Summary

Description: An MMORPG set in a current-day world, albeit with magic and secret organizations.

Conveniences: Very customizable UI.

Annoyances: Memory issues even on low settings with 4+ gigs of RAM;  lack of clarity on how to actually perform certain actions via the cluttered interface.

Standouts: Great flavour text that accompanies all quests and setting descriptions.

Bits

• Much like Star Wars: The Old Republic, character creation is accompanied by optional videos that set the stage and give a bit of background info on each faction.

• One of TSW’s main marketing points is its focus on puzzle-based quests, and in-game browser to help the player solve these riddles. However, in practice they are quite obtuse, recalling the silly, overcomplicated, and illogical mysteries of The Da Vinci Code. The puzzles do help to add variety, but they’re not that frequent and the in-game browser is better suited to directly looking up their solutions rather than trying to piece together misspelled bits of Latin scripture.

• All major quests — of which only one can be “active” at a time — start off with an in-game cinematic. These are fully voiced and do a good job of world-building, but unfortunately their completion does not result in any permanent changes to the world itself.

• There are no classes in the game, and the skills can be mixed and matched as desired. It’s an interesting and liberating approach, although each section of each skill-path needs to be unlocked in a linear order, i.e., it’s impossible to get chaos skill #3 without first unlocking #1 and #2.
• “Decks” are specific combinations of skills that represent certain archetypes and help the player make progression choices. Unlocking all the skills in a deck also rewards the player with a unique costume.

• Travel between major areas is done via an underground world-tree whose individual branches represent unique, traversable paths. It’s a clever way of magically connecting the entire world, and a suitably modular system for introducing new locations.
• Crafting is done via a Minecraft-like interface where ingredients are physically placed on a grid in a rough representation of the desired item. Crafting in general plays a large part in the game as item-drops are relatively rare and many items are not easily purchasable. The crafting and disassembling is a bit clunky, though, as it involves various prerequisites that are not always clear.

• In addition to the global currency, factions hand out unique coins for completing quests that are then used to trade with their vendors.

• All equipable items consist of trinkets that only increase combat statistics such as critical hit damage — there are no traditional attributes such as strength, agility, etc., and the items don’t seem to be tied into any of the skills. Other than weapons, the gear also does not have a visual impact on the player’s avatar as that’s done by separately purchasing purely aesthetic clothing.

Extras

• MobyGames Entry
• The Secret World Wiki

While all these claims might be accurate to some extent, they’re high-level issues that no one can fix single-handedly. Instead of moping about them, I thought it might be a bit more constructive to offer some small, pragmatic advise. In a previous post I tried to do this with a certain localization issue, and now I’ll take a look an interface quirk common in many Japanese games: too many confirmation prompts.

As an example, continuing from a saved game in a typical modern title is fairly painless. Quite often a “Continue” option is the default selection on the title screen menu, and clicking it automatically loads the latest save file.

On the other hand, these are the steps required to resume my game of Resident Evil 5, one of the marquee current-gen titles developed in Japan:

1. Entering the title screen menu immediately brings up a pop-up asking me to “Wait a moment…” followed by a message stating that there’s no storage device selected. This is accompanied by a “Yes/No” prompt asking me if I’d like to select one.
2. Clicking “Yes” brings up the OS browser with the available options: hard-drive/memory card/the cloud. This requires me to scroll to my desired option and click it.
3. Once the storage device is selected, a “Storage Device Configured” message appears along with an “OK” prompt that needs to manually dismissed.
4. Following the previous prompt, a “Loading content…” message shows up and then a “Load successful.” message replaces it. This is accompanied by yet another “OK” prompt.
5. When the title screen menu finally appears, the “PLAY GAME” option is selected by default. Clicking it takes me to the play game menu.
6. On the play game menu, the “CONTINUE” option is selected by default. Clicking it takes me to an overview of the last save game.
7. The save game overview displays a date stamp, the selected character, and some other miscellaneous info. It is accompanied by an “OK/Back” prompt.
8. Clicking “OK” takes me to a network overview screen with various game options such as co-op settings and hit reactions. The default option is “START GAME”, and the screen is accompanied by an “OK/Back” prompt.
9. Clicking “OK” takes me to a loading screen that’s quickly replaced by the inventory screen. Here the default option is “Organize” and I need to scroll down and click “Ready” to proceed.
10. Clicking “Ready” brings up a confusingly labeled “Exit” confirmation with a “Yes/No” prompt. “Yes” is the default option, and clicking it finally loads my save game.

