It’s all in the Details: How Little Things make a game Better

There’s a saying that goes, “God is in the details.” There’s another that says “The Devil is in the details.” Theologically confusing? Yes, but it does tell us about how important details are. Details add color and richness to experiences that you can’t get if you’re just looking at the whole thing. Games are no different in this regard. Details keep you involved in a game’s story, it’s world, or its characters.

Each of these shops is a little bit of detail that made the world a little richer, if confusing. Who do these shopkeepers sell to?

How do small details enrich a world? What are some good examples?

Mass Effect 3 is the epic end to a space opera that took our Commander Shepard from a special ops soldier to the hero of the Galaxy. You meet companions, fight enemies, and even find love along the way. In such a large series of games, one might assume that the little things would be left out.

Mass Effect 3 is the story of a person very in love with shooting things and chest high walls.

After all, who the hell has time to figure out why the spaceships still make noise in space? Mass Effect 3's writers, that's who.  In a scene with your dropship pilot, Steve Cortez, on the Citadel, Steve relates you to how he comes to the viewing port to relax. He has a line, “When I was alone, I'd turn off the auditory emulators and just watch them drift by silence.” The ships in Mass Effect 3 don't make pew-pew noises, you just thought they do because of the emulators!

in fact, because they have sound in space, they can take it away at crucial moments like in Mass Effect 2 when your ship is destroyed and you walk through it's hull.

The writers know that people expect to hear something when they see something on screen, even if real life physics would disagree. With one little line, the universe of Mass Effect becomes that much more concrete, unrealistic expectations of sounds in space and all. It's nice to know that not everything will change when we figure out how to punch holes in the fabric of reality.

Also a strong entry into the "generic white guy holding a gun" poster contest.

Alone in the Dark (2008) is not a particularly well made game, small details or otherwise. The story is meandering, most of gameplay is dull and repetitive, and the numerous set pieces wear out their welcome quickly. Alone was not without it's good qualities, however. The fire in the game behaved so realistically that it was shocking at the time, and the melee combat was more visceral than anything most triple AAA games feature.

The moment it really shined for me, however, involves one of the most common tropes in gaming: a locked wooden door. In most games, you'd have to go find a key, or find some way around.  Alone in the Dark threw me for a loop. When I swung my axe at the door, I busted a piece of the door right into the next room. I stared, totally shocked, for about 30 seconds. Then I gleefully hacked out a protagonist sized hole in the door and walked on through.

You swing melee weapons by moving the thumbstick back and then whipping it forward. Awkward? Yes. Better then pressing the mouse? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Most games will tell you you're a super powerful warrior or mage, but when you try to knock down a damn wooden door the whole lie the game built up around you falls apart. Alone in the Dark says, knock yourself out kid. Beat down that stupid door. Maybe even burn it? Shoot the lock out! Be a real person! Reality is funny in games; we want all the good parts without any of the bad parts. Alone in the Dark actually delivered what I would argue is a better version of game reality than most games. Bit of a shame the rest of the game had more technical issues than a giraffe trying to use a fax machine.

The Witcher 3 is full of things to amaze you, big and small. You can lose hours of your life to Gwent or just walking around the countryside. One of my favorite little details is one that many people might not have even found.

Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, or "how to make all other open-world RPGs look like yesterday's trash"

Doesn't this guy look trustworthy? What with the drying blood and general look of hate?

On one monster hunting quest you are sent to deal with a Leshen (a kind of forest spirit) that was aggravating a small village. Once you get there, you find the whole village slaughtered. On closer inspection you find a little girl alive, who says that a man with eyes like yours did this. Eventually you find the witcher Gaetan. He took the quest before you and killed the Leshen, but the villagers tried to stiff him on payment. Two of the villagers tried to kill him with a pitchfork when he argued. Enraged and wounded, he slaughtered the whole village. The whole tale is deep and winding, but the best part comes as you approach Gaetan. If you're wearing the School of the Cat witcher armor he will remark “Well well, what have we here? Feline armor, wolf's head medallion- a crossbreed?”

Witcher Schools are notoriously strict in their traditions, so it makes sense that he'd be more than a little amused with your copycat style. In fact, he's one of the few people who would actually know anything about different kinds of witcher gear. His one line makes you think differently about him and consider your options for completing this quest much more carefully. He's not some mindless brute, he has a sense of humor, and he appears to regret what he did. Any way you chose to end the quest, that one line made Gaetan a little more human.

Video games have gone from little pixels on the screen to massive, engaging, sprawling wonders of technology. No matter how long or massive games get, little details are what is going to engage people. Nobody is going to remember the 85th firefight in Halo: Combat Evolved, but they'll always remember Sarge's pep-talk in the first level. God's own anti-son-of-a-bitch machine indeed.

So Much Goddamn Waiting: How Games Waste your Time

A dude who wrote a bunch of stuff once said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” People are totally into that dude’s writing, so maybe he knew what he was talking about. Who knows. The point of Shakespeare’s quote is simple: Don’t waste my time. When you avoid padding, you create a more enjoyable experience for your viewer, reader, or player. There was a big push towards longer and longer games as of the last years and while it’s thankfully petering out a bit, games still love to waste your time.

But what are the most common ways that games waste a player’s time?

I dunno if I trust a  dude with that haircut, though the stache is pretty awesome. I guess I can take his writing advice.

Clutter is one of the newer padding methods game designers are employing and the one I hate the most. Clutter is when a game furnishes you with items with the express purpose of taking up space in your inventory and selling them for gold later. Maybe developers don’t think that people will remember how much time they spent dicking around in their inventory screens. You may as well just give the player money, instead of wasting their time. Fallout 3 was filled with real-world clutter like coffee cups, burned books, and cigarettes but none of these items did anything gameplay wise.

This whole place i junk. I will collect this junk, then sell it until the merchants are out of money. Then I shall cart it to my next destination. Onwards forever.

If you picked up too many of them, you needed to spend time emptying out your inventory or selling them for a few meager caps. Dragon Age Inquisition is the worst offender here, however. Your inventory has a whole tab just called “Valuables” which you can sell to any merchant with the press of button. Why even have the middle step? Just give me the gold, dammit.

Why was this dragon carrying 5 sheets of parchment? Why can't I use said parchment? Maybe I should quit the Inquisition. I'm sure regular people don't deal with this nonsense.

Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt took a much more sensible approach to clutter by allowing you to sell the items to a merchant for gold, or break them down into crafting components which you can use for craft new items. By giving the items a non-monetary use you make them an addition to gameplay rather than a distraction from it.

Backtracking is another oft-complained about padding tool that some developers use. Like the name says, it involves making a player retrace their steps through a previously explored area. This might make a player feel like they’re making progress because they’ve spend more time playing the game, but when nothing changes gameplay wise, there’s no point. Tomb Raider (2013) just loved backtracking.

When every map look like this, you know you're in for a long ride. A long unnecessary ride. 

Every area was filled with secrets and collectibles that had no gameplay impact besides extra EXP which you got from completing missions and defeating enemies anyway. While there is some precedent for in-depth exploration from earlier Tomb Raider games, that was the entire point of those games, rather than just something to pad out of the 100% completion game length. There are games that find new use for old tropes, like Super Metroid.

You will have this map memorized by the time you're done with this game, but the last area will still be new.

By gating player access to areas, Super Metroid makes backtracking more like exploration. You may have come across smaller passages earlier that you couldn’t fit into, but with the new upgrade you found you can turn your suit into a ball and roll through! The whole map becomes new again

Grinding is the most common method of elongating a game. Usually found in MMORPGs or JRPGs, grinding consists of forcing players to level up (or grind) to defeat more powerful enemies or gather currency.  In MMOs or RPGs, enemies have specific levels and strengths associated with that level. Given that most of these games are turn based (or close to in the case of most MMOs), player skill doesn’t really come into play. You can’t manually dodge an attack in Final Fantasy X, or slip around the back of an enemy to deal more damage in Persona 3: FES, so you have to rely on your numbers to be better than the enemy’s numbers.

My numbers are better than your numbers, which are better than my friend's numbers. Perhaps one day I will have the best numbers in the land.

I was racking my brain trying to think of a game that did grinding well, but I can’t find one. I’m pretty sure grind should just be banished from the gaming sphere entirely. When gaming becomes an excel spreadsheet with pretty colors, the point has been lost.

If brevity really is the soul of with, then most games are not very witty. I don’t necessarily think this is true, but I do think that the focus on game length has resulted in a quantity of quality situation. Better crafted experiences will stand the test of time while bloated, empty games will end up by the wayside. Long story short: Don’t pad, add!

If you don’t share this with everybody you know, every game will be nothing but grinding forever. Quick, save us all!

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Tic Tac Toe Vs. Chess: How Mechanics with Depth Affect a Game

Everybody knows how to play Tic Tac Toe. It’s one of the first set of game mechanics that children learn. Get three in-a-row of your symbol and bam, you’ve won! Chess is another game with mostly simple rules, but we have a lot more Chess tournaments than Tic Tac Toe tournaments. Why is that? There are a huge variety of ways that you can play chess and win. In gaming, a similar phenomenon pops up. Anybody can pick up the basics of Candy Crush or Street Fighter II Turbo, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Candy Crush tournament anywhere.

Still waiting for chess pieces that murder each other though. I WAS SOLD A BILL OF GOODS, ROWLING.

But how does depth of mechanics affect a game?

For a bit of reference, in the same month this came out, Magic: The Gathering was first released. Go forth and feel old.

Foremost, deeper mechanics exponentially extend the lifespan of a game. With more room for exploration and refinement, the longer the game will last. People still play Street Fight II Turbo, which was released nearly twenty years ago in 1994, at this year’s Evolution Championship Series (EVO), the largest and longest running fighting game tournament in the world. The fact that people are still competing means that they’re still discovering new ways to use the characters.

Basically this but instead of drying laundry it'll prevent your Pokémon from taking 12.5% damage on entry.

Higher levels of play are only possible because of the variety of strategies that a player can experiment with and employ. After all, anybody can level up their favorite Pokémon to steamroll an opposing trainer, but a skilled player assembles their team specifically to counter threats before they’re fully realized. Using entry hazards like Spikes and Stealth Rock mean that a trainer could use a Pokémon with Rapid Spin to counter, or a Pokémon that’s immune to certain kinds of paralyzing attacks. These higher levels of play encourage the perception of progress through a game, by keeping the player more engaged with the mechanics than they were before they played strategically the player learns more about how the game works.

Spend years building a new engine, creating new mechanics, graphics, and people will still put the most effort into bringing back the one game you made they liked.

Deeper mechanics also tend to create passionate fanbases, a double-edged sword if there ever was one. With a passionate fanbase, people will be discussing, playing, and analyzing your game for years to come, but these same people are more attached to game than the studio that develops it. There’s a mod called Skywind for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that is centered entirely around bringing the world of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind into the modern age by porting the whole game into Skyrim. Changes in the formula can have very negative reactions, like the large change in gameplay that players found in Fallout 3 compared to the earlier games in the series. Imagine that you’ve picked up a particularly mouthy barnacle and you’ll get a good idea about what it feels like to develop a “masterpiece.”

Deeper mechanics do not necessarily mean “complicated” or “nonsensical,” so when players must exit the game to understand how it works, something went wrong. Dark Souls, though a deep and enjoyable game, feature some unexplainable mechanics that don’t make sense within the game itself. Figuring out that Resistance is a garbage stat or that humanity is required to summon help (but also opens you up to invasion) is tough without a friend or the internet. Games like Dwarf Fortress are renowned and perhaps even loved for their complexity, but then true popularity will always be slightly out of DF’s reach. If you make a game too simple, it won’t hold enough interest to form a fanbase, so developers must introduce deeper mechanics to keep their company alive (usually in the form of sequel after sequel).

