Trembling Hand

The End of Hit Points

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:22:00 +0000

Abstractions are useful things. Particularly in simulations.

Imagine trying to simulate an F-16 turning at high G. The number of variables that contribute to the actual turn rate, speed and altitude of the plane are staggering. You have the thrust of the engine, the air passing over the wings, the friction caused by the plane ploughing through the air, the responsiveness of the control surfaces etc.

Then there's the detail in each one of these. Just looking at the wing, you have the sluggish boundary layer of air close to the surface of the wing. You have tiny vortices kicked up by imperfections in the wing, or even by deliberate notches in the leading edge. You have the wing loading - or how much mass is being held aloft by the lifting area of the wing. And so on.

So, it's a damn sight easier to abstract all these chaotic variables away in to a smaller number of more manageable variables. Lift, drag, loading, angle of attack etc. Your simulator of an F-16 turning under high G won't be as accurate as the real thing, but you can make it close enough. Particularly for gaming purposes.

This is the idea behind hit points. They made sense in Chainmail, because some units were tougher than others. Militia will drop to a barrage of sling stones faster than armoured knights. And hit points can simulate this phenomenon in a much simpler way than modelling the effects of clothing, armour, or the specific effects of a 50 gram stone striking a particular part of the anatomy.

Hit points were also useful in Dungeons and Dragons. We humans are of limited mathematical capability. Factoring in too many variables in pencil and paper game is not conducive to fun. A simple roll of a d6 to represent the blow of a mace, and deducting that many points from the recipient's hit points kept things moving along at a reasonable pace.

But then things got a little out of hand. In order to represent tougher enemies - things not often found on the battlefields of old like trolls and dragons - and to represent increases in capability as the adventurer went from novice to veteran, hit points started to spiral in to unrealistic levels. Now even a fragile-looking elf, with sufficient levels as a Fighter, could shrug off a might blow from a mace without even batting a highly manicured eyelash.

Then things got even more out of hand. With the jump to computers - which are not of limited mathematical capability - hit points remained. And by this point, the concept of combat as a war of attrition was so far in grained that we started to think of two individuals dealing withering blow after blow until one fell down to be normal.

It's not.

Especially when you take this over-abstracted paradigm and place it in the world of Star Trek. While it stretches plausibility for an individual to take more than one hit from a mace (although Conan was known to shrug them off, to some degree), it is utterly suspension of disbelief-breaking to weather several hits from a phaser.

I've seen phasers vaporise people with a single blast.

So why, oh why, does the upcoming Star Trek Online expect us to swallow a thoroughly outdated abstraction in its rendition of ground combat? Could Cryptic not imagine a better way of abstracting the notion of phaser combat than to employ the old stand-and-face battle of attrition?

It's well and truly time we moved on from the concept of hit points. They were passable for wargames and pencil and paper. But in computer games, it's time we reduced them to zero.

Fatal(e) Interface

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:22:00 +0000

Fatale, Tale of Tales' latest game/art/thing-that-makes-people-angry, is yet another gem. That's not to say it's perfect, just that it does something incredibly interesting, and it's worth taking note of what that is.

Here's the rundown (look away now if you want to approach the game naively). Fatale is a first-person adventure vignette based around the sad story of John the Baptist -- in particular, the part where he loses his head. It lasts around 20 minutes and is broken up into two acts and an epilogue. The first act has you waiting to be beheaded, the second has you floating around as a ghost, and the epilogue has you watching Salome bust some moves.

The art and style is classic Tale of Tales', though I think The Graveyard and The Path probably have more panache. But where Fatale is really interesting is in its approach to the user interface.

First, let me quote from the Readme.txt:

Part 1: In the Cistern
......................
Hold left mouse button, up cursor key or W key to walk forward.
Hold right mouse button, down cursor key or S key to walk backward.
Move mouse to turn while holding a mouse button.
Use left and right cursor keys or A and D keys to move sideways.
Press Space bar to jump (a little bit).

Part 2: On the Terrace
......................
Left click to float forward.
Right click to float backward.
Hold Left and Right mouse buttons simultaneously to stop floating.
Hold left or right button to drag (this if difficult to control on purpose).
Hold middle mouse button to float continuously.
Left click on a light to enter a close-up view (only works after hovering over the light for a while).
Right click to exit the close-up view.
While left dragging, you can enter a close-up view by releasing when the cursor is over a light.

In close-up view: drag to turn.
In close-up view: use cursor keys to pan.
In close-up view: hold middle mouse button to zoom.

Press Space bar for Aureola.

On Aureola: click on collected item (with letters) to enter close-up view (only when holding Space bar).
On Aureola: click on empty slot to point the camera to a light (only when holding Space bar).
Note that you cannot interact with the Aureola when it comes up through hovering over a light or dragging.

Epilogue: In the Sunlight
.........................
Hold any mouse button to zoom.
Move mouse to turn.

What's going on here? Part 1 lasts a few minutes, part two a little bit more, the epilogue is over in no time, they're all played from a first-person perspective, but they have radically different interfaces.

And take a look at how they differ. In Part 1, you can't turn the mouse to look around unless you press the mouse button, but pressing the mouse button also moves you forward. Holding the right mouse button also lets you look around, but you'll be moving backwards at the same time. WASD works as you'd expect, and you can even jump with a spacebar. Part 2 is even messier -- everything is mouse controlled, using strange combinations of clicking and dragging, and there's no WASD, which would have been bloody helpful. And the epilogue isn't much of an interface at all.

As you'd expect, Fatale's schizophrenic interface, combined with other seemingly odd design decisions (which I won't spoil here) has been criticised. I think Lewis Denby from Resolution Magazine articulates it best when he says:

Because for now, Fatale feels like it never quite heads far enough in either direction. As a game, it’s too restrictive and unfriendly to feel solid. As a work of art, it’s not insightful or penetrable enough to leave a lasting impression. Instead, there’s always the sense that Fatale is running on an abundance of clever but incomplete ideas, and technological foundations that are constantly struggling to realise them.

