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Some games worth playing

December 28th, 2005 (Visited 9612 times) Tags:

In the last few days, I’ve had occasion to catch up on a lot of games. Given that I haven’t posted too much over the last few days (been busy playing instead!) I figured I might as well share my favorites off of the list so that you can go out and seek out these play experiences yourself, and think about how MMOs might develop with more attention to features other than the leveling…

There should be boss encounters as thrilling as those in Shadow of the Colossus in all the MMOs.
The care that goes into crafting an atmosphere that is evident in F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon ought to be in all our MMO areas.
Why can’t an MMO pet system be as nice as Nintendogs?
Our environments could learn a lot from games like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones — at one point my daughter shouted out, “Now that’s a Jackie Chan moment!” when I ran off a wall, jumped off a springy shutter, caught onto a overhanging plank, clambered on, then dove into the gap between two buildings, lodged myself within, flipped around, and dropped down onto an unsuspecting soldier.
Why can’t the music systems in MMOs be as good as Guitar Hero? Well, OK, because of lag.

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Friends wrote on December 28th, 2005 at 4:35 pm:

[...] (Leave a comment) 11:26 pmraphkoster[Link] Some games worth playinghttp://www.raphkoster.com/?p=231In the last few days, I’ve had occasion to catch up on a lot of games. Given that I haven’t posted too much over the last few days (been busy playing instead!) I figured I might as well share my favorites off of the list so that you can go out and seek out these [...] [...]

heartless_ said on December 28th, 2005 at 4:12 pm:

Is it really lag? Or is it more the fact that it would take too many people and too much time to implement all those things into a single balanced experience.

I think we’re getting closer to the time where such things will be possible, but we’re not there yet. Baby steps Raph… baby steps.

On the music thing… since I’m a bard loving fan from D&D days and I loved to hear stories of Darniaqs exploits in a traveling band in SWG…

Let me stop rambling and just say I want a good music system built in for a bard class into an RPG. Make it unique to that class and make it so the music serves a purpose both in gameplay and can be combined to create a tune to listen to.

Q said on December 28th, 2005 at 5:23 pm:

The PoP thing reminds me of my favorite game story. It was from way back in Thief 1 so there’s no reason that we haven’t learned from that yet! I know I’ve told you before… I was being chased by guards that were alerted to my presence in the level so I jumped off of a balcony into a pool in the courtyard, swam across the pool, climbed out, rope grappled up to the opposite balcony, and went to hiding on the other side of the building. It’s a moment frozen in my memory as a real environment where I engaged it as a real character within. EQ had a little of this as you could at least out-pace the AI by jumping out a window of a tower with Safefall =) (Easy grandpa Rob.. Thief? EQ1?)

I think the difference is that most designers without my background see your PoP example as a character issue whereas I see it as a world issue. All these computer generated levels and worlds leave out the real finesse of the classic and single player game. Someone’s gotta get your shutters, planks, and gaps all lined up in order to break free of the rat smashing click fest.

Hire more world builders, pay them more, expect more of them. Leave the cookie cutters to player made environments.

Raguel said on December 28th, 2005 at 6:01 pm:

Excellent examples. With respect to PoP: is it worthwhile to add “platformability” if there’s no plan for a “platformy” gameplay? What I mean is, PoP is designed around the idea, but can it be a part of emergent gameplay (I think that’s the phrase, heh) in mmos? Sort of like Q’s example.

Raph said on December 28th, 2005 at 10:20 pm:

Heartless, I suspect that it’s a matter of priorities. Typically, combat gets not just a lion’s share, but an overwhelming one, of the total game implementation time. I mean, add up the total time for all the mobs (which is all stats for combat and loot and whatnot) plus combat items and so on,. and it’s probably 75% of the effort (this is a wild ass guess, mind you — be interesting to see real figures). Everything else gets crammed into the rest of the time.

Oh heavens, did I really suggest deprioritizing combat relative to other systems? Oops.

And no, in SWG we didn’t do that — combat was the #1 priority the whole time.

Raguel, I think it is, and it’s mostly a matter of adding interestingly navigable environments. Most MMO environments might as well be 2d plains.

Amberyl said on December 28th, 2005 at 11:56 pm:

Perhaps it’s worthwhile to ask why MMOG environments lag significantly behind those of single-player games.

Difficulty of implementation? Time to implement? Cost of implementation? Just too far down the priority list? Where does the problem lie, primarily — server, client, design, art?

Igniferroque said on December 29th, 2005 at 1:20 am:

At one point during the development process of SWG, you were thinking about including a music system that allowed players to program music using notes. Due to legal and copyright reasons, you were going to scale it back to chords so no one could, for example, play the latest Mariah Carey song in a cantina. Did that go anywhere?

