So I never update, which sucks. Blame me, because I have stuff to write about, and have for a while. Sorry, I suck. I'll do better!
Bang bang goes burst damage. It's the 'least imba' of the big four game breaking tactics. The reason for this should be fairly obvious. Most game designers are aware of how much damage things in their game do, and they know how much durability (measured in both damage resistance, avoidance, and actual health) their characters have. It's only in 'combo fighters' like Marvel vs. Capcom or BlazBlue where the amount of damage a character can do isn't clearly known when the game launches. It's pretty easy for a dev team to put character health high enough that burst damage is impractical, or at least less useful.
In fact, overpowered burst damage really only takes place when the harder to balance entities like hard control and mobility aren't super dominant factors. In some games, burst damage is the only balancing factor when these elements are overpowered. For instance, in Guild Wars, hard control is kept heavily in check, and is often a merely circumstantial advantage. Mobility advantages in GW are valuable, but one takes an opportunity cost for selecting skills that add to mobility. Burst damage, especially when your entire team focuses burst skills all on a single target, remain as the primary overpowered strategy.
Burst damage is large amounts of damage dealt all in as short a timeframe as possible. Compared to high sustained damage over time, burst damage deals generally less damage over time but much more over a smaller time interval. The idea behind burst damage is to take the enemy by surprise and bypass their ability to use normally effective healing or protective skills to save their teammate. By comparison, sustained damage seeks to overwhelm healers by dealing enough damage to the enemy that it cannot all be effectively countered.
The secondary advantage of a spike is that it quickly removes a single foe from the battle, skewing the field position in favor of the attackers. Since most games allow a player at any amount of health the same fighting capability as a player at full health, taking an opponent out of the battle quickly leaves less time they can support allies or attack your team.
Burst damage is often coupled by other tactics. For instance, hard or soft control is often used to keep the enemy from trying to escape or protect themselves, or perhaps used against healer foes so that the target can't be protected. Inside the small window of a hard control, burst damage is particularly effective, since it can take even a small moment of advantage and turn it into a kill.
It is also fairly easy to disrupt a spike in the same way. By applying a hard or soft control to one or more attackers, the amount of incoming damage can be spread over a longer period of time or negated altogether, leaving more time or less damage that needs to be healed or prevented. This factor is one of the hidden balancers of burst damage.
Another strong balancing factor for burst damage is the need for a condensed team. Oftentimes a team must put several strong attackers together in order to deal enough damage to defeat a single foe quickly. In an objective-based game, it may be problematic to concentrate your team enough to deal an effective spike. If objectives are spaced far apart, a burst team might be able to take down one foe at a single objective quickly and likely take that single objective. However, if they give up the opportunity to capture other objectives on the map, a split team will control more of the map than a concentrated burst team. And unlike a pressure team that relies on sustained damage over time, the burst team is all or nothing - a spike tends to use up a lot of resources for the attacking characters, and if the damage is insufficient, it tends to put the attackers in an unfavorable situation.
How do you exploit burst damage? Well, that answer is pretty simple. Group as many high single target damage characters as you can together and have them all target the same foe. Sometimes spike teams need a catalyst too - Guild Wars is particularly fond of spikes that require one or more status effects to be in place on the enemy.
Preventing spikes is dependent on the game. Some games, like Guild Wars, have protective skills that limit the amount of damage a foe can take in a single hit. Most other games have a much harder time. You must predict the ally most likely to get hit by a spike (often the healer) and apply preventative measures, such as protective buffs, regeneration/heal over time buffs, and similar effects that will soften the blow a little. Each player will have to be ready to act if they see a spike go into effect. For instance, if the enemy all begins to hit one target with movement debuffs or hard controls, it's a clue that a spike is coming. If possible, that character should attempt to escape or otherwise hamper the spike. If it isn't possible, allies should be ready to move and interrupt the spike enough that the target survives.
Another less obvious prediction for a spike is buff removal. If one of your allies starts getting hit by skills that remove their buffs, it is highly likely that the enemy is trying to remove protections in order to open up a big truckload of pain. In general, if the enemy uses weakening effects and doesn't spread them all over your team in order to slow you down, they are probably trying to prep a spike on someone.
Defending against a spike is extremely difficult, and much harder than pulling one off. If you expect the enemy team to employ them, everyone has to be fully awake and ready to stop it.
If you can't survive a spike and you know it, the next best thing you can do is to counter by dealing heavy damage to the enemy. If your team is a sustained damage team, you may still be able to get a lot of damage in and put one or more foes in a bad state or perhaps even kill them. This is particularly useful in games like Perfect World where the healers are also powerful damage dealers - their healers may be focusing on spiking, leaving your team the possibility of unloading powerful attacks on their team as well.
In both the offensive spiking and defensive spiking scenario, one thing remains a big help. Voice communication allows a burst damage team to all coordinate attacks at the same time. Likewise, it also allows a target to notify teammates quickly that they are being targeted. Most spikes have some sort of lead-in, such as debuffs, hard controls, etc. If the victim can announce that they are hit by a debuff ahead of time, they may be able to get it removed or just have preventative buffs applied in advance.
Of course, if you're playing MvC2 and one of your characters is getting rocked by an infinite, there's not much you can do. The biggest thing you can do in a fighter if the enemy is performing an infinite is to make them do the infinite 100% perfectly and break out if they do not. If you are aware of any point in their combo where they can attempt a reset, be doubly aware when it comes around and attempt to block it. When you are getting hit by a huge combo, you just have to get hit, but your enemy has to focus and do it perfectly. If you can drain his mental energy by forcing him to concentrate more on the infinite, you will have some measure of advantage when the match goes to round 2 (or whatever). And if he slips up, you get a shot at turning things around. Most infinite combos deal really low damage, so the best thing you can do is to not panic or throw away the controller.
But really, this article is about burst damage in a MMO or even in a 'unrealistic shooter' like Halo where characters can take lots of bullets. In a fighter, if you know your opponent can do huge damage if they hit you, your best solution is to deny them opportunities to go on offense, either by controlling space (zoning them out) or controlling tempo (keeping pressure on them).
To be fair though, offensive pressure on a burst damage team in a MMO can really disrupt their ability to attack you. If you harass them with soft controls, hard controls, and other annoyances, it can be really hard for them to set up a 1-2-3 kill even if you are not focused on defending it.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Survivor: Samoa prelim evaluation
I like Survivor. It's a competition rooted mostly in social maneuvering, with twists and turns that make things interesting without necessarily creating unfair advantages for the players. Because the game is simultaneously cooperative and competitive, it creates a very difficult to analyze game where no 'false' drama has to be introduced - the game itself is deep enough that they don't need to incorporate BS drama and judges into the game.
This season is going to be on Samoa, which is all sorts of awesome. Samoa has a rich culture and heritage, full of tribal dances, tattoos, and all sorts of other cool stuff. The Samoan people are really open and communal, and I've had the luck to talk with people of Samoan descent about their history and culture. This makes this particular season pretty immersive to me. Also, Samoa is a really gorgeous place. This tends to be the case for most seasons of Survivor, but the "tropical island" appearance of Samoa really feels 'right' for the series.
If I wanted to look at videos of Samoan topology though, I'd be watching the Discovery Channel or something (okay, I watch that too). Instead, I'm here to watch a really good Survivor season, and this one has a few really big competitors I'm looking forward to seeing.
This season, most of the women are fairly uninteresting as strategic competition. The big female power I see comes from the Elizabeth. She's Korean-American, has graduated from three Ivy League universities and is a practicing lawyer. She radiates success, and that's very telling for how she will do in Survivor. Her legal experience, as well as her self-proclaimed "social butterfly" nature, will make her a dangerous competitor in the game. She is also fairly self-realized, understanding that she can be opinionated and that she needs to "be assertive without being blunt." I think she'll be a power player.
The next woman I find interesting is an older lady named Shannon, who calls herself "Shambo." She's a former US Marine (automatic cool points) and is a highly successful sales rep. I'm not sure how effective she will be in the game, but her tomboyish exterior will cause a lot of interesting interactions between the other players. If she sticks around to actually start playing the game, she could be interesting to watch.
Unfortunately, there's no other really cool female players. Generally the female players in Survivor tend to be uninteresting (at least strategically) because the producers tend to pick boring hot chicks instead of quick-thinking strategically minded women. Fortunately, we have a lot of character in a few of the other ladies, particularly Yasmin and Monica.
One girl I'm not looking forward to seeing is Kelly. In her pregame interviews, she expressed interest in flirting with cute guys as one of her major motivations. I do not approve, Kelly. Please do us all a favor and get some annoying guy voted off along with you.
This season has some of the coolest guys in a season thus far. I mean this in different ways than most people, but it has two of the biggest, dangerous Survivor villains ever to grace a show. The other guys (Ben and Erik in particular) I could care less about.
