So Penny Arcade has started a bit of a discussion around the issue of used games with their latest comic, with further discussion being found on the main page.

I’ve heard publishers take pot shots at used games before, getting worked up about how used games are killing the industry, and judging by the responses from developers, they share that sentiment, at least in part. According to a THQ exec, they feel they are being cheated by used-game sales.

I can’t understand that stance, personally.

If you’ve ever read piracy debates, one of the common arguments is that piracy isn’t worse than a library and since libraries are good, piracy is fine. This is bollocks. The difference between piracy and a library is that a library isn’t creating a new copy of a book. When they lend it out to me, you can’t have it out at the same time. Piracy violates copyright by taking a single copy of a game and turning it into many copies, all of which can be played at once, and which the developer doesn’t receive fair compensation for. A library has paid, once, for each copy of a book on their shelves. They can then lend that book out to others, the book being unavailable for further lending until returned.

The library metaphor isn’t a good one for piracy, but it is good for used games and other second-hand sales. When you sell something you own to someone else, and no longer have a copy of that thing to use, you haven’t violated copyright. A single instance of that thing hasn’t become many instances. The original producer, in this case the game developer, have received 1x payment for the 1x good that exists. This is fair.

Oh, you can argue that the bulk of worth in a game is not the media but the experience, and that once someone has played it through and sells it to someone else they have created 2 copies of that experience. But that’s the same for any second-hand sale, and in fact lending thing to friends. What is next, do developers expect a second payment if I lend a friend the latest 5 hour Call of Duty game and they finish it in an afternoon?

Tell me, developers, why do you expect many payments for what is only ever a single instance of your good, regardless of how many times it exchanges hands? Which other industry gets that? If I sold my car and Toyota pitched up and complained that I hadn’t paid them a cut of the second sale I’d laugh in their face. I see devs talking about how second hand sales are stealing food from their children, appealing to emotion, but that is a shitty tactic. What about the factory workers at car manufacturers? I’m sure it would help the workers feed their children if they received 3 payments from the cars they produce instead of 1 but that’s neither realistic nor fair. When I own the good in its entirety (having paid you fairly for it), I get to sell it and keep the money from that exchange. If the second hand car dealer then sells it for a markup, well, they paid for the good, did the work fixing it up and getting salespeople to sell it on their showroom floors, which is space they either bought or rent. What the fuck are you guys doing besides whining how it’s unfair on you that you don’t benefit from other’s property and trading skills? You want a cut of resale profits, how about you start your own second-hand dealerships, like the car manufacturers do?

I can see an argument to be made around tech support of second-hand sales, that they should perhaps have to pay for the service since it costs the developers/producers resources to maintain support centres. Personally I’d call that a bit short-sighted, if someone has bought your game second-hand and is having trouble playing it, it’s far more efficient to help them get it running and potentially create a first-hand customer for your future products (if they end up liking the title) than implementing DRM or even marketing campaigns. Someone who has phoned you for help getting a game running is already interested, offering great service could help sway them to buying your games first hand in the future.

As a last point, I want to discuss this post I saw on Penny Arcade :

“I am a gamer and a developer (art and animation side of things). Theres a lot to say here, but it really boils down to this:
What other customers expect a used product be be identical to a new product? Buying a used car comes with increased wear (and thus decreased function). Buying a used book means you are risking page damage or a broken binding. Buying anything used means that you get a cheaper price for decreased function or increased risk. It also requires a little more awareness on the part of the customer to make sure they are aware of what they are getting. In the video game case, if you know the game wont have multi-player used, you can adjust what you are willing to spend on it, the same way you might offer a few hundred dollar less for a used motorcycle due to rust.”

Ok, yes, second hand goods are generally a bit inferior because of wear and tear. If they’ve been cared for well then that might not be a big factor, but there is generally some wear, yes. BUT. This is completely different from Toyota designing a car whose wheels fall off when it is resold because they are peeved they didn’t get a cut of that resale value. That is just bald-faced greed and publishers should be scorned for it. I’d love it if some law could be passed, something about acting in bad faith or whatever, but that seems unlikely.

So yeah, in my opinion, these developers need to buck up hey. It’s not unfair, it’s not killing the industry anymore than libraries and second-hand book stores are killing the publishing industry and writers. This kind of ranting just makes you look greedy. And, if you want my advice on how to make your games less susceptable to second-hand sales, how about making games that people want to keep and play for long periods of time, instead of disposable clones they can finish in an afternoon. I’ve sold games I was done with to pawn shops, when I was young and broke, I never traded a game I cherished. Nor would I sell a treasured novel. Learn the lesson there.

