EA Cracks Down on Ultima IV Remakes and Distribution – Hinting at Future Release?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 31, 2011
The news amongst Ultima fans this week has combined two events:
#1 – Rumors (and Tweets) from a few weeks ago about Bioware Mythic’s Paul Barnett’s secret project, which point to a web-playable Ultima project.
#2 – EA just issued a Cease & Desist against many sites offering free downloads of Ultima IV, as well two flash-based Ultima IV remakes … including the one by Phi Psi Software which I’ve linked to in the past.
There’s a pretty lengthy analysis available at Ultima Aiera for your perusal describing the situation and history. In a nutshell: Contrary to popular belief, Ultima IV was never truly released as “freeware.” Free distribution rights were granted to a few sites, but EA / Origin never intended to relinquish rights. This clamp-down points to them re-asserting their rights.
Now, they may be doing this as just a matter of housekeeping. But it has people wondering why they are taking the effort, which goes back to rumor #1.
Could an official, REAL web-based return to classic old-school Ultima be in the making? If not, the fan enthusiasm over the last few days and weeks over these rumors ought to hit someone in the head over at EA that there’s some real potential there beyond an old MMO and a generic web-based strategy game that was repainted with the “Ultima” logo.
UPDATE: My own personal view:
I’m a little leery of a modern reboot of the franchise, as I wrote in “What if Ultima IV were Written Today.” It’s got potential disaster written all over it.
But then, if we avoided everything that was a potential disaster, we’d never go anywhere. Some of my favorite games probably sounded like crap on paper. So my natural optimism is still gonna win out here. I mean, I’d love to see good ol’ Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s hand in something like this… but then his track record’s not perfect, either.
So… in the end, I hope the rumors are correct, and that we’ll actually see a new, official Ultima single-player RPG. Even as a web game. Even as a remake of Ultima IV. But I wish they’d allow Phi Psi Software’s original to go back up (maybe as an officially sponsored product, this time?)
Filed Under: News, Retro - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
The Most Independent Game in the World
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 30, 2011
Courtesy of those Mega64 guys…
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Why Do You Quit Playing an RPG?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 29, 2011
So why do you quit playing an RPG without completing it?
For me, I’ll generally keep playing as long as I am still enjoying two out of three of the following:
- I’m still finding interesting things to do
- I’m still finding interesting and significant ways to improve my character(s)
- I’m seeing progress in an interesting story
What else is there that I’m leaving out?
Looking back at Oblivion and the recent Fallout games, I often lost interest in the main storyline (though some of the subquests had pretty interesting self-contained stories on their own), but the worlds were littered with interesting things to do and places to explore, which held my interest until it was clear my character was pretty well maxed out – after which I went back and finished the main quest line without much enthusiasm.
The Ultima games were typically not so regular with the character and equipment upgrades, but you were generally inundated with things to do (having an open world full of dungeons to explore, people to talk to, and mysteries to investigate didn’t hurt), and while the story and characters weren’t always stellar (especially in earlier titles), there was enough interesting storyline embedded in the world design that it kept my interest up. I never finished Ultima VI, though, as there is always a point where the story gets bogged down in tedium, and having plenty of world to explore and leads to follow up on just hasn’t (so far) been enough to sustain my interest.
Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn – that game really managed to keep all three factors (story progression, character progression, stuff to do) really rocking almost all of the time for me personally, and it may be the first one to have done so. It’s prequel – not so much.
With the Aveyond series, story and frequent character progress really kept me playing. Din’s Curse – there really isn’t much of a storyline, but character progression is as rapid and fun as most Diablo-style games, plus there is always more to do than you have time to complete…
But assuming I’m getting 2 out of 3, why do I quit playing an RPG?
Insufficient time investment: The longer I play a game, the more likely I’ll be to see it to the end. A bump in the road that would kill my interest in hour 3 might be insignificant in hour 30.
Major Bug: Corrupt my save file or do something else that makes me feel like I have to backtrack heavily, and I’ll often quit.
I Get Stuck / Lost: This was the #1 game-stopper for me back in the days before the Internet made almost no puzzle unsolvable. There have still been some frustratingly difficult battles that, after multiple failures, caused me to call it quits early.
Something Newer and Shinier Comes Along: I think this may be why I never got too far into Wizardry VII.
Egregious Design Issues: I think I’m more forgiving than most of my friends with this kind of problem (or I just don’t play the right – or rather, wrong – games), but it happens when some flaw is so annoyingly frustrating that – even if everything else is really cool – players quit just to stop the pain. I have done this with other types of games (horrible save point design in console games being a prime example), but not RPGs that I can recollect.
So what’s caused you to prematurely curtail your adventures with an RPG? Anything different? Maybe the story took a twist that you hated? Maybe the game didn’t survive a hardware upgrade?
Bonus question: Have you ever gone back and finished an RPG that you’d abandoned long ago? Why? What made you come back?
Filed Under: General - Comments: 29 Comments to Read
Judges Guild: Older-School Adventures…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 28, 2011
This weekend – in between bouts of some kind of illness that made me it’s punching bag – I stumbled across some unpublished work I did for Necromancer Games several years ago. This was principally work converting and updating some old Judges Guild materials over to to 3rd edition D20 rules. Yep, dice-and-paper, baby. Sadly, back then the guys at Necromancer Games were able to talk to the founder of Judges Guild, Bob Bledsaw, for additional information. Bledsaw died of cancer a few years later (2008).
I am an old-school gamer, but not quite that old-school. By the time I was seriously playing D&D, Judges’ Guild was… well, it was still around, but it was being overshadowed by TSR in such a way that I didn’t really recognize what they had been. It seems – based on my limited understanding – they were the first licensed third-party maker of game accessories for Dungeons & Dragons. TSR was happy to have them make accessories that they thought were in an insignificant niche — things like adventure modules and a campaign setting. When TSR saw that JG was selling quite well, they jumped onto the ol’ bandwagon and started publishing their own modules and similar supplements – with slicker, more professional production values.
Since I missed them the first time around, I was able to be introduced to the Judges Guild line “fresh” around 2002 and 2003. I was able to learn “Old school” that made my own version of “old school” seem downright modern. “Older school?” It was really fun to work on, but everything I did was pretty much dropped when the transition to 3.5 came in the middle of 2003, which put a bullet in the head of the already sagging 3.0-compatible market.
It really was a mixed bag. I guess at that point, they were dealing with a different kind of audience, and really they were still kind of working out what their audience really wanted. One project I worked on was what would eventually become the Wilderlands of High Fantasy boxed set. The original consisted of a number of numbered hex-grid maps of the world. The numbered hexes were keyed into several collections of encounters or lairs. Some had interesting write-ups that could be termed adventure seeds today. But the bulk of them – pretty much all of them that I was working with – could have been easily generated by a short computer program today. The listings had the hex number, a monster type, and quantity. “Hex 1234 Manticores (4).”
Seriously. That was it. Why that was superior to simply rolling up a random wilderness encounter, I will never know. Maybe it was because of the community – anybody who played in that world would encounter 4 manticores when they traveled through that hex. My task was to flesh these out into somewhat interesting encounters. This was a tall order. So I’d take something like an encounter with 8 giant poisonous snakes, and make it a one- or two-paragraph setup describing the ruins of an ancient, long-forgotten temple to a serpent god. The encounter with snakes would involve the ancient descendants of the fierce giant snakes used by ancient cultists in their ceremonies. Or something along those lines.
