King of the Internet

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

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.