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.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
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.
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.
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