The Rise of Magus Version 1.5

Well it's been a while since I posted about the game, but The Rise of Magus is back! The new version 1.5 of the game includes a huge number of fixes and improvements, as well as unlockable content that extends the game. The truth is, this is the game that I envisioned releasing when I first started working on the project, but after almost a year of work I decided to wrap things up and release The Rise of Magus at the conclusion of the main story arc.

I included, however, a hidden item, the Hero's Medal, which when found displayed the following message: "You've found the Hero's Medal! This unlocks something the designer hasn't added yet, but will." I assumed no one would get quite into the game enough to ever find this thing. I was wrong. I got emails and saw forum discussions postulating theories about about what it was the item might unlock, and wondering when the update would be released. So I went and added "one more thing" that gets unlocked by the Hero's Medal. Then I added one more thing. Then another thing got added somehow. Before I knew it I was revamping the entire game and adding a second game on top of it. This process was disrupted for a long time by distractions from the real world, but now I've finally added all of the "one more" things I ever intended to, and I think the game is ready to be played.

I feel like I should have a brief list of changes somewhere, and my blog is as good a place as any, so here's the short version:

• The game is now built in Game Maker 8. The good news is that this means the game loads and runs much faster than before, even though there are more things to be loaded. It still takes up a fair amount of memory, though, and GM8 doesn't give me many options for reducing memory usage, aside from simply making the game smaller. The other downside with GM8 is that it broke all kinds of random things in the game, which took a while to fix. But I guess that was only a downside for me.
• Nifty icon! It was always a little sad to have the game represented by a featureless red sphere, so now it shows a statue of Magus. You can take pride in having this on your desktop.
• The menu now has music. This seems to have a bigger psychological effect than I expected.
• There is now a level cap (30), with a nice extra health boost acquired when this level is reached. This provides something against which to balance to hardest, optional parts of the game.
• Enemy behavior is improved. For instance, they are much better at walking up and down stairs and around obstacles. The new content also features whole new levels of enemy AI.
• The attack collision system has been completely redone. This has eliminated a slew of (admittedly rare) glitches involving hitting enemies. Most notably, from time to time enemies used to take damage from an attack without getting "hit" by it, meaning they wouldn't stagger and could survive at negative health. This doesn't happen anymore.
• Level layouts have been subtly altered, in particular to make jumping about more forgiving at the beginning of the game before players have any idea what they're doing.
• The save system has been updated. Now all bosses offer a "retry" option on death, circumventing the need to reload from the last save point and helping avoid the "oh crap I forgot to save" problem. The downside is that save files from the original version aren't compatible with version 1.5, but you wanted to start from the beginning anyway, right? Actually, this downside was kind of intentional, because allowing players to load the previous version's save files would produce all manner of strange glitches.
• An option to return to Bekkler's Castle has been added after the Bekkler fight, so that players have the opportunity to go back and purchase upgrades and prepare for the Epilogue battle.
• Volume controls have been added, and are controlled with Page Up and Page Down. The volumes are High, Low, and Mute (High is the default volume). I guess this makes the game easier to play surreptitiously at work...hypothetically.
• Hints have been added to a couple places where players often got confused. These hints take the form of a sparkly blue light that appears if the player passes the same room multiple times without finding the intended exit or is unable to figure out how to progress from a room for a long time. Experienced players might not ever run into them.
• Pedants will be pleased to know that the Ruby Sword is now the only sword that any knight wields that appears red-colored.
• It is no longer possible anywhere to jump out of the game through the ceiling unless the ceiling is an intended exit.
• The Hero's Medal, rather than doing nothing, now unlocks new content called "The Duel" from the Extras menu. The picture at the top of this post offers a hint as to what "The Duel" is.
• Completion of The Duel unlocks additional playable content, which in turn unlocks more, but I don't want to give away the surprise as to what this content consists of.
• Many, many changes were made to make the controls smoother, sprites and text cleaner looking, glitches unglitched, and enemies and attacks more balanced.

The short, short version is that the game is more epic and more immersive, and it's hard to put into words how I feel about it now, so you should really just go download it from here:

http://silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus

-Silent Ellipsis

Categories: Gameplay Instance and Sequence

When trying to categorize and describe gameplay experiences, there's one huge difference in experience that I've been thinking about lately, which is the difference between an isolated and repeatable gameplay experience and between the long-term experience of progressing a game.

The former experience I think I'll refer to as a gameplay instance. Note that I'm making up these terms as I go along, so if someone has better ones for me to use, let me know. A gameplay instance includes the decisions involved in completing a specific task, usually in a single gameplay session - like "take the opponent's king" or "roll up the largest ball possible." As I'm describing it, gameplay instances are layered on top of each other - completing the task usually involves completing minor objectives along the way ("lure the opponent out of his defensive position" or "get onto that hill so I can pick up the stuff on top of it").

So with a definition of an "instance" that broad, what is left? The unspecific goal - "progress the game." Usually progressing the game involves completing specific tasks, but there's a separate experience that emerges out of these specific tasks that is more than their sum. In a Final Fantasy game, each battle is a gameplay instance, and navigating a dungeon is a gameplay instance, but then there's the motivation to see what happens next driving you even when you're tired of killing your 300th zombie dragon. That's the gameplay sequence at work.

So while most games these days include both kinds of gameplay experiences, they emphasize each to different degrees. Games far on the instance side include almost all board games, and games like Left 4 Dead that emphasize repeatable mutiplayer experiences. On the sequence-heavy side of things we have adventure games and interactive fiction. Between the extremes we have most modern games, which include overcoming challenges as part of an ongoing progress toward an uncertain final goal.

So I intended to say more, but I think I'll just stick to this for now and come back to it. Generally speaking, the point is that figuring out early on what kind of experience you want to provide and focusing on elements to provide that is important, and among other things you should figure out to what extent you want to emphasize a instanced or sequential experience.

Chess and Resource Management

My local Starbucks has a chess board sitting around, so I decided to play against myself. Since this gives me perfect predictive power about what my opponent is going to do, it obviously removes some of the standard elements of Chess, but there was one thing I realized when playing it: Chess is first and foremost about mobilization. That is, you begin with all pieces in play, but since most of them are behind a wall of pawns to start with, they don't immediately threaten your opponent. The way you gain options is by moving them into positions where they can form threats.

On reflection, this is more similar than I'd thought to modern strategy games and their treatment of resource management. Think of Magic, where I've chosen cards to place into my deck - the cards are there, but they're not in a usable state, they're not active threats, until I draw them (and have enough mana available to use them). Even if I play an RTS game, say Starcraft, I have a potential army that becomes realized when I gather enough resources to build it, and the question I constantly have to balance is how long I should spend mustering threats before I try to use them - if I'm playing well, I should attack as soon as I think I have a force my opponent won't be able to defend against. This is the same kind of strategy I'm using in Chess - I'm trying to move my units into a position from which they can simultaneously threaten my opponent, and as soon as I think I can launch an attack my opponent can't defend against, I will.

So revelation of the day: mobilizing units and building them are, from the perspective of their impact on strategy, extremely similar (as long as it takes a similar amount of effort). The big difference, of course, is that my units can still be used to defend in many situations before I've moved them at all. If you like, however, you can imagine these situations as my opponent bringing the units into play (like if my opponent plays a card that results in me drawing new cards, or allows me to respond by playing one). It also suggests a certain consistency between the way classic and modern games conceive of strategy.

Just thought that was interesting.

On Short Games: Canabalt

Firstly, I see that I've been away for a month now - a variety of tumultuous things have happened in my life recently, so I don't feel too guilty about it.

So anyway, from Raph's Website I just got the link to Canabalt and it got my thinking about short games. You see, the game is very cool - it procedurally generates levels, has nice art, and is capable of producing a "that's badass" experience with simple presentation and single-button interaction. However, it is also immensely unsatisfying, because once you get over the "ah, that's cool" reaction, there's not much else to the game. It's not simply that the game is too short or needs more features - by concept, the game cannot provide anything more than it does.

The issue here is that it takes time for me to fall in love with a game, and even when I like short or experimental games, I never really fall in love with them. This troubles me because I care about art, and I care about games, and I'd like these two concerns to overlap at some point, and it seems that experimental games are an important part of getting there.

Maybe it's just that no one has hit quite the right chord with me to make me fall in love with such a short game, but I don't think that's quite it. The problem is that games, I think, need to allow for exploration, and if I feel like I get it right away, then there's nothing to explore. Exploration here doesn't simply refer to having a big map to cover, though that can work (I'm looking at you, Bethesda games!). A player can explore a game mechanic, or different strategies, or possible narrative paths, or a single narrative path, for that matter.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from making experimental or short games, by any means, but I do worry that games that don't at least provide a couple hours worth of exploration (whether its by having a two-hour long linear path, repeatably simple gameplay with deep strategy, or just lots of stuff to discover in a virtual space) are ultimately limited in how deeply they can affect us.

