robust and clean as GA's, but many of the newer items added to the game perform a non-damaging ability. The Demoman has a shield which reduces explosive damage and gives them a Charge ability. The Sniper can equip "jar based karate" (it is a jar of pee), and toss it on enemy players to increase their incoming damage by 35%. It also reveals cloaked Spies and puts out fires. Spies have several items which change their cloaking behavior. Heavies can restore health with Sandvich.

Of course these are PvP games. Could an ability shooter work against dumb computers? Players in GA ran PvE missions for the phat lewtz, so I am not entirely sure that those missions without progression rewards are fun. All the mobs did was shoot (from what I remember). If they had a wider range of abilities, maybe it would be a bit more interesting.

Combat as an ability rotation is dull and a precursor to grindful play. The design goal should be to provide the player with interesting decisions, and those require interesting situations. The game must constantly test the player's knowledge and demand that they react, not simply act.

So what other sorts of pattern matching cores could be used to build a combat system? It does not necessarily have to be real-time, but it should have the potential to place players in interesting situations against AI. Some other constraints to think about involve porting the system to an MMORPG, namely how much volition does the player have if set in an open world (player state can't be reset easily; what happens if the player engages more than 1 target).

And if you are interested in passing some time, you can take a look those prototypes. A game of particular relevance is StrongMan. It does have a superficial score attribute tacked on to give feedback to the player, so it is not a pure example of a pattern matching game, but it is pretty close.

Air Units in land-based RTSes

2010-07-31T15:19:00.000-04:00

Air units are a source of tremendous cognitive dissonance in RTS games. As a metaphor, air units usually seem awkward. They hover in the air infinitely or, if the developer wants to be "realistic", they fly to accomplish some objective and then run out of fuel and ammo and have to fly back and land again. The sorties usually do not see units going too far afield, which makes sense considering air units that would realistically go 100x the speed of ground units instead travel at barely double their speed (at most). In terms of game mechanics, seldom do air units make sense and offer balanced viable options for a player. Air units often are the most powerful units in the game (Battlecruisers and Carriers in Starcraft, bombers that can level base buildings in one run in RUSE) if they are allowed to be built on-map and are treated as units.

Land-based RTSes are generally based on map control. The map is critical to how the game unfolds. Where are resources? Where do players start? Where are the impassable boundaries the players have to work around? All of this is circumvented by air units. Air units generally do not exert map control unless they're implemented simply as ground units that ignore terrain. Ignoring terrain is, itself, an issue in games where much of the interesting strategic choice blossoms from terrain.

When given the viable option at the beginning of a match, a player should almost always choose air units before they begin to use ground units to cement map control. An air unit that is equally as effective as a ground unit at ground attack is significantly more valuable in that it can ignore terrain to harass the opponent from any angle. Since games have a sharp divide between units that can shoot air units and units that cannot, the early game units generally are putrid at air defense. If they were good at air defense, then air would never be a viable strategy because building basic units would hard-counter it.

Most standard RTSes circumvent this problem by requiring a bit of tech research before the player can buy air units, or by nerfing air units to the point where they are weak enough to not be much of a threat unless massed. Both approaches remove air from viability in the early-game. The best approach to air unit design allows air to be effective and viable throughout the entire game--or at least until the opponent builds counters.

Air units are too fast and too long-ranged to be presented effectively with similar mechanics to ground units in most RTSes. Unless the game is on a very broad scale--a scale which is very rarely attempted in RTSes--air units will not fit into the balance of the game. The speed of air units can cause then to be a must-have in the early game because they can project force much farther and much faster than any other unit and then run away from danger just as quickly. The advantages of going air may be too great for competitive palyers to pass them up, as they were in RUSE during open beta, which leads to the set of viable builds being constricted because the player needs to build air (or a significant amount of ground-based anti-air) first.

There are two ways to "fix" air units in land-based RTSes.

The easier but less satisfying way involves making all air units act as if they're nothing more than ground units that ignore terrain. These air units have to have speed comparable to land units, or perhaps be slower, to avoid obsoleting ground units.

The best way to solve this problem (at least that I've encountered) is to make all manifestations of air power into special abilities. "Off-map" air. Company of Heroes does this to great effect. The key is to not make on-map anti-air units required or common. Give otherwise-useful units the ability to shoot down planes if the planes take certain paths. For instance, the flak 88 in Company of Heroes is a powerful, long-range anti-tank gun primarily, but also acts as a supremely powerful anti-air gun that can shoot down a plane in one volley. As long as air use is relatively rare in the context of the game, making all air units off-map call-ins tremendously increases the seeming realism and fun of air units while doing nothing to damage the metagame.

Engy Update is Credit to Team

2010-07-09T12:21:00.005-04:00

In case you've been so caught up in RealID drama to ignore the other happenings on in gaming news, Valve released the final class update for Team Fortress 2 yesterday following an interesting promotion. The Engineer update also came with a few new maps, including a new Payload Race map, plr_hightower, and it looks like Valve finally figured out how to make PLR fun.

The update focused on adding new weapons and features to the Engineer class with the goals of untethering the player from their buildings, particularly their Sentry Gun, and increasing Engineer mobility altogether. The update hits the mark perfectly; I haven't even played the new Engineer yet, but I love all the new choices presented. A big issue with typical class updates is that the class gets overplayed. We have class caps (limit 4) on our server, but I have no qualms with more teleporters and dispensers!

The first enormous change (that doesn't involve acquiring new weapons) is that Engineers can pick up and redeploy buildings now. If an upgraded building is redeployed, it begins life as level 1 but instantly starts upgrading itself to its old level right before the Engy's eyes, without any input or metal. To redeploy a level 3 Sentry Gun takes maybe 6 seconds. There were plenty of times last night when I rounded a corner to find a level 3 SG there when only moments before there was nothing.

One problem with the old Engineer was how reliant the class was on its Sentry. If destroyed, typically the Engy was in hot water. Well Valve added a new shotgun called the Frontier Justice that shoots "Revenge Crits" after the SG is destroyed (even if blown up by the Engineer himself!). For every kill the Sentry gets, the shotgun stores 2 Revenge Crits; for every assist, 1 crit. The downfall is that the Frontier Justice has half the magazine size of the normal shotgun (3 versus 6), and doesn't receive normal crits.

If planning isn't your thing, you can equip the new melee weapon, a mechanical hand called the Gunslinger. It provides an extra 25 Health to the Engineer, guarantees a crit on the 3rd successive melee strike, and let's the player deploy a Mini-Sentry. This cute little tripod costs only 100 metal (versus 140 for the normal SG), builds 4 times faster, and deploys with full health. Problem is that it cannot be repaired or upgraded and only deals half the damage as a normal Sentry. This certainly helps the Engy be more offensive.

Another game changing weapon replaces the pistol and is called the Wrangler. Activating this device let's the Engineer take control of their Sentry, letting them aim the stationary gun with no range limits and fire at double the normal rate. A laser originating from the Engy points to the target, and the Sentry gains a damage shield that absorbs 66% of incoming damage. Should the player die or deactivate the Wrangler, the SG becomes inactive for 3 seconds. Previously infeasible sentry locations and now usable since Engineers can overcome the range limits.

There is also another wrench you can find which adds a bleed effect to victims, making pesky Spies easier to dispatch.

I think it may be too soon to tell if the game has completely changed. Very rarely does anyone do the typical Sentry turtling, but that may be because of the novelty of the update. The game does feel fresh though, as many people are trying out crazy tactics and enjoying all the new options.

What Blizzard Should Have Done

2010-07-08T13:07:00.004-04:00

Regardless of whatever Facebook integration plans or independent social networking plans Blizzard may have, and however optional posting may be, they should not unveil a player's real name on the forums. It is absolutely unnecessary, and just plain asinine. I was on the fence about purchasing StarCraft II, but now I will be giving that one a pass. I could just watch matches on Youtube, since I always end up spectating RTSs more than playing them anyway.

This is how RealID should have gone down. Upon account integration or creation, the account holder should create a Player Handle. This handle would be a singular player identity across Battle.net and Blizzard's games. If a player posts on the forums, the handle is used as a pseudonym. Reputation is maintained, and players are held responsible.

So players have 3 levels of identity:

a real name which is as global as it gets;
a player handle which unifies a player identity across characters and Blizzard games;
and a character name (or player alias in the case of non-RPGs).

This is exactly how most gamers structure their identity already; the worst part would be working with the interface in making it official.

When someone is RealID befriended, a player only shares the handle. There would be no code to share someone's real name; it isn't needed. Sharing of someone's real life identity should be done on a individual basis, thus simply stating your name in a private message would be enough to "share" it. Of course if a player chooses to integrate with their Facebook friends, their Facebook name must be displayed. Just add the name in a comment in BNet's friend list.

Notice above that I said Facebook name. I have a close friend who does not display her real name on Facebook because she is a middle school teacher. It would be disastrous if her students found her Facebook profile. She obviously already has everything hidden from public view, but that includes Wall Posts, an entirely optional feature of Facebook. Posting on a Blizzard forum would not only share that comment with everyone, but it would use her real name, an identity not even presented on Facebook itself!

I can only imagine two cases for Blizzard. Either they thought about this immensely, did the research, watched the Facebook privacy debacles, and then decided to go through with it anyway; or they have absolutely no idea what they are doing, haven't consulted a single privacy expert or sociologist, and think that people don't care about privacy.

If you are interested in privacy in social networks, I would recommend you check out Danah Boyd's blog. A few really great articles:

Pew Research confirms that youth care about their reputation

Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It's about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.

Facebook and "radical transparency" (a rant)

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what's best for the privileged class. And I'm terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don't live in a lap of luxury. I say this as someone who is privileged, someone who has profited at every turn by being visible. But also as someone who has seen the costs and pushed through the consequences with a lot of help and support. Being publicly visible isn't always easy, it's not always fun. And I don’t think that anyone should go through what I've gone through without making a choice to do it. So I'm angry. Very angry. Angry that some people aren't being given that choice, angry that they don't know what's going on, angry that it's become OK in my industry to expose people. I think that it's high time that we take into consideration those whose lives aren't nearly as privileged as ours, those who aren't choosing to take the risks that we take, those who can't afford to. This isn't about liberals vs. libertarians; it's about monkeys vs. robots.

And I definitely think that Spink's has the quote of the year:

There was a time when Blizzard was viewed as a company run by and for gamers. That time is now over. Even aside from the wrongs or rights of the proposal, no company that fails so badly in understanding gamer culture can really claim to be one of us any more.

HiRez Saves Global Agenda

2010-07-03T14:45:00.001-04:00

HiRez announced last week that Global Agenda will never charge players subscription fees. Global Agenda will follow the same business model of almost every game in existence: Charge for the box and then charge for expansions. The only twist is that they’ll offer token- (to buy loot with) and XP-boosting services at relatively low real-money prices.

Why did this happen?

AvA was supposed to be the key selling point for the subscription. AvA is a garbage mode. It’s not a good competitive mode and you can’t be competitive in it as a casual. AvA satisfies no one, and there are no fixes forthcoming. On the US servers, one alliance (JL) dominated. Your choices were to join them or lose. The mode only rewards first-place finishers, so competition is shelved in favor of collusion—this renders AvA a complete joke as a competitive mode. HiRez made an attempt to improve AvA by putting everyone into one huge zone with player-set territory opening times instead of having multiple independent geography-based zones that are only open for two hours a day at various times of day and night. This decision led to JL dominating the entirety of AvA instead of just a couple of US zones. AvA went from bad to pitiful in 1.3A, and AvA was the main reason why people would subscribe—at least theoretically.

Without AvA to draw players to the subs, why would players bother? There are only so many good-spirited people who would blindly throw their money at HiRez in the hope that they might get value in return. The potential low number of subscribers would have crippled all of the other subscriber content, each mode of which would have required queues to be busy enough for matchmaking to happen. None of those modes alone—and probably no combination of those modes—would justify paying a subscription (there were two arena, full arranged team modes and a PvE mode). The fact that matchmaking may not even be possible because of a low population of subscribers means that if matches were made, they would be terrible due to the matchmaker being starved of players at different skill levels to match-up.

A Bright Future?

I still don’t have much confidence in HiRez after the half-assed attempt to MMORPG-ize the game in 1.3A. I think that the decision to remove the subscription was necessary to avoid the game completely dying. Now players can reasonably have some hope for the future of Global Agenda. What HiRez will do with that future, we will see.

Current indications show that they are going to continue on the path of adding other diversions that will extend the number of half-baked things that you can do in the game—they’re adding “open-world'” zones in the next patch. I have no confidence that the “open-world” zones are going to be sufficiently “open” to please anyone; early indications show that zone populations won’t break 50. And HiRez had to spend a lot of time and resources reworking the UT engine just to get this excuse for an open world off the ground, let alone fun. Such poor benefit-per-cost decisions don’t bode well.

I have severe reservations about GA, but at least I know now that it will survive to see something of its potential. If HiRez polishes and builds on the strong points of the game instead of implementing, in an expensive and time-consuming way, half-assed MMO-impersonation features, they would have a much brighter future ahead.

Coupled Combat Systems

2010-06-29T14:16:00.003-04:00

I'm going to mention FFXI again in this post, but it's not about FFXI. I promise!

There are many systems going on under the hood in FFXI's combat. The world has a week cycle which progresses through 8 elementally-aligned days; each day lasts about 1 Earth hour. Each spell has an element associated with it, and using the skill during the element's day or the day that is weak to the skill's element will cause the spell to be more effectual. The other side of the coin is that if that spell in casted during the day that is strong against that spell's element, then the spell will be less potent.

Weapons have damage types which grant bonuses or dampen damage against certain foes. Popular leveling locations at the moment are filled with Colibris which are weak against piercing attacks. Thus Dragoons and polearm-weilding Samurai are hot jobs right now.

Less pervasive knowledge, but still important to those that can exploit it, the mobs themselves have a counter system. Attacking a bird with a crab wouldn't be a Beastmaster's first choice.

It's not the end of the world if a Dark Knight (using a Scythe) is invited to a Colibri party or a mage casts Fire II on Watersday. These are intricate systems that provide slight advantages (or disadvantages) to those who understand and capitalize on situations. Over a long enough timeline the optimizations add up, rewarding those who are more knowledgable, but sometimes it is unavoidable--healers will still cast Cure on Darksday regardless of the 10% less potency.

These systems make combat more nuanced--more mechanics to be learned and applied on the road to mastery. Spell rotations and weapons have more considations than just DPS at face value. Melee classes maintain several different weapons and use the appropriate blade depending on party composition and camp location. Monsters have more dimensions than just HP, and thus the world has a bit more personality and feels more alive.

How did we let studios remove these types of systems? Was it deemed too much baggage to get on the treadmill? Too complex for plebian minds?

Cheating Death (Pt 2): Kill It

2010-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

Either make player characters truly immortal or build the game around death being a meaningful and inevitable event. In this article I’ll discuss removing death from PvE MMORPGs.

We can see that moderating the effect of death leads to a watered down, minimal slap-on-the-wrist. Death is not a notable event more than taking a flight path is an event. Serious players deride weak death concepts because if death doesn’t have meaning, then, in an analysis of mechanics, combat where the only punishment for failure is death cannot have much meaning.

PvE MMORPGs generally have long, steep vertical advancement. These games are reward ladders intertwined in an interesting fashion. The decisions the player makes aren’t on the “what should I do to kill this lizardman”-level, but instead on the higher level of abstraction on which rests character advancement and time budgeting. Long and dramatic advancement encourages the player to invest a lot of time in a single character. The player naturally hates the concept of losing that character—and the time it represents—in whole or in part. PvE MMORPGs are supposed to be fun, and seeing 300 hours evaporate in the context of a game is not fun.

In a PvE MMORPG, skill growth is easy and short. You learn how to play the basic aspects of your character in the first few levels. Over the next several hundred hours of your character’s life, the game will grant you access to new abilities at a slow trickle, giving you plenty of time to fully adapt your play to use whatever has become available. The content doesn’t give you a reason to learn to play at anywhere near an optimal level, either. Because players don’t have much room to grow their skill, there’s little skill carry-over to make being forced to start a new character (because your old one is permanently dead) anything but a chore compounded on existing chores.

Death is a pointless mechanic in PvE MMORPGs. It means very little and usually has a crappy lore justification. When designers tack penalties on to death in order to give it meaning, players will avoid interesting, risky content, and when they do die they will end up unhappy for no particular gain. Let’s get rid of it.

Make the game so that the player character can’t die. The player can fight indefinitely against any enemy and eventually probably win, but he can’t be killed and forced to respawn. Give the player an ability that allows them to teleport out of battles (or bad places that would usually cause death) at will. Let the player disengage an enemy’s aggro, but then bump the enemy’s health and expendable resources back to where they were before the battle. Build the game around rewarding players for efficiently dispatching with enemies. It’s already this way in effect, why not make it the central issue?

Removing daeth would make PvE MMORPGs a smoother and more enjoyable experience, while sidestepping the awkwardness and mechanical faux pas that a concept of death needlessly brings to such games.

Reaching Destinations

2010-06-25T14:05:00.007-04:00

Travel seems to be a very controversial topic in MMORPGs. The current trend is to enable instant-action as much as possible and toss "immersion" or other virtual worldly concerns out the window. That's all fine and dandy for a game of TF2--I don't want to walk to Dustbowl every time I want to play the map. But for games that are supposed to have "worlds", that world becomes very small.

Humans relate large distances with time, not actual distance units. I wish I could uncover a paper or study on this phenomenon, but I couldn't find one. Anecdotally whenever I plan a trip, I measure the cost in time. It will take 3 hours to get to my destination. Google Maps displays route times in larger font than the distance. One of Science's largest distance units, the light-year, derives directly from a time calculation. This could be that our society is obsessed with speed and efficiency, and time isn't something to be squandered--especially on a video game--but then all the more important to factor in Time to an activity in an MMORPG.

I think that if an MMORPG is to have a 'world' quality, traveling needs to be significant. If the game is supposed to be a feel-good achievement treadmill, then cut the fat and insta-port the player when- and wherever. That's not a game I want to play. If I want empty trophies, I'll load up FarmVille or Progress Wars. If I want PvP competitive gaming, I'll launch TF2. But if I want something resembling a virtual world, I want travel times. There are plenty of things I do in my life grudgingly, but the difficultly of the journey both creates exclusivity and sweetens the reward.

Tips for Travel in FFXI

Each white box marks a Region which is composed of several Zones. Not shown: Aht Urhgan.

To follow up my last couple posts on FFXI, I am listing some alternative transportation systems.

Teleport Crags: Works like a waypoint system. Players must collect a "gate crystal" from the crag and then be near the party member casting the Teleport spell. Spells can be learned on lv36 White Mages (and some more exotic locations at later levels). The passengers can be any level; only requirement is the gate crystal. There are 3 crags near the 3 starter cities, 3 in high-level lands, and 3 in the Shadowreign zones. There are also items which can Teleport players to crags if a White Mage cannot be found.

Outpost Teleport: This is also a waypoint system, but waypoints can only be activated at certain times. Once a week, there is a "Conquest tally". The 3 nations and the Beastmen gain influence in Regions (groups of zones) and the faction that has the most influence at the start of the tally controls the Region for a week. Players can do Supply Runs to an outpost under their nation's control, henceforth allowing teleportation to and from the outpost for a small fee (the destination remains unlocked forever). One of the most used forms of travel.

Warp: A lv17 self-cast Blackmage spell that can also be cast from items. Returns the player to their Homepoint. Any player can purchase a Scroll of Instant Warp using Conquest Points (a currency acquired while gaining experience points). At level 40, Blackmages can learn Warp 2 which can be cast on party members.

