Tutorials, Please

If I could write the Laws of Game Design, rule number one would be that you have to have a good tutorial before you can even think about letting anyone touch your game. Regardless of how well everything else has been developed, if you don't have a tutorial, you don't have a game.

Recently, I downloaded the beta for Mechwarrior Online, and not so recently I tried to play Dota 2. Neither has a tutorial, and, unsurprisingly, both are incredibly hard to jump into. Their mechanics are extremely complicated; Mechwarrior strives for realism (well, as much realism can be achieved in a game about giant robots), with intricate details like heat sink placement having important effects on performance, while Dota 2 carries over all of the mechanics from the original, many of which exist due to limitations of the original engine. They need a great deal of explanation before the player can grasp even the basics, and they provide none at all.

(An aside: the justification I received for both games was that they were in beta, so it was okay that they didn't have a full tutorial yet. I view that on the same level as claiming beta status means you don't have to have controls.)

League of Legends has an excellent tutorial. It teaches the essentials for successfully playing the game, and it also teaches some of the lingo and etiquette. The abbreviations for the names of lanes, the terminology used for calling out events, all explained in the tutorial. It's not perfect, but it's one of the closest I've ever seen.

The perfect tutorial is, without question, Portal. At least 80% of the game is tutorial, explaining the mechanics of portals and pushing players to find new and clever uses for them. It's paced so that just as the player learns a new skill, they're forced to use that skill in a way that introduces new skills. Every designer should be required to play Portal before designing anything.

Wow, this was kind of an angry blog. I'm really passionate about teaching players through gameplay, and so many games do it so wrong. Next time will be more pleasant, I promise.

Games I Love: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

When it comes to the Legend of Zelda series, most fans say their favorite is one of three: A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, or Wind Waker. I do like all three; heck, I've never played a Zelda game that I didn't like (disclaimer - I've never played the CDi abominations).

But my favorite is still Majora's Mask. It's arguably the dark horse of the series (aside from aforesaid CDi disgraces and Zelda II); it didn't include Ganon, or the Triforce, or even Zelda, outside of a small flashback. There's no Master Sword, no Hyrule... outside of keeping Link as the playable character, it almost doesn't seem like a Zelda game at all. But it still keeps the proper feel of a Zelda game, and it has its own flavor and flow that distinguishes it from the rest.

One of the elements of Majora's Mask that makes it strange from the perspective of the rest of the series is its dungeon count: it only has four. Considering it comes on the heels of Ocarina of Time, which had eight (not including mini-dungeons like the Ice Cavern or Ganon's Tower), this would seem like a travesty. And yet it works for a very unique reason - the overworld works as a series of dungeons as well. In order to enter the Woodfall Temple, the player has to explore a number of interesting locations, solve puzzles, and obtain items in the same fashion as the dungeons of a normal Zelda.

The areas of the overworld often have as much or more personality than other Zelda dungeons. Ikana
Canyon, the area that leads to the fourth dungeon, is my favorite section of any Zelda game. Ocarina of Time's overworld segments had charm, but they can't compete with those from Majora's Mask. I'd attribute this to the emphasis on character that MM had over any other game.

Majora's Mask is also easily the darkest of any Zelda title. While Zelda games have always had dark elements to them - in Ocarina, Ganondorf conquers the entire world and turns it into a desolate wasteland - none have had quite the desperation that MM does. It manages to combine hard-hitting writing, soulful music, and bleak visuals into a world that not only tells you that it's on the brink of collapse, it shoves it in your face. One sidequest, in which star-crossed lovers Anju and Kafei are cursed and must be brought back together, has a mournful quality few other games have managed to accomplish. Another, in which a girl is abducted by ghost-like aliens and has her mind broken, shows the player exactly what will happen if they fail.

I'm not sure that I would call Majora's Mask the best in the series. It certainly has its problems - the dungeons aren't quite as strong as those from other titles, some of the sidequests are incredibly obtuse unless you use a guide - but it still sticks with me stronger than any of the others.

Riot and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

When designing the GreatForge RPG system, on two different occasions that I can remember (and probably a few that I can't), we ran into enormous tangles of problems so bad that we had to scrap everything and start over. A system would throw out an issue. We'd try to correct that, and a new problem would pop up, and that solution would show two more problems, and we'd figure out that the system itself had to be taken out. That would unravel the systems that relied on it, and we'd end up tossing the whole thing and started over. We had the luxury of doing that, because we were purely a hobby group, doing this because we loved doing it.

In economics, the sunk cost fallacy (also known in game theory as the Concorde fallacy) is (roughly paraphrased) the impulse to continue down a dead-end path for fear of losing the resources already sunk into it. You can't just drop it all; you put too much time and money into this to just waste it by starting over. Maybe, if you sink more into it, you can salvage it all. But it just digs you deeper. You've thrown good money after bad.

Sometimes, this is unavoidable. The ones signing your paycheck aren't going to be happy if you tell them that you're throwing away the past few months of work. It's easy to understand why they might see it as throwing away those months of money (it isn't, really; time spent screwing up is time spent learning what does and doesn't work, but that's a whole different discussion). But it doesn't mean that nothing can get thrown away.

Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, is not shy about throwing out bad ideas. The champion Evelynn hinged on a binary stealth mechanic; either her opponents could see her and she had no fun, or they couldn't and they had no fun. Riot removed her from the rotation, and then completely redesigned her. She kept the theme of an assassin who could sneak around, but stealth stopped being an integral part of her kit and turned into a nice bonus on top of her burst damage.

With their big tournament over, they're starting a new Season and shaking up everything. Items that were too bad or too good have been reworked or trashed. Masteries have been completely redone, radically changing how certain character types play. The Support role is now more dynamic and exciting, with new items and sources of gold.

