Here's an interesting article from Kotaku.
http://kotaku.com/358169/liveblogging-the-changing-face-of-casual-games
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Unless you work in the industry and ARE a game developer for a large company, don't even bother having a ****in' blog on the net.
Well, it looks like someone at least read the blog even if they didn't like it. Which is great. Well 2 people at least. I thought the anonymous comment was a blast and here's why.
The commenter seems to think that only a game designer working for EA or one of the other giants has any relevance when it comes to discussing design. I don't think I'm interested in getting into the gaming industry per se, though I have worked on games in the past. Formally my qualifications are in Usability, Design, UX, HCI, IA, PM and a few others. But formal qualifications aside, let's examine what a completely ridiculous assertion the commenter really made.
I thought of many examples of why, logically, their argument is laughable, which basically boils down to the following scenario.
The commenter seems to think that only a game designer working for EA or one of the other giants has any relevance when it comes to discussing design. I don't think I'm interested in getting into the gaming industry per se, though I have worked on games in the past. Formally my qualifications are in Usability, Design, UX, HCI, IA, PM and a few others. But formal qualifications aside, let's examine what a completely ridiculous assertion the commenter really made.
I thought of many examples of why, logically, their argument is laughable, which basically boils down to the following scenario.
Only the chef can determine whether your food tastes good.
I don't agree. In fact gamers should (and do) have a huge say in what is acceptable or not in a game, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say as the game player, my opinion of gameplay trumps what the developer thinks gameplay should be. End of story.
There are a lot of great game developers out there to be sure. Over a career (with a three year dev cycle on average) you are probably only going to be really involved with 10 games. If you are at a higher level maybe there will be 20 or even 30 that you can -really- make a huge impact with. If 5 of those are really good games, you'll be lucky.
Now as a player, I can polish of 10 games in a month. In fact, I've played more games in my life than is probably healthy. So in terms of experience, the player knows more about gaming in general, than someone who makes games for a living. It's extremely hard to be critical of your own work in the same way that you can be critical of others.
Most importantly, as a gamer, you know what you like.
I'm often surprised by the tenacity with which people defend bad gaming decisions. You can still like a game and find aspects of it annoying. Mass Effect was a good game in my opinion, but it was far from perfect. Almost anyone would agree that the UI in the inventory was bullocks.
You can criticize a game and still like it. But each game that is made, should by all rights be better than the last. All things being equal, playability/gameplay should not be an issue in most modern games yet we continue to see camera locking, context shifting, and lousy control or UI schemes ruin what might have been an otherwise enjoyable experience.
The fact of the matter is you could have an otherwise good game ruined by poor controls and a bad camera.
Look at jumping in Ultimate Ghosts & Goblins (UG&G). Jumping sucked in the very first original, but keeping the jumping scheme for the sake of "tradition" doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially considering just how much jumping there is to be done in the game. Switch the jumping scheme into Super Mario Brothers and think if it would have been as great a success as it was. Purists will argue that it it takes more skill, so it is better in UG&G, and is therefore superior to easier to use schemes.
But I can't stress this enough, difficulty in a game should not come from the control scheme (most gamers would agree Ace Combat is more fun than Flight Simulator for example) .
*For those who haven't played it, in Ghosts and Goblins you can only jump on an angle if you are
running in that direction, in fact when you first start playing it can be really hard to jump in any direction other than straight up.
There are a lot of great game developers out there to be sure. Over a career (with a three year dev cycle on average) you are probably only going to be really involved with 10 games. If you are at a higher level maybe there will be 20 or even 30 that you can -really- make a huge impact with. If 5 of those are really good games, you'll be lucky.
Now as a player, I can polish of 10 games in a month. In fact, I've played more games in my life than is probably healthy. So in terms of experience, the player knows more about gaming in general, than someone who makes games for a living. It's extremely hard to be critical of your own work in the same way that you can be critical of others.
Most importantly, as a gamer, you know what you like.
I'm often surprised by the tenacity with which people defend bad gaming decisions. You can still like a game and find aspects of it annoying. Mass Effect was a good game in my opinion, but it was far from perfect. Almost anyone would agree that the UI in the inventory was bullocks.
You can criticize a game and still like it. But each game that is made, should by all rights be better than the last. All things being equal, playability/gameplay should not be an issue in most modern games yet we continue to see camera locking, context shifting, and lousy control or UI schemes ruin what might have been an otherwise enjoyable experience.
