Borderlands was one of the surprise hits of the year for me (and many others). It was announced without much excitement and when press events were held, people talked more about Randy Pitchford than the game itself.
I love the game. Check the review to see why and if you haven't grabbed it yet, hopefully it will sway you (be best if you had a coop partner though).
I have been given Mushihimesama Futari to review for NTSC-UK and it is fair to say I am spell bound by it.
For those not in the know, Mushihimesama is a pretty hardcore shmup, specifically of the bullet curtain variety and is not something I normally play as they are incredibly daunting. I popped it in on Christmas Eve to have a quick look at it and before I knew it, 3 hours had flown by.
People always relay stories about how they lost track of time playing a game and this was a genuine and honest example of that. I don't want to spoil the review but from out of nowhere this has made it's way on to my GOTY list.
So, how was Christmas?
I spent a couple of days at my parents and discovered that I am right in my assertion that British TV is mostly terrible (none of my TVs are tuned into receive a signal in my place and thus it is only when I go to other people's houses that I see TV). I long for the day when families consider it traditional to sit around with a game rather than sit and watch terrible British sit coms. I'm not saying games should replace TV but in my family, games are considered something that kids and nerds do and are not part of any family time. My parents grew up without games in their lives until I got a Mega Drive and don't consider games to hold any merit or worth as family entertainment. This is due to a lack of education about games and also the same fear of playing them that paralyses a lot of people that haven't played games before. Which is why I stayed up for hours after people had gone to bed to play Mushihimesama.
Just before Christmas I embarked on a game that both delighted me and infuriated me. My girl was awesome enough to give me a copy of Dragon Age for Christmas (we did presents early) and I popped it in on the day before Christmas Eve as I was curled up on the sofa being ill.
That game is straight up awesome. It is late and I want to go to bed so instead of writing a lengthy paragraph about why it is awesome, let me just say this: it is a Bioware RPG.
THEY MADE KOTOR.
So the delight is obvious but what about me being infuriated with it?
In your camp there is a guy that wishes to speak with you. When you speak to him he describes a wonderful, epic quest filled with adventure and riches. You get several layers deep into his conversation tree and find out the quest can only be embarked upon if you buy more content.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
In my fantasy RPG there is an advert for DLC?
To make matters worse, there is a separate space in your quest log entitled 'DLC'.
This fantasy RPG is filled with adverts for some DLC. This kind of behaviour is repugnant and despicable and I'm probably talking myself out of ever having a job at EA (which will hopefully be remedied by my upcoming blog post about how much I love the Army of Two characters).
For the past year I have been saying that in either 2010 or 2011 we will start seeing ad breaks in games. I'm not talking about a cheeky logo in a loading screen or FMV but a full on advert between levels. When I say that part of me thinks it is nonsense and will never happen and part of me remembers that Need for Speed Pro Street had adverts in the achievements.
One last quick thing before I hit bed; I have just finished Wanted which means I have played the holy trinity of console based Grin games and the fact they are gone breaks my heart. All of their games have some issues but they all have some amazing ideas in them. Absolute gems of design implementation like Wanted's cover hopping system or the way the grapple was worked into combat in Bionic Commando. I would have loved to see what those guys would have made if they got to do an epic project with their own IP.
After an exceedingly ball bouncingly awesome 50 hours Phil and I have finally put a bow on Borderlands.
We have hit level 50 with our main characters and got all of the achievements. The game never got boring or frustrating and it feels strange to no longer have it as a regular fixture in my life. We played through the amazing DLC twice as well.
I don't want to say much more as my review for it will be going up soon.
Speaking of reviews (how does my segue taste?), my Modern Warfare 2 review has gone up over at NTSC-UK. Check it out to see what I have to say about a game full of very serious dudes with guns. Check out Spatial's awesome banner!
Something I didn't say in the review, but will mention now, is that the characterisation of some of the characters in that game is pretty subtle. By that I mean an awful lot of it isn't done in cutscenes and instead it comes from the chatter between Gaz (I'm calling it) and Soap. Once you play this game, go back and look how quiet other games are. Check out Ubi's squad shooters to see a bunch of soldiers currently on the edge of death but being very quiet about it.
This also plays into the way they call out what they and the enemies are doing. The constant chatter describes the chaotic battlefield in surprising detail. I guess it helps when the actors read the lines that they are told to and not selectively pick from a script that a very attractive and intelligent game designer has written for them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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) .
I have recently been talking with the Cool Kidz in my Warhammer group about why we rail against some of the rules in 40K. Often a situation will arise that seems like total bullshit and does not reflect how troops would fight on the battlefield. The rules are queried and checked and then someone will be left with their jaw open at how seemingly unfair or unrealistic the rules are.
