I’ve been playing Resistance 2 lately, taking in its new cooperative mode on the recommendation of a couple of friends.  Co-op in shooters has a long but spotty tradition, so it was neat to see Insomniac deliver a non-competitive experience with a different feel. This one gives the player one of three classes that can be leveled up independently by matching up to play short missions. Each class has a different loadout and responsibility when played: grunt, medic, supply. In addition, there is a resource that can be gathered during matches in order to purchase upgraded abilities and weapon packages.

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.

Last week I got a nagging feeling that I needed to catch up on some of the latest games… I’d played and enjoyed Grand Theft Auto IV, as well as some other open-world and RPG titles, but occasionally there is a “huge” title that I just plain miss. This fall was a busy time…  while I’d played Bioshock and some (but not enough) of Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect, I’d completely breezed by Halo 3. As a long-time shooter fan/developer I figured I owed it to myself to put in a few hours and catch up with what’s held up as state-of-the-art.

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 have this gun look and sound so subdued, with 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 (around 3:00):

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? Read the rest of this entry »

I just noticed today that during my blogging hiatus, Citizen Parker had stumbled onto my posted Analysis of Diablo 2.  It was a fun write, and a Parker had some really cool things to say about it.  Thanks for the nod!

A bit of history on this, I wrote it while I was in the midst of a job search.  They had asked for an analysis of this sort for one of several games, including my fave, Diablo 2.  I was uncomfortable revealing this at post time because it would have been unfair to reveal their hiring practices, but this was for the sadly-departed Iron Lore in Maynard, Massachusetts. 

At the time they were looking for a lead designer for their ultimately entertaining and polished Diablo-like game Titan Quest.  I visited their studios in a cool old New England building, and met with folks like Brian Sullivan and Jeff Goodsill…  It was a nice operation with what seemed like a great culture and feel, and it saddens me that they weren’t able to keep the money flowing.  The public at large (and many developers) seem to forget how hard it is to have an independent studio these days…  New IP is difficult to get attention for, and the game-buying public tends to pool their money on a few selected hits and ignore the rest.

Anyway, back to Diablo…  It was kismet that they had asked me about that game not too long after I finished X-Men Legends.  As you get done developing a game, you mind is filled with the choices you made, and all the things you could have done to make the game better.  Sometimes it’s a struggle to close the book and move on, and it feels important to keep a log of what you’d do different if there was a next time. 

God, my head was filled with stuff like this.  X-Men Legends had an early start conceived as a turn-based RPG ala Final Fantasy before I evolved it into the real-time adventure that got released.  Things get so clear after the fact, but in the midst of it we were struggling to get our new console technology going and iterating on AI.  The XML really wasn’t fully playable (particularly having good companion AI) until pretty near the end of production.  (Although I should say that the unstoppable Simon Parkinson really lived up to the challenge of making that whole package work together well).  But, as even the mighty Penny Arcade has finally begun to understand, sometimes games play like shit until they are fun.  It doesn’t happen with every project, but there are times when you just have to trust your instincts and carry out a plan.

In the case of X-Men, there were a few things that dawned on me too late to really get into the design.  The first was a smaller realization…  For a good chunk of development we were looking for solid gameplay elements that took advantage of the various forms of elemental attacks that the X-Men used…  Typically it was difficult because it was custom-scripted, and generally required one specific hero at the expense of all others in order to enact, which went up against our credo of letting the player choose their favorite X-Men and focus on them.  However, after Harvey and Randy Smith’s excellent talk on emergence at GDC 2004, I came back to work all fired up about the possibilities of the interactions of objects with elemental properties and how they could create some unique gameplay.  Creating more water that could be frozen or barrels that leaked flammable oil would have added a lot of variation to the X-Men’s activities, but the idea really came in too late to really act on.  We were pretty much at alpha at that point and couldn’t take the risk.  Ah well.