Ghetto-warp: A term given to the act of switching to a level 1 job, running outside, dying, and releasing to your Homepoint.

Escape: A situational lv29 Blackmage spell that only works in dungeons or other "indoor" zones. Transports the mage and nearby party members out of the dungeon. Each dungeon has only 1 Escape destination, so it is possible to use the spell to skip traversing a zone altogether.

Airships: Once a player gets to Rank 5 (a milestone in the Mission questlines), they gain an Airship pass. They are then allowed to ride the airships in Jeuno to any of the 3 starter cities for a small gil fee. Alternatively, a player can purchase a pass for a lot of money.

Chocobos: Players can get their Chocobo License at level 20, which allows them to rent chocobos from stables for a small fee. While on a chocobo, the player travels at 200% speed (that is my guess) and will not aggro any mobs. Chocobos cannot enter towns/cities, dungeons, or any zone considered "indoors". Once a player dismounts, the chocobo runs away, and the player must rent a new chocobo from a stable in order to ride again.

Repatriation: By completing "Training regiment" kill quests at Fields of Valor manuals, player gain a currency called Tabs. At any Field Manual, a player may "Repatriate" for a tab fee. Repatriation teleports the player to their home nation.

Lure of the Wild Cat: Four quests in each of the 3 starter cities and Jeuno which unlock the ability to teleport for a small fee to the distant city of Aht Urhgan Whitegate (a major high-level hub).

Runic Portals: A very explicit waypoint system allowing players to transport between Whitegate and various locations in the Treasures of Aht Urhgan zones.

Campaign Teleport: The Wings of the Goddess zones are 20 years in the past. They are called the Shadowreign zones, and a major war is going on in them. Players can join the fight and earn Allied Notes. Players can then teleport to any Shadowreign zone they've visited (they just need to zone into the place; don't even need to talk to anyone or pick up an item) for a small fee in Allied Notes. Players can enter the past/present by going through portals in each zone called Cavernous Maws.

Retrace: Lv55 Blackmage spell. Similar to Warp 2 except that instead of being transported to their Homepoint, players are taken to their "nation of affiliation in the past". Useful for getting to the Shadowreign zones more quickly than using a Cavernous Maw.

Ease of Exploration: Once a week there is a special event where Moogles hide special items called Mog Tablets around the world. Players are tasked to find and return them (and get some very nice rewards for doing do). Once all 11 tablets are returned, three Super Kupowers are picked at random and affect the world for a week until the event starts again. One of these Kupowers is called Ease of Exploration which allows players to teleport to the 3 starter Cities and 2 smaller towns for a small fee.

Run speed modifications: aside from Chocobos which also give players the benefit of aggro-free travel, there are abilities and items which can temporarily boost a player's run speed. Flee is a level 25 Thief ability; Dancers get a jig at 55 to increase run speed; Bards can sing a song to make all their party members run faster at level 37 (and a better one at 73). There are also a handful of items which give the Quickening buff.

Some odds and ends: Nexus Cape, Tidal Talisman.

Mastering the Environment

2010-06-24T14:45:00.005-04:00

Traveling and exploring in FFXI can be dangerous. A death can end an adventure prematurely or leave you with a mouthful of dirt, desperately asking any passers-by for a Raise. One tip I told my friends who recently took the plunge into Vana'diel is that mobs in FFXI wander much further than in WoW. You could be solo'ing peacefully, and then out of nowhere a Goblin catches sight of you and sticks his gobbie dagger right in your backside.

Notice that I said "sight". One interesting system in FFXI is how mobs actually aggro players. There isn't a single "aggro radius", an invisible border to ~~recklessly run through~~ dodge. Aggro triggers include Sight, Sound, Low Health, casting magic, and Weapon Skill usage. Each type of mob might have none or some of these triggers, and the game doesn't tell players with GUI features how mobs detect. In WoW, aggressive mobs have red name plates; in FFXI, all mobs have yellow name plates and players have to learn the rules. E.g. most Beastmen (humanoids) detect on sight, and it is possible to run right up to their backs safely (just hope that they don't turn around). Undead detect on sound, but will come after low HP players from a much greater distance.

Avoiding low health and magic seems simple enough--don't cast anything. Players also get an arsenal of spells, abilities, and items which silence their sounds and hide from enemies. Any Sneak effect will cancel sound detection, and any Invisible effect will cancel sight detection. Keep those 2 effects active (they last random durations ranging from 15 seconds to 5 minutes), stay out of earshot and sight when re-applying, and players can travel and explore to their hearts' content.

But just like something out of Donkey Kong Country 2, FFXI takes advantage of players' expectations of the rules. Some mobs have True Sight or True Hearing, meaning that Sneak and Invisible are useless. Last night I decided to do the quest to unlock the Puppetmaster job. I must pass though some dangerous areas with True Sight imps and pick up a Key Item from a quest location.

FFXI uses a ??? target (yes, 3 question marks) to trigger events, cut scenes, boss fights, and pretty much anything else that is remotely related to a quest. Players need to be on the appropriate quest and not invisible in order to activate the ???.

Well I died 3 times on my way there. Luckily I was able to grab a Raise from a nearby Red Mage the first time, and then was able to self-raise the other 2 times (using a proactive buff called Reraise).

Normally I have no problem avoiding sight lines, but in this particular zone, there is heavy vegetation which obstructed my view. I run down an alley which I perceive as clear, and then get hit for a fourth of my health. "Crap."

Mobs will pursue targets until the player is quite some distance away--well outside any aggro radius. Originally, they would never stop, and players would have to change zones in order to shake enemies. Yes, FFXI had "trains to zone".

Getting around isn't just a simple time sink. FFXI has vast lands, but they are filled with interesting obstacles that reward players who take the time to discover their traits. There are passages and shortcuts not shown on maps; mobs have different aggro triggers which can be exploited to turn a seemingly impossible journey into a cake walk.

A simple delivery quest can morph into an epic adventure. It's not a flight on a gryphon, and it's not a mounted autorun across the zone. It is a quest to return the ring to Mount Doom, avoiding enemies along the way. It is an opportunity to explore desolate and dangerous places. It is a chance to test your knowledge of the world and master the environment.

Cheating Death Pt. 1: Introduction

2010-06-22T18:26:00.001-04:00

We must look at death both from a game mechanical perspective and a metaphoric perspective.

Death is a consequence for defeat in combat. The current structure of MMORPG combat is similar to how combat works in bad movies. The hero fights a bunch of nameless trash and the fight ends when the trash are all dead. The trash are designed to be killed. Designers have made every fight essentially a fight to the death—players expect this and would be confused by having it otherwise. Other outcomes are nothing but cheap excuses for death—mere icing on top of the death-cake meant to make it look as if it is not death but instead some form of retreat or injury. But the effect of the prettified death-cake is still practically similar to unadorned death-cake: namely, death.

Regardless, we all know that the death-cake is a lie. It’s the cooing noises a parent makes at its child to ease the child down from the brink of a tantrum. We are no more than petulant children, looking to have some vague feeling of mock-accomplishment we can pass off as “fun”. Death is an unpleasant detour on the path towards that mock-accomplishment, and so designers find death a difficult obstacle to either include or exclude.

Some people want their character’s death to be a mountain, some want it to be a speedbump. The mountainous death is meaningful, the speedbump death is the smallest obstacle possible on the road towards the accomplishments that many think give meaning to MMORPGs.

Lord of the Rings Online cheats death on the player’s end by making the player’s death not actual death, but a mere shock to the character’s morale. The effect is the same: you lose the fight and your character becomes unusable until someone brings him back to the fight with an ability or the player elects to be teleported at some penalty back to a place of relative safety.

How do you design death into an MMORPG without “cheating”? Without being too punitive? Without it being meaningless?

Come up with death mechanics that actually make sense and aren’t such a cop-out.
Get players used to the concept of death being meaningfull and not just a speedbump.
Come up with a metaphor to make the mechanics fit tidily into a game world. Hell, you could even design the game around death mechanics if they’re going to be serious and important to how the game plays.

I’ll go into more detail on each of these points in a future post.

Global Agenda Won’t Dare to be Different

2010-06-12T17:25:00.002-04:00

HiRez is normalizing Global Agenda to MMORPG standards and this will kill the game. In a few crucial ways, this normalization is half-baked and has no hope of capturing the MMORPG crowd.

A summary of the game’s concessions to the MMORPG normal:

A per-item loot system instead of a whole-character upgrade system.
A randomized loot system instead of craft or AH purchase-based gear acquisition.
Maxed gear is now much more difficult to get—you used to be able to get maxed gear for one build in a month or two of 60 minutes per night play. Now you may never get it.
Open-world “zones” (instances with higher player caps than 20) will be added in later phases of 1.3.
Solo missions were added and open-world solo missions will be tacked on in a later phase.
Token-purchased “wellfare epics” were added to the game.

HiRez doesn’t understand how these additions appeal to the players they are meant to draw. They’ve missed the point of doing what they’re doing.

The loot system is boring, linear progression. Loot needs to be cool-looking, powerful, and very diverse to keep MMORPG players interested.
You can’t trade loot, which means that you are forced to keep crappy drops without hope of trading them for something better. The “advancement at all costs” mindset that makes MMORPGs so addictive relies on trading up through the loot ladder by harnessing the value of past loot. With all equipment being bind on pick-up, an economy that is already a joke has no hope of maturing.
Solo missions appeal to players because they allow for advancement alongside others, but not having to work together. Global Agenda’s solo missions are instanced so the player is entirely alone versus legions of enemies. The missions are so difficult once you get to a respectable level that none but the more hardcore players—given some practice over several failed runs—can hope to succeed.
The open-world zones will just be instances that allow more players on the same map. The largest number of players on any playable map in GA right now is 20, so the number of playres allowed in the open world zones can’t possibly be much larger. The UT engine also does not tend to support large numbers of players (over 64, I think). This will be by no means “massive”.

Let’s look at the real problems with the game as it exists even after the first phase of the messiah patch 1.3.

The loot system is boring. Loot doesn’t do much to differentiate you aside from making you flat out more powerful. But you can’t even become that much more powerful. It’s 4% gains. Flat, small gains do not make for an exciting loot system. It’s just an excuse for a grind.
The economy is a joke. There aren’t enough interesting items to trade with other players. Everything’s too locked down and confined to being used by specific characters. Goods can’t be traded freely enough for the economy to take on the kind of full-bodied nature that makes World of Warcraft’s economy remotely interesting. Global Agenda has not been doing anything to improve the viability of the economy in new patches, either.
There aren’t enough PvP maps. We have had maybe 3 or 4 PvP maps added in five months. Existing maps are slightly altered as an excuse for “more maps”—this is transparent bullcrap, laziness, and it’s lame. Make maps for your players to play; make good, thoughtfully designed maps that look like you actually gave them some effort.
There aren’t enough tilesets—the maps all look surprisingly similar. Crates, metal floors, metal walls, open doors, mainframes, invincible glass barriers—that’s all these maps consist of. The new maps recently added look like they came from an entirely different game. All of the other maps need to be overhauled to reach this standard of design and art.
There aren’t enough (innovative/unique) modes. There are six PvP modes. No new ones have been added since release. The existing modes are all point-based and most of them are rehashes of modes we’ve seen in other games, like Team Fortress 2.
The story is not integrated into the gameplay. The only story you see is in the tutorial. After that, the game does absolutely nothing to get you into any story whatsoever. Global Agenda is transparent through to the game mechanics.
Alliance vs. Alliance is a failure as a competitive mode. The US zones were not competitive before 1.3’s release because all the good players piled into one agency/alliance. The competition was too fragmented to provide much of a fight on a scale broader than a few individual battles. Because there is no reward for finishing anywhere but in first place, there’s no reason to compete—just join the best faction and get your shiny helmet.
Half the devices in the game do not have a role to play for anyway—they are not viable in any build for any reason. And there have been little-to-no balance adjustments since the game’s release. This is inexcusable.
PvE is boring. The maps are linear. Tactical variety doesn’t exist. The AI is bad, though it has seen limited improvement recently.
PvE’s difficulty is primarily due to increased enemy damage, health and increased spawn rates of elites. Hirez did the cheapest possible thing that would increase the difficulty of PvE. They could’ve improved the maps, AI, and added new PvE objectives. They did not.

Global Agenda will not fail because it’s not enough like MMORPGs—it’ll fail because it tries to be like an MMORPG yet doesn’t have the one critical aspect of such games covered: content. Global Agenda has nowhere near enough content to keep a PvE player satisfied—it barely has enough content to keep PvP players playing.

In a market full of much more polished addictive MMORPGs executed significantly better, Global Agenda doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Global Agenda needs to innovate in order to succeed. As events unfold, it’s clear that HiRez does not understand this. They’re satisfied mainstreaming the game right out of its niche and into a market where it cannot compete.

Global Agenda’s lack of vision and direction will kill it. I’ve finally, after playing since release day and earlier, left the game because of the clear disdain for innovation and interest in appealing to a kind of player that cannot be satisfied with a Global Agenda that I would like to play.

The Facebook MMORPG That Once Was

2010-06-08T12:37:00.004-04:00

A couple of months ago, while I was finishing up my degree, a few friends and I decided to turn our Distributed Systems project into an MMORPG. With all the buzz surrounding Facebook and Social gaming (GDC, the ire towards Zynga, and all Facebook's privacy faux pas hadn't occurred yet), we decided we were going to make a Flash-based MMORPG on Facebook. Lured by short development times and the potential revenue, we hoped to roll out a game in a couple months and use the income to fund a real MMORPG.

That is why I haven't posted much lately.

At month 7 of the project, we felt that the game was simply taking too long for our initial goals and realized that we would be supporting a game that none of us were passionate about for at least another year. The company had 3 co-founders, and we all decided that it was time to pull the plug. We learned about tons of technical problems (and some solutions) for large player zones and how to stream assets so that browser gamers weren't waiting around for 20 minutes to play the game. Some days were really exciting and some were immensely frustrating.

I want to talk about some of the high level design here. I won't be posting detailed item or skill data, which are the parts that actualize the design.

We knew that we wanted an open-world design, where scores of players would be able to interact with each other synchronously. This was a very different approach than most other social games which are said to be asynchronously multiplayer. We hoped players would be enamored by this "living world" sensation.

We went through 3 completely different game ideas and finally reached the conclusion that we were not going to have a combat system. The typical Facebook gamer is a woman in her 30s or 40s. They are not the hardcore 18-25 male demographic. Some potential players told us to "make sure it isn't violent". So, as I said, we decided to leave off a combat system.

The problem with no combat is that conflict is harder to come by. There is no explicit way to represent conflict, risk, or danger nor a way to explicitly resolve problems. Without combat, we decided to have a very heavy crafting game, but we had no way to make exploration of the world dangerous or risky. Players would be able to walk to any place they wanted to without any trepidation--this might have been very boring.

EVE's skill system was perfect for us: it allowed only 5 to 10 minute play sessions where the player only queues new skills, and enticed the player to come back to the game every couple of hours to enqueue some more. The modifications we made included making things more streamlined, i.e. 30 levels in a Skill rather than several books of 5 levels, and requiring players to purchase each skill individually.

This put tremendous pressure on itemization though since players were not crafting silly items every few levels just for skill ups. Every item had to have a purpose, and without combat we had to get really creative to make some functional items.

We had to make a secondary stat on crafting and gathering skills called Proficiency. Training increased your Proficiency in Crafting skills but not in Gathering skills. Players had 2 functional item slots which they used to equip "gear" that increased their Proficiency. For Gatherers, this was their only source of Proficiency; for Crafters, this augmented their Proficiency slightly. Recipes and resource nodes had a Proficiency requirement on them; this ensured that players were buying goods and using functional items.

The Marketplace was a global Auction House were Buy and Sell orders could be placed. In addition to functional items, we had quite a few vanity items: clothing, furniture, & pets. Each player was to get an instanced house and be able to invite their friends. Eventually we hoped to allow players to throw parties or own larger plots of land for special crafting machinery.

To make the crafting and gathering games have a bit more flare, we put in minigames. The problem I and some other gamers have with minigames is that they are very hokey and break "immersion". I designed and prototyped quite a few minigames which included everything from a Sudoku-like Exact Cover problem and a simple timing/reaction game. If you are clever enough, you can find them online :P

There are 6 Crafting professions (Tailoring, Smithing, Woodworking, Leatherworking, Alchemy, and Cooking), 4 Gathering professions (Mining, Logging, Harvesting, and Trapping), and 4 Refining professions (Smelting, Lumbering, Weaving, and Skinning). Each profession would take a bit more than 15 days of constant training to skill cap. We hoped players would focus on 2 or 3 professions, giving them 30 to 45 days of related training. Then they could always train the rest of the professions if they wanted to.

The only profession that didn't fit the mold was Trapping. We decided to merge FarmVille with FFXI's fishing system to make something really exciting. Players would acquire traps and bait, set them up in the world, and come back after a few hours to collect the animal. Which animal was in the trap was a function of the trap used (e.g. steel, wooden, large, small), the bait used (different meats, nuts), the time of day the trap was placed (night, day), and the location of the trap (forest, plains, near water). The animals would be used as pets, leather, fur, cooking ingredients, and bait.

The main focus of the MMORPG was crafting and vanity gear--making your character and your house your own. It was supposed to be a low-intensity distraction where players would be a part of a virtual world. We planned to monetize with an item shop which included training rate bonuses and seasonal vanity items.

Without combat, the game just felt very bland to us--the hardcore gamers making it. Our hearts were not in it, and more than once we had to convince ourselves that it was worth it to continue.

I will say one more technical lesson: I will never use Flash for a large-scale game like this again. It simply isn't made for these sort of projects, and I've uncovered everything from drawing bugs to problems with Flash's event system.

Analysis of FFXI Combat

2010-06-07T13:11:00.009-04:00

Several people have asked me what makes Final Fantasy XI's combat "difficult". Thinking about it for awhile I've uncovered that choices have such an impact in the course of battle that the player has little room for error. This doesn't really tell you too much about the game though, so I am going to describe a few characteristics of FFXI's combat as well as some points of reference. This article will primarily focus on combat from a caster's point of view, but melee and ranged classes are also faced with difficult decisions. Abilities which temporarily boost damage output can kill an overzealous player if he/she pull aggro. There are jobs with positional abilities and combos. LotRO fans will recognize FFXI's Skillchain system as Conjunctions/Fellowship Maneuvers.

FFXI is slow. The whole game is. It is from a generation when MMORPGs were still worlds. Pretend that you are waiting 10 minutes for the boat to arrive in Mhaura while you read this (and then take a 12 min ride to your destination). Cast times, cooldown, and weapon swing delays are all several seconds long. All the spells in the Cure line (the quintessential healing spell) have 2 second cast times and 5 second cooldowns. Weapon delays are measured in frames, and the server runs at 60 frames per second. So a 600 delay Scythe has a 10 second swing time. And it will miss.

There is no natural HP or MP regen in FFXI. Resting regains these resources, but only after 20 seconds do they begin to tic upward. Resting is cumulative, so the longer a player remains resting, the more MP and HP is restored on each successive tic (with 10 seconds between each tic). Kneeling to rest and standing back up have animations which lock the character in place. Each animation is approximately 2 seconds long, and a player cannot move nor preform any action until they are completely standing. It is not possible to pop up instantaneously and toss a PWS on a critically wounded party member. Players must play with several seconds of foresight and judge when to stand and when to rest.

A Team Fortress 2 friend of mine (Hi Polonius) says that he enjoyed healing in FFXI the most out of every MMORPG he has played because of its difficulty in judging when to rest and when to actually cast those Cures.