This, I explained, is down to the fact that the rules are not there to simulate every battlefield situation. Back in the 1st and 2nd edition of 40K (we are now on 5th) the rules were extremely complicated and elaborate and were designed to try and cover everything and simulate as closely as they could the battlefields of the 41st millennium. This meant that there were an incredible amount of tables, bespoke charts and rules and it took an ungodly amount of time to resolve things like combat. The Irresistible Force and Immovable Object situation would arise again and again because Codex entries would conflict with the rules, wargear items would clash and all sorts of modifiers would apply to the simplest table roll.
When the 3rd edition rolled round the designers stripped it all down, dumped nearly all of the rules and started again. They boiled it down to the most important elements and rather than simulate a battlefield they tried to create a metaphor for a battle.
Miniature wargames have the inherent problem of using miniatures. Imagine a war zone in the far future. Infantry crouch behind cover and blind fire at a horde of aliens swarming over a ruined building. Grenades detonate around power armoured war gods and commanders scream over sabotaged comm lines to ill disciplined troops. The battlefield is chaos and cannot be conveyed by miniatures. Miniatures cannot be reposed on the fly to show that they are crouched behind cover and we cannot physically check to see whether the hoofed aliens trip on the exposed cabling of the bombed out office they are attempting to move through.
This leads to a breakdown in simulation and the need for an essence capturing metaphor arises.
Using the example above, in the old rules if you wanted to fire through your own troops to an enemy beyond, each trooper would have to individually check to see if they had a line of sight and then resolve their shooting as normal. This would mean that you would need to check the LOS for potentially up to 20 figures. This would often result in conflicts and arguments between players and thus an effort to provide granularity and simulation in the rules slowed the game down with unnecessary complexity and bad attitude.
In the 5th edition rules the simulation has been scrapped as it helped no one. Checking individual line of sights would suggest to the players that the figure's pose represented a snap shot of their actions on the battlefield which is nonsense. Soldiers do not remain in one pose or even one posture during a battle. They crouch to avoid fire, go prone in craters and charge across streets. Now all friendly units are allowed to fire through each other without any line of sight checks. Instead, the enemy receives a bonus cover save.
This has gone from providing a simulation to creating a metaphor. Instead of being pedantic about the position of a miniature, we imagine that as the Storm Troopers turn to fire at on coming Orks through an allied squad of Guardsmen, the Storm Troopers time their shots as the Guardsmen duck into a crater or dive down as squad leaders coordinate their attack. The cover save that the Orks receive represents the Storm Troopers taking difficult shots through or round a mass of bodies as artillery lands around them and their comrades are cut down.
This attitude sits better with some people than it does others. The entirety of Warhammer is abstract silliness and as a designer it is easy for me to see where they have chosen to capture the essence of the situation and provide the most streamlined experience they can. Games Workshop designers also choose to outright contradict common sense in order to provide a better game.
In previous iterations if a unit wiped out an enemy squad in close combat they would be able to move into combat with another nearby enemy unit. This is pretty dramatic tactically as a specialist close combat unit could very easily destroy a huge amount of squads over the course of a couple of turns. Now they cannot do this which allows weaker armies to have a chance to shoot the rampaging combat monsters and level the playing field. This infuriates close combat players but it benefits the game greatly.
As designers, be it of table top games or videogames, we craft a set of rules that allow players to have an enjoyable experience. The above close combat rule is the 40K equivalent to the rubber band AI in Mario Kart. Is a game more interesting if one player very quickly gains a huge advantage that cannot be overcome by the other player or is it more interesting if it comes to a nail biting finale where two players have dealt blows to each other and kept on equal footing until the exciting end game?
In a fun game the player's advantage should not come from the rules but rather the tactical application of those rules.
But how does this relate to videogames?
Well, modern videogames have a problem with players perceive them as simulating reality. Players often wish the rules of a videogame were different to allow them to perform actions that they imagine their character could do in the real world.
This problem is unique to modern games that have realisitic graphics and that take place in real world locations. This is because the rule system is less obvious as players assume these games are simulations. Someone once described Rainbow Six Vegas as a simulator to me. They argued that because the game has realistic art, realistic weapon handling and took place in a real geographical location that the game was attempting to simulate real life.
This couldn't be further from the truth. R6V has a very definite set of rules that are no different to the set of rules in Mario. No one questions Mario's rules though. How can you question whether it is a simulation when you control a plumber that jumps on the heads of some mushrooms, collects other mushrooms and is friends with other mushrooms and where a family of dinosaurs command an army of ghosts, turtles and grinning bullets?
