Tales of the Rampant Coyote
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Ye Olde Archives. Visit the new blog at http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/ - and use the following feed: http://rampantgames.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Game Moments #4 - Daggerfall
Continuing this little series of moments in gaming that just made me stop and say, "Cool!"
I had a lead that someone was looking for me for a job at a nearby tavern. Things just happened that way. Apparently, if you've got a job that no sober person would take, you go a bar and see who'll talk to you. These jobs were usually fill-in-the-blank errand-boy missions. I'd been at it long enough to know the drill. But this time, I was in for a rude surprise.
Anyone who played Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall (or the previous game, which I never played, called "The Elder Scrolls: Arena") will know what I'm talking about. The game was filled with dynamic missions that usually consisted of fill-in-the-blank quests that probably derived from several dozen templates - plus a handful of static, hand-crafted unique quests. These were made more interesting by the fact that they often had impact with one or more of multiple factions in a system more complicated than that found in many more modern games.
This time, my contact turned out not to be the usual patron, but some half-orc guy who identified himself as my arch-nemesis (I didn't even know I had a nemesis of any kind, let alone an arch- version!). He immediately teleported me to some distant dungeon to die.
Normally, I'd react to such an annoying chance occurance with a "load previously saved game" trick. This time, though, I thought it might be amusing to roll with it. Normally, when hitting a dungeon, you come in through the entrance. If the going gets too tough, and you have trouble sleeping there, you can leave and go back to town, healing and whatnot, and come back later. However, my arch-nemesis's spell dropped me somewhere on the bottom, and I had no idea how to escape. So a lot of exploration was required.
During my pitched, anxious battles, I contracted some disease from a giant rat. As my character was a non-magic-using rogue, so I had no magical means at my disposal to cure myself. As I progressed through the dungeon, I became more and more ill. My stats were dropping, and I had no idea what would happen if they dropped to zero - but I had a pretty obvious guess. The disease gave me a deadline to get out of the dungeon alive. And even then, assuming I could make it, I had several hours' worth of trekking to do to get to the nearest city.
I was screwed.
But the tension was great. I decided to keep at it as long as I could, to hang on just to see if I could pull it off. All told, I think I spent about five hours fighting my way through that dungeon over the course of two days. Without spells to rely on, I was using whatever skills and resources my character had - which wasn't much. Towards the end, I relied upon stealth to sneak past monsters, because I was in no state to fight them. My desperation grew - as did the temptation to reload a saved game from earlier in the week. But the longer I stuck with it, the more I had invested into seeing this through to the end, and the less willing I was to simply reload it all and start over.
Finally, unbelievably, I found the exit and emerged into the sunlight. But I wasn't safe yet. One of my characteristics (I forget what it was called... Health? Constitution) was down to the single-digits, dropping by the hour, and I had a long trip to the nearest town --- where I hoped I could find a healer or something to remove the disease.
I made it with a score of "3" remaining. Which probably meant I had a little over 2 hours worth of "game time" left to survive.
My "Arch-Nemesis" - who was really just a random character whipped up in the game's random number generator microseconds before I got that first quest lead - had grown in my mind during my (admittedly self-imposed, or at least self-accepted) desperation over the course of two days. The game had challenged me through the fiction of this new character, a challenge I had accepted and had committed several hours to. Through sheer randomness the challenge grew from a minor in-game inconvenience to an investment of many hours that was threatening to be lost. With a little bit of suspension of disbelief, this random - almost silly - villain had become a real antagonist, and one I was more personally invested in than almost any other game-villain I'd ever encountered.
My very first order of business upon getting healed and rested was to return to the town and hunt down my arch-nemesis. He was still hanging out in the tavern where I'd first encountered him. My biggest dissapointment was that he didn't put up more of a fight. Apparently all his power was put into that one teleport spell. Still, even his canned exclamation of disbelief upon my return - and his lifeless corpse on the floor of the tavern when the fight ended moments later was one of the more satisfying victories I've had playing CRPGs.
Labels: Game Moments, retro
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:48 AM (Permalink)
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It was interesting that you resisted the urge most people have to restore from a save point. It seems like an interesting design question: how do you get your players to go along with your experiences when they can so easily miss out on them? How could this game have said, "No, seriously, go with me on this!" without making it too corny or obvious?
Oh the memories flood back with each new moment you post. How surprised I was that dark night when I broke into the house of a poor merchant, only to find a tiger in his attic.
I bet I was a tasty treat.
Gbgames asks a good question, how do you press them on?
I bet I was a tasty treat.
Gbgames asks a good question, how do you press them on?
I'd say one solution would be to make the reward apparent.