The game is filled with tiny nuances in play like the resting animations. The player is technically still resting during the standing animation, and it is possible to get a final tic while straightening up--a skill that requires impeccable timing. Even to chain cast spells one after the other, the player must learn cooldowns and casting animations. Using animation hints like these makes the game feel like a Fighter at times. There are many more places of mastery than just animation hinting.

Buffs and debuffs are immensely powerful; so much so that there is one class dedicated to them: Bard. Debuffs on mobs increase the effective HP of the tank and the DPS of the damage dealers. They can make a party extremely efficient, killing for 3 hours without stopping. The Red Mage's repertoire of white and black magic (particularly buffs and debuffs) as well as some Red Mage onry buffs make it perhaps the most powerful solo class in the game (as 75 RDM/Ninja).

Red Mages also get FFXI's only set of pimp gear.

Some may point to WoW's buffs/debuffs. I will agree that WoW's debuffs are very important to the group or raid, but how many players bother to stack Expose Armor, cast Curse of Elements, or even Judgement on trash mobs? Parties burn through them so quickly, it isn't worth it. Even while leveling or farming, unless the player is fighting a mob of +3 levels or an Elite, she would be more efficient to just do damage. Most of the experience parties in FFXI take 1 or 2 minutes to kill a mob. That is plenty of time to reap the benefits of status effects. Debuffing also generates tons of threat even if the spell is resisted. So if a player casts 3 debuffs and then immediately starts a nuking rotation, they should prepare to pull aggro.

Perhaps the consequences for failure in FFXI artificially make the choices seem more important. This may just be another lesson in risk aversion, but the other side of the spectrum seems to be Achievement frenzies, and personally I'd rather have risk-reward cycles. If I die in FFXI, I lose experience--the question is how much. Becoming "incapacitate" removes ~10% of the experience required to level from your current total. E.g. I have 802/10400 EXP. Dying would remove 880 EXP, dropping me to -78, at which point I would delevel and be at 9122/9200 EXP. I can lie on the ground for 60 minutes until I automatically return to my homepoint. If someone casts Raise on me, I will get 50% of the lost EXP returned (440), and be restored my level (leaving me at 362/10400 EXP). Raise 2 will give 75%, and Raise 3 will return 99% (but is a level 70 White Mage spell). As anyone with any insight into death penalties will say, this is simply a loss of time. But it stings. And letting party members die might label you as a lousy player. The reputation hit in a group-focused MMORPG is more severe than a few hundred EXP.

Bunch of us eating dirt.

By now I hope I've illustrated how little room for error there is and the punishment for failure. An unfortunate characteristic of RPG combat is the reliance on gear. I've heard players say that FFXI is 10% gear and 90% skill, but I find that breakdown to be very off. Melee damage dealers without Accuracy gear will miss. No amount of skill will make that Random Number Generator be nice. The same is true for debuffers who will want to stack Mind, Intellect, or Charisma respective of the spells they cast. Most of the time, players can get by with the cheap versions of this important gear, and perhaps that is what the 90/10 comment was referring to, but there is a noticeable difference between someone with cheap gear and someone wearing a few million gil.

One more thing I will mention is that Square-Enix is very secretive about mechanics in FFXI. I call it a Hidden Information policy. Nine years since FFXI came out, the developers have never actually told the players what stats do. Players have experimented and inferred what purpose Strength has, for example, but I doubt we will ever know the full extend of STR's influence (certain weapon skills receive bonuses from different stats).

Even though FFXI's combat is slower paced than most moderns MMORPGs does not mean it is boring or uneventful. On the contrary, players have time to think and make important choices. Because players are not simply reacting to stimuli on the screen as they would in a faster-paced environment, the developers have created little room for error. Fewer actions are executed in FFXI than in WoW, but each one of those actions (or inactions) carry immense weight and could mean the difference between 10k EXP per hour or losing 45 minutes of your time.

And those of you who like WoW Talent theorycrafting, look up a subjob discussion. There are 362 job permutations in FFXI, and players can change gear while in combat.

Here are some videos of experience parties:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNI4aMxUptM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ISnlZmXsW0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP6ou85lQm0

The Dark Side of Global Agenda 1.3

2010-06-06T21:00:00.001-04:00

There are three major issues with 1.3:

Massive offensive ability power creep with no equivalent defensive bonus power creep.
The strategy of building a character has been significantly reduced. Many decision points in the old system were replaced by gear progression.
The gap between new players and well-equipped players is wider than ever with the new patch, even though HiRez supposedly made these changes to close that gap.

Power Creep

All devices are now at the same “rank”, which is basically equivalent to rank 4 of the old system. Each device can have modifiers and modifications put on it to give it the equivalent boost to a full set of epics, but localized to that one device.

This is huge power creep. Everyone now does more damage and does not have to specialize their device point build (because device points no longer exist) and upgrades. You can do everything better without good equipment, but with good equipment you can do everything 21% better on top of that.

You used to have to pick two things to get a 21% bonus in across your whole character, but now you can pick one thing per piece of gear.

Character Building No Longer as Strategic

You used to have to pick one stat for armors and one for weapons if you wanted to get a full 21% boost in those stats(armors and weapon upgrades boosted exclusive sets of stats; you couldn’t have +damage armor, for instance). Now, you can individually boost one stat on each device you have. No longer do you have to make particularly difficult decisions about what you want to boost or switch out your upgrades because you are using a different build. Now it’s simply a matter of getting the perfect item—and it’ll take a damn long time to get the perfect item considering they cannot be purchased and must be randomly dropped.

Time is now more important relative to build decisions than it used to be.

THe device system’s removal also eliminates lots of difficult, interesting decisions and small trade-offs that could make a big difference in competitive play (or even PuG PvP sometimes).

The Gap Between Rich and Poor; Much Higher Time-focus

The old method for obtaining epics was to play the game a bit, get some credits, then buy the epics off the auction house for a total of roughly 1 million credits. That does take a month or two of gameplay, but even then it’s not a big deal because you can buy rare upgrades that give you a 14% cumulative bonus for significantly less. You can also buy the upgrades piecemeal throughout your career and see steady growth in your characters capability.

The new system requires you to find epic loot, which does not have a particularly high drop rate from anything, then make modifications (or buy them for roughly the price of what an epic upgrade used to be) to bring them up to a full complement of bonuses. You can buy an epic that is one modifier short of perfect for 200 mercenary tokens. You can earn twenty such tokens per day as a non-sub. So that means you have to be blessed by the RNG, or wait 10 days per piece of equipment to have something that’s roughly competitive. There are 14 such pieces of equipment.

It will take you at least 3 months in 1.3 to have one character outfitted in epics that aren’t even optimal. And the difference between a character outfitted in epics and a character in greys is much wider due to the specialization of modifiers on individual devices replacing the blanket bonus system. And this calculation assumes that you are being a good puppy and playing every single day and seeing success—it may take you as much as 5 or 6 months to have a single character in sub-optimal epics otherwise!

Perhaps if the drop rates were convenient, this process’ time-consumption would be mitigated, but that’s not the case. Drops are quite random and the place where you used to be able to do fast runs for loot—high-end PvE—is now much more difficult. All equipment isn’t useful for each spec, either. My minigun-wielding mobile assault has gotten an epic headhunter rocket launcher as his only epic drop so far. This is entirely useless to me—and its mods are garbage, on top of that. So you have to basically win the lottery to get a good epic item out of the RNG: you have to get an item you will actually use, and then it has to have feasible mods on it. It takes at least 10 minutes to earn one such random drop. Even with some luck, you’re still going to have trouble getting useful epics in any reasonable span of time.

New players have a hard 3-month path ahead of them before they can compete with the play-everday bunch. It was frustrating in the old system to play against opponents wearing epic upgrades when you were just trying to level an alt who barely had uncommons, now a new player or an alt has to look forward to a few months of being beaten senseless by players who have done nothing but invested more time.

It was arguable before that GA’s equipment system could be overcome without much tribulation by sheer skill—HiRez has made it much more difficult for this claim to hold up.

What do you want to see?

2010-05-30T12:00:00.000-04:00

I've been quite happily not playing a single MMORPG recently. Global Agenda is the only game I play regularly, and there's not much market for commentary on that game--I also don't want to write about it because all I'd do is whine about the idiocy of proposed changes that the devs will compromise on after a 14-page thread (this happened for both item conversion and AvA changes) on the forums.

I also lost a bunch of half-written posts when my harddrive suffered catastrophic corruption issues on Friday morning.

Since I'm not playing games I think are worth comment, I turn to you anyone who still reads this blog. Do you want me to write about anything in particular? Even if it's broad or vague--just a little push towards writing about some topic would be helpful.

Return to Vana'diel

2010-05-20T16:21:00.002-04:00

"Rose-tinted glasses," I told myself and my friends. "The game is so slow and punishing. It takes forever to do anything or get anywhere. Monumental advances have been made to the genre since its release. You will unsubscribe the minute you log on."

And yet, about a week ago, I resubscribed to Final Fantasy XI: Online. There was a very illuminating post over at MMORPG.com: Why people thinking about coming back to this game definitely should.

FFXI is from a generation of MMORPGs where grouping to gain experience was highly advised. The game only had 1 real "solo" job when I played, and that was Beastmaster. But SE has taken a look at the market and implemented a few nice systems to help the solo player.

The first are these really nice experience boosting rings. You equip and use the item to gain a +X% Experience Boost for up to Y XP or Z hours, whichever comes first. There is the annual Adventurer Appreciation event going on right now, and you can acquire an Anniversary ring which gives a whopping 30,000 bonus xp over its lifetime. (Some points of reference: you need 2000 xp from level 7 to 8, and 5700 xp from level 29 to 30.)

When you kill mobs, there is now a chance that they will drop Treasure Chests. Inside, there are temporary items which you can use until you zone or log off. These items are usually Potions or Ethers, status curing consumables, or some HP/MP regeneration food. This significantly reduces down time (there is no natural HP/MP regeneration in FFXI).

Another really great system is called Fields of Valor. In a nutshell they are just kill quests which reward experience and money. There are Field Manuals scattered about the zone, and you may elect to do 1 "training page" per game day (56 minutes). They are typically in the form: kill X of this, and Y of that. One nice part is that you don't need to turn them in. As soon as you kill the last mob, you are instantly rewarded with the experience and gil. Upon completing pages, you also get "tabs", which is a currency used to purchase buffs at the Field Manuals. HP and MP regen is available, as well as a Reraise (self-rez) buff.

It is completely possible to solo to 20 without a problem.

The second problem that the MMORPG.com post addresses is the length of time waiting around for a party. Personally, I have spent upwards of 3 hours looking for a party when I used to play back in 2005. But Square-Enix has implemented a Level Sync system. The party leader may synchronize the level of everyone in the party to the level of another member. As long as you are at least the level of the sync, you are reduced to that level and all your gear automatically scales.

The problem underlying mismatched party levels may not be apparent to you. The experience gained per kill is based on the level of the highest party member. Typically, parties opt to fight "Incredibly Tough" mobs, which are 6+ levels above the party. IT mobs give ~200 xp. If someone were to level and make those mobs "Very Tough" (5 levels above), the experience drops to about 120. That is a 40% reduction in experience.

Level Sync means those problems are no more! Parties can be composed of a level 46 White Mage, a level 58 Ninja, and a bunch of other players in the 20s. Everyone will gain the same amount of XP, and veterans can help out their friends and newbies. I honestly wonder why SE took 7 years to make this system.

Unfortunately, SE did not make it easy to install this game. I originally installed off my CDs, only later to purchase the Ultimate Collection off of Steam ($15 for a couple of expansions I was missing), and I had to do a complete reinstall. PlayOnline is perhaps the worst Launcher in existence. And since this game is also playable on PS2 and XBox360 (all on the same servers), there is no need for a mouse. Movement and targeting is all on the keypad (you can change it to WASD if you want).

If you are interested in trying this out, I can help you through the inevitable installation issues. I am on the Fenrir realm and having a pretty good time leveling one of the new jobs in the latest expansion. FFXI may be the last of its breed--I don't even think FF14 will be as difficult a PvE MMORPG as 11. I'll make a more personal post later, but I'll leave you with this screenshot gallery.

Why Open-world PvP-focused MMORPGs are Dead

2010-05-08T12:42:00.001-04:00

Players will approach the PvP game within an MMORPG as a game of strategy. All the tools are there for it to be a strategic affair: no real aiming is required, twitch skills play little role, the players has hundreds of potential actions he can take, and coordinating actions with other players is important to success. PvP is naturally approached as a strategy game, but this game is in the context of the MMORPG that hosts it. All the baggage of the MMO carries over—time-spent indicates power in an MMO, so the strategic nature of PvP is compromised by a context that slants the playing field strongly in the favor of the more prepared player, where preparation is a factor primarily of time, not skill. What you’d naturally play as a skill-based mode is actually constructed on the shifting foundations of a timesink. This indicates that PvP may be inherently broken in MMORPGs unless players do not play it like a game of strategy, but instead treat it was a comparison of time spent and resources brought to bear.

MMORPGs are games of time, not skill. An MMO can never be good enough as a game to sustain the kind of beating players will give a system that grants them great responsibility and power. The game will be exploited and those exploits will be shared among the playerbase until the game becomes a collection of exploits. The more players involved, the shorter the space in time is between a content or balance patch’s introduction and its dismantling and exploitation. This effect is multiplied by the potential power that can be gained by exploiting. Complex systems make it harder for players and devs to figure out what is actually an exploit instead of just being a clever strategy.

Players are a PvP MMORPGs’ biggest opponents. The devs have to fight the players for every single minute of fair gameplay. The players expect to succeed in a world that is built to see them fail until they’ve spent as much time as the guy they’re fighting against, but the devs need these punished players to stay playing for long enough for their paychecks to be signed. It’s no wonder open-world PvP MMORPGs have trouble sustaining subscriber numbers over 50k—even EVE, the sweetheart of the PvP community, sees not much more than 10% of its 330k players participating in nullsec activities.

On RTSes: Micromanagement

2010-05-02T12:16:00.001-04:00

The player can only view and manipulate one part of the map at a time in an RTS. This means that the more micro you require for a player’s units to behave effectively, the less can happen on the battlefield at once. This tends to reduce mental APM in favor of increasing physical APM. Better interfaces can reduce the physical APM necessary to sustain good micro, but an interface innovation can’t change the fact that it’s only physically possible to focus on one limited area of the battlefield at once.

Micromanagement requirements are a cheap way for RTSes to build more “skill” into their gameplay. If the sufficient amount of micro to make all the units on the field effective cannot be achieved ever, the game will seem to scale with skill gain indefinitely. As the player improves his micro and learns to multitask better, she’ll play better. This can continue for a long time in a game with a significant micro requirement like Men of War.

Micromanagement requirements can be measured in the average opportunity cost of having your view centered over a certain unit at a certain time as you effectively micromanage that unit. If you lose the game because one squad of infantry stands still while being slaughtered by easily avoided machine gun fire, the opportunity cost of microing your tank well at that moment is enormous. The more often this kind of disastrous misallocation of micro can occur, the more micromanagement-intensive the game is.

Micromanagement can be minimized systematically in two ways: changing the scope of the game and implementing AI that does micro-level tasks better than the player. These tend to be implemented in the same game most often, as can be seen in RUSE. In RUSE, tanks will kite infantry automatically, infantry will ambush nearby vehicles, hideable units will hide and unhide as necessary in forests, planes will circle and engage targets on their own, vehicle crews automatically repair their vehicles when out of combat, infantry gets in trucks for long journeys and gets out at the end without player intervention. The scope of the game allows this to make sense—the game plays out on a large scale, that of Supreme Commander. The AI fills in where micro would otherwise be required; it allows the player to focus on strategy instead of the player needing to focus on individual unit tactics because he fears his units will get killed through their own stupidity.

Some games, like Men of War and Company of Heroes, can’t avoid micro because their scope is so small. WIthout micro, these games would lose much of their appeal. An AI strong enough to allow the player to focus on higher-level concerns would tend to intervene in areas where the player would expect to have to take action, leading to an annoying struggle between player and machine over fine-grained orders.

Micromanagement should be minimized as much as is reasonable, though, because coming up with a great strategy should be more important than putting your limited viewing window over the right part of the battlefield at the right time. If a game requires twitch skill in issuing orders rapidly, the purpose of the game—strategic problem solving—can all too easily be subverted.

King of the Internet

2010-04-25T12:42:00.004-04:00

Facebook released some pretty interesting technologies a few days ago at f8. You can read Raph Koster for the doomsday scenario, but I doubt it will get that severe. We are approaching a new version of the Web. Mark Zuckerberg leads the charge, undoubtedly reestablishing himself as the King of the Internet.

You will see Like buttons at the bottom of all the posts here now. Enjoy.

On RTSes: Physical APM vs. Mental APM

2010-04-17T17:07:00.001-04:00

We can see RTS interfaces as a communication mechanism. You communicate to your units your intent. You can relay intent at many different granularities. Fine-grained intent could be queuing up a series of move orders, then precisely telling your unit who to attack and for how long once it finishes moving. Other games, like the Paradox grand strategy game series Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, and Victoria, give a far more abstract view of war, where the player gives broad orders to his units. Usually such orders would be simply to move to another province—if enemies are there, a battle will begin, otherwise the unit stations itself in the new province. The grain of control is usually what we use to differentiate the tactical from the strategic when discussing RTS games.

Much like MMORPGs, RTSes have seen parts of their acronym misused and misunderstood. The “S” does not (at least in practical usage) refer to strategy in the military sense—strategy meaning military planning that sees individual engagements as the atomic unit. Very few RTS games work at above an engagement-level, and so are more fit to be called tactical games, at least by the military definition. The “S” apparently does not refer to the military definition, though: it refers to planning being a inextricable, central component of gameplay. This is the only definition that seems to hold true to the genre today.

But planning cannot itself a game make. Strategy games are engines that compare plans. The plan is communicated to the engine by the player manipulating the game’s interface. So often strategy games have incorrigible interfaces because a depth of communication about specialized concepts is necessary—and the player probably does not go into the game understanding these concepts. Concepts implemented in the game may also not map closely to concepts in real life for various reasons, including weaknesses in simulation and insufficient or excessive granularity of control. Sometimes games represent concepts that do not actually map onto any real-life experience at all; communicating the use of these concepts is doubly difficult.

The quality of an RTS game hinges on the ability of the game to interpret a player’s commands to reproduce her plan in the game’s engine. The game must give the player an appropriate set of commands, and allow the player to use these commands in a sensible way. The player needs to see how the commands can be combined to produce aspects of their plan—the player will need time to learn how to do this even in the best of cases, but some games either do not expose the necessary commands to sufficiently implement appropriate planning, or they so confuse the player in how they expose commands that the player cannot figure out how to use the commands to accomplish even relatively simple tasks.

An RTS's interface should aim to make communication as easy as possible. If a player needs to click multiple times and press several hotkeys to communicate a relatively simple order to his units, that is a flaw in the RTS. The common measurement of user activity in RTSes, Actions per Minute (APM), takes on an odd character now that we have brought to light the critical role of communication in RTS games. A well-designed interface for a specific game’s mechanics would allow the player to communicate his plans to the game with such facility that APM, above a certain level achievable with a modicum of experience with the interface, would be unimportant to how well a player plays. Instead of physical keypresses and mouse-clicks being a barrier to plan execution, the mental act of planning becomes paramount. It follows from this discussion that a great RTS rewards mental APM—the ability to create and adapt plans—more than it rewards rapid clicking and hotkey pressing that characterizes physical APM.

Where Has All the Content Gone?