This is the flowchart of advice recommended to new players of Dwarf Fortress. Any game that needs a flowchart is clearly not looking to appeal to the average person.

Chess is almost 1500 years old. To put that in perspective, chess has been around longer than most empires on Earth. Yet, people still play chess and will probably continue to play it until the sun explodes. The more you study the game, the more ways you learn to play. At the same time, most children can pick up the basics after a game or two. Deep mechanics create long lasting and loved games. Next time you’re playing something ask yourself, “is this is a flash in the pan or the kind of fire that burns forever?”

Mobile games will take over the entire gaming ecosystem unless you share this article with everybody you know. Quickly now, they’re coming!

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A Return to Form: The Cyclical Nature of Gaming

People often say that culture is cyclical, meaning that what was popular a number of years ago comes back around as time goes on. I didn’t start to notice this until somewhat recently, but then again I’ve not been around long enough to really see this cycle complete one full rotation. One of the few areas that I’ve invested any amount of time to learn the history of is gaming, so maybe that’s why it’s place where I’m seeing this phenomenon first. Gaming, in the modern sense, has only been around since 1972 and most gamers today probably don’t really start counting until the NES exploded onto the scene in 1985. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to see the old styles coming back around the bend.

SIT ON UNCLE MAGNUS'S KNEE AND HE'LL TELL YOU ALL ABOUT WHEN WE HAD TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES WITH A FUCKING DIAL INSTEAD OF BUTTONS.

Nowhere is this trend clearer than in the First Person Shooter Genre. As of the past three years, we’ve seen a return to the old fashioned run-and-gun style that made the genre was it is today. Moreover, the same titles that fashioned the genre are the ones taking us on a trip down memory lane: titles like DOOM and Wolfenstein.

Doom, as I’ve said before, damn near invented the FPS as we know it. Doom was so popular and influential that the whole FPS genre didn’t undergo any real change until Half-Life, five years later. DOOM (2016) takes what we thought a shooter was supposed to be and blows its head off. When your character is confronted with the usual narrative exposition dump, he pushes the monitor away in disgust; he’s got things to rip’n’tear. Gone are the pretentions to realism and regenerating health; your character gets ammo from destroying monsters in gruesome horrific ways and health kits are instantly applied as your character walks over them. 

Yes, this is how DOOM should look: Bloody, insane, and fun.

Wolfenstein: The New Order combines the old fashioned shooty gameplay with more modern touches, like some semblance of a story. While it returns to its roots, Wolfenstein: TNO also takes time to deconstruct the very tropes that it created. Yes, you play as William Joseph “B.J.” Blazkowicz, but instead of glorifying in his bloody rampages through Nazis, you take time to reflect on how tired and broken he is; you see what makes him strong and what makes him silent. The merge of new and old gives players poignant story moments and adrenaline filled missions, the best of both worlds, really.

It's rare that we get to see a hero look vulnerable in games; most are too obsessed with the typical male power fantasy to chance it.

This is not to say that the renaissance of early 90’s style is limited to the FPS of the world. RPGs are heading back to their roots as well. The classic RPG is sprawling and mysterious, like The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall or Fallout and though the graphics have certainly gotten a facelift, games like Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2 aim to bring back that unforgiving magic many gamers grew up on.

Divinity: Original Sin, released in 2014, saw all of the hand holding that modern RPGs do and decided that, no thank you, it would rather chop off its own leg than leave you a map to their next objective. The kind of game where you can build a useless character and not realize it until halfway through the main story, it will vomit mountains of text at you and expect you to remember the details. Divinity: Original Sin cleverly stops short of the truly classic RPG chore of taking actual notes as you play, but it’s a near thing. Combat is turned based and based on action points and there’s enough side quests for you to faff about forever. If you’re looking to get truly lost in an RPG world, you no longer have to play a game with graphics like the stuff you scrape off your boots.

Pretty graphics and action points!? Where do I sign?

Wasteland 2 had one hell of gestation process. The original Fallout, a spiritual successor to the original Wasteland, was arguably intended to be Wasteland 2, but we had to wait 26 years for a true sequel. Wasteland picks up where the original left off, dumping you off at the ass end of nowhere. Comparing Wasteland 2’s atomic desert to Fallout’s is like comparing a gecko to a komodo dragon. If you hope to journey around the desert alone, better think again. Every door is trapped, every room is full of enemies, and I don’t think you’re too hot at disarming traps or lockpicking, are you buddy? You need to bring along a group of friends, but don’t feel bad if one or two of them bite the dust out there. A huge number of recruit-able characters can round out your squad. When you don’t have to give all your characters voiced lines, the possibilities are endless.

Ah yes, friendly locals! Surely this exchange will end in amicable tea parties and not one party looting the other's corpses.

I don’t know how long this nostalgia ride will go on, but I’m happy to ride it until it runs out of gas. Old games certainly aren’t perfect, and modern games have brought a huge amount of progress to the fore, not just in terms of visuals, but with new mechanics and design choices. Sometimes though, you miss a main character that moves at 40 MPH and guns that clear a room without reloading, or sorting through an in-game journal to figure out where you should be going. I’ll just hold out for a classic-RPG inspired Elder Scrolls sequel here in the corner.

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Overwatch: Why People Goddamn Love it

Every once in a while a game will come out and dominate every gaming news outlet from here to Osaka. For those of you living under rock with no consoles or PCs in sight, Overwatch is a team based multiplayer shooter from Blizzard Entertainment that has done just that. The story goes that Blizzard spent about seven years developing a new MMO, codenamed Project Titan, but when that didn’t work out, they put their considerable resources behind making smaller games, much like the extremely popular Hearthstone and its latest money-printing-machine, Overwatch. Overwatch was released on May 24th, 2016 to widespread acclaim. But why do so many people love it?

There is actually a whole backstory to this nonsense, but none of it is explained in the game. Look out this Friday for an Overwatch Let's Start Looking At.

Most FPS, online or singleplayer, boot you into some scruffy-white-dude-McNormalface, a time honored tradition, going all the way back to DOOM.

CAN'T YOU IDENTIFY WITH ALL THIS ONE GUY

Overwatch, on the other hand, gives you an extremely colorful cast of characters, young, old, male, female, different body types, and many more skin colors than you would expect. A lot of people seem to have a hard time dealing with Representation, for vaguely (or not so vaguely) racist and/or sexist reasons, but I don’t see anything wrong with any kind of player being given the choice to play as somebody that looks like they do. It helps you relate to a character, livens the whole experience, and draws people in who are tired of always playing as pastydudewithstubble#1023.

This is not to say that Overwatch does representation perfectly, but it makes admirable strides in a medium plagued with the issue.

In most online FPS, you play as somebody in body armor, maybe with a skull spray-painted somewhere on you, but little else in the way of characterization.

All of Overwatch’s heroes have individual backstories, emotes, highlight reel intros, lines they say to each other before a match, and design themes. Soldier 76 was the former leader of Overwatch before the governments of the world shut them down, so now he embraces anonymity to make the world a better place, one battle a time. Winston is a genius gorilla who designs and employs advanced technology, but isn’t above enjoying a banana with peanut butter. Ana is the mother of another member of Overwatch, Pharah, and an accomplished sniper and healer. Even if your whole team is playing as Tracer the time-traveling wisecracker, the power of her personality shine through her words, her weapons, and her poses.

Don't mess with Zarya. She will break you.

Mei is the kind of character the devil would make if he felt like being ambitious that day.

Lastly, you can play Overwatch 5 million different ways. Although some will make me hate you (team of 6 Genji, not healing yourself as Bastion, playing as Mei), most of them work. You can choose from four main kinds of hero (Offence, Defense, Tank, and Support). Each Hero has abilities that expand their given roles in any match. Soldier 76 (Offence) can drop a quick AOE heal with his Biotic Field, Lùcio (Support) can push a whole team off a cliff with his Soundwave, or Zarya (Tank) can hold a huge number of enemies in place with her Graviton Surge.

I’d advise exploring new playstyles in Overwatch competitive play though; you’ll piss at least five people off.

Overwatch has a lot going for it, gameplay wise, but the ancillary factors are what push it beyond a typical Battlefield or Call of Duty multiplayer FPS. People like diversity in this media, they like characters with personality, and they like more than one way to do something. Time will tell if Overwatch can maintain its popularity and enthusiasm, but I think it’s got more staying power than 99% of multiplayer FPS.

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Pokémon GO: How to get Everybody to put up with Mobile Gaming

I’m not a big fan of mobile games. Most of them are little more than microtransaction-filled skinner-boxes, distracting players with bright colors and sound effects to disguise the fact that they exist only to nickel-and-dime players out of their money. But I will save my rant on CandyCrush for later. The majority of mobile games don’t have challenging mechanics, decent stories, or exceptional visual design. Then Pokémon GO comes along with (almost) all of that and… it’s fun as hell.

Welcome to what could be the new direction for game developers and publishers.

Pokémon GO is a Free-To-Play mobile game where you create a trainer and catch Pokémon. Unlike the other games in the Pokémon series, you physically walk around in the real world to find Pokémon. Instead of battling Pokémon and throwing a Poké-Ball, you swipe your finger up and toss the ball at the Pokémon. Instead of leveling up Pokémon through battles, you use “Stardust” and “Candies” from capturing a Pokémon to evolve a Pokémon.

You align yourself with one of three teams: Instinct (Zapdos), Valor (Moltres), and Mystic (Articuno). You only battle at Gyms. Instead of the usual turn based rigmarole, you tap on the screen to attack and swipe to dodge attacks. Each gym has a few trainers that must be defeated until you take control of the gym. If the gym is on your team, you add to its prestige. If the gym is not on your team, you could theoretically take the gym over when you’ve beaten all the trainers.

Being a sane person, I went with Zapdos. I can't speak for the mindset of those who picked something other than the thundereagle. Who wants a frigidpigeon or a burnybird? Idiots that's who.

I’m a huge Pokémon fan; I’ve invested hundreds (if not thousands) of hours into the series, so I can’t deny that nostalgia is playing a part in my enjoyment of this game. That notwithstanding, lots of people like to collect things and Pokémon scratches that itch better than any other series of games. For the first time, you get to throw the Poké-Ball and the tension as it rolls around is so much more real than it was playing Pokémon on a Gameboy.

I'm gonna catch you, you stupid fish. I'll catch exactly 101 of you so I can evolve you into a damn Gyrados!

Pokémon GO is tailor-made to exploit nostalgia. For the first time, you see you Pokémon, not some avatars collection, but the Pokémon that you had to catch and raise. It makes you feel almost like you’re really a trainer, and that you’ve finally managed to step into your fantasy. Pokémon GO turns your environment into something magical; yeah, there’s your favorite restaurant, but oh my god is that a Raichu in there?! Your old haunts become new again because there’s something potentially hidden in every corner.

Living in a big city is definitely a big help in terms of finding Pokémon or Poké-Stops.

Pokémon GO is easy to play, especially when you’re supposed to be working, or when you’re watching a show on TV, or just when you’re walking to the dentist. Any way you slice it, there’s a lot of fun to be had pretending to be Pokémon trainer.

But it’s still chock-full of the same design choices that plague non-Pokémon-related mobile game. To get anything like intubation machines and incense without finding them at Poké-Stop or leveling up, you have to spend Poké-Coins, which cost real money. You don’t really need the items, but it takes a long, long time to do anything, and those Poké-Coins can become really attractive. You only power up and evolve Pokémon by catching more Pokémon, and the Pokémon you catch at the start of your journey require a huge amount of powering up to face any gyms, mostly populated by level 15 trainers with 1000+ combat power Pokémon. To hatch eggs, you need to walk around with the eggs in incubation machines, most of which have a limited number of uses. If you’re in a non-populated area it’s hard to catch Pokémon, so you might rely more on the Incense item (attracts Pokémon to you).

