Viridian Games

I bought the collector’s edition of World of Warcraft. I bought it specifically to get the “Making Of” DVD (this is the same reason I bought the collector’s edition of Age of Mythology).

I was kind of disappointed because there’s only one section of the DVD about the design of the game, and about twenty on the various artistic aspects of the game. Still, two things came through in the design section that are critical to the success of the game:

1. Every character can solo. Yes, there’s big, cool, fun stuff that can only be done in groups. But if you can’t group (or just don’t want to), you can still advance your character yourself. When I played the stress test, I thought I’d just lucked out and picked the one race/class combo (Human Paladin) who could solo. Nope. Everybody can solo if they so choose.

2. There’s more to life than levelling. The problem with most MMORPGs is that levelling is about the only real reward in the game. And the more you play the game, the longer and longer it takes to level. Which means your rewards come farther and farther apart – and since by this time you’re already powerful, they tend to mean less and less. Thus, the game gets less rewarding the more you play it. The WOW designers identified this problem and solved it by creating several parallel systems which all iterate at different rates, so the odds are good that no matter where you are and what you are doing, you are about to be rewarded in some way. You’re either going to level, or gain a skill point, or finish a quest, or find that recipe you’ve been looking for, or collect enough money for that cool suit of armor you’ve been eyeing, or something else.

And in identifying and fixing these problems, they have gained me as a player. I normally hate MMORPGs, but my time playing WOW during the first stress test was wonderful, and it was what convinced me to pick this as my first serious MMORPG.

What’s the most powerful texture-mapping technology in the world?

The most powerful texture-mapping technology is the player’s imagination. If you can spark their imagination and get them to buy in, then it won’t matter how limited the rendering technology of your characters is. The player will treat them as if they were real.

The cardinal example is Aeris from Final Fantasy VII. Aeris was represented onscreen by a simple model (I’d be surprised if it were over 300 polys) and was textured in a simple manner.

And yet, when she died, fans wept.

Square took the next logical step in Final Fantasy VIII. In that game, whenever a new character is introduced, we are treated to a beautiful full-motion video of that character (typically doing something supercool). We, the players, then “map” that first impression of the character onto the limited models Square used in the actual gameplay.

By the same token, Bioware gets professional voice actors to record some dialog for each of the main characters in its RPGs. When the player meets a new character, the first few exchanges with them will have speech, so that the player now knows what the character sounds like and can hear the character in their heads even when speech isn’t provided. It’s a very effective technique.

Of course, if you don’t have one of the best computer animation groups in the industry and you can’t afford quality voice actors, you might be able to achieve the same effect with just a great plot and well-written characters.

Half-Life 2 is far scarier than Doom 3 could ever hope to be.

I’m about one and a half hours into it, and so far here are my thoughts.

First, the game is gorgeous, and creates a sense of place I’ve rarely seen in a game before. City 17 feels about as real to me as a computer-generated environment can. Marvellous little touches like birds flocking around the Citadel just do wonders for bringing an environment to life.

Second, the whole “Gordon doesn’t talk” thing doesn’t work nearly as well in this game as it did in the first. Keeping Gordon mute in the first game was a great way for the designers to allow players to “fill up” the character of Gordon Freeman – Gordon never did anything to break that connection between the two. But in the first game, there weren’t many people to talk to, and the ones you did meet either died quickly or were just as confused as you were, so questioning them wasn’t really necessary.

But in Half-Life 2, within ten minutes you’re going to meet a whole bunch of people who have been in City 17 and the Resistance much longer than you have…but you cannot ask them any questions. You can’t say, “How long have I been away?” or “Where exactly are we?” or “What is happening in the rest of the world?” or “Doesn’t ANYONE have a gun I can use?” You’re forced to take what the game gives you, when if you were REALLY there you’d be able to find out stuff for yourself. So I think Valve misstepped there.

Still, I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

“Get the mechanical details right, and the spark will show itself, if it’s there. Good luck.”

That was Steve Jackson, writing about paper-and-pencil RPG design back in 1981. Nothing has changed in game design since then.

About two years ago, at the 2002 GDC, Jason Rubin stood up and bluntly stated that graphics were quickly approaching the level of diminishing returns, and could no longer be counted on to sell games on their own. He expressed nervousness at the time, because his company (the excellent Naughty Dog) had always relied on tried-and-true gameplay styles and had never innovated, instead simply choosing to make their games prettier than everyone else’s. Now, he said, it would become necessary to innovate, and that scared him.

Now, if you’ve read my post below, you know that I don’t think he’s exactly right. I don’t think it’s necessary for Naughty Dog to innovate that much, as long as they execute their core gameplay competently, and Naughty Dog has always done so. In fact, I dinged Jak II several points in my review because it handled it’s “innovation” – driving around the city in the zoomer – so poorly.

But I think Rubin’s panic is a sign of the times; game developers are going to begin casting about for something, anything, to distinguish their stuff from the pack. And there’s always nostalgia to be exploited.

And so gaming will eat its dead. But I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, though we’re off to a poor start with The Bard’s Tale, and the remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates! isn’t looking too much better. This particular strategy will only work if developers truly understand what made the original games stand out, and this requires actually playing them, which I doubt if the dev team for The Bard’s Tale actually did.

If they had, they’d have discovered that a lot of what made The Bard’s Tale special back in The Day ™ wouldn’t go over well with gamers now. The Bard’s Tale was basically a huge homage/ripoff of the Wizardry! series of games, which began on the Apple II computer. (It even let you import Wizardry! characters – or characters from Ultima III, both games from rival companies!) The Wizardry! series began in 1981, making it as old as the Ultima series (though not quite as revered). The Wizardry! games were known for two things: huge first-person 3D dungeons and very crunchy D&D-style mechanics. The Bard’s Tale took both of these and ran with them.