What's perhaps most baffling, at least superficially, is that Fatale isn't breaking any new ground. At it's core, it's a first-person adventure game -- so why have they ditched one of the most successful, intuitive, and well established interfaces we've ever seen?

Well, the answer is that the game is doing something new.

Matters of Perspective

In my mind, understanding the interface is crucial to understanding what Fatale is doing. In Part 1, you play John the Baptist waiting to be beheaded, and by preventing you from looking around unless you're moving forward, you can't help but feel anxious and scared. You find yourself pacing around, staring at walls, and stumbling over boxes. Just looking up at the hole in the ceiling requires you to shuffle around, and when ominous words appear in front of you, you find yourself glancing quickly around and reeling backwards at the same time. Rather than being a limitation, or somehow broken, the odd interface can actually connect you to John.

In Part 2, things change again. You're floating around, unable to grasp anything, constantly pushing yourself to and fro to interact with objects. You're like one of Salome's scarves, and it's fitting that aside from the lights, these are the only things you can influence. Indeed, I've not counted how many scarves are littered around the place, but you may find that you are one of Salome's scarves, rather than John's spirit.

Lastly, the epilogue. It's different again -- hell, you can move the mouse to look around -- but you can't move your body, and your field of view is limited to what's in front of you. Presumably, this puts you in the perspective of Herod while he watches Salome dance (a dance that would eventually lead to John's death) but given what you've just been through, the effect is much more abrasive than it would have been if the scene were a prologue. Again, the change in interface adds to the experience.

There are other little nuggets in Fatale that others will occupy themselves with. Why does Salome have an iPod? Who or what is igniting the lights? But to me, Fatale's most intriguing element is its use of an intentionally disruptive interface to connect you to its story, rather than push you away.

Small Worlds (And Why I Don't Like MMORPGs)

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:22:00 +0000

Quick, go play this now! I'm going to make a point, which you'll only understand after you've played it. Just one or two levels. I'll wait.

Back? Ok, here we go. There's more exploration, surprise, and wonder in a single level of David Shute's Small Worlds than there are in every MMORPG I've played in the past five years.

MMORPGs have the potential to be all that and more, but they aren't. They make me chase numbers I don't care about, dazzle me with skill trees, power sets and trinkets that just divorce me from my character, and make me do the same thing over and over, hunting-and-pecking at the ground, hoping something interesting might turn up -- and something interesting will turn up, but only at a rate calculated to keep my subscription fee dribbling into the coin slot. I find them ugly, demeaning, undignifed and... well, I'll stop there. I have a lot of thoughts on MMORPGs and their debasement of players, but that's another post.

This post is about how MMORPGs can learn something from a tiny, high concept platform game. Small Worlds uses a radically simple concept: it lures you into unveiling a world -- and the story it contains -- using nothing to encourage you but the sheer joy of unveiling the world. This isn't just a case of me being high on Bartle's 'Explorer' ranking or being a 'Seeker-Survivor'. How a player moves its character through (or creates) a story is fundamental to any game that has a story and a character, and Small Worlds is a game that understands this better than most.

Do Any Games Have Good Voice Acting?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:15:00 +0000

Syp makes an interesting argument in favour of voice acting in games, including MMOs. Makes me wonder, what games are there that have actually used voice acting effectively?

I can think of a few:

Max Payne: the cut scenes were eerie and added to the atmosphere and pathos of the hero
Thief: the illustrated cut scenes were brilliant, and the voice of Garret really gave character to your, well, character
Morrowind: the NPC voices ("die, fetch!") helped reinforce the RPG aspect of the game

Any others?

Return to Hyboria: Day 5

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:29:00 +0000

Well, it didn't last long...

Maybe AoC is just the bloodbath that PvPers want - at least, the ones who haven't migrated over to Darkfall. But I'm not a PvPer. And in terms of PvE... well, it just didn't excite me terribly much.

I didn't even get out of Tortage before the mindless slaughter got just a bit too repetitive, and the foibles of the system got the best of me. Dying because you make a mistake is one thing. Dying because mobs spawn around you, or they're standing by the door as you zone, but you're at half health before you can respond, that's just weak.

I do love the environments (although interiors, like the Underhalls are a bit bland). I love the music. And that's it. I'm struggling to think of any other features that really impressed me.

The combo system is great on paper, but the execution somehow makes combos a repetitive chore instead of a bonus flourish of whirling swords and floaty damage text. And little things, like facing affecting whether you hit or miss, turned out have fatal consequences for my Ranger (which I switched to after dabbling with the Barbarian). If I start a combo on a mob at range and it runs towards me and happens to step to the right, then my combo finisher misses. Not that there's any clear visual indication that this'll happen. Nor is there an easy way to adjust your aim, at least that I could discern.

And I'm also getting a bit tired of face-to-face slogging it out until someone falls down. Of all the leftovers from the Chainmail, this has to be the most banal, yet the most pervasive. It has to go.

I really want to like AoC. I can see how it appeals to some. But it just isn't the moody, tense, visceral game I was hoping it would be. It's really just a slightly-more-sophisticated button mashing MMO wearing revealing armour.

Next stop: Fallen Earth...

To Explode Things Where No-one Has Exploded Things Before

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:39:00 +0000

As Syp has said, nice to see Cryptic trying to simplify its voluminous future history on the lead up to Star Trek Online.

But, Cryptic should be cautious as to what message it's projecting about the Star Trek universe, and the game itself.

When I think of Star Trek, certainly phasers and photon torpedoes feature prominently. But so, too, does exploring the far reaches of space, coming across bizarre stellar anomalies, confronting strange new life forms, and solving seemingly intractable mysteries.

If STO is just Starfleet Command IV with added stand-and-face phaser combat until someone falls down or explodes, I don't know if it's the game for me.

Makes me wonder who Cryptic is targetting the game at. There are surely more than enough Trek enthusiasts who don Vulcan ears alone to keep your average MMO knee deep in latinum. So why are they letting STO become assimilated into the ranks of other purely combat-based MMOs? Maybe because they don't know better. After all City of Heroes (which I love, BTW) was basically a spandex-based combat game. No detective work or problem solving going on there.