Ah yes, this is familiar. Welcome to every mobile game ever.

When you get into the actual mechanics of the game; it’s empty under a pretty shell. Battling is rapid-fire tapping and swiping, requiring very little strategy. Each Pokémon only has two attacks. Training has no substance and is just spending resources that the game doles out of at you. You can’t breed Pokémon with the perfect IVs, or with special moves. Trading is now unnecessary because all Pokémon can be evolved just by spending candies. It’s possible that the game will evolve, but given how popular it is in its current state, that seems unlikely.

At the going rate of around one buck an item, things seem reasonable. Then you get your bill and you wonder how the hell you bought 20 lucky eggs this month?!

But underneath the nostalgia, the cute Pokémon animations, and sparkly graphics, Pokémon Go is a giant cash eating machine that Nintendo will ride all the way to the bank. Since its release, Nintendo’s stock has soared 25% (almost 9 billion dollars in value). Making engaging, complex, and innovative non-mobile games is hard and expensive. With the success of Pokémon Go, game companies might choose to create product with less overhead and more possible revenue. That, my friends, is a scary thought.

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This game is 30 seconds long. I’ll be playing it for the next year: Short form gaming

Many games boast “hundreds of hours of content” as a selling point. People want to feel like they get bang for their buck, which isn’t unreasonable. It may be a unique video game phenomenon because you’ll pay upwards of 15 dollars for a two-hour film, but 15 bucks for a four-hour game is clearly unreasonable.

If Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 is worth 15 dollars, any other goddamn thing is.

Short form gaming has a lot of positives that go largely ignored; short-form games are cheaper to make (meaning that indie developers face less overhead); they can be more experimental (because they don’t have triple A budgets behind them and stockholders); and they can be exactly as long as they need to be (as opposed to a 200-hour long game with a 10-hour main story).

Devil Daggers is the 1st person arena shooter equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. You work hard for every 30 seconds of progress you make. There is no story to speak of; you run around on a brick platform in almost total darkness and have to survive for as long as possible. The screen only shows your flame-tinged hand that points forward. By holding down left mouse button, you rapidly shoot red, glowering daggers. Click the left mouse button twice, and you fire out a cone of daggers, much like a shotgun. You can use some common arena shooter mechanics like bunny-hopping or rocketjumping (shotgunjumping in this case) to move around a little quicker or dodge enemies.

Prepare to be spooked. Often. By skeletal hellbeasts. Lots of them.

A few seconds after you spawn a giant and gently spinning tower comes floating out of the darkness towards you, followed by a wave of grinning skulls explodes out of the top of the tower. They loom rapidly towards you, and before you know it, another tower has appeared, and another, and another. The longer you survive, the more enemies (and enemy varieties) come at you. Certain enemies will drop red crystals that power up your daggers. You’re constantly on the move, whirling around to fling crimson blades into the horned skull chasing behind you, or the giant floating arachnid skull that steals your crystals.

Welcome to this, but forever. Also with more skulls.

By constantly pressing you with enemies, Devil Daggers forces you to react on instinct without a precise strategy. Every extra second you can stay alive feels more monumental than any main quest. At the time of writing, the best run out of almost 50,000 players is something around 680 seconds, just over 11 minutes. On average, a player lasts around 50 seconds. Survival is by definition stressful, but Devil Daggers makes it fun.

SLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHT

Half-Minute Hero is what you get when you boil down an JRPG to its molecules, then made it self-aware. A king asks you to destroy monsters around his kingdom but in your absence, an evil wizard casts a spell that will destroy the earth in 30 seconds. You fail to stop him, and after he destroys the world, the Goddess of Time revives you. She resets the clock for you, provided you give her all the rewards from your quests. You have 30 seconds to fight enemies to level up (literally bashing yourselves into each other until one of you dies) and fight the boss. But once you defeat that boss, you meet another boss who can also destroy the world in 30 seconds.

Lots of anime fluff for a game that's entirely pixelized.

Whenever you die, the Goddess of Time restarts the clock and pauses the timer when you head to towns to eat/buy food, buy new gear, and find allies. Since combat requires no input on your part, strategy relies on the gear you have equipped and the item you carry. Short term planning and decision making is a valuable skill after all. Just like in Devil Daggers, death is a quick pause and then you’re right back to the action. Each time you die, you learn a little something more about how the game works and what kind of gear you might need to defeat this particular boss. Instead of focusing on instinct, like Devil Daggers, Half-Minute Hero respects the time you put in; you don’t have to invest 500 hours to be a world saving hero, just 30 seconds.

Here's what it actually looks like. Hurry up, Hero!

Sometimes you don’t have 200 hours to dedicate to one game. Maybe you’ve got a family, a job, or just don’t feel like wading through` oceans of filler. Not a huge genre, short-form gaming has relied on the expansion of the independent development scene. Triple A games are no longer the only show in town. Keep an eye on those short-form games; they’re more than just a flash in the pan.

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DON’T GO IN THERE: Building horror in games

I really hate being scared. Every year, for his birthday, one of my oldest friends always asks that I sit through horror movie with him. He clearly gets enjoyment from watching me get a heart attack, so Happy Birthday, jerk. I clearly make friends with terrible people, but all anecdotes aside, I really like horror games. Being in charge as an active player changes the horror in games from the kind you get in movies to something way more interesting.

But what makes for good horror in games?

From the setup to the end of the game, F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) barely manages to startle you. You start out as a highly trained special operative with the ability to kick somebody so hard they die and the ability to slow down time. In fact, there is no threat that you can’t shoot or kick to death. F.E.A.R is basically like one of those plastic overlays people put on Atari 2600 games, but with spookiness instead of color.

F.E.A.R might not be the best horror game, but it's a stellar FPS with A.I that stands up to this day.

While the mechanics rate a firm one on the scream-o-meter, F.E.A.R’s atmosphere and set pieces rank higher. You walk through dimly lit hospitals, abandoned buildings, and scientific facilities. Every hallway light flickers just before you round a corner. Every time you can’t see into a room, the spooky Ring-like girl who haunts you throughout the game is this close to jump-scare-ing the hell out of you. Horror takes a lot of work to pull off right and though F.E.A.R made admirable strides, it fell a few feet short.

Fun fact! The horror you feel is inversely propositional to the amount of machine guns and superpowers that main character has.

If F.E.A.R was a covered overlay, Amnesia: The Dark Decent is your worst nightmare come to life. Where F.E.A.R gave you superhuman abilities and lots of guns, Amnesia gives you a crippling phobia of the darkness and a lamp that’s always running out of fuel. You wake up in a dark hallway, deliriously trying to remember your name, and stumble through what appears to be a medieval castle as your vision blurs then finally fades out. You spend the remainder of the game just trying to figure out who you are, why you’re here, and how to get the hell out of dodge.

Uh, you know what? You can go first. I'll just hang here. Near the torch. Where it's not superscarydark.

The mechanics of Amnesia are built around horror. You fight back against any of the monsters in the game, your main source of light has little fuel, and the click-and-hold mechanic you use to move objects around is tailor made for hiding in a closet with the door cracked. You go insane if you hang around in the dark too much or if you look directly at the enemies, leaving their appearance a mystery. You will always invent something scarier than any designer can create; the best horror movies don’t show the monster right away, after all.

Let me put it this way: this thing here is the friendliest face you're going to find in this whole damn castle.

I have no idea where I am, I'm terrified to move, and my lamp is almost out of fuel. Everything is awful.

The game is quiet, but never silent. You can hear the castle creak, the wind howl outside the windows, and things moving in the distance. When you turn your back, you can swear you hear something stepping behind you, only pausing when you do. The unsettling labyrinthine level design is full of twists, turns, and secret passages; you get lost easily, leaving you unsettled and your comfort zone in the far distance. The mechanics, the controls, and the way the world looks makes you really feel as helpless as your character is supposed to feel.

It’s clear that combining action and horror is difficult but if we look at System Shock 2, we can see that it’s possible. Like in Amnesia, you’ll hear plenty of ominous moans and groans as you wander around twisted corridors of the Von Bruan starship and you’ll pick up terror-stricken audio recordings which document the collapse of the ship and its inhabitants. The more you learn the more you realize just how monumental the enemy you face is and how impossible your task seems.

You won't be finding a lot of allies on the Von Braun, so you best settle into to facing your enemies alone.

System Shock 2 handles controls awkwardly at best; you don’t feel helpless but you certainly don’t feel like Rambo either. You start out as a soldier but you can’t handle weapons well. You even swing your wrench unbearably slowly, which means you need consideration and planning to fight enemies. As you move through the game, you increase your skills with weapons, hacking, or telekinetic powers to bludgeon, shoot or magic enemies to death. By impairing your abilities, System Shock 2 combines action and horror. You would panic too when half of your shots miss the shambling thing coming right at you.

Yeah, just try to tell me you could see this thing in your face and not totally freak the hell out.

Horror in games must have been a hard concept for game devs and writers to wrap their heads around. How can you scare a player who can miss your jump scares by facing the wrong direction? How can you make a player feel helpless when most games are a power fantasy? With a lot of hard work (and some not-so-scary games), developers and writers managed to come up with a whole new kind of horror. So sit back, put on your headphones, and give you heart a start or two with a spooky game.

If you don’t share this Topic Post, nightmares will haunt you forever until you do. Save yourself and share it.

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P.S. the original System Shock is getting a remake! You can download the demo on GOG for free!. Go do it! There's also a kickstarter if you're into that kind of thing.

YOU LIED TO ME: E3 Hype and You

E3, or The Electronic Entertainment Expo, is the event where everybody involved in gaming struts their stuff. It’s easily one of the most important annual events in gaming, so it makes sense that it gets a huge amount of press. When you focus enough attention on something, soon people will create things to exploit that attention. And that’s how we ended up where we did; where game publishers and marketing people release misleading “gameplay” demos and scripted sequences to dazzle and amaze every E3. It’s hard to avoid feeing the hype when you see something as impressive as these publishers put out, but before you go pre-ordering everything from A to Z, let’s consider how these companies have misled us in the past.

Publishers preview games, tech companies preview new consoles, and gaming personalities and journalists flit about covering it all.

Chief among the creators of unrealistic Hype is Ubisoft. At E3 2012, Ubisoft showed off a very impressive demo for Watch_Dogs. The big hook of this game was the “hacking” that you could do with your cell phone. In the demo, you see Aiden Pierce (protagonist) as he hunts down some guy for some unknown reason. The trailer was structured to show off all the bits and pieces we should expect in the game. Aiden uses his phone to cause all calls in the vicinity of a club entrance to be dropped, allowing him entrance to said club, where he hopes to lure badguyMcWeDon’tKnowWhoHeIs.

Golly gee, look at those particle effects! And that lighting! Realism is finally here!

Aiden causes a car pileup outside the club by turning off the traffic signal, allowing him to trap his target and execute him. The demo ends with Aiden hacking a bridge to go up just as he jumps a car over it, which was pretty awesome. Future Chicago looked dark, gritty, and full of impressive particle effects. The gameplay seemed like a really refreshing take on the GTA style open world and the game’s style seemed like a cool take on the usual Cyberpunk feel.

Woof. Talk about downgrades. The quality change here coupled with the massive amount of day one issues did not bode well for Ubisoft.

In one of the more embarrassing post E3 releases, Watch_Dogs featured almost none of the amazing graphical fidelity we saw in the original trailer. The lighting was flat, the textures downgraded, and detail was lacking. The amazing “hacking” we say in the trailer was reduced to a long distance “use” button for most of the game. While downgrades have become very accepted post E3, the sheer drop in quality here prompted a large amount of outrage. Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3 featured a very similar bait and switch the year before, but the gameplay looked very similar so there was less fan anger. Once again, promised graphical detail and technology was missing, replaced with lower quality material.

