It Continues

In my last post I talked about the inconsistencies and inbalances within different iterations of rules and army lists in the game of Warhammer 40,000.

It has recently been found out that the Tyranids are receiving a new unit that can appear in the middle of one of your units and will inflict a whole load of high strength hits that negate most armour.

The Tyranid army looks a lot like Aliens crossed with bugs from Starship Troopers and have traditionally tended to march across the table and then crash upon you like a wave of claws and teeth. During this time you would be able to shoot them and cripple parts of the army you couldn't deal with in close combat and then soften up the teeming hordes of grunt troops.

They are very much like the Zerg in that swarms of small creatures shield larger, more devastating creatures. This balance of them having to run into a hail of bullets before meeting your army in close combat tended to work quite well with games being fairly even sided. Tyranids have always had units that can avoid this by coming on to the table in different positions but that was something that could be coped with if you were clever.

So understand that 40K is played like this: two armies line up in front of each other and then engage in moving, shooting and close combat across the width of a table. This is a massive generalisation and simplification but that is the idea that the original rules were conceived around and it is how they have evolved.

So in this situation we have the Witch Hunters which are weak, under powered and difficult to use effectively. Across the board from them is a swarm of close combat based creatures that can shoot but are weak at shooting and must run across the board to get into close combat. They must survive a hail of bullets and doing so will allow them to enter into combat and tear apart the Witch Hunters but the game will be pretty close and exciting and interesting.

The Witch Hunters are relying on a couple of turns of long range shooting and one turn of rapid firing and flame throwing to thin out the numbers. They must focus their entire force into weakening the incoming bugs.

Now imagine that during those crucial shooting turns a huge monster appears in one of the Witch Hunter's units and destroys them. There is nothing in my army that can match it in close combat so it is free to munch through my troops. I can turn to fire at it with several units and this *may* take it down in a turn. So at least one important and crucial turn is spent shooting at that creature as the rest of the Tyranids charge toward me. And there are double the number of bugs as there used to be. And, under the new rules, can out shoot an army which is all armed with guns.

The balance of the game has been destroyed. Fun with Warhammer is two balanced armies facing off against each other and letting the battle be decided by the best general. It is not fun to have the battle decided by who has the newest army list.

So now I can't really have fun playing against one of my best friends. We bond and relax over a good game of 40K and now that has been ruined.

An old business model of releasing books and escalating the power and reducing the cost of troops has left some armies far more 'playable' than others.

This is a game design post and not a rant post. A good analogy would be if in Left 4 Dead's Versus mode the infected could make a Witch spawn in a safe room and then double the number of zombies in the map. Imagine if when you are playing Gears of War the Locust could suddenly make a Corpser spawn behind you when you are in cover.

Games Workshop used to make fantastically balanced games. They were consistently fun and fair and now we have a situation where the game is decided as soon as people choose who to play against.

If this was a videogame this would be patched within a week. I get to wait for at least 12 months for a new army list. The modern world is leaving Games Workshop behind.

Balancing 40K

Warhammer 40,000 is a sci fi themed battle game played on a table top with plastic and metal figures that stand about an inch tall. The figures depict soldiers from various alien races and they are moved by players and enter into combat that is resolved by dice rolls.

A huge part of game design is balancing the rules and variables within the game to achieve an optimal play state and experience for the player. This will involve tweaking a vast array of numbers to try to ensure that as large an amount as possible of players have fun that they consider challenging, engaging and fair. In videogames this normally falls to a group of designers that use their own knowledge and experience combined with feedback from everyone that plays the game up until release to change enemy health values, player aim assist and so on until the game feels ‘just right’. This ‘just right’ status is usually incredibly hard to define and achieve but we are fortunate in that a designer can dramatically affect the balancing of the game for the better in the space of a few minutes. Anecdotally I remember sitting with the values of every weapon in the game in front of me and making a whole host of changes and in the space of a half hour we were testing the changes and agreeing that they made a world of difference. This is a total luxury and an aspect I relish and enjoy.

Not everyone is so lucky though.