MMOs I Have Played - Pass It On

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:22:00 +0000

How many MMOs have you played? How long did you spend in each one? Which did you enjoy the most?

They're the questions I asked myself the other day, and it resulted in the interesting list below (remind me: why do I still play MMOs, when I haven't enjoyed any of the recent crop?). I figured I'd also throw it open to the MMO blogging community and ask what MMOs have you played?

If you post your list, I'll link to it here. Could be interesting to see who's played what, and how that's shaped the way we each perceive MMOs today.

MMO -- months played -- star rating out of five*

Ultima Online -- 2 -- **
Everquest -- 4 -- ***
Star Wars Galaxies -- 6 -- ****
Star Wars Galaxies (post NGE) -- 1 -- ***
World of Warcraft -- 15 -- ****
EVE -- 4 -- ***
Guild Wars -- 2 -- **
Dungeons and Dragons Online -- 2 -- **
Tabula Rasa -- 3 -- **
Seed -- 1 -- ***
Dungeon Runners -- 0.5 -- *
9Dragons -- 2 -- **
City of Heroes -- 31 -- *****
Lord of the Rings Online -- 4 -- ***
Runes of Magic -- 0.2 -- *
Age of Conan -- 1 -- **
Warhammer Online -- 3 -- **
Champions -- 1 -- **

*Star rating is an entirely subjective measure of how much you liked it at the time, not how much you'd enjoy playing it today.

Not-so Secret Society

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:51:00 +0000

And I quote:

Why not let your Facebook friends know what secret society you joined?

I dunno. Somehow defeats the purpose of being, you know, secret.

Return to Hyboria: Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:45:00 +0000

Robert E. Howard is one of my all-time favourite authors. Of all time! If you've never read any of his Conan stories, do yourself a favour and grab a compendium today.

So it was with bated anticipation that I longed for the experience of delving into unholy temples of long-forgotten gods to slay demons of madness and corrption in my very own virtual Hyboria.

Alas, a couple of weeks in the Age of Conan beta was enough to steer me well clear of the game come launch. Combat was fun, and the destiny quests were rich, but the rest of the world felt somehow thin. Which is an astounding thing to say given how beautiful the world looked - and sounded (best MMO soundtrack, hands down).

But the gameplay - and bugs - ultimately drove me away at the time. And many others to boot. Still, it's been nearly a year and a half since launch, and as I've just cancelled my subscription to Champions (a desperately disappointing thing in its own right), I figured I'd fire up AoC and see what's changed.

So, enter Styovahn, Aquilonian Barbarian (actually, in my mind - a Bossonian infiltrator and skirmisher).

I have to say, the game still looks as breathtaking as ever, and frame rates are substantially improved from beta. Tortage is still fun. Having dialogue makes a big difference to the NPCs. "Long days... pleasant nights." Who doesn't want to hear that after chatting to someone? (Although "GO now..." is a little less congenial.) However, as I've already done Tortage a few times in beta, I'm finding myself skipping the majority of the dialogue so I can expedite my escape from its invisible walls.

Combat is fun, although the whole Crippling Strike I, Crippling Strike II, Crippling Strike III thing is tiresome. Can't there just be one Crippling Strike that levels up with me?

In terms of the aforementioned thinness, the sensation is still there. Maybe it's just my emotional rejection of theme park MMOs these days - or any MMO where mobs just loiter (including non-social animals like crocodiles, which in Conan, totter about in large troupes) waiting to be slaughtered. And any MMO where I have to gather X of anything.

I originally pictured a Conan game as delving into the dank depths of rotting ruins that I stumbled across in some boundless jungle, confronting mad cultists, stealing a great gem and being chased out by a demented demon - just like the Howard stories. Combat would be fast, furious, improvised and lethal. Instead I have stand-and-face hack, hack, hack against one group of mobs after another. Sigh.

Still, I'm going to stick with it and see how far I get. I do like some aspects of the atmosphere. The combat is more interactive than most MMOs, if still a little clunky. The world does feel more polished. And, well, I fucking love Hyboria. That's gotta be worth something, right?

EVE Online: The Game You Want to Read About

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:37:00 +0000

Every time I fire it up, I just can't find the fun. But, by jingoes, does it make for some satisfying reading, particularly for someone fascinated by what goes on behind the veil. Even when they're talking about the difference between diffuse active and diffuse passive revenue streams, it gets me excited. And that's not to mention this little gem of gaming writing, which you may have already read (if not, read it!). Just wish the actual game was as fun...

Why Champions Will Never Be Balanced

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:45:00 +0000

Balance is a funny game. But it's not rocket science. Appropriately enough, it's game theory.

Eg: Rock > Scissors; Paper > Rock; Scissors > Paper. That's balance.

In the case of RPS, the best strategy is for each player to choose Rock, Scissors or Paper exactly 1/3 of the time each. That's the so-called 'Nash equilibrium' - which means if all players use this strategy, then none of them can do any better by changing their strategy.

You could also call the Nash equilibrium the Path of Least Resistance. Given enough time, you could expect players of the game to settle on the PoLR, for to do otherwise will put you at a disadvantage against other players following the PoLR.

This is not really a problem for the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, because the PoLR involves a mixed strategy employing all three moves in equal frequency. That's balanced, but crucially, it's also diverse.

However, Champions makes things harder for itself because players aren't forced to specialise. In most games, you're forced to choose Rock, Paper or Scissors, so you know there'll always be folk out there who can trounce you with ease. But you also know you can trounce others with equal ease. And it all comes out in the wash, with the population of players settling in to the three strategies in equal proportion.

But in Champions, you can effectively choose from any power in the game. You can choose Rock, Paper and Scissors - which means everyone else will effectively be forced to take all three as well in order to remain competitive. (Just call them Regeneration, Force Shield and Force Sheath, and you'll see what I'm saying.)