That is, for games and art to converge, I think we may need to have larger-scale experiements.

Preliminary Eternal Poison

Because the only way to improve on an awkward title is to add more multi-syllabic words!


I bought Eternal Poison yesterday in a moment of weakness. I realized I hadn't bought a game in two months, which I decided was probably unhealthy, and the game had several solid points in its favor:

1) Nifty cover art. (see above)

2) It's put out by Atlus.

3) On the back, it advertises that you can bind enemy's souls. Pretty cool, but then it elaborates that afterwards you can "enslave" them or "sacrifice them for profit." Yeah, this is pretty much the exact same thing that made me buy Folklore (which I don't regret). It's almost like these crazy Japanese people have figured out the keywords that will make me buy anything they make. Almost.

So anyway, I've played about a half-hour of the game so far, but already have some commentary. Firstly, it definitely delivers on the promise on the back of the box - you play a witch who runs around binding demons into servitude, which is awesome. You also have an ally (familiar?) who is a magical wolf with antlers on cold fire. Somehow it doesn't seem quite as absurd when you see it, though.

The other side of the proverbial coin is that...the UI is kind of clunky. This is honestly kind of shocking from a moderate-budget strategy RPG. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the likes of Disgaea, but I feel like absolutely everything I want to do just has two-or-three-too-many button presses involved. What's worse, every time you attack an enemy, it cuts to this 3D environment and plays out the attack animation in close up. That sounds really cool, except that it takes a good 5 seconds to load the animation, another 5 seconds to load back the tactical map, and up to 10 seconds of attacking animation when all I'm just using a normal attack to finish off a mook. If it were, for instance, a special animation when I score a critical hit, or a special animation the first time I attack the enemy leader, then I'd be fine with that, but not every single time anything on the map does anything. That's just excessive. Fortunately, there seems to be an option to turn these animations off (I didn't know what they meant by "animations off" in the menu screen when I first ran across it, and certainly didn't expect that I'd want to actually come back and turn them off).

Finally, after each battle, it asks you if you want to save your game, and if you do, then it returns you to the main menu screen. This isn't a huge deal, since you can just load the game to continue, but the whole "save and continue" idea has been around long enough that failing to include it is kind of befuddling. It's almost like these design choices were made by someone in the early 90's who used an arcane technique to communicate with a modern team of developers.

All in all the clunkiness is outweighed by the personality of the game so far, and I'm definitely going to continue playing, but it boggles my mind that a game would ship in a condition where in a half-hour I can come up with a multiple-page-long list of obvious and easy improvements. Then again, I guess that's why I believe there's a market for people like me in the first place.

-Silent Ellipsis

FFIV OC Remix

First thing's first, it's my blog's birthday today! Happy birthday, Dreamscape.

Next on the agenda - I've been listening to the OC Remix of the FFIV soundtrack. You can grab it here. I don't know why they have Yang on the cover art and not Cid/Pallom&Porom/Tellah/Edward, but whatever. It covers the whole of FFIV and is pretty faithful (though obviously with more techno beats and electric guitars than the original had).

Personally, it's kind of hit-and-miss: some of the tracks are awesome, like Tundra of Dwarves, Evoking the Dawn, or Somewhere to Hide, and some are less awesome (I'm not going to name names). The Zeromus music seems to encapsulate this by being both awesome and bad at the same time. It's like they had a good song going, and then ended up cooking it too long and burnt it. There's also seems to be an implicit admission that the song has something wrong with it, since there's another version included by most of the same people (and a couple by other people). The second attempt is somehow worse, though. And by somehow, I mean because what passes for evil villain speech when executed with a death metal voice sounds simply absurd when executed with a voice that sounds vaguely human.

Despite my being frustrated with it, I keep listening to the Zeromus music, and it reminds me of something - writing good music is really hard. This might seem obvious, but every once in a while I do stop and wonder if I like the music I do simply because I gave it time to grow on me. This is more likely to pop in my head if I go for a while listening only to music I like (and thus have little standard of comparison). So I find it really fascinating to listen to things that are close to being awesome - the "less awesome" tracks here aren't really bad, they're just unbalanced in one way or another, and when I listen to them a couple times I feel like I can start to pick out exactly where they started going wrong.

Anyway, despite my having some reservations, I recommend you download the music (it's free, afterall!).

-Silent Ellipsis

Crazy Ideas for Crazy Times: Pre-Pre-Ordering

There's a very relevant and well-put article on Jeff's blog about funding for indie game development. The summary is this: the situation looks bleak. On most platforms, financially survivable options are surprisingly narrow. And yet AAA games are trending towards larger budgets and banking on blockbusters, which means there's very little room for "risky" development.

The article also addresses a recent proposal by Gabe Newell of Valve: public funding for games. Basically, instead of starting with publishers, the game begins with funding from the games community, that can choose what kind of games get developped and potentially get a return on their investment. Jeff doesn't think this sounds like a particularly viable option, pointing out, among other things, that if every player is an investor, they may have legal rights relative to the developer that would get, well, messy.

In my opinion, the public funding idea is really interesting, but it seems like the wrong part of it is getting emphasized - if I put down $50 for a cool game idea to be developed, it's not because I'm hoping for a return on my investment, it's because I want the game to be made! That's giving me my $50 of value - I don't also need to get my money back two years later (from what, selling copies to the fans...the one who provided the money to create it in the first place?)

The way to make an idea like this more viable is to focus on the part where players want cool games and are theoretically willing to pay to have them. Here's my variant: pre-pre-ordering. The idea is very simple, and similar to what was proposed above - players want to see cool games made, so they're willing to put down money to have them made, but trying to make it a standard investment relationship is messy, so instead they put down money just to own the game when it's made, on the condition that it actually does get made.

That is, the game developer comes up with a cool idea, maybe some concept art/writing/prototype mechanics, and presents them to the potential players. If the players want the game to be made, they basically agree "I will buy this game if it is made" (which is legally binding, like saying you'll pay for an item on ebay is). Now if a sufficient amount of "potential" funding is raised to make the game, then the players' credit cards are charged, and production begins. If not, then the players keep their money. Of course, once the game is completed, those who pre-pre-ordered get sent a copy without having to pay again.

There is still a question about what happens if a developer fails to deliver a game. In theory they would have to return as much of the money as they can, but it's theoretically impossible for them to return all of it, and this only needs to happen a few times for players to become disillusioned with the system. An alternative setup is that the players aren't charged anything until the game is actually released - in this case, the pre-pre-orders are used to secure immediate funding from another source (and in theory, it should be easy to do so if you're guaranteed a certain amount of revenue).

The second question is, do players who pre-pre-order get some kind of say in the development of the game? Generally speaking, I don't want players to be making major design decisions (for that matter, I don't want publishers making major design decisions), but I do think the model would benefit from giving players a vote in certain aspects of development. This could also be something that costs extra: you can pre-pre-order at the basic cost of purchasing the game, or offer more to be able to vote on community decisions, get guaranteed access to beta testing (or even alpha testing), get your name in the credits, etc.

So that's the idea, minus a marketable name.

-Silent Ellipsis

Why MMO?

Massively has an article up about the trend in MMOs to allow for easier and easier solo play. This hearkens back to a post I made a while back on the same topic, but it still seems like most of the other arguments I'm seeing on the topic travel in the opposite direction of mine. The Massively question is: Given an MMO, why make it more single-player? For me the question is: Given a game concept, why make it an MMO?

I'm not uniformly against MMOs or anything - I actually believe that they have a huge amount of untapped potential. The keyword, though, is "untapped." The kind of gameplay we see in existing MMOs is, by and large, very similar to what you can get in a single-player game (or a merely-multiplayer game, like Neverwinter Nights, Halo, Mario-Kart, or anything that has less than 100 people in the server at once). However, in an MMO the content is more strictly gated, the space between levels is artificially extended, and you can't have any effect on the game world. So I guess what I mean is they're watered-down versions of single-player games.

So what I see isn't an evolution of MMOs, but rather a presumption that MMOs are the standard, causing them to open up to audiences that weren't originally interested. So again, if the game is trying to appeal to people who want to play solo, then why is it an MMO? The actual answer seems obvious when I'm in a cynical mood: because MMOs are trendy and offer high profitability. The profitability portion comes from the fact that you can make more money from each committed user in an online game than you could by selling them a traditional game for a set price - if addicted they'll keep shelling out. Also, online games are relatively immune to piracy, because in addition to a working, hacked version of the client software, you need an actual server to play on.

That said, MMOs are a very risky investment, for several reasons (ooh, time for a list, I love this part):

1) Since standard MMOs rely on being addictive, it's not enough to convince someone to play it - you have to convince them to live your MMO.

