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.

Ingredients
Chicken Breasts
Pesto
Tomato
Parmesan
Angel Hair

Directions
Toss chicken with pesto. Bake at 400 for 25 minutes. Cook the angel hair. Cover the chicken with sliced tomatoes and parmesan. Bake for four more minutes.

This week Matt and Mark discuss Journey To The Center of the Earth, a single screen platformer by Dot Zo Games.

Download the MP3

Subscribe in iTunes

Next week: Tales of Maj’Eyal by Dark God.

Subscribe in iTunes

Download the MP3

Next week we’ll be playing and discussing Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Dot Zo Games.

Sorry for the posting delay, but thanksgiving and Extranaut got in the way! Anway, here’s our take on Synopsis Quest and Shoot First. Mark and I got a chance to try Shoot First co-op after posting and we definitely recommend it!

Subscribe to Pretty GameCast in iTunes!

Pretty GameCast Episode 11 MP3

Oh and here are links to Shoot First by Teknopants and Synopsis Quest by Skipmore.

Extranaut is done, and on time! It’s been a crazy week working on this full-time, but I finished everything I wanted to and I’m pretty proud of it!

You can get the game over here. I plan on patching soon if people find some bugs!

Subscribe to Pretty GameCast on iTunes

Pretty GameCast Episode 10 MP3

References

Matt lost his references card for this week, so leave a comment if you can’t figure out what we’re talking about!

Next Week

A special double episode with:

Shoot First by Beau “Teknopants” Blyth and Synopsis Quest by Skipmore.

If you haven’t heard, my plan was to take a week off from work Thanksgiving week and work on this secret project. Unfortunately, since I came up with the idea, I’ve been unable to stop working on the engine. The game now has a title, a working engine, and planet editor. It’s called Extranaut, and it will be released on November 28th.

Extranaut is going to be a jetpack based Metroidvania. Weirdly enough, exploration games based around jetpacks are actually a rarity. The engine is almost done, the game just mainly needs content at this point. So set your calendars for the 28th.

One exciting thing is that Extranaut’s engine uses Chipmunk physics, which is totally awesome, easy, and fun. I’ve also “composing” the ambient music and background sounds in Audia, a sweet physics based “musical playground”.