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While discussing the future fate of the Fallout franchise with a colleague, we came across a topic that became more interesting to me the more I thought about it: Bethesda purchasing the Fallout license. Licenses for old games are sold quite often these days, usually being thought of as an easy way to cash in without having to roll the dice with a new intellectual property and (gasp) being forced to apply creativity. Sadly (as far as the advancement of creative thought goes), most of the time the “cash in” aspect holds true and they do end up being at least marginally successful. Fallout was no exception here as Bethesda experienced great sales and brought the franchise into the digital age with it’s own slew of downloadable content (DLC).

While this never really surprised me – Fallout experiencing success in the distant past, now being ripe for picking up as a new-generation game – after pondering it more, I have to ask… was purchasing the license really necessary?

Of course, as said, the Fallout series had a very successful past, and there are still quite a lot of fans around dedicated to these old games and who even still play them today. The game distributor Good Old Games (established to re-package and sell older games that typically had trouble working on newer hard/software) arguably owes it’s explosive launch solely to having the Fallout series in their catalog.

So, the original games definitely had some sort of fan-base. However, we are talking about a vastly different age here: an age where the computer was seen as a primary vessel for playing games, and CRPG’s (when such an acronym even existed) were adored for their complexity and challenge. What would become of this franchise coming out of a coma, awakening in the day of the console dominating the gaming market and casual-friendly design being considered more important than brutal learning curves and endless depth?

Fallout 3 was changed considerably from the past games to the future incarnation. Going from a very strategy heavy turn-based role-playing game to an action packed first person shooter, Bethesda arguably didn’t even really attempt to please said existing Fallout fan-base (and really, they couldn’t have even if they wanted to). Sure, the fans may have bought the game anyway – being starved of the franchise name for so long, and it did have little nods to the past – but it had to of resulted in at least some percentage of potential sales lost. However, the sum of these potential sales doesn’t even come close to comparing to the amount of sales from people who have probably never heard of the name Fallout before. Given this fact, it is curious to think of what the sum total reaction would have been had it been Fallout 3 by any other name.

While the old games do certainly have a considerable fanbase, the genre that Fallout finds itself in is anything but unique. You can only spin the apocalypse so many ways. Compare Fallout 3’s setting and theme to that of STALKER’s and you will find a great number of major similarities (of course, I am not talking about overall quality here):

1. Post-apocalyptic landscape – check
2. Mutants, both human and animal – check
3. Superpowers granted via radiation – check
4. Dark, abandoned subterranean locations – check
5. Main character emerging into a world unknown to them – check
6. Semi-nonlinear gameplay – check
7. Quasi RPG character and plot advancement – check

About the only thing I can really think of that is truly special or solely unique to the Fallout universe is the Pip Boy and the 1950’s theme in general. This isn’t a slight to Bethesda or claiming that they ripped off STALKER, it’s just a testament to how generic the post-apocalyptic genre is – it’s basically self-descriptive.

So, what stopped Bethesda from just… making STALKER? Or furthermore, just creating Fallout with a different name? Would publishers not been as pleasant, ever-unwilling to invest in new intellectual properties? Perhaps (and this may be giving the industry more credit than it’s due) it’s simply a case of… shame?

Let’s take a look at a similar scenario involving the System Shock games and Bioshock. Presumably, 2K Games either didn’t want to or couldn’t develop a new System Shock game (the original games being made by Through The Looking Glass). In either case, they instead take to the blackboard and come up with Bioshock, a very similar game mechanically to System Shock 2 (much more so than Fallout 2 to Fallout 3) but with it’s own completely unique and independent style, setting, plot and characters; not to mention they are set over a century apart from one another. In a nutshell, there is nothing aside from raw gameplay that ties System Shock 2 to Bioshock, and thus Bioshock is considered a “spiritual successor” of it – a term often used to describe a game that does more than just pay homage to a past title, but seeks to replicate the feeling of playing the original.

Bioshock was another game that met critical success. This time to all parties involved – past fans were (more or less) happy that the game resembled their beloved System Shock 2, and the much bigger portion of the gaming populace who had of course never heard of the past games greeted the fresh artistic style and setting with open arms. 2K had managed to successfully bring up the past and pay tribute to it while simultaneously creating a brand new intellectual property that has no thematic similarities to the game it pays homage to.

After all that is said and done, what is the true value of a license that is doomed to be unknown by the vast, vast majority of gamers; and to be considered sullied by the few remaining who actually remember what the old games the licenses were ripped from were like? Obviously, if the license is big enough, there’s no question here. If the license to the old Ultima series were to go up for sale, there is no doubt that it would be quickly snatched up and used to carry a great amount of weight behind a new title.

However, those old games that fell into obscurity but still have that ever-persistent base of hardcore fans, who only grow stronger (but generally not larger) in their fandom as time passes and their nostalgia grows; is it really necessary or even worth it to use these licenses to promote a new game? Which of course, any new game using an old license – even one being booked as a “sequel” – is going to be just that, a new game. You cannot resurrect a decades-old title and hope to replicate the same exact gameplay, and once you realize that, you put the very license you bought in jeopardy and risk losing the fans who are the sole reason the license even had any value in the first place.

As well, how will this apply to the future? Will the number of gamers eventually stagnate to the point where the amount of older gamers reminiscent about a past title is of significant size to make a sequel or re-licensing of a game marketed specifically to them? Or when Halo eventually turns into a “timeless classic”, Master Chief becoming comparable to an 8-bit Mario, will it be difficult to pay homage to it due to the ever-changing climate of game design? Only time can answer this one, but I think one thing is clear: licenses to classic games will always have a hefty value, because all gamers are fans of something; and as time goes on, so does our nostalgia grow – getting to a point where we can fool ourselves into wanting something that can never exist – to re-experience the past.

