Devil's Advocate

Our group at Great Forge Studios is four people. When we need to make a decision - for instance, lately we've been discussing how to handle Endurance costs - the four of us sit down and debate until we find a solution that makes us all happy. As a result of over half a year of this, we've begun thinking alike. The proper psychological term is "groupthink".

Every Sunday night I go to a bar with my good friend Scott for karaoke. One night, I decided to bring some of my work with me. He was intrigued, and I showed him what I was trying to accomplish. At the time, it was mostly creative work - coming up with new powers to fill out powersets. He began tossing out ideas, and we debated them. Eventually, we had enough powers that I could bring them before the rest of the team for serious discussion.

One of the first powers he suggested was an attack for Fiery Aura. It was a toggle that hurt enemies and allies alike. When I brought it before my team, it was immediately shot down; they didn't want friendly fire. I asked for a reason, and they couldn't immediately give one. For the rest of the evening, we debated the merits of allowing or disallowing powers that could injure teammates. Eventually, we decided against friendly fire, but it showed me something important: we would never have had that discussion if Scott hadn't tossed out the idea. We thought so alike that the idea of friendly fire never occurred to us.

Every design team needs someone to question every decision made. Far too often, teams who work closely together fall into groupthink, and they take the group's assumptions as fact. Someone has to shake up that mentality and question the status quo.

In discussing Powerpoint presentations, Kathy Sierra said that every slide should to have to fight for its life. I use that mentality in game design - every idea should have explain why it has to be added in. If there isn't a compelling argument that the idea both provides something the game needs and provides something that no other idea can provide better, that idea gets scrapped. Similarly, if the team immediately shoots down an idea, I jump in and start arguing why we have to include it.

Without debate, there is no game design. A devil's advocate is the most important thing a team could have, and I'm glad I found one.

L.A. Noire and the Use of Graphics

On Tuesday, Rockstar Games (developers of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption) released their latest game, L.A. Noire. The game is a crime thriller set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. The player controls a newly-promoted detective as he investigates crimes in one of the city's most decadent periods. Most of the gameplay consists of investigating crime scenes and interrogating witnesses.

Rockstar's biggest success in L.A. Noire is their new MotionScan technology for capturing an actor's expressions. They use 32 cameras positioned around the actor to capture his face as he emotes, and they convert that into CG to use in the game. It allows for a depth of facial expression never before seen in the gaming industry. L.A. Noire was the first game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it received near-unanimous praise. It's absolutely breathtaking.

It's also one of the few examples of using better graphics to enhance gameplay rather than for the sake of having better graphics.

The power of modern gaming consoles and PCs means that games can achieve hyper-realistic graphical quality. Franchises like Uncharted have created experiences that could easily pass for Hollywood blockbusters. Unfortunately, this level of visual excellence is incredibly expensive. Games cost upwards of $50 million to make, and much of that goes to the art teams.

The problem with this is that generally the hyper-realistic graphics don't accomplish anything. Games have whiz-bang graphics purely for the sake of whiz-bang graphics. Most games that strive for realism would be equally enjoyable with half the graphical quality. Good gameplay can make up for weak graphics, but good graphics can't make up for weak gameplay.

That's why L.A Noire is so groundbreaking. The technology used to better display facial expressions is vital to the game; players need to watch characters for eye contact and facial ticks to know if the witness is lying or witholding information. I'm glad to see someone finally using their incredible graphics to improve the experience. And thinking back, it should have been obvious that if anyone would do this, it would be Rockstar.

Portal 2 and DLC

The talk of the week is Portal 2. It launched on Tuesday, and it's fantastic. Just like its predecessor, it is filled to the brim with brilliant dialogue, clever puzzles, and some of the best sound design in the industry. It's only April, and it is already a contender for Game of the Year.

It also launched with an in-game store, and the internet is ablaze with rage. User reviews on Metacritic are decrying Valve as the worst developers ever, and upset gamers are swearing that they'll never buy a Valve game again.

It's easy to see why the Portal 2 store is divisive. Everything on it is horribly overpriced - skins and animations for the co-op characters are several dollars apiece. The bundle containing everything costs 60-70% of the price of the game itself. Even the most devout of Valve fanatics (myself included) have to admit that it's a shameless cash-grab.