Check this sucker out. Watch through to the end.

(spoilerzzz, btw)

Ok, the so way the G22 guys get the drop on you via the magic of cutscenes is annoying, but kinda par for the course. That’s not what annoys me. What annoys me is the way Sis (the ridiculous, immersion-breaking, 16 year-old teenage goth cowboy secret agent girl) and her men have the drop on you, can execute you right there, but she chooses to back off and leave until your character says “Hey, what’s going on here?”. At this point, after surrendering the advantage, she initiates a fight. Note, you have no choice at all about whether you say something at that point, it’s all just a script you’re watching, so it really just comes across as :

A) An opportunity for the game to show off the Sis character model. Note how it runs up her figure, giving the player ample opportunity to examine all the ‘cool’ details, like her cowboy belt and guns, her hoodie and scarf and piercings and goth chic hairstyle. Gotta make sure the player knows how cool the opponent is before he gets into a popamole gunfight with her.

B) Speaking of popamole, it’s fairly obvious that she walks away at first so as to give you some room to hide behind things later, for the boss fight.

It’s just stupid bullshit, poor design by a group of designers who had a vision for how they wanted the scene to play out but couldn’t fit the gameplay into it cleanly.

And of course, immediately after that gun fight I’m given the option to let the psycho bitch go or to execute her. Thanks to the amazing character development up to that point, all I want to do is shoot her, but of course this is a video game and she’s a young, pretty female. And look, she’s shown looking sad and afraid when I’ve got the drop on her, instead of angry and defiant to the last. Protip : games are generally poor at narrative so, for any character the player can choose to execute in cold blood, the ones who are evil will present their defiance and evil to the player, so you don’t have to feel guilty executing them (they deserve it), while the ones who are ‘sympathetic’ are generally the ‘good’ ones. So you just know that shooting her is the ‘evil’ option.

I let her go and sure enough, it was all just a misunderstanding, she’s really just a poor little mute girl with daddy issues. Now we’re bestest of friends.

Worst character in the game, Sis.

Anyway, the point was about how shit that cutscene was. But it’s not the only one! The meeting with Omen Deng is almost identical. He sneaks up on you, gets the drop on you, tells you he can’t have you interfering with his plans. But! But a body will be found, so instead of using the opportunity to shoot you, he locks you in an access tunnel.

And then immediately sends in two dozen secret police goons to find and execute you. Which gives you the opportunity to hide and sneak around killing them.

Once is…forgivable. Twice is just fucking ridiculous.

Speaking of that train station mission, the ending has you chasing an informant guy. You’re chasing him because, in another stroke of genius, even though I’m playing a stealth ninja, another bloody cutscene has my character shouting ‘Hey! You! Stop!’ across the train station at the informant, alerting him to my presence and triggering a running gun-fight. It’s not the only time it does that, either. In the final confrontation with Omen Deng, things were going well, the park mission was fairly well done with all the scripted parts and the allies who could join you, I quite liked it. Then, at the end, another cutscene forcing Mike to shout out “Hey! Omen Deng! I’m here for our awesome boss fight!”. And now my stealth ninja is once again in a running gun-fight.

Lesson to designers : No matter how cool you think your cutscenes are, they’re a double-edged sword. Especially in an RPG. Let me play my game with my character, not the movie you envision in your head.

A statement by some PR guy at Firaxis, shortly after letting about 20 people go :

“I can confirm that Firaxis has realigned its development resources in order to streamline its development process, reduce costs and maximize the overall performance the studio.This will result in the elimination of approximately 20 positions. These reductions will not impact Firaxis’ ability to create and deliver AAA titles, including its forthcoming Sid Meier’s Civilization V and Sid Meier’s Civilization Network for Facebook.”

It’s truly mind-boggling to see this kind of thing in action in corporate environments. When middle-management reachs a certain critical mass it begins wrapping itself in more and more layers of this bullshit doublespeak and bureaucracy. Someone will be giving you this speech and in your mind you’re thinking “Are you fucking kidding? You an I both know that the only reason I’m accepting what you’re saying is because you have power over my salary and career. Can I go back to my desk now?”