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I recently had a fling with Runic Games‘ newly released title Torchlight and, as usual, I have too much to talk about so I figured I would sum up my thoughts here in a new quasi-column called Indirect Fire.

The Fate of Torchlight

WildTangent released Fate quite some time ago at this point, and it can still be a fun game today – one of the benefits of being a dungeon romp title is being nearly immune to the effects of time passage. I really enjoyed it when it came out and was pleasantly surprised with the unique pet system and some of the mechanics like enchanting. With a little refinement and polish, it could have been something really special and unique amongst the old and tired genre.

Given this, I was very excited for Torchlight. Coming from the combined efforts of the developers of Fate, the ill-fated original Mythos and the prestigious Diablo, it was poised to incorporate all of the best things about these games with extra polish and love from such an experienced development team. Unfortunately, Runic seemed to learn nothing from Fate or Mythos and repeated some very questionable design decisions. I find this hard to understand as they become quite apparent after playing for more than a few hours, and surely they must have known of their existence. As usual, these design mistakes are fairly simple in nature and shouldn’t require that much labor to fix. Even now the developers are releasing patches in effort to alleviate this issues, but being as the game is already released, the stamp of semi-permanence has seemingly been applied to it and these mechanics certainly need much more than simple alleviation.

What Went Wrong

One of the major problems of the game is in the character classes. Boasting only 3 classes, Torchlight aims to make up for the lack of quantity in that each of them has 3 extensive skill trees, and this design is largely taken from Mythos. Such a system is pretty common in today’s RPG games, however I’ve always felt they were one of the worst aspects of Mythos and the same rings true in Torchlight. Rather than being restricted by previous skill purchases (i.e. requiring 5 points in one ability before being able to purchase the next), you can get any skill at any time as long as you meet the level requirement for it. This promotes heavy skill saving in effort to max out the later more powerful abilities, which – while rewarding players for thinking ahead – drastically removes fun from the beginning of the game.  This is emphasized even more strongly when you realize that abilities have no cooldown, you can use them as often as you’d like. This turns the 3 big trees of skill choices into a simple chore of finding which ability is the most powerful and then maxing it out and using it for the rest of your character’s career (with the possible exception of using pets).

No difficulty mode transference is another big core problem. By this I mean the ability to start a game on Normal, and when finishing Normal you move on to Hard with higher level monsters and such. The absence of such a feature may sound non-important, or even good, but it really takes a lot away from the game. In Torchlight, easier difficulties only serve as a grounds to learn the game before jumping right into the hardest difficulty. Worse, some people get too far on Easy/Normal and then do not wish to start over on a new difficulty, but they also feel that the game is too easy and boring. However you cannot beat the game and move on to a higher difficulty, aside from retiring your character which essentially deletes it and lets you start a new one that inherits one of your items, making it stronger. This sounds tempting but is silly as the inheritance bonus is more or less just enchanting the item (a feature which already exists in the game without having to retire) and then transferring this item to the new character (a feature which again already exists in the form of a shared stash). In the end, retiring a character for the sake of the bonus simply isn’t worth it ever, aside from the case of “I have a character on normal who is close to the end and I want to play very hard” (which is what I did). A shame as this was a highly hyped feature of the game, and a big selling point for replayability.

In place of the standard dungeon monsters being higher level on higher difficulties, the game touts an infinite dungeon. This uses Torchlight’s impressive automatically generated dungeon technology – possibly the best procedural dungeons as of yet. So there’s certainly nothing wrong with the dungeon itself. However, the idea of an “infinite dungeon” really struck me as off-putting. Perhaps if the game was multiplayer this wouldn’t be nearly as much of an issue, if it would be an issue at all – but in a single player game I just can’t justify trudging through a dungeon that never ends for more than a few floors in the pursuit of trivial loot.

Enchanting, This Feature is Not

I touched on this topic a couple of times by now, yet I feel the need to elaborate on it as it is definitely one of the biggest gamebreakers for me personally. Enchanting. Fate had this problem as well and it is easily one of the top two things that I just can’t understand the developers ported into Torchlight without significant design changes. Here’s how it works: you talk to an NPC in town who gives you a dialogue box where you can place a piece of armor or a weapon. Upon doing so he gives you a price. You click the Enchant button and one of a few different things can happen: the item is enchanted, giving it more sockets or magical bonuses; nothing happens at all; or the slim chance that the item is disenchanted and returns to being a plain “white” item. The major problem here is there is no limit on enchanting. You can do it over and over and over, making the only thing between you and amazing gear is money. Even this might not sound so bad, but the cost to enchant barely goes up and is instead defined by the rarity of the item. A common “white” item costs nearly nothing to enchant whereas a unique rare item costs tens of thousands of gold. Ultimately this makes it so starting off with a common basic item that drops all of the time and enchanting it until it greatly surpasses the quality of rare items is very easy to do and more or less ruins the loot gathering component of the game, which is one of the strongest hooks in this genre.

This enchanting problems falls back on a very common issue these days, the problem of automatically generated loot that is perfectly balanced each level, with various possible modifiers (usually altering it’s name based on the modifier). Popularized in World of Warcraft and of course copy-pasted into every game to be released afterwards, this is the main reason so much loot in a lot of MMOs today is extremely boring; when you have the possibility of getting a “dagger” that does 5 damage, or a “dagger of agility” that does 5 damage and gives 1 agility, etc. However, this is another topic completely that I could ramble on about forever.

