metagame

At the end of the day, Mass Effect’s sequel is a disappointment. Believe me, I know I’m swimming against the current here. EA/Bioware gets to put a big trophy on their mantle  – a 96% Metacritic. That’s the fourth highest score for a 360 title, ever. So am I insane? Maybe. But as I played the game, too many things stood out as “could be better.” So that’s what this this entry is about: pondering what keeps an entertaining game from being what I’d call great.  (One quick note: I’m going to avoid discussion of the game’s morality system. Been there, done that, etc.)

Oh, this counts as your official Spoiler Warning. I’m assuming you’ve either played the game, or that you don’t care if I tell you all about it.

Cover Shooter
For good or ill, the sequel shifts the franchise from an RPG with shooting gameplay (ME1) to a shooter with light RPG elements (ME2). Nothing wrong with that. Two facts justify it: a larger audience of shooter fans means more sales, and the shooter gameplay needed improvement after the first game. But putting shooter first means that it’s become fair to judge ME2 not just against the narrow competition RPGs have, but against the many well-executed third-person console shooters out there.

ME2 is not the worst shooter to be released in the last year, but it seems middle of the pack at best (and not just for the lack of multiplayer). In its second iteration and attempt at cover-based shooting, ME2 no longer has the excuse of being an RPG in shooter clothing. So why leave out the ability to switch between cover points? Why drop out blind fire and suppressive fire? More importantly, why do I keep shooting my cover object when my reticule is over it? Why do I keep having encounters where I’m up above my targets, but the physics of “low cover” are so high that I can’t shoot over it? Why do I keep getting popped out of cover for reasons I don’t understand? And why do the AIs have problems navigating around and using many of the simple cover points?

Artificial Unintelligence
More on those AIs. An obvious problem during combat is the predictable and static opponents. I appreciate the hit point system that player and AI characters share: shields, armor, and health. Each of those layers calls for a specific skill, device, or ammo to exploit optimally. But health state shouldn’t be only thing that the player needs to pay attention to, and I think it is. The AI opponents don’t change their tactics in response to the player, and they don’t encourage the player to respond to anything they are doing. They behave the same regardless of what strategies the player adapts. In truth, the game has enough variety in enemy archetypes, between the rocket launchers, the miniboss mechs, and the semi-invisible hunter enemies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a good job of calling attention to the characteristics of these enemies (compare to something like Bioshock), and none of the archetypes demand any sort of special response.

Big Pile of Hit Points

Here’s just a few concepts that are common to shooters today: grenades that make you move, heavy weapons that make you flank, sniper weapons that demand breaking line of sight, environment manipulation that has to be stopped, AI calls for help that result in additional spawns, and enemy healing skills that require focus fire. Each tactic can force a player response, and along the way develop more dynamic, more interesting combat encounters.

Even if the AIs did anything interesting, I’m not sure how the player would know. The enemies of Mass Effect 2 don’t provide us with tells or clues to their behaviors. How about a tip when enemies launch weapons that destroy or go through cover? The only clue we have of AI tactics in combat are when an ally yells: “Krogan charging!” Compare that to the barks of the enemies and the chatter from the main character found in other shooters. The allied sidekicks chime in with quips: “go for the optics” and “executing sudo command.” Nothing wrong with that, but it demonstrates that the focus of Mass Effect 2 isn’t you or your enemies: it’s your sidekicks.

For a game with so much dialogue, why does the world become mute the moment a weapon is drawn? The player can show off amazing shooting skill, biotic powers that theoretically dazzle the world, and technical abilities that do the same. The enemies don’t react except to take damage. The lack of an AI response to player success represents a fundamental failure to reward good play. Why do we never transition – as we did at least a few times in the previous title – from combat to dialogue, and maybe back again? Broken down, ME2 has two game modes: shooting and talking. Combining the two modes occasionally would seem to be a good thing, wouldn’t it? Otherwise we don’t have a hybrid game, we have two games in close proximity. Many of the AI opponents are gangsters, thugs, and less than professional soldiers. Why not hear them talk? Why not have them surrender or flee with defeated? It wouldn’t be terrible if they acted like mercenaries instead of kamikaze zombies, ready to die to the last man.

Crates, Crates, Everywhere

Level Design
The gameplay areas of ME2 are formulaic. While every game works with templates, most make more effort to hide the cookie cutter. This science fiction franchise has the freedom to create any interactive objects it can imagine. It can invent new technologies; it can design its spaces to be anything. So where do the epic gunfights of the future happen? Big open warehouses stacked with crates! Crates!

As game designers, we need to make our games approachable, but that doesn’t mean that we should default to cliché RPG tropes. In the first Mass Effect, several enemies demonstrated the ability to create force fields of cover on the battlefield. This was cool. Why remove something that creates futuristic cover without one-meter concrete barricades everywhere? Without stacks of crates filling the galaxy? Just what the hell are the mercenaries shipping in these things anyway?