If it were only that easy.

1. The “Select a storage device?” screen shouldn’t be there. Instead, the game should automatically select a default storage device, or better yet, select all the available storage devices. If none are available, a warning message could be displayed on the title screen without requiring a separate modal popup.
2. The OS device-selection pop-up should only appear if the user chooses to manually change the current storage device.
3. The “Storage device configured.” message shouldn’t appear. There’s no point in flooding the user with text if everything went OK. These messages should only pop up if there are errors.
4. Same as above; there’s no need to display a ”Load successful.” message. The transition into the save state should make it obvious that the data was correctly retrieved.
5. If a saved game was found, the default options should be “Continue.” This option should immediately load the latest save game from the selected storage device. Optionally, the game could check all the available storage device and automatically load the latest save file in order to avoid any extra management on the player’s part.
6. The secondary play game menu isn’t necessary if the “Continue.” option loads the latest save game.
7. The save game overview should be removed as it provides non-vital information when trying to load the latest save game. Instead, this data should be presented in the load-game interface where the player browses through multiple save files. Optionally, it could also be shown on the loading screen itself.
8. The network settings screen should be removed as well since it provides non-vital options that are configured at the beginning of the campaign. There’s no pressing need to change these every time the game is loaded, and this functionality could still be provided via an in-game menu.
9. The inventory screen is also superfluous to loading a save game — the save data should already contain the proper equipment information. Presumably the screen is there so that the player can change their loadout following a game-over, but in that case the inventory-customization screen should only appear following the actual death. Alternatively it could also be accessible in-game from the save-checkpoint.
10. The “Ready” confirmation is horribly labeled as it’s an ambiguous descriptor. Is the player exiting the inventory screen, or the actual save game loading process (it’s the first one, but it always makes me stop and think)? The prompt itself is also unnecessary, especially after the nine preceding ones.

Two incessant prompts most Windows users should recognize.

Confirmations prompts in particular tend to be quite prevalent in Japanese titles. Of course these can be useful when it’s easy to hit the wrong button and the consequences of doing so are quite drastic, e.g., clicking the “close” button instead of the “maximize” button in a word processor after writing a lengthy, unsaved document. However, it’s rarely difficult to select the proper save-file in a game, and loading the incorrect one tends to waste only a short amount of time.

Despite this, Japanese developers seem paralysed with fear of the user accidentally selecting the wrong option. This only applies to UI-related interfaces, though; there’s no prompts for avoiding an accidental weapon-reload or putting a car into the wrong gear.

The convention also seems to be that “No” should be the default selection. I have no idea why this is the case, except to prevent the user from accidentally skipping through an important choice while blazing through a bunch pop-ups.

If that’s the assumption, then it speaks very poorly of the application flow as a whole. Perhaps the user wouldn’t be so quick to skip through these confirmations if there weren’t so many of them? And perhaps removing non-vital popups and prompts would provide a faster and sleeker way to get to the fun part of the game: the actual gameplay.

Have you ever played a game that you really liked, but certain parts of it disappointed you (for the record, I totally dig Tom Francis’ proposed ending to BioShock)?

Did the lack of knowledge pertaining to the developer’s budget/timeline/goals/etc., stop you from thinking “Why didn’t they do it *this* way?”

If you’re passionate about a particular title, then probably not. And why should it? As the end-user, you ultimately care about your own experience, and a game’s faults might seem all the more painful if seemingly obvious and feasible changes could have eliminated them.

For me, that game is Tokyo Jungle, and here’s what I think would have made it better:

Interface

Let’s start with the easy, somewhat less subjective field of UI. I don’t think anyone reading this enjoys manually scrolling through the thousands of words that make up a typical EULA (and sometimes studios don’t even want to write their own). The fact that Tokyo Jungle pops up a EULA every time you start the damn game is infuriating. It shouldn’t be there at all, really, especially since its only online component is a global leaderboard.