E3 style puffery isn’t restricted to Uibsoft; Irrational games had its time in the harsh light of reality in 2011. In its reveal trailer, we saw some of the horrible beauty that Columbia had to offer as well as impressive graphics and gameplay. The trailer shows our protagonist in Columbia, some of the weapons he might use, as well as some of his powers.

We also got a good look at the skyline mechanics as well. The cannons you see here fired on the protagonist from miles away, implying some very long range combat.

We got introduced to Elizabeth and her amplified versions of the main characters powers and Songbird, her pursuer. The trailer featured enemies in much greater numbers than we had seen in Bioshock as well as some impressive set pieces. It seemed like the slower style of Bioshock 1 and 2 was changed out for something a little faster paced and somehow even stranger. All in all, it seemed like a hell of a follow up to the first two games.

Things might not have been as shiny, but the shooting mechanics looked similar enough. 

When E3 2011 rolled around, we got a new trailer, but things already looked different. The textures and effects had been noticeably downgraded and Elizabeth’s powers seemed a bit less direct. The shooting gameplay looked similar, though a lot of the weirdness of Columbia was replaced class war and societal strife. Irrational avoided a lot of anger by pivoting the game design and downgrading in more subtle ways. While I prefer the version of Infinite that we say in 2010, what came out wasn’t nearly as shocking as Watch_Dogs.

Why all the hype though? Why do companies wait for E3 to release their shiny new toys? There’s a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is the ever-shifting makeup of game’s budget. In the long-long ago, most of a game’s budget went to development and the rest to marketing, but things have shifted dramatically. Destiny, the MMO-like console shooter, cost a total of $500,000,000 to develop and market but only only 140 million was used for development. While companies are clearly spending more on marketing, the effectiveness of word-of-mouth can’t be underestimated and nothing generates word-of-mouth hype like E3.

The shift in budget makeup and attitude towards E3 plays into the changing purchase funnel for games. It used to be that you would buy a game or console after it came out, maybe reserving one before release if you were really worried that you wouldn’t be able to get a copy. Nowadays pre-ordering is the norm, so much so that pre-order copies of games come with extra content, DLC, or more. E3 becomes the time to launch your pre-order page and get as many sales as you can, even though people haven’t seen the (real) game or even played it. These two shifts have led to more and more focus on E3 “demos” and upped the stakes on both the purchaser and creator sides.

So why would game developers, (most of them) producing this content because they love the medium, manipulate people like this? There are two sides to every story and developers deserve their half as well. They’re under a lot of pressure to get people excited for a game, and a lot of that involves the dreaded E3 demo. They have a specified length and (often) a list of things that need to be in the demo. They then have to slap something together with the assets that you have (notice that Big Daddy wail in the first Infinite trailer?) and make it “playable” on a stage.

Often, the demo is a kind of concept exercise for the devs where they are presenting not what the game is, but what they hope the game can be. Being optimistic is not a fault, though you can see how it might rub gamers the wrong way when the changes are so dramatic. While many of the issues are self-explanatory, the struggles that come with making a game for different kinds of machines can be tough. PCs have the benefit of a modular design and incremental progress, so they’re on top of the heap as far as processing power and graphics capabilities go. Consoles are released in discrete generations and though developers find ways to optimize their performance, they do have static hardware. By virtue of the fact that games start development on PCs, the first we see of them is often beyond what a console could do.

At the end of the day, E3 is a great show. People get to show off passion projects, innovative technology, and new awesome games. We, as consumers, need to keep in mind that a lot of what we see is smoke and mirrors, though not always with negative intent. Sometimes developers are trying to show everything a game could be and sometimes marketing people are looking to nab preorders. E3 2016 will be over by tomorrow and we’ll likely see a lot of awesome stuff, but let’s keep out expectations under control to avoid any flame-breathing rage down the road.

Now that you've avoided excess hype, think about spending some of that time and energy sharing this Topic Post! It'll do you more good than pre-ordering, that's for sure.

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Vanilla’s good, sure, but have you tried it with sprinkles? : Modding and Games

You can spend ten thousand hours working on a painting and the minute you show it to somebody, you’ll get a comment about how to improve it. Nobody is 100% happy with anything and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. We certainly wouldn’t have mods without that little bit of “Hmmm, it needs something else…” Mods, for those who aren’t familiar, are user created changes to a game. Maybe you think that a weapon is overpowered, or that a questline should have different objectives, so you go into the games files and bam, you’ve got a different weapon or quest.

I mean yeah, your brushstrokes are good. But what about the palette? Also, this would be better with aliens.

But what do mods do for a game? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks?

When talking about mods, you’ve got to mention Doom. While not the first game to have mods, the Doom developers made it incredibly easy to modify the game, resulting in a flurry of creative activity. All of Doom’s data was packaged in files called WADs, or Where’s All the Data, making it possible to make whole new levels, weapons, and storylines.

Doom is one of the most important games in history, and the start of the first person shooter as we know it.

The advent and expansion of the internet made it easier and easier to distribute and download mods, expanding the scene further. Doom also showcases one of the key benefits of mods; extending the shelf-life of a game. Doom was released in 1993, but people are still refining, ideating, and creating new mods for the father of the modern FPS. Brutal Doom, released in 2012 and updated at the end of 2015, is one such mod. It’s a total conversion of Doom, meaning that the authors of this mod created entirely new levels, changed up the weapons,

They somehow made it bloodier. Don't even ask me how. I have no idea. They also added reloading, more melee attacks, and a whole slew of other content.

tweaked the mechanics, and came out with a whole new Doom. While not all modders are ambitious as those who created Brutal Doom, you can see how providing tools to your users can extend the life of your game far beyond the paltry 1-2 years that most games are active for.

Of course, you don’t have to look 20 years back to see how important mods are; you need only look back to last year’s Boston based adventure, Fallout 4. Bethesda, Fallout 4’s developer, has a habit of releasing modding tools to users fairly soon after the games have come out, going as far back as The Construction Kit which shipped with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

A bit dull looking, maybe, but you can change up the whole game however you like. There's power in these here boring windows.

It’s no surprise that The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have now become synonymous with mods, but the way that association is viewed might surprise you. While the mods are generally viewed in a positive light, there are those who feel that Bethesda are viewing the modding scene almost like they would view beta testers. By “relying” on the modding scene to fix common issues with their games, you could argue that Bethesda is pushing their work off onto their consumers. You just need to look at the top mods on any Fallout 4 modding site to see some form of the phrase “Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch.” Part of this is definitely due to the scope of Bethesda’s games, but it’s hard to imagine that the phrase, “the modders will fix it” is never uttered in the Bethesda office.

Over 145,000 downloads as of time of writing. 4th most endorsed file on NexusMods, the largest non-Bethesda download site.

Even Fallout 4’s settlement system seems like something that modders would have implemented themselves at some point, though not at the scale that Bethesda did. Mods are great, but the perception that you’re relying on modders to fix your game is not.

There is one area where mods are not so welcome; multiplayer. Any sort of multiplayer game requires balancing, an incredibly time consuming and mercurial process to ensure that there’s more than one way to play. Mods are the antithesis of this, being changes that users create to satisfy a personal want. Maybe you think StarCraft’s Zerg are overpowered, but if you were to be able to mod the game to make them less so, and then play online, any Zerg player would have an immediate disadvantage.

Not to say that the Zerg couldn't just a little nerfing. Zerg rushes aren't fun for anybody. Or maybe they are, at least for the rusher.

There are other concerns around how your product is experienced as well. A recent example of the clash between mods and multiplayer is the forced shutdown of the legacy (meaning unaltered and unexpanded) World of Warcraft server, Nostalrius. Nostalrius was the largest WoW legacy server available until its April 2016 shutdown, with 800,000 registered users. It was not an issue of theft, like if the Nostalrius devs were charging for the use of the server, but more of an issue of branding. Games like WoW rely on expansions to keep people subscribed, to get new subscribers in the ecosystem, and to create a unified experience for all the players. WoW devs do have legal and arguably reasonable reasons for shutting down the server, though it did anger a lot of people. Because multiplayer games are never quite “finished” and because the experience is shared there’s not really any room for personal touches. Think what you will about that, but I don’t think it’ll be changing anytime soon.

Mods can extend the lifespan of a game, fix issues that the original developers missed, and create a stronger relationship between studios and gamers. They can also ruin the balance of a multiplayer game, dilute the vision of a particular project, and create more work for the dev team (got to build those tools out after all). It’s up to each individual developer whether to include modding support in their games, but it’s worth noting that the sales of any modable game are going to continue long after their non-modable counterparts.

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What’s in a Sequel: Heroes of Might and Magic III and Heroes of Might and Magic V

What happens when you mash together every fantasy cliché and trope into one amorphous blob? You get the Heroes of Might and Magic series, now on its 7th installment. HoMM has better reasons than most series for being a bit cliché; it actually created some of the longest standing tropes in fantasy games. The series that HoMM stemmed from, Might and Magic, is one of the original PC role playing games, standing alongside games like Ultima and The Bard’s Tale. I’ve never played any of the Might and Magic games, but I’ve sunk a decent chunk of my life into HoMM. Let’s look at how the series has changed by looking at the (arguable) two highest points, Heroes of Might and Magic III and Heroes of Might and Magic V.

Heroes of Might and Magic III is definitely a product of its time. The art style would not look out of place in any fantasy novel (or the side of a kickass van), the interface is clunky and difficult to navigate, and the A.I. can be very incredibly unfair. That being said, it’s a fun and deep strategy game with an awesome soundtrack.

Heroes Of Might And Magic III Soundtrack-Main Menu Music by Paul Romero, Rob King and Steve Baca http://www.youtube.com/user/PAULanthonyROMERO You can buy this game for windows 7 34/64 bit, Xp and vista on www.gog.com ... its only $9.99 for the full game

You can pick from a total of nine factions, each with around a dozen Heroes. Each Hero has a specialization of some sort, as well as an attack, defense, power, knowledge, luck, and morale stat. As you play through the game, you level up your hero and choose new skills for them to learn. Your available skills cover everything for increased ranged damage for your troops to mastery of certain groups of spells. Your hero can collect and equip artifacts which increase stats or offer other bonuses (increased creature growth, resource production, or possibly new spells).

From left to right, we can see the home base model for Castle, Rampart, Tower, Inferno, Dungeon, Stronghold, Fortress, Necropolis, and Conflux. 

You collect resources to upgrade your home base, build and army, and defeat the other players in any given scenario. Each faction is visually and mechanically distinct and learning the ins and outs of each one takes a decent amount of time. Castle, for instance, has strong offence but very expensive units, so upgrading is tough, while Fortress has very strong defense, but cannot upgrade magic skills as much. Both world exploration and combat are turn based, with combat taking place on a hex grid.

It might seem a bit dull at first glance but there's more tension here than in a thousand hours of Skyrim.

Each turn is a day, and each week you can recruit new units for your army. The time system adds a lot of weight to when exactly you decide to build, move, and fight other enemies because if you don’t time things right, they could have just recruited a whole weeks’ worth of new units.

The maps of HoMM III are colorful, with several different kinds of terrain, locations to visit, and enemies to fight. Most heroes start with low movement points so every map feels huge and uncovering new areas feels substantial and tactically important. The more you expand, the more territory you have to lose, after all.

There's a huge amount of detail in every inch of HoMM III's maps.

The aggressive A.I means that you had to do a lot of multitasking on the larger maps, which definitely creates some tense moments. As you start to conquer your enemies you get that feeling that only strategy games can give you, which can be a tough itch to scratch. The large amount of pre-created scenarios will occupy you for hours, especially given the multiple difficulty levels to try everything on. There’s a random map creation feature which means that you can be playing HoMM III until you up and die, if you so choose.