The two old JG modules I was asked to convert (co-writing with another Necromancer Games writer) were considerably more interesting. These were Modron, and The Witches Court Marshes. My favorite was definitely the latter, by Bryan Hinnen and published in 1982 (apparently when Judge’s Guild started moving away from the D&D system to their own “generic” system which was designed to be converted easily). Unlike the Wilderlands, which tried to describe an entire world in a tiny collection of packages, the module was able to go into detail about a single region. While a dungeon was included, most of the booklet defined the Witch class (complete with lots of new spells), and included a general description of the main town (Grita Heath) and the smaller villages, and a table of events. Modron was really just a city-state with a more detailed description of important locations and characters, and – like The Witches Court Marshes – some interesting cultural twists.
Though I didn’t work on it, I’d want to include The Caverns of Thracia on the list, another JG module I have at least a small amount of familiarity with (I think I have a couple more in my collection, as well as — I think — a couple of JG Traveller adventures). But the interesting thing about these older modules is they really weren’t adventures on their own… they were more of a “kit” for DMs to build adventures. This is probably in-line with TSR’s original vision that D&D was a creative endeavor for DMs, who would prefer to create their own adventures.
It’s very likely – based upon reading these and early D&D modules from TSR – that the encounters in these modules weren’t intended to be quite as static as they were often played. In the Caverns of Thracia, in particular, different factions between monsters are described. As James Maliszewski put it in a review at Grognardia:
While perhaps not large enough to be called a true “megadungeon,” the four levels of the caverns are nevertheless expansive and filled with a wide variety of humanoid factions — a few of them mutually antagonistic — which contributes greatly to the feeling of dynamism the module evokes. This is a “living” environment that puts paid to the notion that old school dungeons are static places with monsters statically side by side without any interactions between them.
Granted, the module was also designed by Jennell Jaquays, who has done phenomenal stuff both in dice-and-paper gaming in the 70s and 80s, and in video games today (including being a veteran of the Quake development team).
Each of the modules also describes a place that is given gravity by being steeped in history and ancient lore. Modron was a city built around (literally) an ancient goddess. The history of the Witches Court Marshes was even more inspiring, with horrors far predating the original ancient settlers to the land. And the Caverns of Thracia mark an ancient empire that predated even the rise of human civilization, before the powerful race of reptilians devolved over centuries into mere lizard-men. It’s meaty, inspiring stuff to get the creative juices flowing and provide a thematic foundation for the module.
Another interesting point with Witches and Caverns is the existence of environmental hazards that often require player skill to figure out. In the computer game analog, these would be very adventure-gamey rather than typical role-playing-gamey. While many times skill (or rather, attribute) checks were called for to succeed in certain actions, there are many challenges (not quite “puzzles,” but they did require logical thinking and careful observation) where success was based on player decisions, not character actions. Time your movement through the geyser room incorrectly (or pay no attention to the warnings), and characters would be killed – no matter how many hit points they had remaining.
Threats are not necessarily organized by expected player level. This is a Big Deal, and a major difference from modern adventures. Gary Gygax, if I recall, actually implied that video games were the cause of the change. Modern gamers tend to have a “clear the level” mentality, expecting a tough but beatable level-boss at the end before progressing to the next tier of difficulty. The older modules didn’t have that structure, though they still tended to have easier challenges in the more accessible areas, and the main threat of the dungeon in the more remote section. But players would expect to have to flee, parlay, or simply avoid trouble until they could regroup and mount another assault – with the enemies taking appropriate action in the interim.
Another point that would be familiar to old-school computer RPG fans would be the less believable elements that seemed created merely to frustrate would-be adventurers. Giant, weird, funky traps that would spin rooms, or have entire bridges fall away, dumping the party down a deep shaft into magma if they touched a door with anything other than the key, that kind of thing. Good game design? Probably not. And the arbitrary and “sudden death” nature of some traps probably added to the feeling of an adversarial relationship between the players and the game master. And what was up with these villainous beings (like succubi) who simply stood around in dungeons masquerading as imprisoned maidens? Or mimics that just sat around all day disguised as a treasure chest? How did something like that evolve?
But these elements – gamey as they were – still contributed to the feeling of an actively hostile environment for the player. Dungeons were apparently designed by the inhabitants exactly as they were designed in the real world – to frustrate and destroy invading adventurers. There isn’t much by explanation as to WHY a particular key is enchanted to zap the first non-lawful-evil person to touch it for 6d6 damage… it just was. Explanations weren’t required.
Many CRPGs up through the early 90’s sort of followed suit. However, there were two major differences here: In CRPGs, players didn’t usually have access to the kinds of spells or detailed observation that allowed these things to be considered remotely fair in the pen-and-paper world. And pen-and-paper games didn’t have save games or respawning, as did the CRPGs that actually had significant environmental-based puzzles beyond simple traps or spinning / teleporting tiles.
I know Caverns of Thracia was converted into a Neverwinter Nights module more than once, but I never played any of them, and I don’t know how faithfully they were done. It’d be cool to see a reasonably faithful conversion of these titles someday, a la Temple of Elemental Evil, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
But it’s interesting to go back and see these old adventures. Are newer pen-and-paper modules superior? In most ways, I’d say so. I think Necromancer Games had a good idea there in trying to recapture that flavor.
Filed Under: Dice & Paper, Retro - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights – Just Add Story!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 25, 2011
Time for another update on the development of Frayed Knights, the indie computer RPG series that is to the CRPG genre what Dogs Playing Poker was to the world of fine art.
When I realized that the size and scope of my “quick and dirty” RPG Frayed Knights was becoming bigger than the longest-winded Final Fantasy title, I decided to break it into three games (apparently a methodology with a long and notable history in both indie and mainstream RPGs, though it took me longer than most to throw in the towel).
The problem – but a good one – is that doing this meant that all three games had to have self-contained stories. It also exposed some significant weaknesses in the story as a whole – I’d been letting things get pretty drawn out. A lot of the work I’ve been doing over the last three weeks has been trying to make changes and give it a little more compelling narrative. It’s not going to be amazing anybody with its literary quality, particularly as I’m fairly insistent on allowing the player to do things out of dramatic order wherever possible, but I hope people will like it.
Now, some people have been puzzled by what this game is really trying to be, given the fact that it’s premise is light and funny, but the underlying game is a little on the hard-core side. To which I say – if hardcore RPG fans don’t have a sense of humor, something’s wrong. My approach to the humor of the game is quite a bit different from, say, Mark Leung’s game or some others. My goal is to achieve something a little closer to Knights of the Dinner Table, Order of the Stick, or the movie The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, and TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and even Friends. It’s more character-driven, and focuses a little more on what should feel a little like four adventurers running through some guy’s home-brewed campaign world. Like most RPG game worlds, an awful lot of it doesn’t make total sense, and these adventurers find their own way of rolling with it.
Not all of the game is done up for comedy. While I hope there will be some laugh-out-loud moments, I’ve never really tried to make every single dialog contain humor. Some parts are actually a little (*gasp*) serious.
