Skyrim

First the success story – Skyrim. Skyrim uses streamlining to hone the character progression systems historically present in the series. Oblivion and Morrowind before it used a semi-traditional RPG progression system where characters were represented by stats such as strength, personality, dexterity, and intelligence, as well as skills like blocking, axe, and destruction magic. When the player made a character she chose primary skills for the character. Whenever the player would actively use any skills, the skills would improve. Once a certain number of skill improvements in primary skills were gained the character would level up. This would then give the player an opportunity to allocate points to the primary stats based on how many skill points they gained since the last level in all categories. This convoluted system made it so the most efficient leveling strategy was playing one’s character poorly – focusing on grinding skills which weren’t the primary skills of the character in order to have the most possible stat points to assign when leveling up. See this article for a better description. New players or players unaware of this would be left with a character that was potentially underpowered. This problem was made worse in Oblivion since the world would scale enemy strength to player level, so as players continued with an inefficient leveling strategy, the world would soon outclass the character’s abilities. While this resulted in a seemingly normal difficulty curve that grew over the game’s progression, it did so in a way that felt unfair. Instead of a story about a character that grew stronger and stronger, Oblivion presented a story in which at first the player character easily slayed countless rats and bandits only to be eventually overcome by a frustrating world-gone-mad of vampiric player killers wearing ancient artifact armor and wielding warhammers of enormous death power.

Skyrim streamlines away most of the awkwardness of this system, instead implementing a system that preserves the feel of the old mechanics. Characters no longer have primary stats or classes, but they still have skills. These skills still progress as the player uses the abilities they govern. Once so many skills are gained the character levels-up which allows the player to choose a perk, some kind of gameplay bonus relevant to one of the skills. Level scaling is still present, but is gentler. In Skyrim the player character becomes and more importantly feels more and more powerful due to the streamlined character system.

Battlefield 3

But where Skyrim uses streamlining to hone its mechanics, Battlefield 3 loses itself due to the streamlining. Battlefield 2′s most exciting part was its focus on teamplay. Players were organized on each side into squads of six players. One player on each side took the role of commander. The commander could issue orders to each squad leader who could then assign objectives to her squad to achieve. In-game voice over ip (VOIP) was implemented to allow squads to communicate, and squad leaders could ask for support from the commander in the form of artillery strikes, radar sweeps, and ammo drops. Battlefield 3 does away with this. Squads are reduced to a max of four players. The commander role has been eliminated and the abilities such as artillery and radar have been assigned to different classes that can kit themselves with this player. There is no in-game VOIP in the PC version and the in-game chat window is too anemic to support communication. The map where squads could visually assign orders and plan their spawns has been upgraded to look more futuristic at a cost of losing functionality. Battlefield 3′s streamlining has taken away any possibility of teamwork in the game. Tragically, the game that’s left features great potential for team-play without any means of successfully doing it. The best a player can do is try to support their squad or team without any overall strategy. It’s a tragic development for a series that had in the past enabled its players to work as team.

The solution to this is to add factions like the bandits shown above. These guys represent groups that think you’re the weak link. Their hostility counter grows each turn whether you attack them or not, causing them to attack every so often.

I also fixed up the resource code, so now it’s possible to gather wood, stone, gold, gems, food, and corpses. I also added wooden walls and fixed the costs of the structures that I have so far.

In short you can build your kingdom, but you still have no chance of survival.

So that’s the next step. I think the main thing is adding the weapons and inventories. Once ranged weapons are added to the game it will be a lot easier to defend yourself. I want to do weapons in a really solid, data-driven way, so it can handle melee weapons, ranged weapons, and spells. Also it needs to be moddable so people can add in new stuff.

One more thing I did this week was change the way the water tile looks, which makes me incredibly happy for reasons unknown.

Solium Infernum raises the paranoia level with secret objectives.

Hidden objectives can add another layer to multiplayer games. Instead of each player knowing the goals of other players, players have to guess. This can lead to metagames and strategies such as bluffing, mimicking, and backstabbing. As such, hidden objectives tend to increase the tension and paranoia for players in the game.

Chess is a really boring game to me: I’m fairly bad at planning chess strategies that go beyond a few turns. I tend to get overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities and end up just picking moves. Chess with hidden objectives though sounds awesome. Each player draws a hidden objective cards at the start of the game. First player to achieve their goal wins. Some possible goals: kill enemy knights, don’t lose pawns, put king in check for 3 turns in a row, etc. When a player achieves one of their goals they reveal it and earn a point. Most points wins when the game ends. This is way more appealing to me, because the tension provided by the hidden objectives and the strategy elements of choosing which objectives to go after first captivates me.

Hidden objectives have some levers that can be modified to create a specific experience: their difficulties can be changed, their rewards can be modified, their number can be increased or decreased, and the conditions for their revealing can be changed.

Can you think of examples of games with hidden objectives?

And if anyone wants to do some play-by-email Solium Infernum, let me know!

It works like this. Each player builds a deck of 30 cards. These cards represent the skills, backgrounds, possessions, and actions of their detective. A mystery deck is also built of 30 random mystery cards and 1 villain card and shuffled.