It’s incredible how rare actual leadership qualities are in people who hold positions of power. Most are….well, they’re this guy :

What terrifies me is I’ve personally heard managers use each and every one of those buzz-phrases. *shudder*

Hmmm, this kinda looks like the direction I’m going with SoW’s magic system :

Two Worlds Magic

Minus the ridiculous art direction and horrid UI, of course. But that sort of ‘mod slot’ approach to spells.

I’ll talk more about it once it is working and I can show you, for now, know that that is kinda the idea.

Urk, too long without an update, too long. Let’s get the ball rolling with a post about an idea I had this weekend.

It was inspired by this thread on ITS. A new response resurrected it from the depths and I found myself reading through it again. A really excellent thread on non-combat design for RPGs, if you haven’t read it, it’s certainly worth a read.

Some really good points were made, not only by Vince but in the responses to his posts. Vince’s argument is that RPGs are fairly 1-dimensional in their offerings on how to solve conflicts. It tends to come down to different flavors of violence. Vince argues that offering alternate paths through a game would result in a much richer experience, and I doubt anyone reading this blog disagrees.

But, as a couple of the respondents in that thread pointed out, one of the problems of non-combat gameplay is, well, the gameplay. I’ve talked about how combat is actually an advanced form of mini-game before. Though mini-games are hated in general, combat is one of the few that are done well enough to be considered a core gameplay system, probably because RPG’s started out as little more than combat simulators, that combat gameplay had to be engaging enough on its own to keep people playing.

Combat is such a success as a mini-game because it offers a few things which most mini-games crucially lack.

1. Depth. By making the combat system complex enough and varied enough, you ensure the player spends the entire game learning to master it. Most mini-games that people complain about are too simple, the player masters any challenge they present in a fraction of the time it takes to complete the game itself. Once there is no ‘play’ left in the mini-game, it becomes a chore.

2. Interconnection with the other gameplay systems. Combat has many inputs and outputs into the other gameplay mechanics. Quests and dialogue often lead to or trigger combat, the loot system is deeply tied to it, character leveling is tied to it. There are feedback loops, choosing different skills and item loadouts will affect your performance which in turn affects how quickly you can level up and feeds back into determining what skills and items you get. Combat is deeply tied to the ‘resource management’ that is at the heart of many RPGs, resources in the form of skill points, money and loot. A satisfying RPG will allow you to regularly make choices about how you build up your character, offering options for you to weigh up in seeking to build a strong character and to beat the game’s challenges.

So, returning to non-combat gameplay. The problem with all non-combat gameplay that I’ve seen so far, with the exception of stealth, is lack of depth. There just aren’t enough moving parts to these systems. You pick a lock, you hack a computer, you persuade your way past a guard…it tends to fairly binary. You have the skill, you get the job done, maybe with a small reflex/pattern matching interlude. Don’t have the skill, sorry, you’re locked out. Imagine a combat engine with the same lack of depth, it would be deeply unsatisfying. Roll the dice, check vs skill, determine outcome. Meh. Not much of a game.

Combat uses skill checks too, certainly, but the possibility space of actions and opponent configurations in combat keeps things interesting. You pass or fail individual skill checks, but the overall success of your combat encounter is based on the net output of a range of skill checks and decisions made throughout that combat. (Hopefully, if the combat system is decent)

It’s the decision part that I highlighted that is the crux. Making interesting decisions is at the heart of gameplay, and this is where non-combat gameplay (again, with the exception of stealth) tends to fall down. If you choose the Speech Guy or the Hacker/Lockpicker, you have made one decision, which skills you want to invest in, what your character focus is. After that point, few if any decisions are made. You come to a computer, you pit your hacking skill against it, the dice roll is made and you either access the computer or don’t. There isn’t really a decision in that process. When you chose the Hacker archetype, you chose to try to hack computers. It isn’t a new ‘decision point’ every time you hack a computer unless there is another factor involved. Likewise, putting another point into a skill you’ve already chosen to focus on isn’t a real decision either. Choosing perks that support that skill as in Fallout, or Feats in Dungeon’s and Dragons, those are decisions. Deciding to put another point into hacking when your entire character concept is ‘I’m a hacker’ isn’t a real decision.

Whereas combat is filled with interesting decisions thanks to the resource management you need to do. What, you don’t think combat is about resource management, except maybe for making sure you have a stock of potions? Nonsense.

Time is a resource in combat. Each action you choose to make is a decision to not take any of the other actions you could have. ( Interesting that the Latin origin of the word ‘decision’ is ‘decisio’, meaning ‘A cutting off’ ). Nowehere is this more clearly demonstrated than in a turn-based system.