Some of the story / setting issues I’ve been facing recently:
1) The story has evolved over the course of a long time. During this time, details have changed. Characters have gravitated different directions than intended. Details of plots have changed. Names have changed. After a while, I really don’t read the dialog very much any more, and I fail to notice that certain things are no longer valid. Or that I’ve had to change the names of certain individuals and are still calling them by their old names. The end-game, in particular, sounds a muddled mess, as I did it in a hurry a long time ago and pretty much everything about it has changed.
2) My choice of doing entire conversations for dialogs has bitten me in the butt. In retrospect – well, I’d probably do it the same way, but I’d be more aware of the problems. Having full conversations based on current game state is AWESOME when it works. You can talk to an NPC, and the characters take note of the fact that you have done A, but not B, and that you are still in the middle of the C. Well, if A, B, and C are all 3 stage states (Not Started, Incomplete, and Complete), that’s 3 x 3 x 3 = 18 variations that need to be accounted for! That is a LOT of friggin’ dialog to write… and to test! It would have been much easier to take a more traditional approach, where the dialog is one-sided and delivered piecemeal.
But it’s cool, it’s fun, and worth it, and I am taking shortcuts where I can (only 7 dialogs instead of 18, copying and pasting chunks of dialog, woot!). I really didn’t think that would be much of an “innovation” in this game, but it’s becoming something of a signature piece. So much so that, as my uber-tester DGM has pointed out, it gets disappointing when something interesting happens that doesn’t spawn a commentary from the characters.
3) Dead space is bad. No not the game (I haven’t played it) – I have something of an allergic reaction to walking too far without something interesting to do / check out. There are still some fairly uninteresting stretches in the game that I need to fill in. My vision of a proper RPG world is one in which there is adventure behind every bush and around every corner. There’s just not enough time to quite achieve that goal, but I’m trying to make it closer.
4) Quests, quests, and more quests – I’ve converting a new, *LONG* (second longest in the game) quest that was previously completely optional into a mandatory quest line, which has required some serious rejiggering of the principal quest line and the game ending. And I’m having a lot of fun throwing in a lot of little optional side-quests too. The goal here is that players shouldn’t have to depend on “grinding” to get ready to face the final encounters in the game. Alas, some of these are simple “fetch” quests, sometimes involving finding something that has been hidden (requiring searching). In some cases, I’m allowing players to find the object both by performing a search in the right area (with the “hot / cold” messages indicating proximity), or by finding the spot with their mouse (displaying the name of the interactive area).
This weekend, I hope to be playing the entire game through, start-to-finish, with some significant combat rules tweaks and a bunch of the new quests, a new dungeon, and story changes. We’ll see how it hangs together, or if I can even make it to the end.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 13 Comments to Read
Why Our RPGs Still Need Numbers
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 24, 2011
Luke Plunkett at Kotaku asks the question: “Why Do Our Role-Playing Games Still Need Numbers Everywhere?” Though it’s not so much of a question as a call to get rid of such archaic relics of the past.
The Snark
So first off, I’ll offer the defensive, snarky response that you are waiting for: “We’re already making games that got rid of ’em. They are called ACTION GAMES.”
Now this isn’t entirely accurate, and is probably not what advocates of more visual / action-oriented RPGs are requesting. But we’ve had action games for a long time that offer permanent performance upgrades (or new abilities) for the player’s avatar. Sometimes purchased in shops. The performance and abilities of the ship / character may be based as much on your upgrades as your own controller-twitching abilities. (Here’s an old example.)
You throw in story and dialog, and some interesting player choices into a game like this, and what’s the difference between this action game and a “true” role-playing game? Not a lot. Maybe nothing at all.
I’m actually cool with the idea of hiding all those numbers in some role-playing games. To turn Plunkett’s argument around on him just a tiny bit, I can definitely see the appeal. You are not alone, and there will always be games catering for you.
But I’d suggest most people who actually consider themselves RPG fans (and not just gamers who occasionally play RPGs) are fine with ’em.
Serious Response: Quantification
But let’s talk about why game developers shouldn’t be beating a path to number-free Nirvana. I’d like to answer Plunkett’s actual question. Why do our RPGs still need numbers everywhere? Great question. Are numbers still important? Let’s ask Clint Eastwood:
As a situation become more important to us, or may demand greater care on our part to interact, we require details. And, where possible, quantification. Particularly in unfamiliar situations where we haven’t had time and experience to internalize likely outcomes.
It’s not enough to hear that our bank account is “fine” if we know we’ve got some major expenses coming up before the next paycheck. It’s not enough to hear from a doctor that a friend who was rushed to the emergency room in serious or critical condition is just doing “okay” – we need details. Okay as in, “She’ll be as good as new after a good night’s sleep,” or okay as in, “We estimate that her chances of surviving the next 24 hours are now above 50%.”
One of the criticisms of older World War II era flight sims was the presence of an ammunition counter. Real pilots didn’t have them in most (any?) combat aircraft. They had to guess. Knowing the exact count wasn’t important – the difference between “six shots or only five” with machineguns isn’t all that critical. But knowing whether or not you only had enough rounds for a single, quick burst or several would make a huge difference, and in the heat of combat it was hard for real pilots to lose track. Given the choice, I’m sure they’d prefer an accurate ammo counter in their planes. That knowledge would give them greater control. And that’s why – in modern aircraft – that counter is part of the head-up display.
Long ago, I tried the suggestion given in some tabletop RPGs to not reveal to players the exact damage that they had received, but instead to describe it and track the values secretly. I tried to be as descriptive as possible. I thought it would add tension and drama to the game. It did, but not in the way I wanted it to. My players hated it. It drove them crazy. The experiment didn’t even last an entire session. They didn’t want to hear, “You are badly hurt.” They needed to know HOW badly hurt. As exactly as possible. I couldn’t just say, “You might not survive another hit with a sword blade.” They wanted to know – a strong hit with a sword blade, an average hit with a sword blade, or a weak hit with a sword blade? Because, you know, it changes everything. And from that, they extrapolated a number range in their heads.
Because from that quantification, they could then extrapolate. What about a dagger hit. What about a fireball? Most importantly, how likely was their character to survive another round of combat without healing?
Yes, quantification can be done without showing the numbers. It may even be a superior way to present the data in digestible form. Comparative charts and graphs exist for that very reason. But numbers provide detail in its most accurate form, and the further you move away from that, the less control over the situation you give to players.
Small Increments Usually Matter in RPGs
The heart of role-playing games is character advancement. While perhaps not exclusive to RPGs, it is a defining characteristic. When it comes to advancement, game designers must choose how big the advancement steps should be. This usually boils down to doling out small, incremental improvements frequently, or big upgrades rewarded much more rarely.
In real life, most changes are small and incremental. In fact, they are so small and incremental as to be unnoticeable in the short term. A person gaining (or losing) weight at a rate of 1 pound a week (a half kilo for you more enlightened folk out there) will not be noticeably changed over the course of a few days. In fact, it’s impossible to measure accurately – that much change is “in the noise” with daily fluctuations. But if this is a consistent delta, after a year the change will have been extremely noticeable in the average person.
