Today, with 2012 fast approaching, we're seeing the explosion and growth of a genre at a probably never-before-seen rate in the games industry. With League of Legends raking in obscene amounts of money, the actual "sequel" to DotA on the horizon as well as another game from a separate company using the DotA name, the genre is absolutely booming.

I've always been fascinated by the popularization of this genre, as I've written about before, since it boasts an absolutely huge entry barrier. While the games do not tend to take much reflex skill (although being a subgenre of real-time strategy, it certainly has its place), they almost universally require a huge amount of knowledge that can only really be obtained through grinding out hours and hours on the game in question. For example, Heroes of Newerth currently boasts 93 playable heroes, each with unique skills and hundreds of possible item builds (and of course, no game is played the same way twice).

This barrier of knowledge and experience leads to a pretty obvious gap between players in the game ("omg why did you buy X item on Y hero"), and makes it very easy to blame a teammate for your teams short-comings. As it's not really a matter of skill, players tend to almost never have the feeling that they personally screwed up, so they will often pass the blame to a teammate - whether deservedly or not.

All of this, the knowledge requirement, lack of personal blame, and long game timers ends up making these games hellish for new players to get into, as an inordinate number of games will end with people yelling at each other. If you're not playing with anybody you know, and your team loses, chances are people will get heated at one another for wasting each others' time.

Which leads to people leaving, potentially in the middle of a game, often before the game is even decided. As mentioned, the big problem here is once a player decides to leave: that's it, he's gone and his team is probably as good as done for. As these games tend to be very "task based", even a bad player is much preferred to not having the player at all (aside in some cases, such as "feeding", but that's another topic for another time). If 9 players in a game play for 30 minutes and all generally think the game is going well and is evenly matched, but one player had a bad start or died too much or is generally frustrated and leaves the game, there is a good chance that the game is ruined for all 9 remaining people. At least the other team of 5 get an easy win, but in these games a well fought match can often be more rewarding than an easy win.

As this genre has become more retail-based (unlike the actual DotA game, which is merely a Warcraft 3 map), they have implemented "leaver protection", which is usually just a fancy way to say "if you leave the game, you get punished". The problem with this is it locks players into playing the game, forcing them to be even more frustrated, causing even more discontent in the community. Still, it's preferable to no leaver protection at all, as again it is one player's experience against many.

Mostly, I am surprised that no game in the genre has attempted some kind of re-joining mechanic. Games do have re-joining on disconnects (another staple feature that the original DotA lacked), but this only works for people who disconnected due to hardware or network malfunction, not people who intend to just cease playing the game. Of course, with the aforementioned complexities that happen on a per-game basis such as item builds and which hero is more powerful as a result of feeding/farming, it would be very hard for someone to just jump into a game in progress. So it certainly would have to be an option, such a checkbox when looking for a match entitled "I am willing to take a disconnected player's place".

As well, players that do this should be considered to be doing charity work: they should not receive any negative statistics that may be incurred on the original player that had left (i.e. ELO rating decrease in the event of a loss). I am not sure how the ratings of the other players should be affected, as it's entirely possible that the replacement player may be much better than the one he replaced. Perhaps some kind of "good guy Greg" policy where the enemy team can no longer lose rating if they lose and possibly gain some for allowing it. Obviously, this mechanic would only be allowed in a non-serious ladder format, i.e. public matchmaking when you are paired up with strangers.

As this subgenre extends into more and more varying gameplay types, I'd really like to see this mechanic be tested. It's kind of a strange concept as these games tend to be considered at their core RTS games, which have never had join-match-in-progress, but this genre takes the RTS elements and pulls them much closer to the arena deathmatch style, which has alwyas had the join-match-in-progress mechanic.

