Putting a Price Tag on Nostalgia
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):
- Post-apocalyptic landscape - check
- Mutants, both human and animal - check
- Superpowers granted via radiation - check
- Dark, abandoned subterranean locations - check
- Main character emerging into a world unknown to them - check
- Semi-nonlinear gameplay - check
- 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.
Tweet this post
Indirect Fire: Torchlight
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...
Tweet this post
Professor Layton and the Curiously Well-Designed Game
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.
Tweet this post
Time Investment as a Resource
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.
Tweet this post
The Enigma of Multiplayer Gaming
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.
Tweet this post
What makes a good esports title?
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
Tweet this post
Theme parks, sandboxes and levels
I recently read a pretty mind-opening quote from the Mortal Online webpage. Obviously there are classifications or subgenres of MMORPGs, and the sandbox genre is an age old one. I've never thought to call games with levels and raid bosses anything other than an Everquest derivative, but this quote has shown me what they really are: theme parks.
The overwhelming majority of MMORPG’s today belong to the Theme Park category. A Theme Park is often carefully planned and can deliver some very unique attractions. On the other hand, the attractions usually require you to be of a certain age or length to ride them, you have to stand in line, and none or minimal interaction is needed from your part. Like a real theme park it always looks the same and chances are you grow tired of the rides after 20 times or so, unless the theme park creates new exiting rides to keep the park entertaining.
In a Sandbox game you are able to create your own rides, and you interact with other players most of the time instead of NPCs. Every time you play will be a unique experience as the player interactions determine the outcome, and the world changes and reacts dynamically to their actions.
As quoted, everything in this genre of game is an attraction. You slowly become bored of the ones you’ve done over and over, since you already know what’s going to happen and when that once-interesting rollercoaster takes a sudden dive to try to scare you, you can’t help but yawn. While going on the same old rides, you are stuck waiting while the developers create new ones. After the new ones are implemented, the old ones are forever forgotten and unused.
One of the great flaws of online RPG’s is that they have character levels. You gain experience from doing certain things and artificially advance your character via these levels. This means there needs to be specialized content for certain level ranges, since the entire point of levels is to restrict what you can and can’t do and keep you playing the game to keep increasing that all-important number.
While it may sound like levels are a harmless and even novel concept, they bring to the table countless serious flaws. First is the fact that they almost always are associated with player classes: this means that when you make your character, you pick your class at the beginning of your character’s career. As you level up, your character will get stronger and ultimately change, meaning that the very first choice you make as a player and the most important one - your class selection - is ultimately a blind decision. As well, you are almost never allowed to change this decision once it is made. This means you are left to the developers’ mercy to hope that the class is balanced and plays as it is advertised (which is almost never the case, extra text is always added to spice the class descriptions up but ultimately it is a falsity). Due to levels, which are a time sink by design, if you end up with a class you dislike you have no choice but to start over from scratch.
Another tremendous flaw that may be less noticed by players is that the inclusion of levels bring an amazing amount of added development time along with them. While the actual act of implementing the leveling system itself is most likely nothing more than throwing some numbers around in the code base, these levels demand specialized content. Common themes in a game with levels are things such “newbie zones” - where players start out with very weak monsters to kill, or “group content” which are scenarios or monsters that only a group of appropriately leveled players can tackle. Thousands of quests are hand written and implemented for no purpose other than to make leveling a little more interesting. While this content can sometimes add spice to a game, there is no point to designing a newbie area that players will only see and use for a limited time in their career. Extrapolate this into the numerous zones dedicated to nothing more than housing the monsters and quests needed to get players to level up past that zone and into the next leveling area, and you can see where the countless wasted hours upon hours of development time could be used elsewhere to much greater effect.
The other ways in which levels ruin games are numerous: any game with levels usually has them as an easily viewable statistic, and since it is almost always the single most important statistic on a character or NPC, being able to view it ensures that all encounters are boiled down to be predictable and boring. If a friend joins the game at a later date in time, you usually cannot play with one another due to level disparity unless the game implements something like a mentor system like City of Heroes did - but if levels did not exist in the first place, this unnecessary code wouldn’t have even been written. Again, levels do nothing but make development time drag on and serve as an excuse to keep players in a game rather than make the game genuinely interesting. Nearly every MMORPG that has levels is released in what most believe to be an unfinished state. And lest we forget, when has a level pattern been referred to anything other than a "grind"?