2) Since MMOs rely on being addictive, most players won't play more than one at a time. That means that most of your potential audience is already occupied playing WoW, so you need to give them a reason to play your game instead of another (whereas a player who bought Halo 3 can, and probably will, also buy Gears of War 2).

3) They're friggin multiplayer. Even though many of the developers at this point have a lot of experience making multiplayer online games, it's still no easy feat to make the game work properly, and this fact makes both programming and designing the game harder, which is final nail in the coffin of anyone who dreams of making a low-budget MMO.

And since they're so high-risk, clearly the publisher is going to try and minimize risk by insisting that the title is as similar to existing MMOs as possible.

So is the tradeoff worthwhile? It certainly is if you're Activision-Blizzard, but given the sheer number of MMOs in development, I can't help thinking that many of these developers would have been better off with a different strategy.

-Silent Ellipsis

Japanese and American Hero Stories

This post is going to be about an over-generalization, but one that I think is interesting: a couple differences in popular representations of heroes in Japan and America.

Firstly, order of operations. I've noticed that one stereotypical anime/video game hero story in Japan goes something like this: There is a group of powerful/supernatural beings X, which threaten civilians/humans; one special member of X, who happens to also be unusually powerful, stands up against his group in order to protect the civilians/humans.

This "special" member of X is often half-human, or has a relationship with a human/civilian that is the foundation of their dissent from group X. The key part here is that group X exists prior to the dissent of its special member. Consider some examples (warning, some of the examples may contain mild spoilers, key word being mild):

Shikabane Hime - The recent anime that brought this to mind. In it undead creatures called shikabane terrorize humans, but one such shikabane (the title character) stands up against them in order to protect humanity.

Devil May Cry - Devils once freely traveled between their world and the human world, terrorizing humans, until the Legendary Dark Knight Sparda stood against his devil kin and sealed the gate between the worlds. Now his half-human son Dante has to maintain his father's legacy by killing devils that make it across to the human world and preventing cultists from re-opening the gate.

Vampire Hunter D - Vampires once freely traveled the world terrorizing humans. One half-vampires, however, stands up against them and protects common humans.

Vampire Princess Miyu - Shinma are supernatural creatueres that feed on humans. At any time one shinma (currently Miyu) is allowed to live in the human world as a "guardian", on the condition that they protect humans from any other shinma that try to pass into the human world. Awesome aside in this case: as long as Miyu protects humans from OTHER shinma, she's allowed to feed on their blood.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - Dracula's castle appears once every hundred years, but when it mysteriously appears only 5 years after its last disappearance, Dracula's own half-vampire son rises from a 300 year sleep to enter the castle and protect humanity from the threat it represents.

Rurouni Kenshin - In a time when swordsmen of skill are regularly deployed as a weapon of oppression, the hiten mitsurugi school was created with the following principles: owe allegiance to no one and protect the defenseless from those with power. Kenshin wanders around protecting civilians from other swordsmen that try to use their martial prowess unjustly.

Gundam - The Earth federation is threatened by the Principality of Zeon, which has at its disposal a "newtype" named Char. The Earth forces start to gain momentum once Amuro, who happens to also be a newtype, happens to pilot the experimental mobile suit Gundam and show a startling affinity for it.

Evangelion - Mysterious alien entities called angels descend upon the Earth and threaten humanity. Humans study them and create an angel-like being in their own image to protect themselves (note, though, that the "hero" status and Eva Unit 1 and its pilot become extremly ambiguous here).

Final Fantasy IV - The Baron's Army has begun aggressively attacking other cities in order to seize magical crystals. The Dark Knight Cecil, captain of the Red Wings, is overcome by guilt and turns against his king and the evil he has come to represent.

Kung-Fu Hustle - Not an anime, but the rule applies. The protagonist is a wannabe gang member trying to break into the famous Axe Gang. As the over-the-top martial arts being used to vie fro control of a tiny town continue getting more ridiculous, he must eventually face his destiny and become "the one" to save the town.

Ninja Gaiden, Trigun - These are two examples where the explanation might qualify as too much of a spoiler.

The point is that this a very prevalent structure. The hero arises as a response to some imminent or ever-present threat, especially if their own empowerment has a direct relationship to the threat.

Now the contrast: in many American hero stories, the hero arises first, and then a threat emerges as an implicit or explicit response to the presence of the hero. This structure is used largely for the nice narrative rhythm it creates (small conflicts are resolved by the pseudo-climax of the hero's rise, and then a true threat creates a greater conflict with a greater climax). Villains are supernatural or otherwise powerful, but are often represented as being poor derivatives or corrupt versions of the hero(es). Some examples that come to mind:

Spiderman - A guy is bitten by a radioactive (movie version: genetically modified) spider and gains spider-related powers. He starts cleaning up crime in his city until unnaturally powerful super-villains start emerging to threaten his crime-fighting work. In one comic, I believe written by JMS, attention is specifically drawn to the fact that so many of his opponents have also had a totemic relationship with an animal (such as Doctor Octopus, Lizard Man, etc.), but suggests they are all poor imitations.

Iron Man - In the movie version, Tony Stark creates a basic armor suit early on, and later creates a much more advanced model capable of flight. A villain gets their hands on the original suit's design and manages to create their own, evil version of it. They fight.

X-Men - As part of the natural evolution of humanity, some people are born with super powers (hey, evolution, stop slacking off and give us super powers already!). A backlash based on the fear of mundane humans causes some of the mutants to become bitter and cynical, and follow Magneto in aggressively and violently overthrowing the non-mutant controlled system.

The Power Puff Girls - Sugar, spice, everything nice, and Chemical X create super-powered kindergarteners. Otherwise mediocre villains become highly annoyed and start accumulating power in order to thwart the super-powered kids. Their ultimate rival, Mojo-Jojo, was also created by Chemical X. As a super-hero parody, this show reflects the creator's perceptions of super-hero stereotypes.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Four turtles and a rat living in the sewers encounter a chemical called "the ooze" and become pizza-eating ninjas that fight crime. Eventually Shredder, a discontent student of the rat's former master, has been finding street kids and training them to become his ninja army of the foot! (also a super-hero parody, as well as a martial-arts parody)

Harry Potter - A young boy discovers that he is a wizard, and spends half a book delighting in the joys of magic and broom-riding. He slowly comes to discover, however, that there is a lurking threat from the Dark Lord Voldemort, who repeatedly tries to use his mysterious connection to Harry to return to life (this one's British, not American, but who cares).

Ghostbusters - A group of paranormal investigating pseudo-scientists develop techniques that somehow actually work and allow them to capture ghosts. They start acquiring fame and fortune, but an alarming increase in the amount of paranormal activity in the area suggests the emergence of a powerful new ghostly threat.

There are obviously counter-examples, as well, but I'm not trying to demonstrate a law, just a trend. It seems much more likely to be the case in an American/western hero story for the heroes to be a boon to civilization, and for the evil forces they fight to have "eliminate the heroes" as a principal goal. In Japanese stories it's more common for the threat to exist and for the heroes to arise in an effort to return things to a state of normalcy.

Other trends in the Japanese stories include an increased likelihood that the hero is a subset of the threatening group, and an increased likelihood that the hero will retire or give up their power at the end of the story. The Japanese hero is more likely to be operating in secret (I don't mean with a hidden identity, I mean without normal people even being aware that a hero exists). Finally, the Japanese hero is more likely than the American hero to NOT be the protagonist of the story. If the protagonist is a hero in the Japanese story, they are often surrounded by much more supernatural/powerful allies. I'm not going to give a lot of examples for all the claims here, because this post is already way too long, but this last point is pretty prevalent, and I'll give a few examples of it in list form:

Tenchi Muyo - One normal guy surrounded by a half-dozen extraordinary alien women...who all want him.

Fushigi Yugi - One normal girl surrounded by a half-dozen extraordinary men from mythical China...who all want her.

Escaflowne - Hitomi is an average high school girl who can read tarot cards. Her two love interests both pilot giant semi-magical armored suits, one of which turns into a dragon.

Chrono Trigger - Chrono is so uninteresting that he literally never speaks. His allies include a spunky princess, a frog-knight, and a robot from the future.

Final Fantasy V, VII, IX, X, XII - Butz, Cloud, Tidus, etc. are fairly mundane guys with swords who have much more interesting people team up with them, including a cross-dressed pirate, a talking flame-tailed tiger, and a bunny-girl in a thong. (FFVI is notable for having the protagonist being the strange and powerful character, not to mention being female, and FFVIII is notable for having no interesting characters at all).

Metal Gears Solid IV - Seriously, why is Raiden like 800 times cooler than Snake?

Half the examples I gave before - In the following examples from the beginning, the story, at least at the very beginning, is focused on a mundane person who observes the hero, rather than on the hero directly: Shikabane Hime, Vampire Princess Miyu (in the OVA, at least), Trigun, Rurouni Kenshin (in the series). In Evangelion Shinji seems weaker than everyone else, but ultimately that's just because we see his vulnerabilities up front, while every other character takes a while to reveal their weakness.