I understand the complexities that these games bring to the mechanic of joining matches in progress, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. For example, and what inspired me to think about this design, Super Monday Night Combat is in the works which is going to be a DotA-style shooter that should be much more welcoming to this kind of option. Really, I'd just like to see it tried - as an avid player in this genre and clocking in far too many hours with DotA classic and Heroes of Newerth, I can't emphasize how many games have been ruined by leavers. The problem is certainly alleviated to a great extent with the leaver protection, but that just means in place of an empty player slot, you have an angry (or AFK) person on your team half of the time. There are a lot of times when it would have been great to just swap that guy out for someone fresh.

I know it's a strange reference to make here, but this feature has sort of already seen a rough implementation in the World of Warcraft dungeon finder. With it, you queue anonymously and get paired up with 4 other total strangers. Of course, in this game, you are merely fighting NPCs, but the same amount of aggravation can occur (more, even) if people don't do their job correctly. And if a group member isn't working out for you, you can kick him and get a replacement easily. It really avoids a lot of the rage and aggravation and streamlines things much more, and I'd love to see it tested in the "hero arena" genre.

As noted prior, I still think APB is a really great game, and the developers pulled off some awesome things. Heck, I even forgot to mention some of the stuff, like the fact the game has a built in music sequencer. They basically made damned-near standalone ready apps for the game itself. Maybe this was part of the reason it blew a huge budget and failed, who knows. The core gameplay was solid though, and it's a damned shame that the future of the game is probably bleak or nonexistent.

In other unrelated news, Consoul is one of the most incredible indie shorts I've seen in a while (make sure to turn annotations off when watching from that link). Ever since watching it last night, and subsequently staying up until about 2:30am, staring blankly at the ceiling; I've been basically just stuck in thought about life and random shit. Listening to Pogo at work isn't helping to settle the wandering mind. I have to wonder if we're in a second renaissance as far as art goes, I have never really sat back and appreciated how large a wealth of art and culture the internet is - but wow, are we ever lucky to have this stuff at our fingertips.

Anyway, here's the anonymous ex-RTW employee's post, re-posted here to preserve its existence ... (Read More)

What a fucking mess. I’m ex-RTW.

An outcome like this wasn’t desired by anyone at RTW, but game development is a weird business. A game can play poorly right up until only a few months before release, for a variety of reasons – Crackdown was awful right up until a month or two before it came out (some would say awful afterwards, too, but I’m trying to make a point). Knowing this, it can blind you to a game’s imperfections – or lead you to think it’s going to come right by release. You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your ass off, not well able to critically assess your own product. APB itself only really came together technically relatively late in its development cycle (and it still obviously has problems), leaving too little time for content production and polish, and lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics (shooting / driving). It’s not that the team was unaware of these huge issues, but a million little things conspire to prevent you from being able to do anything about them. It can seem difficult to comprehend, it certainly was for me before entering the industry – ‘How did those idiots get X wrong in game Y?’. No team sets out to ship something anything less than perfection, but projects can evolve in ways that no one seems to be in total control of. All that said, it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge. I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this. All the issues that had driven me nuts about it were still there – the driving was poor (server-authoritative with no apparent client prediction, ergo horrendously lag intolerant), combat impact-less, and I found the performance of the game sub-par on what was a high-spec dev machine.

But the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better. A large scale team based shooter, in big urban environments, with unprecedented customisation and some really cool, original features. The problem was that management looked at the revenue they wanted to generate and priced accordingly, failing to realise (or care) that there are literally a dozen top quality, subscription free team based shooters. Many of which, now, have progression and persistence of some sort – for free. The game would have been immeasurably better received it had simply been a boxed product, with paid-for in-game items, IMO. This may not have been possible, given what was spent on the game and the running costs, but the market is tough. You can’t simply charge what you feel like earning and hope the paying public will agree with your judgement of value. Many of us within RTW were extremely nervous at APB’s prospects long before launch, and with good reason, as it turns out.