Equipment is a resource, and not just potions. You have limited slots on your character for armour, weapons, magical items. To choose to equip Sword A is to choose NOT to equip all the other weapons in your inventory. And items should have many properties to balance, attack speed, weight, range. Choosing an equipment loadout is all about making decisions, and a good RPG combat system will force you to think about your equipment loadout vs specific enemies, instead of simply picking the type with the highest modifiers. Money also plays a factor, unless the game is a Monty-haul setup (which most RPGs are, sadly), you will be forced to think about where to spend your gold, too.

Your stats and skills are resources. Mana/stamina is obvious, but all the skill points you invest in are decisions you make, choices about how you want to approach challenges. Hopefully, if the character system is good, you aren’t simply pumping points into a single combat skill, you are choosing from a palette of options which shape your combat strategy. Good systems should allow players to work out interesting skill synergies aka ‘builds’.

All of these resources offer players a rich fabric for decision making. Again, let’s return to non-combat skills. You encounter a guard and there is a persuasion option. You have a high persuasion skill, or you don’t. You could argue that this is simple to fix, that you simply extend the dialogue to a number of skill checks. But there is still no actual decision to be made there, all you’ve done is increase the opportunity to fail at Persuasion by forcing the player to meet 5 requirements instead of 1. Even if you make it a bit ‘fuzzy’, by saying that the player needs to only pass 3/5 checks to succeed, it’s still not very good gameplay. You aren’t making much in the way of resource management decisions.

I’ve not covered the breadth of possible ways to make dialogue more interesting, but I think I’ve illustrated the problem that I’m focusing on here. The lack of decision making. Choosing to try use the Persuade skill when you’ve built a social character isn’t really making a new choice. If there were 3 Persuade options, each leading to potentially different outcomes, then it would be. That is the case with combat, there are many paths leading to your goal (kill dudes) and the player makes choices on how to get there. But, when your goal is to get through a door, putting up a skill check which is a no-brainer for characters with that skill and out of the question for everyone who doesn’t, there is no choice there at all.

So, what to do? Well, I’m sure you see where I’m going here. The problem is lack of resource management…so introduce a resource. Some games have something like this for their mini-games, EMP grenades for Alpha Protocol, for example. But I’m thinking specifically of social interaction now.

What I was thinking was…what about a ‘Favour’ resource? What if the player can accumulate that Favour resource with certain NPCs and Factions? Favour that can be earned and spent on certain actions/for certain bonuses.

Let me give an example. Say you have ‘Sten’, Captain of the City Watch. You have 0 favour with him. You do a quest that helps out the City, and because he is grateful, you gain 10 points of favour with him. Later, you have another quest to do with the Mayor of the city and you know Sten has information that could help you, but he would consider it unethical to share that with you. The option comes up to try persuade him to give you the information…but it comes with a Favour cost. 5 points. You can persuade him, but you’re using up some of the good will he feels toward you for past actions. This means you have to think about whether you choose that option, it isn’t simply that you automatically click on any speech options available to you.

Later, you hear about a gala ball which you want to get into, but the City Watch is guarding it and you don’t have an invite. You can go to Sten and try to persuade him to get you into the ball. But now there is two options. As a minor favour, he can get one of his trusted sergeants to turn a blind eye and let you in, but the other guards won’t know about you and that only gets you through the gate, once inside you’ll have to avoid the other guards. This costs 5 favour. Or, he can get you in disguised as one of the guards. He’ll give you the guard gear and arrange for your name to be on lists. But this could get him in trouble if anyone finds out, so it costs 10 favour.

If you called in the favour before, you won’t have enough left for the more expensive option. However, there is a way for you to gain enough favour with Sten to go for option 2, even if you’ve spent some of your favour. He wants you to infiltrate some street gangs for him…

You see how it goes. Different characters/factions have this measure of ‘good will’ that you’ve earned with them, which can be spent for various things, to get you through checks, help with missions, acquire special items, etc. A few more examples :

Say you commit a crime. Persuade Sten the Watch Captain that it was all a mistake, call in some of the Favour he owes you so he can pull some strings to get you a sympathetic judge.

You need gear for a job. You approach your faction leader and tell him about problem, because you’re a trusted lieutenant he directs you to go to the faction vaults and pick yourself up a few things. You go to the store and you can ‘buy’ items from the faction vault, except each item costs you Favour instead of gold. In SoW merchants generally won’t sell special or magical items, however your Faction might have some in their vault.

