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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06.03.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 11:20
The indomitable Jim Rossignol just posted a love letter for exploration gameplay over at Rock Paper Shotgun, and I feel compelled to ruminate upon it here, largely inspired by some of the comments on that post. I’m in the same boat as Jim, I explore compulsively. It started with Deus Ex, which taught me great rewards could wait in the dark corners of a level, and now the activity has been granted additional weight by my aspirations to become a game designer, where attention to detail can only be considered a boon. Now adays I even explore mostly linear games such as Half-Life 2 as much as I can, just to see how they were put together.
But some of the commenters have a point: In many open games, there’s nothing there. STALKER has much exploration, but offers little in the way of gameplay. Maybe you’ll find another mutant enemy. Maybe you’ll find a randomly generated weapon stash. To me, it’s enough, I was there to satisfy my own curiosity and to check out the architecture anyway, but to most players this reward would not be adequate.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: David McCallum Sr. - The Edge
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05.23.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 10:33
When I attended elementary and junior high school, the Danish school system operated under a paradigm called “responsibility for your own learning”, which sounds a bit awkward in English but rolled off the tongue somewhat easier in Danish (”Ansvar for egen læring”). The jist of it was that if the pupils do not cooperate with the teacher, they will learn nothing - you get as much out of classes as you put into them.
When I wrote my paper about Oblivion last year, one of my primary points was that the greatest weakness of such an open game is that the player has a lot of responsibility to make the game fun. They call them sandbox games for a reason - if you build a castle out of the sand, you can have fun; if you take a piss in it, not so much. Oblivion allows you to wander off into the mountains and become tremendously bored. This is the weakness of its narrative but the strength of its gameplay, because you can also wander off into the mountains and have loads of fun.
I spent most of yesterday playing Grand Theft Auto 4 because our Internet connection is on the fritz at home, and God forbid I’d have to open a book or something. One of the missions I did had me chasing two bikers on a motorcycle through the city. At one point they would drive unto the train tracks and take the chase into the subway tunnels. At the entrance to the tunnels, they paused for a moment, long enough for me to line up a shot. I emptied a whole clip of my SMG in their general direction, killing one of them, but the other survived somehow. I followed him into the tunnels, spraying clip after clip of bullets at him before realizing he was immortal - I wasn’t meant to kill him yet.
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05.17.08
Posted in Game design, Game news, Games, Personal at 01:14
So this week has been relatively interesting. Events have occured that were worthy of bloggage. I will now try (and fail) to do them justice. I will also include photos, and this will possibly help. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a long one - even for me.
Insertion and Recon
The conference started Wednesday, but I went to Malmö (roughly pronounced Marlm-soundthatdoesntexistinEnglish) on Tuesday so I wouldn’t have to rush off to check in half-way through the conference. On my way to the hostel, I realized I could pretty much walk the whole way through parks, just occasionally crossing the road to get from one park to the next. This turned out to be a good thing, because I ended up walking that route 7 times throughout Tuesday.
After I’d dumped my baggage at the hostel around noon, I grabbed some lunch and then headed back to the station to meet Ruben. I was fairly excited about this, since I’ve known Ruben online for years ever since he tested my NWN module and recruited me to play in his massive DM’d campaign. For the best DM I’ve ever had the honour of playing with, I was a little disappointed to find that he wasn’t an enormous immortal being of pure light, but he was a nice guy, so I quickly forgave him for letting down my expectations. (Dunno if Ruben would want me posting a picture of him here, so I won’t). We took a few walks around town, then split up to relax before dinner. We met up again half past 6 and quickly found a nice but affordable place to eat. Then we wandered around a bit, had some coffee, and went back to sleep.
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- Game: All of them
- Music: Mindthings - Exponential Tears
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05.07.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 13:27
Have you noticed how popular handheld camera is these days? If you’ve ever studied film, you most certainly can’t help but notice every time you turn on your TV. It’s especially noticeable in action series like Battlestar Galactica where they not only film approximately 95% of their shots with handheld, but they even simulate handheld camera in their CGI space scenes!
It’s a good trend because since the invention of steadycam, handheld camera has been visually tolerable and subtle as well as dynamic and exciting. Naturally the style has spilled into games, which constantly nick ideas from films as well as feed new ideas and styles back into the older medium. Mass Effect’s space sequences featured camera work pretty much identical to the floaty simulated handheld cameras in Battlestar Galactica, Gears of War used shaky and up-close-and-personal handheld camera to show the nasty chainsaw kills, and Guitar Hero sometimes simulates handheld camera to give the impression of a camera man amidst the audience at the front of the stage.
Most recently, I’ve noticed Grand Theft Auto 4 has a bit of a love affair with the handheld camera. It’s used in pretty much every shot of every cutscene, and GTA4 features many many many cutscenes. Far more interestingly, however, GTA4 features several different camera modes, one of which is seemingly randomly placed handheld camera positions. This camera mode makes the action look remarkably cinematic, making the extended car chases even more convincing than the impressive AI and the dynamic open city already makes them, but unfortunately I find it quite difficult to steer properly with the shifting, sometimes very inconvenient camera positions.
I’m looking forward to seeing where simulated handheld cameras can be used in future titles. Assassin’s Creed had something like it in pretty much all the fight scenes, which worked really well (sadly when people describe the game’s often unstimulating and repetitive combat system, they usually neglect to give it credit for the never inconvenient dynamically placed cameras). In any case, I don’t see cutscenes in games going away any time soon, and now that games can apparently fully simulate handheld cameras in-game, more studios than ever will need to hire cinematic designers and cutscene directors. Oh, would you look at that? I happen to be pretty well qualified for the position 
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Track 4
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05.02.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 01:10
Grand Theft Auto 4 has barely been out for a week, and you’re already really tired of reading about it. I know you are, I am too. If you don’t have it yet, you’re sick of reading about this apparently fantastic game that you can’t play. If you have it, you’ve probably been reading about it for 3 months already, and now you just want to play it, and maybe blog about it yourself.
So, to hell with what GTA4 is. You already know. It’s everything, it’s 10 different games crammed onto one disk, it’s everything that made San Andreas good without most of the things that made it suck. Here’s what I want it to be, in my boundless ingratitude.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Mindslave
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04.26.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 11:00
Reading the recent Gamasutra article The Top 20 Underutilized Licenses and clapping my hands at the prospect of a Groundhog Day adventure/RPG or a Shaun of the Dead survival horror pastiche action game, I figured I would write my own little list of licences I’d sell my left arm to work on.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Steve Foxon - Strange String Thing
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