I've always liked Riot for their open communication and dedication to quality and detail. This just makes me like them even more.

The sun never sets on Praetoria

On November 30, 2012, City of Heroes, my favorite MMO and among favorite games period, was shut down. It was an upsetting day, for quite a few reasons. The game that had pushed me through college, the game that had led to me meeting my friends and eventually forming GreatForge Studios, the game that had inspired me to become a game designer was gone. The developers at Paragon Studios, who were some of the most talented, most friendly, and most openly communicative I had ever seen, were scattered.

But possibly the most dismaying is that future designers will have lost one of the best object lessons in game design they could have had.

City of Heroes pioneered several brilliant ideas in the MMO industry, primarily due to its focus on playability. Sidekicking, and its upgrade to Super Sidekicking, made teaming between players of different levels easy. Travel powers and other travel methods made traversing the city easy. The Mission Architect let players create their own stories and share them with the world.

Those are the most obvious things that made City of Heroes stand out, but it's the little things that I'll miss most. Thanks to fantastic animations and sound effects, powers had a weight to them that most MMO combat doesn't seem to grasp. Every power, even the wimpiest of blasts, felt like had impact. With the comprehensive toolkits spread around, every archetype was useful while none was necessary. No Tanker on your team? The Controller's lockdown potential and the Defender's debuff capabilities can keep the team safe. No Blaster to nuke mobs? Everybody can contribute damage to the team.

I won't be able to point out City of Heroes and all of its successes and flaws to the generation of game designers, and that's what saddens me the most.

The Importance of Balance

One of my two favorite game genres is the RPG. No other games offer the same level of customization and attention to story. Unfortunately, I find that far too many of them aren't very well balanced. On many of the message boards I frequent, I love to discuss this, and often I get the same disheartening response:

"Why does it have to be balanced? The AI isn't going to complain."

For a while, I didn't have a response to this. Of course games have to be balanced; that's what makes them good. The more I thought about it, the less sense the question made. It was tantamount to asking why games have to have control schemes that are usable - otherwise, you have a bad game.

It wasn't until we were facing down the deadline for the GreatForge system that I found an answer. We had a system called the Perk Grid; every five levels, a player could choose to have more health, more Endurance (the fuel for their abilities), more Initiative (letting them act sooner in the turn order), or a chance to shake off a control effect or a debuff. This was a nightmare to balance; having more Endurance meant you could use your flashier, fun abilities more often. All having more Initiative did was slightly tweak the turn order, and it didn't matter if you rolled well enough anyway.

After much deliberation, we decided that it had to be removed. It just couldn't be salvaged in a satisfactory way. Scott, our beta tester and my devil's advocate, was upset about this. He liked the extra customization that the system added. I told him that we couldn't balance it properly, especially so close to the deadline. He asked why it had to be balanced. Wasn't the extra customization worth the imbalance? And that's when I found my answer.

Games have to balanced so that player choice matters.

An imbalanced game offers the Illusion of Choice. Informed players who are interested in getting maximum efficiency are always going to go after the option that gives them the best returns, making multiple playthroughs pointless. They are always going to build the same maximally efficient character, make the same maximally efficient choices, and have the same exact experience they did the last time. Players who don't have the same information or impulse for efficiency are essentially paying a "not min-maxing tax".

Some players explicitly want to be weaker for extra challenge. I have no problem allowing them to do that, but it should be a conscious choice. Players should make the game harder because they want to, not because I screwed up my design.

A balanced game means meaningful choices. Meaningful choices mean happy players. Happy players keep buying and playing my games, which means I get to keep doing what I love: balancing games.

No, but there's still a chance you could save me.

Woo! After two and a half years, the GreatForge RPG system is finally complete! Well, complete enough to enter open beta. There's still a ton of work I want to do on it - filling in pages of flavor text, adding systems that needed more time to percolate, writing sample campaigns - but it's finished enough that I'm comfortable showing it to the public.

That means I can get back to this blog! I can talk about all that I've learned from designing a tabletop game, along with other design thoughts I want to explore. So,

With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
 The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will four years before we rest.

Learning from Everywhere

I just returned from vacation in Orlando. My family and I visited Universal Studios, Universal Islands of Adventure, and Disney’s Magic Kingdom. As we walked throughout the parks and waited in line for rides, I couldn’t help but notice that theme parks have a lot of lessons that game designers can learn.

Both Disney and Universal spend considerable effort to ensure that every part of a ride works toward the overall experience. Placed throughout the queue area are television screens, posters, and animatronics to set up the story of the ride. Waiting in line for Universal Studios’ Jaws ride, you watch television interviews with the survivors of Amity, discussing the way they’ve coped with the trauma of a shark attack. Outside the ride, the park is set up to mimic Amity, complete with tacky shark souvenirs. At Disney, the path to the Haunted Mansion is littered with tombstones inscribed with cheesy jokes. The ride operators wear funeral attire and make terrible puns in somber tones. Once you get off Space Mountain, you take a walkway back to the entrance. The ceiling is covered in stars, there are alien landscapes built around the conveyor; the ride is over, but the experience isn’t.

Game designers need to remember that every part of a game should work towards enhancing the experience. The opening menu, the pause interface, everything needs to contribute towards the atmosphere the game is trying to achieve. I’ve played a number of games that shattered my immersion because the interface wasn’t as streamlined as the rest of the game, throwing the fantastic pacing down the toilet.

There’s more to establishing tone for a game than just the gameplay and the visuals. Game designers need to remember that they have lots of tools at their disposal, and they need to use all of them.