The leaderboard is not all that great either. It takes a very long time to load, and it’s retrieved whenever you finish playing Survival mode. Why not do it in a separate thread and let the user move on? Or at least only force this path if the player has gotten a new high score? What makes the delay even more frustrating is that it needs to be endured in order to register all the unlockables of the playthrough. Simply quitting a game does not record any of the collected items, story mode pieces, etc., which should be saved instantly.

Finally, the world map is quite useful, but also somewhat confusing. Its most zoomed-in level is quite small and doesn’t clearly indicate accessible areas. The location-labels are a bit misleading as well since they contain a bar that fills up and an icon inside the right edge of the bar. At first I thought the fill indicated my dominance of the area (how many spots I marked with my animal), while the number of icons represented the amount of food within its borders.

Turns out it’s actually the fill that reflects the quantity of available food, and the icon is just a label for the fill. To make this indicator more intuitive, the icon should be outside the bar on its left side, or alternatively a “food” caption should be displayed within the fill.

Overall Gameplay

Aside from the herbivores’ double-jump and inability to consume other animals, there’s not a lot of mechanical variety between the various types of fauna. Sure, there are statistical differences, but the gameplay is exactly the same. Expect to see crocodiles scaling buildings by jumping from one extruding air conditioner to another. Creating custom gameplay for each animal would’ve been a sizeable undertaking, though, so I’ll give Tokyo Jungle a grudging pass here.

What’s less excusable is the stealth mechanic. For something that’s presented as a large part of the game — especially for those peaceful herbivores — there’s no clear way of telling what is an animal’s zone of awareness. This is exasperated by the fact that many animals spot you while they’re off-screen, especially in lower-left and lower-right corners of the view window due to the perspective of the camera.

The minimap helps to spot these potential threats, but not while it rains, and it’s more of a band-aid solution anyway. A circular outline for each animal’s field of vision would’ve helped, or at least some arrows on the edges of the screen indicating potential dangers. A further aid would be displaying the exact threat-level of each animal, and possibly a countdown timer showing how much longer before it reverts to a neutral state.

Toxicity can also be problematic to detect. Hiding inside of buildings or underneath bridges doesn’t seem to help when it’s raining, and contaminated food is hard to detect due to the very subtle purple visual that can blend in with the background. Simple icon indicators similar to the alert exclamations could have easily removed this ambiguity.

Surival vs. Story

Despite the annoyances mentioned above, Tokyo Jungle’s biggest failing is in how it handles its Survival and Story modes.

Tokyo Jungle was originally a retail game, and it’s painfully obvious that it was modified to fit a price tag. Story mode — the main campaign — consists of 14 short missions, and each one needs to be individually unlocked by grinding it out in Survival mode.

I suppose this approach greatly extends the overall playtime, but it’s quite frustrating to progress through the narrative one small step at a time after jumping through some hoops in a completely separate game mode. This is doubly perplexing as unlocking the story missions often involves a certain knowledge of the game’s mechanics, but those same mechanics are then explained in the unlocked missions. The whole arrangement reeks of a production change that was implemented late into the game’s development.

The story missions could use a few more checkpoints as well, but they’re quite fun as they contain lots of silly and amusing sequences that slowly unravel the game’s mystery: what happened to all the humans? It’s a neat premise, and it shouldn’t be so heavily gated (especially if it was a questionable way to justify the price since the game was released as an inexpensive downloadable title outside of Japan).

Instead, Story mode should be featured first and foremost, and the animals played/fought during its missions should then get unlocked in Survival mode.

Survival mode itself is an even bigger mess.

Its main goal is to live for 100 years and complete various side missions to get as high a score as possible. In order to provide variety and ensure that players get different scores, Survival mode employs randomization and high-threat events/encounters common to roguelikes. The problem is, all these gameplay systems conflict with each other.