But it's not the worst thing ever created. It's not even the worst DLC (downloadable content) ever created.
Nothing on the store affects gameplay; it's either quirky gestures to amuse your co-op partner, or skins to make your robot look slightly different. If you ignore the store entirely, you don't miss a thing. The game doesn't stop having great writing or enjoyable puzzles just because you didn't buy the ability to make your robot dance.

"Day One DLC" comes much worse than this. EA loves to charge you extra for content that's already on the disc you bought. Activision has no qualms about charging $15 for five maps, three of which were on the previous game which you still own.

Yes, the Portal 2 store is dumb. But it's inoffensive, inconsequential, and insignificant. And really, as far as DLC that isn't story-related goes, that's all I can ask for.

Complexity vs Depth

One of the biggest confusions in game design is the difference between complexity and depth. If a game has depth, it allows for many different playstyles, strategies, and possibilities. A game with depth will always have something else to discover. Complexity, on the other hand, merely throws extra layers between the player and progress, and it doesn’t add anything.

As an example, chess is not particularly complex, but it has incredible depth. Anyone can pick up the basics of chess in an hour, but experts can practice for lifetimes and still find new strategies and avenues to explore.

Strategy games thrive on a balance between complexity and depth. The interactions between various unit types lays out the general strategy the player will follow, but there are enough variables that no two games will go exactly the same way.

Kingdom Hearts makes a good example of both complexity and depth. The combat system has a considerable amount of depth. While it’s possible to simply button-mash your way through, you miss out on a great deal of the intricacies of the system. Some enemies are weak to certain types of spells. Enemies telegraph their attacks, allowing for effective use of the dodge and guard abilities to prevent taking damage. Combining abilities with your party members allows for team-up attacks. It’s possible to play through the entire game multiple times and learn something new.

The Gummi Ship is nothing but complexity. In order to obtain parts for the ship, you need to collect crafting components and convert them into ship pieces. These components do nothing otherwise and there’s no other cost to crafting them, so they could just as easily have been replaced with the final pieces. Once you have the pieces, you have to fight with a clunky interface to assemble the ship. And at the end, it doesn’t matter, because the base ship model is competent enough to clear all the Gummi Ship sections anyway. The entire system adds nothing of value to the game.

My favorite rant subject on this topic is Baten Kaitos, a neglected RPG for the Gamecube. Baten Kaitos used a card battle system (which already adds a considerable amount of complexity). Every card had an element, and opposing elements canceled each other out. This meant that playing a fire card and then a water card would completely nullify everything the fire card accomplished. Because the cards you drew were picked randomly, this meant that pure chance could destroy any attempt at strategy you made. All it added to the game was frustration.

Properly executed depth allows the player to experiment with the game’s systems and rewards the player for that experimentation. When done right, depth adds considerably to a game’s lifespan, turning a good game to be played once into a game that lasts for ages.

Games I Love: Skies of Arcadia

I think it’s time for what will be a recurring feature here on Ask Me About Grim Fandango: I’m going to gush about games I love and why I love them.

 

My absolute favorite game of all time, bar none, is Skies of Arcadia. Originally released for the Dreamcast and later re-released for the Gamecube, Skies of Arcadia was an oddity. Final Fantasy VII arrived 3 years ago and brought about an era of darker, moodier RPGs. At the time, developers were trying to capitalize on the trend by making characters with tragic pasts and enough angst to choke an elephant.

Skies of Arcadia balked at that. The world of Arcadia is bright and cheery. The protagonists are unflinchingly optimistic. The music is upbeat, and even the poverty-stricken sections of the Evil Empire’s capital have life to them. Skies of Arcadia remembers something that far too many games forget – you’re supposed to be having fun, and it wants to have fun with you.

It’s certainly not perfect. Random battles happen far too often, even in the fixed remake. The combat isn’t as deep as it could be. The story is incredibly predictable, and some of the characters are horribly 2-dimensional.

