I promised to blog more during my vacation, didn’t I? Seems I’m a filthy liar. Ah well.

I spent the first half of my holiday just completely lazing around, like a lizard in a cave. The second half I started to get back into things, slowly, but I didn’t really feel much like writing interesting blog updates. Especially since the thing I was doing, coding, didn’t really lend itself to being interesting.

But I did make a design change which might interest readers. I’ve decided to do 2 things :

1) Drop Charisma as a stat.
2) Depreciate the Social path.

I’ll explain what point 2 means, exactly, in a moment. For point 1, dropping Charisma, the reason is simple. It’s too much of a dump stat.

If you’re a veteran RPG’er, you have probably experienced the dump stat phenomenon. For any particular archetype, certain stats end up being dump stats, ie it is safe to ‘dump’ them.

I’ve tried to avoid this in SoW by making every stat at least partially useful to every character. But there is a trick here. If all stats are fairly vital you can’t easily specialize your character. But, on the other extreme, if you do what DnD does and make certain archetypes have little or no use for a stat then you create a situation where characters tend to be exceptionally good in half their stats (the ones which affect them) and exceptionally crap in the other half.

The functionally-retarded fighter, the mage who cannot lift more than two books at a time, these are both common archetypes in RPGs, far more so than the more balanced characters. Simply because the benefit from maximizing strength, endurance and agility vastly outweighs the penalties from minimizing intelligence, charisma and wisdom for a fighter type, and vice versa for the mage.

The only game I’ve seen which did this well was Fallout. To build a character who was exceptional in some area required taking on a real, meaningful penalty elsewhere. It made you really agonise over where to put those points instead of just defaulting to maximising the obvious optimal stats for your archetype and dropping everything else. You weren’t [18 18 18 6 6 3 ]

I think I’ve managed, for the most part, to do something similar with SoW. Except for one stat, Charisma. It’s not that hard to design the other stats so that they are all at least somewhat meaningful for the Warrior/Rogue/Mage archetypes. Charisma, not so much.

Also, I don’t want one archetype, the Speech Guy, to have 1 stat which is overwhelmingly the most meaningful, as it is boring if all you do is maximize Charisma, there is no interesting choice there, no variety.

So I decided to dump the dump stat and move Charisma’s responsibilities to other stats.

There are 4 main ‘social’ skills at this point (further adjustments were made to the skill system, I’ll update that in another post, but for now know that Bluff was folded into Persuasion and Sense Motive was folded into Detection ( the renamed Investigation skill ) ). These 4 social skills are Persuasion, Intimidation, Bartering and Seduction. Let me discuss which stats affect them now, and why :

Persuasion. The art of getting people to see things your way or believe that what you say is the truth. Affected by Intellect and Perception. Intellect to come up with cunning arguments and Perception to ‘read’ your target, to see how they react to your words and adjust accordingly. If you think about it for a moment, the traditional DnD model, why does a persuasive person have to have Charisma, aka personal magnetism?

It’s easy to imagine a greasy, fat, little merchant who just happens to have a silver tongue. I don’t know if I’d describe such a person as ‘charismatic’, I probably wouldn’t want to socialize with them, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be persuasive. That type of character’s persuasive abilities come from cunning more than ‘presence’. So I think Intellect + Perception is a good combo there.

Intimidation. Your ability to cow others, to stare them down. The art of projecting an aura of dominance and confidence. Affected by Strength and Willpower. Strength because an obvious display of physical power tends to be intimidating and Willpower to represent that “they locked gazes and his opponent was the first to look away” type of intimidation. Willpower represents mental strength so I think it fits there.

Bartering. The art of the deal. This is actually fairly similar to persuasion, if you think about it. And it’s affected by the same things, Intellect and Perception. For the same reasons.

Seduction. Seduction is a special case skill. It provides a bonus to Persuasion and Barter skills when used against members of the opposite sex and unlocks special seduction speech options in dialogue. This isn’t really intended to be a main skill (seduction is a support skill), but it is supposed to provide an interesting alternative path through certain scenarios.