The fact of the matter is you could have an otherwise good game ruined by poor controls and a bad camera.
Look at jumping in Ultimate Ghosts & Goblins (UG&G). Jumping sucked in the very first original, but keeping the jumping scheme for the sake of "tradition" doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially considering just how much jumping there is to be done in the game. Switch the jumping scheme into Super Mario Brothers and think if it would have been as great a success as it was. Purists will argue that it it takes more skill, so it is better in UG&G, and is therefore superior to easier to use schemes.
But I can't stress this enough, difficulty in a game should not come from the control scheme (most gamers would agree Ace Combat is more fun than Flight Simulator for example) .
*For those who haven't played it, in Ghosts and Goblins you can only jump on an angle if you are
running in that direction, in fact when you first start playing it can be really hard to jump in any direction other than straight up.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Where this blog is going
I think over time I'll be moving to a format which is a bit less negative and more constructive. To that end I'll work on posting some good design principles or heuristics in the future.
Maybe we could get to something like 100 commandments of game design. So the WTF#'s should become heuristics where I'll illustrate what the offending game has done, why it's bad, and what could potentially be done to fix it.
Future posts will also look at things that games have done well.
Maybe we could get to something like 100 commandments of game design. So the WTF#'s should become heuristics where I'll illustrate what the offending game has done, why it's bad, and what could potentially be done to fix it.
Future posts will also look at things that games have done well.
Turok the Terrible?
Gaming Pundits have been on the record saying, in recent months, that 2007 had such a glut of fine FPS games, that you would really need to stand out to make it big in 2008.
So far Turok has been selling like boobies despite being a mediorce FPS, with dreadful usability and playability issues. I'm not sure the FPS appetite can be easily sated despite middling reviews. I guess we'll see how Conflict: Denied Ops fares over the next few weeks.
So what has Turok done particularly wrong that makes it (for me anyway) the worst shooter of 2008, and to be fair, if it was released 5 years ago, the worst shooter of 2003. It hasn't really done anything new, and in many ways brings the genre back about 10 or 15 years.
WTF #1 : Control wrested away from the player, not returned to same point it was left off
So many games are guilty of this and it really drives me crazy. Usually we see a milder form of this in any Japanese made game where a level loads and we are forced to view a panorama of the whole thing before we can move. I was particularly dismayed to see it used every 3 seconds in the DMC 4 demo when 'yet another forcefield' popped up to block progress.
Turok brings this abuse to new heights. The cutscenes we are often forced to watch (Hitting Y on 360 controller skips some of them) takes control away from the player in the worst way possible.
When the cutscene is done the character is often in a totally different location and the camera has been set to a completely different perspective than where it was when we last had control. To top it all off, it does this when you are in a firefight surrounded by enemies.
WTF!?! This has to be the most annoying thing I have seen done in a game in a long time. A game should ease you into and out of cutscenes, and should never punish you for having to watch them by putting into a certain-death scenario after they end. Turok does this all the time, the worst instance is the Spider-Tank mission.
Proposed Solution: Ease the player into and out of cutscenes. NEVER insert cutscenes into the middle of a firefight in an FPS. Always return the player to a place where they have some context. It's no good getting stunned, cutscened and dumped into a killing field, it may be quasi realistic, but in a bad way.
WTF #2 : One way, set-piece play throughout
Ok, for the purposes of playability and design there are times you will need to use set pieces and one-way areas in a game. I think most gamers would accept the need for them. But they should be used sparingly.
The entirety of Turok is one-way gates (the infamous drop-off) that funnel you from set-piece to set-piece.
The result ends up that you have to play through the game the way the designers intend you to, and any elements of stealth, strategy or cunning are erased by the fact the the next wave of enemies will spawn in the same places (often behind you) at the same point in the game, no matter what. This propels you through the game in a meat grinder fashion, and would be (almost) excusable if the plot or gameplay somehow made up for the aggravation.
Proposed Solution: Give us the illusion of choice and free will, even if you have no intention of giving it to us.
Who cares is I can backtrack through an empty level? It's better than always getting trapped by a cliff and knowing the second I get trapped, another set piece will kick off.
WTF #3 : No brightness for you
Turok brings us back to the dark ages (literally) where you can't control the in-game gamma. As a result you are forced to constantly fight in pitch black conditions and ruin your eyes trying to make out what is going on on your 42" HDTV.
