Bag o' Hit Points

This argument isn’t particularly constructive for the FPS designer, the poor soul who is scrambing for anything to keep things balanced and exciting in the wild wooly west of random online pick-up groups. We can’t really blame them for falling back on pure numbers when necessary (full disclosure: X-Men Legends was an unabashed example of the Numbers Game…). Solving this problem through other means is a tough one, but it is worthwhile to pursue avenues other than the venerable Bag of Hit Points.

Challenge Stage

When looking for ways to increase difficulty, game developers often wish the answer was as simple as adding more enemies to each encounter… “No problem! Double the players equals twice the enemies! BAM!” Sadly, very few game technologies give developers the luxury of unlimited enemies onscreen… It’s a yoke that just about all of us constantly struggle with. Back in the sprite days of Doom and Heretic it wasn’t a big deal; those games had extra enemy spawns that were triggered at higher levels or during coop. In these days of high-fidelity characters, however, most technology still keeps the population somewhere in the single digits.

There are tricks to give a feeling of greater foe count… Placing additional enemy encounters in the “dead spots” between the “standard” encounters works, if you never overlap the encounters to keep the maximum enemy count low. It can be tricky to pull off but it can give the player a sense of a relentless onslaught, requiring him to manage ammo and health more carefully even though he never sees more than a few at a time. Unfortunately, by leveraging this method you can ravage any sense of pacing, leveling out those tension peaks and valleys into a steady drone, and changing the game in perhaps unintended ways.

Another population trick is to deliver more enemies to the battlefield through respawning. This allows enemies to repopulate places that were previously cleared out, denying players a safe retreat and keeping the pressure on. This approach can be reviled by players because it denies them a sense of “completion” within a level (it was a contentious feature in Soldier of Fortune, for example), but it can be used to great effect. My first experience with respawning as a gamer was Doom’s Nightmare mode, where all enemies regenerated after 1 minute or so. (Damn that was hard!) More recently it was embraced in Left 4 Dead, where zombies can pour out of just about any opening, inaccessible fences area, rooftop, etc. Careful use of this mechanic can help a game level feel as though it is packed with hundreds of foes, even if your tech can’t handle it (although L4D did a damn good job with the population too)…

Up to 11

In contrast with developers, a majority of gamers wish that higher difficulty was just a matter of making the enemies smarter… perhaps implying the existence of a Jules Verne-era dial with “IQ” scrawled on the side that can be cranked past 10. Unfortunately game AI is never so easy that you’ve got unused slack somewhere that you’re not using. Generally it’s not decision-making that challenges the AI programmer or designer, but rather environment response and navigation. Sure, humans can walk across an obstacle-ridden field without even thinking about it, but an AI that does this naturally requires tremendous work whether the difficulty level is baby-like or insane.

Even if the leap from floor-traversing mouth-breather to devious mastermind were easy, I’ve repeated many times that “smarter enemies” don’t always pave the way to “more fun” anyway. Aside from major boss-level fights, the opponents in many games don’t last long enough for you to really experience their brilliance… showing off would require for the player to see them, which means they’re probably already busy killing them. Sure, you could make the enemies tougher so that you might see their amazing kung-fu, but then you’re back to turning them into HP bags.

Some games emulate enemy “smarts” by simply increasing their shooting accuracy or giving them uncanny perception. Let me be clear, this is not fun. Most games with gun-toting enemies need them to be inaccurate at long ranges. If an enemy pops into a play space a long distance from the player, chances are the player is not aware of their presence immediately… a bit of warning is needed before he gets a bullet in the head. If an enemy’s accuracy is simply dialed up arbitrarily, the player suddenly starts taking significantly more damage from enemies a few pixels in size… you’ve turned the game into a walk through a room full of snipers. Statistically the enemies are just doing more damage to the player each second anyway… so that’s what you want, just crank the bullet damage and be done.

There are some better models out there for bullet inaccuracy that can help remedy the fun, but they are still aren’t used enough (that would be fun to talk about in another post).

Phases of Death

While technically it is a variation on adding health to opponents, but one way of amping difficulty is giving them additional damage states, each of which has to be “killed”. Examples of this are the humans that become “tentacle heads” when headshot in Resident Evil 4, or the aliens in Blacksite: Area 51, that can sever their torso after being “killed”, crawling after the player. These imply non-realistic opponents or a heavy art burden, but it can also be done by having the foe walk with a limp in phase 2, or switching weapons each phase.

This may sound familiar because it is the way that just about every classic boss encounter works… and for good reason. Bosses are “tough” and hence can soak up a lot more damage… without small player victories and new behaviors coming into play, defeating them would be a tiresome exercise in shoveling damage until it goes down (and many action games still use this model).

Cleverly-designed damage stages also have the advantage of not always being used. A 3-stage robot can skip stage 2 and 3 in easy difficulty, last for a second stage in later levels, and die only after all three in harder difficulties. Depending on how an enemy is designed, it might even be possible to regenerate them to a previous state if not killed in time for even more challenge.

A distant relative of the staged model is a mechanic where an enemy must be in a certain state to be killed. For example, a foe may have a “stunned” state which provides you with an opening to slice off their head. By this I don’t mean “Japanese boss-style” where every 15 seconds the monster opens up his eye-dome and can be hurt, but rather a system that gives the player the tools to introduce a vulnerable state. Another example is a robot who must be immobilized with an electric shock, before you step in to disable his control chip. Or a soft-bodied creature that must be frozen first and then shattered (similar to how the freeze-wrench combo works in Bioshock). Games like modern military shooters are more limited in this respect, but if you have the luxury to play with your enemy ecology (that is, their function and response to various stimuli), a large number of additional options open up to you. As above, you can scale difficulty by sprinkling in these new mechanics more aggressively later on (say, early robots don’t have an “overdrive chip”, but all of them do at higher difficulty).

Smarty(er)-Pants

Other tricks aside, there’s still a value in delivering a smarter enemy… or at least one the gamer will recognize as “smarter”. One example of that is to add some coordinated behaviors between multiple foes. A simple trigger that makes several enemies charge at once or synchronize multiple grenade tosses can add difficulty in a hurry. Throw in an audio cue to draw attention to it and suddenly the gamer has a newfound respect for your AI mojo, baby. More complicated relationships like an enemy that lays down covering fire while the other charges can be good also, but the more complex they get, the more likely they are to fail or get lost in the shuffle. Sure, it makes things harder, but look for ways that are going to make the player feel the added pressure.

Left 4 Dead in particular leveraged this synchronization through their “AI Director”. While not technically an issue of “smarts” (the zombies are, well, zombies) when the director decided that the experience needed a massive assault for added danger, the player knew that the game was turning on the heat. The perception of challenge is perhaps as important as the actual difficulty increase.

Adding enemies with interrelated behaviors is also a method to give a feeling that they are “conspiring against you”. A prime enemy that adds challenge to any group is the buffing opponent. The Shaman in Diablo II and the Arch-Vile in Doom II could resurrect fallen opponents, making the whole group for more deadly and interesting to fight. Other, more mild examples of this type of enemy are enemies that have an aura that heals or increases the strength of their nearby friends.

A player must completely change his tactics and adjust when fighting a group that has a buffing foes added. Even one can add considerable challenge, and multiples can be devastating. Beyond just spawning extra ones, their behaviors can be tweaked for difficulty by increasing the buffing effect, casting time, or the radius of their ability.

Looking closer, any type of environmental object that enemies can utilize can add challenge and an extra feeling of intelligence, no matter how simple. Enemy buffs could be provided by emplacements rather than spawned foes. The health stations in BioShock kept you from leaving your nearly-dead foe alone, because he might return fully charged. Emplaced totems such as those in World of Warcraft are similar.

Final Thoughts

Reflecting on what I’ve written above, I see that there is no “magic bullet” for scaling difficulty (although I hoped that writing about it might shake one loose). The techniques that must be used will certainly vary from game to game… My main suggestion is to look beyond the traditional D&D numerical “crutch” when faced with systems that need to scale. I understand why we do it: it’s not just our inner fanboy screaming to get out… numbers are a necessary part of our job and getting results. However, I love designs where the player doesn’t have to be steeped in numbers in order to succeed.

