Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Notes on City of Heroes

Just started playing it today and wanted to get some thoughts down. I'm not an MMORPGer; I played Ultima Online for maybe an hour when it first came out and never tried again until Puzzle Pirates, which I played and enjoyed for a weekend (I even paid the $10 for the first month), so City of Heroes isn't my bag. Still, some points of interest:
You have a very finite number of combinations when making your hero, game-mechanics wise. It's basically fighter-wizard-cleric-rogue translated into superhero. (Which was a dissapointment. You have a lot more power with Freedom Force. But I can see why they did it - Freedom Force could be abused - for example, I made a hero I called *The Human Target* who had absurd hitpoints, the empathy power, and nothing more; when people attacked him they'd die. You wouldn't want to unleash those kinds of exploits in an MMORPG.) But the look of your character is very customizable. This is a powerful draw, even though in game terms the differences are meaningless. One of my flaws as a game designer is I always want the decisions the player makes to mean something in game terms. If an axe and a sword do the same damage but just look different, why bother? The difference is style - different players have different personalities, and some are axe people and some are sword people. Some like to play fighters and some thieves. Some like to play the Allies and some like to play the Axis. I usually open with Ruy Lopez and my brother usually opens with the Scotch. When Nick Doran plays roshambo he always picks rock. I'm serious. In fact, game mechanics that make decisions interesting in game terms (you should use infantry against cavalry and cavalry against archers and archers against infantry) actually ruins the game for some people. ("But I like archers.")
That said, other people groove on interesting choices, and if you provide interesting choices to someone, it can even improve their perception of the game without them knowing why. Case in point: I was playing Jedi Starfighter last weekend, which has you switch off between two pilots, and I was enjoying one pilot a lot more than the other and wasn't sure why at first. It was actually a bunch of things, but one of the things was the fun pilot had orthogonal powers to choose from (shield, attack, slow motion time), and the not-so-fun pilot just had a variety of weapons. With the not-so-fun pilot it didn't really matter that much which choice I made - they all got the job done eventually, but with the fun pilot it did matter, depending on the situation you were in.
(Which brings me to another tangent. Mark Nau suggested last week that all videogame balancing can be thought of in terms of time; assume players are constantly looking for the fastest way, and balance accordingly. If a 1 minute mission gets you 100 points and a 2 minute mission gets you 300 points, people will do the 2 minute mission. If you have two attacks that do the same amount of damage, but one takes a little more time to pull off than the other, people will use the fast attack. If you have an attack that knocks somebody down, and you can't hit them when they're on the ground, people will rarely use that attack - it does not help end the fight quicker. This is an important idea - I used to think of time as being a 'shadow cost' (Andrew Rollings talks about shadow costs in *Game Architecture and Design*) - and things like hitpoints or money would be the main economy in which to do your first round of balancing. You can balance more accurately, though, if you think of time as your gold standard - the 'time standard'? - which your other economies are converted into.)
Okay, I've gone on so many tangents I need to scroll to the top to see what the hell I was writing about. The other interesting thing about City of Heroes is that it costs $50 at retail to start and there's no demo, but Puzzle Pirates costs $10 a month and you could play it for a while for free. A half-hour or so into playing City of Heroes, I was at the point where, if it was a free demo, I would have quit playing and never bought it. But, since I had already paid for it (and Frys is bitchy about returning games, I don't know why I buy from them anymore) I kept at it, hoping it would get more interesting, and it did, once I figured out how to team up with other heroes. This is a similar phenomenon, I think, as gyms getting you to pay your whole year in advance, because they know a huge fraction of their customers are going to bail before the year is up. I'm probably not going to play CoH more than a month; I don't know anyone else who is either. Although it sure is nice to maintain a big subscriber base to your MMO, it's still a win to sell CoH with this retail+subscription model even if everybody quits before the month is out, because of 2 things: you can't pirate a subscription based game, and retail is the best bang-for-buck advertising you can get. Piracy is huge - I'm convinced it's the reason PC games so dramatically undersell console games, and there was an article in the most recent Game Developer that said that in the days of Subspace, out of 8 Subspace players only 1 would have a valid copy of the game.
What would have happened if Diablo II used the same retail+subscription model? Or Warcraft III? Hell, why not Max Payne II? Just because a game is single-player doesn't mean you can't be required to log on to the internet and validate. The worst-case scenario is that the word of mouth for these high quality games is shot in the foot - ("Dude, Diablo II is awesome, you have got to download the ISO file!") - and they end up selling fewer copies because there's fewer pirates out there telling people that the game rocks. Another worst-case scenario is people not buying the game on principle - "If I pay $50 for something I want to own it". Final worst-case scenario is that there are too many people behind firewalls or not on the internet at all. But the best-case scenario is they keep the bulk of their customer base, they dramatically increase sales because 1 out of every n pirates actually shells out money for the game, and they also get a steady revenue stream from the diehards.