They also failed spectacularly to manage expectations. When Dave J spoke out saying there would ‘not be a standard subscription model’, he unwittingly set expectations at ‘free to play’. When it’s announced that we’re essentially pay-per-hour, we get absolutely killed in the press, somewhat understandably. The game also announced far too early (though it kept being delayed), and had little to show but customisation for what seemed like years, largely because internally we (correctly) judged it to be the stand out part of the game. But we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release. We also went to beta far too early, wiser heads were ignored when it was pointed out that any kind of beta, even very early beta, might as well be public as far as generating word of mouth. The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board. We also made the error of not releasing fixes externally to many of the issues early beta testers were picking up, keeping the fixes on internal builds, I presume to lessen the load on QA. This simply meant that to early beta testers, it looked as though we were never bothering to fix the issues they found, when in fact, they were being fixed, simply being deployed back into beta very infrequently. This lesson was eventually learnt, but only after we’d pissed off a large number of early-adopters.

The sheer time spent and money it took to make APB is really a product of fairly directionless creative leadership. Certainly Dave J has great, strong, ambitious ideas for his games. But he’s a big believer in letting the details emerge along the way, rather than being planned out beyond even a rudimentary form. For most of the lifetime of APB, he was also CEO of the whole company, as well as Creative Director. His full attention was not there until it late in the day. This has ramifications for how long his projects run – many years, on average – and the associated cost. This, in turn, means that the business model options were constrained, conspiring to place APB in a really difficult position, commercially. Ultimately, it’s this pairing of a subscription model cost with free to play game play that really did for the game. And many of us saw it coming a mile off. I must admit I’m dismayed about the scale of the failure, however. Many of us thought APB might do OK at retail and sell a few hundred thousand, though struggle on ongoing revenue, and gradually carve a niche. But it absolutely tanked at retail I believe (though I’m not privvy to figures) I think due to the critical mauling it received. It never made the top 20 of the all format UK chart. It’s scraping along the bottom of the PC-only chart, a situation I’m assuming is replicated in its major markets. And being at the bottom of the PC-only chart is not where you want to be as a AAA budget game. God knows what the budget was, but when you account for the 150-odd staff and all the launch hardware and support, it was in the tens of millions of dollars.

MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. It was going great guns over the last year or so, coming on leaps and bounds, impressing everyone who saw it. MyWorld might as well have been a different company – there was very little staff overlap on the two projects, they worked under entirely different production methodologies, and because we were not the next in line for release we received very little attention from the execs (which was a good thing, to be honest). We knew that time was limited, and tried to encourage management to go the ‘google-style beta route – release a limited, but polished core feature set early, and iterate. What happens to it from here on out is not clear, but without the people who wrote it, the code isn’t worth a damn, so I can’t see the project being picked up. Management tried to get a publisher onboard to fund continued development, but the time scales involved meant that was always unlikely, despite some considerable interest from potential partners. God knows what will happen to it now the team are gone. Probably nothing. Years of my life were poured into that project, but it was a blast to make, and at least it was made public so I can point and say, “I helped make that”.

RTW tried something bold, and fucked it up. It tried to make what amounted to two MMOs at once, as well as self-publish. I have to hand it to Dave J. He’s ballsy. But in the end, we couldn’t do it, and I think the whole company will go under sooner rather than later. It’s a shame, too, as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller. But that’s the price of failure, and we certainly failed. No excuses, really. We were well funded, hired some great engineers, designers and artists, and great QA guys. Ultimately, the senior management team must take responsibility. I think they had far too much focus on the company’s ‘strategic direction’ and not enough on day-to-day execution, which was where it really matters. And I think a huge part of the blame lies with Dave J, though I can’t emphasize enough how nice a man he is personally; ultimately APB has torpedoed the company, and it failed largely under his creative leadership. It has other issues (technical, for instance), but the design and the business plan are largely down to him and the board, and they are what have failed so irrevocably for the rest of us.

ExRTW

Anyway, it becomes hard to write about how the genre is dying because developers keep making horrible decisions and nothing is changing. Negativity sucks. So I want to write about this instead: APB is awesome.