Again, there are plenty of counter-examples, too, but there's a strong tendency in Japanese stories to have an everyman stand in and observe interesting and unusual heroes who, in the case of video games, have predetermined personalities you don't have much control over. In the American/Western game, this is highly unusual - the fan is obviously intended to fantasize about BEING the hero who's interestnig and unusual. In video games the American game tends to give the player more control not only over themselves, but over NPCs, as well, and how they evolve (at least in the case of RPGs).

I'm not going to jump to any conclusions about what this means about the respective cultures, since I'm already over-generalizing just in identifying these trends, but they're interesting trends to notice either way.

-Silent Ellipsis

Guiness Knows Video Games

So apparently Guiness World Records decided to put together a list of the most influential console games in history. In short, it's ridiculous. I'm not going to reproduce the whole list (it's a top 50 list), but let's just look at the top 10:

1. Super Mario Kart
2. Tetris
3. Grand Theft Auto
4. Super Mario World
5. Zelda Ocarina of Time
6. Halo
7. Resident Evil IV
8. Final Fantasy XII
9. Street Fighter II
10. GoldenEye

Now remember, these aren't supposed to be favorites, or best games, or anything of that sort - they're "most influential" games. Now, I would measure influential games by the kind of impact they had on the games that followed them, so one rule I apply from the get-go: No games from the last couple years. And yet there's FFXII staring me in the face, and a little further down (at #14) they have Call of Duty 4. Even the Orange Box (further down the list), which seems like it's guaranteed to have a long-lasting impact on gaming because of it's inclusion of Portal, is something I would hesitate to put on their, because there simply hasn't been enough time for it to have a "legacy," which is one of the criteria used to judge these (supposedly).

But that's not the big issue. The big issue is all of the things that aren't in the top 10 list here. I mean, where's Mario - you know, the game that invented the side-scrolling platformer, which for a while was the pre-eminent genre? Where's Dragon Quest, the first console RPG? If you're going to include a Final Fantasy game in the top 10, why isn't it VII, which not only made JRPGs mainstream in America, but got a movie made about it? Why are Super Metroid and Castlevania: SotN so far down (in the late 30's) when they're the origin of "Castleroid" games? DDR isn't even on the list, even though it's a predecessor to games like Guitar Hero (which did make the list)?

And that's granting already that they're discounting all PC games (in some cases, this also seems kind of disingenuous, since titles like Oblivion and Call of Duty are probably more significant for their PC versions than their console ports). That means things like SimCity and Civilization aren't even in the running.

I would probably feel better about this list if they at least had a consistent metric that they were basing it on, but from the Kotaku article, it sounds like every item on the list has vague justifications. Guiness should probably stick to things they can measure, like "largest game cartridge ever," "longest loading screen ever," and "most copies sold back to GameStop."

-Ellipsis

Ubisoft and the No DRM PR Stunt

About to go to bed, but I wanted to throw in a comment on this. Apparently Prince of Persia will ship for the PC with no copyright protection measures. This is theoretically good news, since it suggests that someone is listening to gamers and their rather straightforward points. However, the article also quotes an Ubisoft community representative giving us this gem:

You`re right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games. A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine. Console piracy is something else entirely and I`m sure we`ll see more steps in future to try to combat that.

Wow, nice job predicting that your own initiative is going to fail. I guess the idea here is that he's trying to intensify the sense that they're giving gamers a "challenge" to prove them wrong, in an effort to boost sales, but they seemed to have missed the part where the people who care about DRM aren't morons, and a lot of them aren't going to give you any brownie points (or $60 wads of cash) for releasing a DRM free game and then turning around and demeaning players.

In short, seeing the headline on Slashdot made me think "Oh yay, someone's listening, maybe I'll have to buy Prince of Persia," and then reading the statement immediately changed my mind by reminding me that Ubisoft doesn't really care about gamers - they just like marketing stunts.

I will be curious to see what kind of piracy rates Prince of Persia has, but I'm prepared to take any analysis of the numbers, especially from Ubisoft, with a hefty grain of salt.

-Ellipsis

Fallout 3: Part 2

So when I said that Part 2 was "coming soon," apparently I meant a week later. (edit: if you're hear for tips, scroll to the bottom, this section is editorial)

So, I probably left you with a terrible impression of Fallout 3 after my last post. If so, that means it's time for me to set about the ambitious task of reversing that opinion. Time for Fallout 3: Part 2: The Good Parts.

The Sneaking Game

In Oblivion, I played a roguish character with a bow (and magic). In Fallout 3, I play a sneaky sniper. This largely speaks to my own interests and personality, but the point is that even though the game isn't explicitly about being sneaky, both of these games provided much more satisfying sneaking games than any game I've played that WAS explicitly about sneaking.

Why is that? Let's compare the sneaking experience in a couple different games. In Metal Gear Solid, you are presented with a linear level, with enemies as obstacles. You're supposed to sneak, and the game encourages this by making combat in which your enemy sees you punishing. Of course, since the level is linear and you must sneak, that means that playing through a level devolves into finding the correct path from point A to B that won't involve you getting seen.

In Assassin's Creed, you are also supposed to sneak, although combat against opponents that are aware of your presence is actually pretty easy, while sneaking involves going very slowly and doing nothing interesting (which would draw attention to you). Eventually, every player of Assassin's Creed reaches the limit of their patience with walking around trying to look like a scholar and begins charging guards.

What about Fallout 3? In Fallout 3 you're not "supposed" to sneak - a non-sneaky, heavy duty combat character is a perfectly valid build (I just tried one out for the first time the other day and it was pretty fun). However, sneaking does give you a definite advantage, in both combat and elsewhere. I mean, you get sneak attack criticals, but that's not really the important part, since you could instead invest those skill points from sneak into big guns, and I hear that tactical nuclear warheads also do a lot of damage. The important part is that when you sneak, you can find your opponent before they find you, and then you get to decide how the battle starts. Usually you'll choose to open combat by closing to a good firing range and then saying hello with 4 shots in VATS mode, but you could just as easily open by placing a mine or two conveniently in a path you intend to lure the enemy down, reverse-pick-pocketing a live grenade into your enemy's pocket, sneaking up and turning off a robot (assuming you're really good at science), searching for elements of the environment you can use to your advantage (like gas leaks, slaves you can free, existing traps, etc.), or just avoid the combat altogether. The point here is that sneaking is advantageous because it opens up new possibilities. In other words, sneaking complements the core gameplay philosophy of Bethesda, which is to give the player a high degree of freedom.

Outside of combat, sneaking allows you to get access to areas you're not supposed to be in and allows you to steal things. This might not sound like a big deal, but it means that sneaking around allows you to explore the various mini-narratives the fill the world (which I'll discuss below). This is what initially entranced me about Oblivion - breaking into NPCs houses and stealing their stuff gives you a reason to explore your environment, and a way to interact with it, which is what really brings that environment to life.

Mildly Turn-Based Combat

To avid role-players, one of the features of Fallout 3 that might stand out is that it's also a first person shooter. These have traditionally been antithetical genres: the FPS is all about hand-eye coordination while the RPG is all about resource harvesting and story. We do, however, have a couple precendents now (including one from the big name in American RPGs, Bioware), so what I find interesting is instead the fact that the game is, in fact, lying about being a first person shooter.

But, you object, the game is all first-person, and you shoot things, so how can it not be a first person shooter?! Like I said above, first person shooters are about hand-eye coordination, and Fallout 3 is not. Firstly, the effects of pointing a gun at any enemy and pulling the trigger vary dramatically based on your character's ability with a gun, but what's more significant here is that the dominant mode of combat is VATS mode. The way VATS mode works is that 1) Time pauses. 2) You select a series of attacks you want your character to make, which can be against different body parts of a single enemy or against multiple enemies. 3) Once you've spent your action points queuing up attacks, you accept and then watch your character attempt the various attacks. Hmm...is it just me or does this sound suspiciously like we're not playing a FPS shooter anymore? (hint: it's not just me)

Of course, you don't have to use VATS mode - you can aim manually and fire, although the effect and accuracy still depend on your character's skill. It's also true that after exiting VATS mode you have to wait for your AP to recharge before using it again, during which time you can manually aim, or run, hide, and otherwise stall until your AP is back. The point is, you can go through the entire game without ever taking a shot outside of VATS mode. This means that Fallout 3 gets to have the immersiveness of a first person shooter without requiring any extraordinary hand-eye coordination from the player, and it makes the game much more about what you want to do then about the player's reflexes.