You might also come out of this thinking that I turn my nose up at RPG’s. On the contrary, it’s one of my favorite genres, and Diablo II is still my favorite game of all time.

Finally, I certainly mean no disrespect for what Resistance 2 has accomplished in its multiplayer mode. Along with Call of Duty 4, I think it has laid a foundation for great semi-persistent online experiences for shooters. What others might build upon these concepts in the future makes my mind reel.

It was a fairly addicting experience, as I pushed to each successive level like I might grind an MMO.  The matches themselves were entertaining on their own, with tangible sense of achievement every few rounds.  Unfortunately, I eventually ran out of gas, not because the game itself wasn’t fun enough…  but rather because each creature had 5-10 times the health of their single-player counterparts.  The campaign was a well-balanced shooter with crisp control aim and a great sense of power, but coop had me holding my machinegun on what should have been “popcorn” enemies for several seconds, watching XP pile up as I waited for each bag of hit points to fall down.  Quite simply, it didn’t feel at all like the shooter than I played when not online.

I cannot fault the concept of jacking up the time to kill each enemy…  it’s a time-honored tradition from many classic games.  In Resistance 2, it was clear that they needed to extend the experience and increase the effort required to bring each one down.  It’s probably a useful excercise to discuss why this might be.

The Numbers Game

One reason for enemies to soak up bullets in coop is to match the level of difficulty to the number of players.  If 10 players entered a level that was intended for just one, they would slaughter everything with their added firepower.  Some games ship this way, whether due to limited resources or to reward the effort that used to be involved to connect multiple PC’s for a coop session in the first place.   These days most do their best to notch up the challenge when new players join a session, and sometimes this is done by increasing the enemy toughness.   Diablo did this in the most overt fashion, by reporting to the player that “the enemy forces have grown stronger” when each additional player joins the game.  Behind the scenes it was increasing the experience level equivalent of all the enemies in the world.

Another reason for enemies feeling more invulnerable are in games with a progression track…  ones that reward the player for each hour of play with upgrades in ability and potency (like Resistance 2 does).  Unfortunately it’s easy to forget that in order to build a game where the player feels more powerful over time, you must hold back some of the most potent player abilities at the start of the game.  The player certainly feels a sense of achievement as he gains all the new kick-ass stuff over the course of the game, but sometimes that means he also feels anemic at the very beginning, where he has the least capability.  The damage potential for his weapons are less, his health is less.  His weapons aren’t as flamboyant.  Even the most basic enemies might take far longer to kill than they will later on.  This is a dangerous practice that must be handled with care…  these are the crucial early hours where a player should be falling in love with the product rather than feeling emasculated.

Somehow this is an acceptable practice in RPG’s…  Those games are almost entirely about progression and acquisition, so it is expected that the player will evolve tremendously over hundreds of play hours (or thousands in an MMO).  But because of these incredible progression arcs, most RPG’s play what I call The Numbers Game.  You’ve doubtless seen it…  when players start off their game doing tiny amounts of damage to wimpy rats, but eventually grow to deal thousands of points while fighting giant dragons.  In these situations there is a continual arms race between the damage you deal and the health of your enemies.

For example:  I’m playing an MMO and start with a character who can deal an average of 20 points of damage to an enemy who has about 100 health. About 5 hits will take him down.   After some play time, I level my character to level 20, and can now deal 100 points of damage. Good for me! …except now most of the enemies have around 500 health. I guess it’s still 5 hits to kill one.  Finally, after months of investment I reach the coveted level 50, and I’m clobbering opponents with 1000 points per hit. Of course, you guessed it, my enemies have 5000 HP (or more).

This shouldn’t be a big surprise, because as you gain power, it would be anticlimactic to see a lessening difficulty…  we all want to grow up to finally beat that huge, scary thing that we fled from many hours of play ago.  Keep in mind what this means, however:  In a combat-centric game, a player’s primary metric of power is the number of hits per kill. (This abstracts to “the ratio of time investment per reward”… but that’s fodder for a later post).   But when I play the Numbers Game, do I really feel better about taking down a Level 50 Hoary Drake with my Level 50 character than I did taking down the Level 1 Scrawny Rat with my Noob?  The answer in RPG’s is often “yes”, but in shooters you can get in a lot more trouble.

The difference is in the essences of the genres…  RPG’s deal with skill advancement primarily on the character itself, as he “levels up” and increases his capability through higher numerical stats.   The player himself has less pressure to hone his actual playing skill, aside from juggling the new options presented to him when new abilities are unlocked.   He makes choices about how he wishes to advance, working with figures like “strength”, “speed” and “willpower”, even though they often just present different ways of hurting an enemy.  These various axes of advancement give the player something to aim for, a vast possibility space that he can explore and achieve in.

Since advancement is so tied to how the player’s capabilities are represented, the player keeps a much greater awareness of the numbers and how they affect him.  He understands and accepts that an enemy that is 5 levels above him is extremely dangerous, because the numbers say so.  This is totally fine, because most RPG’s are not about combat…  they’re about advancement, acquisition, and a bit of exploration.   (If you really believe that you played Diablo for the click-and-kill combat, I think I have some real estate you might be interested in…)

Shooters by comparison leave skill advancement largely to the player’s mind and body.  Your manual aiming ability is your primary “accuracy stat”, and timing, dodging and area management are all critical traits that don’t live in the game itself.   In most shooters the player’s character is just as effective with a pistol at the beginning of the game as he is at the end…  even though the game progressively demands more of the player himself with larger groups of foes and challenging level layouts.

Shooters also are tuned for action experience, living and dying by their weapon balance and ammunition management…  Killing one enemy is usually 1-3 shots, and an FPS starts to instinctively know which weapon is best for each situation.   This is the biggest reason that shooters are so seriously wounded by the Numbers Game. By increasing enemy health arbitrarily, the choice of weapon eventually becomes less important. Enemies that used to be demolished by a shotgun blast take several hits, causing players to switch from surprise or flanking maneuvers to attrition tactics. Pistols go from being the standby for taking out weak enemies with minimal ammo investment to becoming basically useless. Different skills and sometimes abhorrent tactics are adopted in order to succeed because the game becomes increasingly “unfair”.  Players might even start to think in terms of DPS (Damage per Second), a major metric in MMO’s and a strong symptom of the Numbers Game.

More Than Just Digits

So this argument does nothing to help out the intrepid FPS designer, who still needs to solve these difficulty issues…  He’s willing to do anything to make the game as fun for 10 players as it is for one, and to make gamers feel increasingly awesome for each hour he plays.  I don’t blame folks for falling back on the numbers when they need to; Diablo II is still my favorite game of all time, and when working X-Men Legends I personally applied the Numbers Game to near-excess (more on that another day).  

Solving this problem through other means is really hard, but going the Bags o’ HP route should be a last resort.  I’ll see if I can scrape up some alternatives in the next post.

In all Fable II is a fun fantasy romp.  Being one who enjoyed the first Fable more than most, I wasn’t particularly surprised.  “Big concepts” like property ownership and marriage aside, there’s something comfortable to me about slipping into the newest fantasy RPG.