Force Fields > Crates

Compare the scenario design to something like Arkham or Uncharted. Can ME2 surprise you? Not really. It sets up its standard operating procedures very early: Small areas are for conversation, minigames, or loot acquisition.The moment you open a door into a wide open space, you find lots of cover barriers in the middle, and you know you’re about to get into another fight. It’s okay to set up this “standard scenario,” but good games should break from their patterns. When you can predict where the bad guys come from, and that they’re identical to the last wave of bad guys, boredom follows.

To add to the problem, the rewards of combat have been removed. Enemies don’t consistently drop ammo – I’m sorry, thermal clips. They don’t produce XP, so the game has to check our progress with blood gates. Enemies don’t drop credits, so we have to have a hundred little dead end spokes that hide treasure chests. So not only are the same enemies filling room after room, but the player doesn’t have any incentive to fight them except the need to grind through to progress.

Mako: A feature without a reason to exist

Minigames
Remember the Mako from Mass Effect? It sucked ass. Driving over featureless terrain in a vain search for content wasn’t fun. During my Mako-completist pilgrimage, I found one tiny piece of story-like information (in a text box! that never went anywhere), a few cookie-cutter bases, and a whole lot of nothing. It would have been the best example “addition by subtraction” in game design. Of course the designers at Bioware heard that criticism – I imagine they knew it before ME1 shipped. So the Mako is gone now (though its ruin looked dishearteningly intact instead of rightfully blasted to bits).

And what did they replace the Mako with? A scanning and resource harvesting game. In ME2, you don’t have to drive around a featureless planet to slowly collect resources: Now you can drive around it virtually and slowly harvest resources. Why? Really, why is this in the game? Were the developers influenced by Farmville?

Scan Results: No fun, Commander

ME2 has evolved into an RPG without hardcore RPG game systems. The game could have delivered iridium, platinum, palladium, and element zero entirely through the game’s third-person gameplay. It could have made any technology that required those resources cost credits instead. Or it could just remove the four additional currencies and tie tech upgrades to game discoveries or character advancement. As it stands, these complications stand out as vestiges of the RPG that Mass Effect left behind. The scanning game is a remnant of the commitment to make an open galaxy game where “you will have the freedom to visit a wide array of uncharted planets.” Guys, harvesting resources is not exploration. Or, you know, fun.

I shouldn’t forget the other two new minigames: hacking and bypassing. I suppose they’re better than the Simon Says button pressing game. There’s nothing wrong with them, per se, other than that they don’t evolve a wit as the game progresses. They become tiresome. Some means of skipping it (purchasable keys, a skill upgrade, etc.) would be nice.

That’s All for Now
This rant has gone on longer than I planned. I’ll pick it up tomorrow and talk about story. Story, after all, is why I think we love games like Mass Effect 2: the choose-your-own-adventure story of the modern age.

Six months ago I posted that Magic on Xbox Live was a Trojan Horse of sorts: an online ad calling on lapsed players to come back to Jamaica. You know, all of you millions of players from the 90s or early 00′s that have given up the game: try it again! Fall in love with the easy XBox game, want more, then get back into buying the cards (whether physical or online).

It seemed like a reasonable supposition. And to some level, no doubt it’s true.

Then a friend linked this today: XBox Live’s topselling titles. Duels of the Planeswalkers, #1. Now, I have no idea what time period that sample measures: the week? the month? But regardless, it’s half a year after release, and this game has serious legs. A lot of people have been playing this game who were just curious about it, or got roped into buying it to play with friends. Duels turned out to be more than just an ad, and I imagine it’s contributing nicely to Hasbro’s bottom line, more than even they expected.

In any event, the success speaks not only to the power of the brand, but also some good game design choices: supporting the trifecta of co-op, single player, and competitive play supports different kinds of players, and encourages the network effect growth that multiplayer games (online or not) can do best.

(No, I don’t have any Hasbro stock anymore.)

The good news: Modern Warfare 2, over four million copies sold. The bad news: over four million copies illegally downloaded. Like music and film, games are just data that can be sent over the tubes. Film and games are respectively harder thanks to their larger size, but growing bandwidth will make this point moot. Piracy is getting easier and easier, and the PC gaming section in the retail stores looks more and more pathetic. While not cause and effect, these are not unrelated either.

Inevitable result: players must log into an internet account to validate their purchase and play a game, much like you would an MMO. Of course, a large percentage of PC game sales these days seem to be un-pirateable MMOs anyway.

And you don’t even need to leave your home. Check out the deals on Steam. Dragon Age, Arkham Asylum, etc.. Good games.

And most importantly, the LucasArts bundle, for 50% off. Lots of classic games that the studio has pushed out in the last year.

