TF2 and the Meaning of 'RPG'

Valve is promoting their next update for TF2. They are calling it a "classless" update because typically they will focus their efforts around a single (or pair as in Sniper vs. Spy) class. We are getting a new Arena map, Offblast, which I can't understand given that Arenas (one death Deathmatch) seem to be the least popular map types, and even competitive leagues will use standard capture-point maps, payload, or capture-the-flag maps. King of the Hill is also being added.

Instead of making witty and stereotypical remarks regarding the character of whatever class they are updating, Valve has decided to focus their attention on Hats. TF2 has a very crude item system which was originally designed to allow players to make strategic decisions. Weapons would have sidegrades which could be swapped in and out. The best (and possibly only good) example is the Medigun sidegrade: the Kritzkrieg. The standard Medigun slowly builds ÜberCharge which can be used at 100% to make the Medic and his target invincible for 8 seconds. The Kritzkrieg version instead gives the Medic and his target guaranteed critical hits for 8 seconds.

Hats are vanity items which players acquire at random times and are extremely rare (I don't have a single one). They can be swapped like weapons, changing your headwear. Because they are so rare, and often hilarious, players want hats and will comment whenever someone is wearing one. Valve is, of course, playing on that social dynamic:

Throughout history, men have worn hats as a way of showing how much better they are than other men. “I buy hats,” a behatted man seems to say. “I am better than you.”

I don't know who is writing all this, but I find it to be quite entertaining. Here are a few gems someone (Blargh) in my TF2 community posted:

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/populace/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/hats/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/war/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/geographic_lumps/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/advertisement/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/barbary/

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/enigmatical/

My favorite being the one about hats:

SMELLY UNFORTUNATE: 'Please, sir.... May I have a hat?'

GENTLE MANNE of LEISURE: 'A-ha-ha! You are as PRESUMPTUOUS as your are POOR and IRISH. Tarnish notte the majesty of my TOWER of HATS.'

His COMPANIONE: 'I have maney hats also but did not bringe them.'

I'll bring up the question which has been talked about ad nauseum: how many items does it take to get to the center of an RPG? TF2 has: role-based, tactic combat; items and inventory. Do we need stats other than HP? Weapon ammo can be considered Mana. Are achievements and weapon sidegrades character progression? I would say 'no' considering they are designed to be situational or support different playstyles.

I think it boils down to persistence. DotA and other MOBAs have everything listed above aside from explicit character progression persistence. When the game ends, you start over. If you didn't start over, but played these games with heroes at max level, then would it be an RPG?

What about a story? Do we need a creative team to dream up some world and its history? Single-player RPGs would be incredibly lackluster without a story (would you play FF7 for just the battles?). But is player-generated history enough to support the story requirement?

RPG seems to be one of those really ambiguous terms, like "fun". We know what it is when we see it, but can't describe its components.

Combat of Pure Strategy (Pt. 1: Introduction; Melee)

Mot introduced me to a game called GOPS (short for Game Of Pure Strategy). It’s an exceedingly simple game, but the results of the game are determined purely by strategy. It’s one of the few games that involves absolutely no element of chance while remaining non-deterministic.

I’ll give a general description of GOPS before continuing; if you’re familiar with the game, feel free to skip this paragraph. GOPS is best played by two players. The game pieces are three sets of tokens with value markings on them. Usually tokens are marked with values that start at 1 and increase in a regular fashion (it’d be interesting to have token values increase according to a power law or some other distribution—I haven’t experimented with it before). Each set of tokens is identical to the others. Each player claims a set of tokens, leaving one set left over. The left over set constitute a stock that will be contested by the two players through a simple bidding process. Bidding proceeds by a token being selected out of the stock at random, then both players play a token (simultaneously) of the value they wish to bid. Whoever bids higher claims the contested token. The tokens that the players bid are discarded. Play continues thus, with players bidding on each token in succession and the higher bidder claiming the contested token, until the stock is exhausted. Once the stock is exhausted (the players’ tokens will be exhausted at this point, as well), each player totals the values of the tokens they have won. The player with the highest total wins the game.

If my description doesn’t make sense, feel free to check out the Wikipedia article. Or this.