I can't really make out why Turok and his merry band of space marines haven't the iq to find a pair of NVG goggles or at the least a bloody flashlight.
Like so many usability problems in games, it is particularly frustrating because it makes no sense whatsoever.
Proposed Solution: Add a gamma adjustment to options screen. Find a way to preserve the technology behind the lightbulb so future generations of space faring marines have some way to see when it is dark.
WTF #4 : Button mashing is the most viable strategy
In an FPS this is never good, in Turok it's brutal. The all-too-frequent dino's are really annoying. They move really fast as you would expect, and in the jungle you have little chance of surviving against them. Ironically the shotgun is grossly underpowered even at extremely close ranges which makes it absolutely useless. The other gun-type-weapons, by and large are useless as well the bow which is generally too slow when you fighting 2 or more raptors at once (and you usually are). The most effective way to fight the raptors in these situations is to save your ammo, bring out the knife, and run around randomly hitting the attack button until they are all dead.
Proposed solution: If the most effective way to beat a part your FPS is to run around randomly hitting the attack button then that whole concept of gameplay probably isn't any fun and should be removed from the game.
The dinos really do nothing for the story or the gameplay, so why have them? The T-Rex battle might have been fun if it didn't involve hiding in a little cave and blasting the thing silly until I ran out of ammo.
WTF #3 : Difficulty arising more from playability than actual game difficulty
If you regularly crank up the difficulty on any FPS on your first run through, you will find Turok constantly annoying in the 'hard' mode and I couldn't imagine stomaching the 'hardest' mode at all.
When you first load up Turok on hard you might be surprised at just how many bullets he can take before going down. To say that player health is generous is an understatement... that is until you start playing through the game and all the other problems crop up.
In Turok it's often too dark to see where you are or what you're shooting at, especially when you're up to your eyeballs in the reeds and surrounded by extremely fast dinos and angry mercenaries. Add the camera problems and the fact the there is never anywhere to retreat to, and you end up with a craptastic experience.
Proposed Solution: Difficulty should come from AI, pacing, balancing and environment, not from controls, camera or stupid design choices around weapons and enemies. Basically if you need loads of health on 'hard' to have a chance at making it through the game there's a problem. Look to Halo 2 legendary difficulty for inspiration.
Summary:
Turok has loads of problems. I wouldn't recommend buying it, and I am still some hours away from finishing it. The only motivation I have for finishing this game is that I spent 60 bucks on it, and my only consolation is that I will soon trade it in for another game.
I'm trying to think of something positive to say about the experience, but I really can't think of anything. The bow is a great weapon, but having a nice modern compound bow takes a lot of the fun out of it. It like a really crappy, really quiet gun. In fact with the silencer the SMG does the same job without any of the drawbacks. The explosive arrows are ok, but rarely useful.
So there you have it. Turok could have been a decent game if they didn't make so many horrible choices in design.
So far Turok has been selling like boobies despite being a mediorce FPS, with dreadful usability and playability issues. I'm not sure the FPS appetite can be easily sated despite middling reviews. I guess we'll see how Conflict: Denied Ops fares over the next few weeks.
So what has Turok done particularly wrong that makes it (for me anyway) the worst shooter of 2008, and to be fair, if it was released 5 years ago, the worst shooter of 2003. It hasn't really done anything new, and in many ways brings the genre back about 10 or 15 years.
WTF #1 : Control wrested away from the player, not returned to same point it was left off
So many games are guilty of this and it really drives me crazy. Usually we see a milder form of this in any Japanese made game where a level loads and we are forced to view a panorama of the whole thing before we can move. I was particularly dismayed to see it used every 3 seconds in the DMC 4 demo when 'yet another forcefield' popped up to block progress.
Turok brings this abuse to new heights. The cutscenes we are often forced to watch (Hitting Y on 360 controller skips some of them) takes control away from the player in the worst way possible.
When the cutscene is done the character is often in a totally different location and the camera has been set to a completely different perspective than where it was when we last had control. To top it all off, it does this when you are in a firefight surrounded by enemies.
WTF!?! This has to be the most annoying thing I have seen done in a game in a long time. A game should ease you into and out of cutscenes, and should never punish you for having to watch them by putting into a certain-death scenario after they end. Turok does this all the time, the worst instance is the Spider-Tank mission.
Proposed Solution: Ease the player into and out of cutscenes. NEVER insert cutscenes into the middle of a firefight in an FPS. Always return the player to a place where they have some context. It's no good getting stunned, cutscened and dumped into a killing field, it may be quasi realistic, but in a bad way.