Heroes of Might and Magic V changed the formula around in very drastic ways, though you might not notice from watching somebody play for a minute or two. The game works in the same day/week turn based based fashion, you still collect resources to build up your base and army, and most of the same factions have returned. Once you delve in you’ll start to notice the differences, however.

Looks like things have become a little more polygonal here.

There are now eight factions instead of nine, with Conflux lost to the winds. The maps in HoMM V feel smaller, but a large portion of that is due to the art style’s increased asset size. The less serious art style gives the game a more whimsical feel, which can make you underestimate the strategy needed to play. It’s more possible to take on enemies with only one hero, due to the easier A.I and new battle queue which tells you what order everybody is moving in.

This is like the switch battle mode in Pokémon; battles are way easier when you know what's coming.

Your units are now more powerful on their own, due to some big changes. A variety of them have the ability to cast spells as well as attack, which opens up all sorts of new tactical options (should I just attack my Archmages, or make use of their weaker fireball spell to hit a larger area?).  Some creatures also have certain abilities connected to their faction, like Inferno creatures ability to gate, or create temporary one-hit copies of themselves on the map.

By far the largest change in HoMM V is the new way that Heroes function. Heroes now have their own turn in battle where they can attack or cast spells, as opposed to casting spells on their creatures’ turns in HoMM III. Each faction has an ultimate skill that you can only get by combining the right amount of smaller skills. In the original HoMM V, you needed to master skills from five different disciplines to get the Ultimate Skill, making it almost impossible unless you were playing a campaign, but the HoMM V expansions lowered the requirements to three disciplines per hero.

The Ultimate Skill for each kind of hero is always super useful and worth pursuing.

Heroes now have unique skills that change how you think about combat as well.  Haven heroes can use “Counterstrike” which allows them to retaliate against any attack on a preferred unit and Sylvan heroes can create a “favorite enemy” list which allows them to do more damage to those enemies.  Your hero is now a much more integral part of your army and in many cases, your most valuable asset.

When all is said and done, HoMM III definitely feels a lot more ponderous that HoMM V, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. There was a clear shift in focus when you compare both games; more creatures in III, but more skills in V. There’s more artifacts and spells in III, but more hero customization in V.  HoMM III is about exploration and exploitation of the world where HoMM V is about character building.

Though the styles are different, HoMM III and V are both enjoyable and challenging games. While I’ll always prefer the third, it’s great to see a series change up their formula especially when they’re successful already. The shift the series took managed to emphasize new aspects of gameplay without gutting the rest of the mechanics, which is certainly impressive. Give the HoMM series a try if you’re at all a fan of strategy games; you won’t regret it, though you might find yourself more than a little drawn in.

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Round Peg, Square Hole: the Three Act Story Structure and Videogames

When you want to tell a story, structure is one of the most important details to pin down. Each style has its own advantages and disadvantages, but the three act structure is one of the most commonly used methods to tell a story. In the original Star Wars Trilogy for instance, each movie has a three act structure, but the three movies can each be taken as part of a larger three act structure that tells us the story of Luke Skywalker. Games are a fairly new medium, so it’s not surprising that most of them use the same story structures popular in books and movies. However, games are not like movies and books, no matter how “cinematic” the back of the game box says they are. The disconnect between gameplay and narrative in most games makes the three act structure a bad fit for most games.

In case you haven't figured it out, I will find a way to tie everything back to Star Wars.

The three act story structure has (predictably) three parts. There’s the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution. The setup is designed to get you introduced to the characters, the world, and their problems. Later there is some kind of incident (the first turning point) where the protagonist is confronted with some kind of issue that indicates the end of the first act and raises a question that the end of the film will answer. In the second act, called the confrontation, the protagonist will try to confront the problem raised at end of the last act but they will find themselves in increasingly worse situations. Eventually the protagonist will hit their lowest point (the second turning point) and have to learn how to deal with the outside issue, which leads into the final act, resolution. In resolution the protagonist will resolve the question raised by the first turning point in act one and the story will tie up all the loose ends.

The second act is usually the longest one in film, but it gets a little harder to say what should be what in games.

You can imagine how well this works for books, movies, and plays. A young person lives in an idyllic village. A dragon comes and destroys the village, so the hero quests for revenge. They challenge the dragon, lose, and train with a master in the woods. Later, they confront the dragon and defeat it, thus avenging their village. The character changes throughout the story (their character arc) and they become somebody different than they were at the start. Something similar happens in a lot of games, but in a more mechanical sense. When you start playing a game, you are unsure of the controls, the world, and the story. By the time you’re done, you’ll have a deeper understanding of all of these.

Incompatibilities with games crop up around the second act of the three act story structure. In a narrative world, this is the act when the protagonist is their lowest point; this is when they fail at completing their quest. In games, this is when the player has been playing for hours and is comfortable with the controls and the world. Game designers try in various ways to make the player feel the sort of low point that the characters experience, but virtually all the ways lead to the player feeling removed from the game. A classic example is a boss fight where, after you have beaten them handily, the cutscene suddenly shows the boss beating your character like a rug. By the time we get to the third act, we don’t feel any of the resolution that the narrative wants us to experience. We’re having fun and just want to play more. Why do you think so many games now let you continue after completing the main quest?

In Mass Effect 3, you defeat the assassin Kai Leng only to have him summon a gunship and destroy the temple you're in, steal the data you were after, and escape.

The bosses in Castlevania are hard, but that just makes victory all the more satisfying.

The problem here is a disconnect between gameplay and narrative; when they’re one and the same, you feel what the character is supposed to be feeling. In Castlevania for the NES you play as Simon Belmont, on a quest to kill Dracula before he can wreak havoc on the land. You fight through various famous monsters (Frankenstein’s Monster, Medusa, the Grim Reaper, etc.) on your way to defeat the ultimate evil. Each level of the game can be considered a three act story structure. In the setup you have to get a feel for how the level is lain out, what kind of enemies live in it, and where the health pickups might be. Then the confrontation as you travel on you find the boss. It’s possible to defeat the boss the first time you meet them, but more than likely you’ll die and have to try again. This is your low point, which segments into your “character arc.” This is the training in the woods that our hero from our made up story undertakes. Then, the resolution when you defeat the boss and move onto the next level. You feel the frustration and fear that Simon would feel when you see a new boss appear on your screen. You learn the patterns just as he would, and you feel the feeling of joy and relief when you beat the boss.

 In Dead Space you play as Isaac Clarke, an engineer sent to repair the USG Ishimura after a distress call. You quickly find out that the ship is deserted, it’s crew murdered by the once-human-now-terribly-deformed Necromorphs. In the first act, you learn about the ship, its inhabitants and figure out how to fight the Necromorphs. In the second act, the “rescue” ship you managed to call turns out to be full of soldiers who plan to destroy the Ishimura and you along with it. In the resolution, you defeat the Necromorphs and escape. The horror that you feel confronting the Necromorphs is the same that Isaac feels, and you feel it because the game forces you to defeat the enemy by dismembering them. You feel the despair that Isaac would feel in the second act when your only hope at rescue turns out to be full of soldiers trying to kill you. The relief you feel when you confront the source of the Necromorphs and prevail is the same as Isaac’s because you can finally relax and stop expecting a monster around every corner.

Why are people always writing in their blood in games and movies? You should keep that stuff in your body.

The three act story structure is wonderful for books and movies. It’s a great way to tell all sorts of tales, be they love, adventure, or horror. When designers try to apply this structure to game narratives, however, things don’t stick. Too many games have a gap between the narrative and gameplay that removes the player from the emotions that the protagonist might be feeling. When gameplay and narrative work together, then we feel what they do.

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One Polygon Punch: Martial Arts in Video Games

Martial Arts have fascinated people for as long as people have been figuring out new ways to punch each other in the face. As Hong Kong action movies evolved into a genre all on their own, so did video games don their Gi(s). From early games like Kung Fu on the NES, to movie-tie-ins like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Martial Arts video games are like as death or taxes; pretty much guaranteed.

You can't see Hero and not want to learn how to do some of what Jet Li can do.

But what makes for good Martial Arts in video games? What are some challenges to designing good Martial Arts systems in games? What games stand out as good examples of Martial Arts systems?

Martial Arts are complex and worthwhile to learn in real life, but nobody wants to play a game where you have to go through grueling hours of practice. At the same time, if fighting were too easy, you wouldn’t experience the power fantasy that games provide. An in-game Martial Arts system should start you out with some degree of knowledge and simplify moves without making it too easy. Martial Arts moves should move rapidly, because watching Bruce Lee whip around his Nunchaku nearly faster than the eye can see is awesome and we all want to be Bruce Lee. Moreover, we’ve all seen somebody break a board with Karate or a bunch of stone tiles with their head so the moves should feel like they’re powerful.  So, we’ve got easy to use, fast, and powerful.

For the most part, the Martial Arts mechanics in Sleeping Dogs are fantastic. Sleeping Dogs is a story of an undercover cop, Wei Shen, slowly losing himself in his dual life with kickass ass-kicking. Already trained in a variety of Martial Arts styles, Wei hits enemies with a variety of strikes, grapples, and throws to take them down. Nothing is more satisfying than chaining a bunch of moves together to defeat a large number of opponents. Many of the attacks give off some suitably wince-worthy sound effects (the knee stomp in particular). Learning more moves as the game goes on makes you feel like you’re increasing in skill even though Wei has powerhouse capabilities from the minute you start the game.

Sleeping Dogs paints a picture of the kind of seedy underworld that movies like Internal Affairs made famous. 

Despite the fantastic the sound effects and animation, there has too many trump moves that make you undefeatable. You can solely use counters, which are unblockable. Enemies will flash red when attacking, defeating the element of surprise and removing a great deal of difficulty. You can spam certain high-damage moves and run through most enemies like a hot knife through butter. The Dim Mak, for instance, takes away half of an enemy’s health and knocks them down, opening them up to stomping or an easy grapple.

Jade Empire is an RPG full of twists and turns, set in a fictional version of Ancient China complete with magic, weapon-fighting, and Martial Arts. You upgrade your health, Chi, and Focus as well as various aspects of your martial styles, like the speed of your attacks or their power. Combat takes place in real-time and you can switch between styles at will. Each attack style has a combo attack, a strong attack, a block, and an area attack. While easy to use individually, switching effectively between styles and the different kinds of moves each style requires a little experimentation to get them all to work together. All of the styles are quick and chainable, with certain moves setting up “Harmonic Combos” which make enemies drop health, chi, or focus pickups.

The fights in Jade Empire are certainly fast and there's plenty of strategy to employ, it feels like there's something missing.

However, for the most part, attacks don’t feel like they do much to enemies. Strong attacks will knock enemies back, but regular combo attacks will just irritate most. While in part due to the RPG nature of the game, perhaps Jade Empire could have made basic combos harder to complete (maybe only correctly timed attacks can lead to combos?), but given combos the ability to drop and enemy to their knees or knock them back? As it stands, the Martial Arts in Jade Empire feels like using a Styrofoam hammer instead of a real one.

The fast-paced Martial Arts in Lugaru: The Rabbit’s Foot are easy to learn, but hard to master. Lugaru is a game about ninja kung-fu rabbits who have to fight wolves. There’s a plot there as well, but really, I’m still hung up on the kung-fu rabbit thing. Unlike Sleeping Dogs and Jade Empire, you cannot chain together moves. If you’re standing still, you’ll do a double punch. If you’re crouching, you’ll do a sweep kick. If you’re running, you’ll do a round house kick. You counter enemy moves by pressing the counter key at the exact right moment. If you keep repeating an attack, enemies counter you back, and if you time it right, you can counter their counter. With awesome ragdoll effects, you sweep an enemy’s legs out from under them, double punch them in midair, then watch them go flying. If you time your jump kick right, you blast an enemy backwards and hear the rock crack as they hit it. By the end of the game you feel like a badass rabbit who has trained, learned, and become a master of Martial Arts. Lugaru’s story is short and forgettable, but there’s no denying that its Martial Arts are fast, powerful, and fun to learn.