Warhammer 40,000 can only be balanced by a new edition of the rules and by new army books (army books or codexes describe the special rules for each army) and these have several years turn around. As with all rule systems, you can only design Warhammer to a certain level before it is released. As soon as it is released into the wild people find all sorts of situations cropping up that weren’t accounted for.

Codexes are even more problematic as discrepancies arise between them and new editions of the core rules and then they can break when going against other armies. This is especially apparent to me as a Witch Hunters player. I play a branch of humanity called the Inquisition. These are Gestapo like characters that hunt out aliens, witches and daemons and are backed up by a legion of hard line warrior nuns. The last time they got a new codex was at the end of the 3rd edition of the 40K rules. We are now half way through the cycle of the 5th edition and they are one of the worst armies out there. Other armies have had multiple army book iterations since the Witch Hunter book was released and these have all been changed in line with the trends that Games Workshop have placed in the core rules (greater variety, cheaper troops). Witch Hunters are not so lucky.

There has been an overall increase in power and reduction of gaming points cost in newly revised armies and the Witch Hunters can’t compete. For example, I have nothing that can kill a Daemon army. Other codexes are more than capable of dealing with them as they have more powerful and cheaper troops. The new Tyranid codex (imagine the Aliens) has halved the cost of the basic troops so they can now field double the amount. They have also increased range weaponry so they can now out shoot some builds of my army and can certainly rip them apart in close combat. These changes as a whole are better but it leaves players like me at a distinct disadvantage. The game is no longer balanced and thus not as much fun. Unfortunately not many people play Witch Hunters and so it is not good business to make a big push to bring them up to date.

I guess the best gaming analogy is class changes in an MMO. Things can change and break the game but they can be fixed the next week. I have been waiting several years for my rules to be fixed.

Games Workshop is a strange beast in that people still put up with this in 2009. We live in a world of rapid iteration and change. If people don’t like something because it is broken and unfair it is dropped, discarded and it fails. Not GW though. For some reason they can release broken rules and we are still drawn to it. This could never happen to this degree in the world of videogames but it is utterly fascinating in the world of Warhammer. How long will it last though? How long before they get rid of the established army book business model they have and we get into rolling revisions that we see every year? Maybe every six months? Maybe every month? How would they deliver this? Ebooks are a good idea. I’d happily pay a few quid every six months to get an updated army list on an ebook reader or something.

It is interesting that GW seem to be following the same curve as videogames. Once we released products that could not be changed until the next big iteration, now I download patches daily. It will be interesting to see how GW deals with this.

2009 - Chopemon's Year In Review

This may seem early for a year in review post but I know that my Christmas and New Year is going to be mad busy so since I am sitting on the train listen to some guy loop music, I may as well get it done now.

So, wow. What a year huh? Certainly a stunning year for game players and makers all round as genuinely amazing games set the bar increasingly higher. The year started on a high with the return of the Street Fighter series and ended with me discovering that the iPhone held one of my games of the year.

On a personal note my year has been crazy. I have found ‘the one’ and fallen madly in love, I have had three games released (one of which became a small gaming pop culture meme) and have learnt a tremendous amount about myself and my abilities in life. It has been a refreshing year in that it started single and happy, neither of which I had been for a while. After being unhappy for a couple of years I finally had some space where I wasn’t derided for various things in my life by the person I was living with. I had space to grow and learn both about what I want and who I am and also about the world I live in. I then met the most wonderful girl in the world, my darling Rachel, felt a love I had never known before and have discovered that my soul mate DESTROYS me at Tekken. I also went to PAX and met two rappers that changed my life and then met MC Lars (who also changed my life) later in the year.

For the first time in a while I can see a new year ahead that is full of promise, wonder and excitement. I mean genuine, unbelievable excitement. MC Lars is playing Nottingham in March for God’s sake! The feeling of having a proper partner to start a new year with is life fulfilling.

One more quick thing before we get on to talking about games, it has been wonderful to explore some new music over the last few months. Realising that you have lived a life without Jay Z in it makes you realize you should never dismiss something out of hand again.