The Broken Window mystery card

During the game players can either draw a card from their detective deck into their hand (to power up) or flip over a card from the mystery deck (a risk, but with good rewards). Each mystery card has challenge numbers on it. Challenges can be social, physical, or investigative. The player that revealed the mystery card can play cards from his or her hand to satisfy the challenge numbers.

For example, if the broken window mystery card revealed – a level one investigative challenge, the player could flip their physics skill (providing one investigative skill) to satisfy the challenge. The next player counter-clockwise may then respond by either playing a different investigative skill (one-upping) the first player or play an action card (to double cross for instance).

The last player to play a card in the challenge gets the success effect of the mystery card if the challenge is won. If the challenge is lost all players who played cards get the effect of the failure line of the mystery card.

The goal of the game is to defeat the villain (a mystery card somewhere in the deck). Only the player that plays the last card in the defeat of the villain (thus getting credit for solving the crime) wins the game.

Frenemy Detectives After Action Report

After a few failed games with some tweaking of the mechanics, I played the first completed game of Frenemy Detectives last night. The game went pretty smoothly with some funny emergent narratives arising. An early one was when my frenemy failed a “Dagger in the Dark” mystery card thus getting stabbed in the back, followed by drawing a “Bloody Dagger” mystery card, apparently deciding to check the weapon in a failed attempt on her life for clues. Another funny one was failing a “Library” mystery card, having the result of having to discard a card, forcing her to discard a “Sherlock Holmes Anthology” – apparently an overdue book!

The villain in the encounter was Cthulhu, and was revealed late in the game (about 5 cards from the bottom of the deck). When we first encountered my character, a coward, threw a smoke bomb, thus getting out of the fight without consequences. My rival got hit with the consequences which contained the chance of adding a “Secret Villain” card to her hand. This card allowed her to win the game when we faced Cthulhu again at the bottom of the deck. By playing the “Secret Villain” card, the player that plays it wins if the other players lose the villain encounter.

I need to add some more cards to the game, but I plan on posting a card list and complete rules at some point in the future.

When games allow players to make choices, each choice must provide distinct gameplay options for the player.

Let’s explore some ways choices can effect the gameplay experience.

Choices can let players navigate multiple content paths

If players can choose between level A and level B, they are more likely to replay the game to see the option they skipped. Also, by varying the difficulty of the two levels, frustration can be avoided if players get stuck on one of the paths.

Choices can impact story

Interactive storytelling is a thorny subject. While games can provide multiple paths of story progression for the player, they often do this in a way that seems like a facade. Sometimes only cut-scenes are modified. I contend that this is not enough. All gameplay choices should effect the gameplay itself. Here’s an example from Dragon Age:

If you choose to start the game as a mage, you play as a wizard who has just completed his training. One of your friends, Jowan, is not so lucky and tells you that the wizard circle is going to make him Tranquil (basically turn him into a robot). He’s planning an escape, but needs your help to destroy a sample of his blood held in the tower phylactery so that the wizards will not be able to track him down.

At this point you have a choice: You can either help him out or reveal his plan to the chief enchanter. I (being a trusting person) decided to help him out. This leads to a dungeon crawl. After destroying his blood sample, Jowan and the player are caught by the authorities. Jowan reveals that he is actually a blood mage (an outlawed form of magic). The player gets chewed out and then sent to join the gray wardens.

Dragon Age: Origins

My brother (being a duplicitous tattle-tale) told the chief enchanter about Jowan’s plan. The result: he had to accompany Jowan through the dungeon, to keep watch over him. Even the cut-scene afterwards was basically the same! He still got chewed out, but the chief enchanter eventually stood up for him.

My point is: while seeming to give the player a choice in Dragon Age, this choice is utterly hollow. A more impacting option would be to make the player confront Jowan directly.

Choices can offer different risk/reward balances

Allowing players to choose different paths with known different risk/reward profiles allows divergent strategies to be pursued by the player.

One game that gets this right is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. In Dungeon Crawl the player must explore different dungeon branches to either collect runes that allow the player to pursue the Orb of Zot, the game’s MacGuffin, or get various rewards that make life easier for the player.

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup

Finding the right order for going through the branches allows the player to formulate a dungeon descent strategy, and also make tactical decisions based on the rewards the player has found so far. For example if the player has no poison resistance the difficulty of the swamp, a branch that contains the first rune most players go for, is increased. This may lead players to first attempt to battle through the orcish mines, a somewhat difficult area, in order to seek out some source of poison resistance.

There are probably more methods in which choices can be made meaningful in games. Can you think of any? Next time I’ll be exploring why the outcomes of choices should be obvious.

Allowing players to make choices when playing video games adds to replayability and player involvement. However, the ways that game designers implement choices range in quality. In some games choices are shallow, unimportant, and ultimately boring or distracting. In others choices are character (or player) defining, captivating, and rewarding. I’ve been thinking about three rules that make choices in video games crunchy and delicious.

In AI War, player choices are incredibly important at the strategic level.

The Rules

The following are three non-exclusive rules of including awesome choices in videogames

1. Choices must be meaningful
2. Outcomes must be obvious
3. Wrong options must be prohibited

I will explore these rules over the next few entries.

Do any of you feel I’m missing any key rules? Am I wrong?

Your homework for this post is to play AI War by Arcen Games.