Several months ago, Mot and I had a series of discussions about fitting GOPS as a combat system for an MMO. I think it’d be great for melee combat, and with some modification it may also work for magic and ranged combat (I’ll cover ranged/magic in a later post).

No random numbers need apply. The system would be relatively simple, as well. Show the combatants the tokens they’re bidding on and give them a time limit within which they must select the token they wish to bid. Better melee characters can receive bonuses for winning certain kinds of tokens. There could be special tokens as well that could be injected into the contested slot (the player would press a hotkey to queue abilities into the contested slot in place of whatever token would otherwise have appeared) by either player in an attempt to perform a special attack.

Combat would be constituted of contests which are organized into rounds. Bidding on one contested token is one contest. Each contest would have a time limit of 5-10 seconds. Sets of 5 contests constitute a round of combat. Whoever wins the round (whoever has the higher total value of tokens won) deals damage to the opponent and performs whichever of their own abilities they had won during the round. A one-on-one combat may take 5-8 rounds depending on who is fighting. This would be slower-paced than most MMOs, but this is not a problem because I aim to emphasize tactical decision-making and not rely on twitch mechanics to keep the players aware.

Why have combat of pure strategy?

• It reduces the role of chance to a bare minimum.


• It gives players a good reason to pay attention to combat.


• It is non-trivial to win a combat.


• It is entirely based on the strategic thinking of the players—you lose because you make mistakes or misjudgments, not because the dice weren’t in your favor.


• It creates micro-level tactical and psychological contests that are missing from most MMORPGs. It’s very satisfying to read your opponent’s bids and expend as few resources as possible to beat them.

Potential weaknesses:

• Combat may become too long.


• Players don’t necessarily want to have to pay attention to combat on a second-by-second basis.


• The first round or two is a feeling-out period where the results may be not strongly correlated to skill (the players are still figuring out what the other’s strategy might be). If players don’t fight one another often enough or if players switch targets rapidly, the draw of the GOPS system is severely weakened.

I think it’s at least worth prototyping a pure strategy combat system. I see a tremendous upside and a lot of appeal for players who enjoy skillful play but still want an RPG-like experience.

The World As I See It

Crafting seems to be one of those "Love it" or "Leave it" features of MMORPGs. Some players use crafting to motivate play (like me), and others see it as a complete waste of time. Regardless if you enjoy crafting, you can't deny the importance of IRL crafting.

Everything is crafted: the monitor you are using to read this right now; the keyboard I used to type it; the meal you just ate; the machines used to gather the ingredients for that meal; and so on. Every good has a story. It has a long list of people responsible for getting the item to you. Everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Lee Kun-hee to Henry Ford had a part to play in the creation of my monitor.

Human manufacturing is at the center of prosperity (which is why many Americans have issues with manufacturing going "overseas"). A process is applied to raw materials and resources in order to turn those resources into something of even more value. Businesses hope to sell finished goods for more money than the resources used to make that good, i.e. make a profit.

If a virtual world hopes to be a microcosm for the real world or hopes to have deep player-social interactions, then a virtual economy is needed. The heart of this economy should be a crafting system. The system should be infused through all aspects of the world. It should not be an afterthought, a modular widget plugged into the game, nor a bone thrown the players to placate their cries for a crafting system. It should be the grand motivator--the reason players log on and want to progress their characters; the reason players form guilds and fight for resources.

Right about now, you should be imagining me as Tyler Durden, explaining the world as I see it. But pervasive crafting systems are not that outlandish. EVE is its economy. I bet you could delete the AH from WoW and no one would care (except Gelvon). Of course I'm being absurd and dramatic; it does have its merits, and there are plenty of people who adore WoW's economy. There are also plenty of people who enjoy autoerotic asphyxiation.

The crafting system which I have been working on uses EVE as its base. I say that unabashed. EVE has research, invention, factories, manufacturing, resources, and finished goods. I'm going to take it one step further. Not only does this system have Blueprint (AKA Recipe) creation and limited use contracting, but the same kind of research and contracting can be done with processes and technologies. And I would like players to be able to name the Technologies, Processes, and Goods they invent, rather than the designers. Yes, I know I run into the issue of having the PEN15 technology and the NUTSAXLOL finished good, but if I make players work for original discoveries, they might understand the importance of the situation and rise to the occasion. If not, then there is always the UPDATE statement in SQL.