An example that immediately pops into my mind is the whirlpool in Ultima III. You remember that thing? Big blue @ that floated around the ocean and threatened to tear your hard-earned ship to pieces! Whenever the whirlpool got me, I always just rebooted, rather than waiting for the death sequence to load.
Then, one day, I found out that the whirlpool did not kill you.
One might argue that I should have just waited out the load. However, on my old Atari 800, it took (subjective) hours for the disk drive to load the data up just so that the game could tell me that I died. That was my expectation, so I ended up hitting RESET many times before I discovered the truth.
In that case, making the reward (for waiting around) apparent would probably have involved hinting to me that I wasn't going to die. In Jay's example, making it apparent might involve simply having his arch-nemesis say, "None have ever escaped this dungeon! You're doomed!" The message alone gives you the idea that a) the game designer didn't just want to kill you off, and that b) you'd have bragging rights on your blog nine years later!
But I see many situations where game developers do make these rewards clear -- I often feel that a frustrating GTA:SA mission or a maddening Soulcalibur III challenge is worth doing (even a dozen times) because a) the game's already shown me that it's worth it, and/or because b) I get to gloat about it! I'm king of the world, Ma!
An example that immediately pops into my mind is the whirlpool in Ultima III. You remember that thing? Big blue @ that floated around the ocean and threatened to tear your hard-earned ship to pieces! Whenever the whirlpool got me, I always just rebooted, rather than waiting for the death sequence to load.
Then, one day, I found out that the whirlpool did not kill you.
One might argue that I should have just waited out the load. However, on my old Atari 800, it took (subjective) hours for the disk drive to load the data up just so that the game could tell me that I died. That was my expectation, so I ended up hitting RESET many times before I discovered the truth.
In that case, making the reward (for waiting around) apparent would probably have involved hinting to me that I wasn't going to die. In Jay's example, making it apparent might involve simply having his arch-nemesis say, "None have ever escaped this dungeon! You're doomed!" The message alone gives you the idea that a) the game designer didn't just want to kill you off, and that b) you'd have bragging rights on your blog nine years later!
But I see many situations where game developers do make these rewards clear -- I often feel that a frustrating GTA:SA mission or a maddening Soulcalibur III challenge is worth doing (even a dozen times) because a) the game's already shown me that it's worth it, and/or because b) I get to gloat about it! I'm king of the world, Ma!
I tend to agree with Dejobaan.
The trick of it is that a good story consists of rising and falling action. While we WANT to see the protagonist succeed, it heightens the anticipation if we see him taking it on the chin - repeatedly - and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. We're the same way with sporting events - a good game isn't a one-sided competition where the victors shut out the competition. It's one that could be anyone's game right up until the final buzzer.
But we've been trained in videogames that failure is either game over, or you use up a precious resource (extra lives, health, whatever) if that occurs. I mean, if we were PLAYING the book instead of READING the book, we wouldn't allow the main character to get knocked unconscious in an alley, or have to go through the ordeal of having his girlfriend die, or any of those other hardships develop, right?
The original Wing Commander game (one of my favorites) had a non-linear mission structure that included "losing track" missions. You could move between losing track and winning track missions until the end. Later, they made the game a linear set of missions, because they found that in practice very few people even bothered to play the losing tracks. Even if the game didn't force you to succeed in the mission, players would re-play the mission over and over until it was successful.
I think Dejobaan's right - there has to be SOME promise of reward for accepting failure or setbacks in games. Face it, the player's ALWAYS got an interactive choice. Reload the saved game or push forward? Quit the game now or keep playing? The trick of creating good gameplay (the big Secret of All Game Designers) is to make the player's decisions Interesting.
In the example from my story - what made it interesting towards the end was that I the decision WAS interesting because I'd already invested several hours into the "setback" track. Losing those hours (and the associated level & loot) would be painful as well.
But if you penalize players for acting like they do in every other game out there, you are gonna really honk 'em off. Better to provide them with a clear idea up-front of what it will be worth to them to accept a setback. Some ideas:
* Accepting at least one setback opens up a new area otherwise unavailable.
* If a "boss" bad guy defeats you, his "bounty" for being wiped out increases (cash or XP)
* Some special ability only gets unlocked after you've accepted defeat (and the consequences thereof).
I'm sure there other ideas along this vein - but the challenge is that these rules themselves will also be "gamed" by players I can see players deliberately causing a setback situation at the least-inconveniencing moment so that they can gather the associated bonus.