A Matter of Timing

Torchlight is single player only, which is most likely the biggest downside to to the title overshadowing all of the other issues (of course, all of the other issues would be amplified had it been multiplayer). Curiously, Runic Games is claiming that an MMO component/version is coming, which is a very interesting prospect given that the game is begging for multiplayer. Not so interesting is the fact that the estimated time of arrival for “Torchlight the MMO” is in 1.5 years. Frankly, in such a long timespan I am having trouble understanding why they insist on even calling it the same game – at such a length of time, I question the necessary secondary marketing to be worth it rather than just using Torchlight as a “brought to you by the creators of” reference.

More than just breaking free of the chains of an already marketed and hyped game, they could also use it as a chance to rebalance and design questionable aspects of the game. Certainly, one would hope this to be true as while these issues can be acceptable for a single player title, they would be exponentially worse in a multiplayer environment.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

With everything I’ve written so far, I guess it is hard to believe that I could still somehow scribble out anything positive about Torchlight. However, it certainly isn’t all bad, and contains many of the elements that made Fate really fun. Of note is that it brought back the pet system from Fate, where you have a permanent companion that runs around with you fighting monsters. You can equip this pet and also send him back to sell your extra loot without you actually having to leave the dungeon. This was also a feature in Fate but as that game was very underrated and not well known, this is new to many people and has caused quite a stir of interest.

The game is also known to be beautiful, which it certainly is. Being rendered in a stylized manner allows for detailed environments, extravagant spell effects and of course huge packs of monsters.

Speaking of environments, Torchlight also features a very easy to use and fun map editor for which users can create their own mods on the game’s engine. I have to say this really shows just how good the randomized dungeon technology in the game is, especially with how easy it is to make gorgeous and varied environments.

And of course at the end of the day Torchlight is still a very solid dungeon crawler.

Final Thoughts

Torchlight is still easily a great game, well worth $20 in today’s market. It is just a shame that the multiplayer wasn’t near being ready as it is plain to see from user reactions how thirsty gamers are for a Diablo-like experience these days. The design issues, while annoying, don’t really detract from the $20 worth of gameplay; however they easily keep it from being a long-lasting title that you’ll want to invest countless hours in like a Bioware or Bethesda game. Instead I suspect most will keep it at a single play-through, not taking advantage of the game’s infinite dungeon or extensive levels, or at least not for any length of time. The bland skill and loot systems simply ruin the game’s staying power, and this is cause for concern as they are planning to use the Torchlight IP for an MMO later on.

However, I wouldn’t let any of this detract you from buying Torchlight as the pricepoint doesn’t really demand an amazingly long game, and playing it through on the hardest setting will serve more hours of gameplay than most titles can offer currently. My personal suggestion is to just take it easy and enjoy the game for what it is instead of trying to work the system and make your character as strong as possible. I know this is the whole point of anything with RPG elements, but trust me. Just enjoy the ride. Don’t over-analyze it and write a novel about it on your personal blog. Er…

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I’ve got a lot of thoughts written down about the MMO genre waiting to be formed into articles, and with each passing year the collective pile of thoughts gets bigger and messier. What turned into a simple forum reply ended up being a giant ramble containing some of my thoughts and inquiries about some basic problems that seem to plague the western MMO industry currently.

A member of a forum I frequent asked about any MMOs using skill systems recently. Apparently Star Trek Online is using a skill system, which afaik is the highest profile game to do a skill system in a long while. Too long.

Honestly, the “diku era” (or frankly, the WoW era at this point what with the new role of quests and all) has to be coming to an end sooner or later. WoW isn’t the only big online success, and most of the other successful online ventures are wildly different and see fairly equal player retention. And most of these aren’t based on leveling or progressing roadblock statistics at all. It’s just a matter of time before developers begin realizing that copying WoW is folly and learning from their mistakes (however many of them need to happen, heh).

Frankly it’s a shame it hasn’t happened yet (not a global change, mind you – just one game to go out and try something new I mean) and it sort of speaks volumes about how big of a problem design and implementation is in the MMO industry, let alone creativity itself. It’s pretty amazing when we’re so devoid of new and interesting features that we begin salivating over something as bland as public quests. Quests that are specifically designed to be done with other players. In a genre that boasts being “massively multiplayer”. Brilliant! And it only took us until 2008 to think of this.

With designers being tossed around left and right, being called saviors one moment and scapegoats the next, they seem to be the easiest target to blame, but is it always solely their fault? I can’t imagine there hasn’t been any good ideas but rather that they all just get shot down due to being “unproven” or having an unknown development time or some such. I’d love to get a behind the scenes look of any given MMO’s development process, like what happened to an extent with Vanguard before it switched over to SOE (although that wasn’t on the best of terms).

Deadlines are another thing that interest me, as it seems WoW is pretty much the only MMO to come out recently that was allowed to take its time and become as well developed as it needed to be. Of course Blizzard is well known for this development style and continues to apply it in both patches and expansions for the game. It seems these days everything else is just developed as “quick, we have a deadline to be as good as WoW in one year! Hurry!”.

Failure after failure just leaves me with a ton of questions. Why do we end up with such below average games? Is it the design to begin with, or is the design solid and rather production is the root of the problem? Do deadlines stifle creativity? Do the poorly implemented features not get changed post-launch because it’s too expensive to replace them (that, while poor features, are indeed implemented – another major problem in MMOs as one loosely constructed feature can be the downfall of a game as all features are extrapolated exponentially over the course of the game)? Are these facets contributing factors to a poor launch/subscription base, thus creating an ongoing downward spiral towards inevitable failure?