That even includes some very “cliched” concepts.  You grow to expect them, even get mad when they don’t materialize…  In action movies it’s the cars that explode after any collision, the bullets that knock people ten feet backwards, or the trusted mentor who’s been behind the plot the whole time.  Fantasy games’ve got plenty of ‘em, and I don’t mind one bit:

1. Stealing from people’s houses.  RPG’s have had a long tradition of ordinary citizens of keeping awesome loot stored in their bedrooms, frequently even in prominent chests.  While Oblivion made a point of scolding you for stealing just about anything, I feel cheated if I know my in-game neighbor has some incredible bauble sitting on his bedstand.  While I usually don’t choose “thief” as an occupation, I can get obsessed with the idea of taking it without getting caught…  Luckily Fable II only considers taking items from dressers or bookshelves to be actual theft.  Anybody that puts their belongings in a huge, gilded chest apparently deserves to forfeit them to the next hero that comes by.  As it should be!
2. Dead-end jackpots. If I’m winding my way through a dungeon and find a side passage, I just have to go down it to see what’s there.  And once I reach the end, I look around to find my prize.  I’ve been playing/making games long enough to know that real-estate is at a premium.  Someone made this nook for a reason…  now where’s my loot?  Games that don’t reward my obsessive exploring properly can leave me feeling betrayed.  God, I’d probably get a brain hemorrhage if I ever tried to play Pathologic.   (“You will not find a loaf of bread at the back of the cave. You’ll find a stone wall at the back of the cave, because it’s a fucking cave.”)
3. Treasure hidden behind waterfalls.  If years of gaming (and the occasional movie) have taught me anything, it’s that when there’s a waterfall, there’s gotta be a secret cave behind it.  For a while there it was the rule rather than the exception.  Even though I’ve done it a thousand times, I still feel a bit clever when I step behind the rushing water to find a nook that houses a chest full of glittering gold.  When I brave the falls and find only a rock cliff wall, it’s a fair disappointment.  There’s a bit of comfort in the fantasy that all waterfalls in the world might conceal a secret or two…

Special Bonus Cliche:  Pirate Ghosts!  Zelda, Mario, Oblivion, Final Fantasy, City of Heroes, Alone in the Dark…  Man, games just love those ghost pirates…  It may just be the fact that they are humanoid-yet-supernatural enemies (which can make them easy to create the assets for) that can attack the player en-masse, but they seem to show up in side-quests in a ton of games, even though they’re rarely the main focus.  And who can blame them?  Wrecked ships to wander around, distinctive garb and speech, and promises of a hidden treasure to be unearthed…  Irresistible, I tell you, for gamers and designers alike!

As I played through the first few levels, I got reminded of weird thing that always bothered me with the Halo series. The weapon you start with, the Assault Rifle, always starts the game on the wrong foot for me.  It always felt anemic and ineffective against enemies, and the third installment wasn’t a whole lot better.  I have no doubt that some of this might be a design choice, since it would be foolish to give the player a powerful weapon at the start of the game.  Of course you need a lot of room for growth so that the player feels a sense of achievement as he/she finds new weaponry. However, for a weapon so obviously inspired by the Pulse Rifle from Aliens (one of the coolest movie guns ever), it’s always been tremendously disappointing to have my anticipation dashed…  The gun looked and sounded so subdued, and had little apparent effect on my opponents.

C’mon, watch this and tell me that you don’t want that rifle to be this badass sounding.

While I got past it and am now churning through Halo 3, the experience got me thinking about what elements make up a weapon that is satisfying to wield. Sure, making a weapon do more damage is what you’d expect, but there are a large number of intangibles that can add to the player’s shooter experience without disrupting the balance of the game.

Most of my roots are from Raven Software, where shooters are (mostly) a way of life. If there’s one thing that members of the studio preached constantly, most particularly my boss Brian Raffel, was that “the player must feel powerful”. It seems obvious, but a lot of times games don’t do enough to make the player feel like the gun in his/her hand is an unstoppable tool of destruction. This is about gratification and player expectation… Movies have trained audiences to expect that guns shoot massive plumes of flame and sparks and are accompanied by tremendous booming sound. In comparison, the sharp, loud crack or pop of a real gun can be a disappointment (although obviously they are intimidating nonetheless in person). Usually just modeling the audio and visual reality of a weapon isn’t quite enough.

Most games that have contemporary-style guns have a few standbys in their arsenal … the pistol, the machinegun or automatic rifle, and the shotgun. As an exercise, I cracked out a bunch of different first-person shooters and captured their weapons on video for the purposes of comparison. These games were:

• Halo 3 (Xbox 360, 2007)
• Resistance: Fall of Man (Playstation 3, 2006)
• Half Life 2 (PC, 2004)
• Quake 4 (PC, 2005)
• Doom (PC, 1993)
• Deus Ex (PC , 2000)
• Bioshock (Xbox 360, 2007)

In each, I took shots of the weapon firing at a surface, and follow with shooting at a “common” opponent. The choice of a “common” opponent is arbitrary (and sometimes driven by convenience when I was capturing footage), but suffice it to say that I wanted to choose an enemy that the player was going to face frequently with a given weapon. A few of these weapons also have “upgrades” that make them more effective, but I wanted to provide feedback on how the weapon would be seen upon first picking it up… will the player be glad he did? Will he or she keep using it because it’s just awesome?

The quality of some of the footage isn’t awesome because of some incredibly dark areas in some of these games, but you should get the idea. If I get a chance I’ll capture some cleaned-up versions of the footage and link ‘em up. Each of the three weapon types has its own video sequence, and for each weapon, I examined several different elements that contribute to a sense of power:

• Gun Visuals: This refers to the visual effect of the weapon’s muzzle flash and bullet trail, and the animation of the weapon itself firing. It is the first thing people think of when they consider how the gun looks and feels.
• Sound Effects: Obviously this refers to the audio of the weapon, from the firing to the impact sounds, if appropriate. It can be tough to balance a sense of “power” in the sound without overdoing it, since the player may hear this same sound thousands of times… if it sounds like Zeus himself leveling mountains, you’ll quickly feel like you’re playing a cartoon.
• Effect on Environment: This includes the visual impact of the bullet on a wall or floor, as well as environmental shifts such as lighting. It is important because the results of stray bullets reinforce the player’s sense of having an impact on their environment and that they have a potent weapon.
• Effect on Opponent: A very important category, this refers to the visual impact on an enemy, and how the enemy reacts to being shot. This is critical to give the player feedback that he is successfully damaging the foe.
• Combat Effectiveness: This is a highly subjective category that is mostly driven by the overarching goals of the game’s arsenal, but worth mentioning. When a weapon is inaccurate or ineffective, it may be such because of an overabundance of ammunition for it, or perhaps the fact that it is designed for certain situations or opponents. It doesn’t change the fact that a wussy weapon can be irritating and simply avoided by frustrated players.

I’m not out to make a stink and necessarily rank these weapons (hey, I know some of the people who made these games) but there are certainly specific guns that do the job better than others. If I wanted to rate a weapon, I’d have to consider its effectiveness and how appropriately it fits into the game’s fiction, which means I’d have to take the entire arsenal into account (and be more fair to tech capabilities) instead of just looking at three weapons. Instead, I’ll talk about their choices and speak briefly about whether they aid or hamper a sense of power.

Pistols

Pistols are a mainstay of shooters because they are the most common type of firearm and most familiar to the audience.  Since Wolfentein 3D it has been put in the hands of new players to give them a taste of gunplay, while still giving them plenty of room to grow into more formidable weaponry.  Quake 2 started the short-lived trend of giving the pistol unlimited ammo so that the player does not have to fall back to melee attacks, but that was quickly eclipsed by the idea of the pistol being a low-powered precision weapon.  Counterstrike in 1999 cemented the concept that a highly skilled player could be incredibly deadly if they could manage the head shots required to get a pistol kill. 

Halo 3

The Halo pistol is a fun one to start with because it is everything Halo’s Assault Rifle isn’t. The visual effects has a nice white-hot flame and a bit of smoke that covers a good chunk of the screen but disappears quickly. The audio is punchy but has a little throaty-ness to it. The effect on the environment is slight, with only a small spark on the walls however. When firing at an opponent, there isn’t a whole lot of feedback because there is little impact and they don’t always seem to hit react, unless you hit them in the head. In gameplay it has a steady rate of fire and reasonable stopping power that makes it fine for a skilled player.

Resistance: Fall of Man

Resistance’s arsenal had a lot of special-function weapons (being from the Ratchet and Clank folk), so they skipped the pistol in this game. Being a fan of every weapon having a “raison d’etre“, I certainly don’t mind that they didn’t just throw in a pistol for extra quantity.