And – for a musically challenged person who couldn’t find a beat with two hands and a flashlight – how does the Guitar Hero music system work?

Jeffool said on December 29th, 2005 at 5:54 am:

I haven’t bothered to learn the whole ‘trackback’ thing, so I’ll essentially copy/paste the meat of my reply from my blog here:

Just adding the relatively simple action set [grab, hang, climb, push, pull] to typical small set of MMO actions [run/walk, jump, attack, evoke via spell, use/equip item] would, I think, introduce such a larger variety on the already existing styles of missions/instances that I don’t get why it hasn’t been done. And that’s not to mention entirely new quest/skill options. Sure most MMO gameplay happens on a 2d grid, but I’d say it’s true that few games use the vertical dimension to really add to gameplay. (Some examples would be FPS’ that use high sniper spots, low trenches to dig in, and let you hide behind objects by ducking or climbing, and some action games like Prince of Persia and Spidey.) But I think creating an interesting world may possibly be easier to do with an MMO than a game like Prince of Persia.

You don’t really have to design every nook and cranny of a world by hand. With the simple action set I mentioned above players and NPCs could do a lot of the work in shaping their world for you. I think it’s easy to see different types of fun emerging here on it’s own for people to get a good grasp of their abilities. (Ever play Halo with friends or online? You’ll eventually run into fifteen other people who just want to pile on top of each other and move level objects around to try new feats and gain access to new heights. It’s in our nature to be inquisitive.) At most a player just needs a few easy training missions like climbing up a tree and out on a limb to rescue a cat, or swinging across a small stream. So let players/NPCs worry about placement of tables, chairs, fruit carts with springing awnings, barrels, planks/boards, ropes, and all the derivatives they could create with those tools.

By letting players actually place objects that can be physically interacted with (even if players still can’t collide, like in WoW), you can free your designers up to worry about larger and more spectacular mission-related interactive environment items like strategic ledge placement, vines, columns, and chandeliers to swing from.

Of course, the problem as always is latency/lag. Doing good physics over a network is something that’s still not quite ready for primetime so far as I know. Particularly in an MMO.

Tess said on December 29th, 2005 at 8:48 am:

Amberyl posited:

I think the folks building environments for MMOGs are often required to do everything in their power to prevent players from doing creative things with the environment. In a single player game, if some emergent environmental interaction breaks the game, or otherwise creates a pathological condition, the stakes are relatively low. People will make humerous videos, and share them on the Internet, and you might even sell more copies of your game. However, there’s a great deal more to lose if things fall apart at the seams in your MMOG.

I’m not saying, mind you, that we should embrace this sort of fear. I’m just saying that there’s a good justification for it.

I’ve tried to jump to places I wasn’t supposed to get to. I’ve tried to explore places I wasn’t supposed to be when I was a ghost. I’ve jumped through known terrain holes. I’ve fallen off the edge of zones, glitched off into the ocean, fallen through the world, and walked around on the ceiling of a room. And I think you know me well enough to agree that I’m a pretty damn honest player! You don’t have to be an exploiter to find some way to get tangled up in environmental quirks. You just have to be curious. Or unlucky.

All that said, always remember, one developer’s taboo is another developer’s opportunity.

Raph said on December 29th, 2005 at 10:39 am:

Chords turned ou to still be too freeform, that’s why we went with music loops.

Guitar Hero works almost exactly like Dance Dance Revolution (actually, it’s almost exactly like Amplitude), with five slots corresponding to five buttons on the guitar controller. The genius in it is that the things to hit are timed beautifully with the music, the music stops when you mess up, and the controller itself requires that you both hit a fret button and also strum on a strum bar. So it just feels right all the way around.

Grimwell said on December 29th, 2005 at 1:22 pm:

Why can’t a MMO have the worldliness of Animal Crossing? Not that AC has an incredibly deep and immersive world, but it has a functional one with NPC’s that have agendas, needs, and on the fly responses to PC behavior.

Darniaq said on December 30th, 2005 at 6:59 am:

A long time ago, I was part of a group of SWG Musicians on the forums conceptualizing a robust realtime music system for SWG. The idea was a bit of a mix of what Guitar Hero is (our’s was based on DDR, but it’s the same thing) and music notation/composition. Someone would write a song, and everyone else would try and keep up.