Hunger is greatly boosted in comparison to Story mode (it takes 90-120 seconds to die of starvation) and the missions are on a strict time limit. This means you are constantly on the run if you hope to get a high score, which also doubles as the currency for unlocking new animals. Completing the side missions awards statistical bonuses and unlocks new costumes as well, providing further incentives to rush through the game.

This approach completely invalidates the stealth mechanic, makes exploration of the cool urban environment impractical, and prevents the player from messing around with fun, emergent events such as battle royales of bears fighting chickens fighting giraffes. The random toxic rains and food shortages add further frustration as they can make some of the side missions virtually impossible to complete.

A better approach would’ve been to tone down the unreasonable hunger meter and remove any other time pressures. Next, the randomization could be more prevalent, starting off each playthrough in a different area with a different mission set. New objectives could come in as old ones are completed, and the resulting pace would let players get comfortable with the game and experiment with its most fun components.

If this led to seemingly infinite playtimes, the randomization could be skewed to provide a gradually increasing challenge. Better yet, the statistically-boosted animals of other players could enter the gameworld as AI-controlled bosses to help crown the real king of the hill. Finally, new animals and costumes not present in Story mode could still be used as prizes for playing through Survival mode.

Agree? Disagree? Have any other examples of a game where certain design choices seemed downright baffling? If so, feel free to leave a comment!

Summary

Description: Telltale’s episodic adventure set in Robert Kirkman’s famous zombie-apocalypse universe.

Conveniences: Mouse-overs display interaction-icons that can be selected using the mouse wheel and executed with a simple mouse click.

Annoyances: Invisible walls; bugs with save-game choices being carried over from episode to episode.

Standouts: A very well written and acted script that does a fantastic job of capturing the vibe of the comic books.

Bits

• Visual hotspots help point out interactive elements, but they can be turned off. What’s interesting is that they sometimes fade in as the mouse-cursor gets close to their specific location. This encourages the player to still walk around and explore, but eliminates pixel-hunting.

• The stylized, cell-shaded graphics serve the game well as all its characters clearly emote without looking too cartoonish.
• Scripted sequences consist of the protagonist walking, sprinting, and peaking from cover to get through dangerous situations. A nice addition is the screen turning a deeper and deeper red as the protagonist puts himself in danger, e.g., leaning up to spy on an idle zombie.

• Close-quarters set-pieces use unique camera angles and rely on QTEs, motions, and hotspot clicking to get through the encounter, e.g., stabbing a zombie in a specific body part multiple times.
• Some conversations require the player to quickly provide a response, but there’s very little time to read through all the possible choices (never mind consider their consequences). This works OK at building tension, but sometimes it’s used in fairly relaxed situations that don’t seem to warrant the time-limit. The options are also unique and don’t follow a pattern like they do in other games, e.g., the friendly, neutral, hostile, and special response types in Alpha Protocol, so there’s no aid provided to the player in parsing them.

• Whenever an action is taken by the player that affects the protagonist’s relationship with another character, a notification is displayed to help register its significance.
• At the end of each episode, a handful of choices are displayed along with the a percentage number that indicates how many other players made the same decision.

Extras

• MobyGames Entry
• The Walking Dead Wiki

Summary

Description: A typical JRPG with a strong emphasis on environmental puzzles.

Conveniences: An in-game encyclopedia is constantly referenced in conversations via underlined words. When tapped, these links open up entries in the top of the screen of the DS while leaving the action in the bottom largely uninterrupted.

Annoyances: Unskipable verbal diarrhea that’s only exasperated by animating emoticons.

Standouts: Fantastic variety and level design in numerous locations that rely on magic for puzzle-solving.

Bits

• The silent protagonist can utilize emoticon responses in dialogues. Although these are a bit confusing and don’t result in any unique events, they add some extra flavour to the conversations.

• The game’s first dungeon is an obstacle course that uses crude cutouts of the original games’ protagonist and villains. It’s a clever way of introducing newcomers to the mechanics and the lore of the game.

• Full-screen storybook sequences are initiated by using optional book items; these further flesh out past events.

