I like success. It's like cake. But I can't learn anything from cake. I can learn from the stack of broken crates, though, and the other failures.

Painful lessons seem to be the ones that teach the most, whatever the subject. Pain provides motivation to find a path that leads to success. I remember the first time I waved a bat as a baseball sailed on by. It was an ugly swing. And my coach let me hear it, in front of all my friends. In fact, my coach would say my swing never was pretty. But his public hazing did make me work hard at improving it.

When it comes to video games, difficulty will always be a charged issue. Pressure comes from all sides: to appeal to a wide audience, to appeal to the hardcore, to appeal to casual player. Whatever those classifications mean in the real world (maybe nothing), game difficulty is something everyone has an opinion about.

I don’t pretend to know how hard you should make your game. Recently, though, I’ve come to think that as game designers, we should be playing with our dials turned up.

How did I get there? When playing Mass Effect 2, I started with a medium setting (“Veteran”), and played through the game rather happily and easily. I predictably found that I was playing the game for its story content, not for its gameplay. Shooting just filled the time until the next cinematic or dialogue moment. I wasn’t enjoying it especially, and I certainly wasn’t learning anything from it. Enemies could be defeated with just about any weapon, tactic, or character ability, and I could engage them head on, ignoring the cover mechanic and succeed. Of course, when you can defeat your foes any way you want to, the decision of how to win becomes empty of meaning. Empty of lessons to learn.

After finishing the game, I started a second playthrough. This was my “evil bitch” experience, and wow, is the female Shepherd a superior voice actress. This time, I set the difficulty to its highest setting — “Insanity.” And in terms of the moment-to-moment, I discovered a whole new game. Enemies, even stock ones, posed a major threat. My allies needed to be managed and controlled lest they die — repeatedly. In order to survive myself, I had to find weaknesses in my opponents or vulnerabilities in the level design. Each combat formed a battle combining ally management, refresh management, and a search for anything that could give me an edge. Some of these elements (vulnerability to ammo types or to certain powers) were intended by the game designers. Some (an inability to deal with player traps in pathing) were not. My tactics bordered on exploits. In any event, I learned what my character could do, what each AI was capable of, and how I could win in different encounters. In short, I knew the game far better than I did before.

The question of “is that an exploit or a good tactic?” is a good one, especially in online games where your play can affect others. I remember early days of MMO play, when we wondered if reverse kiting, sending tells to determine spawns, or FD-camping monsters represented an exploit. EverQuest supported lots of unforeseen play, as a result of the game’s steep difficulty curve. Soloing in specific stood out as ridiculously hard. Players had to find a way to avoid the hard combat math the game’s designers had forged: they had to find a way not to get hit. Without finding gaps in the system or the vulnerabilities of the AI, the player couldn’t succeed on his own. Back then, of course, the game’s harsh penalties of failure and death didn’t stick out like the sore thumbs they would today.

More recently, on a dare I took to playing Darksiders on its hardest setting, appropriately named Apocalyptic. Twenty-odd hours later, more than three thousand gallons of blood has been spilled beneath my blade and scythe (according to this). And because I played the game at such an unforgiving level, the average hit from a demon shed half of my characters health. Learning the game’s rhythms, the pace of when to attack and when to evade, was the difference between life and death.

Losing fifty percent of your character hit points with a single blow sounds painful, doesn’t it? What I found though, was thanks to the mild penalties (fast reloads, frequent checkpoints), I relished the challenge. More importantly, I came to know what defense I had to employ against each AI type, who to kill first in group encounters, and when in each encounter I needed to fire off my panic and powerup buttons.

I’m not sure that “hard is the new good” when it comes to player experience – certainly not for all games or all players. But for game designers, I think it’s invaluable. If you want to play a game at its most pure — not for the story, not even for a good time — tune the difficulty up. Make yourself defeat the game where the margin for error is razor thin. You may learn something.

So let’s look at the Mass Effect 2′s plot [Spoilers!]:

1. Hero is killed by aliens, then resurrected.
2. Hero finds out the aliens are snatching humans.
3. Hero investigates derelict alien ship to find out how to get to aliens.
4. Hero finds out that aliens are boiling humans down to organic soup to make an evil giant. Hero kills evil giant.

That’s the story that takes 20+ hours to deliver? Seriously, we have a volume of content equal to ten feature films, with less plot than something directed by Michael Bay. This is a story that takes (conservative estimate) 100,000 lines of dialogue to tell! Even just in terms of pure cinematic sequences, I hazard that Mass Effect is close to a feature film in length. Why is there so little actual content there?