2010-04-13T16:12:00.005-04:00

What started as a conversation about Aion's level grind and their promotional Double Experience Weekends, quickly turned into a conversation about end game and leveling. I recalled FFXI, my first MMORPG, as evidence of how things used to be before World of Warcraft, and how this generation of MMORPGs tend to be about getting to max level as quickly as possible. This urgency to hit level cap is very off-putting.

This post is going to get extremely anecdotal, but bare with me. I never hit level cap in FFXI (level 75). I had a few jobs in the level 50-55 range after playing for about 3 years. But I did not mind hovering at those middle levels because there was stuff to do. The world wasn't devoid of interesting quests and fights for low- and mid-level players. Gaining experience simply opened more doors. This is in contrast to WoW's model where you don't even get a key to the building until you max out.

The mechanic FFXI employed to make this low level stuff interesting was level caps. This wasn't a "use it or lose it", loss aversion technique, wherein you locked yourself out of content if you leveled beyond the cap. It was an explicit lowering of a player's current job level to at most the cap (you remained at your level if you were under or at the cap).

One piece of capped content was also an excellent way to make money. Mobs in the world had a chance to drop Beast Seals. Collecting these non-tradable items gave you a non-tradable token, called an Orb. Gathering a party, you went to the zone entrance and used the Orb to start an instanced arena fight against special monsters. As soon as your party zoned in, you were immediately reduced to the appropriate level. All your buffs were removed, and any gear above your new level was immediately removed. With a 55 Bard, I would do BCNM 40 fights. I had my gear for level 55, but I also kept a set of level 40 gear for this particular fight.

You got one attempt per orb. If everyone died, tough. If you won, a treasure chest appeared which had tons of goodies in it. These were slowly sold on the Auction House, and all participants were given an even cut. (This amount of trust speaks volumes about the community in FFXI, but that's another topic.) Spending a few hours on a Saturday, running half a dozen BCNM netted you a few hundred thousand gil, certainly not chump change. This would be equivalent to a few hundred gold in WoW. At level 40.

Other BCNM fights were capped at various levels from 20 to 75 (uncapped).

There are Garrison fights capped at level 20. These are open-world fights where waves of monsters attack an Alliance (3 parties of 6 players = 18); the last wave contains a boss which drops loot.

The Mission for Rank 3 (Missions were FFXI's way of communicating the main story to the players and are otherwise indistinguishable from Quests) was capped at level 25. Another Mission fight was capped at 50. One of the expansions had tons of level 30 capped Missions until you got near the end of the arc.

FFXI had a realm event where Giant Treants spawned all over the world. They reduced the players to level 20, 30, or 50 depending on which one you fought.

Crafting training didn't require levels. Exploring, and thus mining, logging, or fishing from, any part of the world required spells like Invisible and Sneak so you did not aggro mobs (these were available as a level 25 White Mage or you could purchase consumables which gave the same status effects).

So even though FFXI's forced grouping leveling system is sometimes called Draconian or grindy, or simply took too long, you were not at a loss for things to do. I managed to get 3 years out of the game without even hitting level cap. Today's MMORPGs don't even start until cap, which is such a shame.

In WoW all signs point to leveling. Players cannot even craft without leveling. The only low- and mid- level stuff to do are instances, which are really just quest locations and group leveling sessions.

What could be done to WoW to make those other levels interesting? An idea which immediately comes to mind thanks to FFXI is low level capped raids. Create a 10- or 25-man raid for level 50s. Loot that drops can be both soulbound and sellable. Cap Deadmines at 20. Cap SM cathedral at 40. Remove the level restrictions to crafting training. Write some epic questlines like Scepter of the Shifting Sands, but cap players at 60. Possibilities are endless.

At the end of the day, players just want interesting things to do in the world. There is no reason to require them to hit level cap for those interesting things to occur. The question players ask of developers should not be "What is there to do at level cap?" but rather, "What is there to do?". Players have forced developers' hands by simply demanding shorter leveling curves. Why would designers spend months trying to balance content for mid-levels if the average time a player spends at any one level is 8 hours? Might as well funnel everyone to max ASAP and make the content there. I personally hope for the return of longer levels and less cap-centric content.

Hiatus-like

2010-04-10T17:32:00.001-04:00

Post volume has dropped here. I’m busy playing games and not having much to say about their design. MMORPGs are boring games for me now, of little interest in any aspect. I’ve been looking for work, which has eaten a surprising amount of time, while also holding an editorship at a smal independent literary journal. My time has been eaten and my interest in kvetching about design has waned.

I’ll probably post once a week or less for a while as my motivation and interest is lax.

Designing a Game: Mage War

2010-04-04T12:15:00.001-04:00

To solidify some of the ideas presented here, I have decided to make public my design process as I design a game. The game is tentatively titled “Mage War”. It is a short, replayable game of strategy.

Here’s a sketch of the skeleton.

In one sentence: In Mage War, two ancient wielders of arcane power warp the very world on which they battle in order to tap greater amounts of magical power and eventually trap their opponent and forever strip from him his magical capacities.

Key mechanics:

The game is turn-based.
The game plays out on two tile-based maps simultaneously—these maps effect one another throughout the course of play.

The terrain map is your standard map of hex tiles that represents mountains, forests, plains, etc.
The mana map represents what mana can be pulled from each tile. Mana veins run along some tile boundaries, from these mana veins mana is replenished to nearby tiles more rapidly. The kinds of mana present in a tile depend on its terrain map contents.

Mana veins have an intensity, and only mages that can harness a certain amount of mana can cross veins of high intensities.
Mana is an exhaustible resource and can be entirely stripped from a tile if there is no nearby mana vein.
In order to cast spells, the mage must move in the mana map and collect the appropriate amount of mana, though each turn the mage must start his mana map movement from the tile that corresponds to his location on the terrain map.
Mana veins can be manipulated later in the game through the use of meta-mana that accrues to each combatant on the same regular schedule.

Magic is used primarily to alter terrain on either map in an attempt to trap your opponent or starve him of mana.
There are two ways to trap your opponent, once your opponent is trapped and you’re within casting range of him, you can strip him of his magical powers and win the game.

Raise armies of immortal warriors from the villages that dot the map and position them such that the enemy mage cannot move next turn.
Manipulate the terrain of either map in such a way that the enemy mage cannot move.

Mages themselves cannot be harmed by magic. Casting a fireball on an enemy mage’s square only burns the terrain, it does not do damage to him.

I will be more specific about individual mechanics in future posts (as I design the game further).

RUSE

2010-03-31T14:59:00.001-04:00

I’ve been playing the RUSE open beta. The game has impressed me so far with its outstanding balance and macromanagement, strategic focus. For once, an RTS is actually a strategy game, not a tactical micro-fest!

RUSE is not a game where you can spam any one unit against a competent player and win. The game has an amount of genuine strategic depth seldom found in RTSes. Most RTS games are designed in such a way that unit micro becomes the primary occupation of the gamer as he plays. Games between even high quality players come down to one out-microing the other. RUSE minimizes micro through reasonable unit AI, and a wider scope than most RTSes. It also puts an unusually strong emphasis on intelligence gathering and deception.

Buildings and Economy

Every side has the same set of production buildings. Their costs differ between sides, though, by as much as $20.

Barracks – Produces infantry and occasionally armored recon. Italy gets a light tankette from its barracks.
Armor Factory – Produces armor and occasionally armored recon.
Artillery and Anti-Aircraft Factory – Produces towed, self-propelled, and/or armored artillery, assault guns, as well as towed, mobile, and/or armored anti-aircraft guns. Some sides, like Germany, get Anti-Aircraft weaponry that can also be turned on tanks.
Anti-tank Factory – Produces towed Anti-tank guns and Tank Destroyers.
Airfield – Produces fighters, bombers, fighter-bombers, and recon aircraft. Can only house 8 planes at a time.
Prototype Factory – Produces special country-specific units like jumbo tanks, flame tanks, hybrid weapons, and all-around late-game units.

Every side also has the same logistics buildings.

Headquarters – You start the match with an HQ pre-placed and yuo cannot build another one. The HQ is the source for engineer trucks (the only source until (if) you build a secondary HQ). Supply trucks need to go from your supply depots to your HQ (or secondary) in order for you to receive money. If you lose your HQ and have no secondary, you cannot use ruses and all your units become visible.
Secondary Headquarters – Engineer trucks can originate from this building if the site of the building they’ll build is closer to the secondary than the primary HQ. Supply trucks can drop money off here if it’s closer to the supply depot than the primary HQ is. If you lose your HQ, you don’t lose access to all the goodies mentioned above if you have a secondary HQ up.
Supply Depot – build a supply depot on a supply dump and supply trucks travel from the dump to your nearest HQ, providing you with your main source of money in most games. There is only so much money available in each supply depot—they run out and cannot be replenished.
Administrative Building – Expensive and fragile building that provides monetary income at a slightly slower rate than supply depots. These are not often seen in shorter matches, but in game modes with more than 3 players a distinct transition in gameplay happens where supply depots run out and player must transition their economies to admin buildings or be cash-starved.

There are also a number of AA, AT, anti-infantry, and multi-purpose bunkers available in different combinations for different sides.

Unit Mechanics

RUSE has a relatively complicated rock-paper-scissors unit balance. I can’t render the counter system here in a particularly readable way, so I’ll simply tell you that for every strategy I’ve used or seen, I can easily think of a counter. No one unit seems too powerful in every situation. Units have clear weaknesses and strengths and combined arms rule the day.

The game breaks down to putting the right units in the right place at the right time—more so than most RTSes. In 1v1 games you don’t have enough time to counter everything (you will surely lose to any competent player if you try). You have to assemble groups of units with certain composition depending on what the enemy has shown you and what you know—map size punishes unit composition errors and intelligence laxity by preventing players from moving units to hotspots rapidly. Preparation and foresight are the bywords in RUSE.

The most notable unit for its interesting mechanics is infantry. Infantry are the cheapest unit in the game at $5 a piece. Infantry are generally weak in combat, but they can hide in woods and cities and launch devastating surprise attacks on enemy units that pass by without recon. Infantry can also capture buildings, including supply depots, with surprising swiftness.

Maps

Maps in ruse consist of several terrain types and features:

Roads along which units move faster. Production buildings can only be built abutting roads. Supply trucks only travel on roads. Engineer trucks generally stay on roads. Roads act as the main arteries of the battlefield—along them most units travel and controlling them has a significant impact on the match.
Rivers provide for choke points by blocking land unit movement. Occasional bridges along rivers comprise the choke points in ruse.
Forests block line of sight, and provide certain units the ability to hide from all but recon units and surprise attack nearby enemy units. Many units cannot move through forests, like artillery, heavy AA guns, tanks, and tank destroyers.
Mountains are impassable and block line of sight. You don’t see many of them in RUSE.
Towns are groups of buildings along roads where infantry and other light units can hide. It’s difficult to see into towns—they’re a great place to ambush tanks.
The terrain aside from what I’ve just mentioned usually takes the form of fields and farmhouses. This standard terrain is the basic and most frequently seen kind of terrain. It doesn’t grant any bonuses or penalties.

Ruses and Intel

The defining feature of RUSE is the ruse system. RUSEs allow you to manipulate the intel (and occasionally alter the abilities of units) your opponent receives. In RUSE, you have three levels of intelligence about enemy units.

No information whatsoever. THe unit is effectively hidden. This occurs when units are hidden by the use of the radio silence ruse or when certain units are in woods. If your recon is nearby, hidden enemy units within its line-of-sight will be revealed to you.
Unidentified. Units that are not hidden but are not within the line-of-sight of a unit are shown as “counters”. There are counters for aircraft, heavy, and light units. The counter you see for an enemy ground unit may be altered by the inverted intel RUSE. You also cannot tell if an unidentified unit is a decoy.
Identified. The exact unit count and names of units are known because you have a spy ruse active in the sector or the units are in line-of-sight of your non-recon units or air recon.
Fully Identified. If ground recon units have line-of-sight on an enemy ground unit, they can tell if it’s a decoy. Air recon cannot.

Here are the ruses currently in RUSE:

Blitz – One of the few ruses that doesn’t have to do with intel. Blitz doubles the speed of your units in a sector.
Terror – Enemy units in the sector will retreat after sustaining less damage than usual.
Fanaticism – Friendly units in the sector will sustain more damage before retreating.
Spy – Reveal the identities of all enemy units in the sector who are not under radio silence.
Decryption – Reveal the orders given to all enemy units in a sector who are not under radio silence.
Radio Silence – Hides all of your units in a sector. They are only visible when in a unit’s line of sight.
Camouflage Nets – Hides all of your engineer trucks and buildings in a sector. They are only visible when in a unit’s line of sight.
Inverted Intelligence – Units in a sector who are unidentified appear as if they were of a different type than they actually are.
Decoy Building – Place a decoy building (corresponding to a unit producing building) in a sector.
Decoy Assault – Attack a sector with decoy tanks, planes, or infantry. You can only decoy assault with a kind of units that your production buildings or decoy production buildings can produce. The only way to tell a unit is a decoy is by shooting at it. Decoy units die in one hit and show a “decoy” message when they die.

Innovation for Innovation’s Sake

2010-03-26T21:39:00.001-04:00

I am not convinced that blind innovation is categorically bad—if it’s a meaningful concept at all. Starting from scratch and trying to make a game that is unique is a great way for game designers to get out of their comfort zone and produce something that aggressively explores and opens up the space of possible game rule combinations.

The Naive View

Let’s assume that innovation and fun can be objectively defined and universally acknowledged. In this case, I see innovation through the improvement of existing systems as moving a particular genre of game forward towards “perfection.” A perfect game is one where the mechanics, if changed incrementally, cannot be made more fun. If you don’t fundamentally alter the rules of a perfect game, you cannot make it more fun. It has reached the end of its evolutionary development. Innovation for innovation’s sake is not moving forward, it is moving laterally. Different paths towards the perfect game are found by discarding what mechanics have come before and coming up with something entirely new. Discarding mechanics can happen at any level: you can discard really basic mechanics like the character being in one world; you can discard mechanics like character death upon reaching 0 HP; you can discard relatively superficial mechanics like instanced raids. Through discarding the old in favor of building the new from scratch, new passageways to perfect games can be opened and these new perfect games have the potential to be more fun than past perfect games.

Those who rail against innovation for innovation’s sake want perfect games before they want lateral exploration of designs to occur. In this case, though, you can have your cake and eat it too: there are enough people making games that there’s no reason to discourage some of them from innovating blindly because you’ll still reach perfection at just about the same speed with or without a few rogue developers who try to reimagine the fundamentals.

By telling people that they should not innovate for innovation’s sake, you endorse the original blind innovations that were built up into our current genres of games. This suggests that current genres of games are the only genres that should exist—certainly that isn’t the case and it’s not beneficial for us as gamers to not want new genres of potentially great games to be invented and also perfected.

The original guy who made games for a spectrometer was innovating for innovation’s sake. He was creating where, in the past, nothing had existed. If you think that people should not innovate for innovation’s sake in games, computer and console gaming would never have existed!

The Nuances of Innovation

The assumptions I made in the first sentence of the naive view are not valid. According to the current understanding the game design community has of fun, we cannot objectively say that something is fun; the nature of innovation is also clearly not objective.

To analyze innovation for innovation’s sake, we must be able to decide if something is innovative. Innovation, though it generally has a positive connotation, basically means change into something relatively new. So if something was changed in a novel way from one game to the next or within one game, we should be able to claim that innovation took place.

Though this is the most intuitive analysis, it does not take into account the intent of the designer or the past experiences of the player.

We don’t perceive change unless we see or hear about the change happening. We must have knowledge of an initial state and a different end state. If you haven’t played games before World of Warcraft and you casually play the game without digging into the universe of MMOs, you would not think that WoW is a change necessarily because you have no other game to compare it against. If you started your gaming life playing shooters and then switched to WoW, you may find it to be innovation for innovation’s sake. Blizzard made a system that converts player time into character power; that’s a baseless change from the paradigm in FPSes of the player’s skill determining his character’s power. A player well-versed in RPGs and MMOs before WoW can see WoW as an innovator and improver. The clear trail of MUDs and past MMOs show WoW to be a slight change that is primarily polishing certain aspects of the genre for good reason, not simply making up new mechanics from scratch.

In order for innovation to be pursued for its own sake, the designer has to actually choose to discard what has come before in favor of rethinking what might be. If the designer doesn’t do that, their innovation is not independent of what has come before. Such innovation must be some attempt at improving a past system and therefore it is not innovation for innovation’s sake alone.

The innovation discussion is a red herring.

What one player finds innovative another might find boring and overdone. A player or designer can never pull back and truly see what is actually new and what is not. A designer cannot willingly eliminate his past experiences from contention as he designs are mechanic. Even if they could, there would be no way for outsiders to tell that this was happening. Is the designer stealing from Obscure Designer B who did it five years earlier, or did she come up with the same solution to a problem independently?

Because “objective” innovation doesn’t translate into fun, perhaps we should not discuss it seriously. The novel is often preferable to what we’ve already seen, but that makes no statement about quality. What is new could be shallow, whereas what is old could be deep.

The question we should ask ourselves is: how does this mechanic contribute to accomplishing the game’s apparent goals, and do these design goals lead to a fun game? If such a mechanic is, in fact, old or new is orthogonal to fun—innovation in games is necessarily subjective in discussions of game design, so it tends to be a red herring. Do we really care about what is innovative? We only care because looking back on how well old mechanics worked seems to be one of our only “objective” ways to see how fun a mechanic is—it’s a poor tool, but it’s the only tool we seem to have that isn’t muddled by our own taste. Until more psychological research comes out about the effects of game mechanics on gamers in the context of different games, we will continue to suffer the tyranny of innovation discussions and “copycat” name-calling. We don’t have the tools yet that we’d need to safely pinpoint the dismal utility of the innovation debate—perhaps the debate will only end when we can make games in a concerted, researched, scientific manner, instead of grabbing at apparitions we saw or heard about from previous games and designers and attempting to glue them to our own delusional and misguided conceptions of fun.

Incentive Addiction

2010-03-24T22:37:00.001-04:00

Extrinsic and intrinsic rewards are at odds. When we find no intrinsic reward, we do boring things for extrinsic rewards. When we enjoy something, extrinsic rewards supplant intrinsic rewards when they’re added to the system—take the extrinsic reward away and the intrinsic goes with it.

This has been shown true by thousands of studies, according to Chris Hecker who talked about it in a GDC presentation (here is the summary I read). It backs up much of the writing I’ve done here on MMORPGs, especially in the themepark subgenre.

Some games don’t benefit from adding reward treadmills—these games have enjoyable gameplay to begin with. Adding substantial extrinsic rewards would only turn the enjoyable game into a grind. This has happened to me to a small degree with Global Agenda. The way GA is continuing, it will only get worse. I hate watching the addition unnecessary and excessive extrinsic rewards ruin a potentially great game. Unfortunately, it seems to be the current fad in game design.

(You might also want to check out this Overcoming Bias article on incentives.)

Global Agenda 1.3: Lopsided Timesinks

2010-03-22T15:50:00.001-04:00

Global Agenda’s much anticipated 1.3 patch will release within the next couple of weeks. This patch continues the general trend towards timesink gameplay, while potentially damaging the balance of a game which is well-balanced already.

Below I will give impressions on some of the changes as posted in this thread by HiRezErez. (I’ve improved the formatting to make it somewhat more readable. I have not altered the text, though.)

Character levels and specializations:

Leveling from 30-50 will now have a lot more meaning.

At level 30+ players will be able to choose a specialization path for the character. Each class has two specializations (that match the current Skill Trees)

You can only choose one specialization which allows you additional skill points in the specialization tree and allows you to use new weapons/devices that are being introduced.