Half-Life 2

The Half-Life pistol is fairly unique in its semi-auto capability, which allows it to shoot as fast as you can hammer the trigger… making it extra-deadly in the hands of the skilled. The weapons in Half-Life tend to go a bit light on the pyrotechnics of the muzzle flash (which is more subtle and realistic), but the sharp crack and echo of the pistol audio makes it pretty dangerous-sounding. The environment impact effects are fairly small and smoky, but the bullet holes and tiny bouncing chunks coming off the wall add a nice sense of the physicality of the environment. When striking an opponent, the bloody impact is small unless there is a wall behind to show the blowthrough, but the nice part is the fact that humanoid enemies do twitch their body parts a bit upon impact, even if they are returning fire at the moment.

Quake 4

Considering it comes from my Alma Mater, I expected some meaty weapons from Quake 4 on par with the macho ones found in the Soldier of Fortune series… However, the pistol’s definitely a bit player in the game, doubtless because of the fact that it does not consume ammo. Its conical muzzle flash is subtle, and the bullet trail doesn’t add much to the gravity of your projectile. The “spacey” firing sound with an incredibly short envelope makes it seem more like air pistol, but again it’s probably on purpose to give more value to the weapons that aren’t “free”. The impact effects are nearly invisible, but at least the weapon has a nice light source when fired in a dark area. The impact on enemies is very slight as well, with only the occasional hit reaction until the enemy goes down.

Doom

Perhaps it’s unfair to use a 15-year-old game in comparison with so many modern titles, but Doom accomplished so much for its time, and some of its fantastic gunfights have only rarely been matched in current games. The pistol from Doom is a bit timid these days, with its red-tinged hand-drawn muzzle flash and staccato “pow” sound effect… The impact effect on the walls is nice and visible, though the smoke rises too quickly taking the attention away from the point of impact. The slight “light” from the muzzle flash does well considering how old the tech is. The effect from striking the opponent is a nice red “flower” of blood, and the sprite enemies play jerky “hit” animation frames enough to get the point across so that you definitely feel like you’re hurting your foe. Finally, the pistol was a solid weapon for base enemies, taking them out in 3 or so shots, unlike pistols from many of the other games.

Deus Ex

This game was not really known for its fast-action gameplay, but it provides an interesting comparison with other FPS weaponry. The muzzle flash is big, but it clearly was mostly a single flat polygon that doesn’t look white hot like its competitors do. The sound effect is certainly not timid, with a big “crashy” gunshot with a long, loud echo. The most disappointing part of this weapon is how little result you see on the environment, spouting only a tiny speck of wall from an impact. Enemies do not fare much better, with almost no effect appearing on a target when hit, and no hit reaction animation. Finally, since the game is extensively skill-based, the player’s accuracy with guns at the beginning of the game is ridiculously low, leading to many impotent-feeling shots.

Bioshock

When I started this exercise, I almost forgot to include Bioshock, but I’m glad it made the list. Its pistol has a bright, large muzzle flash and cascading sparks, including from the hammer, as well as some nice lighting on the dark surroundings. The gunshot sound is a bit deeper than most of the others, but it has a fairly good echo after the initial crack. The surface impacts are the most impressive of this set, with lots of dust and sparks blooming from the point of impact, along with a chunk or two of the impacted surface. The impact on enemies is extremely rewarding, paying successful hits with glistening gouts of blood that nearly rival the excess and stylishness of Gears of War. Finally, the weapon’s fairly effective in combat and can be used as a staple weapon, as long as you can deal with the 6-shot reload cycle. The only unfortunately thing is animation of the weapon itself… Its placement onscreen evokes someone holding the weapon as far to the right of their head as possible, giving the overall firing and reloading actions a sort of weird “gangly” look. Compare this to most games that anchor the weapons about 1/3 from the bottom right corner.

Machineguns

I had to be a bit looser in my definition of “machineguns”, drawing from everything from heavy MG’s to submachine guns to assault rifles to miniguns.  In general, these are the common weapons that people use to mow down opponents.  It also goes all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D (with both the SMG and the gatling), and generally grants a nice sense of power from holding down the trigger to unleash hundreds of bullets.  The application of this weapon varies from game to game, sometimes as a long-range spray weapon for very light enemies, to a closer-range “panic” weapon (see Aliens again) to being a precision implement for rewarding accuracy by putting many bullets in one enemy.  For the purposes of this article I will mostly consider whether it feels freakin’ cool to use. (How’s that for scientific?)

Halo 3

When I break down the Assault Rifle in Halo (which we’ve already discussed as “missing something” for me), I find the muzzle flash itself to be fairly fine. The weapon has a fairly large bulk that covers a chunk of the screen, so the bright, star-shaped muzzle flash does the job well. The muted firing sound is a disappointment however, evoking more of an electric typewriter than Hicks and Vasquez cutting loose. The environment impact effects are very small pockmarks and tiny sparks, although kudos to them for portraying bullets ricochet in random directions afterwards. The enemy impacts are nearly nonexistent, however. The opponents do have a satisfying animated hit reaction when struck, but rarely do I see where I hit them. In general, the Assault Rifle is more effective than it was in previous Halo installments, it still is almost useless unless you are fairly close to your opponent and tends to be skipped over when choosing a weapon loadout.

Resistance: Fall of Man

The M5A2 Carbine in Resistance is the player’s starting weapon, and definitely sees more use than the Halo rifle over the course of the game. This weapon has a nice, bright muzzle flash and a distinct screen shake when the weapon is fired. The sound effect is sharp with a nice echo and seems nicely realistic (in a “WWII movie” sort of way) to contrast with some of the more unusual weapons provided later on in the game. The environment impacts are certainly more prominent than Halo’s, with a high, vertical gout of dirt, although it’s pretty subtle when striking harder surfaces. When hitting an enemy, the dark sprays of blood provide okay feedback, although sometimes it’s hard to tell if you are significantly damaging one of the grunts. This can be a pain because the weapon seems volatile in its effectiveness. Sometimes a few shots do the trick and cut a hose on a foe, but sometimes they just won’t freakin’ die. Perhaps this is to cement the fact that the soldiers are vastly outgunned in this war, but there are too few weapons (and the Carbine shows up too often) to make this point at the cost of fun gameplay.

Half-Life 2

For an automatic weapon, the SMG from Half-Life 2 is a bit different than the others but it fits the bill because it is so frequently used. Once again, the weapon has a fairly subtle muzzle flash that isn’t the white hot light of a dozen suns, but it lets the firing rate and the vibration of the weapon do the talking. It unloads a ton of bullets, more than any other gun on this list, with a throaty chattering sound that blends individual shots into an intimidating roar. The impacts are once again dusty with little physics-driven wall “bits”, but the sheer quantity generated by the rate of fire of this weapon makes it fairly impressive and not too over-the-top. The blood spray from impacts is subtle again, although Valve made the blow-through extremely visible if the enemy is against a wall. The enemies don’t twitch too much when hit by this weapon, but this definitely feels like a precision weapon, so perhaps I don’t feel the need for as much validation of my hits. Overall it feels and plays like a deadly implement.

Quake 4

This weapon is a workhorse in Q4’s arsenal. Its firing effects aren’t too prominent, with the muzzle flash lasting only a frame or two, making individual shots more of a flicker or flash and making the weapon vibration and environment lighting carry the sense of power. The sound is extremely staccato, like the “realistic” Carbine in Resistance, but even more “nail-gun-like” because it is clearly made up of individual short gunshot sounds, unlike the Half-Life 2 SMG that blends them together. The impact effects are good, however, with large sparks cascading from the point of impact. Since the environment is mostly metal, the impact decals are fairly small and don’t leave a lot of evidence of the player’s action. Hitting an enemy spouts a misty spray of blood that is sometimes visible but can be missed, and as with many other games, the opponents don’t always hit react… This is generally for gameplay purposes so that the player does not excessive interrupt the enemy’s ability to fight back, but it definitely can lead to weaker feedback.

Doom

The minigun in Doom is the closest comparison to an automatic rifle for this category. The firing effects are fairly simple again with a hand-drawn flare and a slight environment lighting flicker. Otherwise, this weapon is basically a fast-firing pistol. Actually it literally is, using the same sound, impact, damage effects, and (if I recall correctly) the exact same projectile code as the pistol, so most of the pistol feedback applies. In terms of effectiveness, the weapon is all about peppering your enemies with dozens of pistol shots, making it effective at killing the masses of low-level enemies that is a staple of Doom gameplay.  In addition, it carries a second role is locking down more beefy enemies like the Cacodemon, who gets caught in a “dance” of hit reaction animations while the player keeps firing.