Maybe producers need to just take their time and not immediately jump on the hype train the minute the developers have a single piece of artwork, thus forcibly accelerating the development process. Maybe the foul way betas are handled recently (i.e. as a marketing tool) is a contributing factor to the downfall of recent MMOs. As one gamer looking in from the outside, it just seems like a big tangled indiscernible mess. I’d love to talk with some industry veterans about what it’s like on the inside.

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I’ve never been a big fan of lateral thinking based puzzles, and this is the main reason I have always written off the Professor Layton games on the Nintendo DS and not given them any bit of my attention.

After beating Henry Hatsworth again, trying to recover where I was at in the Dragon Quest IV remake (I can’t for the life of me remember how to get inside the circular mountain range), and grinding out a few levels in the Final Fantasy IV remake, I decided to give Professor Layton and the Curious Village a try after a friend brought it up in conversation.

I have to say I am really glad I finally set my prejudices aside and finally gave this game a go. I’m completely enchanted by it and find myself hard pressed to put it down, even when stuck on a puzzle.

Often I think that games don’t require a lot of extra bells and whistles, and that the core gameplay concept is generally all that is needed – anything else is just for polishing it or making it more appealing to a wider market. I think Layton has proved me wrong in this regard, or at least surprised me. I’m sure that if this game was just a matter of loading it up and being greeted with puzzle after puzzle (the core gameplay), my prior assumptions would have been met and I would dislike the game. However, it has such incredible character and world building that I find the puzzles a pleasure to solve (even though they’re usually only loosely based on where you found the puzzle) and look forward to progressing the story, and of course seeing the fantastically well done cut scenes. The dialogue between characters is terrific as well, and the world is crafted in such a way to actually promote exploring it. Not to mention the character design is as creative as the puzzles themselves, and fits into the quirky world very well. Strange traits for a game based on solving a series of minigame-esque puzzles, but without them it wouldn’t be nearly the same.

I also like how the game really doesn’t take itself seriously at all. Layton and Luke find it completely normal to stop in the middle of chasing down a murderer to solve a puzzle about cats, and will make remarks about doing so accordingly.

Sometimes I will encounter a puzzle that has a very awkward solution and makes me feel more cheated rather than accomplished. However, this is understandable as the game has hundreds of puzzles, and even as someone who is not accustomed to these types of puzzles, they are few and far between (and I’m sure these few esoteric puzzles are probably different for everyone).

Solving puzzles will sometimes reward you with a collection piece for various over-arching puzzles (such as jigsaw pieces), a nice bonus reward on top of the feel of accomplishment. The coin-based hint system is also done very well and again promotes exploring the world. Much like Braid, the game focuses on getting you to solve everything yourself rather than simply giving you answers, and the meta-reward of feeling like you’ve accomplished something is ever present. Again – sometimes puzzles are so awkward that even 3 hints don’t help at all, but you’re never forced to complete a puzzle; regardless of how far along you advance the story, the puzzle will always be in a storage area to try and complete later on – a fact that more than placates completionists such as myself.

While I don’t think I will ever be actively pursuing mind-bender puzzle books as a source of entertainment, Layton has definitely presented them in a way that allows me to enjoy them – I don’t just complete them because they’re “in the way” of the rest of the game, rather the game itself makes the puzzles enjoyable – even though the puzzles are the game itself. An interesting situation. My hats off to Level-5, Layton and his apprentice Luke.

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Time for another non-article post. I’ve got a few big posts that are all kind of waiting to be finished but keep growing larger and larger (hey, I heard that audible groan). In fact, they actually started out as one and split due to length and topic spread. MMO-related, in any case. I was on a slight MMO binge and, as always, it makes me think of how flawed the genre has become over the years; how a games “success” is rated, how unwilling any developer is to take a chance – yet when they attempt to create a carbon copy of a successful product they miss out on the subtle but integral things that made the initial target so appealing… many thoughts, many words to write.

One game that I have absolutely fallen in love with lately, and find myself hard pressed not to ponder about at work, is Heroes of Newerth (“HoN”). Being created by S2 Games, the developers behind the Savage series (of which I have some experience), HoN aims to replicate the experience of DotA, a Warcraft 3 map which has evolved into a phenomenon and a tournament game. Frankly, given the long time success of DotA I am surprised someone hasn’t done this already, although we did see Demigod attempt to earlier this year being the same style of game – it just failed immensely on, again, realizing what made the original game popular (one thing everyone enjoys about DotA is the wide character selection, currently the game has over 90 heroes to choose from – Demigod has 8). Also seeking to claim some of the DotA landscape is League of Legends, which is in beta as well. So, the competition will certainly be there, and it will be interesting to see what DotA players think of the games, and if the majority of them will even be willing to change. HoN seems to claim the most interest because it is a very faithful reproduction of the original game. The developers have essentially cloned DotA up until a point, and are now brewing up new heroes of their own device and tweaking existing ones. It’s also interesting to note that since HoN is a full game  and not a Warcraft 3 map as DotA remains to be to this day, it has some pretty significant advantages – namely it’s extensive statistic tracking. It should be very easy for the developers to see which heroes are being played the most, which might seem out of the ordinary, common item builds or possible exploits and so on. As well, HoN contains some features that DotA players would absolutely die for – such as the ability to rejoin a game if disconnected. Being that HoN games commonly go for 45 minutes to an hour or more, disconnects are not an uncommon thing, and the ability to rejoin a game is immense as people dropping is a huge problem in the oiginal game. As well, HoN implements a “leaver” system where it will track your percentage of games left unexpectedly and go so far as to let players disallow certain leave percentages from joining their games. This was another huge issue in DotA as, since everyone was essentially anonymous and there was no way to have statistic tracking for a custom map, if people were doing poorly in a game they would just leave, thus in many cases ruining a possibly good game for the other 9 players.

