Dragon Age Module

I purchased Neverwinter Nights 2 mainly because of its much lauded toolset. I had intended to create the most brilliant module of the century, get drafted into Bioware's cadre of elite RPG designers, and spend my days talking about elves and buying wenches (can you still do that?). Unfortunately for me I found that the toolset strained my feeble attention span, and I played the main campaign instead.

Now that Dragon Age has been released, I have a chance to redeem myself. I finished off the slightly glitched download process about an hour ago, and spent the intervening time learning how to create an area. With any luck I'll have the basic systems worked out by the end of the week and be on my way to wenches and elves.

A Man of Few Words

The silent protagonist established himself as a gaming giant right at the outset. Early silent protagonists existed largely because game stories used to boil down to: Evil things over there, KILL! Nowadays games' stories have become as nuanced as any story based media (well, some of them have) and we have the hardware and the funding to create long, well written scripts. So why do games like Half-Life decide that their main character will never speak?

For some games it's simply a matter of precedent and difficulty. Link and Mario don't speak because they never have, and characters in CoD games don't speak because it's difficult to represent someone talking when you see everything from their eyes (see The Darkness for a prime example).

For other games though, the silent protagonist becomes a symbol. In the classic platformer Jak and Daxter, Jak never once speaks. I used to think that was just a joke because Daxter always talked over what Jak was about to say, but recently I realized that it was more meaningful than that. The player takes control of Jak, and just like him, has no say in what they have to do next. Sure the player can decide what order to get the precursor crap in, but in the end all of the decisions are made by Keira who gets her motivation from the sage Samos.

Jak acts as the body of the group, Daxter the voice, Keira the mind, and Samos the will or the spirit. While it may sound stupid I think the developers may have actually been thinking about that when they made the game. The player has no say in their own goals, they have to meet the requirements set for them by the game, and the side-characters are the ones who exhibit those requirements. That's exactly how Jak is. He cannot argue because he cannot speak, so he performs his duty without question, as does the player.

The Half-Life series uses the silent character to represent a battle of wills. In Jak and Daxter, Jak is controlled by a single will, but in Half-Life, Gordon Freeman finds himself at the center of a power struggle that he cannot control. The G-Man sets him out on his journey in Half-Life 2, and continues to try to gain power over him in the episodes. The vortigaunts try to battle against G-Man, but Gordon is left out of the mix. Without the ability to speak out against this management of his life, he goes from being a character to being a pawn, and the player has no choice but to go along with it.

As we move into the next generation of gaming we can think more about how our games impact the players, and what message they can convey. The silent protagonist, and other old gaming tropes, can become meaningful decisions on the developers part. Gordon Freeman and Jak represent a new breed of character, one that the player becomes and imprints themselves on. When I play Half-Life I make my own Gordon Freeman, I fill his shoes and feel his confusion. The silent protagonist can draw the character in, and make them feel what a person would feel.

Late to the Game

With the recent release of Modern Warfare 2, I finally decided to take a look at Infinity Ward's first Russian killing simulator CoD 4: Modern Warfare. The reason it took me so long to get around to it was that I was afraid that it would play like the earlier installments in the CoD series. Don't get me wrong. I loved CoD 2, but there was always something wrong with the pacing. The game forced you to do everything on your own, plus allies were dumb as posts, grenades could kill you from halfway across the map, and you needed to unload entire clips into enemies before they died, but the game had good action and fun characters, so I stayed playing.

Modern Warfare got immediate points for making enemies die very quickly. This made me feel pretty cool as I mowed down legions of enemies with a single clip, and improved the pacing. Unfortunetely, Modern Warfare didn't address my main issue, which was that the game makes you do everything. And I do mean everything. Not only do you have to plant all the C4, snipe all the bad guys, and take point every time, but in most gunfights enemies infinitely spawn until you decide to push forward.

The last point is the one I would like to discuss. While I'm fine with being to go to guy to complete objectives, I am not okay with making my success a crapshoot. Every time we got pinned down and had to advance it was up to me to do so, and most times I would get gunned down running into enemy fire. To make up for that I decided to stay back a bit, kill some dudes, and then try to rush their weakened defenses. Of course, the defenses were never weakened. Enemies respawned so quickly that, by the time the guy I had just shot fell to the floor, another dude was taking his place. This meant that I had to just run like hell through enemy fire to get my allies to move up and to get the enemies to stop spawning. When I died, instead of feeling like I had made a mistake, I felt like the developer had.