On the games front it has been a year of continual highs. I don’t want to go through every game as I’m sure all the major sites will cover you on that but instead I want to talk about the games that have personally effected me.

The year started off incredibly. Many years ago a friend of mine blew my mind with a little game called Street Fighter 2 Turbo. From the moment I played it I thought about nothing else until I got my own (hard earned) copy. A child’s pocket money doesn’t buy many Mega Drive games so by god I hammered that cart. Even though I only had a three button pad and was at a distinct disadvantage I could hold my own against all my friends and fell in love with all the characters and the game has become a yard stick against which I judge an awful lot of things. When Street Fighter 4 hit it was like a dragon punch to my mind. The game is simply incredible. It looks amazing, it runs like a dream and the fighting has a perfect balance of accessibility and strategy. I am not a good SF player. I can destroy pretty much everyone I know except a colleague’s Blanka but I know that as soon as I step into the real world of Street Fighting, I am out. I love it though. Everything about just feels right. It controls and plays with the right speed and weight. Every time I lose I can see what I did wrong and it feels great to learn and grow within my character. Seth and the lack of proper lobbies and matchmaking issues stop it from being perfect but my God they came close.

As a side note, someone of indeterminate location on the train is playing a game that sounds incredible. Is the game actually awesome or are the sound effects and me not knowing what it is elevating it in my mind?

February also yielded Halo Wars which once again brought Team Awesome together and provided a venue for us to rock out and socialize. We still continue to play the game and much like Street Fighter, when we roll up against opponents that take us apart, we learn an incredible amount and go into the next match as wiser generals. The game didn’t review as well as I would have liked and I think this is down to a view that a traditional RTS game like Halo Wars must somehow be as complicated or fast as Starcraft. That is an impossible dream while Microsoft still shackles us to a controller but Halo Wars does an excellent job of taking the essence of a RTS and making all the necessary changes to make it work on a console. It does however cause friendship problems when SOMEONE pre orders it and has awesome flames on their Warthogs and I don’t.

February was a strange month for me as both Shellshock 2 Blood Trails and 50 Cent Blood on the Sand came out. I worked on both of those (6 months on 50 Cent and over a year on Shellshock) and they were both received very differently critically. Shellshock 2 had a lot of problems during development and one day I hope I can talk about them in an academic way, which is to say that rather than it be a war story I’d like to use it as a case study about game development. There are things to be proud of in everything you do and I can point these things out in Shellshock but I’d far rather talk about me riding on the coat tails of the guys and gals of Swordfish.

I worked on 50 Cent for 6 months and it was an experience where I learnt a lot about myself. Swordfish (now part of Codemasters) was an amazing studio with genuinely talented and amazing people. 50 Cent went through some tough times during the Vivendi/Activision thing and that game only came together due to the great team in the studio as it bounced between publishers. People look down on the game because it has 50 Cent in but it is a super fun shooter with a lot of “heart” (Jeff Gerstmann). That game needs your attention as it is really enjoyable and shows what can be done with a questionable license. What was really nice to see was that levels and decisions I’d made as part of that team were still in the game and the guys did a great job of finishing off the levels I’d worked on.

I can now tell you that it is Zelda. I should pick that game up.

Moving into March, Phil and I got stuck into Resident Evil 5. This was another game that I thought was exceptional but seem to be in a minority about. The way people judge games never ceases to amaze me and the bizarre and arbitrary ways people determine what a sequel is puzzles me. Regardless, Phil and I dived into treasure hunting and not-zombie hunting and played through the game multiple times on harder difficulties and with game breaking weapons. The draw of leveling up weapons and farming treasure kept us coming back and the game remained tremendous fun despite us knowing exactly where and when the lickers were going to jump out. I also have a total crush on Sheva.

Let’s skip ahead to August and the brilliance of Batman Arkham Asylum. Good God that’s a good game. Rocksteady really know how to make a good game that fully embraces the license. Batman has been talked to death in the press but let me offer a pro tip: hit up their Urban Chaos game in either PS2 or Xbox flavor. That is an excellent game and I always enjoy seeing how a studio has matured in its design theory.

