God of War | Vertigames

With all the good reasons to keep your game design lean and mean, anything you can do to streamline the feature filtering process is worth it. Continuously asking yourself â€œIs this for the good of the game?â€ is difficult, and the answers are hard to trust when you get caught up in the details. A system of high-level priorities must be applied in all but the smallest of games.

The Power of Verbs
A lot of game designers like to talk about Verbsâ€¦ They are a good tool for stripping down a game to its basic components, unfettered by a particular fiction or context. While some designers define their verbs at a fairly micro level such as â€œmoveâ€, â€œturn rightâ€, â€œpushâ€, or â€œdraw weaponâ€, for the purposes of scope it is much more useful to keep those verbs big and chunky that describe objectives or major game statesâ€¦ These are words like â€œFightâ€, â€œExploreâ€, â€œCustomizeâ€, â€œBuildâ€, â€œCookâ€, â€œExpandâ€, and â€œDestroyâ€.

While a game can have many verbs overall, it is also important to identify, very early in the design process, which ones are the Pillar Verbs… These are the core activities that the player will engage in 90% of the timeâ€¦ itâ€™s really what your game is about. It is important to keep the list of these verbs as tight as possible, hopefully three or less. Here is where you are going to lavish the most love and attention, along with the most art and technology. These activities have the most depth and polish applied to themâ€¦ even to the point of having the most buttons assigned to them on a console controller.

A great game has a tight list of Pillar Verbs that read loud and clear, even to a player:

God of War: Fight
Super Mario: Traverse
Halo: Shoot
Diablo: Fight, Acquire
Oblivion: Fight, Explore, Customize
GTA: Drive, Fight

The above list may sound a bit simplisticâ€¦ Halo had driving, right? So did Half-Life 2, but by far the greatest depth is placed in combat. A game may technically have many Secondary Verbs that provide an experience beyond the Pillar Verbs, but generally they add breadth (note I didnâ€™t say â€œdepthâ€) to the game experience or a sense of added value. Diablo II provided a secondary verb of â€œcraftâ€ via the Horadric Cube, but nobody would accuse the game of being about crafting.

On a big project with a big team and a big budget, it is critical to identify your core experiences as early as possible. This sounds intuitive, but many teams have difficulty with this point. The Pillar Verbs are the core of the game, the foundation on which the experience is built. Use them as a Razor for every new feature, bell or whistle: If new item X adds to the depth and richness of one of the Pillar Verbs, it deserves extra consideration. Items that donâ€™t support the gameâ€™s pillars undergo greater scrutiny before being added to the final list of features.

Games spread their efforts around too many Pillar Verbs are likely to end up with a game that is described as â€œunfocusedâ€ or â€œunpolishedâ€. Attempting to layer too much depth into too many verbs even might be (ironically) declared to be â€œshallowâ€, because of the failure to focus the playerâ€™s attention to their key strengths.

Enormous games like open-world titles can be the toughest to nail down. They are inherently about breadthâ€¦ If you added all the micro-activities in Grand Theft Auto IV to a list of verbs, youâ€™d end up with a page or two of entries. However, while some of us might feel that there was a bit too much of the â€œdateâ€ verb in the most recent GTA, itâ€™s still very clear that the Pillar Verbs are still â€œdriveâ€ and â€œfightâ€â€¦ the same as it was in GTA III. It sounds simple but if you go back and play it, driving and fighting was all it needed to sell six million copies.

When Vice City added â€œacquireâ€ with real estate and San Andreas added â€œcustomizeâ€ with clothing and fitness, they were merely window dressing on the core activity of getting in a vehicle and going to shoot something. If GTA IV required you to do more bowling or dating or web-browsing, would you doubt that the game experience would suffer? Worse yet, what if the team developing more of these side activities distracted them from creating a great driving or fighting experience? It would certainly be a disaster. God knows if Little Jacob invites me for a night of drinking one more time while Iâ€™m running from the cops, Iâ€™ll be hurling my controller through the TV.