While I can understand enjoying frustrating gameplay, I can't abide by gameplay that relies mainly on luck. If I was lucky I managed to survive the hail of bullets, and enemies stopped spawning. If I wasn't, then I would die and have to try again... and again, and again etc. Game devs need to look at why their players are having trouble with sections to analyze difficulty. I'm fine with dying for making a stupid mistake like stepping on a grenade, or trying to run and gun in a CoD game, but I shouldn't have to make a leap of faith to advance the combat. Dying because I was unlucky pisses me off, whereas dying because I messed up makes me want to try again.

Liquid Addiction

I have come here today to discuss one of the most unfortunate plagues upon gaming society. It has ruined the pacing of many an RPG, caused people to spend hours clicking on flowers to find the right ingredients, and rendered healing magic meaningless. Yes my friends, I come here to discuss: the potion.

The potion has been an RPG staple for many a year and I only just realized how much I hate it by playing Dragon Age: Origins and Morrowind. In both of these games your character is setting out on an epic quest to kick ass and blah blah blah, and in both games you are hindered by your character having to slam a potion down every few moments so that they can survive through the encounter. This does not make me feel like a bad ass. When I have to take a break from fighting every few moments to nurse my wounds over a bottle of red liquid I feel like I must be playing the game wrong.

The unfortunate truth is that, in all likelihood, I'm not. Many RPGs expect the player to die if they deign to never use potions, and while this would be an okay way to play a survival RPG, it doesn't make sense in epic fantasy. Take Dragon Age for instance. In Dragon Age your party will usually consist of a mage along with a smattering of warriors/rogues. Now, this mage will usually have two jobs. One is to nuke the hell out of high powered opponents, and the other is to heal the warriors/rogues. But, the way the game is scaled, a mage will run out of magic pretty early on in the fight, leaving the party high and dry. That's where potions come in. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a rare occasion that I had to use a potion, but I swear I drink potions more often than I swing my sword. This pacing makes the game feel clunky, and makes me feel cheated and annoyed (especially when I run out of potions).

To fix this problem game designers need to redo the pacing of combat such that mages can consistently heal the party. One solution is to designate a specific type of mage to healing duty (eg. Priests, clerics etc.), but another solution (that would fit in Dragon Age's class system) is an unhinged magic system. In this unhinged system damaging, buffing, and debuffing magic will reduce the mage's mana supply normally. Healing magic, however, will be relegated to another system. The mage could use the blood magic/entropy system of Dragon Age and absorb health from dead opponents or from enemies. They could even use other mages' mana supplies for healing by stealing magic, but that only shows one kind of mage.

For other (less evil) mages there could be a divine magic, or healing magic supply that is separate from their regular mana. A studio could do this simply by having two mana bars, or they could have a system where the mage's regular spells deplete the mana supply, while their healing spells only require that the mage have a certain amount of mana. This would mean that, as the fight wore on, mages would still be running out of spells, but they would be able to heal consistently. The designers would have to nerf the healing so that people couldn't get infinite super health up spells, or they could make it so that, as the magic bar went down, healing spells got more potent. Any one of these systems would make the tactics in RPGs far more interesting and keep us away from our red potion addiction.

Frustration

My recent lack of posts it mostly due to my new found obsession with Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins. The game seems to have taken my advice and eliminated good-bad scores (but they still have popularity scores with your allies) and it is filled with fun characters and scenarios. But, for all its solid storytelling I found myself drawn back to the game with its extremely difficult gameplay. Even the most common of random encounters can wipe you out, and leveling your characters requires some serious thought and effort. What makes the game so difficult though is its deep tactical combat. Each encounter requires a lot of thought and a deep understanding of how your party performs. You have to be able to use each character's abilities in conjunction with all of the others so that you can maximize the amount of pain your party can lay down. Even with mostly picture perfect tactics you can get wiped out just for not paying attention for a few seconds.