Real Game Narrative

This is what I consider the meat of my argument for Fallout 3 being a good game - it presents stories to the player through gameplay, rather than having story occur between bits of gameplay. I'm not referring to the fact that you are always playing during story sequences, although that is true and valuable - you have dialogue, and events that occur while you're playing, but no cutscenes beyond the opening movie. What I'm referring to is the fact that there are stories in Fallout 3 that aren't part of the main story line (or any explicit storyline). For example:

I reload my pistol and give the area one more sweep with my eyes. All the raiders are down, so I holster my weapon and start to investigate my surroundings more thoroughly. I came here looking for food, but with all the years that have passed, it shouldn't surprise me that the raiders have eaten every can off the shelves, and turned the aisles into miniature fortifications. As I come around behind a desk, I find some stashed supplies. I suppose the raiders could have used this as a nice defensive position, if I hadn't slipped into the midsts and isolated each of them between the grocery aisles. There's an intercom here, and I'm tempted to say something silly into it, until I realize that any lingering raiders would be able to hear me, if there were any. I continue exploring until I find a locked door in the back of the place - here's where they keep their good stuff, I'm sure. Fortunately I've been keeping up on my computer hacking skills and there's a terminal nearby that unlocks the door. As soon as it's open I hear the intercom startle to life, "Ok, guys, we're back. Can someone open the back...wait a minute." Oh shit. I slide into the backroom and close the door I just managed to get open. Now what am I going to do? There are some nice supplies in this room, but I might not survive taking 5 or 6 more raiders at once. Then I notice a large tube in the room with a robot inside. The old grocery store security robot is still intact, apparently, and if I can get it running again...I may have a shot at this afterall.

This isn't elaboration - this is exactly what I was thinking as I was playing through this area. This also wasn't part of the main storyline, and though a quest did point me toward this grocery store, the only requirements to complete the quest were to "find some food." In other words, the quest was just an incentive to get me to explore - nothing dictated that I see things in a certain order, notice the details I did, or use the strategies I did to defeat the raiders: I was simply presented with an interesting environment to explore. Nonetheless, there was a story here, and it was because the environment had a sense of character to it.

This is what Fallout 3 does that's really interesting. This is where true game narrative takes form. It's not in the grandiose battles in DC, or in the moral choices your character makes, or in the story that unfolds about why your father left the vault. It's in the little moments that result from having a rich environment. It's when you kill a machine-gun toting super mutant, only to find that they had an unusually large collection of toy cars and teddy bears; or when you murder someone in their sleep and hear their lover's heartfelt stories about them after the fact; or when you explore a seemingly normal office building where every desk has ammunition for military grade weapons stashed in it, and eventually find a computer containing email correspondence along the lines of "OH GOD, THE FEDS ARE HERE." These stories are simply layered into the environment, and they make the world seem alive. When items feel like they were placed there by the characters, and not by the level designer, that's when exploring an environment becomes a story.

I'll take that over an hour long sequence of Solid Snake getting lectured to by a dying man any day of the week.

Final Note

In summary, Fallout 3 is chock-full of problems, great and small, but it's also probably the most interesting game I've played this year. The core gameplay is so fun and the environment so full of interesting stuff that I, for one, have no choice about liking the game. It also allows for a variety of play styles, and they result in very different experiences - if you made a strong heroic character and steamrolled through the main storyline, then you haven't played the same game I have.

One more thing: this obviously isn't an exhaustive list of good or bad qualities. These are just the aspects of the game that I decided to talk about.

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Tips

So since I posted this, I've been checking sitemeter and apparently a LOT of people are getting here searching for tips on playing Fallout 3. Because I'm just such a nice guy, I've decided to add a couple.

First: How to sneak. It's actually pretty simple - you just crouch and you're in sneak mode. On the PS3, you do this by hitting L3 (which means push in on the left analog stick - you don't need to hold it, just press it to start or stop sneaking). While you're sneaking, you'll get an indicator telling you whether or not you've been noticed.

If you see [Hidden] it means no one sees you.
If you see [Detected] it means a friendly character sees you (so don't try stealing that abraxo cleaner).
If you see [Caution] it means a hostile character is aware you're there, but not sure where you are.
If you see [Danger] it means that a hostile character sees you (and is attacking you - good time to hit L2 and go into VATS mode).

To determine whether or not you're hidden, there are a couple factors that come into play. First, your sneak skill - get it pretty high quickly if you want to play stealth (that means at least 50). Second is visibility - if you're in a dark area and/or the enemy does not have line of sight to you, you're more likely not to be noticed. If you run, you are more likely to be noticed than if you walk or stand still, and if you shoot at an enemy (even if you miss), it will almost certainly give away your position. The keys to stealth playing are patience and the ability to gauge how close you can get without being seen (to maximize your chance of hitting with a sneak attack).

While sneaking, you can pickpocket someone by activating them (walk up behind them and hit X). In my opinion, though, pickpocketing isn't worthwhile in most cases, because it carries an inherent risk of getting caught, whereas stealing objects lying about is much less risky (as long as you're [Hidden] you're A-OK). If you have the Sandman perk, and you attempt to pickpocket a sleeping NPC, you will also have the option of killing them in their sleep, which is actually pretty effective (as long as no one else sees the act), because then you can take their stuff at your leisure...I mean, not like you would ever do something like that, being the model citizen that you are.

The second thing I'll cover is hacking computers. First things first - each time you bring up the computer hacking screen, it randomly generates a puzzle, which means you CANNOT go online to find the password for each terminal in the game. You just have to figure it out from scratch. Sorry.

That said, I can give you some tips for how to figure out the passwords. The basic mechanic here is that when you guess a word, you're told how many of the letters from that word were correct. Note, that means letters in the correct position, so if the password is "Ellipsis" and you guess "Epicfail," you'll see "2/8", meaning that 2 of the letters were correct (the initial E and the second-to-final letter, i). One thing to keep in mind is that only full words are eligible input - all of the #$% and such you see is just filler - ignore it and find the next full world.

So knowing this, a good strategy is to rule out as many choices as possible with each guess, by picking words with common elements. For example, if there are multiple words among your options ending in "-ing," then it's a good candidate to guess, because if the game replies that less than 3 characters were correct, then the password can't possibly end in "-ing", which rules out all of the other words ending in "-ing". So pick words with suffixes or prefixes in common with other options, such as "-ent," "-ed", "de-," "re-," or "con-". After you have some feedback from the system, you should only ever guess words that match that feedback, so check each word. I do this by imagining spelling out the word I'm guessing next to the word I guessed before, and seeing how many of the letters are the same (it should be exactly the same as the number the game told you were correct, or there's no point in guessing that word).

Aside from that, you just need luck (and to save before attempting the terminal, since it will permanently lock if you fail). Also, this might have just been a coincidence, but I noticed an unusual number of times that the correct answer was the second option. Worth keeping in mind.

I hope that's helpful, and I'll keep an eye out for any other questions people are implicitly asking by searching for them on Google...

Almost Greatness

I've noticed a string of games recently that began with ambitious or innovative ideas and combined them with high production values. This seems like a fairly straightforward recipe for a great game, but each of these games has fallen victim to major design flaws that have kept it from achieving its potential. These "almost great" games are at once somewhat saddening, since they fail to live up to the gameplay they promised, and a little inspiring in that they show what kind of impact design decisions have (and thus how important designers are). None of them are "bad" games, but they began with ideas of such scope that you can't help feel that something important went wrong in order for them to end up as merely "good."

In particular, there are three games I want to consider here, for a brief time each (this doesn't constitute a full review of each by any means - I'm focusing on what's relevant to this conversation). They are, in chronological order: Supreme Commander, Assassin's Creed, and Spore.

Supreme Commander

First of all, that's a pretty dramatic title. You'd probably expect that a game with the title "Supreme Commander" is on a mission to be the ultimate game of its chosen genre (RTS), and you'd be right. Chris Taylor decried all RTS games that had been made before as "really being economy games," and planned to revolutionize the genre by changing the entire scale of RTS. Supreme Commander did this by literally increasing map size - the largest maps are 80x80 kilometers, a scale at which crossing the map can be, in itself, an accomplishment. This was combined with some really great high-level controls, such as the ferry system - you could tell a factory to produce 100 assault bots, and send them to a ferry point as they were produced, so that they could be picked up by a transport ship and moved to a deployment station, all automated once you'd set it up. It also had strategic zoom - a feature so compelling that after I'd experienced it I was shocked when I tried to go back and play other RTS games that didn't include it.

So far so good. What happens, however, when you actually sit down to play it? First, there's the technical problem: the game requires so much processor power that if you try to play on the largest maps, the game will lag to the point of never ending. As a result, almost all play took place on the smallest maps, which favored rushing strategies, and more or less defeated the purpose of having a huge scale of combat. This was a major problem, but since it was a technical problem it's not the one I'm interested in. I'm interested in what the gameplay looks like when the game is played the way it's "meant" to be played: on a largish map.