At the high end of competitive activities, victory is usually dictated by very narrow increments. In the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the average difference in the two-man bobsled race between the gold medalists and the fourth-place team that took home no medal at all was a mere 0.3 second difference… or about 1/2 of 1 percent.
In D&D, a +1 advantage generally represents a 5% improvement (on a 20-sided die). It’s not really noticeable on its own – over the course of a single combat, it will often not make any real difference in the amount of time it takes to drop an enemy. But it’s hard to describe the thrill you enjoy when you manage to land a hit ONLY because of that 5% margin. Or when the DM tells you that, because of your +1 damage modifier, you took the enemy down to EXACTLY zero hit points just before it was its turn to attack.
But the real value of that tiny incremental bonus is that its small enough that the game can provide several of them. You might get a +1 incremental bonus for leveling up, and another one for donning those Gauntlets of Ogre Power, and two of them for wielding that brand new +2 battle axe you took from the hobgoblin chieftain you just defeated. That’s a total improvement of +4 – twenty percent – to just your chances of hitting, and those combined bonuses ARE very significant.
Video Games Don’t Do Subtle
Subtle – but significant – differences can be hard to recognize in real life.
Even with the extremes of modern graphics, video games are about 100x worse about showing subtle.
Has your character gotten stronger? Unless the on-screen visuals only show about five discrete states between scrawny and ripped, it’ll be hard to tell the difference with anything close to “realistic” graphics. And just how damaging is that bloody head-wound you just received?
Sure, there are plenty of big, un-subtle things that an RPG can show that are, in fact, better shown graphically than in numbers. New powers and abilities, especially. New force fields, fireball attacks… all those wild, wonderful awesome things that make pretty particle effects and cause cool new animations to occur. Particularly for high-action adventure against hordes of lesser foes and the occasional unique boss with his own unique and graphically awesome effects, that is enough. Players don’t have time to figure out the clever little nuances and stacked bonuses near and dear to the power-gaming table-top crowd. They are too busy dodging and swinging swords of more epic flameyness and lobbing their brand-new over-the-top explosive spells to worry about trying to end the combat 5% earlier to conserve mana for the final encounter (it all comes back in 30 second anyway).
For these kinds of RPGs, that would be enough, and in those cases, I agree whole-heartedly: Show, don’t tell, and hide the numbers if you want to. Maybe put them on a toggle for the true die-hards who want to account for every point of damage, but it’s pretty unnecessary when most of their foes are simply keeling over in one or two hits, anyway.
But in my view, that approach really restricts the kinds of things you can do in an RPG. A whole bunch of great ideas get thrown off the table because they’d be too difficult or costly to show graphically. The canonical example is a trip attack that knocks enemies down. This one simple little attack could DOUBLE the animation requirements for a game, as every single character needs an animation to show them falling down, getting back up again, and then doing every reaction animation from a prone position as well as standing (taking damage, etc).
What happens? Well, in general, the cool trip attack gets cut and replaced by some particle-y firebally thing that’s far easier to develop visually. This has nothing to do with developers being “lazy” – it’s simply a case of having a budget of X and a schedule of Y and they somehow have to make game Z fit those constraints.
Numbers – and text – remain a powerful tool to communicate what’s happening in the game to the player. Alternatives are – from a developer perspective – costly. Worth the expense? Sometimes, definitely. But other times it remains the best tool for the job, and eliminating that tool just because it is so last year means hobbling the designers and imposing limits on the kind of things they can do with the game mechanics, and even the kinds of stories they can tell.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 23 Comments to Read
This is the Kind of Hero We Make Games About
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
The L.A. Times wrote a pretty awesome article about one Hideaki Akaiwa, 43-year old man of action.
I prefer the more colorful description of the man at Baddass of the Week (warning: strong language). And general awesomeness. Yes, it’s a bit more colorful and embellished, but I think it also paints a better picture of just how dangerous and desperate things were.
The thing is – whenever there is a disaster, there are people like this. There are 50 guys working in the nuclear reactors right now, knowing that the radiation exposure they are taking in now is likely to shorten their lives by a not insignificant (nor painless) amount, because it needs to be done.
I’m sure as time progresses, we’ll hear more stories like this. Maybe not quite as dramatic as Hideaki Akaiwa, but still wonderful tales of heroism and compassion in the face of adversity. My prayers remain with the people of Japan in this disaster.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
The Ancient Games of the Rampant Coyote, part 2
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 23, 2011
Here are a couple more old unfinished games from my distant past development efforts that I managed to salvage somehow. Unfortunately, many others have been lost – probably forever – including a few of “finished” games (never publicly released, though). But here are two more that I managed to dredge up and actually run:
The first one never quite had a name… I think I told people it was called War of the Superpowers. It was inspired by games like Master of Orion, Civilization, and the boardgame Supremacy. The concept was that you started out in control of a fictional superpower in a time period or tech level approximately that of around 1900 AD. The goal was, of course, to take over the entire world in a turn-based clash of arms and technology.
The maps were randomly generated on a grid, using names of real-world nations, but I deformed the corners of the grid so it looked less… well, grid-like. It still didn’t look “natural” or anything like that, but it looked more interesting and you could always tell which state bordered another. The gray states are independent nations, and would never ally together, so they were easy pickings for a superpower nation. The easiest way to add them to your superpower was through military might, but that would always damage their resources. But they could also be diplomatically enticed to joining your nation – but that was generally more expensive and took longer. However, if threatened militarily by any superpower, they’d be more inclined to be absorbed. Thus it was always dangerous to threaten a superpower’s “buffer state.”
Each state had a surplus or deficit of … stuff. As a superpower nation, they were all combined together as a whole. You could spend time and money developing a state’s resources, but there were always theoretical limits. You could perform an “assay” command on a state as a sub-action of resource development at some cost, but the results were always a very rough estimate. Perhaps too rough, as the maximum in the screen to the left is actually below the current level. Did I mention this game was never finished?
I think I’d envisioned each turn being the analog of approximately a quarter-year, but I didn’t want to literally display that on the screen, so I kept it abstract with turns. Each turn you could take a certain number of “actions” – I don’t remember whether it was always four (doesn’t seem to be), or if it depended upon how many states you controlled, or how much food supply you had.
I’ve always been a sucker for technology advancement in these kinds of games. I’m always the guy who does all the research to max out my tech tree before anybody else. Or get as far as I can before getting wiped out by my technologically inferior but militarily quite overwhelming opponent. It doesn’t matter if my ship is twice as powerful as theirs if they have ten times as many ships. But anyway – I put technology in the game. Apparently I didn’t make it a tech “tree” so much, as you can research a space shuttle before developing aviation as a viable technology. Go figger. But hey, I have a minimalist beaker in the background of this screen representing SCIENCE! Anyway, the different technologies would help your nation as it grew. For example, energy conservation would decrease your population’s energy consumption, thus increasing the energy surplus or decreasing the deficit.
This game was also included on my portfolio disk when I was interviewing for my first game job. I don’t think it won any company over, but I did do the show and tell in my interview with it. I think one company was impressed with my work on Netrunner: Pawn’s Gambit which I blogged about yesterday. I think that SingleTrac was most impressed by another game I no longer have called Armorena. Armorena was a 3D game using my ugly flat-shaded poly rasterizer thich could be played multiplayer over a null-modem connection. I’d written it for a project in my Computer Networking class my final semester in college. The game sucked. Horribly. But it earned a decent grade, and the guys at SingleTrac thought it showed I was familiar with 3D programming in an era where you just didn’t have off-the-shelf game engines or APIs… I had to write it all myself.
