Tag Archives: Bioshock

The Challenge… errr, Challenge – DTO Part 2

Last time I talked about co-op games and the need to tweak the difficulty in the name of a better experience.  I mentioned that inflating the total number of hit points can work, but it can lead to the trap of The Numbers Game, where your existing health and damage are scaled together, resulting in a constant game challenge that only shifts when you fall outside of what the game deems “fair”.  This can work for RPG’s, but is troublesome when used on shooters.

Bag o' Hit Points
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.

pixelshot

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.

fallenshamanfallenAdding 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.

Weapons of Awesome Power (and some less so)

Marine with Pulse RifleLast 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 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)
The Games

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?

Continue reading Weapons of Awesome Power (and some less so)

Making the Rules: The Curse of “More”

In every game I’ve been involved with (and I’m sure most developers would agree), there’s a single teeny-tiny word that creates conflict more certainly than anything else: “More“. Developers want it. Gamers want it. Reviewers want it. Executives want it. Marketing people want it.

Complex StuffEverybody 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?

Spidey CarHow 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.

Niko’s Bowling NightAs 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

Into The West

`Things have been really crazy lately at Surreal, but in spare moments I’ve been thinking about Rick’s manifesto on Japanese games and what it means to me. Certainly a great deal of the debate is personal taste… The cultural differences in the east that gain us interesting premises and memorable characters also net us irritatingly angst-ridden heroes, preachy monologues, immersion-breaking cutesy sidekicks, and existential, introspective endings. I had a similarly inspired discussion this week with some of the guys on the virtues of stealth games. Some love them, some hate them.

Somewhat coincidentally, I’ve been immersing myself in the work of three different continents lately: Bioshock, Overlord and Persona 3. While perhaps they are not completely iconic of the values of their respective region-coding, they certainly reminded me of some of the cultural differences I’ve seen in their products over the years. Here are some broad, possibly unfair generalizations on the qualities of Japanese and American games:

800px-Flag_of_Japan_svg
Japan:

  • Japanese games tend to mix up settings, so that fantasy is often mixed with sci-fi, psionics, westerns, or whatever. The setting and content often just serve the game creator’s style, creating a certain type of character, or having some sort of visual impact, even if explanations are thin.
  • Content is experienced in a fairly linear fashion, even in open-ended RPG’s. Major events are always presented in order, as there is no expectation of “the player writing their story”. The player is definitely being “spoken for” by the mostly mute main character.
  • Characters are strongly defined, very early in the game. Each has a distinct look and clearly identifiable motivations. Even when the game has customization of equipment, it tends to not interfere with the character’s graphic. Whether he or she is wearing a feathered cap or a robot helmet, they still appear in the stylish outfit the character designer created.
  • VieraAll characters, including NPC’s, tend to wear their heart on their sleeves and spew forth their deepest motivations at the drop of a hat. Cute characters or awkward females are frequently included as tension-relievers.
  • The first hour of the game often comes near to playing itself, with an extremely tightly controlled experience. From Square RPG’s to Mario, the Japanese slowly dole out setting and mechanics, even if it takes several hours.
  • Gameplay tends to be compartmentalized into smaller game areas in the interest of a simpler interface and smooth visuals. Interfaces vary depending on the game mode, with no fear of menus, overmaps, or stopping the action to allow the player to focus on a single decision.
  • Japan has an element of “fantasy” in most games. Suspension of disbelief is not a concern with unusual additions to a fiction. The visual and stylistic impact on these choices seems to take precedent over world consistency. Japanese don’t seem to expend much energy on explaining why the world is normal except for one weird element, or why one member of the party is a giant anteater, and the audience just lets it roll over them.
  • The locations in Japanese games are varied, but very often involve abstract interpretations of public spaces. A busy downtown street will be depicted even if the engine can’t support more than 5 NPC’s to occupy it and the camera must be kept top-down to avoid looking at the horizon. This is sufficient, however, to the gamer.
  • While they may seem to defy typical American genres, Japanese games have their own that get followed with some fairly specific guidelines as well: Turn-based RPG, Action RPG, card battle, screen-based sim (from horse racing to dating), turn-based strategy, and so on.