Seduction, as a skill, provides less of a direct boost to your ability to seduce others than the Persuasion skill affects your ability to persuade (Don’t worry, it is also cheaper). This is because much of a character’s seduction ability comes from certain background traits you can pick at character creation only : ‘Beautiful/Ugly‘. Basically, if you want to play the Temptress/Casanova path, you’d pick the ‘Beautiful‘ background trait and maximise Seduction. If you don’t, your character is kinda average, even if you maximise Seduction you’ll never unlock the highest rank of seduction options. Pick ‘Ugly‘ and…well, people are superficial, good luck with that.

Anyway, the Seduction skill is affected by Strength and Agility (by less than the other skills are affected by their respective stats), representing that people who are fit and graceful tend to be more attractive.

But, as I said, even if you maximise this skill and your strength/agility you still won’t match a character who takes the ‘Beautiful’ background trait. Simply put, good genes trump everything.

Right, so let’s talk point 2 : Depreciating the Social Path. What does that mean?

Originally, my intention was for the game to support 4 main gameplay types : Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Diplomat. By support I mean that I wanted the design to allow those to be 4 distinct paths through the game, that a player could specialise as a thief and be able to avoid combat by taking the thief path, etc. This doesn’t mean that hybrids aren’t supported, SoW is a classless, skill-based system after all. But the intention is that if you focus on one path you can get through without being stuck because you don’t have the others. A character who is a thief should never have a scripted event force them into a room where there is no place to hide and they have to fight a powerful warrior. No changing the playing field like what happened in VtM:B.

The diplomat path is, however, problematic. Let me explain some of the issues :

1) The binary nature of Speech checks. The problem with speech checks is you generally either succeed or fail. So, what happens if you fail? You’re boned.

With combat or stealth it isn’t like this. The mechanics generate a range of successes and failures per action which, over time, result in overall success of failure. Think about combat. You hit, you miss, generally the battle isn’t decided by whether you fail a single roll unless you’re taking on an exceptionally deadly opponent. Likewise for stealth, NPCs have varying levels of alertness, you can run away or take actions to distract if guards are alerted, etc.

But lets say the design allows a diplomatic character to talk his way out of a combat encounter, lets say a bandit ambush. Fail a roll and what happens? The bandits attack and you die?

So, I hear you saying, add more checks! Well, there is a problem here. A particular dialogue scenario isn’t the output of underlying mechanics interacting, like stealth and combat are. Each line is written by me. So lets say you fail a check. Now I have to add a branch to give you a second/alternative chance. But two missteps is still an incredibly tight margin. It will also get silly, with me writing tense, dangerous dialogue situations where the NPC keeps giving you another chance to convince them after you fail any particular skill check. Not to mention more complicated.

Short of making the dialogue loop and giving the player the option to come back and run through the exact same dialogue they just failed when they have increased their skills (ugh), it’s a thorny problem. In real life, dialogue is dynamic and generated on the fly. But because computer dialogue is limited by how much writing I can do it suffers from this particular issue.

2) Gameplay length. Let’s say I create a cool mansion zone where you have to get into the inner sanctum and acquire some item. I carefully setup the zone and provide different paths for different characters. Rogues stealth around, avoiding patrols, finding sneaky ways in. Warriors may simply attempt to force their way through. And mages use magic tricks to do the same thing. Overall, lets say the level takes 2 hours to play.

Now let’s imagine the diplomatic path. Do you think it would be 2 hours? In all likelihood it will be a couple of dialogues with a couple of checks here and there. Even if I send you around to different NPCs for chats, the length of time probably comes from travelling to and fro more than the reading of dialogue.

Now imagine the entire game like that. The diplomatic path would be a fraction of the game length of any other path.

3) Talents. In addition to skills that players can increase, characters in SoW get Talent points to spend at each level on customising their character (note, you don’t get any other benefit from leveling up and your level is simply based on how many skill points you’ve acquired, once you pass a certain threshold you’re considered ‘level 2′ and get a Talent point or three to spend.)