The first guy I'll talk about is a pretty cool guy. He's smart, successful in life, and most importantly, he understands Survivor really well. His name is Jaison, a pretty big, good looking black guy. He's the guy I'm rooting for to win. Jaison understands Survivor extremely well, including understanding the intricacies of human interaction and how to decieve and trick people. The best part is that he has a certain demeanor - he has this sort of honest, nice guy persona that will get him far in the game. His strategy will win him the game. His interview is really awesome. His main trouble will be being so much of a nice guy that people will see him as a threat.
Part of the reason I like Jaison so much is that his attitudes and strategy are a lot like mine, so it's like seeing how I would do if I was transplanted there.
Next up is John, who is a rocket scientist (really!) and supposedly one of the smartest people ever to appear on Survivor. Smarter than Ken or Stephen? I have no idea. Anyway, smart guys (and girls) are always cool to see on the show, so it's nice to see geniuses like John (and Liz and Jaison) this season. I don't think John will do exceptionally well. I think he will drop pre-merge without much in the way of allies. Probably. I still like smart guys.
Next on the list is Dave, who I think is also a really smart guy. He falls into the same sort of self-realized boat as Liz. In many ways, he's a white guy version of her (with less credentials). He realizes he's opinionated and that he can say things that will offend people, but it seems less likely that he will control himself like Jaison or Liz will. I think his success will depend mostly on the specific people he befriends. If he can get in relatively close to a nice guy or girl and can lay low, he's got some potential.
I had to watch a number of videos to get a good feel for Mick. He's a poser. Jeff thinks John is a poser, but Mick is a far bigger one. He thinks he's a player and a nice guy all at the same time, and in my initial opinion of him I felt that that he had a good 'player' attitude while keeping an invisible, likable guy opinion at camp. However, a closer look makes me think that he really isn't able to play on the same level as the smart people. He's a pretty snake-like guy and I think he'll be disliked.
The main guy I'm looking forward to seeing is Russell H. This guy is a MONSTER. A BEAST. He will change the way Survivor will be played forever. He's the owner of an oil company, and he comes off as a total pompous jerk in his interviews. He is a total pompous jerk, and I can't say I'm rooting for him to win (although this will probably change depending on how things turn out). Russel stated one thing that I've been talking about since I first started theorizing about merge strategy - that he wanted to sandbag his team so that he went to the merge with a smaller number of people on his team.
THIS GUY IS SO PRO
No, seriously. In Survivor, it is highly disadvantageous to go into a tribal merge with a 7/3 "advantage." It is still a big disadvantage to go in with a 6/4 numbers advantage. I'm sure that Survivor fans will disagree with me. I'm sure that even after Russell ends up taking second place that Survivor fans will disagree with me and say that he got there totally on luck.
For the uninformed, the early parts of Survivor consists of two (or sometimes more) tribes that compete against each other in various challenges. The losers of an immunity challenge must select one of their team members to remove from the game. After a certain period, typically when there are roughly 10 people remaining, the two tribes merge to become a single tribe. After this point, immunity is granted to the person who wins the challenge and all ten people determine which person to vote out from among the people who did not win.
Common logic determines that a larger tribe post-merge will dominate the smaller tribe by superior numbers. However, this is never the case in practice, because the larger tribe always splinters. This is not due to some random lucky chance. It's because people are trying to win.
A tribe with smaller numbers has had to attend Tribal Council (the vote-off process) more times, and thus has more experience with that part of the game. This means that they know how to manipulate people better (generally) and predict how others might vote.
A tribe with larger numbers also builds cliques, better known as "alliances." In any tribe of 5 or more people, alliances of 2-4 people will emerge. The weaker of these alliances will tend to flock to the other smaller tribe (likely one alliance), in order to increase their chances of winning. In many cases, these 'swing vote' players end up winning (such as Bob in Gabon, or Amanda in Fans vs. Favorites) or coming in 2nd or 3rd, so this strategy is well-founded. It makes no sense to keep people around if they are banded together in a tight group. If you are an alliance of 2 people and there is another alliance in your tribe of 4 people, you are extremely likely to go with the group that will put you in 3rd or 4th position rather than 5th or 6th.
Russell H understands this, so even if he doesn't play the social game as well, he will be awesome to watch. He had better make an understanding alliance (of 3) early on, though - or else he'll be in some deep water. After that, all he has to do is find the 'swing voters' and he will likely ride the current all the way to the final 4 people. I do not want Russell H to win because of his character (he's a jerk!) but I do want him to do well as a proof of concept that his strategy is sound. The problem is that he's a jerk, and it may get him screwed before he ever gets a chance to implement it.
There's another guy named Russell S, he's a cool guy but is not as strategically interesting.
Anyway, those are the people that I think are going to make the big waves this season.
This season is going to be on Samoa, which is all sorts of awesome. Samoa has a rich culture and heritage, full of tribal dances, tattoos, and all sorts of other cool stuff. The Samoan people are really open and communal, and I've had the luck to talk with people of Samoan descent about their history and culture. This makes this particular season pretty immersive to me. Also, Samoa is a really gorgeous place. This tends to be the case for most seasons of Survivor, but the "tropical island" appearance of Samoa really feels 'right' for the series.
If I wanted to look at videos of Samoan topology though, I'd be watching the Discovery Channel or something (okay, I watch that too). Instead, I'm here to watch a really good Survivor season, and this one has a few really big competitors I'm looking forward to seeing.
This season, most of the women are fairly uninteresting as strategic competition. The big female power I see comes from the Elizabeth. She's Korean-American, has graduated from three Ivy League universities and is a practicing lawyer. She radiates success, and that's very telling for how she will do in Survivor. Her legal experience, as well as her self-proclaimed "social butterfly" nature, will make her a dangerous competitor in the game. She is also fairly self-realized, understanding that she can be opinionated and that she needs to "be assertive without being blunt." I think she'll be a power player.
The next woman I find interesting is an older lady named Shannon, who calls herself "Shambo." She's a former US Marine (automatic cool points) and is a highly successful sales rep. I'm not sure how effective she will be in the game, but her tomboyish exterior will cause a lot of interesting interactions between the other players. If she sticks around to actually start playing the game, she could be interesting to watch.
Unfortunately, there's no other really cool female players. Generally the female players in Survivor tend to be uninteresting (at least strategically) because the producers tend to pick boring hot chicks instead of quick-thinking strategically minded women. Fortunately, we have a lot of character in a few of the other ladies, particularly Yasmin and Monica.
One girl I'm not looking forward to seeing is Kelly. In her pregame interviews, she expressed interest in flirting with cute guys as one of her major motivations. I do not approve, Kelly. Please do us all a favor and get some annoying guy voted off along with you.
This season has some of the coolest guys in a season thus far. I mean this in different ways than most people, but it has two of the biggest, dangerous Survivor villains ever to grace a show. The other guys (Ben and Erik in particular) I could care less about.
The first guy I'll talk about is a pretty cool guy. He's smart, successful in life, and most importantly, he understands Survivor really well. His name is Jaison, a pretty big, good looking black guy. He's the guy I'm rooting for to win. Jaison understands Survivor extremely well, including understanding the intricacies of human interaction and how to decieve and trick people. The best part is that he has a certain demeanor - he has this sort of honest, nice guy persona that will get him far in the game. His strategy will win him the game. His interview is really awesome. His main trouble will be being so much of a nice guy that people will see him as a threat.
Part of the reason I like Jaison so much is that his attitudes and strategy are a lot like mine, so it's like seeing how I would do if I was transplanted there.
Next up is John, who is a rocket scientist (really!) and supposedly one of the smartest people ever to appear on Survivor. Smarter than Ken or Stephen? I have no idea. Anyway, smart guys (and girls) are always cool to see on the show, so it's nice to see geniuses like John (and Liz and Jaison) this season. I don't think John will do exceptionally well. I think he will drop pre-merge without much in the way of allies. Probably. I still like smart guys.
Next on the list is Dave, who I think is also a really smart guy. He falls into the same sort of self-realized boat as Liz. In many ways, he's a white guy version of her (with less credentials). He realizes he's opinionated and that he can say things that will offend people, but it seems less likely that he will control himself like Jaison or Liz will. I think his success will depend mostly on the specific people he befriends. If he can get in relatively close to a nice guy or girl and can lay low, he's got some potential.
I had to watch a number of videos to get a good feel for Mick. He's a poser. Jeff thinks John is a poser, but Mick is a far bigger one. He thinks he's a player and a nice guy all at the same time, and in my initial opinion of him I felt that that he had a good 'player' attitude while keeping an invisible, likable guy opinion at camp. However, a closer look makes me think that he really isn't able to play on the same level as the smart people. He's a pretty snake-like guy and I think he'll be disliked.
The main guy I'm looking forward to seeing is Russell H. This guy is a MONSTER. A BEAST. He will change the way Survivor will be played forever. He's the owner of an oil company, and he comes off as a total pompous jerk in his interviews. He is a total pompous jerk, and I can't say I'm rooting for him to win (although this will probably change depending on how things turn out). Russel stated one thing that I've been talking about since I first started theorizing about merge strategy - that he wanted to sandbag his team so that he went to the merge with a smaller number of people on his team.
