For a very long time, game developers (and in particular, I guess, game designers and game writers) have worked to get games as close to movies as it’s possible. And, although I understand as well as support the idea behind a cinematic presentation of story elements, the comparison in my opinion breaks completely when you use it on interest curves. Some have used television series as an example, and although this works fairly well, it’s still a bit flawed. The comparison that should be made is to a medium so taken for granted we barely think about them: Books. And, more specific, novels. “What?” you may ask. “But books are only a mass of text. Interactive fiction might fit, but not audiovisual games”. And this is the same logical trap that makes the comparison to movies appear over and over again. Because, as audiovisual as games are, they tend to be 10 to 40 hours long. A movie is for most considered too long for most if it reaches four, a length considered short for a game. This length demands of a movie to quickly get to the intrigue and get on with the story to reach the end quickly […]
On Things in Games
The 1st of Mars last year, I wrote a post about MMOs and time-waste, where I – among other points – wrote: “For instance, you get a quest to kill some bears right outside town. Now, this town is on the top of a mountain, and the bears are down in the alley[sic], so you’ve got to get down that mountain to kill bears and then back up. Sure, this sounds like a small thing, and it is. It is when traveling includes flying all over the world back and forth taking several minutes for nothing that it, in my opinion, gets bigger. Or when I have to run down that same mountain the tenth time. Why can’t I just teleport around, moving to the target instantly? It’s not like I won’t have to know where I’m heading to make a precise estimation of where I’m about to teleport.” Sometimes, the world behaves in mysterious ways. Yesterday, Rock Paper Shotgun (RPS) posted an article asking why you can’t teleport in MMOs. Knowing I’ve asked the same, and during this year of education might have found a few answers, I feel I could make a post going a bit further into […]
Travelling in MMOs
Tutorials are what make you initially learn how to play a certain game. Often they’re quite boring, and sometimes you don’t learn too much from them, either. My guess on these questions are: Tutorials are no fun because they present no challange or goal. Think that you’ve got the typical RTS-basics of selecting and moving. Normally, you’re just expected to select a peasant and move him to the flag, beacon or whatever. What if this peasant is attacked by a bear, and the peasant is terrified. You have ro select him before he gets slaughtered and flee to the village. You do the same thing, it’s just a bit more fun then before. Note that if you fail, there’s always another peasant. Another guess: You don’t learn from the tutorials because (apart from not being fun), they’re not very pedagogic. You’re not expected to know the multiplications tables by solving each pair only once, you have to repeat it a few times. Grind? Yes, but just a short one to make the knowledge stick. When you’re done with the basic tutorials it’s time to play. But what if you could return to more advanced tutorials, that teaches you a few […]
Thinking: Tutorials
This is something that have bugged me for long, but that I didn’t start to seriously think about until now. It’s animations. Or, rather, how they seem to not care about what’s around them. The problem I’m having with them is that animations might look great on one character, but it looks like crap interacting with other animated character. The best example is MMO PvP between close combat players. Two persons wave their swords at one another, and seem not generally taken by that. Suddently one of them falls down in his/her usual way and die. What? So that sword-waving didn’t bother the one who later died? Why did this swing kill it? As a spectator, you get confused. Why doesn’t the animations play so that they dodge, parry or miss most swings, and hit at 60% hp and 30% hp, on which the hit one starts to act more hurt until the killing move which throws it backwards with some ragdoll-stuff? I could generalize to weapon-based close-combat in general. Not even a game like Soul Calibur lets a hit feel powerful. Yes, a meter goes down, but so what? I can’t see anything on my character! A sword is […]
Thinking: Animated characters interacting with other animated characters.