WTF #2 : One way, set-piece play throughout
Ok, for the purposes of playability and design there are times you will need to use set pieces and one-way areas in a game. I think most gamers would accept the need for them. But they should be used sparingly.
The entirety of Turok is one-way gates (the infamous drop-off) that funnel you from set-piece to set-piece.
The result ends up that you have to play through the game the way the designers intend you to, and any elements of stealth, strategy or cunning are erased by the fact the the next wave of enemies will spawn in the same places (often behind you) at the same point in the game, no matter what. This propels you through the game in a meat grinder fashion, and would be (almost) excusable if the plot or gameplay somehow made up for the aggravation.
Proposed Solution: Give us the illusion of choice and free will, even if you have no intention of giving it to us.
Who cares is I can backtrack through an empty level? It's better than always getting trapped by a cliff and knowing the second I get trapped, another set piece will kick off.
WTF #3 : No brightness for you
Turok brings us back to the dark ages (literally) where you can't control the in-game gamma. As a result you are forced to constantly fight in pitch black conditions and ruin your eyes trying to make out what is going on on your 42" HDTV.
I can't really make out why Turok and his merry band of space marines haven't the iq to find a pair of NVG goggles or at the least a bloody flashlight.
Like so many usability problems in games, it is particularly frustrating because it makes no sense whatsoever.
Proposed Solution: Add a gamma adjustment to options screen. Find a way to preserve the technology behind the lightbulb so future generations of space faring marines have some way to see when it is dark.
WTF #4 : Button mashing is the most viable strategy
In an FPS this is never good, in Turok it's brutal. The all-too-frequent dino's are really annoying. They move really fast as you would expect, and in the jungle you have little chance of surviving against them. Ironically the shotgun is grossly underpowered even at extremely close ranges which makes it absolutely useless. The other gun-type-weapons, by and large are useless as well the bow which is generally too slow when you fighting 2 or more raptors at once (and you usually are). The most effective way to fight the raptors in these situations is to save your ammo, bring out the knife, and run around randomly hitting the attack button until they are all dead.
Proposed solution: If the most effective way to beat a part your FPS is to run around randomly hitting the attack button then that whole concept of gameplay probably isn't any fun and should be removed from the game.
The dinos really do nothing for the story or the gameplay, so why have them? The T-Rex battle might have been fun if it didn't involve hiding in a little cave and blasting the thing silly until I ran out of ammo.
WTF #3 : Difficulty arising more from playability than actual game difficulty
If you regularly crank up the difficulty on any FPS on your first run through, you will find Turok constantly annoying in the 'hard' mode and I couldn't imagine stomaching the 'hardest' mode at all.
When you first load up Turok on hard you might be surprised at just how many bullets he can take before going down. To say that player health is generous is an understatement... that is until you start playing through the game and all the other problems crop up.
In Turok it's often too dark to see where you are or what you're shooting at, especially when you're up to your eyeballs in the reeds and surrounded by extremely fast dinos and angry mercenaries. Add the camera problems and the fact the there is never anywhere to retreat to, and you end up with a craptastic experience.
Proposed Solution: Difficulty should come from AI, pacing, balancing and environment, not from controls, camera or stupid design choices around weapons and enemies. Basically if you need loads of health on 'hard' to have a chance at making it through the game there's a problem. Look to Halo 2 legendary difficulty for inspiration.
Summary:
Turok has loads of problems. I wouldn't recommend buying it, and I am still some hours away from finishing it. The only motivation I have for finishing this game is that I spent 60 bucks on it, and my only consolation is that I will soon trade it in for another game.
I'm trying to think of something positive to say about the experience, but I really can't think of anything. The bow is a great weapon, but having a nice modern compound bow takes a lot of the fun out of it. It like a really crappy, really quiet gun. In fact with the silencer the SMG does the same job without any of the drawbacks. The explosive arrows are ok, but rarely useful.
So there you have it. Turok could have been a decent game if they didn't make so many horrible choices in design.
Friday, January 25, 2008
That door is blocked. Go around. That window is invincible. Go around. That drywall is....
This blog is all about good and bad game decisions.
It constantly boggles my mind why game designers decide to do something a certain way, or add certain "features" to their games which does nothing but make playing them a miserable experience.
This blog isn't so much about whether a game is good or bad, but how it could have been better and what it did really well. So let's start with a few examples from an easy one: Assassins Creed.