THIS GUY IS SO PRO
No, seriously. In Survivor, it is highly disadvantageous to go into a tribal merge with a 7/3 "advantage." It is still a big disadvantage to go in with a 6/4 numbers advantage. I'm sure that Survivor fans will disagree with me. I'm sure that even after Russell ends up taking second place that Survivor fans will disagree with me and say that he got there totally on luck.
For the uninformed, the early parts of Survivor consists of two (or sometimes more) tribes that compete against each other in various challenges. The losers of an immunity challenge must select one of their team members to remove from the game. After a certain period, typically when there are roughly 10 people remaining, the two tribes merge to become a single tribe. After this point, immunity is granted to the person who wins the challenge and all ten people determine which person to vote out from among the people who did not win.
Common logic determines that a larger tribe post-merge will dominate the smaller tribe by superior numbers. However, this is never the case in practice, because the larger tribe always splinters. This is not due to some random lucky chance. It's because people are trying to win.
A tribe with smaller numbers has had to attend Tribal Council (the vote-off process) more times, and thus has more experience with that part of the game. This means that they know how to manipulate people better (generally) and predict how others might vote.
A tribe with larger numbers also builds cliques, better known as "alliances." In any tribe of 5 or more people, alliances of 2-4 people will emerge. The weaker of these alliances will tend to flock to the other smaller tribe (likely one alliance), in order to increase their chances of winning. In many cases, these 'swing vote' players end up winning (such as Bob in Gabon, or Amanda in Fans vs. Favorites) or coming in 2nd or 3rd, so this strategy is well-founded. It makes no sense to keep people around if they are banded together in a tight group. If you are an alliance of 2 people and there is another alliance in your tribe of 4 people, you are extremely likely to go with the group that will put you in 3rd or 4th position rather than 5th or 6th.
Russell H understands this, so even if he doesn't play the social game as well, he will be awesome to watch. He had better make an understanding alliance (of 3) early on, though - or else he'll be in some deep water. After that, all he has to do is find the 'swing voters' and he will likely ride the current all the way to the final 4 people. I do not want Russell H to win because of his character (he's a jerk!) but I do want him to do well as a proof of concept that his strategy is sound. The problem is that he's a jerk, and it may get him screwed before he ever gets a chance to implement it.
There's another guy named Russell S, he's a cool guy but is not as strategically interesting.
Anyway, those are the people that I think are going to make the big waves this season.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Champions Online
A boring, non-witty post title.
This is my thoughts and feelings behind Cryptic Studios' new MMORPG, Champions Online. It's a modern day superhero MMO set in the Champions universe (it's a niche pen and paper game). It shares a lot of stylistic similarities with City of Heroes/Villains, but that's bound to happen since Cryptic was also the development team behind CoX. Honestly, CO bears similarity to a World of Warcraft/City of Heroes hybrid, which is good and bad (mostly good, imo).
Visually, CO looks and feels a bit dated right out of the gate. While the models are shiny and fairly detailed, the particle effects and animations seem clunky. I'm not sure who does the animations, but they just don't have the same crispness or flow as characters in even dated games like Guild Wars. This isn't to say they look awful, but overall the game looks kinda average. It's still crisper and better looking than WoW is, but that's not really saying much - WoW is kind of an old game.
The (visual) character customization is good, and has a wide variety of character options. However, there were a lot of bugs in the character editor the last time I saw play at the end of beta that made creating a character and costume rather awkward. If you compare it to City of Heroes, there are simply not as many options. CoX has a lot of costume pieces to make a very unique character and build, and CO has many fewer. Compared to many other games (most?) CO still has a very large number of options. Compared to their competition, they're a little low, so I can't really see it as a major selling point.
Still on the visual front, I do not understand why a game made in 2009 can't have hair and clothing physics. Remember the 90s? It was okay for Lara Croft to have a solid block of plastic hair back then. Now there are numerous F2P MMOs that have real hair and clothing physics. A game released in 2009 in box that costs 50$ and has a 15$/mo subscription fee really has no excuse.
It's worth noting that Redefining Nerds doesn't usually talk about visuals in place of gameplay, but because CO's major selling point is visuals, I feel it important to point out how it stacks up. Overall, I think it's acceptable if you are into the other facets of the game too.
Gameplay is my area of expertise though and CO falls sort of short.
The first and biggest issue I have is the reduction/elimination of the support role. Defensive support, eg. buffs and healing, are reduced to maintained beams of healing that apply heals over time, instead of strategic healing bursts and pre-emptive damage prevention. All burst healing is self-targeted and all damage reduction buffs are self only. This takes virtually all the skill out of playing a support character, and forces a support player to focus on doing one thing, instead of multitasking to protect their team effectively.
In general, CO is very solo-focused. Everyone can 'tank' with a few stray power selections for survivability, and everyone deals at least decent damage due to the way the super-stat system works. The result is that even though there are dozens and dozens of powers in the game, every character falls into one of a very small number of categories:
1: awful
2: generic melee brawler
3: generic ranged blaster
4: God
Regarding #1 and #4 is my next point. The balance of the game is really awful. Even with a wide variety of powers, many of them are like Mortal Kombat characters - mostly the same, except a few are clearly better. Some powers are 'outside the box', and these range from mostly useless (gadget mines) to absurdly good. This huge disparity even between individual powers means that it's easy to end up making a character that does the exact same thing as someone else's character, only much worse at it. Combined with a complex statistic system which rewards minmaxing, and the average player is likely to produce a character statistically inferior in every way to an experienced one.
This leads me to my next point - you can only change the most recent ten changes to your character. You can't change anything before that, so if you get to level 20 or so and find that something you picked early in the game isn't what you wanted, there's no choice but to reroll your character from scratch.
Perhaps the worst of all of it is that there are a number of powers and abilities that are must-have. Even worse is that they form a core group of abilities that supplement other powerful abilities that are not 'essential' but are in the same power tree, making them available sooner. This means that in essence, that you can make "God," a build that can literally handle any problem and deal with any situation.
During the end of beta event where numerous boss Destroids spawned which required large teams to kill, we ran "God" in solo, and easily defeated the enemies without breaking a sweat. In PvP, the God build was able to defend itself against the most dangerous forms of PvP offense (knockback infinites) and completely ignore all other forms of PvP offense, all while delivering its own knockback infinites and huge spike damage.
On that note, PvP is really broken. Currently the metagame revolves around hitting the enemy into the corner with an endless knockback loop then laying down some pets or persistent damaging power (one of which has a pulsing knockback effect) so that the opponent can't escape. All other offensive forms, such as team spikes or landing a hold into a damage chain can be easily prevented by being aware and using teleport, which can escape any situation other than a knockback infinite.
Unfortunately for CO, there is also nothing to really challenge that build. There is virtually 0 endgame content for level 40 characters. This is the same problem that plagues City of Heroes right now (except that's an issue of 'worthwhile' endgame content). Most games have a decidedly endgame focus which is probably bad, but having nothing other than PvP to sate a high level character's appetite is just a mistake.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that at the end of open beta, CO was full of bugs. There were dozens of unfinished missions, incorrect help text for powers (or no text at all!), and numerous costume bugs. While I'm sure these will eventually get fixed, they were so low priority on Cryptic's list compared to hyping the game and selling lifetime subscriptions.
Overall I don't feel like CO was a game ready for launch. It does have a decent amount of potential, but honestly unless Cryptic hires some better developers to balance the powers, CO is going to be another totally imbalanced MMO with no insight into how to fix it.
That's assuming they fix the bugs, of course.
This is my thoughts and feelings behind Cryptic Studios' new MMORPG, Champions Online. It's a modern day superhero MMO set in the Champions universe (it's a niche pen and paper game). It shares a lot of stylistic similarities with City of Heroes/Villains, but that's bound to happen since Cryptic was also the development team behind CoX. Honestly, CO bears similarity to a World of Warcraft/City of Heroes hybrid, which is good and bad (mostly good, imo).
Visually, CO looks and feels a bit dated right out of the gate. While the models are shiny and fairly detailed, the particle effects and animations seem clunky. I'm not sure who does the animations, but they just don't have the same crispness or flow as characters in even dated games like Guild Wars. This isn't to say they look awful, but overall the game looks kinda average. It's still crisper and better looking than WoW is, but that's not really saying much - WoW is kind of an old game.
The (visual) character customization is good, and has a wide variety of character options. However, there were a lot of bugs in the character editor the last time I saw play at the end of beta that made creating a character and costume rather awkward. If you compare it to City of Heroes, there are simply not as many options. CoX has a lot of costume pieces to make a very unique character and build, and CO has many fewer. Compared to many other games (most?) CO still has a very large number of options. Compared to their competition, they're a little low, so I can't really see it as a major selling point.