Again, referencing the quote above, if you give players an environment that they can truly interact in they will find their own fun. Theme park games have to constantly produce more and more content and better and better items, a side effect called “mudflation” (item inflation in MUD games). In a sandbox, the items can be stale as long as players can interact with them in interesting ways and keep things fresh on their own terms. An item called "a rusty sword" that you can pick up, throw on the ground, trade to another player, melt down into it's base components to use to craft a different item, fight with until it breaks, or get a player who is a blacksmith to repair it before it does is a much more interesting item than an item called "Karlore's Greatsword of Demon-slaying" which drops from a special monster that you can only kill once a week and once you pick it up you can't do anything aside replace it with a better item.
Here’s hoping that the sandbox genre will rise again, as I’ve grown very weary of standing in lines. I’ve got my plastic shovel and bucket ready.
Tweet this post
The impact of bad endings in games
Games with bad endings have always baffled me. Much like a novel with a bad ending, I don’t see why someone would pour so much work into the bulk of a piece of work and then botch the ending. Obviously, not all endings can be simply called "botched" - some may feel right to the author but not take off with the general public. This happens a lot with movies, and we end up with director’s cuts.
With games, it seems that most developers just don’t care about the ending. It may be a bit harsh to come out and say it like that, but I honestly can’t see the reason so many games have such terrible endings aside from simply a complete and total lack of effort. I don’t know if it’s because it’s at the end of the game, where budget or time constraint is most likely running the thinnest; or perhaps (although doubtful) it’s that once the player is done with the game their enjoyment doesn’t matter anymore to the developers, so as little time as possible is spent working on the ending. Or possibly that gaming is such an obscure, new form of entertainment that we simply haven’t found a good way to end a gaming experience, especially when it’s a good game. Afterall, in movies and books, having closure is good - but in games we often do not want the experience to end, which could feasibly impact our otherwise unbias opinion.
In either case, I think having a good ending to a game is pivotal. Games with bad endings - even ones that I thoroughly enjoyed the entire way through - will leave a bad lasting impression on me, to the point of ceasing my recommendations of the game. This happened to me with STALKER, a game I enjoyed a surprising amount while playing, but the ending was so hideously insulting that I could do nothing but go into long rants about the game after beating it. It was so bad that I started picking on faults that I would have let go otherwise.
Fallout 3 has just done the same thing to me, and as a much more "high brow" game it really surprised and disappointed me. Whereas before completing the game's main quest I was actually anticipating finishing and starting a brand new character, now after having finished it I don't really have the initiative to go and actually do it. I'm not sure if this actually matters or not in the grand scheme of things as it's a single player game, although it certainly must have some kind of effect. Something about Morrowind made me play that game on and off for almost a year, and I would pretty consistently bore my friends with new tales from "that FPS RPG with crappy combat". Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be pestering them to such an extent with Fallout 3, although it almost has the potential to be there - although the game's longevity is mostly to do with off-topic items (such as dungeon repitition, something much improved in Fallout 3 if you compare it to Oblivion), the ending remains the primary reason I'm not back in Vault 101 right now playing with facial hair options. In any case, I'll definitely be looking forward to any Fallout 3 mods, expansion packs or sequels.
Tweet this post
Site Content
Post Categories
- Articles (8)
- Blogs (8)
- Game Reviews (3)
- Gaming Rants (6)
- Indie Games (2)
- Indirect Fire (1)
- Miscellaneous (5)
- MMORPGs (4)
- Pointless Babble (3)
Sirlin.net
- First Puzzle Strike Review August 31, 2010
TIG Source
- TIGJam 3 August 31, 2010
Rerollz
- New Site: Rift Junkies July 1, 2010
Arvind
- Scripting system! August 28, 2010
David Boyle
- Untitled March 17, 2010
Fuzzy’s Logic
- Boeing Phantom Ray May 15, 2010
Team Fortress 2
- The Highlander Mix-Up Match is HERE! September 2, 2010
Links
- charlestheoaf
- DJ Wheat
- Dystopia
- Fuzzy’s Logic
- Heroes of Newerth
- Lost Garden
- Michael Sanders
- Scott Hartsman
- Smashball
- Tim “termi” Grant
- VDoP