Speaking of which, I thoroughly enjoyed Grin’s Bionic Commando and I think I’m one of only a handful of people that really did enjoy it. I also played Terminator Salvation by Grin and despite its short comings; it was really interesting to see two games by the same developer in such a short space of time.

Jumping to October/November things remained excellent but familiar. Many of the games that came out in the ‘Fall season’ were known quantities. Last year we had several new franchises or re-imaginings that were different enough to be almost new franchises and this year held very little of that. Last October and November gave us Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge which were all incredible games and as they were all new in concept or style it was a genuinely exciting time. The excitement and fervor in the press and gaming community was palpable and thrilling. This year the big games have been Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. A lot of 2s there.

These are all excellent games but the level of excitement just hasn’t been there. Or maybe it is a different kind of excitement. It was electrifying to be going into the unknown territory of last year but this year we know exactly what each of those games are. They are iterations of things we love and while that is exciting in itself, it is not the excitement of not knowing exactly what a new IP holds. I’m not one of the bitter forum dwellers that complains about the lack of innovation in games but I just missed that excitement that I felt last year. In fact, the only game that gave me that feeling to any degree was Borderlands.

Borderlands was full of surprise and outright fun. It is excellently balanced and crafted and a joy to play. I am playing through with Phil and after one playthrough plus the DLC, we are heading in for a 2nd playthrough to hit level 50. Plus I have a crush on Lilith. I see a pattern.

Cooperatively working through stuff has been a theme of this year as Phil and I are partway through the masterpiece of Saints Row 2 and I have been doing Xbox LANs with work colleagues to get through Operation Flashpoint 2 on the hardest difficulty. I never thought restarting an hour long level when you die right at the end would be fun but it is. It helps that we are bro-ing out together while doing it I guess.

The only other game to mention (these aren’t all the games that I’ve played. I can’t even put a number on the amount of things that have either entered my disk trays or been downloaded) is Canabalt. I’m a bit worn out of writing about Canabalt because before writing this I wrote a review of it but suffice to say that it is the only game released this year that I would call perfect. It is a one button platformer and the art, fiendishly clever gameplay and music all combine to make it perfect. There is no other word to describe it.

Oh and Rogue Warrior came out and I worked on that. If you pick it up, tell me what you think of the multiplayer maps. Or hit me up if you need someone to play it with.

Looking into next year, the gods have smiled upon me and are giving me a new Street Fighter. And Resident Evil 5 DLC. So it might be something of a re run of this year. We also get a new Splinter Cell (GOTY already decided), Bioshock 2 (award for having the most potential to get it wrong), a new Army of Two (fist bumps and M4s with drum magazines) and Halo Reach which I imagine will blow my mind. Next year has the potential to be an outright great year and I can’t wait.

The only potential downside might be the persistently annoying preorder nonsense which has been so prevalent this year. I don’t want to choose between retailers or make sure I preorder something to get the full package. I want every new copy of a game to be complete. Make gold guns, and bonus maps something for every customer rather than punishing customers that value one retailer over another. Next year EA are giving away a preorder only game mode in Army of Two and if you buy the limited edition of Bad Company 2 you get the best weapons and a homing rocket launcher. Wicked. Can’t wait.

With that I’m done. I think the guy opposite me has stopped mixing electronica and after 2 reviews and all this nonsense, I’m done. Time for Advance Wars. I think you’ll agree that it has been a good year for games. It has been a personally stunning year and life is looking pretty rosy from here on out.

Stay tuned for my Game of the Year list in the coming days.

Bad People Are Ruining My Life

I haven't been updating the old blog-o-tron recently as I am in the process of migrating all this awesome content to a new site.

The site is ready to go except that it turns out that registering a domain with www.uk2.net is just about the worst idea you could ever possibly have. I am struggling through their transfer process (which they hide from you, charge you for and don't answer their phones about) but I should soon have a web site with a blog and portfolio and possibly more Ice T pictures ready soon.

In the mean time, here is a quick list of things you should check out:

• Assassin's Creed 2, possible GOTY contender.
• Any of Atom And His Package's discography. His music resonates deeply.
• Me on Twitter. I need followers that aren't spam.
  