My next post will hopefully contain all the details, rather than those useless generalities above.

From Absurd Gamism to Moderate Simulationism

If you’re unfamiliar with the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist Theory, please read the Wikipedia article before continuing.

I describe the current state of MMOs as unabashed absurd gamism. The game rules are so strict and so vaguely analogous to real life that the player is forced to suspend disbelief ad absurdum. The metaphors in MMOs are stretched so thin as to be entirely transparent. There’s not even the vaguest notion of realism, not even a modest smear of grit to mar the pristine landscapes that are otherwise dotted with any number of mediocre models there for the player’s pile of pixels to get stuck on.

The learning experience in MMORPGs amounts to becoming accustomed to the ludicrously tiny sliver of actions that your character can perform to effect a millionth of the tiny part of the world that is actually interactive and not just painted adamantium in the shapes of houses, mountains, trees, and terrain. There is a lot of room for MMORPGs to grow into a space that computers are built specifically to handle: simulation.

We have, at our fingertips, machines that can do on the order of 2^30 operations per second (and that’s only counting one CPU), yet we plink around straight-jacketed in game worlds about as rich as a street urchin with a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars to his name. And it hasn’t gotten better since EQ. Instead of daunting worlds full of lethality and trials, we are confined to playpens full of brightly colored balls and clowns who mirthfully caper about to entertain us. It is entirely within our power to harness the capability of modern machines to do the complex calculations necessary to allow the player to enjoy a significantly more interactive and realistic world.

I’m not saying we should force players to piss in the woods every two hours or risk soiling their undergarments—I’m suggesting we build games that allow players to harness their creativity and knowledge of the real world to solve in-game problems. And if the player fails, he may actually learn something about the world he actually lives in (as well as the world his character lives in). Solutions do not need to be esoteric processes labored over by some poor intern. Just like in a tabletop roleplaying game, individual players can use what they know of the environment to come up with a solution.

Even if we do not open up the entire world to the player’s whims, we can at least aim to make combat more realistic and interesting. Perhaps it’s not best to make it as lethal as it is in real life, but at least we can all the players to use terrain, obstacles, and other features of the gameworld to their advantage—not the circle-strafing nonsense that goes on in games like Darkfall, but a more sensible system where positioning is crucial and in-battle tactics amount to more than what hotkeys you pound into the ground in what order. Shamus Young of Twenty-Sided wrote a great article where he proposed one such system.

One of my mission statements is to move MMOs from absurd gamism to moderate simulationism. That means making the game world more like a world and less like a set of gimmicks arranged to be quickly used up and discarded. I believe that this will be one of the many faces of the MMO revolution.

The Curse of Innovation

It’s difficult to innovate well. It requires smart people who have vision and strong analytical skills. But if you innovate well, your chances of success skyrocket. You harness the power of the long tail of gamers who want the new kind of play that your game offers. Differentiation is critical in markets cluttered with the detritus that the internet allows to accumulate, and strong innovation is the strongest differentiator.

Keen makes a stilted and awkward attack on innovation in one of his recent posts. I’d like to rebuff it here because I feel like his vitriol towards innovation is almost a direct attack on what this blog stands for—I cannot leave his attacks unanswered, especially when they are so confused and weak. I’m especially concerned because of the support he received in the offending post’s comments, so I feel that a long-form response is justified.

(I’m going to take on the more forceful of Keen’s arguments, because, quite honestly, I think the weaker version that is more agreeable is only agreeable because it says nothing notable. There’s no need to argue about stating that developers should stop making “bad” games.)

Keen’s Crippled Conjecture

Keen’s attack on innovation relies on a very flawed conception of how games are designed and implemented. By showing that his assumptions are mistaken, I will dispense with his argument.