After I left the games biz about six years later, I had become a big fan of EverQuest. In order to keep my game development skills sharp, I thought I’d make a Direct-X based 3D MMORPG. For fun. I didn’t get far. But I did have some interesting ideas on scene management that I still think would work. Anyway, I made a game engine which I called “Enguard” and was working on an MMORPG called “Here There Be Dragons.”
I was using no 3D modeling package, so all my models were created in a text file, by hand, vertex by vertex. Yes, it is exactly as stupid and painful as it sounds. I’d not done any research on shareware or freeware modeling software… I was just familiar with expensive, premium software we’d used at work at Acclaim and SingleTrac like SoftImage, Maya, and 3DS Max. So this is what I got. I particularly love the spherical goblin up there. I wrote code to generate the sphere and UV mapping.
I borrowed textures and art from DirectX demos and from the game Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption. As you can tell, my dungeon-building skills haven’t improved much over the last decade.
My approach with the different areas in the game was based on some messing around I’d done in text-based MUDs and even text adventures I wrote back in the 1980s. What if you divided up a world into “rooms” with neighboring connections. For a landscape, for example, a single “tile” of terrain data (of whatever size) might represent one “room”, and would be connected to four other “tiles” to the north, south, east, and west. Those would be direct connections. The corner tiles would be indirect connections, one connection distant. With an actual segment of a dungeon – a room or an area with a small collection of rooms or hallways – you could do the same thing, more literally. Now what if the game only kept loaded some high-level information for all of the rooms, and the geometry detail for only your current “room”, and its direct and one connection distant indirect neighbors? I think nowadays that sort of approach is pretty common (but with improved technique), but at the time it was an answer to the long load-times and dealing with AI behavior navigating complex geometry (now their movement would be abstract node-crossing until they got “close” to a player).
I never finished Here There Be Dragons, either. After playing around with it a bit, I realized that there was no way I was ready to tackle even a scaled-down MMORPG. But I’d already done a lot of work on a custom 3D engine, plus some networking code. The “Enguard” engine was nowhere near ready for prime time, but the technology was already there.
And here the story once again has a happy ending.
Instead of making an MMORPG, I thought smaller, action-style games, multiplayer (to take advantage of that networking code I’d written… though ironically I ended up replacing all of it) using the engine. And that was where Void War was born. I had no idea of what I was doing – I was a game programmer with illusions of being a designer who was absolutely clueless about indie games – but it was a great learning opportunity. So that dungeon up above ended up becoming a multiplayer Newtonian-physics based tongue-in-cheek space combat game.
The other games got me a job in the videogames industry. But Here There Be Dragons – indirectly – got me started as an indie.
Filed Under: Game Development, Retro - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
The Ancient Games of the Rampant Coyote, Part 1
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 22, 2011
My first games, mainly for the Commodore 64, have been lost forever. This is not what anybody should consider a tragedy to the art of gaming. But when I’ve found old stories, dungeon write-ups, and so forth from an earlier era of my life, I often do find it pretty inspirational. I would love to merge the raw energy and creativity I had at age 15 with the skill and practicality I have now. If that combination can actually exist together.
A year or so ago I stumbled across a 3.25 inch floppy diskette containing some old game projects of mine from my early twenties. Yes, that’s right – I could fit multiple projects on a single 1.4 meg diskette. This was an era where I think my entire hard drive was a whopping 320 megabytes. With every desktop computer upgrade, I’ve always sprung for a floppy drive. Why? Because I still have a bunch of old games in that format I may still want to load up and play some day, that’s why. And for a case just like this one where I can dredge up the past a little bit.
Anyway – I put a bunch of these old projects – plus a couple of slightly more recent ones – in a directory on my hard drive. I don’t know if I can compile these things anymore without major modifications — I believe I wrote them using a version of Borland C++ (Turbo C++?).
This first one is one I’d love to revisit some day. I called it “Netrunner: Pawn’s Gambit,” a cyberpunk-style action-RPG I wrote around 1994 that drew inspiration from William Gibson, R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk RPG, Interplay’s Neuromancer (based on Gibson’s novel of the same name), Steve Jackson’s Hacker boardgame, and – significantly – the old Synapse Software game Shamus and its sequel (which in turn were inspired by the arcade game Berzerk).
The core idea is that you play a futuristic computer hacker who plugs into “Cyberspace” (the speculative fiction version of what the Internet would some day be) via interface electronics right into his brain, controlling your actions (and hacking) at the speed of thought – necessary to react fast enough to the AI counter-intrusion programs.
Rather than make it a 3D experience (3D was pretty ugly back then, and while I was writing some 3D games back then, they were with flat-shaded colored polygons), I decided that THIS game’s interface into the cybernetic Internet would be in the 2D. It’s easier to get situational awareness that way, you know?
Anyway, the main menu of the game (pictured above) was the bulk of the “meat space” (real world) interaction. Instead of “leveling up,” exactly, you’d upgrade your hardware and software. You’d earn money (instead of XP) by siphoning off money from bank accounts you’d hack access to at various locations on the Net, and by fencing hot data (or used hardware) to Fish the Fence.
Once you’d “jack into the Net”, you’d get this screen to the left. This was a map of all the locations in the world. They were color-coded based upon their difficulty. I think their shape meant something as well… circles were businesses or personal sites, then there were other shapes that meant things like government or military installations. I don’t remember, and haven’t looked at that code to see if I had any comments to say what I intended them for. I never got that far in making the game.
The map screen was really not much of a game – nothing would happen there. But when you’d move onto a grid spot with a node, then you could try and enter the node – which was where the real gameplay happened.
Inside a node, it was pretty much standard action game fare. You’d move from room to room, fighting off the AI defenses and navigating the static defenses (most popular being the ubiquitous locks… which you could either crack with software (if possible), or would have to hunt for inside the system, dodging and fighting defense programs as you went. Your “deck” (cyberdeck) could hold so many points worth of software at a time, and more advanced software couldn’t run on weaker systems. You could download the software if you found it on any deck, but just couldn’t run it.
The software formed your tools and weapons. “Bullet” and its kin were the standard ranged attack program – you’d shoot projectiles with it of varying strength, speed, and special qualities. Landmine would drop a bomb invisible to the AI, which would explode whenever an AI got within a particular proximity. Then there were “freeze” programs that would cause the AI programs to freeze in place, harmlessly, for a bit. Incidentally (I discovered, playing it), “killing” an AI program only reset it – it would respawn instantly in its original location. Maybe a slight delay before respawning would have been a better approach…
The nice thing about this all being a “virtual reality” system is that I didn’t need to worry about my graphics being realistic at all. They were all projections created by the neural interface, after all. And you can see even then my tendency for absolutely glaring misuse of color, a habit I still have not licked today.