Still on the visual front, I do not understand why a game made in 2009 can't have hair and clothing physics. Remember the 90s? It was okay for Lara Croft to have a solid block of plastic hair back then. Now there are numerous F2P MMOs that have real hair and clothing physics. A game released in 2009 in box that costs 50$ and has a 15$/mo subscription fee really has no excuse.
It's worth noting that Redefining Nerds doesn't usually talk about visuals in place of gameplay, but because CO's major selling point is visuals, I feel it important to point out how it stacks up. Overall, I think it's acceptable if you are into the other facets of the game too.
Gameplay is my area of expertise though and CO falls sort of short.
The first and biggest issue I have is the reduction/elimination of the support role. Defensive support, eg. buffs and healing, are reduced to maintained beams of healing that apply heals over time, instead of strategic healing bursts and pre-emptive damage prevention. All burst healing is self-targeted and all damage reduction buffs are self only. This takes virtually all the skill out of playing a support character, and forces a support player to focus on doing one thing, instead of multitasking to protect their team effectively.
In general, CO is very solo-focused. Everyone can 'tank' with a few stray power selections for survivability, and everyone deals at least decent damage due to the way the super-stat system works. The result is that even though there are dozens and dozens of powers in the game, every character falls into one of a very small number of categories:
1: awful
2: generic melee brawler
3: generic ranged blaster
4: God
Regarding #1 and #4 is my next point. The balance of the game is really awful. Even with a wide variety of powers, many of them are like Mortal Kombat characters - mostly the same, except a few are clearly better. Some powers are 'outside the box', and these range from mostly useless (gadget mines) to absurdly good. This huge disparity even between individual powers means that it's easy to end up making a character that does the exact same thing as someone else's character, only much worse at it. Combined with a complex statistic system which rewards minmaxing, and the average player is likely to produce a character statistically inferior in every way to an experienced one.
This leads me to my next point - you can only change the most recent ten changes to your character. You can't change anything before that, so if you get to level 20 or so and find that something you picked early in the game isn't what you wanted, there's no choice but to reroll your character from scratch.
Perhaps the worst of all of it is that there are a number of powers and abilities that are must-have. Even worse is that they form a core group of abilities that supplement other powerful abilities that are not 'essential' but are in the same power tree, making them available sooner. This means that in essence, that you can make "God," a build that can literally handle any problem and deal with any situation.
During the end of beta event where numerous boss Destroids spawned which required large teams to kill, we ran "God" in solo, and easily defeated the enemies without breaking a sweat. In PvP, the God build was able to defend itself against the most dangerous forms of PvP offense (knockback infinites) and completely ignore all other forms of PvP offense, all while delivering its own knockback infinites and huge spike damage.
On that note, PvP is really broken. Currently the metagame revolves around hitting the enemy into the corner with an endless knockback loop then laying down some pets or persistent damaging power (one of which has a pulsing knockback effect) so that the opponent can't escape. All other offensive forms, such as team spikes or landing a hold into a damage chain can be easily prevented by being aware and using teleport, which can escape any situation other than a knockback infinite.
Unfortunately for CO, there is also nothing to really challenge that build. There is virtually 0 endgame content for level 40 characters. This is the same problem that plagues City of Heroes right now (except that's an issue of 'worthwhile' endgame content). Most games have a decidedly endgame focus which is probably bad, but having nothing other than PvP to sate a high level character's appetite is just a mistake.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that at the end of open beta, CO was full of bugs. There were dozens of unfinished missions, incorrect help text for powers (or no text at all!), and numerous costume bugs. While I'm sure these will eventually get fixed, they were so low priority on Cryptic's list compared to hyping the game and selling lifetime subscriptions.
Overall I don't feel like CO was a game ready for launch. It does have a decent amount of potential, but honestly unless Cryptic hires some better developers to balance the powers, CO is going to be another totally imbalanced MMO with no insight into how to fix it.
That's assuming they fix the bugs, of course.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
I'm a Moral-what?
This article was going to be about a lot of things. Some people suggested I write 'burst damage' next, others suggested I write about the D&D game I inadvertently 'ruined', and other suggestions were made to talk about this season's Survivor cast.
Then, Valve did something cool.
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2787
This is kind of a big deal, for a number of reasons. To understand what the significance of this is, you have to understand how their item system works. When playing TF2, you can unlock items either by killing players, getting achievements (some of which are really innovative), and also at the end of a round. Of these, the achievement method is the most guaranteed (you get a specific reward for getting a certain number of achievements) while the others are random.
The idle programs in question log you onto random servers, and you idle - until you're kicked, then the program finds a new server and logs you in. Since you have a chance at getting items at the end of a round, there's a chance you'll get items periodically while you do nothing.
This is obvious cheating. Valve took a stand, and removed all items from anyone who abused third-party programs to get items. They gave a bonus item to everyone else, as if to say "Thanks for not cheating!"
I have a complicated stance on this, though. Valve's response was roughly correct. They did not have an existing rule in place, but this behavior was not in line with what they thought was correct gameplay. They did a lot of data mining to identify patterns with these idle programs, and eventually found a way to use those patterns to find the majority of these 'idlers.' I have no problem with Valve's actions.
The issue I have is with the idlers. My personal code of ethics in competition states that you should do everything within your ability to win. This means exploiting bugs or rules loopholes, and in a way, idling qualifies. However, it also does not really qualify. Idlers aren't competing for anything, they just want more items. Still, they should be allowed to exploit any hole in the rules that may exist - it is up to the designer to make rules (or better yet, patches) that fix these loopholes.
The issue with idling is moral - if you join a server and idle, you are hurting whatever team you are on. Even if you eventually get kicked, the team you get stuck on is down a player, and the server gets full, when there is a player that isn't contributing when others are waiting to get in.
What about 'idle servers'? There are servers built for idlers (you don't even need a program), so they can farm items. Is this okay? I feel that it is okay. I'm not sure what Valve's stance on this is, but since these people are not hurting anyone, that it is okay for them to exploit a rules loophole to farm items.
Idlers who lost most of their stuff for using 3rd party programs are up in arms right now. They make up a tiny portion of the TF2 population (4.5% is still a lot, though - thousands of people) but they speak like they are the majority. They claim that since there was no rule, they could not be punished! Well, morally speaking, screwing over your team is pretty lame.
I think that the only thing Valve could have done is implement the rule sooner - it really wouldn't have stopped the idlers (take a look at duping in Diablo II for instance), and they could have done their mass item removal afterward.
Then, Valve did something cool.
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2787
This is kind of a big deal, for a number of reasons. To understand what the significance of this is, you have to understand how their item system works. When playing TF2, you can unlock items either by killing players, getting achievements (some of which are really innovative), and also at the end of a round. Of these, the achievement method is the most guaranteed (you get a specific reward for getting a certain number of achievements) while the others are random.
The idle programs in question log you onto random servers, and you idle - until you're kicked, then the program finds a new server and logs you in. Since you have a chance at getting items at the end of a round, there's a chance you'll get items periodically while you do nothing.
This is obvious cheating. Valve took a stand, and removed all items from anyone who abused third-party programs to get items. They gave a bonus item to everyone else, as if to say "Thanks for not cheating!"
I have a complicated stance on this, though. Valve's response was roughly correct. They did not have an existing rule in place, but this behavior was not in line with what they thought was correct gameplay. They did a lot of data mining to identify patterns with these idle programs, and eventually found a way to use those patterns to find the majority of these 'idlers.' I have no problem with Valve's actions.
The issue I have is with the idlers. My personal code of ethics in competition states that you should do everything within your ability to win. This means exploiting bugs or rules loopholes, and in a way, idling qualifies. However, it also does not really qualify. Idlers aren't competing for anything, they just want more items. Still, they should be allowed to exploit any hole in the rules that may exist - it is up to the designer to make rules (or better yet, patches) that fix these loopholes.
The issue with idling is moral - if you join a server and idle, you are hurting whatever team you are on. Even if you eventually get kicked, the team you get stuck on is down a player, and the server gets full, when there is a player that isn't contributing when others are waiting to get in.
What about 'idle servers'? There are servers built for idlers (you don't even need a program), so they can farm items. Is this okay? I feel that it is okay. I'm not sure what Valve's stance on this is, but since these people are not hurting anyone, that it is okay for them to exploit a rules loophole to farm items.
Idlers who lost most of their stuff for using 3rd party programs are up in arms right now. They make up a tiny portion of the TF2 population (4.5% is still a lot, though - thousands of people) but they speak like they are the majority. They claim that since there was no rule, they could not be punished! Well, morally speaking, screwing over your team is pretty lame.
I think that the only thing Valve could have done is implement the rule sooner - it really wouldn't have stopped the idlers (take a look at duping in Diablo II for instance), and they could have done their mass item removal afterward.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore
In competitive gaming, there's a shared thread between 'dominant' tactics and builds. In games where players can select a wide variety of options, patterns emerge between what is the best and most dominant strategies. There are 4 main characteristics I'd like to go over today, and talk indepth about one of them.