Rabbits and Kung-Fu work oddly well together and I'm not sure why.

Martial Arts are hard to learn in real life. Video games let you experience a little of what it’s like, without the getting knocked around or the years of practice. The best games make you practice a little, but only so that you feel like you’ve earned your skill. Now, go practice your forms, grasshopper.

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The Katana and the Longsword: Strengths of Japanese and Western RPGs

Most videogames are about escapism, getting into somebody else’s skin for a bit. While almost every game has you playing a role of some sort, RPGs have always been the genre for the story-loving gamer. RPGs come in two overarching flavors: Western and Japanese. While they both share a general genre, you’d be wrong in assuming that they’re similar. Some message boards are filled with threads over which type of RPG is superior, but I think that’s the wrong tree to be barking up. There’s no real point comparing vanilla and chocolate, after all.

This is one of the less confrontational pictures I could find when I searched "Western and Japanese RPGs." As you might notice in this image, there are some strong stylistic differences between the two sides of the genre.

What are the strengths of the two types of RPG? How do the two styles complement each other?

You could say that Japanese RPGs are like rollercoasters; there are ups and downs, twists and turns, but you’re strapped in for the ride. Generally, you (as the player) don’t drive the story forward. Instead, you control a character in-between story sections and watch the plot unfold. In Final Fantasy X/Final Fantasy 7, you control Tidus/Cloud (both blond haired young men with very impractical weapons) in combat and in the overworld, but when dialogue starts happening, the game takes the reigns from you.

Most of FFX's story comes through in cutscenes.

Battle is turned based, instead of the ATB system other FF games used.

There may be the occasional choice to make, but the story is going to the same place no matter what. When the player can’t influence the story, the writers can set up character’s stories without having to worry if the side characters should be reacting differently to the world and the main character. The writers and designers can also engineer a different sort of attachment that somebody playing Fallout might feel for their character, much like the attachment you might feel to a book or movie character.

People still have serious feelings about Aerith Gainsborough, the kindest character in FF7. The remake is going to stir up some tears for people.

The more focused nature of JRPGs also lead them towards longer stories, due to the absence of a lot of side content. This means that stories can develop in a slower way, often with better pacing and tone. A good portion of this is probably due to cultural differences, but JRPGs are also more willing to get a little weird. In Persona 3/Persona 4 you play as a high school student by day, answering test questions and hanging out with your friends, but by night you enter an alternate reality (through your high-school in 3 or a TV in 4) and fight evil spirits.

Here's normal school life.

And here's fighting demons by night. In the same school.

The focus on mobile gaming in the Japanese gaming market has also created some really interesting mechanics that you don’t see anywhere else. In The World Ends With You (an RPG for the DS), you fight enemies by drawing shapes on the bottom screen of the DS rather than hitting buttons, for instance. You start to think of combat in a very different way, more related to your own reflexes and the patterns of your attacks rather than just swinging a sword.

If JRPGs are like riding a rollercoaster, Western RPGs are like driving an ATV; you can stick to the trail, but you can also try to drive over that mountain over yonder. One of the principal strengths of the Western RPG is the level of player interaction with the story. You can see from Dungeons and Dragons to Baldur’s Gate to Fable that your choices move the story forward.

Each dialogue choice here could learn a different outcome and change the story moving forward.

Gameplay and story aren’t kept as separate parts of the game in WRPGs. You choose what your character says, does, how they act, and what kind of person they are and the story reacts to your choices. Many of them are less linear and offer more freedom in terms of movement. In Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, you can flit from town to town, solving side quests and leveling up, discovering side content. Many western RPGs never force you down their story’s path; less than 30% of people on Steam have completed Skyrim’s Main Quest. These games generally have more content to explore and more replay value compared to JRPGs because seeing everything in one go is very hard, or even impossible due to the game locking you out of some content due to a choice you made.

So many places to go and not progress in the main quest.

Western developed RPGS are also free to explore more niche sides of the genre, such as Real Time Strategy RPGs like MechCommander. You also have games like the Mass Effect and S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, which both toe the line between shooters and RPGs. The strong PC support of western developers for RPGs also means that WRPGs are more likely to foster a strong modding community which can extend the lifetime of a game by years. Hell, people are still making mods for System Shock (which came out in 22 years ago!).

You can see how the two kinds of RPG are two sides of the same coin. Both kinds are about immersing yourself in a fantasy (pleasant or not) and both usually involve some degree of stats, micromanaging equipment, or leveling up. They take such complementary directions that you have to wonder if developers on one side saw what the other was doing and though, “Hey, let’s fill in the gaps!” Sometimes you even get games like Dark Souls, a very western style Japanese-developed RPG. It’s kind of like when chocolate met peanut butter, except in the case of the Souls series, chocolate and peanut butter teamed up to kick the crap out of you.

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Evil will Always Triumph, Because Good is Dumb: Playing the Villain in Videogames

What is it about being evil in videogames that’s so fun? Well, we’re not really allowed to do it in real life. There’s all sorts of consequences for evil deeds and before you know it, everybody’s calling for your head on a platter. Videogames skip all that messy nonsense and just let you enjoy the (Ill-gotten) fruits of your labor. So, you decide you want to be a villain and you go looking through your collection for a good game, but then you realize that playing a compelling villain is almost impossible in most games. What’s a gamer to do?

Look at how much fun he's having! I wanna do that! I'll dress up in black!

What can a game to allow you to be a good villain? What games take (mis)steps on the road towards good villain gameplay?

It seems to me that a compelling villain, a good villain, doesn’t see themselves as the villain. They’re not cartoonish-ly evil, they don’t spout sermons about how they’ll kill everybody, etc. A good villain does evil things for an arguably “just” cause. Ozymandias of Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a great example. He destroys all of New York City, millions of people, to stop the world from destroying itself via nuclear weapons.

This might be the first time a villain has ever planned ahead for this sort of situation. Good on you, Ozy.

He’s a villain that merits discussion and argument, with complex motivations and ideas. Melisandre, the Red Woman, from George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series is another villain with complex motivations. Games rarely offer you the full package of compelling villainy, but there are some standouts which take steps in the right direction.

Knights of the Old Republic, an RPG by Bio Ware, is an epic tale of discovery, adventure, and weighty decisions. In any Star Wars game, movie, TV show, etc., The Force is divided into two sides: The Light and the Dark. The Light Side of The Force is supposed to be harmonious, compassionate, selfless, and is the tool of the Jedi. The Dark Side of The Force is fueled by “negative” emotions such as anger, hate, rage, and is the tool of the Dark Jedi.

I feel like the Dark Side could use a little makeover. Maybe a bit less red, some more pastels. It would really help with their image.

KOTOR gives you hundreds of choices throughout the game that move you towards The Light or The Dark side. Thematically, going towards The Dark Side makes a lot of sense. The Dark Side is incredibly powerful and faster to achieve mastery in than The Light Side. Choosing the “evil” path over the “right” path makes sense, given what we’re told in the universe. It’s reasonable that you could think that you’re the best person suited to ruling the galaxy and that might is the only way to get there.

See, Darth Vader made the mistake of trying to turn this whole "ruling the galaxy" thing into a family affair. Nepotism is dangerous, my friend. Branch out a little.

However, this does not translate into gameplay in a meaningful way. There are times when you come in the conflict with your companions over your alignment (and have to kill some of them), but the actual mechanics of playing don’t change enough. You still use the same Force powers but now that you’re evil, “light” powers cost more of your energy. I would prefer it if certain powers were closed off to you entirely due to your hate. Another way to go would have been to reduce your health, but increase your damage output the more you slide towards evil. After all, fighting angry is no way to protect yourself.

Fable, an RPG by Lionhead Studios (recently closed), focuses on the Hero’s Journey in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way. You literally go to a “Hero” school where you learn all that’s required to become a protagonist, then you’re off doings quests around the land, discovering more about your past. Every little thing you do in Fable moves you towards “good” or “evil”. Eat some tofu? You get some good points. Slaughter a town of peasants? Bad points.

What happens if I'm just kind of an asshole? Do I just get a greasy comb-over? 

This system really impresses when it comes to the actual gameplay effect of your actions. Your body slowly changes either way you go, with goodness giving you a literal halo and evil causing you to spout horns. The more evil you get, the more the people around you will fear you. Many NPCs will attempt to run away from you and shops will refuse your business. On the combat side of things, mastery of certain kinds of spells were closed off to you, and upgrading opposite alignment spells is way more expensive, XP-wise. There are arguably compelling reasons for some evil actions, like the extra money you can make in arena by killing your partner but a majority of the actions don’t really make sense. If you murder civilians, they’ll close off their shops to you and you won’t be able to buy equipment. Villains should do evil things because they’re trying to do something they think is just, but in Fable there’s no ends to justify.

Mass Effect 3 is the culmination of a space opera the likes of which has never been seen in gaming before. Throughout the game you can make choices that give you Paragon or Renegade points, which align with “good” or “evil” respectively. Mass Effect 3 deserves praise for allowing you to gain both Paragon and Renegade points because few people are totally good or totally evil.

Like this guy. Not a very nice dude, but he did some heroic stuff. Snape is a complex character worth arguing over.

Mass Effect 3 is one of the few games to offer compelling reasons to take “evil” actions. In one instance, you discover an ancient race of insects that ravaged the galaxy a thousand years ago is still alive. They attempt to convince you that they will be peaceful if you let them live now. Exterminating them to preserve galactic safety is a reasonable action to take based on the information you have, even though the doing so is distasteful. In the second game, you have the option to give hyper advanced technology to a pro-human splinter group that you’ve been working for. They’ve been the ones protecting humanity while the Galactic Council sits on their hands, so giving them the tech is a reasonable thing to do even though the group has a dark past. In the third game, you have the option to stop a cure to a disease that causes 999 out of every 1000 stillbirths in a violent race of aliens. You need their help to defeat the Reapers (the seemingly-unstoppable race of machines aiming to destroy the galaxy), but in the past, these aliens have tried to conquer the galaxy themselves. In each of these situations, you undertake an “evil” action for justifiable reasons. The rest of the time, however, Renegade actions amount to “I’m an impatient asshole who just likes waving my gun around.”

Accurate depiction of 99% of Renegade actions. I feel like being nicer will get you more stuff than being a jerk, but maybe that's just me.

For a leader you need your people to respect (or fear) you but the Renegade actions in Mass Effect 3 would just make everybody around you think you’re a dick. Your actions also do not change gameplay in any way, which is a wasted opportunity. Maybe darker characters could get higher damage versions of offensive powers, or be able to access illegal technology through the black market.

Everybody likes playing the bad guy once in a while. Lots of games let you indulge in some bad behavior, but few of them offer any sort of compelling villainy. There are definitely a lot of challenges around designing stories that feature a compelling villain, let alone designing a game that lets you play as one. However, we’ve seen that games can take steps in the right direction; all that’s left now is putting them all together.

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Hit me one more time: Death and Punishment in Games

Dying is a big part of life, both in reality and in videogames. Since the first games, there has been a need for some kind of failure state. After all, what’s the fun in playing a game you can’t lose? Some games, like Atari’s Pong had “loss” as a failure state, but most games went with “death” of some kind. In any game, there needs to be some kind of factor that makes death unappealing (besides the fact that it’s an uncomfortable reminder of our own fragile mortality) so you avoid it. Different kinds of games have tried different things to make death unappealing, though some work better than others.

When arcades died, the continue screen died with them. IT's a real shame, considering how awesome some of them are.

What are some interesting methods of de-incentivizing death? Which of them are well designed?

