08.14.08
Posted in Game design at 23:45
Yesterday I had a spontaneous impulse to write down one of my generic game concepts, thematically based on a long-defunct Deus Ex mod name of The Preachers - or rather, based on the impression I got of it from reading its website 7 years ago. Reading over the concept, it was starkly clear that in many ways it resembles half of my other game ideas. I mentioned this to Gelo, and he confirmed that he’s experienced the same thing: Before deciding to write the book he’s currently working on, Rebel Cell, he had half a dozen very similar concepts under consideration.
A few more people have since confirmed this, and it does make a lot of sense: When you have loose plans to make something creative, you’ll have a pretty good idea of the basic sort of work you want to do, but it’s easy to think of many different variations of this central concept. With that in mind, here are the three components that seem to appear in most of my game concepts:
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- Game: Viking: Battle for Asgard
- Music: Carpark North - Transparent and Glasslike
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07.31.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 20:26
I reckon that every game project will once in a while present a few interesting design challenges. That’s one of the reasons game design is fun: Solving creative challenges can be just as much fun as actually playing a game, especially when it evolves into a collaborative discussion about possible solutions. Recently, one of our levels in TNM has provided us with a new and interesting design problem.
The Concept
The map in question is a vast sewer system designed as a labyrinth, inspired by the Hong Kong canals level in Deus Ex. Like the Hong Kong canals, there’s nothing strictly plot-critical in the sewers, the player will never need to visit them, and indeed the first two playthroughs of TNM (both by Gelo) skipped the sewers entirely to make it through the game faster. Instead, the sewers are a vessel for exploration, a recontextualization of the good old dungeon to be delved into and investigated for the sake of adventure.
The sewer level is the only map created from scratch by me, so it holds a special place in my heart. But it’s a bold design, and it’s not meant to appeal to everyone. When I originally visited Hong Kong, I was immensely thrilled by the way entire parts of the map were hidden simply by virtue of the map being so big and intricately structured. I believe I’ve mentioned it before, the sense of a “secret” that’s grounded in the fiction of the world, rather than being some sort of invisible door that disrupts your immersion in the game’s world. The sewers were designed to be so enormous and labyrinthine that things could be hidden simply by placing them slightly off the beaten path.
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- Game: Quake 4! No, just kidding: TNM
- Music: Alphabeat - Fascination
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07.22.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 18:59
Now that we’re almost done with the first closed beta build of TNM, it’s time to kick back and pat ourselves on the back until the bug reports start rolling in as an unstoppable tide (or trickle, if you’re more optimistically inclined). It’s also time to start thinking more abstractly about game design again.
As part of an ongoing discussion with Shane about the quality of Mass Effect’s dialogue, he gave me what is probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received: That TNM’s dialogue is better because it flows more naturally. I don’t think I’d agree with that, but it did get me thinking about the different ways to use interactive dialogue in games.
Bioware’s games always put quite a lot of agency in their dialogue, meaning a lot of the choices you make in Bioware RPG’s are made through dialogue options. In Mass Effect, this usually manifests itself in the form of coloured options that are unlocked if your Intimidate or Charm talents meet the requirements. Sometimes you can go so far as to execute an NPC by selecting the dialogue option that makes Shepard shoot him in the face, and often you will use the dialogue to make important decisions concerning the direction of the storyline.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: AFI - This Time Imperfect
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07.20.08
Posted in Game design at 16:54
Item sets are a brilliant invention. I’ve loved them ever since I first encountered the concept in Diablo 2. It tickles my collector gene in a way not even card games like Magic: The Gathering has managed to. The moment I pick up a set item, I know that I must have them all, even if they are individually inferior to items I’m already carrying.
Yesterday Nick ran me through the Deadmines instance in World of Warcraft with his level 41 mage. I came out of there with 3 items in a set of 5, obviously designed with rogues in mind: Blackened Defias Armor, Blackened Defias Belt, and Blackened Defias Boots. Together, they gave me a set bonus of +10 Armor and +5 to Arcane Resistance, but temptingly greyed-out stats informed me that picking up either the gloves or the leggings would grant me a +2 increase to my expertise rating (which I don’t even know what is) and that completing the set would increase my attack power by 10.
I immediately went to the auction house and spent a fortune to acquire the gloves and the leggings. The funny thing is that this set is pretty useless to me as a druid: I need Intellect and Spirit to boost my magic, but every item in this set grants Agility and Strength bonuses. I don’t care though, I’m primarily concerned with looking extremely cool and stylish in a world where almost everybody below level 60 looks like a tramp or a clown. You just can’t go wrong with black.
- Game: World of Warcraft
- Music: Three Days Grace - Riot!
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07.15.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 19:19
Overall I’ve enjoyed my vacation on Darkshore. Spent a lot of time on the beach. Didn’t get much of a tan though. My girlfriend turned into a bear a couple of times, so that was a little freaky.
- Uthar the Warrior, heading home to Stormwind from Darkshore.
How do you roleplay in World of Warcraft? With great difficulty. It’s not really a game that fosters immersion - every time you even begin to forget you’re playing a game, the rules are shoved into your face again. Enemies fade in out of thin air, bears cheerily drop battleaxes when you kill them but somehow fail to yield any claws most of time, NPC’s will mourn the death of their beloved although your own death can be rectified in the time it takes your spirit to run from the graveyard to your corpse, and food consumption has level restrictions.