1: Hard control, and barring that, control effects in general. All of these threads have similarities in that they restrict or reduce your opponent's options. Hard control is the ability to completely remove your opponent's ability to move or fight back, typically through stun, knockdown, or similar effects. Other control effects include reducing your opponent's options by restricting their movement or ability choices, or reducing the power of these options (damage or accuracy reduction, etc.) I'll be focusing on this one today.
2: Persistent entities. MMO players generally refer to them as pets. This can include traps and area denial tools, lingering projectiles or delayed effect projectiles (eg. Gier in Arcana Heart) and similar tools. Pets allow a player to restrict the opponent further. At its simplest, a ranged character with a melee pet can force the opponent to keep moving to escape the melee pet while able to function at his ideal range. Pets can often do debilitating things or just deal threatening damage, controlling where and how your opponent moves, which is very powerful. Some pets can even perform defensive functions, which lowers the amount of concentration a pet master has to spend on staying alive. Even if developers do their best to balance pet classes, they tend to become more powerful just because having a seperate, persistent entity changes gameplay.
3: Spike or burst damage. This is the act of depleting an opponent's life rapidly, without allowing them much time to defend themselves. Large amounts of burst reduce the value of healing, because healers must react in a small window and heal large amounts of life immediately in order to be effective at all. Once an enemy is dead, further healing isn't useful. This also takes a person out of the battle before they really have a chance to fight back or defend themselves with any type of active defense. A typical spike might take as few as 2-3 seconds, or as many as ten, depending on the game. In fighting games, this typically refers to characters that can deal lots of damage or win the fight off a single opening. Burst damage needs to be balanced by the ease in dealing it - if it's too easy to set up a burst/get an opening, it tends to be overpowered.
4: Mobility (and stealth, by extension). In Guild Wars, skills that increase your movement by only 20% for brief periods are treated as gold. This is because mobility is so critical in competition. Characters with extremely fast movement can dictate the pace of a match, while slower characters must take their opportunities to attack within the windows that the faster characters give them. A melee fighter who is not allowed to get into melee range due to a lack of speed never gets to fight at all, and a ranged character fighting another ranged character who has the flexibility of speed can pick and choose his moment to strike and his opponent must react. This is really huge for competition. Stealth, teleportation, and other means of controlling the distance in the fight are an extension of this because they do the same thing - manipulate the distance at which the battle is fought and dictate the pace of the battle. A stealthed opponent can control when a battle starts, just like a faster opponent can.
Today I'm only going to talk about control, because each of these topics is really huge.
Control is the most frustrating thing to fight against. In a fighting game where characters use fast recovering moves to leave you on the defensive, you can be made to feel helpless. In a MMORPG when you are permanently stunlocked, feared, or held you are literally helpless with no way to escape. Although perma stun builds can be an element of bad game design, they can also lead to more gameplay depth (WoW). The cost of frustration on a player unfamiliar with perma stun is jarring, though.
Quite simply, getting locked down permanently isn't fun. It doesn't matter what game you're playing - if it's EVE and your ship is getting jammed, warp scrambled and webbed, your ship can do nothing except drive at a slug's pace in most cases. Even burst damage is more fun than that - at least when you're bursted down, you're dead and then you've lost and you can go do something else or try again, or respawn if it's that sort of game. When you spend 10 or more seconds staring at your screen or holding block, it's like you have basically lost but the game is forcing you to witness your death for the next minute. People call these tactics lame or 'cheap', and rightfully so - they aren't fun at all. Even when there are counters, if a novice doesn't know or doesn't have the counter, the match becomes unfun.
Guild Wars takes the hardline approach by making hard control impossible for long periods. Interrupts happen instantly, so it takes one person's constant effort to completely lock an enemy down. Knockdowns are very hard to 'chain', so repeated knockdowns are generally uncommon. Instead, light control is sprinkled throughout a game that is built far more on mobility and burst damage, and surprisingly, active defense is pretty viable (and actually essential).
I think that FPS games luck out since in most cases (barring a few weird exceptions like the Sandman in TF2) hard control or control at all is pretty much not present. Symmetry in FPS games (where each player or team has the same options) also makes the other elements a non-factor, since every player has access to more or less the same options. Also, even if there were control elements like stun in an FPS, knockdown or stun would quickly lead to a death, rather than the 10 second lingering (or more) that most MMORPGs tend to have.
Fighting games treat hard controls completely differently. Typically, a hard control is a combo starter, since the opponent typically can't block. Sometimes (most Mortal Kombat games) this leads to infinites, but in most cases, a hard control is landed, which results in a combo, which either puts the players back in a neutral state, or leaves one player at an advantage. Knockdowns can be seen as a form of hard control though, and once knocked down, a player's options are few, allowing the attacker a large degree of flexibility without necessarily granting the attacker any free hits.
Even soft control is kind of meh. Soft controls reduce your ability to fight back, or can simply remove one option available to you. If one takes a control like Guild Wars' blind, it can still be heavily crippling to someone who depends entirely on non-magic combat. In MMOs where high-end builds tend to be specialized for one type of strategy, crippling that one strategy with a soft control is almost the same as getting pegged by a hard control.
Stacked soft controls can be worse than hard control - in the EVE Alliance Tournament 6, people used sensor dampeners to reduce the enemy's locking range rather than ECM to jam their locks outright. Stacked sensor dampeners led to enemies literally being unable to lock at any respectable distance, forcing players into knife-fight distances if they wanted to attack at all. In City of Heroes, stacked accuracy debuffs can give a foe 5-10% accuracy even with buffs to overcome it, which effectively keeps an opponent from fighting back.
The same reasoning behind controls doesn't apply to the reverse. Buffs that affect the same variables as debuffs tend to be very tightly controlled, often placing caps, stacking penalties or just outright lack of stacking at all in order to restrict people from turning teammates into gods. Debuffs and controls on the other hand tend to be very loosely controlled.
What does this all mean? Well, it means that controls are always something we need to look out for. Whether it's infinite stun/knockdown combos or range floor debuffs, our builds need to include ways to counter or otherwise weather the storm of control. If the game is too focused on control and debuff to the point where it makes matches a matter of who lands the first stun, maybe the game isn't worth playing.
1: Hard control, and barring that, control effects in general. All of these threads have similarities in that they restrict or reduce your opponent's options. Hard control is the ability to completely remove your opponent's ability to move or fight back, typically through stun, knockdown, or similar effects. Other control effects include reducing your opponent's options by restricting their movement or ability choices, or reducing the power of these options (damage or accuracy reduction, etc.) I'll be focusing on this one today.
2: Persistent entities. MMO players generally refer to them as pets. This can include traps and area denial tools, lingering projectiles or delayed effect projectiles (eg. Gier in Arcana Heart) and similar tools. Pets allow a player to restrict the opponent further. At its simplest, a ranged character with a melee pet can force the opponent to keep moving to escape the melee pet while able to function at his ideal range. Pets can often do debilitating things or just deal threatening damage, controlling where and how your opponent moves, which is very powerful. Some pets can even perform defensive functions, which lowers the amount of concentration a pet master has to spend on staying alive. Even if developers do their best to balance pet classes, they tend to become more powerful just because having a seperate, persistent entity changes gameplay.
3: Spike or burst damage. This is the act of depleting an opponent's life rapidly, without allowing them much time to defend themselves. Large amounts of burst reduce the value of healing, because healers must react in a small window and heal large amounts of life immediately in order to be effective at all. Once an enemy is dead, further healing isn't useful. This also takes a person out of the battle before they really have a chance to fight back or defend themselves with any type of active defense. A typical spike might take as few as 2-3 seconds, or as many as ten, depending on the game. In fighting games, this typically refers to characters that can deal lots of damage or win the fight off a single opening. Burst damage needs to be balanced by the ease in dealing it - if it's too easy to set up a burst/get an opening, it tends to be overpowered.
4: Mobility (and stealth, by extension). In Guild Wars, skills that increase your movement by only 20% for brief periods are treated as gold. This is because mobility is so critical in competition. Characters with extremely fast movement can dictate the pace of a match, while slower characters must take their opportunities to attack within the windows that the faster characters give them. A melee fighter who is not allowed to get into melee range due to a lack of speed never gets to fight at all, and a ranged character fighting another ranged character who has the flexibility of speed can pick and choose his moment to strike and his opponent must react. This is really huge for competition. Stealth, teleportation, and other means of controlling the distance in the fight are an extension of this because they do the same thing - manipulate the distance at which the battle is fought and dictate the pace of the battle. A stealthed opponent can control when a battle starts, just like a faster opponent can.
Today I'm only going to talk about control, because each of these topics is really huge.