Notes on Shadowlords

Matt Rhoades has got us playing Neverwinter Nights co-op at work now - since we've made our submissions to the console manufacturers and are just sitting around waiting for them to pass or fail us - and we're enjoying it a lot. The way the different classes complement each other in D&D was always cool; NWN brings it home. A lot of shouting across the halls at each other: "Where are you going?" "Should I open this door?" and so on.
So, since I've reinstalled it on my laptop and I got the D&D bug again, I thought I'd play some of the fan modules that I heard were pretty good, singleplayer. There's this one called *Dreamcatcher* by Adam Miller that I saw recommended on a game design forum, but it's a sequel to *Shadowlords*, so I decided to work through that before moving on to *Dreamcatcher*. I just finished *Shadowlords* a few minutes ago, and I got that feeling I always get at the end of a good game - sorry that it's over.
Now, it didn't totally blow me away. I was expecting some kind of revolution and really it's basically just a competent, near-professional expansion pack. Still: done by one guy. Now, there's only so much you can do when you're reusing the same tilesets and monsters that we've already seen a dozen times. So how does Adam Miller keep us into it? I'm not sure, but he did: I played late into the night last night and when I woke up I wanted to dive right back in again.
Maybe it's the story. Miller breaks it down into five chapters, each a separate module. Although I would have been reluctant to start a 20 hour epic, I had no problem starting a 4 hour one...and then when that one ended with questions left unanswered, I thought, maybe just one more. Each chapter is like a layer of an onion; you solve a mystery only to find there's a deeper, larger mystery behind it. Which, at the end, left me kind of confused and wondering how I got there and what happened...sort of like watching the X-Files, I suppose.
Also, Miller does a good job of making you feel like you're in a story rather than watching a story where you get to play inbetween the plot points. Even more so than the original Neverwinter Nights. I think this is because Miller, in a way, subscribes to the Half-Life philosophy of "no cut scenes" - events conveniently happen as you arrive, you overhear important dialog as you saunter by, and the story unfolds that way. The third module has you chasing evildoers through an abandoned temple - if it was a movie, there would no doubt have been cuts to the evildoers sabotaging the bridge, etcetera - but here you just come across a destroyed bridge and have a comment from your henchman to piece things together. For a game, I think it's better this way; you're more in the character, in the world. Also, you get the feeling that the world would continue on without you; if it wasn't for you, the evildoers would no doubt complete their evil schemes.
Another nice thing is the single unifying theme or motif. Death runs through the entire thing, starting with corpse-trading and then undead and then immortality and gods of death. Adam Miller manages to put a message into the story - if we didn't have death, we'd have to invent it - and really involves you in that message by having a scenario where you have to choose between giving a sick girl immortality or easing her onto the next life. Of course, I saved the game and played it both ways, just to see what would happen. It amounts to an endorsement of assisted suicide, with you playing Dr. Kevorkian, and is probably the highlight of the module, because when are you going to be able to buy a game in a store with that kind of message? Whether you agree with it or not doesn't matter - the fact that it's there takes the game to a new level. I'm reminded of Harlan Ellison's "Paingod" - a story about a god of pain who learned to respect his job when he realized that without pain there could be no joy - except the prose isn't quite as good.
It has issues - there were times when the difficulty seemed overwhelming, although that may have been because I was playing a sorcerer and things are tough for a sorcerer before they get their third level spells. And every now and then Miller would try to be funny - quote Monty Python or whatever - which broke the mood, took me "out of it", but I'm willing to let it slide because - hey - the guy's doing this for fun, right? In fact, if he was too serious, it might make me a bit uncomfortable, like having a DM that's *way* too into it.
(When I was a kid who was *way* too into D&D, I used to dream of having some kind of machine that would make custom miniatures and tiles that would look just like my characters and dungeons - NWN isn't quite there but it's close.)
You know, it's a nice thing that Neverwinter Nights has all this fan-created content, because it gives me the opportunity to try different classes and races without having to see the same story over again. (*Cough* Diablo 2 *cough*.) Maybe once I've finished *Dreamcatcher* I'll try one of these paladin-only ones.