The AI were supposed to be of all shapes, flavors, and strengths. I think I had two or three implemented. Similar-appearing AI (of different colors) were supposed to have similar attacks and styles. Some would hang out and shoot at you. Some would shoot homing weapons at you. Some would chase you. Some would do damage to you (which would damage your hardware and your own health). Others would freeze you in place, allowing you to take actions but not move, making you easy prey for the other AI. And so forth.
You’d find passwords and keys in the different rooms. Then there was data areas, where you’d collect your “treasure” (in the form of skimmed bank account info, sellable data, or storyline text). The “story” of the game, as in Neuromancer, was in the form of text files found scattered across the Net pointing to a grand conspiracy, and conversations in the “Gentleman Boozer” bar with other hackers like you.
I wish I remembered what the story was about, because the bits and pieces I’ve found in the game were tantalizing. I remember it involved – as in Neuromancer – a big fight with an AI which used a 3D realtime-rendered polygon face (a very simple mesh). My 3D rendering code – with the simple flat-shaded polygon rasterization – is all in there.
In the same directory is a sprite-making program I wrote for the game (I dunno why I used that instead of a shareware pain program), and a map editor. And a couple more programs that I haven’t looked at and don’t remember what they were for. Editors or test programs, probably.
As I said, this would be a cool concept for me to dust off and revisit someday, maybe as a web game. It would be pretty easy to do. The idea still sounds like a nice fusion of ideas, though I don’t know how well the cyberpunk / “netrunner” idea would really fly today.
But the most important thing about this half-finished game is that it was at least partly responsible for my career as a game developer. This was what I showed from my “portfolio” to two prospective employers, and both companies offered me a job.
Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 13 Comments to Read
How to Run a Game Company… Into the Ground
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 21, 2011
I recently re-read the book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
The book principally follows the careers of “the two Johns” of game studio id Software of the 1990s… John Romero, and John Carmack, from their childhood, through their SoftDisk and id days, up through the collapse of Romero’s Ion Storm.
When I first read the book, I was just beginning my experiment with “going indie.” I found the first half of the book – through the release of Doom – to be incredibly inspirational. The whole experience at the Shreveport lake house while they were making Commander Keen – it felt like what making games should be like.
Unfortunately, as we know, as the company expanded their methodology that worked so well back then didn’t scale too well. Making games isn’t as much like playing games as we’d like. Hiring some talented fans of his games to make Daikatana didn’t work out so well for Romero, though I’m pretty impressed they managed to get the game out at all.
This second reading, after having spent a bit more time over the last few years involved with indies, seeing other companies become successful (and “enjoying” the dubious honor of experiencing it first-hand as an employee of another game studio crash & burn), and reading a bit more about running a business, the mistakes and flaws of id Software and Ion Storm are more readily apparent to me. And their problems – which fortunately didn’t destroy id Software, though it did gut the company pretty badly after Quake – seem inevitable.
I can’t help but compare it to my own situation. If by miraculous event Frayed Knights sells a half-million copies and I’m able to turn Rampant Games into a full-time business with real employees and stuff, would I avoid the same fate?
In all honesty, at this point in time, I’m not sure I would. I think I’d get in trouble pretty quickly. I’m working to address the problems I see with my own process, but the truth is that while I’m a lot more savvy to business and marketing issues than I was when I started, I’m still running Rampant Games by the seat of my pants. It’s a labor of love – and I hope it always will be – but I still suck as a manager / producer. I don’t have a system in place. If Frayed Knights – or some other game – manages to have some kind of magical ingredient, I’m not sure what it would be other than “throw all the cool ideas I can afford to throw into it that seems to work together and see what happens.”
You think I’d have figured it out by now. I’ve been a programmer, a designer, and I’ve released games as an indie. I’ve worked with lots of indies, and I’m sure somewhere in my brain I have a bunch of scattered facts about what to do and what not to do to make a tiny game studio successful. The problem is that sometimes its hard to recognize that you are making classic mistakes. Or you convince yourself that in spite of a history of failure, this time engaging in a particular behavior won’t hurt because you’ll do it the right way. And there are enough famous exceptions out there to convince you that you may be correct.
But to turn things around – if I were to put together something of a top ten list of things to do to make sure your fledgling game studio crashes and burns, it would look something like this:
#1 – Don’t have a schedule or milestones. You’ll only miss them anyway. The game will be done when it’s done. And if you do make the mistake of making a schedule, just acknowledge the missed deadlines and keep going. Don’t waste time trying to figure out why your schedule was wrong in the first place.
#2 – Don’t bother integrating and testing your game frequently. It wastes time, and everybody knows it’ll just come together in the end, right?
#3 – Don’t plan. Just do it. Design docs are for wussies. Marketing and sales plans are for boring guys in suits. Just keep pushing to get that game done that you all have in your head, and everything will take care of itself from there.
#4 – IP rights are of no value to a small studio. Publishers are nice guys, and know that they can’t make the sequel to a hit game without you. Besides, if you do end up making a “hit” series once, it should be easier to do it the second or third time, right?
#5 – Leave your developers to their own devices. They resent meetings, and will think you are uncool and micromanaging them all the time. Since they are competent, they should of course know exactly when they are doing and are supposed to be doing, don’t really need any kind of guidance, and can coordinate their efforts with their coworkers without your help at any time. They should already know what everyone else is doing and how that affects them. They don’t even need a sounding board for their ideas. And if you do have a meeting, make sure they are long, drawn out affairs where it’s clear that it’s an emergency necessitated by their own failures and incompetency.
#6 – Don’t pay attention to burn rates. If you blow that schedule you weren’t supposed to make, and run out of money in the bank halfway through development (or you maybe think it’s halfway through development), don’t worry about it. Banks will be happy to give you a bridge loan in a heartbeat for as much as you think you might need to finish your game, and will be happy to accept “when it’s done” as a deadline.
#7 – Double your scope and budget for your second game. Because these kinds of things scale linearly, and there’s no reason to expect new hires to be any less productive than your experienced, motivated core team right out of the gate. Just remember that you are going to at least double every penny that you put into your game.
#8 – Screw over your employees. That shows them who’s boss, and makes them more motivated to work harder for you – they’ll want to get into your good graces so you’ll be less inclined to screw them over in the future.
#9 – Make your work environment either a wild and crazy frat house full of distractions, or an austere gulag. Don’t settle for anything less than those extremes. And even if you don’t go for the full-on gulag approach, mandating professional attire is also important, because your end product is professional-looking employees, right?
#10 – Downtime is for chumps. If your employees work twice as many hours, they should get all their work done twice as fast, right? Don’t worry about morale – spending three months twiddling their thumbs and surfing the web with nothing to do at the beginning of the project should totally balance out the nine months of mandatory overtime at the end of the project.
So there you go. If you were looking for advice on how to run a game company. Follow even a just a few of these ideas, and I can guarantee you’ll do a great job running a game company… into the ground.
Filed Under: Biz, Books - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
RPG Design: Returning to Base
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 18, 2011
Many computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have a concept of a “home base” for the player – a safe location to return to in order to rest, heal, trade, advance, acquire and complete quests, and so forth. The actual location may change as the game advances, but these safe spots (which may literally be “save spots” in games with limited save points) get returned to again and again by PCs.
While not universal (especially in modern CRPG design), I’m hard-pressed to think of another genre that commonly features this kind of mechanic.