Every aspect of HoN oozes with strategy, even from the very first game screen there are significant metagame elements involved as each team chooses their heroes; counter-picking one another or choosing random (which lets you start with extra gold), letting the timer run out to hide a pick, one player picking a hero in a draft early and swapping it with a teammate later – these are just some examples, and the game hasn’t even loaded at this point.

When the game does load, you’re bombarded with a slew of more choices to make. What skill build are you going to go on your chosen hero? Possibly more importantly, what item build? There are many items which you can buy and eventually combine with one another to turn into powerful weapons. After choosing some starting equipment, you need to figure out which “lane” you are going to go to. Lanes are the main pathways from each team’s base, and there are 3 lanes, with 5 heroes per side. This means one hero has to “solo” a lane, which has many interesting side effects as they may have a harder time going solo, but they will also advance more quickly since they gain more experience from being alone.

As the game progresses, each side fights to push the lanes toward the enemy base. Waves of allied NPC units (“creeps”) that spawn at your base and traverse down the lanes, fighting whatever comes in their path, assist in this goal. When you finally enter the enemy base, destroying key buildings can make your creeps stronger and creates a lot of pressure on the enemy base. The ultimate goal is to destroy the opposing team’s main building at the back of their base.

While the environment and items make up a huge part of the game, the heroes really steal the show with their unique array of abilities. From summoning a voodoo doll that transfers damage it receives to its target, to making an impassable boundary by tearing a fissure through the ground, to literally picking up and throwing one enemy at another one; there are a lot of possibilities for very interesting combinations of heroes and abilities. Again, this really enhances the metagame aspect of picking the right heroes and making sure your team has good synergy. Your team might have an incredible ability to deal damage, but no stuns or disables and thusly can never finish an enemy hero off. Or your team may have too much of an emphasis on disables and not really have anyone to do the big damage necessary to capitalize on them. Of course, there are always items to fill in the blanks with activated abilities like being able to go invisible, or apply a reflect damage buff, or disable an enemy hero by transforming him into a critter for a few seconds. There are endless possibilities and somehow, through it all, the game manages to be incredibly well balanced.

Heroes of Newerth is currently in beta, but invites can be found pretty easily. I’ve got a couple left myself so if you’re looking for one feel free to drop me a line with your e-mail.

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Time spent in relation to how well you play a game is an interesting concept. There are always people all across the spectrum – some become proficient fast, some slow. Even chess has young prodigies that can challenge older “hard-earned” grandmasters. And yet, experience itself is a huge boon even in a game where younger players can quickly catch up to older ones.

As a proponent of skill-based gaming, my stance has always been that your skill should simply be your skill, and time spent shouldn’t affect anything. Granted, time spent will always affect at least the meta-game (the aspects in a gaming environment not under your control, such as your opponents play styles and tendencies), but I’ve mostly only meant the extreme cases where games actually increase your ability to perform better through time-based activities. In an acronym: MMO’s, or massively multiplayer online games.

Although not all MMO’s have this feature, most do and it has become a cliché of the genre. You start out with a skill level of 0 in fighting, you attack and kill a rat, and you gain 1 fighting skill throughout the duration of the fight. Or 10 experience towards your next level (increasing your attributes and combat ability), or perhaps the rat drops an item that you can equip which makes you do more damage to the next rat you face. There are many methods that could be employed, but they all share the same time requirement trait. This is in direct contrast to traditional tournament games such as first person shooters, real-time strategy, or fighting games where you simply enter the match, play the match, and then leave the match with nothing of permanence affecting you in the next match (again, aside from possible meta-game aspects such as your mental state). Given this, these games are usually considered to be much fairer and thus much better competitive games as the only resources are raw knowledge and “skill” (knowing how to play the game and having the ability to do so). Of course, you have to expend a third resource to gain knowledge and skill, and that’s time.

After thinking about how many hours a lot of top tournament players will spend practicing a day in their chosen game, it seems a bit strange to keep my prejudice against the MMO system of skill gain. At the end of the day, what is the difference between a Starcraft player spending 12 hours a day practicing a match-up, versus an MMO player spending 12 hours a day to advance his character? If your character still requires out-of-game skill and knowledge to be played better in the latter system after he is “capped” (you are no longer able to expend time to advance his in-game skills), how is it any different to the former game?

Starcraft: Brood War is the most popular e-sport game currently.

Another dynamic in MMO’s that I believe I touched upon in another article is community status. Much more so than one-match-at-a-time genres, your role in an MMO community plays a huge part, as social aspects are a huge part of persistent world gameplay. One recent example of this is in EVE Online, where the group of players in Goonsquad managed to use their social presence to influence a key member in a huge rival alliance, which ended up with the total collapse of that alliance. Even though Goonsquad was enormously outnumbered, their community and social placement in the game allowed them to overcome a very large threat they may not have been able to deal with on the terms of the normal game rules (i.e. combat). In this example, the time investment leading up to this gain for the players would have been purely meta-gaming related. It had nothing to do with the players’ character skills, they all could have been freshly made and still have carried out this operation. It’s also worth mentioning that “the Goons” as they are known play many games, and have earned such a reputation that merely hearing about them coming to play your game, or on your MMO server, is enough to make some people quit or stay away from that game on that basis alone. Even when they choose to play a game that is based on time-based skill gain, their long-term gained social presence gives them an advantage in the meta-game. Ironically, EVE Online is the prime example in this regard as well: the method in which you train your character is by selecting a skill, and then the game tells you an amount of time until you get better at that skill – this time passes regardless of whether you are online or offline, thus your overall skill is directly related to your character’s age.