On a largish map, it's true that transporting your soldiers across the map is difficult, and this, at least at first, leads you to build forward bases and set up elaborate ferry systems to move your troops around the map. I say at first because it wasn't long before I realized that there was another solution: high-tech weapons with obscene range. Tech3 (and in the case of the UEF Tech4) artillery, along with "strategic missiles" are capable of hitting the enemy from the opposite end of the map even on a 40x40 kilometer map. If you're playing Cybrans, then you have another option - you can build Soul Rippers, which are flying fortresses of death and destruction that can cross the map easily and have enough health and firepower to take on the enemy army without any ground support at all. These are all very cool units, but they're also so convenient, compared to building and transporting a ground army, that they remove any incentive to play the game the way the makers originally intended.

That's not the largest problem, however. The largest problem is that despite the existence of resources on the map to be harvested, the most efficient way to build up an economy is to get to the third tech level and then build power plants and fabricators that can produce resources no matter where you build them. Combine this with the fact that there's no limit to the number of these structures you can build and you realize the kind of advantage gathered by a player who spends all of his time building up his economy. What's more, automated base defenses are so effective that a player can hold off an entire army of enemy troops without every building a single soldier of their own - in fact, when I play, I usually don't even build a land factory, since you can create engineers from an air factory. What do we have here? We have a game where economy is king, and all of that sophisticated transportation and territory-acquisition strategy falls by the wayside - all you need to do is turtle. Build base defenses, build up your economy, and then build a super advanced super weapon that makes you win.

The ultimate result of which is that Supreme Commander didn't revolutionize the RTS genre like it intended to. It didn't change the "economy game" paradigm - instead it is the single most economy-focused RTS game ever made. It seems that a couple of these points were noticed by the designers, given the changes they made in the expansion, Forged Alliance, but from my experience, they didn't go far enough in changing the fundamental elements that prevented the kind of strategic play they were looking to create.

Assassin's Creed

I notice that the section on Supreme Commander is very long. Due to time limitations and the desire not to repeat myself too many times, I'll try to be much more brief in my discussion of the next two games. Assassin's Creed is another game that was looking to revolutionize a genre, but this time, the genre in question wasn't RTS games, but stealth games.

Assassin's Creed makes use of something that was utterly absent from all stealth games before it: social stealth. That is, in a game like Thief or Metal Gear Solid, the way you sneak is by crouching in the shadows and waiting until you victim turns his back on you. In Assassin's Creed the way you sneak is by walking around in broad daylight - trying to look as much as possible like a normal citizen. It's fair to say that Altair is following the advice of Asimov in Foundation, "It pays to be obvious, especially when you have a reputation for being subtle." Assassin's Creed also allows you an unprecedented amount of physical freedom, allowing you to climb on just about anything and everything, leaping from rooftop to rooftop feeling like a badass.

This was all great, but in a demo of the game made some time before its release, the presenter said "In Assassin's Creed, you can't take seven hits to the head, or even one, and keep fighting." They were going to have a realistic fighting system, where one false move could mean death. Well, that didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened - not only can you take seven hits to the head and continue fighting, but as you continue fighting, your health (or "synchronization") will gradually regenerate, meaning that you can continue fighting indefinitely, even if you are making mistakes and getting hit. I happen to know a couple of people who did exactly that: skip the stealth entirely and just kill every single guard in the entire city. Now, I'm usually one for not restricting players to a single style of play, but the game is supposed to revolve around stealth, and to be honest, the combat is both a little shallow and very easy. Once you get the hang of counters, you can take an army of literally any size and win without breaking a sweat.

The problems didn't quite end there, however. The missions were all a little too repetitive, and several of the important features didn't seem quite believable enough (really, I only ever hide in rooftop gardens - why don't guards ever think to look in them?). What's more, playing the game "properly," that is by using social stealth left and right, is just too hard, slow, and inconvenient for the player, compared to hacking-and-slashing. Altogether, the result is that Assassin's Creed was pretty fun, and featured some awesome climbing, but failed to revolutionize the stealth genre.

Spore

Our most recent example is the highly-anticipated Spore. By highly anticipated I mean that when a demo video was released a couple years ago showing the kind of gameplay Spore would have, people thought this had the potential to be the most groundbreaking game of the decade. The scope was unprecedented: you begin as a single-celled organism, become a sea animal, move onto land, develop sentience, create a civilization, and eventually become a space faring race wandering the galaxy. It was going to be the ultimate sandbox, for once you’d mastered the creation tools every step of the way, you would have access to all of them during the space stage, and could create any kind of world you wanted.

The ambitions of Spore are highly praise-worthy. Unfortunately, once again, the game, though fun, fails to deliver what it intended. There are two fundamental problems with Spore. The first is that the game can’t decide if it’s supposed to be a sandbox or a goal-oriented game. If it’s a sandbox game, then there shouldn’t be any restrictions as you progress (such as the inability to edit your creature after the creature stage), and there shouldn’t be any gameplay features that force you to spend your time doing a particular thing (you get hungry in the creature stage, and so can’t ever stop hunting, or you get constantly attacked and have to spend your time defending yourself). In a sandbox game, challenges like combat should be challenges that the player can attempt when they want to and ignore when they want to. If, however, the game is really goal-oriented, then the decisions you make and the things you achieve should be more significant – as it turns out, whether I have on pair of wings or eight pairs has no gameplay effect, that I can easily make a creature that effectively dabbles in everything instead of having to choose, and no matter how many body parts I gather, as soon as I’ve acquired enough DNA to progress to the tribal stage, then I effectively lose my progress, because beginning a new “stage” is more like starting to play an entirely different game than it is like continuing the same game.

Interestingly, the second fundamental problem is a problem whether the game is sandbox or goal-oriented: the game stages are too disconnected. Not only is the gameplay different, but your choices and achievements don’t have much impact. I can gather every body part in the cell stage and hunt and kill every species I run across, or I can just gather the food that happens to be floating around, and either way, as soon as I get to the creature stage my body parts are all obsolete, and I’m starting a different kind of game. Similarly, if the game is a sandbox, you should feel free to go between the various modes, and play as a creature for a bit, and then switch to a space-faring race, and then switch to a single-celled organism. Currently, not only are you stuck with the creature you have when you progress past the creature stage, but you have a preset amount of time playing in each stage. That is, in theory you can play the creature stage indefinitely, but you aren’t accomplishing anything (since what you do has no effect on future stages), there are no more large rewards left to work for, and the game at that stage becomes much more challenging, eventually becoming too hard to be much fun for someone looking for a sandbox experience. Based on the greater design concepts, the lower-level design requires that the developers decide how long the player will spend in each stage, and inevitably you can’t pick lengths that will satisfy everyone (or even fully satisfy one person, since they’ll likely want to spend more time in the stages they like and less in the stages they don’t).

The gameplay changes present a problem of their own, however. One issue is that when you effectively are incorporating multiple game genres into one game, each genre’s gameplay is going to feel a bit shallow. What’s worse is that the player feels like the time they spend mastering each gameplay style is a waste, because they don't apply the skills they learned in future stages. The only exception to this rule is in the creation tools - as you master one tool, you feel more confident approaching the next creation tool. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there seems to be a general consensus that the creation tools are the most fun part of the game.

Conclusion

There is a trend running through these games. They begin with innovative concepts, but it seems that the rest of the design process revolves around mitigating the effect of these ideas, and trying to make the game more like other games of the genre, likely in the name of accessibility. RTS gamers are used to economy-based strategy, so Supreme Commander's revolutionary beginnings tend in that direction until it ceases to be revolutionary; players of 3D action games are used to HP and being able to hack away at guards, and Assassin's Creed heads in that direction until the creative stealth elements become optional; players like being given some kind of direction, and so Spore gradually moved away from being a sandbox game until it became a pseudo-goal-oriented game.

It seems to me that the same piece of advice can be applied to all of these games (and many others that I don't have time to discuss here): if you have a great idea, run with it. The remainder of the design process should be spent trying to figure out how to support and emphasize the good idea, rather than how to restrict it or make it seem less original. It's not like Supreme Commander gets to be very approachable and intuitive as a result of being so economy-driven; the learning curve is still very steep. Similarly, players of Spore don't get a deep, goal-oriented experience; it feels a little wonky, instead. If you have a really innovative concept that leads to new kinds of play, players will appreciate it, even if it takes them a little longer to get the hang of it - you want them to be willing to put in that time to get a truly original and compelling experience, rather than taunting them with the potential of a new experience, only to drop them in a game that feel suspiciously like many games they've already played.

-Silent Ellipsis

P.S. Wow, this whole post ended up being a bit more epic than expected.