And that makes it awesome. It's so rewarding when you finally manage to survive and encounter you've been playing for the last half hour, or when you discover a new talent that gives your character a supreme edge. Every time I sign off I want to jump right back on in order to practice my tactics and bring my skills up to speed. Dragon Age frustrates you to be sure, but it does so in a way that makes you want to keep playing it so that you can get better and better. Now if you'll excuse me I've got some darkspawn to slay.... Damn. TPK.

Hack and Trash

The action-RPG genre has been the well respected bastard offspring of the action and RPG genres since the dawn of the computer gaming era, and in that time the genre has consistently failed to take the best of both action and role playing. Action-RPGs often use a traditional role playing leveling system and then give the player nothing more than control of their character's attack frequency and location. The Elder Scrolls series is a perfect example of this. Bethesda employed a system that was designed more for turn based or tactical combat, but decided to give the player the ability to flail their weapon around as they so pleased. Unfortunately, the direct control of attacks is not enough to constitute action gameplay. Other action-RPGs lean the other way and make intense, blood pumping combat systems, but sorely neglect the leveling system that they tacked on to garner mass appeal. To fix these problems with action-RPGs we need to examine what it is that makes both genres great.

First let's dissect RPGs. The first, and most obvious thing is leveling up. Nothing quite sets off a gamer's endorphins like that satisfying ding and the promise of a whole new batch of skill points. It allows each player to customize their character so that they can take advantage of their play style. Do you want to focus on melee combat and heavy armor? We have skills for that. Magic and summoning? Skills for that. RPGs can offer the player a great way to play the game the way that they want to play it. Other high points of RPGs are their epic storytelling and characterization.

Action games are characterized by blood-pumping, explosive combat, relentless gameplay and the ability to have complete control over the character. Games like Half-Life and Prince of Persia offer their players intense gameplay that requires both fast reflexes and skill. While they are two very different games, they both exemplify the qualities that make action games great. Dying is a momentary setback, and the combat is paced so that you are prepared for each encounter and can spend less time trying to heal or stock up on equipment and more time fighting and advancing the story.

Now, the idea of an action RPG should be to combine the best elements of the two genres into one super-genre, so let's see how this should work out. The most basic elements lie in the basic gameplay and story implementation. By giving total control to the player in combat the game allows for action, and then by granting levels to the player as they advance they have implemented the RPG aspects of the game. Simple right? Well the problem that many game designers face is then implementing pacing. RPGs tend to be much slower, ponderous affairs, while action games tend to try and run the player through the story as quickly as possible so they can get right into the action. To counter this a designer could use a system like Half Life 2s where they keep the player in full control during cutscenes. Players would be able to continue fighting and adventuring, or select dialogue options a la Bioware games in order to keep them involved. By keeping the player playing during story sections, action oriented gamers will have their twitchy kill instincts sated, and RPG gamers will get the deep story and characters that they crave.

The bigger problem is pacing in combat. In a traditional turn based, or strategy based RPG players are willing to slog through either lengthy cut scenes, and can accept having to hit a rest button to heal their party. Action games however, require a much more rapid pace. My biggest issue with the Elder Scrolls series was having to stop every encounter in order to sit on my ass, chugging potions, or having to hit a button to make me rest so that I could get back to full health.

To fix this issue designers have to start using a technique that Left 4 Dead has pioneered: The Administrator. Using the Administrator system, game devs can make sure that, as the player advances through the story, the game is constantly feeding them just enough health and equipment to get by. This will prevent the obnoxious Elder Scrolls scenario of having to go to sleep after every fight and can keep the action gamers engaged, while the leveling and story can keep the RPG-ers satisfied. Then we can have a true cross genre videogame.

Bonus Post: Open World Relationship

After playing the funny, and quite entertaining Brütal Legend I realized that the game's entire premise made it much worse than it could have been. I'm not talking about the metal universe, or even the rts/action combat. What I'm talking about is its open world nature. The game's plot, while not terribly original, was pretty entertaining and was peppered with interesting characters and set-pieces. So why was it so obsessed with ripping me out of it? For every cool level where I got to save my friend by fighting giant spiders, or lead my metal minions to glorious victory, I had to participate in at least six rather dull sidequests in order to get 100% completion.