CCP’s EVE Online places more emphasis on community interaction than most games.

“Macroing” is yet another interesting concept the MMO genre brings to the table. This is the act of gaining character advancement in a game without necessarily having to pay attention to the game itself – basically, advancing your character “for free”. The time investment is either much slimmer (i.e. a “semi-attended” macro, where you can do something else and simply check back from time to time), to not having to invest at all (unattended macroing: your character “plays itself”, gaining skill in the process). Macros can come in many forms: from sticking a penny in your keyboard to hold down a key, all the way to a custom program made specifically to play your character with specific settings (also called a bot or script). Whether be it a macro, bot or script there is usually a fairly big time investment for the author to actually create the method employed. After he distributes it, there can still be a time requirement for the people who acquire it to learn how to use it, but it is much less given that they don’t have to actually come up with the concept and create the method by hand. In either case, there is time spent in the process of setting up your character to work on its own (saving you time in the end – spending time to make time). What’s interesting here is that while macroing is often called a form of cheating or exploiting, one cannot deny the fact that the player is using this to his advantage. Essentially, the player is becoming a prodigy – advancing in the game faster than other users. Remember also, even if the macro goes at the same pace (or less) than another user playing “legit”, the player using the macro can spend his time to strengthen his community role which, as discussed above, is certainly one way of becoming more powerful at a game.

Glider is one of the leading World of Warcraft bots used to advance characters and farm gold – the game’s currency. The program has become so controversial as to inspire lawsuits from WoW’s creators, Blizzard.

This is all relative, since in actual tournaments these things almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed. Of course, in most tournaments we do not have to worry about this – but now that the World of Warcraft Arena has become a tournament game in and of itself, it could be cause for concern that players may used some ill-gotten advantage to strengthen their avatars. Fortunately for that game, however, it’s not a very big deal to “max out” your character to a point in which he would be equal to others in tournament play, so it’s not an issue in the big picture. If a game does come along where the time investment is much higher, and it becomes competition worthy, it will be interesting to see how these cases could be handled. On the other side of the coin, the standardized “match-at-a-time” games are also starting to bring in some time-based concepts to the table: we are starting to see first person shooters where you gain experience, ranks, and access to more varied equipment based on your avatar’s skill or experience.

In the end, I think the bigger question aside from which version of time investment is superior, is what goal is the person asking the question trying to pursue. Even monetary gain can be had via both systems – tournament earnings versus playing letting bots run their characters, earning them items or money that they can sell for real world currency. It’s all relative to each person’s particular goals at the time of asking said question.

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Well, I was going to post this a couple of nights ago but it kind of got swept up in the excitement. What excitement you ask? Well…

The new version of Dystopia is out! Although 1.2 might seem like a meager decimal increase from 1.1, it actually marks a huge improvement to the game and even more importantly, the first release that I can really say I had a huge part of. My latest work on the game was creating the trailer along with the help of the team’s musician, bioxeed. Bioxeed has also recently put up a mix of all of his Dystopia music, so if you like this music style be sure to check it out.

High quality x264 download link for the trailer available here.

It’s really been a great ride. I never thought I would become a game developer but it is something I really enjoy. Even moreso, I never thought that the old Doom maps that I’d toy around with in DoomED would be the precursor to year-long projects that push every limit of a next-gen engine. Having finished two maps from scratch, picking up and finishing a partially-completed third one, and collaboratively working on a fourth with other members of the team (termi, Venciera, charlestheoaf, Spire), and creating a few dozen model props and textures, I’ve been working on the mod for over two years now. And even though Dystopia is getting to a point where I can see myself being done working on it, there is plenty more exciting things in the future in the world of game development. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to pursue an actual job in the industry (I don’t know if I could be as passionate about something that isn’t my brainchild), but I’ll certainly be continuing it as a hobby.

I’ll try and get a Game Development page up soon highlighting the work I’ve done so far with Dystopia, now that it’s all public. If you’ve got a Steam account and any source game that includes the Source SDK Base, be sure to check out Dystopia and let us know what you think on the forums.

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I usually like to stay away from blog-like posts, but I figured I should post an update given that this website has deviated a bit from its prior intended use. I was originally going to mainly post about Warhammer Online, specifically the class I played. Fortunately, I realized fairly early on (having only leveled two characters to the cap) that the game was horrible; Mythic revealed their incompetence and all in all it wasn’t that long of an affair. It’s strange that MMORPGs invoke a feeling of longevity, where you want to play for the longest – through thick and thin – to be the best (in a genre bereft of skill) and become a spokesperson for your player class, or other extravagant goals. In games that promote customizable avatars and social aspects, it is where we try hardest to stand out in a crowd. I find this a fitting contrast to FPS games where customization is usually nil, and it hardly even matters if the game records your stats (leaving a permanent footmark, which is all MMOs have going for them) – while it’s a nice touch, we are satisfied merely by on-demand skill and recognition. And of course it’s much easier to get recognition in an FPS – you just need to play well, in stark contrast to an MMO where they are usually entirely based on how much time you put into them.