WoW doesn’t want you to forget you’re playing a game, it wants you to learn the rules and then powergame the hell out of them. It wants you to keep chasing those extra 0.5 DPS forever and ever. Now that I’ve tried playing both on an RP and a non-RP server, I can say with reasonable certainty that - barring any RP guilds that have thus far managed to elude me - the only difference is that RP servers have slightly fewer characters named “uberdruid” or “UrDad”.
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- Game: World of Warcraft
- Music: Little Jimmy Reeves - Sidetracked
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07.02.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 15:54
Whoops, looks like I have temporarily failed at blogging. It’s not that I’ve been insanely busy, just that I’ve been a little low on energy recently. I have had time to play games as always, of course: Mainly Titan Quest, but also Perfect Dark Zero which I played in co-op with my friend Torsten. I’ve played it a bit in solo and as with most other games, it is far better with two players. It’s a decent enough action game, but it has at least one major weakness.
As far as I can tell, Rare tried to make a stealth action game. In my opinion they failed, and as a bit of a stealth game connoisseur, I’ve been trying to figure out why.
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- Game: Perfect Dark Zero
- Music: Sons & Daughters - Darling
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06.18.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 23:59
Character progression systems in roleplaying games is something I feel pretty strongly for. Growing better just seems to be one of those primal urges, like collecting better equipment, but generally without the luxury of being able to change your mind and switching out your items at will. When you’re levelling up, your choices are usually a lot more permanent than when you’re out looting, and for that reason, you grow more attached to them.
After playing quite a few (though far from all) CRPG’s on the market, I’ve developed a pretty good idea of what sort of character system I prefer. The main rule is that every upgrade to your character should be significant. The more important a new skill or ability is, the more I enjoy the game. I’d rather have a steady trickle of important upgrades to my character than sudden level-ups full of invidivually insignificant improvements.
Case in point: Compare Diablo 2 with a Dungeons & Dragons game such as Neverwinter Nights. In NWN, you receive a constant stream of experience points which don’t matter at all until you reach a specific limit which triggers a level-up, and then you get a broad range of improvements across all categories (skills, feats, spells, attack bonus, hitpoints). Picking feats and spells are interesting, since each choice you make is significant, but as for attack bonus and hitpoints, the progression is generally slow enough that you don’t notice a particular difference once you’re around level 5 and up. The difference between 50 hitpoints and 60 hitpoints can make a difference in a fight of course, but it doesn’t change the way you play the game.
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- Game: Titan Quest
- Music: Mary Jo feat. Cairbre - Bang Bang, Mystery Man
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06.15.08
Posted in Game design at 17:01
I came across a post about writing in games over at Brenda Brathwaite’s blog just now, and it reminded me of an old controversial article on Gamasutra wherein it was claimed that games don’t need writers since the designers generally do a way better job (I stress that Brenda’s post made a completely different point). The article’s main argument was that writers are good for one thing, which is structuring a plot into the necessary acts and arcs that a plot needs in order to be good.
I beg to differ. In my opinion, writers are good for at least two other things: Story and dialogue. Here, it’s important to discern between story and plot: Plot is what specifically happens on the screen or on the pages throughout a book, film, show, or game. Story is all of that plus anything else that’s mentioned, referenced, or subtly hinted at. The new Star Wars trilogy was already part of the story for the original trilogy before they were used as plots for films in their own right.
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- Game: Titan Quest
- Music: Titan Quest Soundtrack - The Prophecy
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06.14.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 15:48
Having completed GTA4 last week, I was in need of a new distraction, and Homeworld - lying installed but utterly unplayed on my desk - seemed to require too much cerebral activity for my current needs. I’ve been following Shamus‘ episodic dissection of Flagship’s Hellgate: London, and for some reason I was reminded of my intentions to purchase Titan Quest once the price dropped to something affordable.
Titan Quest was released in 2006 to mixed reviews. To call it a Diablo clone would be about as fair as calling The Witcher a Baldur’s Gate clone or Call of Duty 4 a Quake clone, but TQ does fit snugly into what has been excellently called the “Third Person Looter” (TPL) genre. It’s a top-down game that allows zooming but provides no camera rotation(!), and the gameplay, like most games of its kind, is extremely simple:
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- Game: Titan Quest - Immortal Throne
- Music: Embrun - Gigoloco
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06.07.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 22:48
I was browsing Shamus’ blog Twenty Sided the other day, idly making plans to kill him and take over his readership, when I came across a post wherein he lambasted Invisible War for largely limiting your choices to “Kill” or “Let Live”. Not only that, but compared eg. to the similarly Life/Death-based choice of what to do with Juan Lebedev in Deus Ex 1, most of these choices seem a bit tame because you usually don’t have any reason to kill the character in question.
On Lebedev’s jet, you have your orders not to kill the prisoner conflicting with Anna’s urgent demands that you execute him and threats to do it herself if you hesitate too long. It becomes a reasonably well balanced choice between killing your ruthless partner or killing the unarmed guy who claims to know important things about your past.
As with any game design observation, and particularly those that involve Deus Ex, I immediately turned it around and looked at The Nameless Mod through its perspective, and I noticed that by far most of the choices we have in the mod are similar choices for whether or not to kill different characters. On some occasions, you have reasons for and against, but I admit they’re never quite as terrific as the Lebedev dilemma, and by far most of them simply concern ancillary characters whose deaths have little consequence and offer you no significant benefits.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Metallica - Harvester of Sorrow
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