800px-Flag_of_the_United_States_svg

 

United States:

  • Americans tend to expect more of a consistent feel from their settings, with fantasy, western, or modern day delivered with certain expectations. When settings are mixed, there tends to be more energy spent explaining why when the Japanese seem to accept each new world.
  • Player choice is a highly valued in American games, even if it isn’t delivered all the time. The player’s ability to take an environment and solve it the way he wants to is very important to the public. This usually puts an emphasis on gameplay or mechanics, but this choice is often to the detriment of storytelling.
  • GordonfreemanU.S. games tend to take characters to the extremes… Either the game is about the main character, which forms the nucleus of a game’s style, such as God of War, or the character is pushed into the background, making the environment or the gameplay the “main character”, such as in Bioshock or Half-Life. Character customization is valued so the player can be anyone, which detracts from visual design as well as strong player motivations as portrayed in cutscenes.
  • The first hour of an American game is focused on “netting the player”, with awareness that the audience may have several games vying for his attention. A great deal of choice and ability is thrown at the player in short fashion to make sure that they understand everything the game is about quickly.
  • First-person perspective is also highly valued in American games. These titles universally push the main character into the background, allowing the player to be that individual.
  • American games are strongly focused on presenting a continuous experience for the player, with few menus or load times, and game controls and interface that must serve combat as well as during exploration. Menus are kept to a minimum, and real-time battles are always expected in the game world, leading to a more complicated control scheme. Online is also a strong virtue, which almost requires a continuous experience to be functional.
  • Settings in American games also are frequently pushed to areas that the designer can control without protest from the player. A dense city for example is often avoided because they are hard to deliver without the compartmentalizing practices of Japanese games. This can lead to more freely explorable games with a far lower visual fidelity, such as Grand Theft Auto III.
  • Ironically, however, Americans are influenced by mass media to be more attracted to “realistic” settings and subject matter. Film and TV fall into modern settings even when they explore the fantastic, from Quantum Leap to Bruce Almighty) Unfortunately, while theses settings make it easier for filming TV and movies, they are harder for U.S. gamemakers to place continuous experiences in (in a way that satisfies designers and audiences). Americans are much less interested in suspension of disbelief.
  • American games tend to more readily associate “settings” with “genre” than the Japanese. A fantasy game often has a certain set of gameplay expectations, as does a modern military or crime game.
  • Action in American games almost universally means combat because they are astronomically easier to put into real-time continuous experiences. And since there is so much pressure to set games in the modern day, the conversation usually turns to guns, because Americans can’t imagine a society that guns are not a part of.

cloudvselderI’m not here to simply rebut Rick and say that Western games are superior (maybe someone else will do that!). One common point of contention between those that enjoy Japanese games versus American ones is how stories are told. Japanese games get all that character data out to the audience quickly, and get right to the drama between them. The dialogue will often include long drawn out exposition on a given character’s motives, and generally those motives are not too deep. American developers are influenced by western cinema that places artistic value on subtlety, slow tension-building and multi-layered character depth. Sadly enough, these techniques are hostile to the average game-player’s patterns… Delivering a punchline to a joke that was set up only ten minutes of cinema-time doesn’t take into the account the chance that the player quit, saved, and waited for two weeks before picking up the game again. The player might miss the several subtle cues that told us that the main character is already dead, or whatever. Sometimes it’s frustrating enough during the development process that many developers either cut all the interesting side-plots before ship, or just fall back on summer blockbuster conventions, which leads to more guns and explosions.

As I touched upon in my post on Children of Men, brisk, bold, simple storytelling is probably the best thing for games. For all the posturing and monologues seen in Japanese games, they are getting the information out to the player and reinforcing it multiple times. The player will certainly remember Cloud and Dante more than Garrett or even Gordon Freeman. Ironically, when an American game guns for a memorable character like Kratos in God of War, the game ends up being more linear, with a clear character who is not bashful about his motives… In other words, it creates an experience like the Japanese have been doing for years.

[Ed: Check out Rick’s series of posts here and here.]