03.24.08

The Crate Problem

Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 19:18 by Jonas

I’ve started the first balance pass of the first section of TNM, which is the biggest and most non-linear part of our mod with its 26 maps offering about 30-40% of our total play time. I’ve chosen to split the balance work on these maps into two parts - first I’ll remove any items that I’ve placed too many of, then I’ll go over it again adding the items that are missing. This prevents the balance sheet from getting way too confusing to handle reliably.

My biggest problem now is the dreaded crates. Everybody and their grandmother would, if prompted, tell you that crates are a lazy design choice, and that’s why they’re increasingly rare in modern games. To the player, crates are just a weird, nonsensical design flaw that we’ve all grown used to through repetition.

But the problem is that crates are (were) used for a reason. Several very good reasons in fact. First of all, they’re an easy way to say “hey, look over here!” A packet of pistol ammunition or a clip for an assault rifle or a bioelectric battery or whatever is generally small and easy to miss, whereas a crate is big and easily recognizable. After a level or two of picking up various goodies from these iconic equipment drops, the player will be trained to look for them, and you’ll never have to worry about calling attention to important places or item locations again - just put in a crate and your player will go there.

Surprisingly, it’s also great from a realism point of view. This is odd because realism is, of course, the main argument against using crates: How often do you actually see crates littering office buildings or back alleys or parks? Unless you work in a warehouse, you don’t really see a lot of crates. But let me ask you another question then: How often do you just leave stuff on the ground? Well, if you’re a messy teenager you may not even be able to see your floor through the piles and piles of junk littering it, but most normal people put things on shelves, on desks and tables, or in closets and cupboards.

If you’re a level designer working on an industrial factory complex or a park or canyon map, logical places to put items and equipment for the player will be few and far between, and if your game allows the player to sneak past enemies or if the enemies in the area are wild creatures or monsters so the player won’t even be able to pick equipment off of defeated enemies, it can be pretty hard to keep finding good ways to replenish the player’s health and ammo without making the player stop to ask “what the hell are grenades doing lying around the base of this tree…?”

Crates are the remedy! Crates are used to store all manner of objects temporarily while they are being moved from place to place. If you find a couple of crates with ammunition at the side of the road, you assume it’s been dropped off for somebody else to pick up later. If you find a crate with medkits on the floor of an industrial complex, you assume it’s recently been received and has yet to be unpacked. Or, if you actually stop to think about it, you’ll realize it’s still pretty unrealistic.

If you’re wondering how on Earth this ties into the balance work I’m doing right now, the answer is simple: Our crates do not support difficulty filtering (the measure we use to determine which items will appear on which difficulty levels), so if I need to remove an item from certain difficulties, I can’t put it in a crate. One of our programmers offered to code difficulty filtering into our crates, but I told him no because… crates are a lazy design measure, right? Instead, I find myself adding extra geometry or furniture to the world so I have somewhere to put all these items - somewhere that makes sense and where the player will notice them.

Once again I’ve managed to make things harder for myself. But look at the bright side: I get to whine about it in public! And hey, you’ll see a lot less of those logic-defying crates in TNM.

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