It’s a bit like the dossiers you can buy in Alpha Protocol. I liked that idea, even if I felt they could have done more with it. And, of course, you could tie stats into this. Persuasion could decrease the Favour cost of persuasion options, meaning that Speech characters could lean more heavily on their allies. And Charismatic characters could receive bonuses to the Favour rewards they earn.

There are some problems with this idea, though.

For one, how do you communicate the fact that these options are open to the player? It’s fine in the example of the Watch Captain, above, because the NPC involved in the quest is the one you have favour with. But I’ve been thinking further. Imagine you are part of a Faction, and you receive a quest to deal with some bandits/assassinate a guy. Now, you could do it yourself. But maybe you prefer not to get your hands dirty. Wouldn’t it be great if you could go to your faction leader, tell them you have this ‘little problem’, and get the Guild to send over a few of their best bruisers/assassins to take care of it for you? The idea excites me, but I don’t want players running back to their Faction NPC every time they get a quest to see if it has opened up an option to spend Favour to solve it. It’s something I’m mulling over. AP solved it by having the extra options you could buy come from your black email market connections, which you can access between missions. Something convenient like that would be good.

Secondly, difficulty of implementing this. In some cases, it’s simply extra dialogue. But even that starts to scale up heavily. And would it annoy people, if I did something like the above in one quest, give them the option to send assassins after a dude, but I didn’t give the option in another, similar quest? Should I reduce scope to ensure it is universally an option, or do I limit it to a percentage of quest content?

Thirdly, it requires keeping the plot focused on a core cast of characters and factions, instead of a larger cast. Alpha Protocol did this, for a similar reason. If Favour is something you need to earn and choose when and on what to spend it on, the NPC or Faction you build favour with needs to be present in a large enough chunk of the game content to make that decision interesting. If you build favour with an NPC who you only interact with for a short period, it won’t work. Look at the Captain of the Watch example, you need enough ‘hooks’ involving him to make gathering Favour with him interesting and to offer difficult choices on when and where to spend it. It’s simpler with Factions, luckily, because they’re more widespread. And SoW is already focused on those factions. But it will still take some effort. I figure most hubs would need to have the majority of their plotline built around 2-4 core characters as well as factions. Which isn’t a terrible thing, for the sake of character development. But it could cause exponential growth of dialogue trees, eek.

And finally, hoarding could be an issue. Look at potions in RPGs. Lots of people never use them because they are worried they will need them later. What if people hoard Favour because they are afraid they will need it later?

Well, that’s the idea I’ve been thinking about. Does it idea solve the problems I mentioned above, about non-combat gameplay? No, not really. But I think it might make it at least somewhat more interesting.

Anyway, feel free to discuss or make suggestions. I’m still thinking about this one.

Yeah, I know I’ve been lax with blog updates, both SoW related and otherwise. I’ll get back on that, shortly. But first, a brief interlude. I received sad news this morning. My grandmother passed away in the night.

It’d been expected for a while, she was rather frail and in and out of hospital. Still a bit of a shock when it happens, we celebrated her 90th birthday just last week. Perhaps a bit of a relief though, for her; old age is a cruel thing, she’d gotten past the point of being able to do much more for herself than sit around, waiting and remembering brighter days. A sad thing, to look at a loved one and think that death would be a mercy.

Rest in peace, Gran. We’ll all miss you.

Right-O. Let’s talk Alpha Protocol.

You may have noticed that this was high on my ‘Most Anticipated List’. And I was rather angsty about how delayed the release date was in SA. Well, I’ve finally got my mitts on a copy. I’ve only just started, but I thought I’d post my initial impressions.

I really, really want to like this game. Fairly unusual setting (for a CRPG), unique spy-themed mechanics, promises of plenty of ‘Choice & Consequence’, writing by Chris Avellone. Hard not to feel hyped.

Which is why I am sad to have to savage it. Seriously, what the fuck Obsidian? What. The. Fuck?

You’ve all probably played the game by now, so I’m not going to bother talking about the premise much. You’re a spy dude who signs up with a secret covert outfit called Alpha Protocol, missiles have been stolen, shady corporations are selling to both sides of the conflict. At first blush, this sounds much better than the standard ‘save the world/universe from marauding orcs/aliens/robots’ RPG plotline, even if it is fairly pedestrian by spy-genre standards.

The problem is that, as shocking as it is to say for an Avellone title, the delivery of that initial premise is bad. The introduction to the plot is just a fuck-up.