So instead of there being a Nash equilibrium involving multiple strategies in equal proportion, in Champions there'll likely always be just one optimised strategy that will give an edge over all others.

That's unbalanced and boring, because everyone gravitates towards the one strategy. Yawn.

The Tyranny of Balance

I don't know whether Champions can find a way out of this balancing trap. They can balance one power against another, but given the wide open nature of the game, players can simply choose a wide spectrum of powers that will give them the best odds against any other combination. They're already frantically scrabbling to find the Nash equilibrium, and once it's found, it won't take long for it to spread to other players.

One possible out would be for Cryptic to up the possible interactions - like this variation of RPS, which involves 25 different strategies. This might make it so it's impossible to choose a range of powers to cover every eventuality - so you must specialise to some degree.

But bugger me, it'd be a bastard to balance such a complex system. Might be possible, but given Cryptic's unsophisticated attempts at balancing to date, I don't have much confidence they'll navigate this game theory minefield.

Maybe the game industry can just call it a lesson learned: diversity and choice might look appealing on the surface, but get a few tens of thousands of gamers involved, and suddenly that diversity will evaporate to one FoTM PoLR, and you end up worse off than if you'd forced people to specialise in the first place.

Why You Get Booted From Left 4 Dead Versus Mode

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:06:00 +0000

Some smart folk at the University of Missouri have discovered something that women have known all along: men are more aggressive and competitive against strangers than they are against their friends. But more specifically, we now know it applies to computer games in generally the same way that it does to physical activities. It also explains why otherwise lovely people turn nasty while playing Left 4 Dead's Versus mode.

Here's a quick recap on the science of male aggression. When some animals are threatened, a couple of hormones -- testosterone and cortisol -- start pumping. This physically prepares them for a fight and helps clear their minds so they can focus on employing winning strategies. These two hormones kick in whenever territory/resources are being threatened, or when a challenger wants to have sex with the animal's mate/s. For you and I, things aren't so straightforward, as a 'challenge' depends on what you consider to be a threat to you (and your status), which might be different to what threatens me. It's why some men argue over trivial points over the dinner table, and others think drag racing is pretty cool.

And it all comes down to hormones. When you're being challenged, your hormones start pumping and, if you win, the levels stay high -- your body is saying "WHO ELSE WANTS SOME!?" -- while the opposite happens to the cowering losers -- they just want to go home.

Us and Them

But, this response is also influenced by what's called an ingroup-outgroup effect. Competing with people in your group doesn't produce the same effect as competing with strangers; in fact, the guy who beats his friends is likely to have lower testosterone levels than the losers. It makes evolutionary sense, of course -- you don't want to start hurting the other guys in your tribe because you need them.

And it's the same with computer games, apparently. This isn't such an obvious finding, as testosterone in particular is closely linked to physical activities (that is, activities that involve more than just pointing and clicking). But thanks to a series of canny experiments involving Unreal Tournament, we know for sure.

Here's the science-speak:

The simulated male–male coalitional competition during video game play elicited a testosterone challenge response, but only when this between-group tournament was played before the within-group tournament. Men did not show a challenge response during the within-group tournament, whether assessed in terms of their contribution to the overall points scored or their within-group rank. If anything, higher ranking men had a muted testosterone response.

If we take this theory and apply it to, say, Left 4 Dead, it can explain why the two modes -- Versus and Co-op -- might elicit such different responses. Specifically, Left 4 Dead's Versus mode would trigger our primal responses to out-group challenges, which can lead to more aggressive and competitive behaviours than a similar game of the (comparatively sedate) Co-op mode. In Versus mode, there's more at stake*, both teams are pumped up, everything's suddenly more intense, and if you don't cut it, you're gonna get kicked. You'll also feel more of a rush after a win and want to keep going; you'll be more disappointed with a loss; and you'll probably be generally more profane (that's just my own observation). Does that sound about right?

So the next time a bunch of potty mouthed Versus players kick you because you're not up to scratch, don't fret. They're just feeling threatened and insecure.

* I'm assuming that playing against an AI is less threatening than playing against humans -- in other words, that AI enemies don't trigger the same kind of out-group aggression as human enemies. This makes intuitive sense, but to my knowledge, this hasn't been tested. (We do know that people react differently to human opponents compared to AI in other ways, however.)

On Randomness

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:45:00 +0000

If you're at all interested in peering behind the veil of games, then you must read this wonderful account of randomness in game design by Greg Costikyan.

There's so much there to absorb already, but I'd like to add a few postscript notes on randomness:

There's an aspect of randomness that Costikyan touches on that I think it supremely important and often overlooked in gaming circles. Randomness in games (particularly simulations) doesn't necessarily simulate real randomness in the real world, it represents our ignorance of a deterministic world.

Whether there actually is true randomness in the super-quantum world doesn't really change anything - Chaos theory is entirely deterministic, for instance - but even so, many macro level events appear random simply because we're not privy to all the detail of the initial conditions of an event or the complex interactions that occur.

Consider a shell striking the side of a tank. You can live in an entirely deterministic world in which, with sufficient information prior to the shell striking the tank, you could predict the outcome of the strike with perfect precision. But garnering that information is entirely impractical. Thus, to the casual observer, it appears as though there's an element of unpredictability in whether the shell will penetrate the armour or not. And that unpredictability is modelled in games as a random element.

The take home message is this: in simulations, randomness can be a tool to represent our ignorance, not necessarily representing randomness in the world being simulated.

Long odds

There's another aspect of randomness in competitive games that is relevant: some sports that contain more randomness can be more enjoyable to fans (and perhaps to players).

I read this in Scientific American some years ago in a comparison between football (soccer) and basketball in terms of the randomness. The former is a low scoring game, while the latter is a high scoring game. As Costikyan mentions, if there's randomness at play, a higher number of random events will tend to gravitate towards the mean.

As a result, a single freak random event in basketball resulting in a score will often be quashed by the greater number of non-freak events. So a less skilled team is ultimately more likely to be defeated by a more skilled team.