Deus Ex

As with the pistol in Deus Ex, the muzzle flash for the assault rifle is a simple flat sprite that doesn’t have much motion and is slightly transparent, meaning that it doesn’t look “hot” enough. The firing sound effects are also fairly low-key, leading to less of a sense of power, which is surprising given the massive sounds generated from the pistol and shotgun. There is nearly no impact effect from using this weapon, on either the environment or an opponent… the enemies in particular do not hit react much at all from impacts. This is likely to avoid the “hit react dance” that lock down opponents in games like Doom, but the weapon is generally inaccurate enough at the start of the game that players can get frustrated after acquiring what they thought would be an awesome weapon. Early in the game, the best way to get kills is to fire up the body and go for the headshot.

Bioshock

With the Thompson SMG, Bioshock once again delivers a nice sense of power in their weapon effects. The weapon’s muzzle flash is white-hot and the gun’s high rate-of-fire as well as the huge shells ejecting in all directions provides some very gratifying feedback. The sound is nice and staccato, but it also has a verylong echo that helps blend the individual shots together, although a bit less than Half Life 2′s SMG.  Each bullet’s impact on the environment is again very good, spouting an excessive amount of dust and sparks, and hits on enemies once again presents a prominent splash of blood that gives a tremendous sense of reward for being on target.  Overall this weapon feels very good to wield.

Shotguns

The shotgun is an incredibly fun weapon to use in just about any game, being introduced so dramatically in Doom.  Generally it’s a close-range weapon only, scoring almost certain kills within 5-10 feet, but reducing to near ineffectiveness once the enemy is very distant.  Some games rely on the shotgun to be easy to use and allow the player to fire fairly quickly, but in general games limit their rate of fire with extensive recoil or reload times.  However limited it is, the shotgun is nearly always one of the most satisfying weapons to use, from the sound to the effect it has on opponents.  Few gamers don’t crack a smile when they find the very first shotgun in a new game.

Halo 3

When it comes to ferocity, the Halo shotgun is a standout. Its huge muzzle flash covers almost a quarter of the screen with fire, sparks and smoke, and the sound is beefy with a very long echo trailing off. The impact effects are unfortunately very small, although there are enough pellets that it leaves a satisfying number of divots in the terrain afterwards. The impact on enemies is again fairly subtle, although the enemies will almost certainly play a hit reaction… if they survive the gunshot at all.  If they do die, the enemies topple backwards with a nice sense of force. In the video, the brute shows off another nice bit of design.  While they are tough enough that they can’t be flattened with a single shotgun blast, their armor generally gets knocked off with the first shot, giving the player a sense that he accomplished something rather than is continuously piling bullets into a relentless pile of meat.  

Resistance: Fall of Man

Compared with Halo, Resistance’s shotgun is a bit more subdued. Its muzzle flash is softer and less “hot” looking, and the weapon jerks back far enough that it appears to be firing towards the ceiling. Its sound effect is also a little hollower and lacks some of the “boom” of other shotguns. The world impacts are nice however, with the pellets causing many prominent sparks or sprays depending on the surface. The impacts on enemies, again, is mainly shown in their reactions, from hit animations to being thrown backwards as a corpse. It is another classic shotgun in that it is quite effective at taking enemies out in 1-2 hits, but in general it requires a very solid bead on the opponent to score an instant kill.

Half-Life 2

Living up to their precision credo in weaponry, the Half-Life shotgun is different in that its spray is much tighter than other game shotguns, perhaps being tuned for more realism or longer-range shootouts. In terms of visuals, the muzzle flash is 1-2 frames but is conical and meshes well with the nicely-animated weapon recoil. The sound effect is dramatic, but doesn’t rely on echo as much as other shotguns. The world impacts are once again dust and tiny bits, but come in a quantity that is satisfying in a “realistic” fashion. The impact on enemies again will come from the blood seen on the wall behind the enemy rather than the impact itself.  In general, this weapon feels very satisfying without being overly “big”, with its tight shot spread making it deadly at a longer distance with only the six shot capacity as a weakness.

Quake 4

This shotgun has a softer muzzle flash that is a bit difficult to see, mainly because it is attached to the barrel of the gun after it recoils upwards. Since the fiery “action” is pulled towards the upper right of the player view, this shotgun’s impact effects provide most of the visual “punch” of this weapon. Unfortunately, the impact sparks are much less prominent than they were with Quake 4’s machinegun, perhaps due to performance reasons with the number of particles generated. The sound effect is a nice combination of “punchy” and “crunchy” without having to rely on a long echo… The impact on an enemy can be a mixed bag. The standard misty spray of blood is generated when a character is hit, but it doesn’t always animate in response. However, if the enemy is killed, it flies back very far (which can be quite satisfying). This weapon is a good member of the Q4 arsenal, except for its criminally long reload time.

Doom

Every first person shooter owes the Doom shotgun a great debt… When it came out it was the coolest damn weapon players had ever wielded, unmatched for years for its raw sense of power as well the satisfying recoil-and-cock animation after the shot. The hand-drawn muzzle flash itself of course looks dated these days, but the cocking motion up and left still provides a nice perspective view of a weapon that otherwise is only seen from an extreme back angle. The sound is throaty and dangerous-sounding even now, and the environment impacts provide a fairly good cloud of dust. Best of all, when hitting a grunt enemy, from a soldier to an imp, Doom’s shotgun doesn’t disappoint. Most baseline foes perish in one hit, flying backwards in a bloody arc that still grants a satisfying experience.

Deus Ex

The sawed-off shotgun is one of two in Deus Ex, but I used it because it is more “typical” than the game’s semi-auto shotgun.  The muzzle flash sprite, like the other Deus Ex weapons, was again very hard-edged with not enough brightness to make it look “hot” (likely due to using alpha instead of additive transparency for the sprite). Since the gun recoils far up and to the right, your eye focuses more on the impact of your shot, which is marked by only a few bits of wall flung about. Similarly, only a few tiny bits of blood are visible when striking an opponent although a hit reaction animation was nicely more common.  This weapon has a “boomy” sound is as similarly overstated as the pistol, feeling a bit too cartoony to listen to over the course of an entire game.  Finally, since I wanted to compare weapons at a skill level more suitable to first impressions, so once again Deus Ex’s skill system gave me a very low accuracy with this gun.  For a weapon that I pick up and expect to be satisfying, this might have higher realism, but it felt the most impotent of the shotguns. 

Bioshock

Nice to end on a high note…  The Bioshock shotgun was truly a surprise to me when I filmed it, even though I had already played a fair amount of the game.  The muzzle flash is large and is accompanied by a nice satisfying cocking animation that evokes Doom’s. Unfortunately the recoil brings the weapon far to the right like the pistol, which provides the awkward-looking arm positioning seen in the pistol as well. The firing sound effect has a nice “crack” with a long echo trailing off, but the best part are the world impacts, which stir up huge chunks of the ground, leaving dust, sparks, and huge divots. When striking an enemy, the big ol’ blood splash comes through for us again, giving us juicy feedback that we just hurt someone bad.  Overall this is a good weapon that can take an enemy down in a couple of hits, and makes you feel good whether you hit or not… everything a shotgun should be.

More Power, Mister Scott!