But the game has its tone down perfectly. Like its hero, Skies of Arcadia understands that moping for more than a minute or two is obnoxious. It decides that rather than dwelling on the negative, it’s going to accentuate the positive. And its charm is infectious. It’s impossible to listen to the music swelling and see the protagonists grinning and not feel better yourself. And that’s why I love Skies of Arcadia.

A Case for Linearity

A growing trend I keep finding as I converse with other gamers is a belief that linearity in games is inherently bad – that being linear is automatically worse than being nonlinear. It’s particularly frustrating, particularly because I can’t have a reasonable argument about it. Whenever someone begins talking about linearity, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the developers are trying to dictate the way they play.

I’ve never been a big fan of nonlinear games; whenever a new sandbox game launches, I think that I haven’t given them a fair shake, I try it, and I end up disappointed. I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something, as the rest of the world goes absolutely nuts over the latest Grand Theft Auto, or Red Dead Redemption, or whatever it is this month. I really want to enjoy them as much as everyone else seems to, but I just don’t get the appeal. After some thought, I managed to pull together exactly why I dislike them.

When someone praises a game for being “nonlinear”, they mean that the game is a wide-open world that lets the player do anything they could possibly want! Huzzah! No restrictions, no obnoxious rules getting in the way. Just run around, shoot people, run them over, and go wild! Unfortunately, that seems to be the entire appeal. And while I can get behind that for a short time, it gets dull after about an hour. At that point, I start asking, “Okay, so now what?” And there usually isn’t a very good answer.

Nonlinearity also cripples the ability to tell a good story. When the player can decide to drop the plot to screw around for a few hours, the pacing gets thrown out the window. Giving the player so much control over the protagonist’s actions creates a massive mood dissonance. Niko Bellic of GTA IV talks in almost every cutscene about how he hates being forced to kill, and how the war was a terrible slaughterhouse, and then as soon as the player gets control, they can kick a guy out of his car and run over pedestrians like bowling pins.

Admittedly, part of my complaint comes from my emphasis on story and characterization. I adore games as a storytelling medium, so giving the player the ability to destroy the story being told rubs me the wrong way. But I’d rather the developers take away some of my options in order to tell a good story than give me complete freedom and nothing to do with it.

Illusion of Choice

One of the biggest issues I run into with far too many games is what I call the Illusion of Choice. When a game offers you the choice between two options that are terribly unequal, the choice might as well not exist. If I offer you the choice between 100 dollars and 100 yen, I haven't really given you a choice at all.

Lately, I've been making my way through Dragon Age: Origins, and I've been meeting this problem in spades. Your party in DA consists of four characters, each of which is one of three classes. Theoretically, you can choose any of the eight (nine, if you include the DLC) main characters to make up this party. In reality, you're going to need a Warrior who can take hits, and Alistair tends to be better than the other two; a Mage to do magic damage, and only Morrigan fits that bill; a Mage to heal and buff, and only Wynne can do that; and someone to do physical damage, which means the rest of the cast. The player character can be built to fill any of those slots, but it only frees you to take one other person. The game gives you the choice of eight, but at least two of those are all but required.

Bioshock suffers from a similar problem. While you have the choice of filling your slots with any plasmids you wish, one of them had better be Electro Bolt. It stuns enemies, it electrocutes anyone standing in water (and in Rapture, there are a lot of puddles), it opens doors, and it drops security drones better than anything else. On the other hand, slotting Cyclone Trap is a waste of a slot. It doesn't do enough damage or provide enough control to warrant filling one of your few plasmid slots with it. If you need to lay traps, you can draw enemies into puddles for Electro Bolt, or draw them into an oil slick and use Incinerate, or fire trap bolts from the crossbow.

Generally, Illusion of Choice tends to appear because the developers misjudged the usefulness of certain tactics or abilities. In Dragon Age, because mages can provide damage, control, and healing in ways that no other class can replicate, they become the best choice for party members. In Bioshock, Cyclone Trap doesn't provide anything that other plasmids or weapons can't do better.

The answer to avoiding the Illusion of Choice is to ensure that all options are equally useful. This tends to require a lot of analysis, as the more choices you have, the greater the chance that one will be more valuable than the others.

The alternative is to not allow choices at all. Please don't do that.