Trapped

So I've been using Dvorak for 5 months now, and I'm only up to 80 wpm, which sucks because I used to be 100 with Qwerty. So now that I've got some free time I tried to switch back to Qwerty. I was hoping it would just come back to me...but no. Most of the old neural pathways are erased. After a couple days of trying to relearn Qwerty and only getting back to 20 I now figure the quickest way to get back to 100 will be to stick with Dvorak.
So...advice for people thinking about switching to Dvorak: don't. If you want to type faster just practice with Qwerty. (And learn to touch-type for Christ's sake...although I guess if you can't touch type you aren't thinking about Dvorak.)

My E3 Book Report

I was complaining to Tomo how the lines to play the games I'm interested in were too long, and it made E3 not worth going to. He pointed out that I should be playing the games that people aren't interested in...I'm going to play those big games eventually anyhow, and I might learn something from the ones that don't have lines. So, yesterday, that's what I did.

Jade Empire: it's hard to demo a role playing game at a trade show, so Bioware focused on the new action combat system when demoing it to me. Now, I really admire Bioware; they and Monolith are the only developers I can think of that have multiple games in development at the same time without letting quality suffer. (Although I expect Treyarch to join their ranks soon.) But they're really going outside their core competency here. We've been making action combat systems at Treyarch since we were founded and we still haven't caught up to the Japanese. There's a lot of competition in this arena. If anybody at Bioware is listening, I know it's too late to scuttle your plans for an action-oriented combat system...but I think you should do something about the latency - when an action gamer presses a button, he likes to see the results of that button press pretty much on the next frame. That's why the slashes in swordfighting games and the punches in punching games usually only take a couple frames to connect, and they connect the dots with motion trails. When you play Jade Empire, the combat feels scheduled. You mash on the dodge button but don't actually see the dodge until it's your turn. Or something. That may be part of your design--maybe you're not allowed to attack/dodge until you've recovered from your last move--which is okay, but then you probably shouldn't bill it as an action game, because people are going to expect the responsiveness of a brawler. (And you can't ship your designer with the game to tell the player, "Your attack didn't work because he blocked you. Give it another try.") You know, I remember reading in the post-mortem for KOTOR that E3 helped refine the combat system. Sounds like you should be doing some gameplay testing on virgins before E3, so when you get to E3 there won't be nasty surprises. Anyhow, I remember that KOTOR didn't show well at E3, either, and Bioware turned it into videogame gold before it shipped, so I expect the same to happen with Jade Empire.

Mercenary: GTA meets modern warfare. I was playing it in the Sony booth. It seemed promising but the demo crashed on me before I really got into the action, and there was no one around to reset the box.

Republic Commando: I ordinarily wouldn't pay any attention to a Star Wars game since Episode 1 betrayed my childhood, but a friend demoed it for me and it's pretty cool. It's closest competitor is Full Spectrum Warrior, but the play mechanic is much simpler - with one button you can order your squad to do cool, useful things. I didn't get to play FSW but I watched people wrestle with the controls and it seemed like a chore just to get your squad to walk in a line. So although these games are the same genre (squad level combat), they're actually targeted for totally different markets. The hardcore military geeks will want to play FSW whereas people who want to get straight into the thrill ride of commanding an elite squad will go for Republic Commando. My prediction is Republic Commando will outsell FSW, although right now, "Republic Commando" game gets 88500 hits on Google, but "Full Spectrum Warrior" game gets 114000. LucasArts has some advertising and PR to do to catch up.