Let me give you some examples of Talents :

Hungry For the Kill
Ranks : 1-3
Every time you score a critical hit, you are restored 10/20/30% of your maximum Stamina.

———-

Desperate Offence
Ranks : 1-3
When your hit points drop to below 20%, your Attack Rating, Attack Speed and Damage are increased by 20/40/60%.

———-

Sniper
Ranks : 1-3
Increases chance of critical hit when using a Focused Shot by 10/20/30%.

———-

Time to Scarper
Ranks : 1-2
When hit critically, you gain +15/30% Dodge Rating and Movement Speed for 10 seconds.

———-

Metamagic Mastery
Ranks :1-5
Each level of this skill decreases the cost of using metamagic techniques by 5% while increasing the benefit by 5%.

———-

Ok, so it isn’t hard to come up with a range of interesting Talents for combat, stealth and magic. But not so much with Social skills. The problem is thinking of Talents that grant new functionality or modify existing functionality instead of just making you better at the same things the social skills do. I do have a few talents, but fewer than for combat, stealth and magic. The mechanics behind dialogue checks are simply less complex than the other realms so they have less place for interesting quirks, mechanically.

Some examples :

Poker Face
Ranks : 1
Gain +2 to Persuasion checks when lying or hiding the truth.

———-

Intimidating Presence
Ranks : 1-3
Increases Dodge Rating by 100/200/300% of your Intimidate Skill level.

———-

Antiques Dealer
Ranks : 1-3
When selling Rare, Exotic or Antique items, you get a 20/40/60% boost to the base value of the object for purposes of sales checks, as you convince your target that the item is worth more than it is.

———-

4) Equipment. Let’s face it : acquiring new gear is fun. Like talents, there are a vast array of cool items you can design to support warriors, rogues and mages. Social types? Um, costumes, maybe? Fashionable gear? Which doesn’t do much more than give you a boost to your social skills, resulting in a less-than-fun game of ‘change outfit before every dialogue to match the social group’.

Perhaps I lack imagination but I just think that social equipment is hard to make interesting without a lot more context and mechanical subtlety than is standard in RPG social interactions. I never claimed SoW would revolutionise dialogue. It’s got traditional dialogue trees and checks, that’s it.

Ok, so those are the issues. So what do I mean, “depreciating the social path”? I mean it is no longer a stand-alone game path. Instead, I’ve folded the Rogue and Social skills into one group called ‘Agent’ skills. ‘Agent’ because it is more of a neutral term than ‘Rogue’.

The way I figure it, while Warrior archetypes tend to confront challenges head on, to match raw strength against raw strength, Agents are characters who use their skills to circumvent problems or find ways to give themselves an advantage. They sneak around guards, they pick the lock on the back door, they lure foes into traps, they use their quick tongues to get themselves out of problems or to circumvent the ‘human barriers’ of others. They exploit the loopholes in the system, find the weak points. Agents are spies, assassins, scouts, thieves and diplomats.

I’m not getting rid of speech options, far from it. I’m simply saying that speech options are one of the tools of the Agent’s trade, not a completely independent path through SoW. If you fail a Persuasion skill check, your fallback may be needing to sneak in, or picking a lock, not necessarily another dialogue. Or, should you be a hybrid character, thwacking things with a sword.

Right, I’m less busy now so let’s finish the ME2 discussion before it’s all old news. Well, older news.

As you could probably tell from the previous part of this article, I really liked ME2. I also made the following statement :

There has also been some discussion on whether ME2 is an RPG, whether it is the future of the entire RPG genre, whether is is a completely new genre, etc etc. As is the standard for internet debate, such discussions have been polite, respectful conversations between gentlemen and ladies of the highest intellectual caliber.

Luckily, I am here to offer you a viewpoint so insightful that it should resolve such issues once and for all, allowing us to move forward in the spirit of enlightenment and intellectual harmony.

