Tag Archives: Half-Life

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)

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.]

Making the Rules: Great Enemies

complicated_flowchartPreviously I’ve talked about how games adjust AI difficulty because of the need to fulfill the player’s fantasy, and provide them with success and positive feedback. This time I’d like to talk about perils and pointers for creating good combat AI. Now, while many articles that wish to address “great AI” contain heavy jargon or equations and diagrams depicting line of sight, or reticular splines or some such, let’s put that aside for now. It can be a great deal simpler than that (although in some ways more challenging).

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Imagine dropping a player in a sprawling maze… hedgerow, factory, prison, whatever… that is impossible to be known beforehand. Within there is one incredibly realistic, human-like AI… It operates on its senses, with no unfair information about the maze or the player, but it executes on some crazy supercomputer with a million factors that it takes into account, from its knowledge of combat tactics to its own preferences and personality. Hell, let’s even keep track of what it had for breakfast in case we want to simulate a chance of it having an upset stomach. This AI’s job is to start searching for the player and make assaults as he moves through the maze. For a moment, as we watch the AI, we can see it moving through the maze, tracking the player’s scent, thinking about how to flank him… when it hits a fork in the path, it decides to go left or right based on tactical decisions, or its own tendencies, or whatever a human-like AI should do. Perhaps it has a human-like idiosyncrasy like alternating… Whatever. The important thing is when it finds the player, whether by crafty wiles or just dumb luck, it switches to combat tactics and starts attacking the player without warning, pressing any advantage it can. When it is out of the player’s view, he is completely stealthy, undetectable until he encounters the player again.

Wolf3dNow imagine this experience from the player’s perspective. He’s moving through the maze, starting to get familiar with his surroundings. Assuming the brilliant AI is quiet like he is, the enemy could be around any corner. The first time he encounters him, the attack could be anywhere, behind, ahead… who knows. If the AI is particularly crafty and sets up a sniper ambush, the player could die in a single shot to the head. To the player it’s a chaotic, unpredictable experience… Perhaps a fun one for some, perhaps not.

Now let’s replace the AI with a more rudimentary version, one that makes more random decisions about what path to take while moving through the maze. This is sporadically punctuated with the AI taking the best path to the player, using perfect information. The enemy will still use intelligent tactical decisions once the player has engaged it in combat, but when it is out of the player’s sight, the AI is entirely artificial. For the player, assuming the general frequency and predictability of the enemy appearance is similar, very few audience members will notice the difference.

Now let’s go even further, and replace the AI with a spawning routine that creates an enemy at the edge of the player’s awareness at a similar frequency and predictability as either of the other approaches. Certainly there are a few cases where it would make a wrong choice, such as spawning the enemy from a dead-end, but how often would this become apparent to most players? .

Now what point am I making here? That “real AI” is worthless? Of course not! When the enemy is within the player’s view, it needs to act extremely effectively, to provide the player with sufficient combat challenge and to keep the illusion up that this is human-like behavior. However, once the player has lost all perception of the enemy’s movements, there is a significant drop-off in the impact of sophisticated AI on the player’s game experience… That enemy could go off and play chess, consult his favorite tracker’s handbook or compose humorous limericks about the death of the player, but none of it makes much of a difference if the player is not aware of these activities. And it doesn’t advocate delivering “good enough”, it’s just that we could be using that supercomputer for better things.

A Pinch of Player Feedback

Soldier of Fortune 2-1Of course there are better ways of selling an interesting “hunt” scenario between a player and an AI. The game might have remote cameras out in the world that allow you to sporadically see his activities. The enemy can leave a trail that you can pick up. He can make noises that might give away their position or distract you. These additions almost universally add additional player awareness of the AI’s activities when he is out of sight.

Sure, you can add some clever AI tactics that go beyond spawning… he might feint in one direction to lure you off, then work around and flank you. However, consider that we are adding to events in a chaotic, confusing combat situation to begin with. How would most players feel if they went towards an enemy who disappeared, appearing not much later to shoot him in the back? He might feel confused, or cheated, like the AI did something illegal. There is no satisfaction to be gained by guessing the enemy’s next action and planning accordingly. There is no learning process to “outwit” the opponent, nor is there any way to increase one’s skill to defeat him, aside from simple reflex improvement such as firing a gun accurately.

The development of most game features require the creator to balance of the investment of time and computer performance, versus the gameplay value created. No feature is free, and in a shooter, if the AI programmer spent all their time creating AI’s that can independently recreate all the works of Shakespeare, the time would generally be wasted… such effort and horsepower doesn’t help the player… this is a game about combating the enemy. Back when I was working on Soldier of Fortune 2, there were some enemies that had the ability of tossing clips to each other if one ran out of ammo. However, nobody knew that feature existed. Why? Well, the clips were never exchanged unless the two enemies were behind cover, completely out of sight. Also, the ammo level of any individual enemy was never a significant issue in the game, since fights tended to be very short and deadly. This was a time to invoke a cardinal rule of game development: Features that do not notably affect the player experience are usually not worth implementing.

Half Life 1Contrast that to the AI in the first Half-Life, which critics and consumers unanimously celebrated as one of the most significant contributors to their enjoyment of the game. In Half-Life the enemies did all sorts of things, from flanking you to spotting your thrown grenades and responding accordingly. However, combat against the deadly Black Mesa soldiers was a very hide-and-shoot affair, so there would have been little opportunity for the player to understand their tactics and smarts. However, some exceedingly smart individual at Valve decided to give the player a radio that intercepted the soldier’s communications, which gave the player a window on their reactions and strategies. Sure, it would have been even more challenging for the player if he had absolutely no clue to what the enemies were going to do next, but it is far more impactful to the player’s experience to allow him to understand how smart the enemies are. Arguably, beyond every other feature the enemies in Half Life had, the radio was the single most significant invention of that game.

Enemy communication of their intent has been used in other games, such as Halo, where the slightly comical alien grunts would spout exclamations like “there he is!” or “where’d he go?” when they observed a specific situation. Metal Gear Solid soldiers talk to themselves, saying “what was that noise?” and so on. Of course it’s not realistic, but it makes things more fun. Concealing those mechanisms actually creates a less compelling experience than when you lay out the rotating gears in front of a big window that the player can see.

Great AI lives in the player

mgs2iceSo if a more human-like opponent leads to unpredictable, and often unsatisfying behavior, and realistic, limited information plunges the player into a chaotic, random-seeming experience, what is the player asking for when he or she is asking for “better AI” or a “smarter” opponent? The answer to this harkens back to a previous point, that the player wishes to fulfill a specific fantasy that they have. They wish for their opponents to respond as they imagine they would in their fantasy. In the case of a super-spy fighting against armies of henchmen, it’s a set of opponents that appear to fight against the player effectively, yet die or fail to kill the player at appropriate moments so that the player can feel powerful.

In a player’s fantasy, an enemy is still capable of many things. There is a great deal that a gamer can imagine his electronic opponents doing to try to outsmart him. This includes flanking the player, hearing noises and investigating, changing ammo types, and spotting and responding to thrown grenades. In fact, it could be said that a large variety of actions at the enemy’s disposal is what might make him seem “smart”. However, again, with limited information confounding the player’s ability to appreciate this rich palette of AI options, there is but one avenue to make a character seem intelligent… we must inform the player of some of the choices that are being made while they are being made, so that the player can feel even cooler when taking them out.