Rainbow Six Vegas (to carry on with this example as I fucking love the game and have a lot to say about it) is essentially the same game as Mario when viewed in a reductive way. The game provides a setting for the player to move in and combat enemies with a number of tools. The player must learn the rules of the game and use their understanding of these rules along with a selection of tools to get from the beginning to the end.
The difference is that players can relate to the Rainbow Six characters and setting more easily and can impose their own desires and perceptions or reality upon the supposedly realistic aspects of the game. The fact is that R6V is entirely unrealistic. You can disembody your vision and view yourself in the third person, heal fatal bullet damage, the weapons are not at all realistic and instead of neutralising a terrorist cell you kill an entire army.
The game has a very defined set of rules and does not create what we traditionally call a simulation of combat. Instead it creates a metaphor of a special ops team clearing buildings of terrorists. This is because a game where you rappel through a window, throw a flashbang, shoot two dudes and then order your team to blow open a door and clear the next room is far more fun than trying to rappel through a window to find that there is a knot in your rope and then being shot in the legs and waiting for an hour for the rescue team to clear the building and extract you and then spending days of gameplay in a military hospital.
The former is a metaphor for how we wish combat was and the latter is a simulation of the actualities of combat.
What people actually want is a believable context. They want to perform the actions they feel they should be able to in possibility spaces that feel contextually realistic. When a player resorts to saying "That's not realistic" at a point in a game it means that the metaphor has been broken and that they now view it as a simulation. This is a fine line to tread when we have games that look like Crysis and are the nearest to photo realistic as we have gotten.
Designers must strive to create games that are like the 5th edition of 40K. Games where the players buy into the fantasy and do not resort to wanting a simulation but instead are happy with the metaphor for whatever scenario we are trying to create.
For various reasons a load of posts on here have been deleted and some have been edited and reposted.
I started this blog to talk more about games than I actually have so I want to refocus it a bit as a way to encourage me to write more about the game design issues I think about all damn day.
Some kind of normal service will be resumed in the coming days.
P.S. One of the devs over at Gearbox has promised that if you send him a picture of you buying Borderlands he will play it with you.
Oh yeah?
Check this out: if you buy Rogue Warrior I will play it with you. If you buy Rogue Warrior and make a donation to Child's Play, I will come to your house (so long as you live in the UK) and play it with you.
The first multiplayer trailer for Modern Warfare 2 just dropped like a payload from an AC-130. In the same way Infinity Ward started showing off Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer, they have chosen not to do a reveal trailer or a trailer that captures a broad swathe of gameplay. Instead they have chosen to show one mechanic of the game, which is an interesting way of showing people the experience.
This is not a video aimed at the same crowd as the single player reveal but rather it exists to stoke the excitement of people who like to tweak the hell out of their perk selection. Way back in 2007 the first glimpse of the multiplayer game we saw was of what looked like mad haxx0rz. One dude shot another dude THROUGH A WALL. This showed off the game’s bullet penetration and Deep Impact perk and was especially amazing as no game had done bullet penetration to that extent. In an RPG you might choose to buff your Intellect. In Call of Duty you choose to buff your ability to make bullets go through walls into other players.
The new Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer trailer shows off unlockable kill streak rewards. Call of Duty features a ‘the rich get richer’ mechanic where the better the player does, the more rewards they get. In COD 4 after 3 kills the player would get a UAV which would show the positions of every enemy player on the radar. After 5 kills the player gets to call in and target an airstrike and after 7 kills, an AI controlled helicopter gunship circles the map and targets enemy players with a devastating barrage of fire. In Modern Warfare 2 you get to pilot a Spooky gunship.
This system has caused some consternation amongst some players and designers. To be straight up, in the case of Call of Duty I don’t have a problem with the kill streak rewards because I’m not that bad at COD and will semi regularly unlock the kill streak rewards. It is an interesting problem though. Multiplayer shooters have a notoriously high barrier to entry because as soon as a player has played a map they have a large advantage against a new player for the obvious reasons. Newer players are weak and vulnerable in a system like COD’s where those players that have played more of the game are not only better in skill but unlock skills and weapons that allow them to more effectively gun enemies down and unlock circling death machines.
The same system occurs in single player games. Devil May Cry punishes players that struggle with the game by giving them fewer unlocks. Good players will gain more in game currency to buy better abilities and upgrades which will then ease them through the rest of the game. Worse players will gain less currency and thus be able to buy fewer upgrades and will have a tougher time getting through the game.
