Author: Zubon

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Behind the Black

… or, “UI vs. Player” (not a FFXIV review).

You get used to playing with games that have first-person view or an adjustable camera. Playing some old school (-style) games, I am reminded of how the third-person camera and the interface was used against the player. It is like my earlier post about how the game abstracts, you suspend disbelief, then you are expected to forget that abstraction at some point.

The particular example I am thinking of is having things visible to the character but not the player. We all take advantage of this in third-person view games, looking around corners, above the ceiling, etc. You can see the entire screen, even if your character has a blocked view. But there can be a six-story boss just off-screen, with only a flat plain between you and it, and you will never see it coming. Many game reveled in having power-ups hidden just a bit to the left and right of the screen.

The game of the weekend at Kongregate is Epic Battle Fantasy 3, a Final Fantasy-esque game. There are chests and secret passages hidden behind foreground objects on almost every screen. Some of them are partly visible or have a hint that there must be a secret passage, but others are just invisible. Some of those chests hold equipment you cannot get elsewhere, and there are in-game medals for finding them all (and you need x medals per zone to get to a room with more chests with more exclusive equipment…), so the game encourages a mini-game of pushing up against everything and trying to open invisible chests. Your characters can see the chests and secret passages open in front of them, but they are powerless to tell you. They cannot even cry as they pass by the loot they so desire.

It had not struck me at the time that this is a related issue in Desktop Dungeons. Exploration is very important, but your character can only see next to itself, not down a hallway. Maybe you carry a very weak torch. I proclaimed a fondness for seeing the whole level so you would know if it was worth playing, but of course that is the other side of the absurdity: you can see the entire level, even though there is no way your character could.

Either approach works, first- or third-person view (or third with flexible camera), but it is annoying to have it used against the player. And it feels harder to use first-person view against the player.

: Zubon

Accepting Responsibility

Via our good friend Darren comes this developer post. You should read it all because, holy crap, that is how you admit that the launch did not go well. It would take longer to summarize than for you to read it, so I give you this excerpt:

The point is, the issue here is far far worse than many of you think it is. I wish it was an issue of the game being released too early. That’s an easy thing for a company to “fix”. Elemental’s launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part.

You win back a surprising amount of trust by not acting like the Iraqi information minister. [Commenters say, “no.”]

: Zubon

Unique Mechanic

Is it just me, or do the unique class mechanics stand out more in Warhammer Online than in most other games? The more I reflect on it, the more I see it in other games, but it just seems more prominent in WAR.

By “unique class mechanic,” I mean the special feature that guides many of a class’s skills/abilities. (They are not truly unique in WAR, because one class on each side has it.) The orc and elf tanks tier up, the chaos and dwarf ranged DPS summon turrets, and the human and dark elf healers have an energy pool they can refill with melee combat. The mechanic mattered to different degrees based on your class and spec line; it never felt all that exciting on my chaos healer, while my dwarf ranged DPS had turret- or gun-improving talent options.

My unsubstantiated feeling is that the earlier in the design process that the mechanic was added, the more vital it feels. City of Heroes gives every class something special, but it does not feel terribly special. City of Villains mechanics do feel special, because the classes are built around them. Brutes, Stalkers, and Dominators are defined by their special mechanics. Blasters and Defenders? Eh, it’s a bit of a bonus.

You get a reset on that timer if you completely re-do the class. Then you can re-build around a new core. I expect a bit of that to happen in Cataclysm, so that there is less feel of “mana or something slightly different,” although you do get rather different effects from bars that build up during combat and those that empty out. Or I could be completely wrong, because what do I know about WoW, but you have certainly seen classes re-done so that they fulfill the same role with radically different mechanics.

Unique class mechanics create additional balance issues, but for the moment I am wondering which I would prefer: designing classes entirely around the mechanics or just using them as a bit of flavor on whatever else they would do. There is a delicate balance in the latter, sometimes done well with race: if you can be a dwarf cleric or an elf cleric, you want there to be some interesting difference in how they play without making it an effectively forced choice because one race synergizes so well. “Sometimes” because there is that narrow range between “doesn’t matter” and “forced choice.”

: Zubon

Display the Options

Make things visible on the execution side of an action so that people know what is possible and how actions should be done; make things visible on the evaluation side so that people can tell the effects of their actions.
— The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

Decoration and interaction appear in non-user-friendly forms, frequently and sometimes intentionally. If done well, the “intentionally” can add to a game; other times, the developers are demanding that you ignore things on one hand and use them with the other.

Games abstract. They include many realistic details to create verisimilitude, but then you are required to treat them as purely decorative. Continue reading Display the Options

Class Wars

Commenters elsewhere respond to Ravious’s post on the GW2 Necromancer. Within 24 hours of first Necromancer information, the comments note that Necromancers are overpowered and that Warriors will devastate Necromancers. It is not just that people are commenting on balance for a game they have never played, for which they have no stats, where the game does not even exist yet. It is that people have already chosen their classes and preemptively started calling for nerfs and buffs.

As scissors says, “Rock is imba. Paper’s fine.”

: Zubon

A Local Peak

Improvements can take place through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The [designers] change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the next go-around. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill–or at least a local peak.

— The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

Local peaks are not bad things. They are, within a certain range, as good as it gets. But if you want to go higher, you need to go down to go up. Many have seen the local peak and noted only that all paths away lead down, so we can do naught but muddle about at this height.

Ideally, you are not hill-climbing in the dark and your vision is leading you in the right direction. Some people will head in the right direction but not go far enough to get higher. Some will not even make it to the next hill, backtracking towards the familiar local peak, perhaps getting tired and falling short. You could break your legs trying to straddle the divide. People atop the local peak will point to the failures below.

And then someone proves that the next hill over is higher. They climb and keep climbing. It often seems to be the next guy who makes it to the top first, while the trailblazer was tired from trying all those false paths along the way. And, of course, there is a rush from the last local peak to this one, which is now proclaimed to be the greatest summit ever, the greatest summit possible.

: Zubon