The Massively Multiplayer Illusion

My complement convinced me to try out Granado Espada recently, and one of the things I noticed while playing was that occasionally another player would walk by. Now, this might seem like a rather silly thing to "notice" since I was playing an MMO, but that's just my point - it struck me that a substantial part of my game experience DIDN'T involve interacting with other people, and even when they popped into view, they usually went on toward whatever monster spawn point they were heading to without stopping to say hello. It was funny, I thought, that I was playing an MMORPG and yet after a full hour of play had only spoken and interacted with NPCs and monsters. And by "funny" I mean weird.

Let's consider another example: Guild Wars. In Guild Wars the only persistent environments are the cities. All explorable areas are instances that contain only the party that set out to explore them. This means that even though there are millions (I don't know what the specific number is) of people who play Guild Wars, and thousands who are online at any given time, throughout most of the time I spend playing, I only see 1-7 other players. Even then, you can fill up the empty slots in your party with henchmen, and in the newer expansions, heroes. What does all of this mean? It means that when I play Guild Wars, I play in a party of me, two friends, and a bunch of NPCs. Despite the supposed "massively multiplayer" nature of the game, my experience, as a player, is that of playing of a 3-person multiplayer game. That's not necessarily a bad thing - I prefer playing with my friends to playing with random 13-year-olds - but it's not really a "massively multiplayer" experience.

But, you object, like I just said, the cities are persistent, and there you can interact with many people at once. This is true. It has also lead to some fun multiplayer experiences, or as I like to call them, "social experiments." I one case, I decided to start running laps around Ascalon city, talking about "staying in shape" while I did it. My friend was amused and joined in, and then a random stranger joined...10 minutes later I had an entourage of 60 players, all running laps around Ascalon city behind me. Some of the people in the back of the line asked "where are we going?" Needless to say, I was pleased with the results. Nonetheless, that totaled about a half-hour of play, and clearly wasn't something the game designers really intended for me to spend my time doing. Outside of district 1 of Ascalon city, which is a 24/7 dance marathon, cities serve two purposes - to gather parties and to customize your character. The thing is, this exists in games that aren't MMOs, as well. Consider Counter-Strike, or just about any RTS game: you join a server where you can create games, customize anything you can control out of game (for example, your "deck" in Age of Empires 3), and chat with people. The only difference is that instead of usernames on the side of the screen, the players in GW have avatars in their giant server rooms.

This brings me to the crux of my post: why is there such a huge push to make games "massively" multiplayer? What happened to making games just multiplayer? The reason I ask is because it seems that most designers working on MMORPGs are under the impression that because they're making an MMO, they're greatly restricted in their options, and that they have to have feature x, y, and z. As I've tried to explain above, however, most of the multiplayer aspects of an MMO are available in games that don't count as being MMOs simply because they don't choose to present themselves as MMOs. In AoE3, you can not only team up with your friends against bots, but by doing so you gain experience and levels which carry over into your future matches and increase your range of abilities. Yet this is not an MMORPG. It's not even an MMORTS. It's just an RTS game.

I think what designers should consider for each and every virtual world they build are 1) just what the unique possibilities of MMOs really are, and 2) how non-MMO games get around the major pitfalls of MMORPGs. I don't have time to go into both these questions in detail, but I'll say something brief about the first one. I think MMOs present two elements that cannot be achieved in single player and "merely multiplayer" games: living economies and co-operative world creation.

Since you have many people sharing (and competing for) the same resources, the value of any item in the game is determined not by design-fiat, but by supply and demand. This is incredibly interesting, and some players are drawn to play MMOs specifically play with the game's economy. That said, most MMORPGs have terribly distorted economies. After the game has been going on for a while, the majority of items are worth either next to nothing or ludicrously large amounts, and even in games with professions and large marketplaces, the richest players are always the high-level players that have completed the highest-level dungeons, who then get to determine the shape of the economy with their enormous expenditures. In other words, economies in MMORPGs are actually very limited, and I'd be willing to bet that almost no MMORPG developers prioritize the economy as one of the most fundamental elements. Rather, they start with combat and quest design, and then get around to worrying about the economy later, when the core mechanics are already decided.

The other unique element that MMOs present is in an even worse position: most MMORPGs lack co-operative world creation altogether. The world that you play in a carefully crafted static world where you can have no impact on anything except your own resources. The static nature of the world is, of course, one of the aspects of MMORPGs that people complain about most often, and is often excused as simply an inescapable consequence of making the game massively multiplayer. I don't understand this excuse at all. As I just said, the potential for co-operative world creation is one of the unique things that MMOs have to offer. Think about all those hundreds of quests in Oblivion, in a world with only one hero running around inside it. Even a dedicated player is only able to explore a fraction of the world, much less the possibility space in the game for different character types, different choices at different turns, etc. If there were a couple hundred, much less a couple of thousand, players running around this world, stealing from people's homes, catching and imprisoning thieves, closing Oblivion gates, etc., you might get an emergent narrative.

The only games that take advantage of these features of MMOs are the ones with little or no gameplay, such as Second Life. Just imagine a game that has an economy and user generated spaces like Second Life, and interesting and dynamic game mechanics to back it up and make the world alive. Then go and play a massively multiplayer game, and prepare to be disappointed. What I want is either a game that's really willing to run with the "MMO" bit and explore the potential of large-scale user interactions, or else a solid RPG that's willing to settle for being "merely multiplayer", so I can play with my friends without having to deal with grind-based gameplay, simplistic quest objectives, and an in-world economy that's in worse trouble than our real world economy is.

-Silent Ellipsis

Undiscovered Pixels: Game Censorship

So apparently I'm not the only person who was inspired to make a post about censorship today. I don't know if the folks at Penny Arcade were also motivated by the news that an edited version of Fallout 3 is going to be released in Australia, but one way or another it seems to be topical right now.

Aside from the Fallout 3 news, what really brought this up for me was running across uncensored versions of sprites from Final Fantasy VI recently, as I've been on a sprite-hunt to gather material for a game I'm making. Not only are these 32-bit pixelated images that were being censored in the 90s, but they weren't exactly the most offensive of images to begin with. Let's look at a couple examples.

Here we have one of the parts of the final boss fight, specifically the "Godess." She has gone from not-nude to more-not-nude, which is truly a profound change. I mean really, 60% of a pixelated female thigh is ok, but 80% of a pixelated female thigh is just asking for eternal damnation, apparently.

But FFVI didn't just include scantily clad women.

That's right. FFVI's last boss fight also included a bare-assed man. Oh, the humanity. Actually, both this picture and the manner in which it has been censored remind me of something...



To quote my AP Art History teacher, "See that cloth there? There used to be a big old shlong hanging out there." He later claimed that he was just trying to keep students awake when he said that, but I think it's a very informative way of putting it. Michelangelo's Last Judgement happened to coincide with the beginnings of the counter-reformation, and the artist was forced to censor his painting in order to maintain propriety. It was ridiculous, but worth pointing out that 1) The original figures were actually nude, and 2) They were very realistic, masterfully painted figures, not pixelated enemies (that's not an insult to FFVI's sprites - we're comparing them to Michelangelo's Last Judgement here). Does this mean that we (and by we I mean Americans in the 1990s) have become more prudish since the 16th century? That's quite an accomplishment.

Or is it because we believe that video games are a kids' activity, and therefore should be tailored to be consumed by children? Despite the fact that the average gamer is not a 13 year old kid, many people seem to be holding on to the belief that video games are fundamentally a child-oriented medium. The creation of games like Fallout 3 is evidence that this is simply not the case. Many games are being created for mature audiences (just as many movies and books are), and to account for the difference, we have a game rating system. Just as children shouldn't be taken to R-rated movies, they should be given M-rated games. It's not hard to find these ratings - unlike movies they're printed right on the front of every game released, in plain view. Instead of taking three seconds to look at the rating and try to gauge the game in question, however, paranoid parents want to make developers jump through hoops to release even mildly adult content in games, and in doing so limit the narrative possibilities of games.

What about the question of going international? In FFVI, we had a Japanese game being censored for American audiences, but in the case of Fallout 3 we have an American game being censored for Australian audiences. I can't fault Bethesda here: if in order to sell your game in another country you have to edit it, it just makes sense as a company to do so. Still, I can't help feeling like developers are losing something when they compromise in a case like this. I'd rather Australians get to play a censored version of Fallout 3 than no Fallout at all, but it saddens me to think that people there won't be able to see Fallout 3 as it was originally conceived. Note that in this paragraph I'm running on the assumption that Fallout 3 will be a good game - I can't say that for certain, obviously, but knowing it's being developed by Bethesda I don't think it's unreasonable to have high expectations.

Silent Ellipsis

P.S. Didn't get around to mentioning the most hilarious examples of censoring in FFVI. In one area, a sign that says "Pub" is changed to "Cafe," and one enemy smoking an opium pipe is censored - to not include the smoke (the pipe is still there). Really, what are we supposed to expect the pipe is for?