If you want to specialize in both areas and change between them frequently you will need to create and level up another character for that class.

Very negative reaction from the community forced HiRez into reconsidering the sudden inflexibility here that would cause players to have to level up two characters of the same class to have the same flexibility they have in one character now.

Vertical advancement, a problem in this game that is passable at the moment due to its limited nature, will be emphasized and elongated in the patch. I’ve been frustrated with power differences between level 10 and 30 characters up to this point as I’ve leveled alts through PvP—now it’s going to get almost doubly annoying.

New weapons/Devices:

For each class specialization new weapons and devices are being introduced. We are trying for at least one weapon/device per slot type per class
Some examples: The Laser Sniper Rifle, The Barrage Grenade Launcher, The Claw,The Perfect Rifle, The Beacon Tracker, The Impact Hammer, The Multi-Heal Gun, The Oathbreaker Boost. There are over 50 that we are currently evaluating for introduction.

These weapons/devices will be earned in a special way using Conquest Tokens

These weapons have a minimum player level requirement ranging from 30-50

Conquest and Mercenary Tokens:

Conquest Tokens are earned by playing/winning different parts of the game with a maximum tokens that can be earned each day. (Subscribers will get them faster since they will be able to participate in more parts of the game, but everyone can earn enough over time to get the various rewards)

Mercenary Tokens are earned by playing/winning various matches with a maximum tokens that can be earned each day. (All players earn these at the same rate)

Rewards, Loot and Crafting:

We plan on having full Armor drops as loot in PvE missions which are character bound when you get them (both Co-Op and Open Zones)

We also plan on allowing Armor crafters create upgrade kits to these Armor drops to improve their stats.

Weapon upgrades will be replaced with Upgrade Kits that allow players to improve the stat on the actual weapons (instead of overall stats)

Weapons will also drop as loot in PvE with improved stats over current weapons (which can be then upgraded with Weapon Upgrade kits from crafters)

Weapons and Armor can also be purchased with Conquest Tokens and Mercenary Tokens.

Timesinks! Now you have to grind to attain weapons and other equipment to be competitive in PvP, further increasing power differentials in a game already made a bit more annoying by existing vertical advancement.

Balance will also be tossed aside in favor of adding some new weapons and devices which almost definitely will ruin existing class balance. Before this patch, many devices are absolutely useless. After the patch, I’m sure many more will be. Instead of adding more potentially game-breaking devices, HiRez should focus on making more existing equipment viable. HiRez sees that their coffee table is unsteady, but instead of evening the legs, they instead have Aunt Bertha sit on it.

Store openings:

More stores will be open.

The Jetpack store will have two new jetpacks available that are purchased using Conquest Tokens

A new hightech UI is being introduced although not all screens may be changed to it in time for the 1.3 release

Opening all the stores that were in the game at release but closed? Sounds good to me. The conquest token bit is going to encourage grinding, though, which is counter to the skill-based philosophy of this game’s core design as a third-person tactical shooter.

It’s great that they’re fixing up the UI. It is quite buggy if not downright bad now. I bet, though, that the interface will be half-converted after this patch and will not be polished and finished for a while yet.

Open Zone (Warzones)

We are currently testing these zone which are large open spaces that players will join to do various missions. For the 1.3 release we plan on having open PvE zone with several different mission types as well as a PvPvE zone with several mission types and a zone win condition.

We are currently rewriting some of the Unreal 3 server to allow more players to interact in the zone. We don't know what the final number will look like yet but we hope for a minimum of 30 players in a PvE zone and 50 in a PvP zone.

Oh! Now maybe this game can justify labeling itself as an MMORPG/FPS—though it’s still neither an RPG nor an FPS, and it’s barely an MMO.

These new open world areas will further fracture the population, exacerbating the existing PvP and 4v4 queuing problems (not enough people in the queues for the games to be much fun).

What Should They Have Done?

10 new PvP maps: two for each game mode.
A new, innovative PvP mode that doesn’t involve standing on a point.
Three new kinds of PvE missions that auto-adjust the difficulty level of enemies depending on the team’s character and skill levels. Each of these missions should have a couple of maps.
A huge bug-fixing pass on the existing interface. All mouse-overs are unified in a new, clearer style of writing that makes it clear what everything does.
5 new AvA maps.
Bugfixing and enhancement of existing AvA platforms, vehicles, and gameplay in general.

This would expand the game significantly for existing players without introducing new timesinks or balance issues. 1.4 would then be spent on rebalancing a large chunk of the non-viable devices and weapons currently littering the game.

Instead of making Global Agenda a strictly better game, HiRez has specialized the game more in the MMORPG direction. At this point, HiRez needs to draw players back and attract new players. They can’t readily afford to further fracture their playerbase and dither on what kind of game they’re making. Unfortunately, they have chosen to try to make the game more like a themepark MMORPG—something which is incompatible with the micro-level gameplay.

I don’t know how this will turn out for the game in the long run. The game may lose a lot of the skill-interested players and gain some MMORPG players who are then turned off by the game’s skill-focus at the micro-level and later quit. On the other hand, the new features may draw enough players back to the game and hook them again. As the game is now, with roughly 1k players online at peak hours, I doubt it can survive by further breaking apart the population into even more queues and introducing increasingly demanding timesinks.

Global Agenda is a game caught between two design philosophies. So far it seems that they either don’t realize this, or they’re simply trying to cash-in on “easy” MMO money through the impossible path of trying to make everyone happy.

Macro- and Micromanagement in MMORPGs

2010-03-19T12:41:00.001-04:00

MMORPG characters require attention to micro—you have to tell your character what to attack and with what abilities all the time, even if the task is trivial. This constant interaction keeps people in touch with their characters at a basic level. If these trivial small actions were streamlined away or automated, the player loses his sense of identity with his character. The player feels like she is the character because of all these small routine actions—if the player didn’t have to do these actions, that direct attachment to the character disappears; the player will feel like a detached watcher or manager of their characters instead. This could potentially be devastating to a game that focuses on the player identifying with her character over a long span of time, as themepark MMOs do through their one-character focus and permalife mechanics.

Many players find the macromanagement in MMOs to be appealing: setting up a guild and coordinating reward gathering procedures. They do mundane tasks in service to higher goals—the ends here justify the means to these players. Grinding isn’t a problem in this context. The grind glues the fun macro-elements of the game together.

MMORPGs fail when the macro doesn’t sufficiently glue together the micro. On the other side of the spectrum, shooters focus solely on micro and often have no macro-level functionality. One match is a self-contained unit of play in most shooters. Only recently have we seen MMORPG mechanics like vertical advancement and unlockables build meaningful macromanagement into the shooter space.

Themepark MMORPGs that can’t have interesting combat (and most of them can’t) should focus on making the macro fun. Give players plenty of social options, a great guild interface, customizable characters both in look and capability. The micro-level can safely be dedicated to keeping player-character attachment strong, while the macro-level houses the broader “fun”—social interaction and higher-level activities give meaning to the themepark MMORPG.

One example of this macro/micro split is permadeath in themepark MMORPGs. Permadeath is implicitly built into themeparks at the macro-level. Guilds and groups organically form and disband. Social organizations and practical gaming organizations live and die—and we can easily tell that it’s happening.

In the sense that a character is an notional society of cells (though it’s not modeled, that’s how we understand organic beings), MMORPG micro and macro are self-similar and seem to be fractal in nature. Though the game doesn’t model the ongoing fight against entropy in the living organisms of the world, natural processes of organization and disintegration act on in-game societies to produce the macro-level effect without the micro-level effect being necessary. Players bring this to the game through merely playing it.

Themepark MMORPG design can improve by designers being conscious of of the micro/macro distinction and how important it is to the life of the game.

Playing a Healing Medic in Global Agenda PvP

2010-03-16T13:16:00.001-04:00

I’ve played over 60 hours on my medic in Global Agenda now, almost exclusively PvPing. Here are some tips and tricks for being an effective medic in PvP.

As a healing medic, you should prioritize targets to heal in two ways: heal good players before bad players. Heal other healing medics first, then assaults, robotics, and recons in that order. Don’t heal a bad assault instead of a good recon, though—keep your eyes open for good players and help them turn the tide by keeping them alive as long as possible.

Remember that healing has a multiplicative effect on team ability. The better you heal a good player, the better he’ll play: he can be in battle for a much higher percentage of the match because he doesn’t have to withdraw when low on health or wait to respawn. A better player will be more useful each second he’s alive than a bad player.

Pre-Game

When you first get into a PvP match, run a /who on each assault and check their star rating. You should stick to the ones that are higher-rated, because they’ve proven that they improve their team’s chances of winning the most. Most of the time, a high-rated player will contribute more—you can push your team over the top by keeping him alive where otherwise he’d be dead.
Just because you’re a healer doesn’t mean you can’t bring along poison wave or poison aura! A great healer adapts to the situation. If they don’t have many medics, well placed poisons can turn the tide of the battle. Change your offhands during the match, if necessary, to maximize your effectiveness. On Scramble and Payload missions, one poison off-hand can make a huge impact because players will tend to cluster around the objective.

Heal Well

Use obstacles to block opponents from firing at you as you heal teammates. The less damage you take, the better job you’re doing healing your target. A dead medic can heal no-one. Use terrain to your advantage to avoid enemy fire. Sit lower on a hill than your assault buddy so you aren’t exposed. Heal them from behind a wall. Find a crate that you can crouch behind and heal friendlies without being hit by fire from the other side.
Use your offhands to pile on burst healing when a friendly (or multiple) takes severe and sudden damage. Last night I was running PvP with a full group of high-skill players—I was using a three-wave offhand build, with frenzy wave, healing wave, and power wave at my disposal. I could pile on 1300 burst healing in a matter of seconds, along with my right-click heal doing 242ish per tick. I’ve saved many teammates by launching all my waves in the middle of a big fight—power wave and frenzy wave can, when coupled, especially lead to a fight shifting into my team’s favor.
Don’t waste your time healing players who are full on health unless you’re trying to regain health using the biofeedback beam. Keep as many people alive as possible.
The right-click heal on biofeedback and boost beams does double healing, but it’s much more expensive in power. Use the right-click heal often, but don’t overheal with it. Pay attention to your target’s health and stop healing with right-click as soon as he’s topped off.
If you begin taking sustained damage, use your jetpack to hop around erratically until your enemy switches targets. Go back to healing your friends once the heat is off.
Never let a bomb recon’s bombs hit you. Taking their damage can easily kill you. EMP bombs can disable you and lead to your team being pushed off an objective. Dodge bombs and grenades as much as possible—your teammates sometimes cannot do so because they’re busy capturing an objective or finishing off an enemy, but it’s your duty to keep them alive after the bombs go off. You probably won’t stay alive for long if you eat bomb damage.

Fight Back

Is a recon harassing you, but getting away using his stealth whenever teammates apply pressure? DoT him. Hit him with your agonizer, a poison or powervirus grenade, or a poison wave. While the DoT is in effect, he cannot effectively cloak.
Use your melee weapon. If you need to deal damage, your melee weapon is your best bet. Not only does swinging away with your poison injector do more damage than most ranged weapons, you also recharge power while you’re doing it. For this reason you may want to prefer melee to ranged combat if you need to fight.
Take out undefended turrets. Do whatever you need to do to help your team. Is a turret harassing your teammates while another healer is nearby? Get behind the turret and kill it. Preventing damage is as good as healing it.

Short, Replayable Games

2010-03-14T22:37:00.001-04:00

Think of chess. A game of chess is relatively short. A casual game lasts no more than an hour, usually. Serious games can take longer—three-hour-game tournaments are common. Notice that when you play a game of chess, you’ve processed a few dozen board positions and seen some tactics you haven’t before encountered. You can’t hope to get the entire experience of playing chess from playing one game. Chess isn’t “over” when you’re done playing one game.

Too many videogames are considered “over” and exhausted once you’ve finished your first play-through. Experience-oriented games tend to reach a point where they are clearly “over” and “beaten”. Themepark MMORPGs are unique among experience-oriented games because they do not have a decided end-point, but instead have an open end onto which developers tack more and more content until the game no longer is worth the investment.

Experience-oriented games work better with longer play sessions, because they rely on the player holding information about characters and stories in their heads throughout the playthrough in order for the game to have its full effect. Experience-oriented games are designed almost as interactive movies. Their stories are almost always static—created by game designers and writers and consumed as they are intended to be consumed, in whole and unaltered. Designers paste gameplay into gaps between story exposition. The gameplay does nothing to alter the story, though different pieces of the story may be shown at different times because of gameplay.

I prefer short, replayable games because they tend to be designed in a way that avoids several aspects of many games that I dislike.

I don’t want to play games that demand so much of my time just to experience a story which will doubtless be less interesting than the stories in the great works of fiction that I could easily sit down and read instead of playing the game.
I don’t want to play games where playing the game is a small part of the experience. I play games to play games. If a community grows around the game and they help to give it meaning, I enjoy that aspect—but if the game isn’t good as a game, and if, when I play the game as a game, I can’t have fun, I won’t play the game.
I don’t want to play games that rely heavily on rewarding the player at every turn for the mere investment of time. Games that do this are not good games, they are reward engines that push people to perform actions they’d otherwise find boring. Games should not need to rely on extrinsic rewards to keep their players playing—this reliance is a design flaw. (It may make the game more money, though. I’m not concerned with how much money a game makes; I only care if I have fun playing it.)

I love the rapid replayability of a game like chess. I enjoy building my knowledge and skill over multiple plays of a skill-based game. I want more games like this. Especially games that don’t require great reflexes or great eyesight. Strategy games get to the heart of gaming as an intellectual pursuit—turn-based games cut out the physical skill element. I wish more people would make turn-based strategy games meant to be competitively played. I will try to make them myself in the meantime.

Battlefield: Bad Design 2

2010-03-11T21:08:00.005-05:00

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has really nice graphics, but its design has some glaring issues. With all of the cheerleading done by reviewers (not that they cover game design much in their reviews, anyway), I think some criticism is in order. Here are a few aspects of BFBC2 that have annoyed me repeatedly in my first 10 hours of playing the game, mostly in multiplayer.

They hate newbies and want them to fail.

BFBC2 has vertical advancement in its multiplayer. Lots of it. You advance as a player through god-knows-how-many levels and unlock equipment. You also advance in each class—assault, engineer, recon, medic. Your class-specific advancement takes the form of unlockables you earn by doing positive stuff (killing enemies, getting assists, capturing points, etc.) while playing as that class.

These unlockables add significant utility to your character. You cannot use your class-specific utility ability until you’ve unlocked it, which may take many matches. This is hideously awful design. Not only is a newb hampered by a lack of knowledge of the basic game mechanics, he also cannot be useful at a base level as his class would indicate. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare mitigated this issue by giving all characters, regardless of level, a full compliment of weapons and perks—increasing level unlocked a wider variety of weapons to choose from, it didn’t outright add new abilities on top of existing abilities that made your character significantly more powerful than someone of lower level.

It’s noticeably easier to get XP once you’ve unlocked your class abilities, as well—this means that the newbie is put through a slog of slow XP gimpiness and he has no way to avoid it. This is terrible design both as a vertical advancement system and as a mechanic in an FPS that should be entirely skill-based.

Grenade Hell

Taking one grenade’s damage will kill you. Modern Warfare took note of this peculiarity and added a “grenade danger indicator” graphic that lets you know where a nearby grenade has landed. BFBC2 gives you no indication that a grenade has landed nearby—the only way you can tell would be to actually see the grenade thrown. When you’re busy aiming an innacurate gun at your opponent and praying you’ll hit them, it’s difficult to see every little flying detail around you and differentiate between a grenade and, say, a piece of completely superfluous garbage fluttering in the wind.

In Global Agenda, grenades can’t kill you in one hit. There’s no grenade indicator graphic, but there is an audible “CLICK” sound when the grenade hits the ground. Grenades are also huge glowing balls of death, easily visible. Global Agenda’s third-person perspective allows a wide-enough field of view that you can usually see where grenades are coming from and react reasonably. Grenades are balanced in this fashion.

Grenades in BFBC2 are instant and near unavoidable death because there are no audio or visual cues unless you’re staring right at the person throwing the grenade. This is not balanced and it is not fun.

Big Maps Mean Marathons

My pinky hurts from holding down the shift key half the time so that I can get between parts of the map at a reasonable pace in the standard case of not being near any vehicles. The Conquest multiplayer mode will wear out your shift key in this fashion.

Big maps are great for vehicles—piloting a tank doesn’t make much sense in a small map. But the maps in BFBC2 are annoying large if you don’t have a vehicle. You usually won’t have a vehicle. The maps are large, but you still will regularly find that it makes no sense to drive a tank through much more than three or four clearly delineated pathways through the map. This makes vehicular combat usually pretty boring and predictable, because mobility is limited to a large enough extent for strategic maneuvering to be minimal.

Big maps cause gun balancing issues. Suddenly, the range of a weapon is critical information for the player to have, because he will regularly encounter situations where he can see enemies who are beyond his weapon’s effective range. Outranging your opponent can win you a battle in such an environment. Most weapons, unfortunately, aren’t particularly accurate at any but short-to-medium range—unfortunately there’s no indication of weapons’ effective ranges. Obviously snipers will dominate in such an environment.

Ever try drawing battle lines among 32 players who can spawn just about anywhere on a big map? So seldom is it clear who is attacking from where that the little pinhole first-person perspective through which I see the game is even more inadequate than usual to the task of giving me reasonable sensory data on my surroundings.

Other Assorted Annoyances

You need a shocking amount of XP earned before you gain access to the red dot sight. As I said in my post about CoD4, using iron sights is almost strictly inferior to using red dot sights. This is yet another example of how vertical advancement in an FPS can be surprisingly frustrating.
There’s no clear indication of the effective range of different weapons in BFBC2. This game has huge maps—you need to have a good feel for how far the gun will fire if you’re to gauge combat situations appropriately.
No clear sound when you hit an opponent. When firing a relatively inaccurate weapon at range, the little symbol that appears to indicate you’ve hit an opponent does not provide enough feedback for you to gauge the amount of damage you’ve dealt.
BFBC2 punishes you for being near an explosion by distorting your sound for several seconds. The game’s sound is already suspect—occasionally an appropriate echo or some such dazzle will be cool, but the sound isn’t as useful to me as the sound was in CoD4—punishing players who are already besieged by explosive-wielding enemies by stripping them of one perceptual input is unnecessary. If I don’t have my headphones on while playing, tanks can sneak up behind me without me noticing the audio cue.
There is so much bloom, random particles in the air, and camouflage that I find it very hard to see enemy combatants at range unless they’re moving. My eyes aren’t particularly good, but I notice that in this game, particularly, I have lots of trouble seeing enemy combatants.
Every vehicle and combatant icon on the radar (which could be quite nice otherwise) has a bloom effect on it that makes reading the radar completely impossible if there are more than a few players or vehicles in the same place. This is terrible primarily because you rely on the radar to choose where you want to deploy, and deploying in the right place consistently is a huge contributor towards capping points in conquest and winning games.
You can be a part of a squad of up to four players. Anyone can spawn on top of a squadmate anywhere they are on the map as long as they're alive. This means that where one enemy is, 3 more can instantly appear. This renders strategic movement moot to some extent, because a dead enemy will just be magically respawned with full health and ammo where his one remaining squadmate is camping right near where you just whooped his ass a minute ago.

Overall Impression So Far

I would give BFBC2 a mediocre review. It does nothing particularly well, but could be reliably enjoyable if I could see well enough to be effective in combat. 2.5/5.