Control is the most frustrating thing to fight against. In a fighting game where characters use fast recovering moves to leave you on the defensive, you can be made to feel helpless. In a MMORPG when you are permanently stunlocked, feared, or held you are literally helpless with no way to escape. Although perma stun builds can be an element of bad game design, they can also lead to more gameplay depth (WoW). The cost of frustration on a player unfamiliar with perma stun is jarring, though.
Quite simply, getting locked down permanently isn't fun. It doesn't matter what game you're playing - if it's EVE and your ship is getting jammed, warp scrambled and webbed, your ship can do nothing except drive at a slug's pace in most cases. Even burst damage is more fun than that - at least when you're bursted down, you're dead and then you've lost and you can go do something else or try again, or respawn if it's that sort of game. When you spend 10 or more seconds staring at your screen or holding block, it's like you have basically lost but the game is forcing you to witness your death for the next minute. People call these tactics lame or 'cheap', and rightfully so - they aren't fun at all. Even when there are counters, if a novice doesn't know or doesn't have the counter, the match becomes unfun.
Guild Wars takes the hardline approach by making hard control impossible for long periods. Interrupts happen instantly, so it takes one person's constant effort to completely lock an enemy down. Knockdowns are very hard to 'chain', so repeated knockdowns are generally uncommon. Instead, light control is sprinkled throughout a game that is built far more on mobility and burst damage, and surprisingly, active defense is pretty viable (and actually essential).
I think that FPS games luck out since in most cases (barring a few weird exceptions like the Sandman in TF2) hard control or control at all is pretty much not present. Symmetry in FPS games (where each player or team has the same options) also makes the other elements a non-factor, since every player has access to more or less the same options. Also, even if there were control elements like stun in an FPS, knockdown or stun would quickly lead to a death, rather than the 10 second lingering (or more) that most MMORPGs tend to have.
Fighting games treat hard controls completely differently. Typically, a hard control is a combo starter, since the opponent typically can't block. Sometimes (most Mortal Kombat games) this leads to infinites, but in most cases, a hard control is landed, which results in a combo, which either puts the players back in a neutral state, or leaves one player at an advantage. Knockdowns can be seen as a form of hard control though, and once knocked down, a player's options are few, allowing the attacker a large degree of flexibility without necessarily granting the attacker any free hits.
Even soft control is kind of meh. Soft controls reduce your ability to fight back, or can simply remove one option available to you. If one takes a control like Guild Wars' blind, it can still be heavily crippling to someone who depends entirely on non-magic combat. In MMOs where high-end builds tend to be specialized for one type of strategy, crippling that one strategy with a soft control is almost the same as getting pegged by a hard control.
Stacked soft controls can be worse than hard control - in the EVE Alliance Tournament 6, people used sensor dampeners to reduce the enemy's locking range rather than ECM to jam their locks outright. Stacked sensor dampeners led to enemies literally being unable to lock at any respectable distance, forcing players into knife-fight distances if they wanted to attack at all. In City of Heroes, stacked accuracy debuffs can give a foe 5-10% accuracy even with buffs to overcome it, which effectively keeps an opponent from fighting back.
The same reasoning behind controls doesn't apply to the reverse. Buffs that affect the same variables as debuffs tend to be very tightly controlled, often placing caps, stacking penalties or just outright lack of stacking at all in order to restrict people from turning teammates into gods. Debuffs and controls on the other hand tend to be very loosely controlled.
What does this all mean? Well, it means that controls are always something we need to look out for. Whether it's infinite stun/knockdown combos or range floor debuffs, our builds need to include ways to counter or otherwise weather the storm of control. If the game is too focused on control and debuff to the point where it makes matches a matter of who lands the first stun, maybe the game isn't worth playing.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
No, Really Really, Morality is Not Subjective
No, I don't think this time is going to be a preachy moral article. It's about morals, sort of, though.
In roleplaying games, alignment, or 'percieved alignment' for those games without alignment rules, is sort of a big thing. Some games just gloss over the topic (returnergames) while others, most notably D&D, make it a big, game-altering deal to be of a particular alignment. This article is about the more hard systems of good and evil, and how ridiculous some GMs can be.
Good and evil in the type of D&D way are pretty poorly defined, and even though more recent books have more clearly explained each alignment, players and GMs continue to misinterpret such principles as 'lawful good.'
The first thing to think about in any morality situation is intent. The intent of a person is 99.9% of what determines whether an act is good or evil.
A character who accidentally does just about anything, without being aware of the consequences of the action, is not performing an evil act. A character who accidentally causes the death of someone is not performing an evil act. How many paladins have you heard fall because of unintentional consequences of their otherwise noble decisions? The answer: A lot.
The intent of the action determines pretty much everything behind it. If the paladin happens to put his sword in the closet, unaware that a pixie is hiding out in there, and inadvertently hacks off one of her wings, he is not going to fall. He might fall if he was mean about it afterwards, depending on the whims of the GM, but if he was like, "zomg im sorry :(" that should be enough to say, the paladin isn't performing an evil act.
If a character does something that is evil that they do not realize is evil, it is still (probably) not an evil act. For instance, a heroic character is deceived by an illusion into thinking that a town of innocent people are actually treacherous monsters that are threatening the town. If he kills the people (deceived by illusion) it would probably not be considered an evil act. There's a situation like this in Baldur's Gate 2, where the players and a group of paladins are hit by illusions, and both groups think the other group is a bunch of hostile monsters. When you win, you find out that the enemies are paladins, and you go and find the guy responsible (a red dragon, which you can choose whether or not to pwn its face). This is not an evil act - unless the players were to be like, "oh, well I would have killed them anyway." This changes the intent from killing hostile, life threatening monsters to killing a group of benevolent do-gooders. Intending to kill good guys is almost always an evil thing.
So looking further at intent, we get into the morally grey. What if two countries are economically dependent on a particular resource, and there isn't enough of it to go around, and so they go to war over controlling the resource (after negotiations prove impossible). The individual combatants in the war are almost assuredly not performing evil acts. The politicians might be, depending on how critical the resource is.
Using a more fantasy example, say a village is struck with a terrible disease, and the only way to cure it is to make medicine from the roots of a really ancient tree. At the same time, there are druids who guard the tree and the forest and wildlife that would die if the tree were dug up. Inevitably there's going to be blood there, and it's a pretty morally grey decision as to who is in the right. Neither side is doing evil, even if we may side with one group or the other.
Back on the subject of things that would cause a paladin to fall or that would be considered vaguely evil, is actions that are obviously stupid. If a hero knows that what he is doing could result in harming innocents if he screws it up, then yeah, that is probably evil or would cause a paladin to fall. There's a little bit of grey area here too, but not a whole lot. If the paladin is climbing a tree to retrieve a magical arrow he fired, and there's a chance that the branch could fall and if someone was walking under it they could get hurt, the paladin is probably not doing anything evil, even if the branch does break and someone gets hurt. If we escalate a bit, say a hero is fighting a monster on some dangerous terrain. If the hero moves to safer ground and continues the fight there, it might endanger innocent lives (due to fireball explosions or whatever). This hero is totally doing something that would make a paladin fall, especially there are consequences. Again, if the hero doesn't know that innocent people are around when he makes the tactically superior decision to relocate, then he is obviously not doing something evil, though.
Lastly, good intentions are not 100%. If a crazy person believes that a village is actually shapeshifted demons (because he's told, whatever) without doing any investigation, and rolls out and starts murdering people, that's evil, period. Obviously if he finds out they are demons, and they are a threat, then he is totally justified in cutting them down.
On that last point, though - slaying demons is not always a good act. Demons that are harmless, or that seem to not want to mess with people, are not 'free xp'. Slaying a sleeping red dragon who has no history of terrorizing humans is an evil act, even if red dragons are traditionally evil.
That's really something that is overlooked a lot in fantasy - killing is not something one should just take lightly. It's one thing to fight in self defense, and it's one thing to protect people from evil creatures. It's not okay to go hunting for orcs or goblins or whatever.
Segway time ... loading ... loading ...
Lawful good is a pretty misunderstood alignment (right up there with neutral evil and true neutral). Lawful good does not mean a character is a pacifist or an idiot. It means that they hold a (good) ideal or belief, and maybe follow a good religion and live in a nation with good laws.
A lawful good character (even a paladin) does not have to be 100% honest at all times. It's morally wrong to lie, and it might even be morally wrong to decieve people. However, if it serves the greater good, not telling the bad guy that your kingdom plans on invading next week is completely understandable. When the rogue lies like a politician to save your party, it is not against a lawful good character's alignment to shut their mouth, shrug their shoulders, and be unresponsive. It is against their alignment to lie, but in the situation where it could lead to the safety of an entire kingdom, it is probably okay if a paladin makes a suggestion that the rogue "is a pretty honest guy" or "couldn't make this kind of thing up."
Evil is even less understood. Believe me, I know. The best way to sum up evil characters is, they are like players. Ha.