APB, or All Points Bulletin, is being developed by Scotland based developer Realtime Worlds. New-comers to the MMO industry, working on a project that had been lost in limbo and rumored to be canceled in the past, it's hard to think that anything good could come of this ill-fated title some years later. However, RTW has really pulled together and created something extremely impressive.

In the simplest of gamer translations, APB is more or less an online version of Grand Theft Auto. Players choose to play as either a criminal or an enforcer and proceed to partake in cops & robbers shenanigans as the game pits them against one another in small packs amidst a large section of city. The way in which the game pushes either faction of players towards one another is two-fold. For one, either faction can receive missions from their contacts. These missions are pretty basic: criminals go set buildings on fire, enforcers investigate crime scenes. Most missions in this game basically boil down to going to an objective location and either using an item, dropping an item off, or holding a point. When players enter missions, the other faction will randomly receive chances to try and stop whatever they're doing, which pits the players in a mission against one another and lets them slaughter each other with a variety of ballistic and explosive weapons.

The second way of players engaging one another stems from what are called "open world crimes": criminals can break into storefronts and grab loot, mug pedestrians or simply cause chaos, all of which can be done at any time, in any place. If an enforcer "witnesses" a criminal in the act, and neither player are part of an active mission, the enforcer will have the option to begin a mission involving himself and the criminal regardless of the criminals say so. And yes, this system really does lead to enforcers going out on patrol and looking for criminals, without the game forcibly telling you to do so.

Ram raiding a storefront: a sophisticated crime that can only be pulled off by the brightest of criminal masterminds.

This second system is really interesting to me not only because it literally turns into a game of cops and robbers - which is awesome in it's own right, but it also shows that APB isn't afraid to disregard the players consent. If I were to hear about a system like this without first playing the game, I would have been completely unsurprised if I had seen the enforcer having to ask the criminal if it's OK for him, as a cop, to engage in combat with the criminal. The criminal could then tweak his mustache, adjust his monocle and with a gentlemanly bow be on his merry way. Fortunately, APB is not so gentle, and I was pleasantly surprised with what I did see. Being tagged for an open world crime will toss you in a mission instantly, with no warning, and most of the time with the enforcer behind you ready and waiting with a pair of handcuffs. Or a shotgun.

Daily leaderboards tie into the game via rewards and bragging rights.

This isn't the only way in which the game tears down the foam padding that newer MMOs have spoiled people with, betraying a players sense of safety while they're in what are aptly named the action districts. At any time there can be numerous players roaming the map with bounties on their head. After you get to a certain level of notoriety, the game announces to the entire area that a bounty has been placed on your head. Everyone, enforcer and criminal alike, is now free to kill you. The best part? You are now free to kill everyone. Yes, the guy standing at a vending machine trying to decide what outfit he is going to wear today is cannon fodder. A group of people discussing Lady Gaga's genitals on the sidewalk via the games area-based VoIP can freely be run over by a bountied player in a garbage truck, honking his horn and screaming like a lunatic the entire time. Even better, the game rewards players for going on long kill streaks by again announcing your manly feats to the zone and awarding you extra money per kill. If you manage to get the best kill streak and top the daily leaderboard, you even get a prize sent to you in the in-game mail. And of course, since you do have a bounty on your head, after all - the player who finally ends your rampage will get a nice chunk of change.

Carnage in the Streets

With all this mayhem going on, it might sound a little too chaotic. However, the districts are designed with the 100 player limit per instance in mind and - while disconcerting to think about in comparison to the massive numbers a traditional MMO server holds - this is perfect much a perfect fit. A small enough amount to generate a sort of whimsical "single serving community" of common friends and foes within an instance for the duration of your play session, but also plenty of people to get a steady stream of missions and never have a dull moment.