Innovation and the Gaming Habit

2010-03-09T22:25:00.001-05:00

People don’t buy games because solely because they are innovative, they buy games because they think the games will be fun to play. People do not try to reference some objective and authoritative “fun” when they decide if they will buy a game. They see the game in relation to their interests and what they’ve played in the past—based on this, they’ll decide if they want to try the game out. Perhaps they’ll have read a review before hand, but, most likely, players are buying games almost blindly. People who enjoy games will do more research before they purchase, but there still is thought of objective “fun.”

Fun is relative and subjective. So is novelty. We call novel game ideas “innovative”. We do this on a wide scale, taking into account all the games we can remember playing and some we’ve only read about or watched others play. There is no objective novelty to which we refer when we tag some mechanic or game as “innovative.” Our perception depends solely on our past experience. I may perceive a game as innovative, but you would be right to note that, for instance, three obscure games made by a Finnish game developer in 2001 already did that before, therefore the game isn’t innovative. All that matters, though, is that I find the game new, fun, and fresh. Discussions about true objective innovation are academic affairs.

Or maybe I’m looking for a game that will be more of the same in a genre I love, in which case I want to be comfortable and not jarred by unwanted novelty, unnecessary innovation.

If you follow how people spend their money, you’ll notice that they may claim to want something novel, but they most often buy more of the same. Note the painfully slow progress of the FPS genre, in particular.

Gamers clamor for innovation when they grow bored with kinds of games that they used to love and want to play more. Different people perceive the patterns in games at different levels of abstraction. The higher-level the patterns, the more games you’ll get bored of and the more you’ll clamor for innovation. When patterns become familiar and gameplay in those patterns is no longer fun, players will want innovation. This happens one player at a time—the community will not collectively make this leap, because each individual player needs to see the patterns and grow bored with them separately and on their own terms. When others point out the patterns the process may speed up, but boredom must develop from actually playing the games.

Over the past several years, gaming has grown in leaps and bounds. So many new players are seeing these hackneyed patterns for the first time that innovation seems unnecessary to industry participants. Game developers can borrow heavily from the past, sometimes outright cloning old games, and the new generation of gamers will pick up the rehash and experience it as if they were playing a brand new game. No need to innovate in an environment such as this—and this pattern of rehashing games to capitalize on new players shows no sign of reaching its end.

To most players, innovation would just be a nuisance. They’re busy playing games that were conceived thirty years ago and enjoying them just as their parents did in those days when the gaming industry was barely an industry. Players take a while to catch up to the modern days of gaming—many never do. But anyone who enjoys games and plays enough of them to develop a discerning taste will find that innovation and fun are noticeably correlated.

Innovation will never be chosen because it brings popularity. As the number of jaded gamers grows, though, innovative games will service niches that can comfortably host many profitable ventures.

Defining Massivity

2010-03-08T15:06:00.004-05:00

I am so sick of people calling various online games "virtual worlds", or worse yet, "massively multiplayer online (games)". I hope to make a few distinctions, namely the difference between a virtual world and a virtual environment, and when a multiplayer online game actually qualifies as massive.

Damion Schubert noted the selling point of MMOGs compared to regular online games. That difference is "massivity", the potential for hundreds of users to interact in a virtual environment. Since Schubert's comment was in passing during his presentation, he doesn't seem to provide a formal definition of massivity, and I don't know him personally, so I cannot ask him for one.

Ultimately what an MMOG design hopes to achieve is a feeling of massivity. This is an aesthetic experience which cannot be easily quantified nor defined, but I will attempt to do so. Massivity is the feeling that the user is part of a large world which changes without her being there. It is the potential for hundreds of players to interact in some virtual space, all perhaps with different goals.

We can have games without massivity. But we cannot have massivity without a virtual environment, specifically a virtual world.

I like to use a layered definition when talking about MMOGs: virtual world + game = MMOG. Most people can identify a game or at least hazily understand that there are game systems at work when they experience them. But everyone from bloggers to journalists to game designers seem to forget what a virtual world is.

I define a virtual world to be a globally-accessible simulated, persistent environment in which users interact through an avatar proxy. A virtual world is a virtual environment with the following constraints:

The environment must contain the concept of location. It must be able to relate entities in the environment to the user with positional information. A chat room is not a virtual world.
The environment must persist between play sessions. It must convey the notion of a "living world" which advances while the user is not engaged with it. Any instanced encounter with an end is not a virtual world.
The environment must be globally-accessible and consistent, meaning all agents in the environment could potentially congregate at a location. This is technically impossible, but the impossibility must be transparent to the user. Any user understands that as long as he is a part of the virtual world, he can meet (intentionally or by happenstance) any other user in the world.

Channeling is a solution to a technical problem which diminishes the feeling of massivity because the game replicates the same environment, breaking the consistency of the world, and no longer are the technical limitations of the environment transparent to the user. I am not saying that channeled zones are not virtual worlds; they simply break "immersion". As an aside, has anyone ever experienced a channeling system which wasn't annoying or confusing?

Studios are releasing many online games which are breaking molds. They call it a "hybridization"; I call it exploitation of the buzz surrounding MMORPGs. Facebook labels games like Farmville and Restaurant City as virtual worlds. Debates ensue on whether or not anything with character persistence (e.g. TF2) is enough to qualify the game as an MMOG. I find this talk very dangerous because it dilutes the definition of virtual worlds and MMORPGs.

Is Diablo 2 an MMORPG? By Farmville or Global Agenda standards, it would appear to qualify. It has privately instanced virtual environments, character persistence, and public chat rooms serving as lobbies. But there is no global environment where any one user could accidentally interact with someone else. The world does not evolve and move without the user present. Sure items are traded and bands of players do quests together, but is there really a persistent world anywhere?

Any of the recent shooters with character and item persistence, whether or not trading is implemented, still reside in game spaces, not virtual worlds. Games are played on maps which have a beginning and end. They are highly structured games with limited participants. There is no central gathering place where players can interact and put their mark on the world by simply standing around. Character persistence is not world persistence.

MAG or even a hypothetical game with more than 128 v 128 battles are no more an MMOFPS than TF2, i.e. they are not MMOFPSs. If a player logs off in the middle of a battle, his team may lose the match. But the buck stops there. There are no repercussions in the larger game world, because there is no larger game world! His guild doesn't lose land, his skeleton isn't a terrain decal for the next week; the players lick their wounds or bask in victory, and they start a new game. Once again, character persistence is not world persistence.

Using today's weak definition, we could classify any online multiplayer game as an MMOG. That would defeat the point of creating genres at all, and we would be back where we started: what is the difference between Everquest and Dungeon Siege? Massivity.

Experience-oriented vs. Competition-oriented Design

2010-03-06T21:27:00.001-05:00

When analyzing game design, I note that some games aim to give as many players as possible a certain set of experiences and go no further than that, while other games aim to provide ways for players to compare themselves against other players. These two styles of design can be intermingled in a single game, but often the game will clearly point towards one of the two styles.

We can draw a distinction between two different kinds of design: the experience-oriented and the competition-oriented.

Experience-oriented Design

Most games are experience-oriented. They present you with a set of challenges that they expect you to overcome and areas that you’re supposed to explore. After you’ve explored and completed the challenges, you have experienced the game. You understand what’s going on—the mechanics are usually simple and act as a goad to keep a baseline of interest—you don’t have much need to play it again. Usually these games have a linear (or multi-linear) storyline that you would play through once; maybe you’d play through a second time if you really liked the game.

These games need to focus on immersing the player in an interesting environment. These games should be relatively easy. Or they can provide facilities for changing the difficulty setting to suit any skill-level.

Experience-oriented games may have sections of gameplay where skill matters, but usually these sections will be tests of efficiency where being better at the game grants you a minor advantage—experience-oriented games shouldn’t have skill tests that provide high barriers to content, because experiencing the game’s content is the focus of an experience-oriented game.

Experience-oriented games include the vast majority of JRPGs and single-player RPGs, and single-player games like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid. Themepark MMORPGs and some sandboxes fall primarily into this category of design.

Competition-oriented Design

A competition-oriented game discriminates among players based on their skill. Experience-oriented games generally do not—they ask for no more than a time investment and a base level of ability.

Gaming itself started with competitive games where friends would play against one another at games of strategy like chess and go, as well as various card games and sports. Videogaming started with competitive games—but in these games players generally competed against the environment for high scores, only indirectly competing against one another through comparing scores. Arcade games were naturally competitive games based on sufficiency skill tests, because arcade games that let players play for a long time on each credit make less money and will be removed in favor of more profitable machines. From arcade gaming grew consoles and PC games as we know them today. As gaming became more popular, there was more financial incentive for games to be open to more people. Designers lowered skill barriers and games focused on the player’s experience instead of challenge.

Competition-oriented games are built to be played repeatedly. Players play the game through multiple unique times to learn how the game mechanics work and evolve progressively more effective strategies through trial and error. In order for a game to be competitive, its core gameplay must measure player skill in some way. The easiest way to do that is to pit two players against one another with even, usually symmetrical, starting conditions and similar mechanics.

Games like chess, go, stratego, othello, poker, backgammon, Counterstrike, Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2, the Halo games, bullet-hell games, and competitive RTS games like Starcraft, Company of Heroes, and Command and Conquer 3 are among competition-oriented games.

The Tension

MMORPGs, because they rely on massive populations, naturally orient towards experience design. When people start playing MMORPGs, though, they aren’t sensitive to the fact that they are playing an experience-oriented game. The tickling they receive for spending time in the game seems like the tickling they’d receive for being of high skill and succeeding at a skill-oriented game. The distinction between a timesink-based game and a skill growth-based game is not readily visible to the everyday player, so they’ll continue playing the game under the impression that they are a good player because they’re continually rewarded as if they were one. The player will eventually thirst for a real skill test—they’ll want to show off their skill at this game they’ve invested so much time into. In this way a tension develops between experience-oriented and competition-oriented gameplay and design.

Competition-oriented design must discriminate among players—players are measured against one another and players can view that measurement. Good competition-oriented games make this measurement easy to read, though it may only be on a discrete “I won” vs. “I lost” scale. A game can’t discriminate and fail to discriminate at the same time. For this reason, a mechanic cannot be both designed in an experience-oriented fashion and a competition-oriented fashion.

Mechanics of the experience-oriented and competition-oriented varieties can be mixed within the same game, though, and often are. Themepark MMORPGs (and some sandboxes, as well) don’t discriminate until the very top of the time investment reward chain has been reached. This is how such games resolve the experience and competition tension inherent in an experience-oriented game design.

A themepark MMORPG based on skill doesn’t make sense. A game based on content exploration and letting all players have access to as much content as possible cannot be a game based on skill discrimination that uses content as a board and pieces are used in chess. This does not preclude themepark MMORPGs from having competitive elements. On the other side of the same coin, we can say that competition-oriented games will only be weakened by adding experience-oriented design ideas—if a game is to be based on competition, clouding that competition with timesinks can only weaken the core of the game.

“Maximizing Fun”

2010-03-03T21:35:00.001-05:00

All game design should intuitively should rely on the following maxim: Games should maximize fun.

But where? and how? What is more fun and for whom? Who do you care about? When given a decision between making something fun for one kind of player or another, which kind do you choose?

One of the first questions asked when trying to design a game: why are we making a game? Or, more precisely, why will we make design decisions?

You can’t always make design decisions that appeal to the largest number of people because you don’t know what the largest number of people actually want. Game designers probably do not think of why they’re making design decisions in a broader sense—they might say “because this will be fun” or “because this will make money” but they won’t be able to answer much further if pressed. Game design is guided very much by intuition. Designers primarily refit concepts they’ve seen in other games into the context of their game—genres are in this way perpetuated by endless clones with slight variations. Without a more objective criteria for design decisions, “that which I think will be most popular” or “that which I’ve seen and liked before” are the main justifications for design on a broader level—as long as those justifications rule, clones are the order of the day.

When I approach analyzing a game’s design and judging the quality of certain design decisions, I open myself up to the patterns the game reveals to me. How do I play the game? Where are the developers trying to focus my attention? I start from a holistic view of how the game is put together and then look at more specific aspects to see if rough edges show themselves. I try to see what design decisions fit and do not fit with the patterns I noticed when looking at the game as a whole.

From here I can derive the “consistency” of the game design. A consistent design directs the player naturally towards what the game does best and doesn’t distract her with divergent quirks and mechanical dead-ends. Generally, games that have consistent designs are better games. Judging the consistency of a game is one way to get a feel for design quality while avoiding the multifaceted and ever-changing subjective nature of fun that gets in the while of “maximizing fun”. Consistency is still very subjective, but it is at least one step away from blind traditionalism and appeals to popularity to which so much game design seems to fall victim.

My Severe Doubt

2010-02-28T23:38:00.001-05:00

I’ve been suffering from severe doubt with regards to the value of my game design thoughts. A friend whose opinion I value on this matter continually subjects my thoughts to a kind of opposition that makes me doubt the validity of putting them on paper at all. Am I writing no more than a collection of misguided justifications for my own taste and perspective? Am I only an elitist clinging to what little foothold in the sheer cliff face of subjectivity that will allow me to raise my head above the press of all the other pundits and gamers?

I feel trapped between a will to further refine my thoughts and the knowledge that these thoughts may just be insubstantial and baseless. My doubts are only worsened because I cannot tell if my thoughts are actually baseless. I’m tempted to throw up my hands in despair after long conversations about fundamental topics in game design and how I approach its analysis. Perhaps I am no more than a thrashing lunatic—perhaps my mental faculties delude me into thinking that there is some significant systematic epistemology to game design at the very edge of my perception so, like a schizophrenic person, I continually shift my eyes to find the thing has disappeared, only to reappear once again barely out of my view a few seconds later.

“Fun” taunts me. Flitting before me, seemingly within my reach. I can nearly contain it in a theory only to see it has left merely one of its parts trapped in the confines of my thought, the rest of it still flutters, free. It slides through my fingers when I try to clap my hands together over it. I try to use logic to present ways to judge game design decisions, but the measuring stick is not logic, but fun. Logic can tell us if a game is designed consistently and if it follows some greater vision as evidenced by the patterns it exhibits when played and analyzed, but logic itself doesn’t capture the goal of game design, which is to generate fun.

Now that I’ve revealed my struggle to you, I wish to make clear a few points about my writing here so that you can better understand my intentions and why I communicate in the peculiar way I do.

A few things you should understand:

If experts of game design exist, I am not one of them and may never be. I claim no expertise. I think about game design every day and try to do so productively. This separates me from many game designers who practice professionally, I am told. Does this qualify me to have an opinion? Not entirely. But I feel that expressing my opinion here for others to read, enjoy, and argue against is better than keeping these opinions unexplored and unexpressed.
I’m just making stuff up here. I post my thoughts on game design. I express them not because I am in touch with some hidden truth to which others are blind. I write because I think, and thoughts unexpressed—especially those thoughts refined with some rigor—do nothing. There is no use in understanding and knowledge if it cannot be somehow conveyed. This is currently the primary way I can convey my limited understanding of game design. I’m working on games at the moment, but they are not close to release and may not be for some time. My only means of expression is this: the written word, written in the hopes that the small waves it generates among its readers will ignite some significant discussion, discovery, and ultimately better games.
I don’t have evidence to show you—I write based on my experience, analysis, and thought experiments. All of the work on game design I’ve ever read (that I can remember) contributes parts to each of the pieces I post here. All of the conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues—each contributes. I base my thoughts on my own limited experience playing the games I find fun and a few that I do not enjoy but played to experiment. I do not approach game design as a scientist, but as a philosopher. If I make verifiable claims that I do not myself verify, I will gladly lean in the direction any significant evidence for or against my claim would sway me.
I don’t write here because I’ve found the truth. This brings to mind an aphorism I believe to carry some valuable insight: “He who claims to have found the truth has definitely not.” I may write as if I have found the truth, but I only do so because to fill my writing with disclaimers would make each post an exercise in extracting meaning from apologies instead of directly absorbing meaning. I don’t wish to cloud my writing further than my meager communication and thinking skills so far have clouded it, so I write persuasively with a bold tone. If I am wrong, I hope that the tone makes my mistakes obvious and encourages others to challenge me. If I am right, it serves well at convincing others of my case.
I am exploring. Because I am on a journey to find theories that allow myself and others to better design games, I write in an exploratory fashion. I try on new ideas through posting them on this blog and gauging reactions. I’ve learned significantly from this practice, and I will continue to do it. I hope that you can join me in this exploration—try to argue, in the comments, with the intention of exchanging information and ideas, not with the intention to show your superiority to me or to others in the conversation.

Now that I have written these disclaimers, I feel more comfortable proceeding. I hope that you will keep them in mind as you read my posts here.

Global Agenda’s Playerbase Stratification Problem

2010-02-25T11:13:00.000-05:00

The root problem in Global Agenda’s design is that it pulls its playerbase in too many different directions.

If a skill-based game is good, it doesn’t need to have a lot of conventional content. Counterstrike didn’t have PvE and leveling. Starcraft doesn’t need fifteen modes of play. Themepark MMORPGs tack on many features and endless content because they rely on content to keep their players entertained. Themeparks don’t benefit from sufficiency skill tests and active skill ranking on a broad scale as serious RTS and TBS games inevitably do—themepark gameplay is oriented towards experiencing an event with friends, not towards ranking and measuring your skill. Global Agenda’s player vs. player shooter gameplay (not only the explicit “PvP” mode, but AvA as well), the focus of the game and the very core of the game, naturally establishes skill orientation between players. There is no other gameplay except for PvE missions which reward teams for completing them in a sufficient time with at most a certain number of deaths. Though slightly more experience- and content-oriented, PvE is also a sufficiency skill test.

Global Agenda strives with one half of its being to be a skill-focused game, and with the other half to be a content-focused game. Though games are not zero-sum compromises between skill- and content-focus, creating a skill-based game with high quantities of traditional content limits the amount of work that can be done on game balance—you can usually either work on lots of content or you can create very balanced content, not both. The skill and content tug-of-war forces players of two distinct kinds to coexist in the same game: those who are content-driven (generally MMORPG players) and those who are skill-driven (generally FPS players). There’s clearly friction here in the game’s design.

Global Agenda’s “PvP” mode relies on a matchmaking system. You queue your character (perhaps with a team of three other players at most) and the matchmaker attempts to put you in a game on a random mode and random map where each side has a 50% chance of victory. In order to do this with any degree of reliability, the matchmaker needs a baseline number of players at each skill level. But since Global Agenda is partially content-oriented, a playerbase that would barely be sufficient to keep the matchmaking for PvP supplied with players now is stretched through 7 different game modes.

Player vs. Player
Player vs. Environment
- Low Security
- Medium Security
- High Security
- Maximum Security
- Double Agent
Agency vs. Agency (Conquest)

The game usually doesn’t have more than 4,000 concurrent players. Demand between these modes is not equal, though, so the problem isn’t as bad as it may initially look. Regardless, all of the other modes constantly distracting players still starves the PvP matchmaker of player diversity at all times but maybe one or two of the peak hours when most players are online. There will be two or three modes that receive the majority of the attention, and the rest will be starved.

Global Agenda has woven the player-availability problem from themepark MMORPGs into a skill-based game where more players are needed in certain modes to ensure reasonable matchmaking. As the game builds in more game modes (and we’ve been promised some kind of excuse for an open-world “zone”), this problem will get worse. The developers don’t seem to be aware of this issue—they need to pay attention because there’s no guarantee that adding more high-level game modes will draw enough players to keep all the other queues for PvE and PvP moving at a reasonable pace, let alone allowing enough players queuing for the matchmaker to do a good job. If players are subjected to long waits and too many lopsided matches, they’ll leave Global Agenda for better games; I’ve already seen hundreds of posts on the forums about matchmaking driving people out of PvP and complaints about how the matchmaker is “broken”, and the problem will only get worse from here.