The second inspiration I got, however, came nearly at the very end of the game, as we were doing final tuning.  For so long, we had been chasing the dragon of encouraging the player to switch characters.  Ostensibly this was to support the X-Men chestnut of “combo attacks” like the Fastball Special.  These would have, ironically, been a breeze if we had stuck with the turn-based Final Fantasy model, but they were really hard to implement and control in the chaotic environment of a real-time, multiple-enemy brawler.  Anyway, switching characters with the D-Pad was a great combat option that existed, but generally any one character was powerful enough to deal with any challenge.  As it was still a bit disorienting to do a lot in battle (and a bit inconvenient because of the use of the D-pad), the player usually just switched for variety and flavor.

What was apparent to me right at the end of development (not that it was a revelation) is that using powers were always going to be the most exciting thing, because that’s where we lavished the most love and custom effects.  The unique opportunity that existed in X-Men Legends, however, was that there were four characters that were usable most of the time.  So, while in other games you shoot your wad and drain yourself of power, then go off and recharge or drink a potion or something, our players could continually switch characters and use that character’s powers while the drained character was busy recharging.  As such, we could have introduced a mechanic that encouraged the player to keep a power chain going, rewarding them for using power after power, ultimately reinforcing the fun that should exist with all these extravagant powres going off.  I think that would have completely cemented the “team” feel and brought the game beyond just being a multi-character elaboration on Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance (and I make no claims that we don’t owe that game a great debt).

Of course by then the game was nearly out the door, and I was gearing up to move on to new opportunities.  I feel a bit sad that we weren’t able to get that sort of thing in, but since that game has spawned two successful sequels built on the same mechanics, I guess I can’t complain.  It just proves that there is always one more feature, one more bit of polish for every game you work on. You can either kill yourself over it, or just save those ideas for next time…

Ah Peter… I see you like making a statement. Awesome, this blog is a mix of all our opinions, and you’ve done a good job of backing up your own point of view. I’m not particularly suprised about your reaction to Halo’s health mechanics though… You’re an old-school online gamer, forged in the searing online fires of Mount Quake.

In contrast, as I’ve stated before, I like to play shooters (starting with Doom and its awesome shotgun) balls-out fearless, working out interesting ways to leap into the fray and rely on guts and skill to get the job done. Sure I like sessions of strategy too, but there are times where I just enjoy acting like a hero and being rewarded as such. I don’t even mind getting mowed down in tragic fashion if it’s due to my bravado. Such an approach does play havoc with my survivability in certain online contests (notably against Mr. Carlson), but I have fun doing it nonetheless.

The classic 100% health model, however, played a bit at odds with my play style. For me, each room or area of Doom is a fairly self-contained challenge, but upon completion I might have lower health than is practical to move onto the next session and still survive… you can’t always rely on the placement of health kits to get you back up to snuff. I’d often load up a save and try to get through that area with more health. This honed my skill and let me practice new ways of clearing a room, but as time went on, I found myself starting to play the game very “safe”… luring enemies around corners, slowly harassing opponents and so on. Doom suddenly became a very slow game to me. I enjoy tactical exercises like Rainbow Six as much as the next guy, but it wasn’t what I was looking for in a classic action shooter. Read the rest of this entry »

At E3 2006 I was surprised by a game that came out of the blue and had interesting, exciting combat, a very cinematic style and a cool-looking character. On the show floor I played through the arena they showed twice, despite the lines and all the other things there were to see. It was Heavenly Sword, and it was the reason I finally broke down and bought a PS3.

I had a brief moment of doubt when the demo came out and I didn’t have as much fun as I did at E3… it seemed to be missing a sense of context, and the frame rate seemed worse. Nonetheless, since I had owned a PS3 for two months and still had no games, I bought it this weekend and cracked it out on Sunday.

I love it. Screw the people that gave it weak reviews. It’s got: Read the rest of this entry »

This article was written out of necessity back in 2005…  I was looking for a new gig and one studio asked for, as part of its application, a paper analyzing one of several possible games.  Diablo 2 was on the list.  Great timing!  I had gone from X-Men Legends, where I learned the ups and downs of action RPG’s to working on Lord of the Rings Online, where discussions of scope and the feasibility of various online choices was the topic of the day.  Both games set a lot of speculation stewing in my head about what could be done with the Diablo formula and why it was successful in the first place.

Analysis of Diablo 2