The issue with is that the sandbox nature of the game made it feel disjointed, and took away from the pacing and potential deepening of the storyline. Moreover, and open world sandbox style of game is more suited to a game where you can actually make decisions about the game as you play. In Brütal Legend the story is set in stone, and doing sidequests and stuff only gives you extra loot and gear. This is not how a sandbox game should be. When the world is opened to the player they need to be able to affect the world through their actions. Brütal Legend was a great game, but it lost most of its pacing and depth to the modern day obsessing with sandboxes. I for one, would love to see a resurgence of the linear games of yore.

The Threat of Death

As promised in last week's issue, today we will discuss consequences and persistent worlds in video games. I mentioned last week that the only way for a choice system to come into full effect in a game was to make the game have lasting consequences that affect not only the story, but also the capabilities of your character. Most games nowadays tend to let the player off way to easily for screwing up. This stops the gamer from fearing the dangers that should be present in a game. A game over screen and a slight wait while you fire up your last checkpoint don't inspire terror in most people. When I see a heavily armed squadron of bad dudes I don't want to think "Well, I might as well try to kill them. If I die, no big deal." I should be pissing my pants in terror and trying to find the simplest way to get around them.

This is where the issue of consequence comes into the game. Most games let you off with little more than a stern warning if you end up biting the dust, and then allow you to go right back to where you died and try it again. How about a game that actually punishes the player for failing missions or dying? Fable 2 made a half assed attempt at consequence (of course everything was half assed in that game) by giving the player a permanent scar, and by taking away a minimal amount of experience. But, that doesn’t inspire much more terror than the game over screen. I don’t care if my already butt ugly, blocky Fable character has a scar on his ass, I want games that kick my ass for failing, that really throw a wrench in the works because of my failure.

A prime example of this concept is the new hardcore RPG for the PS3 Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls is a game that not only expects you to die, but actively tries to make you fail. If you are killed in a mission you re-spawn with your maximum health reduced by one half and all of your experience/loot/souls taken away from you. Moreover, the more you die the harder the game makes itself, like some kind of twisted reverse Left 4 Dead. While this specific approach wont appeal to many gamers, it does inspire an actual amount of fear of death. If I’m presented with the idea of the game getting harder the more I die, I’m not very likely to press my luck. This will allow game developers to create a new level of intensity in their games. Intensity that, right now, is sorely lacking.

To make this idea of consequence palatable for most gamers however, we need to devise a system that will punish you for failure, but not so much that the game becomes impossible or overly difficult. To demonstrate my example I will use... well, an example. Take a sci-fi game that is about a hero named Action Bob. Action Bob has been given the task of defending a small village from a group of slavers. So, being the hero that he is, Bob diligently sets up the defenses, musters the town's militia, and gets ready for the slaughter. The slavers arrive right on time, and about halfway through the mission the Bob leans a little too much out of cover, takes a bullet to the gut, and is out cold for the rest of the fight.

For those attentive among you, you might have noticed that Bob was only injured by the bullet, and not actually killed by it. This will allow Bob to continue his adventures, but with some kind of wound de-buff. When Bob comes to he notices that the town was destroyed during the raid. Corpses of villagers are everywhere, and most of the buildings are smoking ruins. Bob also notices that he is missing a couple of his best items and has had his stats permanently reduced due to his injury. The consequence of Bob's failure is pretty self evident here. Not only did he doom an entire town to death and/or slavery, but he is also suffering from the effects of his injury. This can have a dramatic effect on the remainder of the game as Bob will no longer be able to visit this town for supplies and rest, and he will most likely meet some of the enslaved townspeople along the remainder of his journey.

While this sounds a bit harsh for making a simple mistake, remember that failing a mission/dying should inspire fear in the player. Of course the difficulty would have to be scaled appropriately in order to prevent players from dying all of the time and letting all of Bob's friends die, but that could be easily achieved through a Left 4 Dead style administrator system that could compensate for the player's skill, and keep them a little ahead of the competition.

By giving players something to fear from death, they will think more about their strategies, as well as the choices they make.

Deviating completely from this train of thought, next time I will be discussing how to make a real action RPG with: Hack & Trash.

For all of you who love tabletop gaming, check out this new gizmo that's being worked on down at Carnigie Mellon University.

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.