Sure it’s an all-around good game. Hours and days later, I keep thinking about Arkham, and I reconsider what you can guess about my development experience (officially: no comment).

On this face of it, designing a Batman game presents significant challenges at the high level. First, you’ve got this Batman guy. He’s a great character — in fact he’s too much of a character.  How do you decide what your video game Batman can do, what tone and mood to set… when there’s been at least four Bruce Waynes on film in the last two decades? Add in the television versions — the animated series that’s been around in different forms for a while — and even Adam West’s version. Don’t forget the comic books that existed on paper for far longer than you’ve been alive. The printed Batman is the creation of so many artists and writers, each with his own take on the caped crusader, how can all of this come together cohesively? It really doesn’t.

When an audience experiences a single source, they often come away with strikingly different opinions of what a character is about –  along with how serious or realistic the story is. With its striking volume of  material, Batman simply means different things to different people. What’s important to the character and franchise? Brawling? Gadgets? Solving crime? Sneaking around? Rooftop chases? Vehicles? Sidekicks? Villains? Gotham itself?

So, there’s too much there to even try to be comprehensive. To their credit, the developers of this title didn’t really try.  I don’t doubt there was considerable pressure to do more — internal, external, fans  — since  everyone thinks they know Batman. To include more villains. To include vehicles. A love interest. A sidekick.

On the surface of it, if someone told me that a new Batman game would combine sneaking, brawling, platforming, and puzzle solving, I’d probably have told them: that can’t work. Cut something.

And yet this title pulls it off. It also remains loyal to their character pretty much all the way through. None of these gameplay modes is complex or deep, and that’s why I think it works. Brawling is based around a highly directed “use-this-button-against-this-type-at-this-time” sort of whack-a-mole. Platforming consists largely of  jumping and ropeclimbing, no different from what we’ve seen before. Sneaking is guided through obvious hiding spots, kept fresh with amusing AI. So it’s cinematic, fast-paced, and easy to learn.

The result is  hybrid game worthy of praise (and, in my case, envy).

Well Done, Guys

Dungeons & Now What?

It was worth commenting on before, but time flies and here we are. DDO freeplay has gone live. Someday I should compose something of a personal postmortem on the game, but until then, we can talk about this development.

Of course, by “free” it’s “freemium,” not absolutely free. There are ways – subscriptions and microtransactions – for players to put money into Turbine’s pocket (and no doubt Atari and Hasbro take a cut, or else they wouldn’t have agreed to the new business model). On balance, though, it does seem that Turbine has made it possible for the absolutely free player to earn access to all of the game’s content. The guy dropping the nickel just makes it easier. Not entirely unlike the latest social network games.  But with better graphics.

So what do I think ? It’s a savvy move, even if it’s widely regarded as a Hail Mary pass born of desperation. DDO was never designed (or marketed) to compete with games at the now-traditional $15 subscription. A smaller scope resulted in something between Diablo and a full MMO in terms of content, scope, and investment. We should expect the audience to be able to discriminate value when it doesn’t work in their favor, and Tubine failed that test. D&D players most everywhere prove highly sensitive to price; many believe a $30 Player’s Handbook is overpriced, when the cost per hour of entertainment quickly approaches zero. Finding ways to reduce, hide, or make costs incremental to the audience are all good ideas in this internet age.

Check back in a few months to see if Turbine announces additional content or an expansion (new business model success!) or cuts bait (patience was never their strong suit).

For the second time this summer, I find myself playing a game based on a movie. Yeah, I know that technically Arkham Asylum isn’t based on The Dark Knight, but … let’s just say that they have a lot in common. Shared protagonist, villain, and tone.

Oh, don’t take my word for it. I lie all the time. But not all of the critics can be lying.

At the office yesterday I witnessed some verbal urination on zombie proliferation. Here I was gleefully slaughtering countless numbers of the walking dead without a thought to the success of their nerfarious campaign. Count up some of the recent IP: Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, Fallout, Bioshock, Prototype, Mass Effect, Dead Space. There’s more. Zombies are everywhere! Killing a million zombies should get you a lifetime Achievement or something.

Why? Zombies represent unambiguous anthropomorphic evil.

We don’t get many evils that everyone can agree on. The world is too divided, too aware, too full of post-cultural relativism and political correctness. We can’t reach consensus on the world’s villains. Sure we can agree on problems: hunger, war, disease, etc., but we have trouble pointing at people and saying: Thou art evil. Individuals can cast that verbal stone, but someone will always disagree. So it’s pretty much down to mindless undead (not vampires, obviously, they’re soulful) now that we can kill without remorse. No guilt for mass murder? What more could the shooter fan want!

It’s also important that zombies look basically human. We’re wired to recognize human appearance and motion. Even if things seem a little off, we register the walking dead as a kind of enemy that we understand. It wouldn’t have the same emtional impact to be fighting nonhumanoid forms (though given our attachment to our pets, zombie dogs are a nice trope.)