The district level design is of particular interest, especially being a level designer myself. Like GTA games, APB is set in big city districts and basically lets the player roam free and do as they please. However, every last alleyway and parking garage is crafted with exquisite care as the game can choose nearly anything to be a location for a mission. With this in mind, APB appears more like a series of shooter game levels tied together by roads, and the missions reflect this. In an FPS game, you would play a round on a certain map, then the scoreboard would appear and everyone would load into a new map. In APB, it feels very much the same - only the "loading new map" process is simply getting in a vehicle and driving down the road to the next objective. The thoughtful placement of the mission locations ensures that each area usually has at least a handful of entryways and exits, and plenty of varying ground to get on and cover to get behind. Along with a clever effective range system, this allows for a ton of different play styles and ensures that shotgun users and snipers alike can generally feel useful regardless of where they are in the map; but there is certainly room for planning and strategy.

Character customization allows for in-depth control including body modificaton, tattoos, and multiple clothing layers.

Perhaps the thing that has generated the most press regarding APB, and what will invariably continue to do so for a long time to come, is the customization system in the game. In what has been a fairly competitive title to claim in the MMO market - who has the better and more in-depth character customization, APB has just abruptly ended the contest for at least a couple of years. The extent that the detail of character customization APB goes into is simply ludicrous. When creating your character, you can only choose body measurements and colors. However, upon entering the social district, a whole new world opens up to you via clothing (which can be applied in realistic-feeling layers), tattoos, vehicle decals, and especially: the symbol designer.

The symbol designer is more or less a light vector editing program. You are given a certain number of shapes to work with out of a large list of basic and more complex unlockable shapes. You can apply various modifiers to these shapes, such as layer order, gradients, outlines, and even masks. Any veteran photoshopper knows the power of masks, and it certainly marks how intricate the APB symbol designer is. Even during my short time in beta I had already seen people create custom clothing and sell it for tons of cash, and turn around and buy a new car or weapon. People have created uncanny images of popular characters and memes. The editor is also very simple to use and I was creating detailed symbols using dozens of shapes in a matter of minutes.

Items and symbols can be sold on the in-game marketplace.

And of course along with the symbols are plenty of places to put them. As well as tattoos on your skin, imagery on your clothing and decals on your cars, your symbols can also be used as your graffiti. Around the districts are various billboards. As mentioned previously, there are leaderboards in-game for players or clans who got the most kills, stole the most cars, or other various objectives. Being top ranked for one of these categories will display your graffiti symbol on the associated billboard for everyone to see. And with the, er, creativity of the denizens of the internet, this makes for an interesting feature. A particularly amusing thought what with the latest innovations of the gold selling community is that, at least in this game, they would have to work for their advertising!

APB is a refreshing breathe of air. While not truly an "MMO" in the traditional sense, I find that even the more basic elements of the game are designed and implemented extremely well and make for a really fun and engaging shooter. The fast-paced arcade feel combined with the terrific mission system pretty much ensures no dull moments are had, and racing around the huge districts from mission to mission guarantees a new change of scenery at every turn. I especially look forward to seeing what is in store for the future of this title, as there are so many ways it can be taken. More cars, more equipment, new leaderboards for stuff like car stunts, minigames in the social district, new action districts with special rulesets like FFA - the possibilities are really endless with where APB can go, and it already has a rock solid gameplay foundation. I look forward to seeing where Realtime takes it, and being there for the ride.

I killed Ronald

Funnily enough, as I am opening the foil, Jes claims "there's going to be a vampire card in there and I want it". I laugh and say OK. There has certainly been some vampire-centric stuff in MTG before, but it's not really a common thing to see in the game. In addition, she has never played the game. Sure enough, there's a "Bloodhusk Ritualist" in the pack, a "vampire shaman" creature type which counts as both a shaman and a vampire due to the presence of the words in the text and would thereby be affected by abilities that target either type (told you I was a nerd).

I wonder when MTG will finally die out, and what will become of its players after it does? Every time I indulge in said tradition, I become more and more surprised to find the game still going strong; now that the CCG market is completely flooded with hundreds of games, almost all of them requiring a massive financial investment to play, it's a wonder that the original is still on shelves with that same old "Deckmaster" card backing.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.