It’s a simple principle. You start with a story hook. Something that draws the player in, gives them a ‘Why’. Why pursue the plot, why care about the characters, why is everything happening the way it’s happening. A good plot hook will kick your game off with a bang, draw them into the mindset and context of the game and give them good reason to chase your primary goal. It’ll give them a reason to grind rats in their underpants.

BG2 starts with you being abducted and tortured by Jon Irenicus, a man seeking to draw out your divine essence, until an attack by unknown forces on his compound gives you an opportunity to escape. ME2 has you being sucked into space and dying as your ship is ravaged by unknown aliens. Planescape starts with you waking up in the mortuary, looking like a corpse, a message to yourself from yourself tattooed into your back and a floating skull with an accent chatting you up. Fallout sees you kicked out of your home vault in search of a desperately needed water chip, the door and security locking behind you, an unfamiliar world ahead. Bloodlines sees you transformed into a vampire after a night of sex and drugs, waking up only to be taken prisoner by the court of vampires you never knew existed, your sire slain in front of you and you yourself narrowly avoiding this fate.

All of these are RPGs that have done that initial plot hook really well (I’m sure there are plenty more that have too). Alpha Protocol…doesn’t do it well.

Maybe it’s just me. But I just didn’t find a reason to care, the ‘hook’ failed to sink into my skin. Sure, they try. You’re presented with a situation from the end of the game, the protagonist confronting some smug executive of the company who is selling weapons to terrorists, a dude clearly setup to be the antagonist (but I’m sure there will be some twist there later). It then flashes you back to the beginning, when you joined Alpha Protocol. Except you don’t realize you’re playing your initiation mission, you wake up on a table and have to ‘escape’ what seems like an enemy facility, which it turns out is just a setup by your superiors to evaluate your skill. Once you get out of that you’re introduced to your jovial spy-boss, who then sends you to do some basic spy proficiency training. Once you’re finished that, you again get interviewed by your boss who sends you off on a mission to Saudi Arabia, but not before that it flashes forward to the scene with you and the evil executive dude….

If it sounds a bit muddled, it is. I know what it’s trying to do, the old ‘tell the story through flashbacks during a conversation so as to intrigue’ thing, but it bounces you around too much. You’re in the future, then you’re in the past escaping an enemy facility, but it turns out you’re not escaping, it’s just training! But ok, now you’re really training, ho ho, except before you can settle down in your HQ and get to know the place/characters you’re shipped off to the desert (after a quick trip back to the future), to a safehouse with a TV, a computer to read your email and no real people to interact with at all.

The way it bounces you about, added to the way you don’t really have much time to get the feel for the Alpha Protocol HQ, resulted in me feeling rather bemused and disconnected from it all. Didn’t really care about the organisation I was a part of, nor did I have much of a connection to my own character. Had a bit of a sense of the other agents but didn’t spend enough time with them before being shipped off to my empty safehouse to establish any real interest in who they are, as people.

Except for this bit where my character says ‘I hope to never see this interrogation room again’ and the boss-man says ‘If I had my way Mike, you never would’ in a way that made me go ‘dun-dun-DUN’ in my head. Hopefully it won’t amount to anything. ‘Cause I swear, if that was a ‘subtle’ hint that the bossman is the real antagonist I’m going to mail Avellone an angry letter.

So yes, the story doesn’t work for me at all, not in the sense of it being incoherent, in the sense that I just don’t care, it’s failed to hook me. Ok, I’ll go shoot terrorists in the desert, whatever. This is a problem, because the story and interactions are desperately needed to hold this game together. Because fuck me sideways, but the actual gameplay is shody.

It’s not the whole ‘It looks like an RPG but plays like a shooter’ thing that bothers me. I’ve enjoyed a number of other titles like that. It’s a range of poor design choices and technical issues that drag the experience down. It just doesn’t feel competent, not at all.

In fairness, this isn’t Obsidian’s usual type of game. So it’s understandable that they don’t have a great grasp of the mechanics. But it isn’t really that hard to look to the other games they are obviously drawing inspiration from and analyze what works and what doesn’t. They seem to have failed to nail the core gameplay. I sometimes get hints that it is almost there…and then something fucks up and I lose that feeling.