Lag is an issue of course, but I was figuring on limiting band sizes to partly account for that, and using a separate autonomous system to allow players to communicate directly as well. This system would exist outside of the channels used by the SWG game itself, sort of a separate chat client still bound by the security needs of SOE. The system would facilitate the realtime needs of the band, buffer a few seconds of the results, and then stream that back into the larger persistent environment.

This sort of adds a “game” component to the experience, allowing players to rack up XP or bonuses or whatever, while not being stymied by the limitations of a game already trying to do a near-infinited number of things concurrently.

I’m not sure if it would have worked, but I’ve always wanted to try it

And yes, I wish all boss encounters borrowed from Single player components. The only challenge is addressing the player requirement for predictability if that boss is part of a repeatable encounter. I swear it’s the entire concept of mob drops that holds back innovations in mob AI

(yea, I know, technical stuff too, but I feel the technical is outpacing the desire to make mobs truly smart).

Glazius said on December 30th, 2005 at 9:26 am:

City of Heroes/Villains, despite complaints about the cookie-cutter nature of its indoor environments, does at least foster some real interactability _within_ those environments.
Ranges for attacks are calculated in three dimensions. Yes, in some cases you can hover out of range and peg a largely melee mob with ranged attacks, but there are very few melee mobs which can’t at least pick up a gun, crossbow, or rock.

You can’t break line of sight to dodge an attack after the animation’s been started, but most attacks need line-of-sight to target.

Mobs also generally have vision cones rather than proximity awareness – what I’ve seen of the aggro mechanics seems to indicate that mobs can aggro unprovoked via vision cones, but bring friends along through a proximity-based mechanism.

The last isn’t immediately applicable to anything other than stealthing (which anybody can do) but the first two combine to make powers that stop enemies from moving, or slow them down, or force them to move somewhere, very useful and strategic.

Two examples, both from City of Villains because I’ve been playing it a lot recently. I’ve got a corruptor whose powers are ice blasts and cold control, many of which have some secondary component that slows movement speed. Three of the powers I can eventually acquire are “rain powers”, which summon a large immobile cylinder that constantly pulses small amounts of damage over a long period of time to anything inside it. They don’t need line-of-sight to target – I can pick any point I can get my mouse to as the center point of the cylinder.

But the mob AI is unilaterally smart enough to come in out of the rain, and most can get out of the cylinder before it does 20% of its full damage potential. I make a little game of keeping things inside the cylinder using the various slow effects available to me – an AoE slow that radiates from one target, a powerful, slow-recharge, single-target slow, the secondary effects from the rest of my ice blasts, and a low-damage short-duration immobilize.

The other example is a little more situational. I’ve got a brute with the stone melee offensive set, which is very heavy on attacks that knock things down in addition to doing damage. I’ve devoted one enhancement slot in each of these attacks (they start with one, and you get 2 to put anywhere every other level) to improving the knockdown, to the point where I’m actually knocking things back with ragdoll physics. At the time of this little anecdote I had three attacks that could knock things around – two damaging attacks that had about a 50/50 chance of knocking something back, and a lower-accuracy short-range AOE effect triggered by a footstomp – non-damaging, but it always knocks back and stuns things briefly if it hits.

Running through an office complex I found that the final room had an interesting formation – an elevated balcony with a winding stair leading up to it that wasn’t visible from the ground. Talking on that balcony where two bosses that I needed to take down. CoH cons also include variable levels – a player is generally a match for 3 minions or one lieutenant and a minion, but will need to dip into some reserves to take on a single boss, and here were two right next to each other that I, being a melee class, couldn’t really separate. Except I _could_. I ran right up into the middle of the conversation and hit the AOE stomp, and since knockback is generally ‘away from me’, both bosses got flung to opposite sides of the balcony. As they staggered up I ran over to the one nearer the edge and knocked him up and over the railing. The fall didn’t do much damage, but it did buy me enough time to grind the other boss into a fine paste before the one I knocked down could pick himself up and run up the stairs to the balcony.

It’s no Prince of Persia, but it’s definitely a step up from “3D” that’s treated as 2D on the server side.

–GF

Q said on December 30th, 2005 at 11:43 am:

I’m glad you enjoy City of, but really that game is one of the worst directions that environments could go. For the most part you may as well not even have an environment, you’d have generally the same play experience if you had an empty screen with a few choices you can click, “fight group A”, “fight group B”, “Stealth by and ignore fight”. The effect would be the same as going through nearly any level in that entire game. The mobs are grouped and spaced such that you don’t agro the next even though you can clearly see them. Sit and rest, buff up, discuss tactics, have a cup of coffee, then go fight a few mobs on your own terms. Stand at that spot and repeat your rest and coffee routine. By level 5 or so you’ve seen the same level parts arranged in almost the same way an embarrassingly large number of times. You may as well be killing your million Bols in SWG for all the variation and playability City of offers players. I can’t imagine how anyone manages to ever have the patience to overcome that boredom to max out in either game.