To summarize, if you to give me that awesome feeling when I pick up a weapon in a shooter, these are the things I look for:

• A nice sized, white-hot muzzle flash effect, with a small amount of lingering smoke.  Not so much as to obscure what I’m shooting at, though. 
• Good localized world lighting eminating from my weapon.
• A recoil animation that pulls back significantly, but doesn’t pull back so far that the muzzle flash isn’t pointed at the target.
• A bit of screen shake for more powerful weapons.
• Sound effects with a sharp attack and a nice tail (“echo”).  If the weapon is automatic, make the tail enough that they blend the various shots together into a “growl”.
• Wall impacts that impart a lot of dust (or sparks vs. metal) and loose nice, visible, unrealistic chunks of wall.
• Impact decals that are at least the size of a fist, and more specifically can be seen up to 10 feet.
• Enemy impacts marked with a significant splash of blood, a size that equals perhaps 1/3 of the body.
• Enemy hit reactions whenever possible, and always with a shotgun.  If it is possible to give the enemy’s body a jerk without disrupting his ability to act (see Half Life 2), use that.
• An enemy that dies from a gunshot should not crumple straight to the ground, but be knocked back slightly from a pistol kill, and signficantly from a shotgun kill.
• An enemy’s death should be marked by a distinctive scream or other sound so that they know when the opponent is down, even if he continues to ragdol upright for a period of time.
• The more inaccuracy you impart on your gun, the more important the visibility of your hits need to be, so that the player doesn’t assume they are scoring hits when they are not.  Regardless, avoid excessive inaccuracy in any gun to avoid frustration.

I hope this little tour has been informative in how different weapons can give that ol’ feeling of power. If I have time I may add new games with similar weapons for comparison. However, what might be more useful is undergoing the same exercise for third person weaponry… Compared to first-person, a third-person game has a much more difficult time conveying a sense of power because the action isn’t quite as “in-your-face”. As such, some games like Grand Theft Auto never really achieve the gratifying result of a gunshot that an FPS can. I’ve seen a few that do, but that will wait for another day.

Back when games were smaller (or more recently in the casual game space) scope choices were easier. You started with limited technology, manpower and time. Generally you started with a singular activity and fleshed things out from that root. Whatever you couldn’t accomplish would quickly get stripped from the design.

These days, as games get bigger and budgets get larger, the choices become more difficult. Feature sets have become very broad as shooters now come standard with vehicles, and driving titles get gun combat added to them… And when you’ve got a 10 or 20 million-dollar budget on a “triple-A” title, everyone’s got high expectations. It’s much harder to explain to an executive why you can’t just drop upgradable vehicles or clothing shops (or something as earth-shattering as multiplayer) into your game with just a bit more work.

As you start to debate the scope of a game, the boogeyman known as “player expectation” also comes into heavy use. Open-world games and MMO’s are the worst, providing the player with a large world and wide breadth of activities, along with incredible competition in that space. Grand Theft Auto is the poster child right now for breadth, with its bowling, fake internet access, cellphone upgrades, functional toll booths… they attempt to give players the closest thing they can to a full palette of features in a modern city. This means their game is just plain packed with stuff. Since it’s impossible to provide absolutely everything the player might expect or find “fun” in that space, the decision-making can seem arbitrary or even like guesswork.

I know that hardcore gamers hate to hear about developers delivering anything but the maximum they possibly can… Members of the hardcore can gripe that games are too simple these days and that they need as much depth and features as possible. I’ve been involved in heated arguments with good friends about what features in Oblivion (a game that I played the hell out of) might have been necessary or unnecessary. These folks are hardcore to the extreme (and also developers), and I respect their stance … but I did say before that making cuts can spark conflict, no?

Depth and complexity are awesome things, but are best served in more carefully chosen places. Features that are just “filler” can just distract from the pacing and action of a title, and poorly-crafted activities can turn a player’s early experiences into negative ones. While your average gamer might believe that “more” does no harm, the truth is that every game is created using a limited sum of money… even the mighty GTA IV. Anything created for a game, no matter how simple or small it may seem, takes manpower and brainpower. Design, code, art, documentation, testing, translation… These resources must generally be applied to get the biggest bang for buck.

So what do you consider when looking to spend your buck?

Does it support the game’s objectives? Ideally, the biggest share of richness and depth should support a game’s stated core values (combat, exploration, collection, partying, whatever). I’ll talk more about setting these “pillars” next time, but if a new feature does not help a game further its primary objectives, see if it can be modified to do so. If this is not possible, the feature isn’t necessarily cut (everything from UI to game saves count as “features”… they are of course required to have a functional game), but these elements should be scrutinized and kept leaner and meaner if possible.

Is it worth the cost of entry? In a technically challenging project, it can be valuable to take an “all or nothing” stance on some features… When you implement a small feature, you are still creating new tasks for multiple team members, communicating objectives and checking on progress. There’s a start-up cost for something “new” that can be significant, even for something very light on technology or polish. Can that feature be filled out to be a more significant addition to the game experience? If not, sometimes that small feature is not worth the investment… and a game full of lots of tiny half-hearted features is rarely better than fewer, stronger, more robust features. A similar notion is that if it’s worth putting in the game, it’s worth making it good.

Is the gamer really going to notice? This particular statement is a rather cynical one, but it is a common theme in my posts if you’ve noticed… You want to put things into your game that gamers enjoy and tell each other about. Stuff that’s going to make your game stand out from the crowd. Stuff that makes critics sing and sales ring. Tiny little weird details are fun and all, but that realistic depiction of ice cubes melting is probably only going to amuse you, your buddies, and some forum-dweller named Monty in Arizona.  Fun is fun (and programmers like a challenge) but keep your eye on the prize.

These are some of the basic reasons to think twice before you think “More”, but I’ll talk more about the pillars of a game and aiming your axe next time.

Everybody wants their game, whether the one they’re making or the one they’re playing, to be jam-packed to the gills with stuff. Why? Well, features just make everything seem cooler. A gamer feels like they are getting better value for their dollar… and extra bullet points on the back of the box makes everyone happier.

But you’ve gotta ask yourself, is a game with 500 weapons really better than one with 10? Sure, if the game is about acquisition, like Diablo… However, a lot of action games generally aren’t better off with 20 different models of assault rifles (and there are plenty to go around…  I used to play Phoenix Command, remember).

Is that extra stuff always worth it?  Was No More Heroes really a better experience for having that empty open-world you could drive around in your motorcycle? Would Kane and Lynch have been better if you could get into those parked cars and driven around their dense one-block-sized levels?

How about Spiderman 2? I’ve noticed this one to be a bit more divisive with developers, since it feeds into the almighty “gamer expectations”… Sure, he ran around an open-world like Grand Theft Auto, but should Spidey have been able to hop in a car and drive around New York City? Would it still have been a Spiderman game if instead of swinging through the rooftops, he was tooling around town in a low-rider?

Game development is just as much about focus as it is about “doing neat stuff”. Your game is nothing if you don’t make a great core experience. Believe it or not, God of War really had a pretty simple combat system under the hood… they just polished the hell out of it. There weren’t 20 weapons, or an intricate collection of grapples and throws. There weren’t even that many enemies. They honed in on what their audience enjoyed and they were rewarded with a huge hit.

Bioshock started as a much more complicated game, reflecting its RPG roots in System Shock. There were a ton of cuts made to the game to make it more like a “shooter”. But dear lord, you sure can’t tell as a user of the end product… it’s still an incredibly complex game!  I’m sure there were tons of fights inside the development team when the axe started falling.

As I play GTA IV these days, for all its great gameplay and amazing accomplishment, it’s an iteration of a series that has been in development for over a decade. It’s got the biggest budget of all time. People are already starting to wonder what it’ll do to people’s expectations…  Do they really think that Gran Turismo will suddenly allow you to get out of the car, enter the stands and buy a popcorn? That Soul Calibur will add rocket launchers and monster trucks? That Halo will allow you to hop in a frigate and become a free trader across the galaxy?

And more importantly, would those great experiences be better for it? 

I’ve talked before about making sure that your game is scaled appropriately, but when and where do those cuts happen?  I’ll hit this next time.

Sequel articles:  More Part 2: Justifying the Axe, Pillars and Razors.

See also:  Making the Rules: The Scale of a Game

Of course that was okay!  They were forging new territory…  While Ultima Online was the first large-scale success in the online space, with Everquest it got even more widely-accepted…  and new gamers were still enamored with this persistent multiplayer combat-and-socialization model and discovering what they enjoyed doing.  If people found, say, staking their virtual claim on a small collection of huts, systematically killing every orc that appeared there to be effective (that is, spawn camping) perhaps there’s something to it.  These gamers didn’t want to wander around and trust that a patrolling creature might not jump them at the wrong time, but rather find an area of a reasonably predictable challenge and socialize while they waited.