Virtual Worlds and Moral Choices

Raph Koster had a link on his blog about a week ago to a post about a family of monsters slain by adventurers in World of Warcraft. It’s very interesting, and led me to read an insightful, though much older post by Raph, “The Evil We Pretend to Do,” and ultimately the Terra Nova post, “The Horde is Evil”, which claims that the choice to play an orc or undead in World of Warcraft is a morally significant decision. This series of posts together have led me to consider the following question: what does it mean to make a moral choice within a virtual world? Rather than considering the specifics of World of Warcraft, I’ll try to discuss this in more broadly applicable terms.

There are a variety of ways we might answer this question, the first of which is presented by “The Horde is Evil.” We might think that there is moral significance to a choice of character type in an MMO. By choosing to be represented in the world by a character associated with evil, you are presenting an implicit approval of that evil. This doesn’t seem right to me. Choosing a character type in an MMO, especially if by that we mean a character’s race, is a matter of choosing a setting. You’re not choosing any actions your character has performed, but choosing the cultural and historical background of that character. If that counts as a morally weighted (and negative) choice then you could just as easily say that choosing to play World of Warcraft is a morally negative choice to begin with, because you’re choosing to play a game in a world that includes not only evil, but rampant warfare. You could instead have chosen to play a game, or even an MMO, that includes no war, no combat, and no evil. Insisting that a choice of setting in a virtual world is morally weighted is tantamount to declaring that MMORPGs are, on the whole, morally evil, which beyond being simplistic isn’t an argument that’s going to have any traction among gamers.

So if I disagree with the thesis of “The Horde is Evil” does that mean I don’t believe that decisions in a virtual world can have moral weight? No it does not, but we might mean something else entirely by that. Many people will agree that a decision that affects the happiness of others carries implicit (or explicit) moral weight, and online virtual worlds allow users to affect each others’ game experience. If I stick around a spot where a rare treasure appears on a timed basis and continually gather it, I might be preventing other players from gathering it; if I use a macro to collect massive quantities of a valuable resource, I devalue that resource that other plays have earned legitimately. Beyond these unintentionally side-effects of my actions, there is the phenomenon of “grieving.” Grievers are bored or insecure players (or both) who intentionally go out of their way to ruin the game experience for other players. This could entail verbal harassment, repeatedly killing another user’s character, joining a party and then refusing to help when they run into trouble, or a variety of other activities intended to provide amusement by frustrating others. As grieving is an activity that directly affects other real, living people it’s clearly a moral decision, but is it a very weighty one? In the majority of cases the worst consequence of grieving is temporary annoyance and frustration. What’s more, this behavior isn’t really specific to virtual worlds. Even if it takes a particular form within a virtual world, the behavior is essentially harassment, and the virtual world in this case is simply a medium through which the harassment occurs. The virtual world is playing the same role that a phone does in a prank phone call: the content of a prank phone call does tell us much about the moral nature of telephones.

There might be a third thing that we mean by saying that a decision in a virtual world can be a moral decision – we might think it’s moral or immoral not because of the impact it has on players, but because of the way it affects the virtual world itself. This strikes me as the interesting concept, because it’s not immediately clear what to make of it. On the one hand a virtual world is fictional, so it seems that the events that occur within it shouldn’t be any more weighty than they are in a book or film. However, the nature of a virtual world is that it is participatory: many people are invested in the virtual world (emotionally and financially), and they can shape it through their actions.

We may need a few more conceptual tools before we evaluate this idea. First, I will suggest that what is fundamentally capable of being moral or immoral is choice. When we say that a person is moral, we mean that they are a person who makes good moral choices. Part of the reason I reject the thesis of “The Horde is Evil” is because of this. I don’t think it’s coherent to suggest that a race (such as orcs) can be inherently evil – they can only be evil by virtue of their choices. The second idea that I am going to put forward as useful for our purposes here is that morality, at some root level, depends upon value. What I mean is that whether you are a deontologist, a consequentialist, or virtue theorist, you should think that what it means for a decision to be moral is that it promotes something of value. The exact nature of this question can be debated, but I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a decision having moral import without suggesting that something of value is affected by it.

Now let’s see how these concepts fit in with our thoughts about virtual worlds. If we’re going to judge something as moral, we’re judging a choice to be, so the actions taken by the computer can never be considered moral or immoral (though the decisions of the designers and programmers that resulted in the computer performing that action might). Rather, we’re concerned about player choices, as manifested in the actions of their avatars. What’s more, we’re concerned with how these choices affect things of value within the virtual world. Given that the world is, as its name implies, virtual, and exists primarily in the minds of the players (as mediated by the game), it seems to me that the only kind of value to be found within it is instilled in it by humans. This kind of value is easy enough to find, however: virtual worlds are largely about identifying with the interests of your character or avatar, and acquiring possessions, experience, and the like for them. A player might also identify with the interests of their guild, faction, or with the virtual world as a whole.

So what kind of effect can a player have on things of value? In truth, in most persistent worlds the answer is “very little.” In every persistent world I’ve ever seen, player characters never permanently die, NPCs cannot be killed, and monsters and NPC allies will eternally respawn. In most worlds it’s also not possible to take territory or possessions from other players, and all factions in the game will exist for as long as the world persists. These static virtual worlds actually disarm most of the moral weight of decisions within them, but if a world were designed to include more significant consequences of actions, then the idea of morally weight decisions by virtue of their influence on the world would become very real very quickly.

Let’s look at a concrete example. In the posts I referred to above, one topic of discussion is the fate of monsters called murlocs at the hands of adventurers who slaughter them in huge numbers in order to complete quests. There is something disturbing about how this is presented to the player – you are committing acts of genocide – but within persistent world, there are no lasting effects of a player completing the quest. The moral impact of killing murlocs is only the impact it has on the game experience of the player(s) killing them. Let’s consider an alternative possibility: the number of murlocs in the world is limited. Perhaps the murlocs reproduce at a certain rate, and if the rate at which players kill them exceed the rate at which they reproduce, their population will dwindle. Now we have the possibility not only that a player can have the visual experience of killing a murloc, but that their choice can have an effect on the world. If murlocs are slaughtered in large enough numbers, they might become extinct on that game server. What about a world in which player characters can die permanently? In these situations it seems like the possibility exists for in-game decisions to have a real impact on things of value to other players.

More generally, what I’m suggesting is that if players can shape the virtual world that they are in, they have the potential to promote things they value within that virtual world, whether that be immersive gameplay (in which case playing an villain could actually be a morally positive decision, by allowing for a more dynamic game world), the aesthetic features of the world, or murlocs. In this situation a destructive player can make a morally significant decision within the context of the virtual world, as can a constructive player. Given the nature of most worlds today, this is more an issue of the potential of virtual worlds, but it is still of immediate interest, at least to people like me.

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This is, I think, the second and last cross-post from rocketon.us (at least for now). The other posts I've made there are application specific, and not of as much general interest.

-Silent Ellipsis

Games and Game-likeness

This is the first of a series of cross-posts from rocketon.us, from June 13:

Reading Craig Perko’s month-old post – or rant, if you prefer – about “message games” reminded me of one of the topics that I find really interesting: what is it that sets games apart as a medium? The kind of games Perko is talking about are simple games that involve clicking through a scene, or performing a single action, and may include moralistic points. The problem is that one click does not make a game – it makes an animation that you have to click on to see.

In reality, there is no universally agreed upon definition of a “game.” We can describe them in general terms, however. Games are interactive; games offer player choices; games either have built-in goals or a means for players to develop goals as they play. There are a variety of features that are common in games, or important in certain genres, but I think these are the most fundamental features that make an experience a gaming experience.

Here’s a different approach. Marc LeBlanc has compiled a list of 8 aspects of games that make them fun: Sensation, Fantasy, Fellowship, Discovery, Narrative, Expression, Challenge, and Submission. If we consider, however, not just what makes games fun, but what makes them uniquely fun, we see that other media can fulfill some of these kinds of fun just as well, if not better, than games. Movies offer plenty of sensation, novels contain compelling narratives, and any kind of social networking site can offer fellowship.

So the real question is how can games offer these kinds of experiences in a unique way? By approaching them in a game-like manner. For example, if a story isn’t linear, or preset, but branches or can be traversed in a non-linear way, then it is not just presenting a narrative, but a game narrative. This makes the narrative more than just a story – it’s a way of exploring the possibilities of gaming. A compelling game narrative doesn’t just present the player with a story – it lets the player see the story being created as the game progresses. Similarly, every kind of fun on the list above can be approached in a game-like way.

Why should we care if a certain experience is game-like or not? Some of us like to call ourselves gamers, or say that we love gaming, but if we don’t know what goes into a gaming experience, what do we mean when we say that? Games may very well be the medium of the 21st century in the same way that film was the medium of the 20th century, but if so, then games need to have a clear sense of what it is they have to offer. If we ever want to see the full potential of games, we need to find and explore the parts of an experience that make it into a good gaming experience.