However, in football, a single freak event that results in a goal can dramatically affect the outcome of the game. As a result, a less skilled team has a greater chance of defeating a more skilled team due to randomness.

The consequence of this is that fans of less skilled football teams have more incentive to actually turn up to games because there's a reasonable chance their team might win, even against a superior team. However, if you're a fan of a deadbeat basketball team, there's less point turning up to watch an almost inevitable defeat by a superior team.

That said, over the course of a season, these random events start to wash out even in football, meaning the more skilled teams will be more likely to meet in the grand final. But, as we all know, a single freak score in a grand final is not at all uncommon. Perhaps that's what makes a GF match so thrilling (if devastating to the losing team).

Why Roper has to Go

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:04:00 +0000

With the release of last night's patch, Bill Roper has unequivocally demonstrated himself to be incapable of managing an MMO, let alone during its critical and challenging launch period.

Champions Online is already in a perilous state - it's future hangs in the balance today - and only a dramatic turnaround in attitude and competence by the leadership at Cryptic will have any chance of saving it.

Roper should do as Age of Conan Producer and Game Director Gaute Godager did after the botched launch of AoC and fall on his sword, and pass his responsibilities on to someone more competent. We know Cryptic has people with experience on (the only) successful superhero MMO. Put one of them in charge. Roper has already brought about the downfall of one much-anticipated game, Hellgate London. Let's not allow him to ruin another.

Last night's patch is the catalyst for me posting this. It was a monumental patch that changed the dynamics of the game substantially yet again in the short lifetime of this game. Never have I seen so much change in such a short period of time - not even in a beta. And these changes are not just superficial, they're sweeping - sometimes nerfing entire powersets, or like the infamous launch-day patch, nerfing everyone. It's now to the point where when you choose a power, you're just not sure if it's going to be nerfed in to the ground in a future patch. Levelling should be an exciting experience, not one filled with trepidation.

Not only has this patch changed many aspects of the game, but it continues Cryptic's mystifying approach to 'balancing' powers. Certain powers have been known to be overpowered. But instead of reducing their effectiveness or increasing their cost to put them in line with other powers, Cryptic has nerfed them in to oblivion.

A few examples are Eye Beam (used to increase in damage the longer it was maintained - now does trivial damage and is a waste for such a great looking power); Heat Wave (used to regularly do good damage and include a hold the longer it was maintained - now has a 20 second timer making it situational at best and superseded by other damage or hold powers on shorter, or no, timers); Personal Force Field (used to absorb a decent amount of damage before dropping - now a few hits and it's gone, plus damage is reduced from the force field before being reduced by blocking); Mini Mines (used to do far too much damage - now do drastically less making ranged AoE powers more potent than a PBAoE power that requires you to be in harms way). I could go on, but the forums have plenty of description of the powers that are no longer competitive.

Then there are the bugs. This patch was released to the euphemistically-named Public Test Server for just a few days, two of them being a weekend. In that time, the community was vociferous with its feedback - particularly about a couple of bugs that had sneaked in. Yet the patch went live, bugs and all. Not only that, but the devs appeared entirely unaware that the bugs even existed, only acknowledging them later - and now requiring another patch to fix. Not only this, but the bug makes the game unplayable for many. Makes you wonder what the Public Test Server is actually for.

What you see here is a failure of leadership, not development. Someone is responsible for the overall direction of the game, for the strategy for dealing with overpowered powers, for listening to community feedback and responding, and ultimately signing off on the changes in each of these patches. And that's Roper.

People are already cancelling their subscriptions. Many want to continue but are only holding their breath to see how the game fares a month or so after launch. Reviews are already out, with a few influential ones being highly critical of the flakiness of the game. Cryptic doesn't have long to get its house in order, and each day Roper continues steering Champions is another day closer to going the way of Hellgate.

Theorycrafting in Plato's Cave

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:31:00 +0000

I love theorycrafting. And not only because I'm a high systematiser. But because it's an ideal (pun!) parallel for our lives inside Plato's Cave.

With theorycrafting, we're attempting to discern the underlying formulae that dictate the happenings of the virtual world around us: how many Strength points give what % damage bonus; what +crit chance we get from Dexterity, etc. But our access to those formulae is indirect - few games allow us to peer beneath the veil to see the noumenal world in all its splendour (although there are a few enlightened exceptions).

Instead we see the effects of those formulae, the shadows of them projected on to our screens. From these vague outlines we begin to see patterns: add 10 Constitution, gain 100 Health. But some times the patterns aren't readily apparent. There might be several formulae at work, or several variables interacting in a complex way. Or the world might have a built in element of randomness.

In the end, the programme to figure out all the formulae that underlie the virtual world might be in vain. Some formulae might be buried so deep that the effects are so confounded by the time we see them that there's no way to discern a pattern. Other times our information might be incomplete, such as in decimal points being truncated in the UI.

Quoth Rumsfeld:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

As a result, the community might uncover competing versions of the underlying formulae. Both might be plausible. Both might have some circumstances where they don't appear to hold. Both might have reasonable explanations for why this might be the case. And both might, ultimately, be wrong.

Theorycrafting is also a popular pursuit in the real world. Science goes about it by observing and measuring the projections to produce theories as to what the underlying formulae are. It then uses those theoretical formulae to make predictions about what other projections we might be able to observe. But if we go out and find that adding 10 Constitution one day gives us 110 Health, then that theory is called in to question.

Philosophers fill in the blanks that aren't covered by projections. They dwell beyond the pale of observation where competing theories spawn and wrestle. They ask: "if X is true, what else might be true?" And X needn't be true in order to ask that question.

They also supervise the methods of enquiry. The very logic that suggests if I have 50 Constitution, then I have +500 Health, can be abstracted to 1 Constitution = +10 Health is the product of philosophy.

Finally, philosophers make the leap from description to prescription. They can argue for or against using the theorycrafting for min/maxing. They might suggest that 1 Constitution should give more than +10 Health. Or that power X is imbalanced compared to power Y. In fact, the very virtue of 'balance' is an assumption that can be questioned by philosophers.