Subsequent games tried to change that habit.  Dark Age of Camelot gave players an extra XP incentive to kill creatures that hadn’t been killed in a while, encouraging them to move between spawns rather than stick to a single one.  Star Wars Galaxies had the interesting take of creating monster “hives” that continuously spawned its supply of mobs until it culminated with a boss fight, after which the hive was destroyed.  A shame that the world wasn’t an interesting place to venture out in otherwise. :-/

But in both those cases they tried to change the core behavior of those gamers, which was to seek out a location of stability where they could grind in peace.  In most cases MMO’s since Everquest has tried to create alternatives, but I’m not aware of any (with the possible exception of Galaxies above) that tried to create new gameplay around it.

I actually find that surprising because in many cases game developers are pretty good about taking an odd bit of unexpected gameplay and turning it into an asset.  Take the practice of kiting, for instance, where a player uses a combination of damage and incapacitating powers to keep a powerful creature at a distance while they slowly whittle them down to their eventual death.  In Everquest, this was seen as an abhorration that allowed players to kill things that were genuinely higher than their appropriate level.  A series of nerfs ensued to try to rectify the situation, but the tactic (there’s that word again) entered the basic toolkit of the everyday MMO player. 

These days, kiting is less often frowned upon and considered more of a valid tactic in games like LOTRO and City of Heroes, although maligned by some.  It still bears the mark of being player-driven, however…  there are occasions where players accomplish feats that the designers never even dreamed of, like these WOW players that awesomely kited a devastating boss into the main human city of Stormwind.  My hat’s off to you, lads. 

Anyway, games are full of unexpected surprises that delight gamers and even their creators.  When id Software added knockback damage to rockets to Doom and Quake, they didn’t initially do so with the intent of creating the technique of rocket jumping (that is, to fire your own rocket at the ground to blast you high into the air).  This only became apparently through play.  However, once it happened, they didn’t shut it down.  In subsequent games like Quake III they made it easier, and better balanced the risk-reward of liftoff versus damage taken.  These days, Team Fortress 2 has turned these antics into practically a twisted, explosive ballet.

Consider also the “errors” that gave us attack canceling in Street Fighter II (brilliantly explained in this article by God of War’s Eric Williams) that led to the lengthy combos that are integral to tourament play over 15 years after the game’s creation.  The ridiculous pistol juggling seen in Devil May Cry, where a “bug” caused a damaged creature to stop falling, was embraced by its creator and set itself as the hallmark move of the game.  The entire game of Deus Ex relied on emergent gameplay (whose very definition implies unforseen uses of gameplay elements) to deliver the player an experience made unique by their solutions to problems placed before them.

Without these “accidents”, gaming might be a lot less interesting these days.

Certainly one element about it is the sense of danger that exists.  From corpse runs to trains there certainly are a lot of things that keep players on their toes.  Combats were risky…  a few bad misses or fizzled spells and that blue mob suddenly had the upper hand and you were fighting for your life.  Players are flush with stories of how they overcame adversity, or had victory snatched from their hands at the last minute.

So it’s interesting to consider for a moment the fact that all the “problems” that each successor, from Camelot to WOW, have tried to fix were indeed features that made EQ fairly dynamic and more importantly unique.

Consider zone camping.  Due to technology limitations that were less stringent in WOW and DAOC, Everquest was broken into zones or sub-levels that created hard boundaries that initiated a level load for the player…  and of course monsters could not cross.  As such, a common practice was for players to use the zone edge as a safe zone (even if they were deep in a hostile area) because they could exit the level at the first sign of trouble.

This tactic came hand-in-hand with the risks of monster trains, which resulted from the fact that Everquest monsters were vindictive and followed you almost forever once you damaged them.  What’s more, if they happened to pass by another idle monster, that creature would likely join in on the chase.  This resulted in dungeons sometimes being the scene of ridiculous parades of hostile creatures, all chasing a single player balls-out (see inset).  Once a train started, a party had almost no choice but to evacuate to the zone, which of course led all those mobs to the happy zone campers sitting to gain back their health… you can imagine the carnage that erupted.

Zone boundaries (and hence zone camping) were eliminated through the introduction of continuously-streaming levels in games like WOW.  The removal of barriers like this made it also necessary for the monsters to give up any chase for a short distance, more or less stamping out trains…  This is not only because it would be ridiculous for a snow creature to be led all the way to a desert town, but because streaming levels have very stringent rules about the graphic and sound assets loaded for each area, and hence a wolf needs to stay within its expected habitat.  (This is the biggest challenge for us when dealing with open world mechanics of This is Vegas.)

While gamers generally shouted “Hooray!” at the demise of these odd mechanics, ironically these were the same players that were carefully planning around zones and trains…  In the Everquest community, it quickly evolved from capitalizing on quirks of the systems to legitimate tactics.  And these tactics were just as interesting as the “mez/root/tank/heal” manuevers that had developed over EQ’s combat.  They provided an additional layer of experience between “per combat” and “per session” that might be called “per expedition”.

So am I saying that players were having fun and just didn’t realize it?  Well, sort of.  I’ve held for a long time that gamers don’t always understand what makes a game fun, and that penalties, inconveniences and grinds are often a close companion to reward (as opposed to creating a “win game” button).  However, in this case, gamers were complaining more about chaos and unpredictability than against the situation itself.  They just never knew when a train might come in from some other player and ruin their evening. 

Nothing is more frustrating than to spend an evening and not make progress (this was one of my biggest pet peeves about Everquest back in the day), and many players had successful sessions punctuated by devastatingly frustrating sessions.  No doubt, they always remembered the worst ones.  These gamers wanted a more predictable and efficient way of exchanging time for advancement, and they always seek out the easiest path to do so. 

In EQ they found areas where they could spawn camp with the easiest XP and loot.  They located the areas with the biggest reward for the lowest risk.  And when new games came out like Camelot and WOW where these aspects were more predictable, they rejoiced and jumped ship.  They moved to experiences where each encounter was more predictable, where nothing ever went really, really wrong.  They played in games where they could maintain a basic strategy and always end up on top.

Ironically, what they moved towards is al almost perfect definition of a grind.

Yep, we played that Everquest, thanks to a loan of some updated discs from Dave Webb.  After some extensive guesswork, we managed to remember our old accounts and were pleasantly surprised to see most of our characters still hanging around.  And we had 21 days of free playtime to boot (no doubt thanks to some “come back to EQ” promotion at some point).  Nice. Thanks Sony!

Our experience playing it was very “Everquest”.  The very first moment Sandi logged on with her beloved character Celestiel, she was struck dead by a long wandering dark elf guard.  We hadn’t left the game six years ago in a completely hot zone, but we had become complacent about the amount of risk that existed in that world. 

I remember back in the Raven days spending every Monday night playing EQ with Jersey” Jim Hughes, Rick Johnson, Matt Pinkston, Chris Foster and Jeremy Statz among others…  We spent a solid six or more depressing months with this ritual, ultimately barely reaching level 20 for our efforts.  We’d get home from work and start playing around 8, struggling to find each other.  Sometimes somebody was on the other continent, and we had to wait the 30-40 minutes for them to take the boat over.  We’d find our hunting spot and set up camp, and do great for a while…  until a wandering monster or a player-led train finally got the drop on us and we perished, losing half the experience we’d gained in the previous hour. 

After one fairly successful evening before we finally broke it up, Jersey was heard to say “I actually had fun tonight”.  We were amused, then in shock, in the realization that we were paying to play this game when 75% of the time we just walked away angry.  But who was listening to us…  Everquest was making Ferraris full of loot at the time, and apparently the crazy nutball addicts were happy…  Incidentally, we had one of those addicts (who I won’t name) at Raven.  I remember when they first released the command that tallied the total number of days played.  This dude bragged that he had over a month online.  I stopped for a second and pointed out “Dude!  The game’s only been out for three months!”  Yes, along with work (10+ hour-a-day crunch time even) and sleeping, he was still averaging over eight hours a day playing.  That’s probably not that amazing nowadays that “online addiction” is starting to go mainstream, but Jesus, that was insane back then.