Sticking to your Values
By nailing your Pillar Verbs, you will have an invaluable tool for focusing your game. However, thereâ€™s one other list that needs to be considered when you are prioritizing your features: the Pillar Values. For example, would you claim that the only emphasis in the direction God of War was to have great combat? What about all those memorable moments they provided, the huge monsters, or the crazy button-matching minigames? Clearly they were out to create a visceral, brutal character, and an epic, cinematic experience as well. Whether they were summed up in a formal list or not, you can tell that the team had a clear objective to provide these things from the word go.

Pillar Values are often expressed as â€œvision statementsâ€ that describe the most important aspects of the game experience, and help guide the high-level decision-making during the creation of a game. They should be established early, and ideally embraced by the entire team. Despite the immensity of the task, the Pillars will help you still put a focus on whatâ€™s important. What you are basically doing is locking in what you believe will be the main reason that players will enjoy your game, and what people will remember about it. Make ’em straightforward and memorable too… if nobody can remember them, they do no good.

Like Pillar Verbs, the Pillar Values should number no more than my favorite number of three. (Four shalt thou not countâ€¦ Five is right out.) Too many values, or poorly-defined values, can once again result in a sub-par game, leaving the impression that you didnâ€™t know what you wanted to accomplish.

One personal example of Pillar Values is the set held during the development of the superhero action RPG X-Men Legends:

Itâ€™s about a team of heroes, not an individual. The game isnâ€™t about a single superhero, but giving the player control of an entire team.
The most destructive game possible. Technology-permitting, provide the most interactive, destructible environment possible.
This is your own team of X-Men. Allow the player to choose whatever team he or she wishes, and play the way he or she wants.

Again, Pillar Values should be so strongly executed that they should be obvious in a gameâ€™s execution. Itâ€™s easy to tell what some of them were on successful games:

God of War: Unapologetically brutal character. Powerful, visceral combat experience. Epic environments and setpieces.
Halo: Cinematic Setpieces. Unique vehicles. Genre-defining multiplayer experience.
Devil May Cry: Fast, over-the-top combat. Style over substance.

This explains God of Warâ€™s massive success in using â€œquick-time eventsâ€ (button-prompt minigames driving â€œcannedâ€ cinematic sequences) as a successful part of the their game experience, even while other imitators fail. While to some they might seem to be just â€œfluffâ€, every moment of minigame action provided in God of War is used to add more brutality, power, or epic action to the combat experience. It just so happens that canned sequences can convey certain actions extremely well. When similar games try to throw a button-prompt minigame at the player, it can sometimes just be a vehicle to make the main character do something clever that doesnâ€™t necessarily reinforce the core game values. As such they just donâ€™t provide the same magic as when Kratos leaps onto the Colossusâ€™ face and stabs him in the eye (awesome).

Sharpen that Razor
Everything that Iâ€™ve said in the past couple of weeks is based around the idea that cuts are good. Thatâ€™s difficult for many folks, developers and gamers alike, to accept. Too often we get wrapped up in that one favorite feature that didnâ€™t make it to ship, and forget all the good parts of the game that did ship.

Cuts happen, and they happen constantly throughout a projectâ€¦ They are driven by producers working to fit the project to a schedule, by artists or audio people who are asked to generate too many assets, or by programmers who must trim down an overambitious technical plan. They are a required part of a game reaching completion, and since a game that doesnâ€™t ship is a guaranteed failure, itâ€™s worth accepting cuts for the opportunity they can provide.

Whether there is a game designer making these calls, or if you are just looking to add some sanity to your corner of your project, these tools can allow you to control your cuts and make them up-front. By focusing your game development on pillars, and using them as a razor to guide the cutting process, you will see less wasted time, fewer tears, and a lot more of an enjoyable development experience. Better yet, I contend that if you focus on whatâ€™s important throughout a project, you will create a better game for it as well.

Vertigames

Tag Archives: God of War

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