One huge advantage theorycrafters have over philosophers is that they know there are formulae to be found. For philosophers in the real world, to know such a thing - to know that there really is something outside the cave - would be a triumph unparalleled in the history of philosophy.

So next time you hear a philosopher say something ludicrous, remember - they're just trying to figure out what the Constitution/Health formula is, but out here in the real world, we don't have tooltips.

Champions: A Step Backwards from City of Heroes

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:22:00 +0000

Far from being the step forwards that many people (including myself) thought it would be, Champions Online is a step backwards from City of Heroes. At least when it comes to teaming.

That's not to say Champions is a bad game; it has a lot of appealing characteristics. But for some reason Cryptic made the decision to make the spiritual successor of City of Heroes in to Just Another WoW Clone (JAWC). And as a result, it's not as good - or unique - a game as it could have been for those who like to team.

Let me elaborate:

In virtually every part of City of Heroes, you're better off teaming than running it solo. Not only is the xp is better in a team, but knowing you're going to be teaming rather than soloing means you can afford to specialise and fulfil a specific role. This also meant that each of your dozens of alts (and, admit it, you had dozens - I know I did) could play entirely differently from each other, thus keeping the game experience novel.

The LFG tools were also well ahead of their time. The team UI was very well thought through. The missions would automatically scale to the team - and their chosen difficulty level. And most importantly of all, missions were automatically shared, with every team member getting xp and credit.

Now, Champions follows the textbook themepark model of WoW. Enter a new area - find all the exclamation marks - get the quests - go pummel x of these, collect z of those - return to contact - get next stage of the quest - etc ad nauseum.

And amongst all that is everyone other player, running around, pummelling the same mobs, collecting the same widgets. It really makes you feel pretty insignificant, no matter how many quest dialogues mention your saving the world.

Above all, it discourages teaming. First, the team interface isn't nearly as good as CoH's. Many quests can't be shared. XP/min is lower. And the missions don't scale to difficulty - in fact, the five-person limit to teams is arguably there because even three-person teams can inflict genocide on any nearby mobs.

You can't even examine other players to see whether they have complimentary power sets. Not that they will - because teaming is so rare, everyone naturally evolves into a self-sufficient soloist (something uniquely possible in Champions even more-so than CoH), with a bit of DPS, a defensive power and some healing - oh, and no team buffs, because they're a waste of a power slot.

It all becomes a race to grind out your missions - which is ironic, because mob xp is relatively low and quest xp high to prevent grinding. Yet, here we are. Grinding missions solo, with no-one to chat to, and there's so little content that the next solo tank-mage that I make will do it all again.

I know it's early days, and there are many gripes to be had with the fledgling MMO, but besides fixing grievous bugs and getting the power balance right, I hope Cryptic throws its energies into improving teaming. If it fails to do so, many of the old CoH diehards - many of whom were subscribers for three, four or five years running - will slowly fade away in the night to fight crime elsewhere.

The Importance of Patch Notes

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:18:00 +0000

I'm sure developers have many other things on their mind around launch day than scribbling together some patch notes. You know, like keeping the new guy away from the patch servers.

But scribble they should. Often and with fury.

For someone entering an MMO for the first time, the information processing requirements can be overwhelming - especially for an MMO as complex as Champions. There's the interface to learn, the geography, power sets, game mechanics, combat mechanics - and many decision to be made where a lack of information can be crippling down the track.

Add to that a deluge of patches - as is the norm for MMO releases these days - and the information bar, set high as it is, keeps moving. Not to mention the ever present spectre of a nerf of your favourite power - or the tantalising hope for a buff.

So players flock to patch notes. They feed us the precious nectar of information that helps us navigate the game world. And they give us a momentary glance behind the veil of development.

For this reason, compiling comprehensive, accurate and detail patch notes should be as much a part of the patching process as is rolling it out smoothly. Patch notes should go live as the patch is made available for download - not 12 or 24 hours later. They should provide an exhaustive account of changes, even ones that seem banal.

And they should offer reasons. Not justifications or technical mumbo-jumbo, but real reasons for the change: "X was reduced in effectiveness n% in these circumstances because it is intended to be balanced with Y and was out-performing it."

The excuse that a patch was rolled out before the individual responsible for the patch notes had a chance to post them is not good practice. If you're not putting the patch notes together when building the patch, then you're doing it wrong.

AI: More Than Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:33:00 +0000

Here's a lovely video:

See that Nvidia logo? It's no accident. The main processing unit on a contemporary graphics card (GPU) is a big fat parallel processor -- compared to the relatively serial-based CPU -- and can therefore do a truckload of calculations at once. In some ways, this is more like a human brain, and so it makes sense that GPUs would be of interest to researchers looking at artificial intelligence. Indeed, about five years ago I chatted to David Kirk, Nvidia's 'chief scientist', who seemed to lament the fact that the capabilities of Nvidia's graphics cards were used for... graphics. What it could be used for was making things intelligent, artificially-speaking.

But this video isn't about AI.

InstinctTech is using a GPU to mimic the group behaviour of 4000 relatively 'dumb' entities. It's flock AI writ large; a problem that doesn't need solving and, in gameplay terms, is mostly just a visual effect. What happens next? 8000 entities? 8 million?

That's not to diminish InstinctTech's work -- this is beautiful, technically impressive, and puts a nice oily sheen on Nvidia's well-defined biceps. But I'll be more impressed with a single, computer-native construct that passes the Turing test. Or just comes close. Or, hell, is marginally better than marines in the original Half-Life.

And it doesn't even need graphics.

Champions: Where's the Crime Fighting?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:34:00 +0000

I don't know about you, but when I think of superheroes, I think of crime fighting. Yet, in several days of Champions Online I've put a sum total of zero crims behind bars.

For goodness sake, even Superman foiled the odd bank robbery and saved the odd kitten (well, okay, I've saved one cat).