It was way too long since last time I wrote, so it’s getting time to write again. I’m in the middle of something like four parallel school-projects at the time, so that’s one important reason I haven’t written as much as I should have to consider this thing “active”. Anyway, I thought I’d bang my head a bit on a really hard nut to crack: File-sharing, specifically the illegal branch of it, and how it can be dealt with. Note that I’m making a stand saying “deal with”, and another by not using the word “Piracy”. I’ll come to why later on. So, File-sharing, or – as this text will focus on – the illegal file-sharing not followed by payment to the creator. It is very accepted among those I know of, and seems to be fairly accepted on the ‘net, as well. So it will probably, in some twisted way, be controversial of me to argue against it. And I risk breaking the radio-silence I’ve preferred to move around in with this blog (to keep expectations and problems away). But, as I want to do this for a living in the future, it will be vital you can make […]
Thinking: File-sharing and selling
Yes, another MMO-post. I’ve been playing some World of Warcraft again this holiday, and I quickly got back to what I saw as the big downsides of the genre – the grinding, which I’ve already covered, and the amount of time you plough down in stuff like transportation or finding groups. For instance, you get a quest to kill some bears right outside town. Now, this town is on the top of a mountain, and the bears are down in the alley, so you’ve got to get down that mountain to kill bears and then back up. Sure, this sounds like a small thing, and it is. It is when traveling includes flying all over the world back and forth taking several minutes for nothing that it, in my opinion, gets bigger. Or when I have to run down that same mountain the tenth time. Why can’t I just teleport around, moving to the target instantly? It’s not like I won’t have to know where I’m heading to make a precise estimation of where I’m about to teleport. The second thing is when you level up and have to get back to town to get to some trainer to buy […]
Thinking: MMOs and time-waste
It’s time to write this! I still don’t know what my suggestions will be, and I bet I’ll have a wild discussion about it, but I can’t let the blog fall because I hold this post too long. Before I start, I should mention that my MMO-experience is limited to 2 or so years of World of Warcraft, 12 or so hours with Guild Wars and 10 minutes or so with Tibia (then I got bored, killed and quit). But I’ve gotten the impression that WoW is very similar in the grind-aspect to many other MMOs, so I think I have experience enough to talk. So, Grinding. To repeatedly doing one task over, and over, and over and over. Like killing a monster. Or doing a dungeon. Over and over and over. I really wonder if anyone considers this to be “fun”. Many of us probably don’t think about that it’s just the same thing over and over – just one more level, just one more quest, just this one item – but you tend to think about it when you have no close-by goal. It’s the later of these I don’t like. At all. To grind without a close-by, […]
Thinking: MMOs and grinding
It was awhile ago I made my last post. During this time, I have had a few topics to write about, but haven’t had an idea of what my point should be or what to use as examples. I believe I have that now. What this post will comment is the ability to wield every weapon at once or being able to use every weapon in the game perfectly from the get-go (and not about the flood of enemies you slay – I’ve already mentioned that). For instance, in the Quake and UT-series, you can wield something like 10 weapons at the same time while several being very heavy. This doesn’t affect your movement any tiny bit, or make you heavier in any sense. No, I’m not going to suggest a Tibia-inventory (Tibia had a weight-based inventory with a weight-limit and the closer you were to that limit the slower you became), but it doesn’t make sense to run around with a BFG, a rail-gun, a plasma-cannon, a pistol, a shotgun and lots and lots of ammunition for all these at the same time. Not even guys like Rambo can do that (and he’s fictional, too)! Thankfully, that way of […]
Army of One in FPS
With all these thinking about RTS, you could almost think I don’t like them and that’s why I post so much stuff about them. Actually, it’s the opposite. The reason I find so much RTS-stuff to write about is that I’ve played them a lot through the years and have found things to note in some games that others have had or lacked. In many RTSs, the developer wants to use all kinds of forces that are used on battle-fileds – ground, sea and air. Sometimes the developer succeeds in making all three viable and important aspects of the game, sometimes they don’t. As I’ve got no ideas of my own on the subject, I’ll take a few games as examples and note what they did and how that turned out. No offence to the people loving these games, the reason I remember them is because I like them, too. I’ll begin with the Warcraft-series. In the second game, they used naval forces to conquer a special resource and transporting units between bits of land. Air was only used as scouts. It all worked very well, the ships was a very important aspect of the game. In the third game, […]