In the Pokémon series “death” is not much of a hurdle, and that’s a good thing. You “lose” in Pokémon by making all of your Pokémon “faint.” You wake up at the last Pokémon center you visited after blacking out. Nurse Joy heals your Pokémon and tells you three or four lines about how the center is always here to help you.

No, I think I'd like my poor electric rat to just stay terribly poisoned, thanks. Is this free? Is there Pokémon healthcare? Do we have an HMO? Hold on, I need to call my mom.

If you just mash the A button to get through it quickly she’ll heal your Pokémon and you’ll have to listen to the whole spiel again. It might not seem like punishment, but having to read the same lines over and over again is just annoying enough to make “dying” a pain. This whole process incentives good item use and keeping an eye on your Pokémon’s health as you travel. If you let your Pokémon faint too often they start to dislike you which leads to your Pokémon disobeying you in the middle of battle.

I guess this is what I get for putting Caterpie first against that level 75 Charizard.

This system is well designed because it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay in a large way while also ensuring that you want to avoid dying, just so that you don’t have to hear Nurse Joy lecturing you again.

Death is such a part of the Souls series that the first DLC-included version of Dark Souls is called Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. You’d think that because death is so common in that game that there’s no way to de-incentivize it, right? When you die in Dark Souls, all the souls you’ve collected (used to level up, upgrade weapons, etc) are left where you died.

Welcome to the Souls series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter.

After death you respawn at the last bonfire (the game’s checkpoints) that you used. To get them back, you have to make it back to the spot where you bit the dust. What’s so clever about this method is how it changes based on how many souls you were carrying and where you died. If you only had a couple of thousand souls, you might not even care about them but if you had several hundred thousand, you would probably want to head back super carefully because losing all those souls means losing hours of game progress.

All your souls are right there in that little green light. You will die many times trying to get back to that light. You will resent that light.

If you just rolled off a cliff by accident, then picking up your souls is a simple as going back to the spot and grabbing them. If you died in the middle of a boss fight, you might have to dodge around a giant dragon while maneuvering towards your souls. It’s a multilayer form of punishment that really fits the tone of the game and incorporates directly into the gameplay nicely.

In Bethseda RPGs, death always results in the same thing: reloading your most recent save. Most modern games have an autosave system that will save your game every x minutes, but some older games require to manually save your progress. Bethesda RPGS are famous for their massive amounts of content, and each game just keeps adding to the pile.

This bear is actually a metaphor for how badly the massive amount of content (the bear) is going to crush you (you).

Every time you die, you can lose hours of progress depending on when the game saved, or when you did. This is unfair because it feels like saving should be a system that the game handles, rather than the player. It’s almost like you’re being punished for enjoying the game so much that you forgot to take yourself out of gameplay and go through a bunch of menus to save. This is a case where the game goes too far towards dis-incentivizing death, to the point where death results in you putting the controller/mouse down, maybe for the day. This can be mitigated, based on how often the game autosaves, but that’s more of a band aid than a cure.

Dying in The Legend of Zelda is a slap in the face that you see coming a mile away. You know that you shouldn’t have gone into that high leveled temple with one and a half hearts, but you did anyway.

This is not going to end well for me. What's that, Giant Dino-corn? You agree? Nice to have consensus.

Before you know it, you hear that sad little sound effect and you wind up back where you started the game. Every time you die you respawn with three hearts, no matter the maximum amount of hearts you have. In the beginning of the game you only have three maximum hearts so you can shoot (maybe throw? It’s unclear) your sword no problem. However as you progress though the game you get more hearts, so death means that you start out hobbled. Now you have to start out every new life by either grinding for hearts, grinding for money to buy medicine to restore hearts, or you need to find a fairy pool to heal yourself. This feels poorly designed because the game is putting an artificial time sink between you and more progress. The only difference between starting like this or starting will full hearts is about ten to fifteen minutes of wasted time.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!” Videogames have to make sure that death is aggravating because they’re the only place where you can die every five minutes and still be doing what you’re doing. Exactly how to go about making death aggravating must be a hard concept to wrestle with, given how final it is in reality. Clever developers come up with systems that play into the game mechanics, but others go for the low hanging fruit of time based frustration and quicksaving. Next time you die in a videogame, think about what you have to do to progress again. Is the mechanic well designed? Is it annoying? Why so?

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Anything it takes: Survival In Video Games

Some of the most harrowing tales in human history are based around survival. Robinson Crusoe, Cast Away, and The Life of Pi are some standout examples. To game designers, survival is a fun mechanic to add into a game, or in the case of games like DayZ and The Long Dark it’s the entire point. These days survival mechanics move a game more towards reality, i.e. the need to eat, drink, etc while settling you in a hostile environment. Developers can sometimes shoehorn in mechanics where they don’t quite fit. After all, to someone with a hammer everything looks suspiciously like a nail.

So what makes for good survival mechanics in games? Why is survival fun in the first place?

Fallout: New Vegas is a game with surprisingly deep survival mechanics. It’s made with the same Bethesda engine as Fallout 3, but the game’s staff are all ex Interplay Entertainment (developers of the original 2 Fallout games) members. The game returned you to the west coast with a twisting tale of betrayal, greed, and complex faction interplay.

Fallout: New Vegas is hailed as a return to better parts of the Fallout series. I prefer Fallout 2, but F:NV sure beats the hell out of Fallout 4.

While you could eat and drink in Fallout 3, it offered little benefits beside a small bit of health and a hefty dose of radiation. In F:NV’s Hardcore Mode, eating and drinking are a must. As you skip meals and pass up water bottles, your stats slowly decrease. Go without for long enough and you die of starvation and/or dehydration. Stimpacks no longer heal a chunk of health instantly, but instead restore it over time. To heal crippled limbs, you must find a doctor, a doctor’s bag, or a few other options. Ammunition now has weight, instead of being magically weightless. These are not gigantic changes, but they fundamentally change how you play the game.

F:NV is one of the only games I've played that actually makes buying food a worthwhile option.

You now have to think about food/water weight when you’re moving across the Mojave. You can’t just pick up every weapon you find, but you have to think about what kind of ammo you’re carrying and if you can afford to spend more weight points on a new type. Moreover, the scarcity of resources plays into the game in a very thematic way, drawing you more into the world. You can gather resources to cook or create health items and you have to make choices about how to use everything to the best of your ability.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R series is another series that features a few survival elements, though only in two out of three games. The survival elements are lighter in S.T.A.L.K.E.R than in FNV, but there are a few other mechanics that balance the whole package out, for the most part.

Nothing spells bleak quite like swamps and radiation. I'm still a little confused as to why anybody would go into the Zone, frankly.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R has no thirst mechanic and the hunger mechanic takes several in-game days to take effect. After a few days, your health lowers constantly and your stamina is severely reduced. S.T.A.L.K.E.R stumbles when it doesn’t make hunger a bigger threat. S.T.A.L.K.E.R could lower your carrying capacity, or affect your weapon handling when don’t eat. Maybe you’re so weak from hunger that you can’t hold your gun steady, or perhaps kickback is increased because you can’t brace the weapon properly?  S.T.A.L.K.E.R introduces new combat and survival mechanics that shine, however. When you take damage in S.T.A.L.K.E.R you bleed and your health drops over time, with speed depending on the severity of the wound. If you don’t use a bandage on yourself, you can bleed out in the middle of a fight. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat radiation storms can occur and random, forcing you to seek shelter. If you’re caught outdoors, your health drops rapidly, and you’re assailed by disorienting effects.

Sprinting to find cover as the sky darkens around you is one of more harrowing parts of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. These emissions are also a great example of gameworld and narrative working with gameplay.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R games put you in one of the most inhospitable environments ever designed in games, but the survival aspect that comes with that setting is never really addressed, with respect to your character’s limitations. It might have been better to remove the food aspect of this game entirely, as it doesn’t add any depth to the game.

Why does any of this even matter? Isn’t survival kind of a terrible burden to have to face in real life? Well, survival mechanics offer a degree of realism that you usually don’t see in games. This is not to say that it makes games “realistic” or anything like that, but it does take some of our real world expectations and give them tangible gameplay implications. We get hungry, so does our character. We need to drink, and if we don’t in game, our character will suffer. It’s a fine line to tread between oppressing a player with annoying mechanics that stop the action every ten seconds and half-assign the mechanics so that they’re just in the way of gameplay, but when developers manage to get it right, it adds a lot to the game. I think you could also make a good case for the general direction towards more “realistic” mechanics in games. Swinging a sword in The Legend of Zelda is very different from swinging it in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for instance. More complex mechanics feel like a natural progression and they challenge players a more.

Survival mechanics are a cool tool when used well. They can add a lot of depth to a game and make the player feel more involved in the world. Next time you’re playing a game with survival elements, think about how the game uses these elements to draw you in (or push you out if they’re bad) of the game world. How do the mechanics change how you play? What would make the mechanics better?

Where the Hell do I Go?: Direction in Games

Figuring out where to go is one of life’s really big questions. Choosing a career, romantic partner, or even a place to live can be difficult, frustrating, or just plain confusing. You would think that games, where somebody can design everything exactly so, would be easier to navigate, but you’d be wrong. Whether deliberate or not, a lack of direction can harm your enjoyment of a game just as well as bad controls or a boring story can.

But, what is good direction? How does direction make a game enjoyable?

Halo: Combat Evolved is a revolutionary FPS with lackluster direction. Out of the eleven levels, seven could easily lead you to confusion and frustration. Several of the levels are made up of identical corridors, so you can’t figure out which way was forward or backwards if you got turned around.

Aliens really love the color purple. Ever notice that? Why is that? Also, how do they know where they're going in this stupid ship?

Since Halo has no cover system, movement is very important during a firefight, which does play well with the level design. Assault on the Control Room (5th level) has glowing arrows on the ground, but in Two Betrayals (8th level), you have to navigate the whole level backwards so the arrows just confuse you. Also, if your levels are confusing enough to warrant arrows everywhere, you might already have a problem.

The level looks pretty straightforward, but you'll definitely spend a few minutes saying, "Wait, did I come from here?"

The alien design the areas in Halo could be a reason for their confusing nature, but as a game designer, you have to make sure your players can find their way through the game easily. The lack of direction here is a problem because it prevents you from progressing in the story, or fighting new enemies, which are the two principal fun parts of any shooter.

Okay, so I'm a green dot in a grey void. That's helpful for my adventuring.

The Legend of Zelda is another genre-redefining game that suffered from too little direction. Much of this may be due to the technological limits of the time and to their credit, the designers did a good job making the game world memorable enough to navigate, but the “map” in LoZ is useless.

It tells you your general position in the world, but only some of the time. Several areas of the map will not let you past until you have walked through them upwards of three times. Without any sort of landmarks on the map, how are you supposed to distinguish one green (or blue/red if you upgraded your armor) dot on the map from any other position? I think the game designers realized this, because there are several times when you get a hint along the lines of “GO FIND THE OLD MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD.” These hints are an example of the right kind of direction in LoZ; they point you to a distinct place, so it’s easier to figure out where you are and where you’re going. However, the main goal of the game are hidden behind hints like “SPECTACLE ROCK IS AN ENTRANCE TO DEATH.”

Where the hell is Spectacle Rock? Which rocks? There’s like 50,000 rocks in this game world. Are they ones shaped like eyes? Are the rocks a spectacle because they’re impressive? Stop telling me nonsense, Old Man!

LoZ has very impressive scale and exploration for its time, but it also has a mission: defeat Gannon, become the hero of Hyrule. Wandering about aimlessly can be enjoyable for a time, but eventually you want to make progress on your journey and a lack of direction prevents that.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game aiming to capture the playstyle of classic shooters while feeling modern. It’s a pretty tall order, but Wolfenstein did very well in terms of scores and sales, so maybe they managed it. On the surface Halo and Wolfenstein: TNO might seem pretty similar. Both are FPS with a sci-fi bent where you travel to a world unlike any you’ve known. Both take inspiration from older FPS and both are regarded highly.