That said, I’ve given up on Warhammer, and am in one of those “I’ll never play MMOs again” slumps. I kind of hope it sticks, because they really are such terrible wastes of time. That said, I am the guy who quit Everquest permanently… around a half dozen times (I even gave all of my items away each time, as if to solidify the fact – it’s interesting that I would be so sure of my decision each and every time). Still, whenever I cease playing an MMO, I tend to “wake up” as if from a bad dream, trying to understand why I would ever find myself in such a position due to the “play until you are so fed up you violently quit” aspect of the games. The same is not true of other genres, even if interest comes and goes; there are never any “hard feelings”.  MMOs almost feel manipulative, where the primary goal is to simply keep you playing for the sake of your subscription, certainly not for your satisfaction – how many times have we all continued to play an MMO even when the only discussion on Ventrilo would be is how horrible it is and how we all hope the next patch is good? It’s an amazing thing, that such games not only manage to keep players, but thrive so heavily that they have penetrated the casual market – where aspects like the above are least likely to be accepted (not to mention that MMOs actually have a fairly steep learning curve, another facet that means they should not be appealing to casual players).

In any case, as is obvious I’ve been using this website to post any rambling thoughts I may have about games, old or new, or game design in general. I’ve been playing Lock’s Quest on the DS lately quite a bit and am thinking about posting something about that as I’ve had quite a bit of inner dialogue about the game the more I play it.

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Multiplayer games and how they sustain their player population has always mystified me. Especially as a huge fan of independent games and game studios, and the common struggle to keep a low-brow indie title retaining players when it is necessary to the game’s overall health (i.e. a multiplayer game).

Being a first person shooter fan for most of my life as a gamer, this is by far and away the field I have the most experience with. When Quake came out, the hobby of hacking game files and creating maps for the older 2D FPS games had grown into something more as players started banding together to create bigger projects in the form of modifications, or mods. Quake mods encompass some of the most popular game types today, including Capture the Flag, Rocket Arena and of course Team Fortress. In those days, finding players usually wasn’t hard even if the players needed fairly advanced knowledge in order to get Quake and the mod up and running, and then configuring Quakespy, MPlayer or whatever server browser they used to find games. Still, even though they faced these technical barriers mods grew and flourished, some even surpassing the popularity of the original Quake deathmatch. Most modifications in this era were simple changes in the games rules. Although there were some “total conversions” (mods with custom artwork, audio and other assets); most fell into the more simple category, even the very popular ones. Mods are usually multiplayer as well, since they are created by people who are passionate about the game, and at this point those players are usually much more interested in the multiplayer aspect of a game.

Today, mods are better than ever, with some mods even matching retail games in both graphics and features. Mod teams often go on to pursue jobs in the game industry as a result of the skills they learn, and the mods they create are as fun, balanced and unique as ever. Accessing mods is a breeze as there are many websites that link them and mirror their files for download. Playing them is as easy as playing the game they’re a modification for. So why, then, is it so hard for mods to retain players when in the past they would retain a huge player base even when it was more underground?

One potential reason for the decline in activity – even after the rise in quality – of mods is that there simply isn’t an influx of players anymore. When Quake mods were big, Quake was big, and when Half-Life mods were bursting at the seams, Half-Life was winning awards at a staggering rate. Half-Life itself was even over-taken by one of its own mods which has since turned into a retail game: Counter-Strike. In fact, I believe it is now more responsible for the ebb and flow of mods than Half-Life itself. Now that the Counter-Strike player base has stabilized and is no longer growing at a fast rate, we have seen mods on the decline. Players are happy to stay where they are, rather than when they were new to the game and open for playing new mods. Thus, even though mods are at the highest quality the players have ever seen and much more easily accessible, it is harder than ever for them to retain players.

Mods aren’t the only multiplayer games that have seen issues, however. It has become increasingly hard for most games, aside from the few most popular, to retain multiplayer player bases. Ironically, the games that do the worst in this regard usually advertise themselves as multiplayer only – which should ensure that the multiplayer is better than other games. However, history has proven that the games that often get popular usually boast both a single player campaign as well as multiplayer, even if it means that the multiplayer will obviously suffer in some form as a result. More sales simply means more potential players, and players are much more willing to invest into a compelling single player experience than an unproven multiplayer game, even if the single player aspect of a game only lasts for the very beginning of its lifespan. Id Software even considered their multiplayer only game Quake 3 a failure, when it proved to be one of the best multiplayer FPS experiences to be had, even to the point of the Cyberathlete Professional League re-implementing it after trying other newer, more modern FPS games which all ended up failing. Of course, mods are a different story, but are also hard to include in this comparison since a healthy mod player base depends entirely upon the game it is a mod for – one could argue that Counter-Strike is a multiplayer only game and sees massive popularity, but we must remember that it started out as a mod for Half-Life, a critically acclaimed single player game.

Perhaps having single player is necessary if only to advertise the game to players, as if to say “buy me, at least you can be secure in the fact I have a single player campaign”? Although, this makes no sense as, again, the single player is simply a short storyline incursion usually halfway between a movie and a novel. A game only becomes truly long-lasting when it has a multiplayer component. So why does it seem that games need to have a single player component, and why are players so afraid to purchase multiplayer only games, even in this new age where having a computer basically assumes having an internet connection? This brings me to my next point, the MMO genre.

As if to prove everything I’ve said so far wrong, MMOGs came into existence, whose acronym says it all: Massively Multiplayer Online games. These games almost seem to ensure high player numbers simply by employing a subscription based model (even after purchasing the game box), as if to say “pay us money and we will continue to provide a multiplayer service”. While it is true that most MMOs see a much larger cost and development time (and thus should see larger player counts due to hype, advertising, etc.), the fact remains that to the untrained eye they are simply below-average games. Only very recently are we starting to see MMOs that break the mold and tell stories in compelling ways similar to single player games (however, ironically, the one that performed best in this regard, Age of Conan, was considered a failure mostly due to other issues), yet still MMORPGs have grown to having unimaginably large player bases almost without any rhyme or reason. The quality is almost a non-issue in comparison to “normal” games. The genre insists a subscription model, which many gamers claim they refuse to play on principle alone: “If I buy a game, it’s mine; I shouldn’t have to spend more money just to continue playing it”. Yet still these games manage to bring in immense numbers shadowing other genres. Even stranger still is that this genre is almost entire computer-based, when we are in an era of console domination.