It originated, as many things CRPG, as a feature of dice-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons. In earlier editions of D&D, starting player characters were so weak that an adventuring foray was rarely expected to be more than a battle or three before retreating for rest and recuperation (and trading treasures for equipment and alcohol) back in town. Adventure modules and the core rulebooks themselves suggested this type of ebb-and-flow, and even spoke of what kind of changes might occur in the dungeon in between forays by the party.
Earlier CRPGs strongly reflected this kind of gameplay. Oftentimes you could not even save the game except while safe in town or in the tavern (Boo!). While it was possible to rest and regain needed spells and hit points in the field, a hike back to town was necessary to do so safely. One rarely “cleared a level” on a single foray into the dungeon. Every venture past the safety of town (even stepping outside the tavern, in early Might & Magic games, The Bard’s Tale titles, or the recent retro indie RPG Sword & Sorcery: Underworld) carried risk, and there was a cost associated with returning to “base” – in terms of time, and in respawning enemies on a return trip. But return trips were absolutely necessary, as spell points, hit points, and other resources steadily diminished out in the field and could only be reliably (and cheaply) replenished back “home.”
Other games – particularly modern CRPGs – have diminished or rid themselves of this mechanic. It still exists in some jRPGs as a save point (which sometimes automatically heals the party, or at least allows the party to rest safely). There usually remains a need to find a place to trade in treasure for new equipment and supplies, although it may be less centralized and require minimal cost. In Torchlight, you can send your pet to go sell unwanted items for you, and the only cost being without the animal for a short period of time. Dungeon Siege went even further, allowing you to convert unwanted items directly into gold with a spell. I went even further in my RPG-in-a-week experiment, Hackenslash, where I converted unequipped items directly into their gold value equivalent with no spell required – partly because I didn’t have time to implement a merchant.
Like traditional action games, the player can often expect to ‘clear a stage’ before returning to a home base – which is then done more for bookkeeping: Buying, selling, restocking gallons of healing and mana potions, updating quest status with NPCs, and so forth.
Then you have games like FTL’s Dungeon Master and SSI’s Eye of the Beholder, with no real home base whatsoever except for previously cleared areas of relative safety.
The ease of returning back to “home base” is another aspect that provides a subtle but significant impact on the flavor of an RPG. The availability of “combat teleports” back home in games like Diablo, Torchlight, and Depths of Peril promote a more aggressive style of play, as there’s always a low-cost, and deceptively low-risk escape available – often resulting in frantic, desperate jumps through a portal from overwhelming hordes.
Contrast this with a deep dungeon foray in early Wizardry games or (so far as I can recall, it’s been a while) the old Gold Box D&D games. Resources had to be measured, as a return trip back home could be a dangerous undertaking on its own. A rest in dangerous territory could be interrupted with a surprise attack by monsters, so it was always necessary to keep something in reserve just in case. Knowing when to pull back was a dearly-earned skill, especially with the punishing death penalties in the first Wizardry.
Din’s Curse is an interesting hybrid. First of all, the home base no guarantee of safety. You are never very far from a quick trip back to the surface (every level has a teleporter back to town), but it may not always be accessible as an escape point. You may not know where it is (especially if you just arrived in the middle of a level due to a teleport trap), or the way may be barred by enemies and traps. It’s quite possible to push through an entire dungeon without a trip to safety (especially if you find merchants who have set up shop in the dungeon), but in practice that rarely happens. And sometimes, in a role reversal, the home base becomes far more dangerous than the dungeon itself.
The presence, function, and accessibility of a “home base” exerts a powerful influence over the gameplay and character of a CRPG. There are many variants that I’ve skipped over here, particularly when it comes to teleport and other movement spells. And I’m sure there are many other possibilities and subtle variations yet to come.
But – note to indies, in particular – please avoid making those “home bases” the only place you are allowed to save your game anymore, ‘k? It was annoying in 1981, and it hasn’t gotten more forgivable with age.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 23 Comments to Read
Planet Stronghold Now Available at Rampant Games
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 17, 2011
Since I know you guys were only waiting to buy this game until I put it up on my own website… 🙂
Planet Stronghold
Planet Stronghold is a sci-fi story-based RPG… sort of a hybrid Visual Novel and turn-based RPG. You play a young but gifted new recruit assigned to the most heavily defended human outpost in the galaxy. Just as, of course, things start getting really, really interesting. Naturally, you’ll find yourself in a pivotal position choosing sides in a conflict with major repercussions across the galaxy. There’s tons of dialog (written, not voiced), over forty unique enemy types, eight NPCs you can recruit into your party, and six possible romantic relationships — three for each player-character gender. Yes, that’s one more piece of dating sim / VN thrown into the game.
I’ve actually been pretty excited about this one for a while for it’s unusual approach. People keep saying they want something different — not only is this a science-fiction based RPG, and turn-based (woot!), but the whole approach – very conversation-driven – is distinctive. It may be a little too much on the cute or silly side for some – and I know some of you folks can’t stand manga-style artwork – but it’s different. And fun.
The game is built around a Python-based engine, and versions are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (all from the same link).
Anyway, as always I recommend downloading the demo from the link above and checking it out first, as tastes (and hardware compatability) may vary.
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
So You Want to Work in the Video Game Industry…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 16, 2011
This video has totally been making the rounds over the last 24 hours or so… or at least, I went from never hearing about it to seeing it in a dozen places overnight. So I’ll make this a baker’s dozen…
Now those in the video game biz (or close to it – like game journalists) are getting a kick out of this video because it speaks truth. Though in the interest of fairness, I’d like to note that it is somewhat exaggerated truth. But it does ring true and resemble a whole bunch of discussions I’ve had with wannabe game developers.
It’s also exactly why I wax evangelical about the indie game movement.
But from my limited mouse-eye views in an ever-changing industry, I should note that it’s not all as horrible as presented here. I think that was done mostly to counter-balance the doe-eyed optimism of the wannabe. In my experience, creativity is still heavily valued among developers, and they find ways of expressing it even while having to perform a rapid turn-around on a sequel of a game using some kid’s TV series license. It may not be well-rewarded in the marketplace, but the developer culture still values (insofar as I have seen) the creative spark and the willingness to go balls-to-the-wall to make a quality game.
In fact, the 80-hour workweek is not generally a mandate from the upper echelons, but comes from the developers and middle management themselves trying to make sure they have the quality they want from their creation in spite of not having time for it put into the schedule. The greatest cynicism in the industry comes from the developers themselves and their own frustration at shipping product that doesn’t meet their own demands for quality (which may be impossibly high, as well). But if it was totally up to them, games would rarely ship…
And yeah, the poor game testers. We’d often hire new testers who would come in on Monday to start their “dream job” who would disappear before the week was out. There’s an expectation that making games is a lot like playing them (even though they know, consciously, that’s not the case…). It’s really not.
Ultimately, video games are business. That goes for indie games, too. Like any industry that provides entertainment, the work that goes on back stage to produce the product doesn’t much resemble what the audience sees. If you’ve ever hosted a big party, you know exactly what I mean. That’s a fact of reality that will never change. It’s a lot of work to make something fun.
But that doesn’t mean the industry built around that can’t change for the better.
Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 18 Comments to Read
Over-Streamlining the CRPG?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 15, 2011
I was nodding along in general agreement (or maybe it was just sympathy) with indie game developer Lars Doucet up until the point where he tried to call a tower defense game an RPG. But I have to admit, in spite of my immediate “WTF?” reaction, the game does sound really fun. We’ll have to see if Defender’s Quest ends up feeling like a “real” RPG when it’s done, or just a TD game with RPG elements.
But he points out a few weaknesses common in most RPGs that I thought were worthy of note, so I recommend reading the article. I may not entirely agree with all of them, but they do sum up a lot of the perceived problems. Big empty areas and lots of time wasted wandering from point A to point B. Random, meaningless fights. Stuff like that.
A lot of these come down to a question of abstraction. You can get rid of all of the ‘dead space” and boring parts of a town by converting it to nothing more than some nested menu. Does this make a superior game? If so, then we hit our evolutionary peak around Wizardry I – when the town really was nothing more than some text menus – and have been going downhill ever since. For that matter, you can take the entire RPG experience down to an abstraction like Sophie Houlden’s The Linear RPG – which I think is an awesome deconstruction of RPGs, captures a lot of the essential “high level” gameplay, but I think also illustrates that much of the fun comes down to those superfluous details many designers seem to want “streamline” out.
I think what Mr. Doucet is missing here is a key element of RPGs for many of us, and that is exploration. Not just exploration of the geography, but digging into the lore, the characters, the stories, and even the rule system. Some of us occasionally do enjoy trying to figure out the difference between a “+15 Ancient Blue Halberd” and a “+10 Exquisite Rapier of Greater Frostbite.” Though admittedly, those of us who do should probably be kept inside cages at night. But hey, it’s how we roll.
I don’t think I’d disagree with the idea that the combat system is the core of an RPG – although I’m of the opinion that literal combat isn’t absolutely necessary (but I wouldn’t try to make a commercial RPG without it at this point). But it’s definitely where the challenge comes from. And hey, if combat involves playing a TD-style game, or a match-three game, or a card game with opponents, that’s cool. I’m a fan of changing that up and doing something different with it from time to time.
But what an RPG is about, to me, isn’t the fighting. I want the fighting to be fun, of course. It’s critical. But really, combat isn’t what the RPG is about. Think about it for a minute. Is your goal to fight the guards holding the princess, or to rescue the princess? Are you out to get into an epic fight with the evil wizard, or to defeat the evil wizard?
What an RPG is about is these other things – story, exploration, interesting choices, and character improvement. Combat is the most common type of challenge of many that must be overcome to continue on with what the RPG is about. It’s the overcoming of challenges – the conflict – that makes these goals feel worthwhile. But without all these other things that make an RPG feel like an RPG, all that combat becomes meaningless.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 16 Comments to Read
Yet More Ways to Use Your Console to Learn to Play Guitar…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Rocksmith. Coming this fall…
Ubitsoft’s New Rocksmith Game to Let Players Use Any Real Electric Gutar…
An interesting point that’s just thrown out there in this Hollywood Reporter article about the game is this: “Another Guitar Hero killer was the cost to license music. But Key says that’s not an issue yet with Rocksmith because bands seem eager to align themselves with a guitar game with benefits more so than mere video game.”
Hmmm. How much do you want to bet that as the game became more popular, the cost of licensing the music skyrocketed?
Filed Under: Mainstream Games, Music - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
A Whole New Game of Rock Band…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 14, 2011
My new Fender Squier Rock Band 3 guitar arrived on Friday. I’ve been saving up for this puppy for a few months in preparation for its release. Fortunately, I’d already picked up a $40 Mad Catz midi-to-XBox converter that I knew it required.
This was the kind of thing I’ve been waiting for since the first Guitar Hero. I should note that while technically I “play” guitar, it’s possibly more accurate to say I play with guitars. I joke that I play guitar about one month out of the year. I get back into it for about a month, spend some time getting my callouses back, and then trying to get my skills back up to where they were the year before. Maybe I learn something new that I can mostly forget over the following year. And then, with my already crazy schedule, the guitar gets forgotten amidst a pile of priorities.
I’ve been a perma-beginner since I was sixteen years old.
So the whole idea of “Pro” mode for Rock Band 3 was really appealing to me. Could a game really be used as a practice tool? I have no doubt it could, in theory — I mean, my day job is making simulators to train crane & heavy equipment operators to be better and safer at their jobs. I know it works. So I was looking forward to this release.
The cool thing about the new Squier guitar is that it’s a real, analog guitar. You can tune the strings, plug it into an amplifier (hey, I just happen to have one handy…) and wail away. Awesome sauce. Granted, it’s a Squier – an entry-level guitar – and not something you’d really want to use for a professional performance or anything. But for a beginner or just dinking around and practicing in the basement, it’s probably fine. But the interesting part is how you can tap on a dampener that looks like an extra pickup on the body, raising it into position to dampen the strings, and switch it to midi / game controller mode.
The guitar itself as a controller is pretty impressive. For basic playing, it’s remarkably dead-on. There are some definite limitations that I haven’t been able to see handled in Rock Band yet. String bends, for example, confuse the sensors and just don’t work. I have heard that fret-hand muting is pretty much “faked” in the Rock Band 3 tracks, which isn’t bad, but it means it will let you get away with cheating or poor technique. I found it very forgiving for my ham-fisted playing, which is great for a beginner, but a more experienced musician may find it a little unresponsive.
The gameplay is the remarkable thing. It’s — well, it’s not really Rock Band. I’m used to jumping in and being able to play a song “cold” in Hard or Expert mode on the standard guitar controllers. I don’t see that happening with this one. The chord shapes used in the game aren’t exactly intuitive. At least they are labeled, so experienced guitarists won’t be left totally in the dark. For simple power-chords, you can probably get away with it well enough.
Expert mode is note-for-note exactly as played (or as exactly as they can make it) by the performance you are imitating. You can probably get away with crappier technique in Rock Band than you could get away with in a real performance, but I imagine that with a little bit of polish (and hopefully the avoidance of any really bad habits), anybody who has mastered songs on “Expert” would probably be ready to plug into a standard amp and play with a real garage band. Very cool stuff.
But it seems that with Pro Guitar mode, Rock Band 3 is about solo practicing. A lot of it. That feels weird, Rock Band for me has always been more about getting together with friends and basically playing air-instruments and singing badly but consistently enough to score success on the mic. With pro guitar, the bulk of the “gameplay” seems to really just be incentivised practice of songs until you get good enough to play it – with or without friends. And, theoretically, with or without Rock Band.
That’s not a bad thing. It opens up a whole new dimension to the game – but it’s a totally different mode of play. It makes a game out of practicing songs. I don’t think it’s a replacement for a real teacher or more conventional practice, but it definitely takes the whole musical game idea to a whole new level. Instead of just playing a game to music, its making a game out of making music.
Pretty awesome stuff. I’m looking forward to playing it some more. Here’s hoping that maybe a year from now I’ll be able to look back and see some real progress in my own playing for the first time in years.
I’m interested in hearing how experienced guitarists feel about the game so far with the Squier.
Filed Under: Mainstream Games, Music - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
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