Ground- Naval- and Air-units in RTS
Perhaps a description of “C&C-like RTS” is in place before I begin. What that means is the RTS sub-genre where you start out with one building and possibly a few resource-gatherers to mine resources to build up a base to build up an army to raze the opponent’s base. This is the very meaning of RTS to some, but “Real Time Strategy” can be so much wider, as teams such as Creative Assembly, Paradox and Massive has proven with their games. In many of these games – primarily the Blizzard-games and their clones – you start out with a main-building and a few gatherers, and the first thing you do is to send them to mine, to build more gatherers. And repeat for awhile. In others, you’ve got a builder, the main-building and enough cash to build up a resource-gathering building and a gatherer to get the economy rolling. Just as with Character-creation in RPGs, this stuff isn’t the fun part of the game and takes too much time. It has to be shortened, or taken away all-together. The latter would take away an important tactic in the game (ruining the opponent’s economy), so I guess that’s ruled out if […]
The slow start in C&C-like RTS
Ok, now it suddenly became a lot more posts these two last days – I guess I realized it’s fun to post often rather then post only when you feel you *have* to. So, lately, I’ve been hearing signs from oh-so-worried very-old-people that video games “makes our streets more violent” and blah blah blah. I’ve always been annoyed with that sort of un-based bullshit. Based on the Swedish ungdomsstyrelse (can translate to “council of youth”), they state that “Among the high-active gamers 24 percent states that they never drink alcohol, which can be compared to the 19 percent among those that never game”. And, following a tautology ((p^(p->q))->q), or “alcohol and ‘alcohol leads to violence’ combined leads to violence”, must mean that gamers are less likely to drink, and thus commit to violence. Anyway, just the other day, a (yet again very very old) man in a debate-article first gives an example in a Swedish TV-show when a husband shoots his wife with a gun in front of their common child, and then the child watches his mother slowly die – and then states video-games are extreme! And, with the exception of the Manhunt-games, I can’t find any single example […]
Thinking: Violence and games
Just read through Rock, Paper, Shotgun about DICE’s new project, Mirror’s Edge. Although the idea in itslef is enough to make me all smiles for the rest of the day, it gets even better when I found out I’ve basicly have had the same thoughts independently, and even wrote about it here recently! Which means I’ve had the same idea as the smart guy on Dice. And if great minds do think alike, it makes me a great mind! I hope I’ll one day get this sort of great idea and have the ablity to relize it first…
Some other guy’s idea makes me feel smart
I really should post stuff when they comes to mind. Several topics have gone through my head the last days, and I could’ve posted about them. It wouldn’t be that good posts, perhaps, but it would make this blog seem more active. Anyway, I found a topic yesterday that I just *had* to write about: The choice of random in RTS. This might seem like a small thing, but most of it is unused potential. Before a match starts, you’re in that lobby-window with everyone else. Sometimes you can choose the map in that room, sometimes the map is chosen before that room is created. But always, always, you choose a faction that is displayed in public. And there’s a random option for faction, but not map. And you can’t pick between which to random. That’s what the rest of this post wll be about. Because, I find this being a problem in the beginning of RTS-matches. If you know which faction the opponent is, you tend to know which tactic s/he’s likely to use. And know how to make your first move yourself. If you play with a friend with the same factions, you learn each others’ tactic(s) and […]
“Random” in C&C-style RTS
This makes the first “Thinking” post on this blog, which means I’m likely setting the format for other Thinking-posts to go in. This first one will be about “1st person and immersion”, which is how you can make the game feel like something bigger in 1st view. First thing first, the 1st-person view can be used in almost anything with a bit of thought, not just FPSes. There’s lots of stuff you can do in first person that hasn’t been tried, or that can be done better. Let’s start with story-telling methods. I’ll divide these into cut-scenes (such as Metroid Prime or Halo uses) or player-redirection (like Half Life uses). There are uses for both of these, and they’re be better then the other in different situations. For example, if you want a long dialogue between the player’s character and another character, or want to show an impressive view of a scenery, the cut-scene might be to prefer. Sure, it pulls the player out of his role and separates it from it’s character, but unless you intend to make the player be the character, nothing is really lost. If used scarcely, the cut-scene can actually make the player feel like […]