Let’s start with the design decisions. Probably the poorest is how they’ve done the stealth system. I was completely flabbergasted to discover that you have no UI indication whatsoever of how well you’re hidden and how much sound you’re making. I know it is based on finding cover instead of hiding in shadows, but still. Am I more exposed behind this potplant than behind this column? How much noise am I making with this equipment load-out? What about when I shoot this pistol? I can’t think of a stealth game which didn’t feature at least some feedback for the player. But AP shows nothing. Am I doing well at stealth? The only way of knowing is when the guards ring an alarm.

Speaking of which, cardinal sin number 2 : Gradually increasing levels of awareness, and the lack there-of. This is key to a stealth game, it allows the player to experiment and make small mistakes without completely blowing things. AP has an incredibly tiny margin here when you’re starting out, even though I took a stealth character. If you don’t hide well enough the guards go hostile, alarms blare and everyone starts shooting. As you get access to skills like evasion it becomes a little better, you can make a slight slip and quickly duck away, but the margin is still really tight in comparison to other games. Combined with lack of UI feedback it results in a seriously poor stealth experience.

And then there are the magic powers. I’m not talking about Shadow Operative, which I haven’t got yet. I’m talking about Awareness. Thorton must be part bat, because I just activate Awareness and now all the guards show up on my sonar. You’d think it would be a great help with all the insta-spotting nastiness but it actually further ruins the stealth gameplay if you don’t have to even check around walls to see that the only hostiles nearby are in front of you, or in that room. So it’s a choice between very little margin of error when you stumble, or complete awareness of every NPC in front of you when you activate the power.

So the basic stealth mechanics are shit. But it’s compounded by fucking terrible level design. I’ve played three missions in Saudi Arabia, bear in mind, and people say it gets better later. Fuck, I hope so.

You’ve already got very little visual feedback about stealth and guards who are alerted to you the minute they see you. Now, add levels where simply turning a corner will put you in view of a guard tower across the compound that you didn’t see and where the guard will instantly spot you and start firing. I thought I was being clever climbing up onto a roof to get the lay of the land, sneaky like, but I was being shot at before I got up over the top of the ladder, by dudes I couldn’t yet see, who had become instantly alert across the courtyard. It was awesome, like a birthday party, but with bullets instead of cake. So far, I’m 0 for 3 in my attempts to stealth through the missions with a stealthy character. I was good at Thief, btw, so it’s not just incompetence.

Luckily (or unluckily), on Normal difficulty the game is a cakewalk so far. Guards manning the towers or machine gun emplacements struggle to hit the broadside of a barn. Which is great, because it allows you to actually use another poorly designed system : The gun focus shot.

AP has this idea of each gun type having a specific type of gameplay, and most having a special focus shot to support that type of gameplay. Which is cool enough. But each focus shot takes a few seconds of aiming in stillness to ready. For example, the pistol lines up critical shots if you focus on guys for a moment, the shotgun does a knockdown attack, etc.

It sounds cool, until you use it. Aiming from stealth, it makes sense. You get a bead on a dude’s head and take him down. But once you’re actually in a medium range firefight, standing still waiting for the special shot to charge feels particularly awkward. Especially given the cover-based shooter concept. This is a fairly common scenerio : After triggering a machine-gun manning soldier’s alertness, I pop up out of cover, ignoring the hail of bullets that are raining around me ineffectually, and carefully line up a shot on the guy’s head, taking him out. It feels fucking ridiculous. And that’s from cover. I can’t even imagine how dumb it would be bursting into a room with the shotgun and standing there waiting for your knockdown shot to charge up.

The guns feel feeble without those focus shots, even from 10 feet away. It is almost always more effective for me to just run up to a guy and karate-chop him, even if he is armed and firing at me, than to take the time to shoot him normally. Unless the dumb AI gets stuck, in which case I sit there waiting to focus my shot. This happens all the time, an AI will get confused by me being up on a ledge and stand there, waiting, or hover indecisively on stairways.

Now, I know the low gun damage is probably because my skills are low. But there is a sweet spot for balancing this kinda thing. Opening up with my guns from 5-10 feet away should be more powerful than low level melee, even if I’m not skilled with those weapons. Instead my choice is ‘exchange ineffectual pellets’ or ‘hold still while being shot at to build up a critical shot’ or ‘stunlock the fool into oblivion’. I tend to simply charge around melee’ing everyone. I’ll charge a dude and beat him while his friend is firing at me with a shotgun, then beat his friend. And now that I have Rage it’s just joke.

Grenades are cool though. Well, mine are. On normal difficulty I’ve ignored the ‘grenade nearby!’ indicator and kept firing a few times. They don’t sting that much, unless it’s a serious firefight. It’s often fine to just let your endurance soak it.