The trick of it is that a good story consists of rising and falling action. While we WANT to see the protagonist succeed, it heightens the anticipation if we see him taking it on the chin - repeatedly - and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. We're the same way with sporting events - a good game isn't a one-sided competition where the victors shut out the competition. It's one that could be anyone's game right up until the final buzzer.
But we've been trained in videogames that failure is either game over, or you use up a precious resource (extra lives, health, whatever) if that occurs. I mean, if we were PLAYING the book instead of READING the book, we wouldn't allow the main character to get knocked unconscious in an alley, or have to go through the ordeal of having his girlfriend die, or any of those other hardships develop, right?
The original Wing Commander game (one of my favorites) had a non-linear mission structure that included "losing track" missions. You could move between losing track and winning track missions until the end. Later, they made the game a linear set of missions, because they found that in practice very few people even bothered to play the losing tracks. Even if the game didn't force you to succeed in the mission, players would re-play the mission over and over until it was successful.
I think Dejobaan's right - there has to be SOME promise of reward for accepting failure or setbacks in games. Face it, the player's ALWAYS got an interactive choice. Reload the saved game or push forward? Quit the game now or keep playing? The trick of creating good gameplay (the big Secret of All Game Designers) is to make the player's decisions Interesting.
In the example from my story - what made it interesting towards the end was that I the decision WAS interesting because I'd already invested several hours into the "setback" track. Losing those hours (and the associated level & loot) would be painful as well.
But if you penalize players for acting like they do in every other game out there, you are gonna really honk 'em off. Better to provide them with a clear idea up-front of what it will be worth to them to accept a setback. Some ideas:
* Accepting at least one setback opens up a new area otherwise unavailable.
* If a "boss" bad guy defeats you, his "bounty" for being wiped out increases (cash or XP)
* Some special ability only gets unlocked after you've accepted defeat (and the consequences thereof).
I'm sure there other ideas along this vein - but the challenge is that these rules themselves will also be "gamed" by players I can see players deliberately causing a setback situation at the least-inconveniencing moment so that they can gather the associated bonus.
Appending to my comment (now that I'm more awake):
The rub is this: Wing Commander I provided a track that was completely viable that allowed for failure. The "failure" track was SLIGHTLY less preferable than the winning track. But even that small inequity was - or perhaps the PERCEIVED inequity by the players - was enough that it was rarely played. Players instead chose to reload a saved game and replay until success just to stay on the winning track.
The trick to making it viable and not encouraging players to "game the system" and seek setbacks or failure is to make both choices as apparently equal (yet different) in the eyes of the player. Perception is everything.
How do you broadcast this message to the player?
I can't say for sure (never tried it), but here's an idea. Let's say your game has a "mission loading" screen. When a setback appears, how about a new "mission loading" screen that holds the hint of something different and unique up ahead. A little narrative (voice-over or text) announcing the situation? This hints to the player that what he's encountering is not just some painful time-wasting element, but an actual part of the game that they'd missed until now.
I don't know how this would have worked in the Wing Commander example. Maybe if you didn't get berated so much for failing the mission - but instead there was some in-mission hints that plan B was already in the works. Something along those lines.
I'm still speaking all theoretical-like, because I have never seen a game that really went all out trying to do just that. The Witches' Wake game, a module for Neverwinter Nights by Bioware, did have a little element where you had to fight your way through afterlife when you died - making even death an interesting part of the game. Interesting enough to allow once, at least.
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The rub is this: Wing Commander I provided a track that was completely viable that allowed for failure. The "failure" track was SLIGHTLY less preferable than the winning track. But even that small inequity was - or perhaps the PERCEIVED inequity by the players - was enough that it was rarely played. Players instead chose to reload a saved game and replay until success just to stay on the winning track.
The trick to making it viable and not encouraging players to "game the system" and seek setbacks or failure is to make both choices as apparently equal (yet different) in the eyes of the player. Perception is everything.
How do you broadcast this message to the player?
I can't say for sure (never tried it), but here's an idea. Let's say your game has a "mission loading" screen. When a setback appears, how about a new "mission loading" screen that holds the hint of something different and unique up ahead. A little narrative (voice-over or text) announcing the situation? This hints to the player that what he's encountering is not just some painful time-wasting element, but an actual part of the game that they'd missed until now.
I don't know how this would have worked in the Wing Commander example. Maybe if you didn't get berated so much for failing the mission - but instead there was some in-mission hints that plan B was already in the works. Something along those lines.
I'm still speaking all theoretical-like, because I have never seen a game that really went all out trying to do just that. The Witches' Wake game, a module for Neverwinter Nights by Bioware, did have a little element where you had to fight your way through afterlife when you died - making even death an interesting part of the game. Interesting enough to allow once, at least.
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