Seriously though, evil characters simply want what they want. Most evil characters are not chaotic evil and do not do evil things just for the sake of doing evil. Most (neutral) evil characters want power, money, or prestige. They will steal or murder people to get at what they want, but that doesn't mean they always will. Evil isn't dumb either, and the bad guys most likely aren't going to kill the good guy king and steal his daughter and run off to the castle to wait for a good guy to show up - unless the bad guy was strong enough to handle the entire king's army when they attack his castle in retribution.
When I make an evil character, I give them goals, motivations, and reasons for doing things. Then, because they are evil, they use evil means to get at those goals.
Evil means isn't the only option to an evil character. If it's easier to get at something they want by doing good deeds, an evil character is totally capable of doing good things. Evil isn't like good - it's the absence of morals, not the presence of them. That means most evil characters have no qualms about doing 'good' things if it gets them what they want.
There can be evil characters devoted to being evil, such as lawful evil religious zealots or chaotic evil morons. These characters are pretty cool and wacky, but rarely do they feel dangerous like an evil character who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Fortunately, most lawful evil characters aren't so devoted to doing evil that they won't do 'good' things.
To sum it all up:
Being a good guy is about wanting to do the right thing, as much as possible.
Being a bad guy is about getting what you want.
Selfish motives are always evil, and selfless motives are always good.
Keep that in mind, guys!
In roleplaying games, alignment, or 'percieved alignment' for those games without alignment rules, is sort of a big thing. Some games just gloss over the topic (returnergames) while others, most notably D&D, make it a big, game-altering deal to be of a particular alignment. This article is about the more hard systems of good and evil, and how ridiculous some GMs can be.
Good and evil in the type of D&D way are pretty poorly defined, and even though more recent books have more clearly explained each alignment, players and GMs continue to misinterpret such principles as 'lawful good.'
The first thing to think about in any morality situation is intent. The intent of a person is 99.9% of what determines whether an act is good or evil.
A character who accidentally does just about anything, without being aware of the consequences of the action, is not performing an evil act. A character who accidentally causes the death of someone is not performing an evil act. How many paladins have you heard fall because of unintentional consequences of their otherwise noble decisions? The answer: A lot.
The intent of the action determines pretty much everything behind it. If the paladin happens to put his sword in the closet, unaware that a pixie is hiding out in there, and inadvertently hacks off one of her wings, he is not going to fall. He might fall if he was mean about it afterwards, depending on the whims of the GM, but if he was like, "zomg im sorry :(" that should be enough to say, the paladin isn't performing an evil act.
If a character does something that is evil that they do not realize is evil, it is still (probably) not an evil act. For instance, a heroic character is deceived by an illusion into thinking that a town of innocent people are actually treacherous monsters that are threatening the town. If he kills the people (deceived by illusion) it would probably not be considered an evil act. There's a situation like this in Baldur's Gate 2, where the players and a group of paladins are hit by illusions, and both groups think the other group is a bunch of hostile monsters. When you win, you find out that the enemies are paladins, and you go and find the guy responsible (a red dragon, which you can choose whether or not to pwn its face). This is not an evil act - unless the players were to be like, "oh, well I would have killed them anyway." This changes the intent from killing hostile, life threatening monsters to killing a group of benevolent do-gooders. Intending to kill good guys is almost always an evil thing.
So looking further at intent, we get into the morally grey. What if two countries are economically dependent on a particular resource, and there isn't enough of it to go around, and so they go to war over controlling the resource (after negotiations prove impossible). The individual combatants in the war are almost assuredly not performing evil acts. The politicians might be, depending on how critical the resource is.
Using a more fantasy example, say a village is struck with a terrible disease, and the only way to cure it is to make medicine from the roots of a really ancient tree. At the same time, there are druids who guard the tree and the forest and wildlife that would die if the tree were dug up. Inevitably there's going to be blood there, and it's a pretty morally grey decision as to who is in the right. Neither side is doing evil, even if we may side with one group or the other.
Back on the subject of things that would cause a paladin to fall or that would be considered vaguely evil, is actions that are obviously stupid. If a hero knows that what he is doing could result in harming innocents if he screws it up, then yeah, that is probably evil or would cause a paladin to fall. There's a little bit of grey area here too, but not a whole lot. If the paladin is climbing a tree to retrieve a magical arrow he fired, and there's a chance that the branch could fall and if someone was walking under it they could get hurt, the paladin is probably not doing anything evil, even if the branch does break and someone gets hurt. If we escalate a bit, say a hero is fighting a monster on some dangerous terrain. If the hero moves to safer ground and continues the fight there, it might endanger innocent lives (due to fireball explosions or whatever). This hero is totally doing something that would make a paladin fall, especially there are consequences. Again, if the hero doesn't know that innocent people are around when he makes the tactically superior decision to relocate, then he is obviously not doing something evil, though.
Lastly, good intentions are not 100%. If a crazy person believes that a village is actually shapeshifted demons (because he's told, whatever) without doing any investigation, and rolls out and starts murdering people, that's evil, period. Obviously if he finds out they are demons, and they are a threat, then he is totally justified in cutting them down.
On that last point, though - slaying demons is not always a good act. Demons that are harmless, or that seem to not want to mess with people, are not 'free xp'. Slaying a sleeping red dragon who has no history of terrorizing humans is an evil act, even if red dragons are traditionally evil.
That's really something that is overlooked a lot in fantasy - killing is not something one should just take lightly. It's one thing to fight in self defense, and it's one thing to protect people from evil creatures. It's not okay to go hunting for orcs or goblins or whatever.
Segway time ... loading ... loading ...
Lawful good is a pretty misunderstood alignment (right up there with neutral evil and true neutral). Lawful good does not mean a character is a pacifist or an idiot. It means that they hold a (good) ideal or belief, and maybe follow a good religion and live in a nation with good laws.
A lawful good character (even a paladin) does not have to be 100% honest at all times. It's morally wrong to lie, and it might even be morally wrong to decieve people. However, if it serves the greater good, not telling the bad guy that your kingdom plans on invading next week is completely understandable. When the rogue lies like a politician to save your party, it is not against a lawful good character's alignment to shut their mouth, shrug their shoulders, and be unresponsive. It is against their alignment to lie, but in the situation where it could lead to the safety of an entire kingdom, it is probably okay if a paladin makes a suggestion that the rogue "is a pretty honest guy" or "couldn't make this kind of thing up."
Evil is even less understood. Believe me, I know. The best way to sum up evil characters is, they are like players. Ha.
Seriously though, evil characters simply want what they want. Most evil characters are not chaotic evil and do not do evil things just for the sake of doing evil. Most (neutral) evil characters want power, money, or prestige. They will steal or murder people to get at what they want, but that doesn't mean they always will. Evil isn't dumb either, and the bad guys most likely aren't going to kill the good guy king and steal his daughter and run off to the castle to wait for a good guy to show up - unless the bad guy was strong enough to handle the entire king's army when they attack his castle in retribution.
When I make an evil character, I give them goals, motivations, and reasons for doing things. Then, because they are evil, they use evil means to get at those goals.
Evil means isn't the only option to an evil character. If it's easier to get at something they want by doing good deeds, an evil character is totally capable of doing good things. Evil isn't like good - it's the absence of morals, not the presence of them. That means most evil characters have no qualms about doing 'good' things if it gets them what they want.
There can be evil characters devoted to being evil, such as lawful evil religious zealots or chaotic evil morons. These characters are pretty cool and wacky, but rarely do they feel dangerous like an evil character who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Fortunately, most lawful evil characters aren't so devoted to doing evil that they won't do 'good' things.
To sum it all up:
Being a good guy is about wanting to do the right thing, as much as possible.
Being a bad guy is about getting what you want.
Selfish motives are always evil, and selfless motives are always good.
Keep that in mind, guys!
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
You Deserve a Pat on the Back
Man, it's been forever. Sorry -.-
So I've been thinking about design and how it relates to good games. I've also been thinking on a very important concept:
What do you deserve when you play a game? This is entirely different depending on whether you are a novice, intermediate, or expert player. It's hard to juggle all of these things together, of course.
A novice player deserves a fun learning experience and easy to use game mechanics. I think this is very important. If novices don't grow in a game, they will put it down. For developers, that means a lot especially if their game has a subscription fee. For a community, it means the community has lost another hopeful contributor.
As experts, we sort of take the new player experience for granted. We almost always scoff at the tutorials for games once we've played through them our 2nd - 50th time through the game. Amusingly, many people who dislike the tutorial the most are the people who still haven't learned everything in it, but I digress.
I think the bare minimum for a game is that it has a fairly long (20-ish hours) and enjoyable campaign/story mode that should also serve as a tutorial for high level game concepts. There are very few examples of this. Of the examples that do exist, ALL of them are for single player games (Devil May Cry 4 is a pretty decent example even if the actual tutorial in the game is mediocre - the gameplay itself is a fairly excellent teacher of gameplay concepts). There are some good multiplayer game tutorials, such as Virtua Fighter 4/5's tutorial mode. However, these are strung together like boring lessons and aren't woven into an engaging campaign or story mode.