The mechanics of The Bard’s Tale define old-school CRPGs – monsters were nothing but pictures and sets of stats. All monsters existed solely to make the player’s life miserable. Most of the city was uninhabited, what few NPCs existed had very little dialog, and there was little in the way of plot except for the intro and endgame. Nothing was made permanent until the player saved, which could only be done at one place in the entire game. Items required identification, and many were cursed. Players were forced to memorize or look up four-letter codes to cast spells, and a spelling error caused a spell failure, sometimes with disastrous results. Players could easily run into an impossible-to-beat monster party just as the game began. There was no real sense of progression to the game; no sense that the game was inviting you in and pulling you forward, and there was no sense of coherency to the world. The game was what it was: a humongous dungeon (though it was textured as if it were outside) with passages leading to other humongous dungeons, all of which contained frightfully powerful groups of monsters, tons of strange items, traps galore and impossibly hard puzzles. Now, that sounds like fun to me, but it could sound very dull and arbitrary to younger gamers (and hey, they could even be right).

So if you’re going to take a classic game and update it, either don’t pick one that won’t appeal to modern gamers, or accept that you’re targeting a niche market and retain the classic mechanics that us older gamers remember fondly. A license is more than just a name.

So, having said all this, do I have any suggestions for games that would update well and should be remade? You bet. And I’ll be detailing them in later entries.

Something’s been percolating in my subconscious. I think it started about a year and a half ago when Greg Costikyan lambasted Warren Spector’s 2003 GDC keynote, in which Warren suggested that if game designers cannot innovate as often as they want, they can at least make the best games they can where they are. It didn’t help any when I read an excerpt from Chris Crawford on Game Design where he (among other things) said that sequels have no artistic content.

Both of these really rankled, and it has taken a good long while to figure out why. Actually, it didn’t take long to figure out why Crawford’s remarks had rubbed me the wrong way; he’d effectively said that Ultima VII, Day of the Tentacle and Shenmue II had no artistic content, an indefensible statement, especially in an industry where a new game design can take a few games to wear its rough edges off and become really fun. But there was something else, something deeper. And I finally think I know what it is.

I don’t think innovation is that important to game design.

Costikyan and Crawford both obviously pine for the days when everything designers (including themselves) did was innovative. But designers were innovative because they had no choice – no one had ever done what they were doing before! The field was wide open; everything was innovative.

But the nature of the available play styles on a platform are dictated by input devices, and the input devices we use haven’t changed much in a good long while. When I play Doom 3, I still use the same mouse/keyboard/screen setup that I used to play Quake. When I play Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (yet another sequel that was better than the original), I use the same gamepad/screen setup I used to play Pitfall on the Atari 2600. Yes, my controller now has more buttons, a rumble feature and analog sticks, but the basic concept hasn’t changed – one hand steers the character and the other hand presses the action button(s).

Thus the only way to get the kind of earthshaking innovation Costikyan wants is to change what play styles are available, which is exactly what studios like Bemani do. Lots of people point to Dance Dance Revolution as a rare example of innovation in this moribund industry, and they are right. But what did Bemani have to do to get that innovation? They had to introduce new input hardware, and without that hardware DDR is just a Flash game. What else have I seen recently that at least attempted innovation? Lifeline looked very interesting…hey, new hardware. Donkey Konga – oh, wait. New hardware.

We’ve very nearly completely explored the possibility space of both of the classic gaming setups. We’ve discovered a lot of play styles that work extremely well with them. And having done that, we are now devoting the majority of our energy to making better and better games using these play styles. I’m trying to figure out why this is a bad thing.

“But there are only so many genres of games! Where are the new genres?” Well, again, genres are dictated by what people are willing to play and what can be physically done on the hardware. When the mouse came along, it made more play styles possible. When fast 3D came along, it changed a lot of play styles. And then came the internet…pity no one ever figured out how to use that to play games…

“But the industry doesn’t award innovation!” This is the conventional wisdom, and I disagree with it. The biggest selling game of all time is The Sims. The previous biggest selling game of all time was Myst. Both of these games were considered innovative when they were first released. Yes, you might be able to make a quick buck by knocking off yet another decent RTS, but a) it has to be decent to have any shot at success and b) you can just as easily lose your shirt that way. And while the industry doesn’t directly award innovation, it does tend to award good work – yes, I know, Ico and Beyond Good & Evil both tanked at retail, but for the most part it’s true – good work gets rewarded, and good work is the first necessary component to innovation.

The second is inspiration. And inspiration can’t be forced, it can’t be bought and it can’t be faked. When the lightning strikes, it strikes, and when it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Innovation is inevitable, but the speed at which it happens depends very much on how much work in the field has already been done. Innovation now tends to wear away at the rough edges of play styles (witness Doom 3’s excellent handling of in-game interfaces) or adds fun new tweaks to an existing play style (Burnout 3’s aftertouch system or any of the myriad of new features in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) or blends play styles in interesting ways (notice how designers are grafting RPG elements onto every other genre) instead of creating new play styles out of whole cloth. It’s a river smoothing its rocks, where originally it was Michelangelo passionately attacking a marble slab.

The point of game design isn’t to innovate – it’s to make fun games. Innovation is just something that happens once in a while along the way. Designers should always have a bottle on hand to catch the lightning just in case it strikes. But if it doesn’t, I see nothing wrong with merely flawlessly executing a classic play style while throwing in a few new tweaks just for fun, and making lots of gamers happy by doing it.