Some designers take the view that the player should be working hard to become better at the game. Ex Ninja Gaiden designer Tomonobu Itagaki deems that only a select few players should be able to enjoy his games fully as Ninja Gaiden takes a lot of hard work to understand and play. That is a fine view to take as long as you can accept the consequences of lower sales, a niche audience and critical reviews. FHM famously scored the original Xbox Ninja Gaiden 1/5. This is a perfect example of a review catering to the magazine’s readership because most readers of FHM simply won’t be able to grasp and enjoy Ninja Gaiden (I’m not being a snob here, I have never got past the second level of a Ninja Gaiden game) as it is not their play style.
Imagine you are new to Call of Duty and you try the multiplayer. You enter the game, emerge from your spawn point and a sniper drops you through a wall. You respawn, stick low in cover and work your way through a building. An enemy player strafes into the corridor and you both open fire. Despite both having assault rifles, he kills you first as he has unlocked a rifle with a higher rate of fire and has a perk which causes each bullet to do more damage. This gives him enough for an air strike. As you respawn the world explodes around you as the air strike rains down. This gives him the extra two kills he needs for the chopper. As you respawn again you see the names of your team scroll up on the killed list as the gunship hoses them. You creep down an alley and as you emerge, the chopper appears from over head and kills you again. You take the disk from the tray and trade it in. This is not a worse case scenario, this is can happen with worrying regularity.
Maybe you are thinking that this is just something you need to suck up and with time you will be the one calling in air strikes. This is true and after some persistence the rewards come thick and fast but you will potentially lose a large percentage of your player base after their first game. I am something of an advocate of levelling up systems that reward players with cool shit as I am capable of braving the meat grinder of online shooters to get to the sweet candy centre filled with red dot sights and gun ships. But what of the players entering the world of multiplayer for the first time and are being thrown to the heavily armed wolves with only a burst fire M16?
Videogame designers are almost all universally bad at tutorials and I struggle to think of any recent high profile game with a good tutorial.
Note: I use the word tutorial to describe a sequence of events where the game explicitly describes its mechanics to you. I am not counting the games that just drop you in and tell you to go.
Single player portions of games have yet to find an elegant way of explaining the mechanics of a shooter that uses every button on the pad in multiple ways and multiplayer shooters have yet to really start exploring tutorials. A notable entry into multiplayer tutorials is Team Fortress 2 with the intro movies it plays for each map. However these are often ignored and skipped past. Shadowrun had training missions against bots but just thinking about those actually pains me.
Call of Duty more than any online shooter needs a tutorial as it is deep and complex and draws in players who are experiencing online shooters for the very first time. Who knows, perhaps Modern Warfare 2 has a tutorial system but in the absence of any information, let's consider some potential solutions.
The following all use Call of Duty as an example and presume you have some knowledge of the mechanics present in the game.
Until the player ranks up to level 3:
A simple voice over description of the mode plays during a load screen. A non threatening voice is important so don't make it sound like Marcus Fenix.
Enemies are drawn with a Ghost Recon style diamond around them. Players can get used to the sillouhette of an enemy and recognise the shape of an enemy in prone and also behind cover.
All bullets have exaggerated tracer rounds to show exactly where the bullets are landing.
The radar could display all players at all times.
The game uses an under the hood system to determine if the player is exposed or in cover and displays either a warning message or a supportive message when this happens.
The grenades have a trail attached to them or a marker is displayed in the world to help predict where they will land.
Good firing points are indicated in the world.
Perks are displayed by colourising an enemy when the player is in combat with them to show if they are using Juggernaut etc.
Some kind of dialogue is shown when the player dies to explain what caused their death in simple language.
Surfaces are colourised and maybe labelled to show their resilience to bullet penetration.
A warning indicator shows that they are in the scope of a sniper.
A proximity warning indicates that claymores are near (not their exact lcoation though).
The game detects whenever someone calls you a "fag" and mutes them, filing automatic bad rep.
There are a hundred ways we can ease the transition into multiplayer without achingly boring tutorials. All can be optional and they could even fade away as the player becomes accustomed to them. Many of the above would never work in a single player context as they would smash any kind of fiction you are trying to build but a multiplayer environment allows us to not worry about whether we are colourising walls or drawing boxes round characters for the first few matches.
Due to this being the internet and knowing how people often misinterpret what someone writes, I want to be clear that I am not crapping on Call of Duty. Call of Duty is just a good game to talk about as it is at the fore front of modern shooters and its influence can be felt more and more.
Thanks to Sustainability on the Infinity Ward forums who I stole these images from. His analysis of the trailer is something to behold.