Keen suggests that a game mechanic can be in one of two states: core game mechanics that are proved fun and worth perfecting in future games; peripheral game mechanics that are still experimental and should be subordinated during development to the core mechanics. Keen uses these classifications to make the statement that the former should not be compromised in pursuit of the latter. According to Keen, developers should not innovate if they have not perfected the core game mechanics.

There are several gaping flaws in the assumption that underlie this position.

1. How do you define the core game mechanics of a genre? To define a core set of game systems that are intrinsic to a game genre is far from trivial and deserves significant study.


2. Not all game concepts fit neatly within a genre.


3. What about innovative core mechanics?


4. How do you ensure your core mechanics actually work? If we’re not going to mercilessly copy every single formula, stat, talent tree, and advancement nugget from previous games we can ignore this, but if we stray at all from exactly what has been proven to work, we have to prove the validity and balance of our “standard” system all over again.


5. It’s impossible to find a “core mechanic” with which everyone is satisfied—without such mechanics, there is no bedrock of solid design constructs for us to perfect and later build innovation upon (according to Keen’s theory).


6. Not everyone agrees on what is a mistake and what works. Different kinds of gameplay are fun for different people. What is fun for players is generally what works and we all know how subjective, whimsical, and fickle fun is.


7. Perfection in games is impossible. Different games are perfect for different players. Aiming for perfection either means diluting the character of your game so it appeals to a massive audience or you need to know exactly the kind of player you want to have fun in your game and maximize that player’s fun. Both of these choices are impossible: the first because it’s impossible to perfect a game for everyone and the second because it’s impossible to narrow the audience of a game down that much without targeting exactly one player.

These seven flaws illustrate the weakness of Keen’s assumptions. His deductions made based on those assumptions cannot hold water.

The Source of His Sordid Suspicions

After reading Keen’s post, I quickly understood why he held such an opinion. It’s a simple case of response bias. Keen plays games that have some chance of interesting him—this immediately filters out 90% of games, most of which are worthless clones with little to redeem them. Keen is biased towards playing innovative games, because innovation is more interesting than faithful cloning. The spectacular failures among these innovative games pop out like 300-pound tumor on a 150-pound man. It’s easy to remember the games that innovated but were let down by a some decisive lack in design. It’s much harder to remember the games that didn’t innovate and were entirely pedestrian because they blur together into one ignominious mass of boredom.

It’s all a matter of what makes Keen—and probably you, too—care about games’ failures.

Why won’t people care that your game failed?

• No one knows about your game (or you have a very small playerbase).
• Your game is pedestrian (or worse) and is a glorified rehash.

Why will people care that your game failed?

• Your game is hyped (or you have a significant playerbase).
• Your game is a significant evolutionary step forward.
• You promise innovation, but your game does not innovate.
• You promise innovation, but your innovations fail.

Learning from Opinions

I find reprehensible the dismissive attitude towards opinions—especially when, as a result, people selectively dismiss opinions when there is disagreement. We’d all like to think that we know facts when we see them and don’t need to give credence to the opinions of others in a field like game design, but we really do not have enough information and experiential data to support fact claims. Subjectivity and opinion is at the core of game design: what can be more subjective than the concept of fun? Fun doesn’t exist without an experience to host it and those experiences don’t exist without beings to have them—this is subjectivity at its most obvious.

The subjectivity of a statement or concept does not prevent us from gaining useful information from that statement. Dismissing all opinions because they are opinions, and therefore are useless to discourse, is sacrificing the immense amount of data that is held within what caused the opinion to be held. Each opinion must be held for some reason (although asking for details may lead beyond the point where, as Hilary Putnam put it, one “turns his spade”) and understanding these reasons will offer us insight, or will give us a reasonable cause to dismiss the opinion.

Of course, opinions that are purely a matter of taste are generally less useful because they are not reasoned opinions—their causes are entirely biological, genetic, or due to other permanently subjective or non-intellectual factors. For example, it is of no use to argue over the tastiness of mustard, because no matter how much we argue over it our opinion of mustard will not change. Similarly, if you simply do not like certain game settings in a visceral way, you aren’t going to start liking them even after extremely detailed debate because your opinion is a matter of taste and thus irrational. Debating over taste always gets us nowhere—but we cannot avoid the fact that we all have tastes. We can use our knowledge of our own tastes and the tastes of others to inform our judgments regarding if their opinions and ours will align. (This touches on a basic issue I have with game reviews: what exactly is the objective of a review supposed to be? It’s impossible to rate a game “objectively” but without objective metrics we’re stuck in the land of tastes and judgment calls.)