Wolfenstein: The New Order shows you a truly chilling future, but hey, at least it gives you plenty of firepower to deal with it.

Wolfenstein succeeded where Halo failed, however: direction and level design. Designed by (in-game) Nazis they may be, but the areas in Wolfenstein are very easy to navigate. Part of this is due to the fact that the areas are all very conventional. You spend your time in hospitals, prisons, and cities that are all lain out how you would expect them to be. Want to go up a level in a house? Find the stairwell. Want to find a first aid kit in a museum? Go the bathroom.

Hell, even the literal-actual moonbase is easy to navigate. If that's not good level design, I don't know what is.

The areas also change drastically as you progress through them, so remembering where you’ve been is much easier. The designers could have easily made the world very alien, given that 20 years pass under Nazi rule, but their choice to go with familiar environments means that you’re never unsure about where to go. You’re free to concentrate on the story, the gameplay, and finding secrets.

Hyper Light Drifter is a game in the same vein as The Legend of Zelda, focused on exploration and adventure. Much like in LoZ, you’re just dropped into the game with no real understanding of who you are, where you’re from, or why you’re here. Much like LoZ, Hyper Light Drifter focuses on simplistic combat with a few items and a big world map.

It's also a beautiful game if you're into pixel art.

Unlike LoZ, HLD starts you out on a linear path and then opens up to a huge world. This gets you more centered in the world and also makes choosing a direction to go that much less daunting. HLD also has a map that shows you the general world location, but it has landmarks that give you some idea of where you are in relation to everything else. There’s no stated “main quest”, but “objectives” are marked on your map so you have an idea of where to go.

You will be spending a looooot of time here, so get used to this map.

Their exact location is still a mystery, and given the several tiered nature of the world map, exploration is still more than required and encouraged to beat the game. If Skyrim is the preschool teacher holding your hand as you walk around the park and The Legend of Zelda is the person who puts a black bag over your head and throws you out of a moving car, then Hyper Light Drifter is hiking with a map and compass. You might not know exactly where you are, but at least you’ve got an idea.

Direction is important in life and in video games. Nobody wants to spend their whole life doing something they hate and nobody wants to wander around a game world pointlessly. In games like Elite: Dangerous, the exploration might be the point, but for most other games, some semblance of a path is needed. The next time you’re playing a game and don’t know where to go, ask yourself what the designers could have done to make finding your way feel organic, or if the lack of direction was a design choice, what are they trying to achieve?

Love to Hate ‘Em: Villains, Blackguards, and Jerks.

What is it about a villain that makes them compelling? Why do people see Darth Vader and think he’s the coolest character in Star Wars? What makes people despise Delores Umbridge more than Voldemort in Harry Potter? In traditional mediums, you experience a story passively, but video games allow you to personally confront villains, so it makes sense that players might hate their virtual adversaries a little more than you might have a movie villain.

Except for Delores. We can hate Delores just fine without having to actually deal with her.

So, how do you construct a good Video Game villain?

Mass Effect is a series filled with antagonists, big and small, but few are as well composed as Saren, the villain from the first game. Saren is a Spectre, an agent of the inter-species galactic council. Spectres are the right arm of the Council, their eyes and ears across the galaxy. You first encounter Saren on a human colony, where he and his robotic Geth have brutally slaughtered the colonists. He even murders another Spectre in cold blood.

Look at this jerk. About to kill his friend. Didn't even give him the dignity of an awesome fight on a rooftop.

Saren makes for a good villain for a number of reasons. The first is that he’s present from the start of the game to the end of the game. While you face smaller enemies along the way, you never forget that he’s the one you’re working against. Saren is also clearly dangerous; his army of Geth easily lay waste to every place they visit, he himself is an extremely well trained special agent. When you do encounter him face-to-face, he’s a challenge to fight and he can easily beat you and your team if you’re not careful. In the few moments you get to speak to him, you learn about why he’s doing what he’s doing. He believes that he can secure a future for organic life by helping the Reapers take over the galaxy, and though there’s definitely some cowardice in there, he’s trying to preserve the galaxy, in his own way.

Well, maybe he's just a coward. 

The one area where Saren falls short is this development, which is basically non-existent, besides going a little crazy near the end of the game. You have no chance to see what Saren was before he met Sovereign, how they met, or really understand his journey, which is a shame.

The town in Silent Hill 2, aptly named Silent Hill, is more memorable than most villains, despite no final battle, or even a body. As James Sunderland, you journey through Silent Hill, trying to find your wife. The town has no form, but you can’t shake the feeling that it has feelings; specifically, the feeling that it doesn’t want you there and that it will get you to leave. From the minute you get there, an oppressive fog makes navigation hard, and not-quite-human monsters crawl out of the woodwork to harass you.  

Charming place, no? Who wouldn't want to find an AirBnB here? Nobody that's who.

Here is where Silent Hill succeeds where Saren failed; as you progress through the game and explore the town, you understand a little more about it and why it is the way that it is. When you look at the characters in the game, you see that the town reflects what they bring with them. The town is a trial by fire, in a way. You made Silent Hill the way it was; you’re not here to fight the monsters in the town, you’re here to confront your own demons.

Maybe there's a reason this game opens with the main character starting at his horrible twisted reflection...

The town is obviously present and presents a danger, so it’s only real failing is the lack of gameplay challenge. Without challenging gameplay, the town of Silent Hill almost feels like it would make a better movie villain than a game villain.

How much of a jerk must this guy be that his own granfather doesn't even know his name?! At least you can name him ASSFACE if you want.

What about something smaller, more homegrown? Pokémon Red introduces you to Gary (or Green if you’re a game purist) right off the bat, and boy, is he fun to hate. From the minute you meet him, Gary is snobbish, rude, condescending, and just a general jerk. 

Gary impedes your progress with a well-trained team a number of times, he’s always one step ahead of you, and somehow he’s still smug after you’ve beat him down every time. Sure, Gary isn’t grand or evil or even that threatening, but he’s all the more infuriating because he’s much realer than a rogue government agent or a supernatural town. Gary can send you packing to the Pokémon center and he’ll laugh at you while he’s doing it.

You never question why he’s doing what he’s doing either; you know that he’s trying to do the same thing as you, become the Champion. The only issue with Gary is that he never changes, no matter what you do, or how badly you beat him. Gary is always Gary, and you never figure out why he’s the way he is, or get to see him evolve.

There is no good story without conflict. There is no protagonist without an antagonist. Games put you in the protagonist’s shoes and a good antagonist helps make the journey memorable. A good video game antagonist should be present throughout the whole game, be dangerous, develop throughout the story, be challenging, and have understandable motivations. Though none of the villains we’ve looked at here had all of the qualities, they’re still good villains and antagonists because they’re well rounded. 

Yes, I would like to pick up 5000 swords: Loot and Looting in Games

Loot, for those of you who don’t know, is a term used for equipment, armor, currency, and other pick-up-able items that you would find in a videogame. You usually get loot for completing a quest, or killing an enemy in a RPG, though the lines have definitely gotten murkier over time. The distinction that I still think holds true is if you can find an item with many slight variations, it qualifies as loot. You probably wouldn’t call an ammunition pickup loot, but you would call a +1 Steel Sword loot, for instance. So, now that you’re all edumcated, let’s get down to it.

I'm going to pick up all of this junk, stuff it in a chest, and totally forget about it forever.

What makes for good loot in games? What makes for a good loot system in games? Why is obsessively collecting things fun at all?

The most impactful example of loot and looting in video games has to be Diablo, released in 1996. In Diablo, you play as one of three classes and you are charged with defeating Diablo, the Lord of Terror. The loot in Diablo is good because it presents a clear reward for progression, with harder enemies giving out better loot, and because figuring out what is better isn’t a headache.

All the needed info is right there, presented clearly. Loot like this is hard to find and really gratifying when you stumble across it.

The items also have a number of stat requirements which increase replay value by offering you a number of different playstyles besides just the class differences. In Diablo 2, 3 and Titan Quest (a mythological themed hack’n’slash lootfest very similar to Diablo) the items are even easily visible when you’re fighting an enemy, so you can tell what they’re going to drop ahead of time, which increases anticipation.

You know what weapons these enemies are going to drop just by looking at the enemies. You'll be able to tell if a weapon or armor piece is rare early on, which makes defeating tough enemies with rare items fun.

These games also all make good use of chests and treasure boxes. These items are usually positioned after bosses or near the end of dungeons to give a reward besides the items from the boss and to increase the anticipation to finish an area. Yes, you’re low on health potions and you know there’s a tough boss ahead, but man, you could find that +5 Staff you’ve been wanting in the chest behind them.

Most games took their loot systems and loot design from Diablo, so they’re generally well thought out, but there are some odd choices some games make. Borderlands is another loot filled game, though through the lens of an FPS-RPG, rather than an isometric RPG. Borderlands is a generally good game, but I think the loot and loot system have some issues. First of all, unless a weapon is massively overpowered, you can’t figure out much about it when an enemy is using it. You might be able to tell what kind of weapon it is, but only if you’re pretty close, as the cell shaded design of the world makes the weapons tough to distinguish.

It's hard to figure out what kind of weapon an enemy is using, especially when a bunch of bad guys are shooting at you, which is always.

Another choice I’m not too fond of is one that World of Warcraft made with its loot system. While the actual loot in WoW is pretty interesting design-wise, the loot system revolves around a lot of random drops. Essentially, bosses and enemies in WoW have a set group of loot that they can drop, with each item on the list having a certain percentage to drop once the boss/enemy is defeated.

For this particular boss, the drop rates aren't even known yet. This doesn't really seem like good, or even fun, loot design.

This encourages “farming” of items and bosses. Farming is when you keep killing the same boss over and over again to try to get an item drop. MMOs are designed differently than other games, specifically to keep you playing, but having a mechanic that actively discourages progression doesn’t sit well with me. It feels a little too much like a Skinner box, and the fact that designers would think in such a blatantly manipulative manner is a little off-putting.

So, now that we’ve talked about what makes good loot/a good loot system, let’s go a little deeper: Why is collecting loot fun at all? Well, there’s a number of reasons. One of the first is just aesthetics; who doesn’t want to create an awesome looking character by equipping them with cool weapons and armor? There’s something very gratifying about building a unique look in these games, and though Diablo was a bit primitive graphics wise, the later games really allowed you to create an awesome looking hero.

Somebody spent many hours (or even possibly some real money) making this Demon Hunter this awesome.

Besides customizing how you look, there’s also the satisfaction you’ll get from making your character move effective in a general sense, or designing a particular build. For instance, you might be building a character that has a really high damage per second, so you equip armor and weapons that increase your attack speed.

You can design your gear around your build, aiming for a specific kind of gameplay or experience.

Lastly, collecting things, useful or not, is pretty fun. Pokémon is a living example of this, as is the absolutely gigantic amounts of different kinds of Oreos you can find in China. Maybe you don’t even want to equip the full set of that awesome armor, you just want to have all the different sets in your storage and use something else. People like collecting rocks in real life, so collecting different suits of armor in games doesn’t seem that odd to me.

Bet you thought I was joking. Nope. China has a huge variety of Oreos, with different flavors and style of cookie. You don't realize how much you'll miss peach Oreos until you can't get them anymore

Loot and loot systems are huge parts of gaming history, from table top games like Dungeons and Dragons to AAA games like Destiny. Every game puts its own unique twist on the concepts pioneered by earlier games, but every game with a decent loot system shares some qualities. It’s hard to improve upon a system like Diablo’s, but game developers and designers deserve credit for exploring new ground. So next time you’re playing your favorite lootfest, ask yourself what the game is doing to make their loot system more unique and interesting.