What I have vanquished includes: aliens; radioactive zombies; demons; mutant four-armed monsters... and I fully expect to see an orc horde fresh from Mordor (or Azeroth) round the next corner.

And if you weren't already feeling like you're playing WoW with a cape, the next content update will bring undead, werewolves and an ancient necromancer to battle!

Granted, my characters are still relatively low level and I haven't made it to Millennium City yet, but I have played several hours into the game with nary a wallet being stolen nearby.

But for Batman's sake, if this game is to appeal to my comic book fantasies, I need to prevent some actual crime in the first five minutes. Not 'crime' as in 'aliens and zombies are illegal around these parts' but muggings, bank robberies, or even the theft of a loose nuclear weapon. I'm here to save the city! I'll save the planet when I'm a bit stronger, thanks.

I can see why Cryptic has gone this route. They did crime with City of Heroes, and they did it well. I love how you would wander around town heading to your next mission only to hear some hapless citizen cry for help as a thug attempts to snatch her purse - makes you actually feel heroic to go out of your way to help them. CoH scaled nicely with level too. At low levels you battled street thugs, moving on to serious crime gangs, then to sinister international organisations and ultimately to trans-dimensional villain groups.

With Champions, you save the entire world from alien invaders in the tutorial. It's like they put the last mission first. That might appeal to some, but not to me.

I'd much rather the tutorial start with me patrolling the back streets and seedy alleys of the city, preventing petty crimes, perhaps getting wind of something bigger going on down town like a major bank robbery to foil. Perhaps that can give hints of bigger challenges to come: shady underworld organisations; nefarious plots to destroy the city; the calling card of an actual supervillain.

The decision to start us off feeling like top-tier heroes, working alongside the likes of Defender and Ironclad - two of the chief heroes in Millennium City - during the tutorial is a mistake. It sets us up as powerful, famous and capable when we're none of these things, and won't be for many dozens of hours of gameplay yet.

I don't know if this error can be repaired. I think it could with a bit of creative coding. Perhaps a new tutorial (because goodness knows the current one is too long - especially for a game so conducive to alts, forcing you to re-save the world over and over and over...). Perhaps a new starter zone in addition to Canada and the Desert. A new city zone with petty crime to foil. Man, I'm so there.

As for future expansions, the notion that an ancient necromancer would be something novel and suited to a superhero game is baffling. I sincerely hope future expansions are more super than fantastic.

Come on Cryptic. We know you have it in you. Now get to it. Make us feel like superheroes again.

Champions Day One: Super Nerf

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:27:00 +0000

Here, folks, is a cautionary tale of what not to do when launching a new MMO: nerf a majority of the key powers in the game without warning, without patch notes and without testing, all on day one.

Effectively this patch turned Superman into The Greatest American Hero.

Here is a list of changes compiled, not by the devs, but by vigilant forum goers. Highlights include:

All Offensive passives reduced in effectiveness by 66% (+115% -> +45%)
All Defensive passives defense reduced in effectiveness by 66% (24% -> 8%)
Overall quest experience dropped
Overall mob experience raised
'Henchman'-class mobs (the fodder) damage increased

One wonders why you'd spend weeks in closed and open beta only to drop a monumental game-changing patch the day you unleash the capes upon your virtual world, simultaneously pissing off all the beta testers (who happen to be vociferous forum goers) and perplexing all the new masks in town.

Add to that a crippling performance bug that sees a goodly number of players - possibly even a majority - experience frame rates between 10-20fps regardless of graphics settings, and you're really on a roll.

Respeccing Respecs

But it doesn't end there. One of the signature features of Champions was the vast customisability in terms of powers and builds. And one of the mechanisms that made this customisability possible was the respec system - for some reason called 'retcon' in Champions.

In fact, in beta when you left the tutorial and first entered the Power House (where you can try-before-you-buy powers) at around level 5, you had the option of respeccing all your powers free before locking them in.

This was a Good Thing. Not only did it allow you to tweak your initial powers in a safe, amply padded environment - because you can't try-before-you-buy at character creation - but it enabled you to ditch your default second power given you by the character creator in favour of a spectrum of alternatives from your chosen framework. So, if I was an unarmed martial artist, I could give the heave-ho to the low damage kick with a minor defence buff and say hello to a more potent roundhouse that had the advantage of a root and making me feel a little more like Chuck.

But no. At the opening of the early start programme, the respec costs went through the roof. If you were lucky and hadn't levelled beyond 6 before you hit the Power House, and you sold all your accumulated gear, you might be able to afford to shed that second power. But if you lacked the dough, or were unlucky enough to level to 7, where the respec costs increase dramatically (ironically, I accidentally levelled to 7 while trying to kill a few mobs for drops to pay for my respec), then you were stuck with your second power for good.

Yeah, the devs acknowledged it was a bug. Yeah, they promised a patch to fix it. But for many of us head start players, we were forced to shelve characters until the respec prices were fixed. Even when the patch landed and the prices were dropped, they're still a hefty punch, meaning it'll be difficult, if not impossible, to respec more than a few powers at a time. Disappointing.

The Six Month Rule

Now, I know it's not strictly kosher for the thinking man's (and thinking woman's) gamer to sign up on Day One of any MMO. But I'm a sucker for superheroes, and I ~~have~~ had faith in Cryptic (although not that shifty Roper chap). So... I bought a six month subscription. But, I'm not going to enter my code and kick it into gear until I'm certain these teething problems are solved. And I don't think I'm alone.

As for the game itself... I'm still compiling my thoughts. I'll post a more comprehensive analysis in the next couple of days.

The King is Back

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:39:00 +0000

If there's one game that sits at the heart of Trembling Hand, it's Dan Bunten's M.U.L.E. It's equal parts psychology, strategy, economics, and game theory; it's the quintessential multiplayer game. That the game hasn't been matched in 25 years is inexplicable, but it looks like we'll get to play an official version again soon: Dan's daughter Melanie has secured the rights and is working on some remakes, including an iPhone version. Raph Koster has the skinny.