• The Djinn system is quite convoluted, but it’s an interesting combination of Pokémon and Final Fantasy style summons. Equipped Djinn provide statistical upgrades as well as unique spells and can be summoned in battle. Summoning Djinn uses their special ability at no cost to MP, but it temporarily un-equips them and fills up an elemental pool. These elemental pools can then be used to summon creatures with increasingly more powerful abilities.
• Although the Djinn can be mixed-and-matched amongst the characters, the player is limited by the rule that all characters must have a similar amount of Djinn equipped at all times. The advantages of keeping all Djinn of a certain element type grouped together further detracts from experimentation.

• The environmental puzzles are well designed and integrated quite organically with the magic system as they rely on many of the same spells that are used in battle. This helps the gameworld feel like a consistent whole rather than a series standalone minigames.
• Many of the areas feature optional paths that hold great rewards (e.g., a sword that raises the attack attribute from 8 to 44) and encourage exploration.

• Although the maps are 3D, they’re superimposed over a grid that makes gauging distances much easier. This approach also forces a clear and unique limitation on magic as all spells can only affect objects on the same elevation level as the player.
• An in-game item can be used to give the player hints as to how to proceed by highlighting any objects or entities currently on screen that can respond to spells. Although this shows which spell should be used, it doesn’t instantly give away the solution to a map-wide puzzle. The mechanic also removes possible sources of confusion without breaking the fourth wall.

Extras

• MobyGames Entry
• Golden Sun Universe
• Golden Sun Adept’s Refuge

• What Kratos Taught Me About Combat Encounters – Some very practical tips on combat from one of God of War’s designers.
• Hotel Dusk: Invisible Causality – I never had a name for it, but the term “Invisible Causality” seems fairly appropriate when describing one of the more infuriating aspects common to adventure games.
• Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts – Narrow, Intimate, and Prospect spaces, and how such concepts relate to level design.

Not too long ago I praised The Witcher for a plethora of things it did really well. The sequel’s not bad either, but its minimap is absolutely horrible. The main problem is that it rotates with the camera, and the lack of compass directions also exasperates the issue.

Rotating minimaps are great for following a linear path, which is why GPS devices use this design. The user hardly ever needs to worry about whether they’re driving South or South-East, but they need to accurately follow the generated route. Consequently, it’s a lot easier if the path is always facing the same direction as the car, i.e., if the arrow on the screen is pointing right, they need to make a right hand turn.

However, if the map doesn’t rotate, then driving South with an arrow pointing right actually means making a left-hand turn. To avoid this confusion and unnecessary work with mentally rotating the map, the view of GPS devices is synched to match that of the car.

FPS titles also tend to benefit from rotating minimaps. Their levels are often small or just linear, and it’s very helpful for the player to be synced with the minimap view. The reason for this is that split-second decisions often need to be made based on the immediate surroundings.

For example, if the player is following a team-mate turning right but there’s an enemy hiding just around the left corner, it’s beneficial to instantly know which direction to face in order to counter the ambush. Since FPS games also inherently don’t possess a floating camera, it’s that much more advantageous to be aware of what’s lurking beyond the player’s view as there’s no other way to peek around the scenery.

Static minimaps, on the other hand, are much more suitable for games with large areas that need to be traversed multiple times.

In these titles, it’s important to familiarize oneself with the layout of the land in order to travel through it efficiently. Goals are often described with compass directions in mind, and landmarks are used to aid in the building of a mental map for the overall area.

If the minimap constantly swings around, not only does it keep changing the direction north is pointing, but it also forces the player to digest a radically different topography each time they glance at the minimap. A static view is superior to this as it facilitates the parsing and memorization of an area’s layout. This in turn allows the player plot their own paths and comfortably maneauver through the game’s environments.

Of course some players are only used to one approach or the other, in which case why not simply include both options?

• As Far As The Eye Can See – How optical illusions are employed in Skyrim to make the gameworld feel vast.
• The Secrets Of Enemy AI In Uncharted 2 – A comprehensive piece on Uncharted 2′s enemies and how their attributes and behaviours were designed and implemented.
• John Cleese on Creativity – YouTube video of John Cleese’s famous speech on fostering playfulness; quite relevant to videogame prototyping and development.