There’s a lot to learn from other people’s opinions, but only if we have some knowledge about the person’s tastes and their experiences. To hedge against unfamiliar readers getting nothing out of our opinions, we should back them up with our best shot at expressing the reasons why we hold our opinions, including what objective perceptions and facts on which we’re basing our opinions.

Cutting Down the Role of Chance: Loot

There are two key factors in making looting fun—we shouldn’t trample these in our attempt to remove randomness:

The first is Variability. In the case of very low variability, loot becomes routine and uninteresting. The potential for rare or unique items is limited by either the number of rare or unique NPCs in the game world or the number of high-skill crafters. High variability can lead to overpowered or useless loot being the majority of what is dropped; this can spell havoc for power growth schemes and leads to looting becoming a very cheap, high pay-off slot machine.

The second is Appropriateness, which can be split into two factors: appropriateness for the player doing the looting and appropriateness for NPC being looted. Players get excited when they find loot that is appropriate for their character—here we encounter the first kind of appropriateness. Loot that offers an upgrade from the character’s current equipment (without breaking power growth balance) or that offers a different kind of ability to the character is viewed as appropriate. Loot should also be appropriate to the NPC carrying it—a bear should drop a bear pelt, not a sword.

So how do we remove the role of chance from loot and what does that do for us?

An easy and very intuitive way to handle NPC equipment and possessions: give each item a 1 in X chance of being on a given NPC or NPC type, then specify an offset value for each (this value can be anything as long as the offsets are different). Start a spawn counter for each NPC type and give the NPC each item when spawn_counter + offset is divisible by the X above. X can be modified depending on the kind of players that have been hunting the NPCs (if the NPCs are intelligent enough to make such a modification)—perhaps a camp of human bandits will start spawning with more fire-resistant gear if a player has been ravaging them with fireballs for the past half-hour.

At first, this approach seems sufficient, but we’ve made assumptions that aren’t necessarily true in an MMO. Looting isn’t an entirely blind process. The player might know loot rates and so kill off a lot of creatures that drop certain items, greatly unbalancing the totals of important items available for future players to loot off of mobs. Also, there may be some mechanic that allows the player to see what kind of loot the NPC is holding (for instance, if the NPC has a giant glowing sword, a player would be more likely to go after the NPC because of the higher reward). The counter-based solution is good for generating your starting NPC population’s loot, but the system has no awareness of what’s already in the world. If players only kill off the NPCs they know have certain items, the drop rate will stray because the existing population has drop rates that are effectively significantly lower. To counteract this, the system needs to keep track of the loot currently on NPCs in the world and spawn NPCs with or without the loot in order to keep the distribution on or near target. This certain doesn’t need to manifest itself in unique mobs respawning instantly after they’re killed, though; I mainly imagine this solution applied to make keep quests doable without excess grinding.

We can also use the way combat resolves to modify the loot enemies will drop. When different kinds of attacks land on the opponent, they can lead to different effects on the opponent’s equipment. A fireball would burn away cloth armor or melt metal armor, for instance, leaving nothing worth taking in the former case or only some metal scraps in the latter case. The more times the opponent is hit by standard weapons, the poorer condition his armor is going to be in. You can imagine a myriad of attack-item reactions that can lead to loot being lost or transformed. Suddenly, spells that debilitate the opponent without affecting their belongings will be a crucial tool in a mage’s arsenal and allow them to be more than just glass cannon DPS.

If we implement these two policies, we not only increase the role of player decision-making in what loot is dropped (and also encourage a diversity of effect types in order to preserve or destroy certain items), we also prevent the ever-annoying problem where the random number generator gives you a fifty percent chance of getting that quest item, but the coin keeps landing on tails instead of the needed heads. We certainly don’t have to compromise any variability or appropriateness in the process.