As a nice benefit on the production side, you can attach, um, mindless or even buggy AI to the poor bastards and no one will care. It’s in character for the soulless bits of postconsumer flesh to fail to pathplan, get stuck on objects, or block each other in a doorway.

So are there non-undead solutions for enemies? Get away from the present day…

• Historical. Mask your political incorrectness and cultural relevance by jumping back in time. Hide beneath the blanket of realism, niceties be damned. That means we get Nazis, the other anthropomorphic unquestionable evil. And a reenactments of WWII that appear unlikely to end during the 21st century. Sadly, if you go back in time much further you quickly eliminate shooters entirely. Sure, you have Westerns, which my father and Clint Eastwood raised me on. Sadly, though, not an especially popular game genre.
• Fantasy. You can make your villains as evil as you want if they emerge from your own sick imagination. You can also make them dumb, smart, or whatever. And in your fantasy setting, you can use whatever magic powers you want in order to simulate brawler combat, shooter combat, or whatever. One problem here is that unless you use the “default” fantasy setting – some mishmash of Tolkein and D&D – you’re going to have to do a lot of work explaining your world and how it works.
• Science Fiction. The future has just about all of the advantages of fantasy and more approachability for the audience. But because there is no default science fiction mish-mash for science fiction, you may have to do a lot more exposition on how your universe came to be.

This has to be a devious plot, right?

Since Duels of the Planeswalkers launched a week ago, I’ve donated a few bucks and more than a few hours to Wizards of the Coast and Microsoft. Good friends and I joined in to play this latest digital incarnation of Magic: the Gathering. It’s not often that I take the chance to play CCGs anymore, despite the occasional work league or draft night. And just like I don’t have the focus to play an MMO like I once did, I lack the commitment to play enough card games or research the current metagame. Both steps would be required to become even an average player on Magic Online. (Interesting idea there: how much do Magic and MMOs, along with their communities, have in common? We’ve already seen the cross-overs.)

Anyway this “Magic-lite” is up my alley. It’s easy fun. But enough blatant advertising for my friend Worth Wollpert. I have a theory about Duels. First, let’s consider what this product isn’t:

• Despite the quotes in that article, I don’t believe that this product is targeted at new players. For one, m:tg is too damn complex and confusing for most of us to learn without someone to teach it. The tutorial for Duels is mediocre at best. The mentor feature seems a good idea that’s unlikely to see any use. And the complicated game board has to be off-putting to any Joe or Jane shopping for something just a little different on XBL. A few people will pick up Duels and learn the game straight up, but my bet is that we’re talking about a small audience.
• I also don’t believe the game is aimed at current players. Why would Wizards create competition for its profitable lineup? Duels will never have all the cards or complexity of the complete game. Consider the counterpoint of Magic Online, a game which by necessity mimics the incremental purchase business model of the card game. Duels may milk a little extra money, but it can’t rival what current players spend on either the physical card game or its digital re-creation.
• Duels isn’t a big cash-grab. At least, not in itself. Even if Duels does well, say two hundred thousand downloads, WotC’s cut of that would be pretty small once you factor in the cut for Microsoft and the software developer. Probably less than a million dollars dropping to the bottom line, all told.

So Duels isn’t a big moneymaker, and it isn’t targeted at new players or current players. What conclusion have I led you to? My take is that Wizards intended Duels to be a playable advertisement — a demo, if you will — aimed at lapsed players. Give these lost souls a taste of this Magic-lite game, and remind them of the fun they have playing the game. Some of them will want something more. Something deeper. More deck construction, more customization. And Wizards will welcome these people back with open arms.

Feel free to attribute this to my paranoid subjective bias.

Thou Shalt Maximize Revenue

This has trial balloon written all over it.

Advertisers and creative designers will soon have more artistic freedom to turn campaigns on Xbox Live into interactive and interconnected experiences reaching far beyond technology for television, Sean Alexander, director at Microsoft’s Advertising Business Group, said Monday.

Personally, I don’t much care. Navigating the XBox Live experience won’t be much changed when I get ads splashed about on the top or bottom or hiding in the corners. And while I am well tired of paying a subscription fee for content and then still putting up with ads (hello, Sirius XM), Microsoft won’t be the last to go down this road.

Of course, your opinion may vary. DrezKill has a different opinion:

But seriously, whether you have a GOLD account or not, f*ck dis shiznit!!! Gawd damn you Microsoft!!! Damn you to hell!!!

Looking over at my Xbox screen, this doesn’t really seem like anything new. Everything on the “front page” is really just an advertisement for a game, add-on, or piece of content.

Update 7/2/09: That’s no balloon! Larry Hrib, Xbox Live Director of Programming, confirms that ads are coming to XBox Live. Don’t worry, though, they’ll be tasteful.