The level design is poor in other ways. Stealth games generally feature guard patrol routes, half the fun is figuring them out via observing NPCs from cover and then sneaking your way through/knocking them out. But a number of times the patrol routes are so obviously designed just to give you a stealth take-down opportunity that it screams artificialness. Guards who are patrolling in nearly empty rooms, moving from staring out a doorway to tapping on a keyboard and back again, endlessly. And muttering ‘interesting!’ each time they do. It just isn’t laid out well (or open enough) enough to give the sense of a restless human being, it is all too robotic, too obviously a script just to get them to turn away from the doorway you’re hiding in. And the alternate ways are all clearly marked out for you by the special animation markers, killing any sense of ‘figuring it out yourself’.

I could probably harp on some more, but let’s move on to technical issues. Can anyone say ‘rubbish console port’?

The UI is shit. Why do I close menus by right clicking? Why doesn’t ‘escape’ always work to close a menu? Why do I open/close my PDA with tab, but once I’m inside a sub-menu I have to right click to go back from that sub-menu before I can close my PDA with tab again? This is clearly not a PC design.

And then there is the way the inventory screen sometimes goes wonky. I’ll click on ‘Armor Mod slot 2′ to open it, and it will open the base armor tab. So I go back and try again, it does the same thing. So I open slot 3, then go back and open slot 2, now it works.

And what about the awesome mouse? If I spin my camera there is often a ‘jerk’, where suddenly it will glitch and then be in a slightly disconcerting position. If I ever felt truly threatened by the combat that would be annoying.

And some idiot thought it would be great to have a motion blur effect when you spin your camera around your own avatar. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off until my friend pointed out that I was stupidly going to the ‘Advanced Options’ tab in the video settings, not noticing that it was actually under the Simple options. Silly me, motion blur is a Simple option while distortion effects are Advanced! It all makes sense now!

Speaking of shader effects, what about the cool Depth of Field effect which sometimes doesn’t shift focal depth when I’m using a scope on my assualt rifle, resulting in me zooming in on a big blur. It’s a hard life, I tell you, being a visually impaired super-spy.

The basic animations in the game aren’t amazing, but I’d be fine with them…if it weren’t for the glaringly noticeable problems with path following. Basically, every time an NPC hits a path node and changes direction, they simply jerk to be pointing in that direction. No kind of turning, just yank and they’re off that way. To make it worse, there was an animation glitch in the NPC soldiers in the training levels. Every time they’d turn, for a fraction of a second they’d try to go to some other animation before resuming the walk, resulting in it looking like they were trying to do a jumping jack for a split-second every time they turned.

Fuck it, I’m tired. There may have been more bugs, I can’t remember now. I think that about does it…

…wait! How could I have forgotten the mini-games?!?! Oh my word. That hacking mini-game is, without a doubt, the single worst mini-game I’ve ever played. And I’m vaguely sympathetic to the urge to experiment with mini-games. But squinting at a grid of shifting numbers for the ones that aren’t moving is just painfully shit. The circuit by-pass game is fine, as is the lock-picking…well, the lock picking game would be fine if it didn’t feature a nonsensical timer. Computer circuits, I can get the timers there, it’s all cyber-nonsensey. But picking a lock? The time pressure should come from patrolling guards, not an inherent property of the lock itself! I suppose all the cool mini-games had a timer so lockpicking would have felt lonely without one too.

(Speaking of nonsensical, why does an elite pistol cost me $112K? Is it made of Unobtanium?)

A reboot of the Mortal Kombat movie, with a darker, more realistic tone?

Details are sketchy at the moment, but this viral clip has been circulating the net. Personally, I think it looks kinda sweet. Here’s hoping it’s a teaser for a real movie.

And man, this one is good shit.

I have no idea if the game will be any good, but the trailer is certainly promising. The part with the dude who’s jacked in being forced to shoot himself was especially nice.

If you want to see the actual game, Oscar posted up some screens here : LINK. The first few are action-y but the others show some interesting locations, I’m digging the art style. Also, looks like it’s going to be the 3rd person camera that’s all the rage these days. Ah well, I like that viewpoint well enough, and it looks like martial arts might play a bigger role, judging from the trailer.

Overall, I’m quite excited, though the memory of DX 2 reigns that in a bit. Please, oh please, don’t let me down again developers.

Hell, if both DX 3 and Thief 4 turn out to be good, well, I may have to hang up my cynical asshole coat.