I implore you to check out the original in the meantime. World of M.U.L.E. seems to be a hub for MULErs, and you can find some strategy tips here. Or just dive into the online version here.

On Betas, Champions and Lifetime offers Lost

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:58:00 +0000

You gotta admit, Cryptic have balls. Imagine, not only offering a lifetime subscription to Champions Online where you have to sign on the dotted line before you've even seen the game, but then retracting the offer before the listed end date.

Add to that their 'open' beta, which wasn't technically open at all - thus inspiring perplexing headlines such as "Open beta fully opens for Champions Online".

As Dave mentioned to me, it's like Cryptic occupy some kind of strange Bizzaro world of their own. Oddly appropriate, methinks.

Update: And they're back! So Cryptic have common sense when it comes to PR too!

Open Beta, My Arse

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:19:00 +0000

I honestly don't know what irritates me more:

That open betas are now more of a marketing tool than an actual beta test;
That Cryptic can have the nerve to call this an 'open beta', when it's restricted to subscribers to that shockingly redundant relic of the 1990s internet, FilePlanet;
That this means one has to pay to ostensibly test a game or;
That much of the gaming press just lap it all up*.

Seriously, folks. We need to start demanding more - of developers, publishers and the gaming press. We need open betas to be actually open and actually betas. If an MMO wants to run a free trial, call it such. If they want to charge gullible folk for engaging in their beta testing, let them state that up front - and not call it 'open'.

And we need the gaming press to exercise a little due dilligence from time to time and actually call things as they are, not as the press release calls it.

*Credit where credit's due. BluesNews, ever the gaming news hound, got it right. And, as much as it shocks me to say, so did GameSpy - even declaring its relationship with FilePlanet. That's one gaming site I ceased frequenting long ago due to its fairly banal insights into PC and MMO gaming. Maybe I should give it some more credit and visit more often?...

Light Cycles

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:26:00 +0000

Got to disagree with Tom Chick on this (although, when have I ever agreed with him?).

Call me old fashioned, but this is deeply cool:

This, not so much:

TRON is still a wondrous representation of cyberspace, where the very laws of 'nature' are those that pertain to code, not particles. The low polygons, inertia-free movement and Gauraud shading were all essential to that vision. Making it more 'real' makes it more intuitive, but making it unreal was what originally made it unique.

Why Does it Need to be Massive?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:47:00 +0000

MMOs, they're all the rage with the kids, but how important, really, is the 'massive' in MMO? Not so much these days.

For those who solo - which appears to be a goodly proportion of MMO-ers - the 'massive' doesn't really mean squat. Give them the same world, the same quests, and run it offline, and they'd scarcely know the difference. Heck, call it Oblivion. Oh, there's the odd player economy/auction house and crafting, sure, but these features aren't the core features they once were, if upcoming games are anything to go by.

If you're partial to a bit of group questing, the 'massive' means a bit more - but not really that much more. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest the average number of players in a party/group/team across most well-known MMOs is somewhere around three or four. The median is probably even less - perhaps two or three. That's not so massive (although I'd love to know the true numbers).

What about pick-up-groups? Where are you to find your ad hoc teammates if not in-world? Well, any 'massive' lobby can replace that feature and then drop you in to your own private world. Heck, the 'massive' part of City of Heroes is pretty much a bloody big lobby for finding teams to run the instanced missions.

Even if you're part of a guild and regularly run through content with them, that's not necessarily 'massive'. You could have a small shard with only a couple of hundred players in it - including all your guild mates - and besides the aforementioned player economy and crafted items, you'd hardly tell it was different from a 10,000 pop server.

Player housing, cities, politics? Nicely 'massive', but again, not proving popular in many of the new wave of MMOs.

Ah, what about PvP? Surely you need a 'massive' population to provide you with fodder? Not necessarily. Steam is 'massive'. Team Fortress 2 isn't. But TF2 can handle a similar number of combatants as many instanced MMO battlefields. Heck, Warhammer Online was often a bloody big lobby for scenarios.

RvR? Ahhh. Now we have something worthy of the title 'massive'. But what proportion of MMO-ers are into open RvR? I'd wager it's not the drawcard for the majority. Besides, you could easily have a strategic RvR map with individual 'non-massive' ('tiny'?) instanced battles, and you'd be pretty close to existing RvR in many ways.

Not So Massive

Massive used to mean something. Back in the days of Ultima Online, something new was afoot. Multiplayer games had been around for a while, but UO was a new kind of thing (well, not that new if you were into MUDs).

UO, and the first generation of MMOs, like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies, were paragons of 'massive'. Their signature features were remotely hosted persistant sandbox worlds and the idea was that players would populate and shape the outcome of these worlds. This is why crafting was such a big deal, even if it's become a bit of a pale mockery today. Then came the theme park, and many of the sandbox features fell out of favour - and with them, much of what was essential to the 'massive' in MMO.

Today's MMOs are still 'massive', but they could easily be 'tiny' and many people would either never notice, or not complain. When it comes to future MMOs, the 'massive' is even less important.

MMOs in years to come could move even further away from the 'massive' - and such a move might even be a Good Thing. Sure, 'massive' will continue to appeal to some, and I hearily endorse a pluralism of games catering to a broad spectrum of tastes. But I caution current MMO enthusiasts about clinging to the 'massive' for the sake of an acronym.

Consider a game with a 'massive' lobby where you do your shopping, train up your character and find your team - or even survey the strategic map. Then you launch in to a 'tiny' instanced encounter that caters to your current fancy. It could be a PvE mission, a PvP battlefield or an RvR engagement etc. Such a game wouldn't be lumbered with the hosting burdens of a 'massive' game, and it could better tailor content - and difficulty - to the teams as they enter the world. It could even include more randomised content, so you don't get situations where you know precisely where the mission objective is or the spawn points are. Kind of like Left4Dead. Furthermore, it could more easily cater for the large proportion of solo players by scaling to their needs. I call it an MTMO (Massively Tiny Multiplayer Online).

Would such a game be that much different from an MMO? What would it lack that you crave from current MMOs?