Siren: This made me not regret going to E3. It's a horror game heavy with atmosphere, Silent Hill style, but with interesting play mechanics. The opening text for the demo says that you're at a serious physical disadvantage to the enemy and you'll have to use your sight powers to negotiate the levels. Fantastic, I think. I prefer sneaking around to a straight fight. I like having that opportunity to actually think. So you've got this sight power - you go into a mode where the screen goes all snowy (like a television set tuned to a dead channel, thank you Gibson) - and you search with the analog stick to lock onto one of your enemies. Then you're seeing through their eyes, hearing their hoarse breath, and watching them hunt you. It's like the monster-cam from a horror movie, except you're the one being hunted. Very creepy. Adding to the creep is that the levels are saturated with fog (must have been easy on the renderer) - in this one level you have to escort a blind girl to safety, Ico style, except if you go too far ahead she'll get lost in the fog behind you. (It reminded me of losing my mom in a mall as a child. Terrifying.) The sad thing is, those play mechanics they talked up in the text before the demo weren't actually useful in the demo. I could have won the thing just by walking and fighting. Hopefully in the full game they'll realize their potential...I can almost imagine the marketing blunder as it must have happened. ("You can't have a level that requires people to think at E3!" "But that's what this game's about!" "Doesn't matter! Take the thinking out." And so a game with some subtlety becomes a brawler, and they lose both the people who want the subtlety and the people who want brawlers, because they're all playing Devil May Cry 3 or whatever.)

I was hoping Ubisoft would introduce something new, because one year they gave us Splinter Cell and then another year they gave us Prince of Persia. This year was all sequels for them. Looking back on it, I guess Splinter Cell was 3 E3's ago? So maybe they take every other year off. They're going darker with Prince of Persia 2 - he's more buff, he has decapitation moves. Trying to capture that American kid who thinks Manhunt is the pinnacle of game design, I guess. (There's one particular kid - let's call him "Nazi Boy" - I had in focus tests who fits the bill. For him, if a videogame isn't a murder simulator, then, well, what's the point? Oh, and he had this to say about Spider-Man 2: "You guys should have crates you can smash to get health." Happily, he represented a minority of our focus testers.) Probably not a mistake - I'm going to buy PoP 2 for the gameplay, and if they can sell more units by making it darker, well, okay. But part of me hopes they'll lose a lot of sales because the people who bought Sands Of Time aren't actually into that.

This Pleases Me

Activision marketing and Yahoo has got a trailer for Spidey 2 up, and it's pretty cool, if I do say so myself. All gameplay footage too, I might add. I wasn't too happy last year when our E3 trailer was all prerendered stuff. This year we rock.

More Different Notes On Chess

Raph Koster pointed out how skill usually obeys a power law: for example, if you plot out the number of people who achieve certain scores in golf, it is not a bell curve, but most people are down in the sucky range and it drops off until you get to the score that only Tiger Woods achieves.
Chess has a ranking system, and I wondered if the ranking system followed a similar law, so I did a little quick and dirty research on the Internet Chess Club server - I sent ads to play with people ranked from 600-700, and it reported how many people were eligible. I sent ads for 700-800, ditto. 800-900, 900-1000. The lowest end of the curve had 2 people in the 700s - at the high end there was one guy in the 2800s.
So - was it a power law?
No. It was a bell curve.
I don't understand. But I guess I'm not very bright; that's why my 1300 is in the bottom 10% of ICC players. All I can think is that it's something to do with the ranking system itself, which doesn't really measure skill but measures your position relative to other players. If, instead, we measured chess player's skill by some kind of more linear metric - (How about: how many CPU cycles a computer program has that they can beat half the time?) - then maybe we'd see Raph's power law.
By the way, Raph's power law has implications for those of us making mass market games. We tend to tune the difficulty of our games to the point where we think it's fun; what we don't realize is that because we've been playing our game for months or years we're at the far end of the power law and most of humanity has no interest in those ridiculous levels of difficulty. Adding nightmare difficulty levels and extreme challenges adds value for a very small percentage of our users. So why do it? Because it's cheap, and because that small percentage may be the people who recommend your game to others. If it's not cheap...you probably shouldn't bother.