For the record AC is a fairly good game, but some of these things are just so annoying I can't understand why anyone would have thought they were a good thing.
WTF #1 : Loading Loads a Loading Screen for Loading the Game
For the love of God why? When you start Assassins Creed you load into an interface whose only real purpose is to load the game. This is just twice as annoying as a regular loading screen.
A simple solution would have been to provide 3 options on the main screen:
New Game
Continue
Continue (for real this time)
I wonder how many people would willingly load into the Animus ( *cough* Matrix *cough* ) first if they had the option to skip it. My guess is almost everyone would skip it (seeing as how you can access the Animus from Select and Start anyway...).
WTF #2 : Forced Camera/Player Lock When Freedom Needed Most
This one is mind boggling. Whenever you save someone, or go to assassinate someone, instead of trying to save your own hide, or get into a good position you are completely mesmerized by by some idiotic thing and are unable to move effectively, look away, or protect yourself.
WTF #3 : Blinding the Player as a Reward
A game should never reward you for doing something well by poking you in the eye. There are countless times when you pull off some awesome feat in AC and are in the midst of trying to sneak away or survive when the screen blooms into brightness and crazy shit flashes all over the screen.
Add the slow mo, camera lock, and guards who will kill you (but only you) for absolutely anything and come up with any formula that does not equal fun. Why?
WTF #4 : Flag Collecting / Flying Through Rings
Ok, I really don't know a single person who has ever said to me that they enjoyed collecting flags in a game. AC is chock full of this nonsense. Even better, you often have to do this while on a timer, dodging guards and idiot citizens. Not fun.
What makes this especially not fun, is you have to comb every inch of every area in the game while constantly contending with WTF 5.
WTF #5 : Infinite Guards Covering up Some Other Deficiency
Ok, there's an infinite amount of guards and no matter how many are killed, there will always be more. This is annoying because you can't control an area, even for 10 minutes while you get something done. Unfortunately they kind of had to do this because there's nothing remotely covert, stealthy, or assassin-y about Altair.
It's just stupid, annoying, and ruins the experience.
It constantly boggles my mind why game designers decide to do something a certain way, or add certain "features" to their games which does nothing but make playing them a miserable experience.
This blog isn't so much about whether a game is good or bad, but how it could have been better and what it did really well. So let's start with a few examples from an easy one: Assassins Creed.
For the record AC is a fairly good game, but some of these things are just so annoying I can't understand why anyone would have thought they were a good thing.
WTF #1 : Loading Loads a Loading Screen for Loading the Game
For the love of God why? When you start Assassins Creed you load into an interface whose only real purpose is to load the game. This is just twice as annoying as a regular loading screen.
A simple solution would have been to provide 3 options on the main screen:
New Game
Continue
Continue (for real this time)
I wonder how many people would willingly load into the Animus ( *cough* Matrix *cough* ) first if they had the option to skip it. My guess is almost everyone would skip it (seeing as how you can access the Animus from Select and Start anyway...).
WTF #2 : Forced Camera/Player Lock When Freedom Needed Most
This one is mind boggling. Whenever you save someone, or go to assassinate someone, instead of trying to save your own hide, or get into a good position you are completely mesmerized by by some idiotic thing and are unable to move effectively, look away, or protect yourself.
WTF #3 : Blinding the Player as a Reward
A game should never reward you for doing something well by poking you in the eye. There are countless times when you pull off some awesome feat in AC and are in the midst of trying to sneak away or survive when the screen blooms into brightness and crazy shit flashes all over the screen.
Add the slow mo, camera lock, and guards who will kill you (but only you) for absolutely anything and come up with any formula that does not equal fun. Why?
WTF #4 : Flag Collecting / Flying Through Rings
Ok, I really don't know a single person who has ever said to me that they enjoyed collecting flags in a game. AC is chock full of this nonsense. Even better, you often have to do this while on a timer, dodging guards and idiot citizens. Not fun.
What makes this especially not fun, is you have to comb every inch of every area in the game while constantly contending with WTF 5.
WTF #5 : Infinite Guards Covering up Some Other Deficiency
Ok, there's an infinite amount of guards and no matter how many are killed, there will always be more. This is annoying because you can't control an area, even for 10 minutes while you get something done. Unfortunately they kind of had to do this because there's nothing remotely covert, stealthy, or assassin-y about Altair.
It's just stupid, annoying, and ruins the experience.
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