Beware of Second-Order Effects

2010-02-22T23:49:00.001-05:00

Games are basically glorified math problems with metaphors partially covering the numbers and fancy symbols. The best games are usually interesting and engaging metaphors plastered over difficult math problems.

Unfortunately, game designers are a bit less apt at math than programmers. Being both a programmer and a wannabe designer, I approach game design from equal parts design and math. I’m no mathematician, but I have a toolbox of mathematical concepts that I use to better understand game design.

Many games fail to accomplish a semblance of balance because designers add mechanics and reward systems without a view of the broader math those mechanics will force their will upon. One such concept often missed: Second-order effects. Whereas a player’s superior skill has an additive impact on their effectiveness (a first-order effect), complex and over-rambunctious reward systems can multiply that bonus of skill into an insurmountable obstacle for less-skilled players.

The “Slippery Slope” of Success in Strategy Games

Imagine two players of measurably uneven skill at a certain strategy game. If they were to play against one another in this game, let’s say it’s a competitive turn-based strategy game whose result is based entirely on skill, the more skillful player would increase his advantage every turn. Every single turn the less skillful player would be losing by a wider margin than the turn before. The less skillful player can never win such a game and will lose the game each time by a predictably wide margin that has compounded each turn into a massive deficit. This is the nature of skill: this process of compounding advantage/disadvantage cannot be altered but by adding elements of chance and asymmetry to the game.

In reality, a player’s pure skill doesn’t directly map to a higher advantage turn-over-turn. The dynamics of a strategy game usually mitigate skill differences in the early-game (the first four moves in chess, for example) because there are fewer possible moves and those moves are usually somewhat obvious to even an advanced beginner. In most western strategy games, the number of possible moves explodes as the game progresses, peaking at some point in the mid-game, then tapering off due to fewer pieces being on the board, or the board position becoming more and more determinate as more pieces are places and static positions grow. A noticeable exception to this pattern is Go, which moves from a completely empty to a mostly full board throughout the game—leading to a continual restriction of possible moves and possible good moves.

As the game progresses and the strategy space widens, the player who can better distinguish successful strategies from unsuccessful ones will win. This discrimination between strategies is the essence of skill—players who are more skillful are better at discriminating between strategies that might, to a lesser player, seem to have the same utility.

At each point of decision, the more skillful player will choose a better strategy. The more viable strategies to discriminate between, the more of an effect skill will have. At each decision point, the better player compounds his advantage, while the less player sees the game slowly slipping away. The worse player can never make up ground.

(Humans do not behave uniformly, though, and skill is not static. We need to play against others in order to determine there skill, and players behave with different skill at different times. Playing a strategy game doesn’t degenerate as quickly or regularly as a describe here, because I’m describing ideal conditions—human flaws add much appeal to strategy games where otherwise such games would be repeated drubbings of less-skilled players.)

Skill => Success => Reward => Less Skill Required?

Designers love to reward displays of skill with game mechanical perks. Kill enough goblins and you’ll level up! You played well, so now the game is going to become easier. This kind of design is surprisingly dangerous if you want to design a game of skill and not a timesink or casual game. But it’s so intuitive—it rewards you for doing something well, which will make you want to continue to play. Using positive feedback to reinforce the actions in games that you want players to keep doing—this seems like a completely reasonable thought process.

Here we see a second-order effect. Certain mechanics multiply the player’s effectiveness beyond the normal turn-over-turn addition caused by outplaying an opponent.

Rewards can cause second-order effects that ruin the balance in games of skill; A second-order effect that quickly make matches unwinnable for the less skilled side by multiplying the effectiveness of the more skilled player, increasing his advantage by leaps and bounds as the match progresses. In lopsided and poorly-designed reward systems, actions at the beginning of the game are multiplied and lead to surprisingly enormous benefits later in the game, instead of actions at the beginning of the game leading intuitively to equally important actions later in the game.

I approach games of skill that involve vertical character advancement and gear collection with intense suspicion because I’m aware of how easily second-order effects can skew the players’ apparent skill levels and sap the fun out of what could otherwise be a strategically interesting game. Most of the time, game designers appear oblivious to what they are doing when they add rewards. They tack on external reward structures to make their games more addictive, but in the process they’re punishing new players who are necessarily less-skilled by giving a multiplicative bonus to the effectiveness of veteran, higher-skill players.

When designing a competitive skill-based games, reward structures need to be looked at with the utmost suspicion. They have a tendency to compound in broken ways—ways that quickly transform a game that would otherwise have numerous viable strategies into a one-dimensional, strategically uninteresting race for the first imbalanced reward.

Leaving Themepark MMORPGs Behind

2010-02-20T23:59:00.000-05:00

After last year’s extensive MMO trialing, I’ve come to a few conclusions about what I want out of games at this point in my life. This may not generalize to other people, but it may be an instructive thing to share for those that follow this blog and want to know the origin of much of my game design thought.

The Same Patterns that Lead to the Same Patterns

You can easily define a number of mechanic patterns in MMORPGs. These go largely unchallenged and effectively provide a framework for games in the genre.

Persistent intrinsic semi-permanent character advancement.
Loot advancement.
Your play session is only a window into a game world that continues persisting before you’ve logged and and after you log off. (I’m not saying “persistent world” here because “changes” to a themepark game’s world don’t persist for more than one character.)
The game is based on the player controlling one character at a time.
The player is an adventurer who kills a variety of creatures for various reasons (quests) to gain experience used to advance.
The player can combine materials harvested from nodes or looted from enemies to craft items.
Players organize into game-facilitated groups and guilds to defeat stronger enemies.

Most of the games I played were nothing more than a collection of minor variations in the implementation of those patterns. (And some of those implementations were outright failures.) Very few moved away from this: Atlantica Online makes you control a party instead of just one character and DDO instanced everything and focused on small-group content—two examples of more significant variations.

These patterns bore me. I’ve seen them done so many times. Playing MMOs turned into a process akin to painting rooms in a house. Each room is different in shape and size, some may even have a special feature that needs particular attention for the painting to turn out appealing, but after you’ve painted one or two rooms, you get the point and the rest of the rooms are just minor variations on putting paint on walls and avoiding putting it elsewhere.

You can find such basic patterns in any genre of any medium, of course, but in MMORPGs there seems to be nothing interesting beyond the specific implementations of these patterns. The PvE centeredness of themepark MMORPGs primarily relies on player time investment to gate content and character progress. Since there’s very little one can do in a themepark MMO to set themselves apart in terms of skill—there’s little competition among MMORPG players aside from in the top 10% or less of players who play competitive PvP and raid at the highest end—I will end up playing the game to see how the genre-specific patterns unfold. And when these patterns unfold, the result is boredom.

What Themepark MMOs Show About their Players

(I try not to treat negatively people who play games in different ways than me. I understand that not all players have the same goals when they game. Fun isn’t uniform from day to day, person to person. Even if everyone did have the same goals and fun was uniform, taste accounts for significant variance in what games people play. I hope that the following section is not too negative about themepark MMO players—I intend it to be an explanation of how I feel about the games and not a indictment of other people who play and enjoy them.)

I’ve given up on themepark MMOs (and many sandbox MMOs, as well) due to their direct time-investment focus. When I think about where I’ll be after playing a game for a few months, I’d like to be able to say that I differentiated myself from others through my skillful play and strategic thinking. MMORPGs require a significant time investment before you can get to a point where skillful play and strategic aspects show their faces in any way that would let me distinguish myself from most players. I’d be throwing time into an MMORPG and getting nothing back but the same standard rewards everyone gets for investing time.

Through playing a themepark MMORPG, I think that I would be labeling my free time as a throw-away. Why should I bother playing a game where I’m just one of a huge crowd of other players, unable to differentiate myself in a game-significant way? It communicates nothing about me to others; there are plenty of other significantly more interesting games that could communicate more about me as a player and person. I cannot avoid the thought that the game acts as a medium through which I communicate about myself to others and to myself. I could choose to ignore this communication and just play whatever game tickles me (and themepark MMOs are expert at tickling), but I don’t because ignoring a signal will not make it go away.

These thoughts of signaling through game playing do not occur to most people—and if they did, I doubt whoever thought about it would mind it much. It matters to me, though, so I’ve moved away from MMORPGs to other multiplayer games that act as a more dynamic communication medium.

Global Agenda: Decidedly Flimsy

2010-02-17T20:08:00.002-05:00

You can easily to get caught up in playing the game and forget that it has no story (though it pretends occasionally to), involves an arbitrary vertical advancement timesink, has "loot" that is unappetizing, has a funky auto-matching system that is a crapshoot in general (even though I'm sure it is pretty good for what it is), mediocre level design, and uninspired PvP and PvE modes. The game is fairly generic and uninviting unless you actually want to play Global Agenda because you've heard specifically about the few good parts.

"If you ignore the gaping holes in this sweater, it's actually quite a nice article of clothing!"

GA is a tactical third-person shooter, but at night when no one is around it dresses up as an MMO. Sometimes, in fits of extreme fantasy, it fancies itself as a real MMORPG.

But this is nonsense. Whenever you get into a match, it’s clear the game is a shooter. It’s skill-based, relatively fast-paced, and tactical. HiRez would need to severely alter the game to make it a recognizable MMORPG—it’s never going to happen, and if it does it would alienate most of the players who play it now.

Regardless of how much HiRez and the game’s fans trumpet how the game is some kind of MMORPG/FPS hybrid, don’t be fooled. This game plays like a shooter, not an MMORPG. Tacking on character advancement doesn't magically make the game an RPG, let alone an MMORPG. Adding crafting and naming a cooperative mode “PvE'” doesn’t convince any but those who very much want to be convinced.

GA is a game trapped between two worlds. Overall the game is "blah". The individual aspects of the game don’t cohere well, the interface isn't particularly good, and I generally get a directionless feeling from the game's design--or perhaps its the feeling that there are too many directions and nothing is taken far enough. Is the game an MMO, or a competitive FPS? Is it supposed to be some kind of RPG? I don’t know—all I know is that when I play a match, I have fun playing a tacitcal third-person shooter.

I find playing in individual matches is fun, but everything on a wider scale is “meh”. The game is less than the sum of its parts. The difference between subscription-free play and the Conquest mode style that you pay to play is too awkward—Conquest isn’t particularly fulfilling, but it’s the only place you can play with a full organized team of players instead of being stuck in a group of 4 queuing to be thrown into pick-up groups of ten players.

I hope HiRez can move the game forward, though. I'm enjoying this skeleton of what a future GA should be.

Gameplay is not Grinding

2010-02-15T18:10:00.002-05:00

When players discuss grinding in MMOs, someone inevitably brings up this argument:

Guess what you do in every video game created? The same thing over and over and over and over etc.
FPSs? Shoot everyone who isn’t with you.
RPGs? Level up and kill big bad monster to get super duper helmet of the bear.
RTSs? Kill the enemy.
Platformer? Jump n' duck to the end.
(Source)

Grinding is more than "doing the same thing over and over". If you continue the process of reducing games to basic physical actions then calling those actions "grinds", you should go down to the level of "computer games are just repeatedly pressing buttons and moving a mouse--they're not worth playing". By that same logic, communication is just moving your body in certain ways, so it's not worth doing.

The reason we play games isn't that the actions of doing so are inherently "special" in some way--we play games because they organize those normal actions into something more, something that has meaning to us. By removing the meaning through reducing games to "grinding keypresses", you completely miss the point of playing games.

The substantial error in logic made in this reduction-based argument that suggests “grinding” is indistinct from playing a game: it claims that if A’s parts are the same as some of B’s parts, those two things are the same. In truth, If you can reduce two things in a certain way so that one thing’s elements are a subset of the other’s, you do not establish a relationship of equivalence. A chair isn’t a wooden leg. A table isn’t a wooden surface. Further, tables and chairs are different, though they both have legs. Desks and floors are different, but they both have a horizontal surface. Two objects or concepts cannot be treated as equivalent if there is relevant difference between them; there’s clearly a relevant difference between playing a game normally and grinding, though grinding can occur while playing a game.

Games are more than pressing buttons on a computer and pleasant lights and sounds emerging from the machine in response. Games are defined by the mental process of play, which leads to physical interactions with the environment. Without play, we cannot differentiate games from other arbitrary sets of rules and goals. Trying to break down games into a series of physical events misses what actually makes a game what it is: the fact that people are playing it, and that the game has meaning to them through their play.

So grinding is not simply pressing buttons repeatedly—we can break down any computer game into pressing buttons repeatedly. Grinding is when the mental process of play breaks down because it became separated from the game’s meaning. It’s similar to when a word sounds wrong and seems to lose its meaning after you say it a hundred times in a row. Grinds separate the meaning from the gameplay by the sheer force of repetition. Since game design is focused on cultivating meaning, game designers should wish to prevent game systems from devolving into grinds.

“Character” Advancement in Games of Skill

2010-02-13T01:04:00.001-05:00

First, Global Agenda institutes an annoying leveling treadmill that turns an otherwise very fun tactical shooter into a timesink and unnecessarily punishes new players in a game where skill deficits are already a huge issue. Now Command and Conquer 4 is committing the same sin in the RTS genre. (Read Bilsybub’s impressions.)

Rewarding people for playing a game longer when the game consists of repeatedly playing matches that are supposedly skill-based? This accomplishes a few things, none of them are particularly good for players or game balance.

Punishing newbies.
Supplementing the power increase of player skill improvement, leading to a further advantage to players who should be better at the game anyway.
Introducing a timesink that the player cannot get around.

Learning to play the game is enough of a timesink—why augment that with an advancement system that is guaranteed to progress slower than your pace of learning? It will only handicap newbies and make their matches less fun.

The people who really benefits from this nonsense? Whoever sells the game. Now you must play for 20 hours in order to even have access to a competitive set of abilities, units, weapons, or whatever.

Gating aspects of a competitive game of skill may prove to be a profitable business decision, but it’s a painful game design decision and can only erode player patience among competitive players. This takes the most soul-sucking part of themepark MMOs and shoves it into games that could not be further from the themepark design philosophy. These games will probably see much financial success because of the addictive quality of vertical character growth—this pattern will spread to more and more titles and continue to bother me and other supporters of skill-based games.

Now the same business vs game design conflict that has brutalized the design of themepark MMOs has come to roost in skill-based games. The future seems to be turning a skill-based game into an MMO by adding some “impact” PvP and vertical growth timesinks. This is bad for skill-based game design—but who cares about game design? Everyone’s in it to make money who has enough money to make such a game, so we’ll see this frustrating trend continue.

GA Follow-up with Todd Harris

2010-02-12T00:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I was extremely dissatisfied with IGN's interview with Todd Harris. I criticized Cydoc and then rhetorically posed a bunch of questions from the top of my head that I, a passionate player, had about Global Agenda.

Hours later, some of my questions were indirectly addressed in a newsletter--particularly random PvP queuing and an extension to the Conquest free trial.

Several hours after that (while I was playing GA), Mr. Harris personally answered my questions. I want to thank him and Hi-Rez for taking the time and for caring about their game as much as I do.

First, thanks for the attention to Global Agenda. There are a lot of MMOs out there and we appreciate your interest in our title. Clearly you guys are investing a lot of time with the game as you form your opinions and publish them. I may not agree with them all but I can respect informed opinions. I wish all game journalists would be as well informed before they post. :)

I saw your most recent blog earlier today. And so, without further ado, are some quick written responses to the questions you guys were most interested in.

The servers are down or restarted almost daily. Are player numbers and activity surpassing your technical expectations?

Global Agenda player activity has indeed been very strong - slightly ahead of our projections to the extent that we've added more capacity in Europe and are working on new servers closer to our Oceanic community. In the first days after launch we certainly had a set of restarts for tuning and application of server patches. That said, I would invite anyone to compare our 'uptime in the 2 weeks since launch' against any other MMO launch and I think we compare very favorably. In the first ten days we were perhaps overly-aggressive in bringing down the server to apply dev patches. We have moved to an approach where maintenance patches are applied during a pre-scheduled off-peak time unless it is truly a critical issue. This maintenance schedule should make things more manageable for players and still let us continue to improve the game as is our commitment.

Why are VOIP channels so shaky? Should we be complaining to you or to Vivox?

Mainly us. We work closely with Vivox. So, in terms of the exceptional sound quality of our built-in voice, we'll both take some of the credit. :) Likewise, we work jointly to address any issues. We have had zero issues with the core technology Vivox delivers. And we worked hard to ensure that any voice issue would not affect the core game. However, a small set of users have definitely experienced VoIP channel stability issues within Global Agenda and we are delivering a patch later this month that we believe will address those reported issues.

What qualifies Global Agenda as an "MMO" while League of Legends is not?

Each game needs to choose its own path in terms of qualifying itself. And even then we know that players bring their own expectations to the table. We've tried to be VERY candid about what Global Agenda provides and what it does not since some players assume MMO means World of Warcraft with different art. As you guys know, our website states that "Global Agenda is NOT a typical MMO in many respects and does not include: a large, seamless world to explore; quest givers; open world PvP or PvE; elves. If you consider any of these items to be must-haves within your MMO, we may not be the game for you.

We categorize Global Agenda as an MMO because, although instance based, our game allows thousands or tens of thousands of players to all find one another, interact, and compete online within a single-shard universe. There is no segmenting of the population based on named server as you find in the typical MMO or typical online shooter. We also feel that Global Agenda's AvA gameplay delivers more persistence and consequence than the typical MMO but each player needs to make that determination for himself.

Personally, I'm encouraged by the many hybrid games now emerging that allow thousands of players to interact online in non traditional ways. These games each trigger lots of debate about terminology but I think the innovation is exciting to see.

Follow-up: What makes Dome City more than a glorified lobby?

I think Dome City hosts functionality beyond what most people would expect in a lobby. Specifically - locations for player mail, an auction house, and player crafting, in addition to the expected set of vendors. That said, Dome City could certainly be called a graphical lobby and I wouldn't debate you on it. Its primary purpose is to support our mission-focused gameplay and accessible character progression. I do think we have lots of room to add social elements and immersion elements to our city spaces over time but our priority was to deliver fun combat first.

Players have expressed dissatisfaction with the random PvP mission type. Why hasn't a preference system been implemented?

A preference system for PvP will be live before the end of this month.

Earlier today I posted the following to the GA community:

For initial release we consolidated gametypes within a single PvP queue. With no guarantee around number of players we would have, our top priority was to ensure the players got into matches quickly and to make sure our matchmaking system had a sufficiently large population to balance out sides. That said, we've heard how much players want to specify, or eliminate, certain match types. And we do have the population to support this request. So, we will be implementing player selections per PvP gametype so you can exclude or include each type as you wish.

Do you plan on extending your matchmaking system to include character talent specialization?

No current plans for that. We'll continue to monitor matchmaking and improve it but so far it is doing a very good job.
Are players of high TrueSkill matched with similarly skilled players, or does the system try to even out the teams by dropping in low-skill teammates?

Matchmaking's first priority is to ensure that the average skill-level is equal between the two sides – in addition to considering other factors like keeping classes balanced and character levels balanced. Matchmaking prefers to also keep the standard deviation low within a match so similarly skilled players are together. However we balance all of that against minimizing the time players are waiting for a match. Bottom line: if the population online is fairly low you could have some lower or higher skilled teammates as long as the average skill-level is the same between the two sides.

Why is Conquest free until March 3rd rather than for the first 30 days of box purchase, like every other MMO?

The MMOs that include 30 days with box purchase also shut down your access to the game entirely when you stop paying subscription. We let you play the core game in perpetuity and I think the real question is why every other MMO doesn't offer that! As an aside, we have recently extended our Conquest free offer until the end of March. The extension will allow allow more players to sample Conquest and allow us to demonstrate our commitment to delivering new content frequently.