I guess it’s stories like yours where you actually pretend you’re playing a game.

Nyght said on December 30th, 2005 at 12:00 pm:

Ouh now.. what was that I heard just the other day?….(reworded slightly)

“Be cautious in trying to apply your opinions and playstyle as universal. (This is a constant problem for us players, so I know the dangers well.) YOU may not like the environments, but a lot of people do.”

And some will pay money for it.

Q said on December 30th, 2005 at 12:04 pm:

That’s fine if a developer can manage to get their players to brainwash themselves into thinking that their environments are interesting and interactive but City of’s are NOT and that’s not opinion, it’s fact =)

Their world is pretty though.

Darniaq said on December 30th, 2005 at 1:18 pm:

There’s two ways to look at this.

1) Academically: Truly interactive environments.
2) Experientially: Environments interactive just enough.

#1 is tough. Second Life is the only one that comes closest, and the ideal (imho) is SimCity. Slightly further away are UO and SWG.

#2 is much more fluid though, and where most games fall. Every interactive element in the game must be hand-placed by the developer (or in some cases, the player). And this is most often to add gametic elements anyway.

In some games, the only interactive things are mobs and vendor NPCs (ie, EQ). In others, interactive elements are creatively used to deepen an experience, or at least to just require some lateral thinking (ie, CoH).

What players want depends on the value of that interactivity.

Glazius said on December 31st, 2005 at 1:04 pm:

I think that, if you can have fun using only the tools that exist within the game (and, uh, if that wasn’t the case I _would_ like to know which parts of my little narrative required extraludological elements), then you are actually ‘playing a game’.

I mean, I could be wrong, and then, of course, there’s no “real” fun anywhere in the world, only “pretend games”, since _having_ fun is to some extent dependent on your mental state.

Jason Booth said on January 30th, 2006 at 12:32 pm:

Latency isn’t the issue, focus is. Amplitude, a harmonix game done before I got here, allready did the networking required to do something like Guitar Hero online. It’s not really that hard. After we finished Ac2s music system, Geoff and I prototyped a system that would allow people to compose with a brush stroke like interface.

But, I think the real problem is not one of note choice; but actually one of sythesis and style. Solving the note choice problem so that things all sound ‘right’ and work together is a purely mathmatical problem. But the expression of how one plays an instrument like a guitar, and how that guitar actually sounds, is an entirely different thing.

In many ways, early DDO was an attempt to capture some of what Zelda and Price of Persia offer in gameplay. That’s why there’s things like ladder climbing, ledge grabbing, traps, stealth, spreadable fire, etc, in the game. Dan and I were specifically influenced by those two titles and spent most of our time trying to include more verbs into the basic movement mechanics. Once the higher ups decided it should be a WoW clone instead, a lot of that magic got left by the wayside and we split; but it seems as if some of it is still there.

But really, as you pointed out in the comments, raph, it’s one of time and focus. And it’s only going to get worse as these games become more defined within thier ruts. I remember a while back you compared MMOs to TV shows, where there will be a standard set of features which all MMOs have, but different styles and settings applied to them. Unfortunately, that basic set of features is growing very large, thus making sure that there is very little room for qualitative improvements because we have so much quantity to manage.

So either we go by the belief that every MMP is “All previous MMP features ++” and never really get to any of the things you mention, or we abandon that notion entirely and spend our time making diverse and different MMPs which do not try to be all things to all people. Obviously I prefer the later, because I hate spending 90% of my time re-implimenting the same crap I did the last four years..

Raph said on January 30th, 2006 at 12:39 pm:

I’m very curious as to how you resolve the latency issues for real-time play with other people… I mean, a really good drummer will have precision in the

RodeoClown said on January 30th, 2006 at 3:29 pm:

in the… what?

Don’t leave us hanging here. Please!

Raph said on January 30th, 2006 at 7:04 pm:

Odd.

Precision under 100 milliseconds. Really good ones will be under 50ms, sometimes on the order of 20ms.

So if you’re doing a game where people hit individual notes together, and you have to signal player A that player B hit a note, it has to travel to them (either via the server and then out, or directly peer to peer)… a consistent ping under 100ms is highly unusual.

RodeoClown said on January 30th, 2006 at 7:54 pm:

Thanks

It’s definitely a good question? How do you overcome the lag problem to get multiple people synchronised really closely?

Some games worth playing

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