Back to Sandi and I.  Once we gt our bearings and we figured out the new HUD map that helped us navigate, we did pretty well.  And we did have fun.  There was something special there that has been diminished with the iterative MMO’s that we had played since, from DAOC, to WOW, to LOTRO.  What was it…?  Ha!  I was going to write it today, but I got too wrapped up telling my war stories, sorry!  I’ll hit it up with some meat next post.

I was an incredibly huge fan of Super Mario 64, which I put up as my favorite game of all time. That game was a pioneer in so many ways, and its gameplay still holds up quite well today. It had an extremely workable camera that was tuned for each area you went through, and along with its controls, they went unmatched for many years after its release. (Maybe Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, another favorite of mine, finally matched it?)

Of course I was waiting for this game because I would love another Mario 64. Unfortunately I went through this same anticipation five years ago for Super Mario Sunshine and was gravely disappointed. I ask around a lot about what was wrong with Sunshine and I get very vague answers. It had all the trappings of Mario 64, but why did it fall flat? Thinking back I think it was an uncompelling package, another “island paradise” with arbitrary block puzzles sprinkled in. More offensive was that damn backpack/watergun thing. Mario is about motion, and that “clean up the gunk” spray nozzle thing required me to keep Mario in place. What were they thinking?!? Seeing that nobody that I know liked it (and even reviewers retroactively dis that game), but it still netted a 92% on GameRankings, I certainly have to take all the hype for Galaxy with a grain of salt.

So Sunday I cracked Galaxy open and was drawn in. In a couple of good sessions I went through two full galaxies and probably about 25 stars. I’m a completionist so I went for all the secondary objectives first before moving to the next area.

Here are a pile of impressions:

• The Wii control scheme, for maybe the first time in my experience, isn’t annoying at all. You move Mario with the stick like you always did, but somehow the disconnected nunchuck feels better than a gamepad stick might, because it isn’t a big slab and can be tilted to help orient you to the action.
• Thank fucking god they ditched the “flip the wiimote to jump” thing that they toyed with a couple years ago. You just press the A button as you’d expect, which doesn’t give you the 1/4 second delay you get with gestural motion in most Wii games. That would have killed Mario.
  • This is hopefully a very good sign for Wii. It seems like when it was introduced, everyone out there was trying to use fancy whirls and flips to do mundane things. Tilt the wiimote to steer? Wow, dude, you just invented the joystick. Shake the wiimote to make Link attack? You just invented the button, asshole.
  • Some of the wiimote point-at-this mechanics are a bit weird, such as the float-stars that pull Mario along, but they do feel pretty unique and perhaps not easily replaceable with a button (there are advanced techniques like gravity slinging that start to emerge later).
  • The sticky slingshot-thing (where you pull back with the wiimote to fling Mario at a target) certainly could have been controlled with a joystick, but in the end it felt like a fairly versatile game tool.
  • The secondary use of the wiimote works pretty well. Picking up crystals by pointing the cursor at them is a nice diversion when you’re being launched this way and that, and the idea that a friend can hang out and play crystal control is pretty cool. They do have the “shake to spin” thing that gives a bit of my above gripe, but it feels fairly responsive and doesn’t get too annoying.
• Gravity takes you wherever it wants to. Walking upside-down, leftside-right, frontside-back is disorienting, but somehow he controls and camera manage to bring it home and you quickly adapt. As a result, you get a weird sort of topsy-turvy feeling that somehow you continue to keep control. It’s exhilirating, and addicting.
• The camera can be a bit disorienting, such as when you are in an upside-down overhead view, trying to head stomp something. Only a couple times was I at a loss for control, such as when Mario is walking on some glass spheres and the camera doesn’t move when he’s on the other side, leaving you staring at Mario’s feet through distorted glass, wondering which way was up. The moment was so magical, however, that I hardly minded.
  • The incredible Psychonauts was the only other game that I can think of that did this well (such as the Milkman level, which for me was the moment the game went from curious to sublime).
• The puzzles use their main mechanics in very interesting ways. Gravity will flip you this way and that, and it’s also localized, so you’ll meet challenges where you leap up into a zone that snares you with reverse gravity so you land on the ceiling. They could have stumped players, but the mechanics are so well communicated that you just feel totally in control.
• The “collect crystals” mechanic is pretty weird though. First of all, you can “shoot” them, but so far that mechanic hasn’t been very important… You can use it to stun enemies if you don’t want to risk spin-attacking them or hopping on their heads, but I’m not sure that giving Mario a weak “gun” really added to the game. So far it’s been a redundant mechanic other than a couple times that it was shoehorned in as a required action.
  
  • Oddly, the crystals you collectare the same ones you use as ammunition when you shoot. I’m not generally a fan of combining two very opposing purposes into single resources (imagine a shooter where your health was your ammo) because you become gun-shy (no pun intended) about using it. I really avoid shooting crystals very much, but so far the “currency” I’ve expended to unlock stars/doors has been pretty minimal, so maybe I’ll loosen up. I’m just worried that I’ll get halfway through the game and some mushroom-headed star mutant will ask me for 5000 in order to get some super-awesome thing.
  • Also, the “aim to collect crystals” is a bit weird since no other pickups like coins and so on work that way. I’m glad that I can hoover up dozens of the little things in seconds, or even grab them while in flight, but it can be a bit of a mental switch when you scoop up all those crystals and then have to walk over to grab the one coin. Of course it makes sense, because coins regain health, and I’m getting used to it.
• Moving Mario is easy, as it always is (damn those guys can just nail motion). All the Mario 64 moves exist, but some are easier like the wall-jump (Mario “sticks” to a vertical surface for a quarter second before sliding down, giving you a chance to launch again).
  • The moves, however, are more or less undermined by the spin attack, however, which you can use during a jump to go higher and further. This pretty much negates the need for the old standbys of the triple-jump, crouch-backflip and the crouch-longjump. In a sense it feels like those old moves are just there as a nod to the previous game, although it felt nice and comfortable to know they were there.
• Sending Mario into space is strange but oddly refreshing. After how stale the “island paradise” felt in Sunshine (what, am I suddenly playing Sonic Adventure again?), this suddenly felt like a wild reinvention of classic Mario themes.
  • However, I did lack a sense of place in some cases. I came to “know” these little chunks of rock, but the early part of the game really felt like I was being led by the nose, getting to a launch star and being sent to another planet over and over again. There wasn’t a sense of “planning” to it, nor did I feel in control of my exploration. But, nobody ever accused Mario of being open-world, so the fact that these paths are mostly linear seems appropriate to the series history.
  • The sight range was incredibly long, and it was amazing to be able to see these little chunks of rock far in the distance. I could even wave my wiimote pointer at them and steal distant crystals from the surface. My only regret was that I didn’t feel like an explorer… I wanted to see that piece of rock in the distance and figure out how to get to it. Instead I just went where the game led me next.



• They still have lives. You pick up the mushrooms to get an extra life, and gaining them is easy. Just like in Mario 64, saving and restoring the game will strip you of all but 5, even if you had 60 of them during a play session. People might consider that mechanic a relic, but it seems very Mario to me.
• Mario still has some of the greatest personality of any game character in existence. Sure, he’s disgustingly cute as he yips and cheers while jumping around, but god damn is he charming. It never gets old to me.

The best moment so far was Megaleg, where you get thrown onto a little planet with this giant robot with big legs towering over you. Once a leg comes down, you climb up the side of it and onto the main body where you finsih him off. It felt like a unique Shadow of the Colossus moment, but even cooler because of the ridiculous exaggeration of the huge robot on a tiny planet.

So overall, I’m really digging Galaxy. Not sure if it is in “greatest game of all time” territory yet, but it’s probably the best game I’ve played this year so far. It adds a completely new angle to platformers in the way that Portal turned the shooter formula on its ear. If anything, it makes me glad to know that new ideas do still exist, waiting out there for us to find them…