For fairness, let’s boil down a similar story – another second part of a trilogy:

1. Hero is wounded by a monster, then rescued.
2. Enemies attack the home of our hero and his friends. They escape.
3. Hero goes through training montage.
4. Hero’s friends are captured. Hero’s best friend is frozen in carbonite.
5. Hero rescues his friends. Hero finds out the leader of the enemies is his father.

Now that’s a story. And that story has a villain we remember.

It’s Not Personal
The villains of Mass Effect 2? Faceless, anonymous evil. Unknowable menaces. They show up every 50,000 years and kill everyone. They’re like a natural disaster, and just as impersonal. Guess what, guys, villains without faces make terrible opponents. We have to see the villain (and ideally, understand him) before we can get emotionally invested. Before we hate. The Reapers kill plenty of humans, but their goals remain unintelligible. The best villains make their enmity personal, and so the story becomes personal too.

Come to think of it, this story never ended well either.

The funny thing is, Bioware’s writers know this. They knew it in Knights of the Old Republic, during which we discover the primary villains are you… and the sidekicks who betrayed you. They knew it in Mass Effect 1. Remember Saren? The player interacted with that villain repeatedly, and when we weren’t arguing with Saren, we watched cinematics of the evil bastard doing terrible things. Remember also how much we focused on Shepherd becoming the first human Spectre – an accomplishment personal to you. The development staff in Edmonton hasn’t forgotten how to tell a good story in Mass Effect 2. There are good stories, really good stories, embedded in the game: stories of betrayal, loss, and revenge. Stories of self-discovery.

That’s true of every character’s story except for one: yours. You’d think that the player’s story is the one that would matter most, right? Regrettably, the player has been reduced to playing generic action hero fighting generic alien bad guys. The story equivalent of Space Invaders.

And what’s worse? The material to make a personal story is there in the narrative. The aliens killed you! Sure, it would have been better if the possessor/lead villain had appeared to do you in himself. But as it is, Shepard is returned to life before we can blink, and all too quickly the whole thing is forgotten. Your character doesn’t seem to care that he died, and the enemy doesn’t care or even acknowledge that he killed you. If no one in the game cares, why should we? Our character spends more time arguing with sidekicks about why they resurrected him. Really, why was Shepard killed at all? Was this all a marketing stunt?

By the way, the whole alien Harbinger boss employing a possession is a great mechanic, if underused. I love the idea of beating up the master villain repeatedly, though I wish he had more lines of dialogue than “I will hurt you.” The designers appear to be saving the Big Bad for the third in the trilogy, but why not script up a threatening conversation with a possessed Collector? I could kill the creature afterward, feel good about myself, and still know that the war is far from over.

These are cool sidekicks. I wish my story was as good as theirs.

It’s Not You, It’s Me
I’ve circled around this point here and in the last post, but the fundamental failure of Mass Effect is that the game isn’t about the main character and the story isn’t about him either. In terms of polish, effort, and sheer gameplay hours, the game is all about the sidekicks. Recruiting each of the sidekicks, and completing their loyalty missions, composes the bulk of the game’s content. Imagine instead if that effort was expended on dealing with your character, in making your choices and your decisions matter, and producing branching content that actually branched as a result of your actions and conversations. I think I’d like to play that game.

It’s another point worth making: twelve sidekicks and five allies? Really? I know the designers want to encourage replayability, and having over a hundred (12 x 11) different possibilities of sidekicks to bring along would seem to further that cause. And yet not really. A big cast doesn’t mean anything other than a whole lot of characters I won’t spend much time with. There are great little payoffs in each of their stories, but I wonder if we couldn’t go deeper instead of wider. I’d rather have fewer sidekicks, but develop them more. Maybe their side stories could be interwoven and tangled instead of forming totally independent narratives. Couldn’t Mordin have something to do with the Warlord’s genetic program? Maybe Jack was on Samara’s or Garrus’s target list. Why not tie together Tali’s and Legion’s story and advance the story of the geth to some resolution?

We love this genre of game because it offers meaningful choices. Or at least appears to. Embrace that. As far as replayability goes, make this game one in which the player decisions are the most important thing. Make  branching content that affects not just how you get someplace in a linear story (a always leads to b, regardless of how much of a saint or bastard you are along the way). Change what actually happens during gameplay (a could lead to b, c, or d). I know that branching content is expensive, but the bandwidth appears to be there. The focus is just on other characters. The usual argument against branching content is that you’re making a bunch of content that a high percentage of the audience won’t see. I don’t think that argument applies to Mass Effect 2.

The only way your story can really change in Mass Effect? As best I can tell, your choices in doing loyalty missions and assigning roles to sidekicks in the final level can determine if sidekicks die. That’s it. Your little story though, is steadfastly linear, all the way through. Your choices can’t affect you, or any outcome we see during this game – but don’t worry! They promise it will in the next!

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.