Geek

Feeling a little insecure, because I only scored 34% on the Geek Test. Chris Busse says it's because of my geek shame - that I was unconsciously trying to score low. But hey - I really don't have a computer that runs linux. It's broken. And I don't have subscriptions to science fiction or financial magazines. Anymore. And I only know the name of one character from the Dragonlance novels. And I haven't collected comics since Neil Gaiman stopped writing Sandman. So there.

Speaking of geek culture, they really have to make a Call of Cthulhu movie. I've been thinking this ever since I heard about Bethesda's game. I thought "How much mindshare can Call of Cthulhu" really have? So I did the Google test - Cthulhu gets one million hits. By way of comparison, "Van Helsing" gets 600000, "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" gets 150000, and "The Hulk" gets 600000. Instead of milking comic books dry, if movie makers want to tap some untapped geek culture, this is the place to do it. I'm not saying it would be X-Men or Lord of The Rings - I'm just saying it would do a damn sight better than freaking "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".

There have been some crappy Lovecraft movies already that didn't do too well, but I chalk that up to not really trying. These were low budget, low marketing dollar things. If they pumped as much money into a Call of Cthulhu movie as they did into LXG or Van Helsing I'm sure they'd have a success on their hands.

Here's my advice if you've got a hundred million dollars to throw around, and want to see some ROI: buy Arkham House, Chaosium, and the people who make the Cthulhu plush dolls. (Thanks to the Cthulhu plush dolls, Mark Nau's daughter has been quoted as saying, "Cthulhu was bad and is having a time-out." That works on so many levels.) Fund a big-budget movie. Get Gore Verbinski to direct, and Sean Connery to play the sea captain. Gore is good because he's done both horror and boats. It's more important to get him than Sean. Then, stay true to the book, for Christ's sake! You don't have to be perfectly true; I'm talking Lord of The Rings, X-Men, or Spider-Man true. Don't do the i robot, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Starship Troopers thing, because you will alienate the hardcore audience and when the casual audience asks the hardcore audience, "Hey, you're an expert, should I see this movie?" the hardcore will say, "No."

I can see it now; the movie would be a period piece, set in the 1920's - the first two thirds would be psychological terror a la The Ring and then the last third, when Cthulhu has risen from his watery grave, would be monster movie. BUT - do not use good lighting and clear cinematography on Cthulhu - just looking at him is supposed to drive men mad - do flash cuts like on the corpses in The Ring, have him in shadow, have him look totally different from different angles, only show a piece of him at time. Let people's imagination scare them. Verbinski is good at that.

And don't worry about the fact that nobody knows how to pronounce Cthulhu. Pick a pronunciation and after you saturate the world with movie trailers, you'll have standardized it. I'd say keep the hard C sound in front because it sounds cooler.

So what are you waiting for? Go do it. I want to see that movie. And if you get even richer...can I have a taste?

Random Stuff

Spider-Man 2 will be finished any day now. Our open bug reduction trajectory plots out with us finishing some time next week. (Although these things do tend to level off as you approach zero. Sigh.)

Still playing lots of chess, and have more to say about it:

Chess violates one of the common rules of good game design, which is: eschew punishment. Chess is very punishing; lately, it's been reminding me of playing an old-school platformer where you have to negotiate a series of escalating challenges with no save points - after a long period of exacting trials you screw up and have to start back at the beginning. Too bad your king doesn't have hit points. But I'm not giving up yet. In chess vocabulary it's called a "blunder." Maybe I should buy this book. I like the cover.

Learning chess has been like studiying my own mind and the fallibility thereof. (Oh, look, a typo, think I'll leave it there just for laughs.) I may not be suited for chess because I'm more of a "ready, fire, aim" sort of person; in general, in games and in life, I like to try something, see if it works, and then fix it if it doesn't. (Something other coders have rebuked me for...) So maybe chess is good for me, teaching me a different approach to problems.

Which brings me to another topic: Chris Busse asked me if playing chess was helping me in other areas of life. A game shouldn't have to help you in other areas of life. (But it's cool if they do. I learned a lot from Civ and SimCity.) If a game does have to help you in other areas of life...then I'm in trouble.