Picking a Side

Ice T is your God.


You may remember a while ago I posted up a piece about tutorials in multiplayer and easing the player into the online portion of a game. Check it out.

Modern Warfare 2 has landed and the first time you play multiplayer it is totally brutal. There is no easing in or tutorial and it is hard and frustrating. The game came out on a Tuesday and thanks to a retailer sending it out early, I had it on Friday. I jumped into the online a few days before the game came out and I was already getting *destroyed*.

In the first Modern Warfare I would consistently place in the top three players on my team and was fairly happy with my performance. When I played MW2 I was always near the bottom until I hit level 4 and then I jumped right to the top again because I unlocked a gun that was usable. For the first hour and a half of playing I was angry and frustrated. I felt gimped by the default classes and as soon as I unlocked the M4 I felt liberated and I could play the game and compete.

The first four levels in multiplayer do not allow you to compete, they are there to show you all the cool stuff you can unlock. They are frustrating and painful but you play and get through them because every kill you happen to make is something to savour and cherish.

MW2 is an amazing game top to bottom and the shooting and moving is so well honed that even though xxxSepiroth69xxx keeps no scoping you, the game is still fun.

It is a brave move to make the barrier to entry for the multiplayer so high in a game aimed at such a mass market crowd but it works. They won't get 100% people enjoying both the single and multiplayer portions of the game becasue of the skill level but their multiplayer player base will grow substantially because despite being hard, it is rewarding.

In other Ice T related news, Borderlands is excellent and is the epitome of a social coop experience. In coop the game doesn't scale until you get four players and so me and Phil have been tooling around and thoroughly enjoying playing a game together and just chilling out. The quests are typical for an RPG and it is the complete opposite of MW2. There are no set pieces or brisk pacing in Borderlands, it is all about grinding through quests at your own pace and enjoying the loot system. It is rare to see a game as focused as Borderlands and it is all the better fot it.

I also have a total crush on the Siren. DON'T JUDGE ME.

Other business:

• I'm on Twitter now, www.twitter.com/chopemon
• Rogue Warrior hits the shelves at the end of the month and people were really enjoying it at the Eurogamer Expo.
• I'm going to be a company shill and evangelise the multiplayer in Alien vs. Predator. I can talk about it as it has been showed to the public. It is super tense and exciting and the species based game modes are amazing. Look for it in February.
• Rachel has just posted a small Tekken 6 review which blew me away when I read it. Check it here.
• A colleague of mine writes a very funny blog (he is a very funny man) and you should hit it up here.
• One last thing before I hit the 360, A bunch of us recently went to see MC Lars and he is good peoples. He puts on a fantastic show and he is a super nice guy to hang out with. Here is a picture of us being all hyphy:

So Little Time

Apologies friends, I have been busy.

Busy with videogames, work, the love of my life, MC Lars and Warhammer. In an attempt to write more I am making adjustments (I quit my D&D group!) so that I can bring you more awesome sauce.

As a stop gap and to provide you with suff to read with your morning coffee before I get all up in some bandit's face in Borderlands, here are two reviews I recently had published:

Mini Ninjas

Transformers: Revenge of Megan Fox

Enjoy!

Thought For The Day

I know, I know, I'm behind on my blogging.

Do you know how many good games are coming out at the moment?

Anyway, to get the ball rolling on a bigger piece I want to post up a quick thought. And by thought, I mean something I read in a book and want to repeat.

Success and failure is the satisfaction or frustration of desire.

When applied to games it helps to frame the recent trend in games that some call accessibility and some call dumbing down. For the record (and this is a longer post for the future) I don't agree with the dumbing down statement.

What I will say as a way to spark a train of thought in my head that will lead to a proper post on the subject, in many modern games success is not winning at a game but rather having fun through personal expression (there is no way to 'die' in DJ Hero). Failure is the frustration of not being able to express yourself and have fun because of circumstances outside of your control (inconsistencies between vulnerability and invulnerability between enemy and player animations) .