GA Failview

2010-02-11T15:00:00.002-05:00

Over at IGN, Cydoc interviewed Todd Harris, the Executive Producer for Global Agenda. Or rather: pandered. Not surprising that another game journalist asked questions which could be answered by browsing the Global Agenda website. GA players are going to get nothing out that information session.

Here is a game which is getting bad to no press coverage, and instead of conducting an actual interview, Cydoc turns it into a fact-fest. It's not even a hype-erview.

PR at HiRez might be thinking that it'll generate some buzz, but there is nothing buzz-worthy in the entire thing! There is some drivel about the origins of "No Elves" and Recon sleep darts; I almost rolled my eyes out of my head. I doubt this will sway anyone considering purchasing the game. So who exactly is this interview for?

These are the questions that Cydoc should have asked:

The servers are down or restarted almost daily. Are player numbers and activity surpassing your technical expectations?
Why are VOIP channels so shaky? Should we be complaining to you or to Vivox?
What qualifies Global Agenda as an "MMO" while League of Legends is not?
Follow-up: What makes Dome City more than a glorified lobby?
Players have expressed dissatisfaction with the random PvP mission type. Why hasn't a preference system been implemented?
Do you plan on extending your matchmaking system to include character talent specialization?
Are players of high TrueSkill matched with similarily skilled players, or does the system try to even out the teams by dropping in low-skill teammates?
Why is Conquest free until March 3rd rather than for the first 30 days of box purchase, like every other MMO?

Fun and Learning

2010-02-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

We don’t have a good way to derive what will be fun for different people aside from attempting to replicate what we find fun. Fun as a concept is transient, temporal, experiential, slippery, subjective, and fickle.

If I were to pick a starting point for a discussion of fun, I would start with the importance of learning. I agree with Raph Koster’s assessment that fun is a matter of learning. But when some players hear this, they pull back from the idea with shock and dismay, curious as to what education has to do with gaming.

Schools have turned learning into dreary work, though we frequently learn and enjoy the process—games are one such case of self-directed learning.

Players resist thinking of games as learning experiences because when society institutionalizes a concept like learning, we associate the institution with the concept that birthed it and draw a confused distinction in our minds between the institutional workings and the actual concepts. Through their experience the American public education system, most Americans have been traumatized into thinking that they want to learn as little as possible. Combine that trauma with a general aura of anti-intellectualism in the United States, and you can easily see how learning would be frowned upon by working people. Learning is a weapon wielded by the intellectual elites (who they consider to be liberal blow-hards who have never worked an honest, real job). In an idealistic meritocratic society, hard work means more than smarts. Smart people are crafty, manipulative, and cannot be trusted; hard-workers are honest, feel with their hearts, battle-worn, and sympathetic. We, of course, side with the hard-working factory worker instead the lazy banker (not that the banker is necessarily smart or the factory worker is necessarily dumb). Values among Americans are changing with regards to smarts because of the prevalence of computers and their usefulness in the modern world, but there is still this palpable dislike for anyone who wants to make you think—and that dislike extends doubly to people who would have you think for yourself.

The joy of games is that they allow you to think—they make you think without you being aware of it! They are distractions. Distractions make you think about something aside from your normal concerns. Fun games establish self-contained thought patterns that please us because they are outside of our everyday experience. Games let us engage in an exotic kind of thought unlike our everyday drab thinking.

This thinking is simply learning for a different cause.

When you learn, you internalize patterns so that you can recreate them or recognize them later. Pattern matching is the basic operation of the human mind. Everything we mentally do is pattern matching. Our senses provide us with data; our brain processes them and, through recognition, understands the world. From this understanding, we make decisions and change our environment or ourselves. This view is so abstract and big-picture that we do not think of it in our everyday lives. Pattern matching is the frame through which we see the world—it’s easy to see how we wouldn’t notice that frame when we’re so busy looking past it.

Games present us with new patterns, or new variations on old patterns that we like, and we find learning these patterns fun.

Global Agenda’s Design Failure: DPS Medics

2010-02-09T17:28:00.004-05:00

EDIT: Please note that this post was written before Global Agenda 1.3 was released. This was before solo PvE was possible. The open world did not exist when this post was written. Please keep that in mind. (In other words, this post may be irrelevant.)

In Global Agenda, Medic is the only class that can be a dedicated healer. Robotics can plant medicrates that heal nearby allies for a fixed amount every second or two, and they can buff allies’ damage through planting sensors or defense through planting forcefields between allies and enemies. Medics can buff as well as robotics, if not better, and they can heal other characters anywhere on the map.

Every class in Global Agenda has three talent trees. All classes have a “balance” tree that provides general improvements like a bigger power pool, faster power recharge, and extra defense. The other two trees are specific to each class. The medic has a healing tree and a poison tree.

The poison tree is a design failure for three reasons.

Reason #1: Poison Medics throw off Team Balance

In Global Agenda, you always play with a team. You play 4-man instances if you’re doing PvE, and 10v10 matches if you’re doing PvP or AvA (Agency vs. Agency; conquest).

Global Agenda balances teams based on class composition. Each team will have roughly the same number of medics (there may be one more on either team). If each team has three medics, but one side has two poison medics and one healer while the other has three healers, you’ll notice that, if skill is even between the teams, the team with the healers will always win.

Keeping allies alive in Global Agenda is paramount—an ally waiting 10 seconds to respawn and running back to the fight location is not helping his team for as much as thirty seconds per death. Perhaps the medic-spec imbalance would not be an issue if poison spec medics could do significant damage, but poison medics are easily foiled because they are reliant on poisons and debuffs that any heal-specced medic can dispell with the press of a button once per minute.

Poison medics act to spoil team balance. Especially when all PvP is through pick-up groups (you can only have a 4-man group when queuing for PvP, but teamsize is 10), a DPS medic takes away a surprising amount of utility from his team because others cannot adjust to fill the roles needed—only medics can fill the role of dedicated healer.

Reason #2: Poison Medics are Redundant

Other classes have DoTs. Other classes are better at doing damage. Why let a support class spec so that it can do comparable damage to classes that are meant to do damage primarily? Other classes do what poison medics do—everything except healing on demand.

EDIT: And other classes can use off-hands and certain weapons that do the same kinds of debuffs that poisons allow. If anything, the Recon class should use poisons. Otherwise, giving medics the ability to counter medics is poor design, considering other classes can just shoot the medic who is healing and kill it before moving on to the teammate he was earlier healing.

Reason #3: There is No Soloing

Why do you need a DPS tree in the medic class if there is no reason the medic should be using it? Damage trees became popular among support and healing classes in other MMOs because healers needed some way to solo so they would be casual-friendly—but you never solo in Global Agenda!

The Third Tree Should be “Buffs”

HiRez should remove the poison tree and replace it with a buff-centered tree that gives bonuses to different buffs’ durations and magnitudes. A buff-centric medic supports other characters and will be able to heal effectively at any time.

I’m not against medics having a few offensive off-hands—but allowing the medic to essentially substitute his or her entire healing capacity in favor of dealing damage has too many downsides and almost no upside.

[EDIT: I'm arguing that medics shouldn't be encouraged to DPS through dedicating an entire tree to it. I am NOT saying that medics should be unable to defend themselves. Medics should be able to do reasonable damage to foes, but they should not be encouraged to eschew the point of their existence, healing, in order to do a little more damage.]

Meaning, not Immersion

2010-02-06T14:03:00.001-05:00

In MMO games, the concept of immersion is overplayed.

Perhaps it’s a leftover from the era when 3D graphics first arrived and people gaped at how they could be truly within, “immersed” in, a game world for the first time. This would be genuine immersion—just as a you are immersed in water when you jump into a pool, you’re immersed in a 3D world when you play Mario 64. This far immersion makes sense.

But gamers want to take the concept of immersion farther. Now immersive games have to be games where the world is more real. This doesn’t mean that the world has to be more superficially like ours (though that’s what many developers seem to want it to mean)—it means a world that has a similar level of detail to our world, at least as far as the player would naturally examine the world. Players think immersion requires that the game include small details of the real world that have no mechanical reason to be in-game. From many player’s descriptions of immersion, it seems to be no more than an artificial glomming-on of graphical assets and sounds to add detail to the game world, even if that detail has no significance in playing the game.

People who talk about immersion as being of critical importance are picking out nice details and artistic flourishes in a wall mural of a morbidly obese leper vomiting, then claiming that those details are why people enjoy looking at the grotesque mural.

Immersion is bunk because you can’t apply its concepts consistently to an MMO without becoming a gibbering maniac. Wolfshead claims that World of Warcraft is (or was) immersive, in part, because of the little critters that roam about uselessly in the game world. Seeing a cow or chicken wandering Azeroth doesn’t mean much to anyone. It’s cute, sure—but immersive? If immersion only requires a vague similarity to the real world in a superficial Potemkin Village-like way, immersion doesn’t mean much aside from a proliferation of graphics, 3D models, and sounds.

If you try to find immersion in the major mechanics of the game, you will fail. Characters grow vaguely like people do in real life, but do people suddenly become much stronger every time they’ve accumulated a certain amount of experience? Mobs in the game world respawn fully-grown and in a set pattern—this alone should make an immersion-interested gamer turn and flee. Quest-givers give everyone who stops by the same quests to do the same things; what!? This is the least immersive genre ever. Everywhere you look for immersion you’ll fail to find it—unless you’re happy with pretty lights and sounds.

The best definition I can think of for immersion in gaming: the player’s impression that the they're in a real world. This may capture an extremely superficial understanding of why games interest and addict players, but it misses the point. We don’t care about games because they resemble a real world, we care about them because they have meaning to us both derived from the gameplay or bestowed on the game by the outside world via, for instance, communities and social organizations.

Players only care that what they’re doing in the game has meaning to them, whether it comes from the game itself, other players playing the game with them, or from the player herself. Without meaning, a game will fail regardless of its immersive qualities. People don’t want an immersive game, they want a fun game. Let’s think about meaning as a positive quality in games instead of immersion, because wherever immersion fails, it is a really a failure of meaning, and wherever immersion succeeds, it is because of meaning.

Botched Newbie GA Experience

2010-02-03T12:52:00.002-05:00

I am back after a long and busy few months, and I want to talk about Global Agenda. Evizaer posted some facts of the game, and I'm going to share my perspective of the PvP missions.

I played a melee-focused Recon until 25 and a launcher Assault until level 18 in pre-order beta. Starting back at level 5 in release reinforces my notion that this is a very skill-centric game. Even at level 7, I topped damage, kill, and objective charts. However, I am going to attribute my dominance to a design oversight.

There are 5 PvP mission types, each with a handful of maps. I don't know the exact number, but it's in the ballpark of 15. When a player queues for a PvP mission, they cannot select a mission type preference. All enqueued players are pooled together, and when the matchmaking system finds appropriate players, spins up a random type and map, and puts all the players into the game.

That is terrible newbie game design. A game should shepherd newbies into the game, teaching them new systems once the players are familiar with the previous lesson. They should spend a few sessions with one map type, learning the strategies involved. Then the new types should open up, allowing the player to queue if they feel compelled. This is--in fact--exactly how queuing worked in the pre-release beta and some of the earlier closed betas. HiRez decided to change it to a single pool in order to "lower queue times". I never had a queue longer than 2 minutes with the former system. (Not to mention that I hate the spamfest that is GA Payload.)

Newbies who are trying to make heads or tails of combat, class abilities, team dynamics, etc. are forced to learn new map mechanics every 10 minutes. They have to learn where objectives, corridors, and hotspots are on every new map. So rather than focusing on the intricacies of fighting, they have to figure out basic map layout. This lack of consistancy and familiarity delays gaining player skill, and as a result I don't get healed by medics.

And I'll make a little comment about GiantBomb's 33 minute "quicklook": the reviewer ran around with his secondary weapon the entire time. Enough said.

Global Agenda: An Overview

2010-02-01T23:21:00.003-05:00

In this post I’m only discussing the gameplay outside of Conquest, a mode that costs you a monthly fee but adds impact PvP to the game.

When you log into Global Agenda and pick a character, your character appears in “Dome City”, which is essentially a 3D lobby for setting up PvE missions, PvP matches, and Conquest. The game is in 3rd person, but in a dead-on camera orientation instead of an over-the-shoulder orientation.

The Player Character

Health. The standard measure of life. The game tells you how much life you have and lets you know how much damage you’re taking per shot by scrolling numbers above your head. Damage and healing numbers relevant to you scroll above the appropriate character.
Power. You don’t reload in this game and there are no ammo limits. You have a pool of “power” that you expend to fire different weapons and burn your jetpack. When you’re out of power, you can no longer fire the weapon or use your jetpack. Power regenerates when you’re not draining it.
Melee Weapon. There is no choice of melee weapon—at least from what I’ve seen. You always have one available to you, though.
Ranged Weapon. Different classes get different kinds of basic weapons. For example, medics can either use a standard assault rifle or a shorter-ranged poisoning gun; Recons can use SMGs or assault rifles; etc.
Specialty Weapon. Each class gets a unique selection of specialty weapons. Recons get sniper rifles, medics get their healing guns, assaults get rocket launchers and miniguns, among other weapons and gadgets.
Off-hand Abilities. You can equip three off-hand abilities. You can trigger each of them roughly once a minute. They offer class-unique effects, deployables, and area effects on friends and foes.
Jetpack. Everyone has access to a jetpack at all times.
Boost Ability. Each class has a boost ability that they can use after sustained excellent play. The effects of the boost are different for each class, but usually it’s a big help to your teammates and can alter the tide of battle.

The game features four character classes: assault, medic, robotics, and recon. The classes are vaguely similar in concept to Team Fortress 2 classes. Each class has three skill trees that you put points into as you level up the character. Characters do grow vertically in this game—though it’s a game of skill.

Assaults have high attack and defense. They use grenade launchers, miniguns, and rocket launchers to deal lots of damage. They have shields that allow them to become temporarily invulnerable to different kinds of damage.
Medics heal friends or use DoTs and debuffs to aid their allies in dispatching foes. They can either use their off-hands for improved healing and buffing, or they can gain access to poison auras and grenades to debuff and sap their enemies’ health.
Recons use stealth, sniper-rifles, mines, and bombs to sabotage enemies’ defensive positions and reap havoc on any lone player they can pick off.
Robotics kill and heal through the use of drones, turrets, forcefields and "medicrates”. Robotics are a utility class that offers tremendous strategic potential.

Player vs. Player

Without paying for a subscription, you can play five PvP modes and five difficulties of PvE missions. To play these modes, you queue up in Dome City much like you would for a battleground in World of Warcraft. The game then attempts to fit you with a relatively balanced team. Usually it does a good job. Occasionally the queue is just too unbalanced for the automatching system to deal with and you get lopsided teams—I’ve been happy with automatch so far, though.

The PvP modes are

Control. Teams vie for control over three points on the map. The team who controls the majority of the points gets victory points. The first team to a set number of victory points wins.
Demolition. Mot calls this “reverse CTF”. Each team has a “robot” that a player can man. The first side to get their robot to the other team’s base three times wins the match.
Breach. One team attacks and one defends. The defenders attempt to prevent the attacking side from capturing three critical points—one at a time. If the attackers can’t claim the next critical point within ten minutes, the defenders win.
Scramble. A critical point appears on the map at “random”. Teams fight for control of the point. When the point is captured, a new critical point appears a few seconds later and the process repeats. The first team to capture four of these points wins the game.
Payload. Two teams struggle for control of a cart on rails. The attacking team tries to move the cart to the defending team’s side of the map. There are two checkpoints along the way past which the defenders can’t push the cart once they’re reached by the attackers with the cart. If the defenders prevent the attackers from pushing the cart to the next checkpoint in 10ish minutes, the defenders win.

Player vs. Environment

[I initially wrote "enemy" instead of "environment" absent-mindedly. Thanks to Randy for pointing it out to me.]

PvE missions consist of four-man instances. I haven’t played enough of these to have a good idea for what variations occur. Generally you and your team fight your way through an mob-populated locale and face off against a random boss at the very end.

Players gain loot through PvE that can be used to craft. I’m not sure exactly how crafting fits into the game, because crafting didn’t seem to be doable outside of Conquest in the beta. I’ll report back on crafting at some later time.

Experience point gain seems to be balanced between PvE and PvP missions. Because you have a signfiicantly higher chance of success in PvE, the XP rewards are noticeably less.

Unique Issues and Features

You don’t jetpack around and shoot people at the same time. You need to switch to the jetpack in order to use it, so you can’t fly and fight at the same time. This creates an interesting mobility dynamic and gives a lot of room for player skill to show.
No reloading and no ammo! Power is tied to using any equipped item (aside from boosts and off-hands). This creates some unique trade-offs: do I jetpack away with my remaining power or try to kill my opponent? If I try to kill him I won’t have any juice left to jetpack away easily. This kind of opportunity cost built into the game adds a unique tactical dynamic.
A variety of off-hands leads to several unique and viable character builds. Every class has at least two viable builds.
You can change your build within a match. You aren’t locked into your character build when you enter a PvP match for the entire match; if you’re in an equipment zone, (basically, your “dropship” where you spawn by default) you can freely alter your character build.
Cooperative and competitive game modes keep gameplay interesting and diverse. Tired of PvP? Get together with your friends and take on the challenge of a PvE mission. If you’re tired of facing dumb bots, queue for a PvP match and enjoy a challenging match within a few minutes.

I will post more commentary on the game as the mood strikes me. It seems like not many of the bloggers I follow and that seem to follow this blog have been covering Global Agenda, so this overview post can act as an introduction to an otherwise unfamiliar game. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in a comment.

The Combat Addiction

2010-01-30T22:50:00.001-05:00

One of the first exercises we did in a fiction writers’ workshop I attended involved writing a story in which no one died. It seems like an easy constraint to work around, but through doing the exercise you realize that we rely heavily on death to dramatize events, even in everyday conversation. Removing such a tool from a writer’s repertoire complicates the process of building drama—you have to use more intricate characterizations to allow the characters to establish relationships that reverberate beyond the simple binary of life and death.

Death is cheap and overdone. Violence is the easiest and most dramatic way to kill—death confers its gravity to violence. Nothing is flashier, scarier, more engaging sans-context than violence. Cheap fun is violent fun.

The “explicit” culture of the west loves to show everything in brutal, washed-out, overacted detail. Flashy content draws eyeballs and eyeballs mean ad money. As movies and TV grow flashier, people grow accustomed to the flashiness and want more. Games follow the same trend.

Now that technology allows great special effects, directors and game developers no longer need to be inventive and implicitly communicate with their audience—they ship off a work request to 3D artists and animators who put together an explicit, flashy scene leaving little to the imagination.

Games default to being about combat because violence is the easiest way to give meaning to actions. It's the cheapest way to draw attention. Creating game mechanics to model combat also makes the most sense, because combat is the simplest and most dire form of dramatic conflict between two people. Conversations between characters are destined to be boring in games focused and fixated on combat, because a scene where someone’s death is all but guaranteed will make any conversation but the most interesting and well-written seem bland.

Read a great writer's work or watch a great movie and you won’t see rampant action and impending death as the focus of every scene. Good movies do not flag in the “boring parts” where guns are put away and characters engage in negotiations or simple conversation. Well-executed storytelling can include violence, but often doesn't need it--only the threat of violence or the tension of the interactions between well-defined characters.

The storytelling in so many videogames is so awful because of this overreliance on violence. It’s the easiest way to draw eyeballs and create drama, though, so we’re bound to see combat as the focus of the majority of games in the future.