In fact, engaging multiplayer campaign/story modes are highly boring for the most part, and many (like WarCraft/StarCraft) actually teach you the wrong things. A decent example of a fun designed story mode might be Soul Calibur 3, and a decent example of a story mode that could have been fun is definitely Super Smash Brothers Brawl. When compared to these story modes, games like BlazBlue or Soul Calibur 4 or Street Fighter (any) just don't hold up.
Soul Calibur 2's adventure mode (called Weapon Master) was somewhat interesting as a tutorial, since it often forced you to defeat your enemy in different ways, including ring outs, juggle combos, and so on. Unfortunately, it didn't really go far enough and the result is that players didn't really learn optimal combos or setups for their character. Still, as far as multiplayer games go, it's pretty much all we've got.
You could call the entire level 1 to max level gameplay in a MMORPG the campaign/story mode, but the reality is that in most cases, players are forced into 'real gameplay' decisions long before they hit max level. In WoW for instance, the tutorial period is rightfully levels 1-10, and at level 10 they can head into WSG or the Arena and PvP for their first time, and go into their first instance shortly after that. In City of Heroes, there really is no endgame content and the 'tutorial mission' ends at level 2 (and without teaching the player much).
An ideal tutorial teaches players about as many pertinent gameplay elements as possible. Also, the gameplay needs to be structured that the mechanics are transparent and easy to grasp.
Although I've talked about simple vs. complex a million times, I'd like to illustrate why so many people play Soul Calibur. The game is easy to pick up. It is not a very good intermediate player's game, but at the beginner level it's easy to understand. Moving the stick in a direction makes you move in that direction, and it has three attack buttons and a guard button. Most of the moves a beginner would do are easy, direction + button affairs, or possibly direction + two buttons. Even at the expert level, the experts are doing these same moves, which helps transparency. Beginners don't often feel like they've been destroyed by experts, which is a big help for a good learning experience.
An intermediate player deserves an intuitive process in learning high level gameplay and positive feedback. Obviously, also, a game needs to be fun at this level.
The intermediate level is where the novice starts learning strategies and such, and the intermediate player usually thrashes novice players like rag dolls because the intermediate player can usually figure out something that beats a majority of low level button mashing. In order for the intermediate player to not get bored though, they've got to keep growing in their skills. They also need good competition, which means that in the case of online games and MMOs, intermediate players need good matchmaking.
Soul Calibur is absolutely horrid about teaching high level concepts to intermediate players. Frame traps, just frame timings on silly things (just ukemi?! what?) and extremely strict combo timing makes it hard to bridge the gap between beginner and expert. Nowhere in the tutorial does it show examples of "my turn, your turn" gameplay, mid-low-throw mixup, safe wakeups and other similar high level elements. This means that intermediate SC players often stay there and never become experts. Amusingly, this is possibly for the better, since most expert SC players claim that their game is less fun.
Other games vary. StarCraft is even harder, as is chess. In general, most competitive games are not really built for intermediate players. This means, as a new player, it's often hard to make the jump from intermediate to expert. This is why, in general, competitive communities tend to have a dearth of new expert players.
Expert players deserve a game with a wealth of viable options and lots of depth. Fun isn't as important anymore, as deep gameplay will generally create 'fun' for experts even if the core mechanics aren't all that fun.
For a look at 'wealth of viable options' I think Arcana Heart (and sequels) is probably one of the best examples to look at, with a reasonably sized cast and a lot of different magic spells to choose from. I think that the design is somewhat accidental, and the game itself is a little too hard.
I'd be a bit biased in this, but currently I think BlazBlue is one of the latest and best games to explore competitive depth. It's an expert's game to be sure, but it isn't really an intermediate or beginner's game even though it has a number of features to make it easier on those players.
The learning curve for most games is very strange, and not really representative of anything in real life.
I'm not sure how short hop is intuitive at all, Smash players.
So I've been thinking about design and how it relates to good games. I've also been thinking on a very important concept:
What do you deserve when you play a game? This is entirely different depending on whether you are a novice, intermediate, or expert player. It's hard to juggle all of these things together, of course.
A novice player deserves a fun learning experience and easy to use game mechanics. I think this is very important. If novices don't grow in a game, they will put it down. For developers, that means a lot especially if their game has a subscription fee. For a community, it means the community has lost another hopeful contributor.
As experts, we sort of take the new player experience for granted. We almost always scoff at the tutorials for games once we've played through them our 2nd - 50th time through the game. Amusingly, many people who dislike the tutorial the most are the people who still haven't learned everything in it, but I digress.
I think the bare minimum for a game is that it has a fairly long (20-ish hours) and enjoyable campaign/story mode that should also serve as a tutorial for high level game concepts. There are very few examples of this. Of the examples that do exist, ALL of them are for single player games (Devil May Cry 4 is a pretty decent example even if the actual tutorial in the game is mediocre - the gameplay itself is a fairly excellent teacher of gameplay concepts). There are some good multiplayer game tutorials, such as Virtua Fighter 4/5's tutorial mode. However, these are strung together like boring lessons and aren't woven into an engaging campaign or story mode.
In fact, engaging multiplayer campaign/story modes are highly boring for the most part, and many (like WarCraft/StarCraft) actually teach you the wrong things. A decent example of a fun designed story mode might be Soul Calibur 3, and a decent example of a story mode that could have been fun is definitely Super Smash Brothers Brawl. When compared to these story modes, games like BlazBlue or Soul Calibur 4 or Street Fighter (any) just don't hold up.
Soul Calibur 2's adventure mode (called Weapon Master) was somewhat interesting as a tutorial, since it often forced you to defeat your enemy in different ways, including ring outs, juggle combos, and so on. Unfortunately, it didn't really go far enough and the result is that players didn't really learn optimal combos or setups for their character. Still, as far as multiplayer games go, it's pretty much all we've got.
You could call the entire level 1 to max level gameplay in a MMORPG the campaign/story mode, but the reality is that in most cases, players are forced into 'real gameplay' decisions long before they hit max level. In WoW for instance, the tutorial period is rightfully levels 1-10, and at level 10 they can head into WSG or the Arena and PvP for their first time, and go into their first instance shortly after that. In City of Heroes, there really is no endgame content and the 'tutorial mission' ends at level 2 (and without teaching the player much).
An ideal tutorial teaches players about as many pertinent gameplay elements as possible. Also, the gameplay needs to be structured that the mechanics are transparent and easy to grasp.
Although I've talked about simple vs. complex a million times, I'd like to illustrate why so many people play Soul Calibur. The game is easy to pick up. It is not a very good intermediate player's game, but at the beginner level it's easy to understand. Moving the stick in a direction makes you move in that direction, and it has three attack buttons and a guard button. Most of the moves a beginner would do are easy, direction + button affairs, or possibly direction + two buttons. Even at the expert level, the experts are doing these same moves, which helps transparency. Beginners don't often feel like they've been destroyed by experts, which is a big help for a good learning experience.
An intermediate player deserves an intuitive process in learning high level gameplay and positive feedback. Obviously, also, a game needs to be fun at this level.
The intermediate level is where the novice starts learning strategies and such, and the intermediate player usually thrashes novice players like rag dolls because the intermediate player can usually figure out something that beats a majority of low level button mashing. In order for the intermediate player to not get bored though, they've got to keep growing in their skills. They also need good competition, which means that in the case of online games and MMOs, intermediate players need good matchmaking.
Soul Calibur is absolutely horrid about teaching high level concepts to intermediate players. Frame traps, just frame timings on silly things (just ukemi?! what?) and extremely strict combo timing makes it hard to bridge the gap between beginner and expert. Nowhere in the tutorial does it show examples of "my turn, your turn" gameplay, mid-low-throw mixup, safe wakeups and other similar high level elements. This means that intermediate SC players often stay there and never become experts. Amusingly, this is possibly for the better, since most expert SC players claim that their game is less fun.
Other games vary. StarCraft is even harder, as is chess. In general, most competitive games are not really built for intermediate players. This means, as a new player, it's often hard to make the jump from intermediate to expert. This is why, in general, competitive communities tend to have a dearth of new expert players.
Expert players deserve a game with a wealth of viable options and lots of depth. Fun isn't as important anymore, as deep gameplay will generally create 'fun' for experts even if the core mechanics aren't all that fun.
For a look at 'wealth of viable options' I think Arcana Heart (and sequels) is probably one of the best examples to look at, with a reasonably sized cast and a lot of different magic spells to choose from. I think that the design is somewhat accidental, and the game itself is a little too hard.
I'd be a bit biased in this, but currently I think BlazBlue is one of the latest and best games to explore competitive depth. It's an expert's game to be sure, but it isn't really an intermediate or beginner's game even though it has a number of features to make it easier on those players.
The learning curve for most games is very strange, and not really representative of anything in real life.
I'm not sure how short hop is intuitive at all, Smash players.
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