F1irst P0sting and a Moral Conundrum

Well here it is. Blog #Umpteen-billion. For those of you who are new to the site (read: all of you) this blog will be dedicated to games, game design, and the partaking of games with a special focus on improving what the industry's got going. Without further ado, let's make a better fun.

The Problem:

The topic of today's discussion will be the ever contentious, and increasingly popular: MORAL CHOICE SYSTEM. For those of you who missed out on the revolutionary, and popular Knights of the Old Republic, and have had their head in a hole for the past few years, a moral choice system is when the player is allowed to decide how their characters act and respond to the conditions around them. For some games this has meant allowing players to chose between good and evil, or given them the power to affect every conversation that they have. Sounds cool right?

Now we come to our problem. A player's choice often boils down to choosing between normal human being (good) or hopelessly psychotic devil creature (evil). Don't get me wrong, there's room for psychosis in games. Some of my favorite characters are psychotic, but I've found them to be poor subjects for moral choice systems. I can't imagine Kratos deciding between disemboweling the minotaur or rescuing the poor Athenian child. Psychotic people you see, have no subtlety, and we need our choices in games to be subtle.

The greatest failing of KOTOR was, without a doubt, it's evil moral choices. The whole point of the Dark Side in Star Wars was that it slowly consumed you, that you believed that you were doing the right thing, while letting your anger and fear envelope your mind, dragging you ever deeper into the hell you had created for yourself. KOTOR had none of that nuance. You stepped out into the world and immediately began slaughtering innocents, mistreating your allies, and acting like an overall prick. This makes both for poor character development and makes taking the Dark Side path a choice that you have to make right away as opposed to making it as the game develops.

The good decisions are often no better. Mass Effect, a more recent proponent of the moral choice system, kept you as the hero regardless of your decisions, but supposedly had NPCs react to you differently based on whether you were Paragon or Renegade. My issue with this system was that it was too easy to be good. Trusting people and risking your life to save the innocent usually worked out, and, on the off chance that someone decided to kill you, you could gun them down without a thought. This bugged me. If I went around trusting all of the gun-toting, crime-committing, crazies in the world, I would rapidly become dead, so why do my videogame heroes get away with being so bloody stupid? I don't want my moral decision to be between raving lunatic and dumbass.

The Solutions:

First we need to ask ourselves the big question, why a moral choice system? Games seem to be obsessed with the idea of moral choice over just plain old choice. Furthermore, they love to assign arbitrary values to each decision a character makes. Why should saving a small child give me ten goodliness points? And why should letting that selfsame child die earn me ten badliness points? I can understand developers having background meters on a player's morality in order to affect how other characters react to them, but why have those values visible to the player? To solve our problem I'm going to use a theoretical game scenario. The player character and their friends have gone camping. They got cut off from society when their car broke down, and now they have to survive in the wilderness while working their way back towards civilization. Let's say that your character and an acquaintance, let's call him Bob, are running from an angry bear. As you come to the banks of a river that you can cross to safety Bob trips over a log. Do you:

a) leave Bob and save yourself?
b) help Bob up and try to get both of you to safety?
c) distract the bear with manly posturing so that Bob can escape?

All of these options make a certain amount of sense, and all will have consequences later in the game. We'll start with option a). Bob collapses, and you continue to run, fording the river, and getting to safety. Bob doesn't make it. At this point most games would award you with a helping of evil points, but I'm going to keep that out of this scenario. Instead, your character is going to have to return to camp and explain to the rest of the group how Bob died, and you will have to attempt to survive with one less person in the group. But, you came out of the situation unharmed.

Option b) could very well end with both of you being mauled, but maybe you can both make it back to camp injured for the rest of the game, but alive. Saving Bob with manly posturing will, let's be honest here, most likely end with you being mauled and having some permanent game-affecting status debuff. But, that's all part of what comes into a choice system. Instead of the game telling you that you're an evil character, or a good character, it'll be forcing you to play through the consequences of your actions. For these consequences to come into full effect of course, games need to develop a system of persistent punishment and reward that will have a significant impact on your gaming experience.

And hey, we could even have you make those choices while still in full control of your character, instead of selecting an option in a dialogue box.

We will discuss consequences and a truly persistent world next time with: The Threat of Death.