Summary

Description: A game about demolishing small city/rural areas so that a runaway nuke carrier doesn’t run into any obstacles and explode.

Conveniences: A ton of visual indicators that ensure the player is always aware of the level’s layout and goals.

Annoyances: The handling on some of the vehicles is extremely sensitive; camera controls are wonky.

Standouts: A silly yet intuitive excuse for causing lots of destruction with various types of machinery.

Bits

• Each regular stage begins with a fly-over of the area showing a rough path from the start of the level to its finish. The player can also pause the game at any time and move the camera around to get a better view of the surroundings.

• A unique arena is used to introduce each new vehicle. These levels do not contain a carrier but instead focus on destroying various infrastructure under a time limit.
• Every vehicle in the game has a unique function, e.g., the Ramdozer truck can plow straight through buildings and push explosives, the Ballista motorcycle is very quick and can fire a limited amount of missiles, the J-Bomb mech can fly and “butt-stomp” buildings, etc.

• Many levels require the player to utilize various vehicles and industrial machinery. This is necessary as some vehicles have limited ammunition and cannot possibly destroy all the necessary buildings. In other cases, it’s necessary to move trains or operate fork-lifts to properly clear a path for the carrier.
• Switching vehicles and exploring on foot is necessary to find hidden scientists that are tucked away from the main path.

• Grounded beacons function as collectibles, but they’re never picked up and removed from the playing field. Instead, they briefly flash when the player first moves close to them. This can result in a neat, cascading effect as multiple beacons light up in a row, but it’s actually difficult to tell whether a beacon has already been activated.
• Whenever the player gets close to a building that’s in the carrier’s path, arrows pop up and surround the location indicating that it should be destroyed. The colour of the arrows also changes based on the carrier’s proximity to the building, and an additional arrow is placed beside the minimap to indicate the next target.

Extras

• MobyGames Entry

Summary

Description: Top-down action game where firemen are tasked with combating a blaze inside an office building/factory.

Conveniences: Small fires serve as collision obstacles but don’t hurt the avatar; the AI companion is invincible, only attacks fires within the player’s vicinity, and generally stays out of the way.

Annoyances: Long and unskippable text pop-ups; camera doesn’t adjust to the player’s facing direction making it hard to look ahead.

Standouts: Lots of unique gameplay elements (albeit not implemented realistically) that stem from various fire-fighting concepts.

Bits

• The player’s water-cannon has unlimited ammo and can fire a close-range burst at the ground, or a focused, long-range stream into the air. This has various gameplay implications as the player must constantly switch between the two modes in order to properly deal with fire.

• Different types of fire not only cover the environments, but also serve as typical videogame enemies. They possess unique animations, movement patterns, HP values, high and/or low presence (that syncs with the water cannon), and even unique functionality such as spawning other fires or exploding upon death.
• As fires move across the ground, they permanently scorch the areas they touch.

• Each level contains a boss — an out-of-control, borderline-sentient fire monstrosity.
• The player’s goal is to simply progress from one room to the next; putting out fires and rescuing civilians is entirely optional. However, both tasks serve as risk-reward systems.

  Extinguishing fires is akin to obtaining collectibles, and the player’s end-level ranking is based on how many fires were put out. Locating helpless workers is also dangerous and time consuming, but it’s the only way to restore the player’s health.

• Scripted text pop-ups  appear periodically throughout the game and provide the driving narrative. The non-modal ones are particularly nice as they don’t pause the action.
• Each level has a time limit, but nothing seems to happen when it runs out. The only disadvantage is that at about the 85%-gone mark, the player’s health is drained to a sliver.

• Despite the whole game being taking place in just one building, there’s quite a bit of variety in the visuals and mechanics of the environments. Ventilators and conveyor belts affect the player’s movement; boilers, windows, and lamps burst under pressure; heat damage collapses floors and hanging lights; airducts and make-shift tunnels force provide alternative routes; blowback from enclosed infernos explodes out as doors are opened, etc.

  There’s even a section where the two firemen get to ride an elevated platform outside the building itself!

Extras

• MobyGames Entry
• Hardcore Gaming 101 Article