Age of Conan was much friendlier to a non-MMO player, yet still failed to see great success compared to other more “ordinary” games in the genre

In almost every way it appears that the MMO genre is a complete anomaly when it comes to gaming trends, but of course there are very compelling reasons for these players to be there such as social aspects and a true sense of progression. Interestingly, FPS games are starting to implement some of these features in the form of friends list and actual rewards for playing the game for longer periods of time (such as Call of Duty’s system for unlocking new weapons and perks).

Another anomaly in multiplayer gaming that must be mentioned is a Warcraft 3 map that seems to break all of my aforementioned rules. While it’s no mystery as to why Blizzard’s RTS games retain large numbers of players, it is interesting that Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a custom map for Warcraft 3, has become a huge phenomenon. When refreshing the “custom games” browser in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne at nearly any time of day you will find an overwhelming number of DotA games populating the list. This game-in-a-game has grown so big that the playerbase devised its own set of rules and regulations (for lack of a decent set in the rather poor options playing a “custom game” gives you), even to the point of creating custom programs for this game, and the developers have even announced that they are creating an entirely new stand-alone game in the same vein as DotA. So how did this happen? While DotA was not the only interesting game type to expand and eventually grow from Blizzard’s RTS line-up (you just may have heard of a little thing called tower defense), one can’t help but wonder how it came above all others and not only survived, but flourished in the worst of conditions: unlike FPS game servers, where even they have a hard time supporting new games, Warcraft 3’s game hosting is abysmal in comparison, and DotA is a game that is very unwelcoming to new players. Yet still it has managed to flourish to the point of being a real world tournament game where players compete for money.

DotA sees commercial-like success as nothing more than a Warcraft 3 map

The mystery of what attracts players to multiplayer games is no less clear now than when I started. There are certainly some historically-proven safeguards a company can take to hopefully ensure players will play their game, which is a very important aspect when the enjoyment of said players relies on other players being online. Companies seem to be getting more in tune with what games need to support a community of players as well. Yet still, even today new communities spring up seemingly out of nowhere in the strangest of conditions where none of the modern selling points for games may be present. Some companies even seem to be harnessing this aspect of randomness, such as Valve releasing Steamworks, a new way for modifications to get more recognition via Steam. This actually works in their favor as, being that the mods are applications for Valve games, they will in turn end up getting more people to purchase the games needed to play the mods on if they rise in popularity. While on the same token, more and more multiplayer games are released still-born such as Savage 2 or Shadowrun. It will be interesting to see if this is a hurdle that can be overcome in the future or if the safe method of creating a single player game with multiplayer will continue to be the standard.

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The struggling hobby that is e-Sports has gone through a lot of ups and downs recently, so this is certainly an interesting question to pose: what does make a good e-sports game?

The first thing that will come to many gamers minds will be the type of game it is. First-person shooter fans will be quick to defend the FPS genre, along with real-time strategy fans for RTS (and of course, the sub-genres within these genres for one-versus-one or teamplay, different rule-sets and such). However, I believe this division is what is holding e-sports back from becoming truly mainstream.

There have been some leagues – albeit none taken very seriously – that have tried to cater to this division in utilizing a multi-game format approach; however these have mostly been for fun or very small cash prizes and thus not gotten a lot of coverage or interest.

The most successful e-sport currently is StarCraft, and that is largely because the playerbase has refused to deviate from this title; thus allowing spectators ample time to learn and understand the game – and for the players to become extremely skilled at a single title rather than spread their skill thin as other e-sports players have to do quite often. It will be interesting to see what StarCraft 2 does to this e-sport scene, as real sports don’t have to deal with sequels, however I think the impact will be minimal as it has grown so large as to be a part of the culture itself in the main StarCraft hub, Korea. It is in every way, shape and form an “electronic sport”.

Overall, I think the biggest thing that a good e-sport title needs is consistency, which is mostly up to the players to determine. Everyone has their favorite games, but a decision needs to be made on a lone title to use as the platform for that specific e-sport genre. As we saw with the CPL, CGS, the old cyber games and other leagues rise and fall, the reason mostly seems to be due to the inconsistency with games being played and the lack of staying power. As with any sport, it is up to e-sports to have a good fan base to generate the revenue necessary to run them. With most leagues constantly bouncing from game to game, fan interest is very hard to hold and they seem to inevitably fail. The game needs to be simple to understand, yet have a large amount of skill and depth involved. It needs to have a good level of showmanship for the all-important spectators, and there needs to be a pre-existing level of fandom for the game itself – you cannot simply make a game specifically for e-sports and expect players to embrace it.

Given all of the aforementioned attributes, and the fact that game developers rarely seem interested in e-sports, I’ll have to chalk the answer to this question up to luck. As Korea became infatuated with StarCraft (due to it being one of the first titles released internationally there), it become more and more a part of the culture to the point of where it wouldn’t be considered strange to hear two people talking about it on the street. Although it is not strange to hear people talking about videogames in other countries, they are often talking about the topic as a whole, and not a specific game. Indeed, it is rare to even find someone with the same preference in games as you in most of America and Europe. If a game becomes truly explosive in popularity in these regions, and boasts the necessary traits to become an e-sports title, we may see resurgence in this hobby in these regions. Until that day comes, whether or not you can make a living off of professional gaming, I think e-sports will still largely be considered a hobby.

Originally posted at ugame blog

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