So time to put my money where my mouth is and resolve this question once and for all. Stick around though, for an encore I shall cure world hunger and solve 3rd world debt.

Jokes and hyperbole aside, let me offer you my opinion on this issue, which you are free to discard once you’ve finished reading this post. There is a lot of argument around these points, mainly due to a lack of consensus as to what an RPG is, exactly. To be clear, by RPG I actually mean C(omputer)RPG, to clarify that we’re not talking about pen and paper games. So let’s start there with that most fundamental question :

What is an RPG?

(Are you ready for it?)

Answer : ‘RPG’ is a communication shorthand term for a game which shares common features with the other games classified as ‘RPGs’.

At this point you’re probably thinking “Well, no shit Gareth, we understand what a game genre is, don’t be a smart arse”.

Except I think that this is one of those things which is so obvious, so familiar, that people don’t really think about what that means and the implications of it. Lets take a step back, to the beginning of gaming.

In the beginning there were no game genres. Game developers just had some neat idea and tried to implement their concept given the technical constraints of the time. It wasn’t a ‘platformer’, it was a game about a dude jumping over pits and avoiding alligators. And this other game was about a guy going and beating up goblins in a cave with his sword.

While there were only a small number of games it was ok to describe each game individually :

“It’s called HackALot, right. You’re this fantasy knight, ok, and you wander down the levels of this dungeon and you can pick up stuff and equip it and as you fight monsters you gain experience which you can use to level up your character and…”

But as more and more games are developed, people naturally begin grouping them based around shared characteristics. Terms emerge which people can use to quickly convey information about the features of the game without actually spending the time describing those features. It’s a platformer. It’s an FPS. It’s an RTS.

“It’s an RPG.”

All good so far. But now we start to run into the problem. Because we’ve organised games into these genres, people think the categories we’ve created are distinct from each other, that there are nice clean separations between the genres, lines where you can clearly say ‘This genre ends here, and there the next one begins’. Like these terms were arrived at due to an intelligent design instead of simple evolution of the language of gaming. And, like biological evolution, sometimes things don’t fit comfortably and neatly.

People want to think that the Gods of Gaming stood up at the beginning and declared ‘And Lo Shall There Be Game Genres! And They Shall be Sixfold, and They Shall Be Known Thusly : Thee FPS, Thee RTS, Thee RPG…”

But that isn’t what happened. There were never any natural, clear lines. There were just all these games, and people started to group them together based on similarities.

Ok, I’m sure you’re with me so far, this isn’t particularly profound. But here we get to the real heart of the problem, why people can’t agree. It is this line :

“and people started to group them together based on similarities.”

There is nothing in that sentence that says anything about a specific feature. More specifically, there is nothing in that sentence that implies that actual roleplaying was a requirement for a game to get entry into the CRPG genre. It wasn’t even a requirement for the games that started the genre.

Because when people argue about what is and isn’t a RPG they run into a problem. Just about every sub-part of an RPG can be taken out of it and placed in a game of another genre and that game won’t magically become an RPG. This is the thing about genres. People naturally want to look for some defining feature, some element they can point to and go ‘Ah-hah! There, see there? That proves it. This is an RPG (or FPS, or whatever)!‘

But there often isn’t any one thing. There is fuzziness, overlap. A first person game isn’t necessarily an FPS. A game where you have an overhead view and give orders to a group of individuals isn’t necessarily an RTS. And you can find examples of every RPG element, from inventories to character progression systems, in games from other genres. Other games have had inventories, or allowed the player to upgrade their character via some progression system.

But the Roleplaying Gareth, surely it is the Roleplaying! That’s the ‘ah-hah!’ element of RPGs!

Is it? And what exactly is roleplay?’

Well, roleplay at its most basic is when you take on the persona of someone else and act how you think that person would act in a given scenario. Everyone has roleplayed at some time in their life, especially as children. We’ve all played Cops and Robbers, or whatever your personal equivalent was. I remember we used to love Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so we’d go off and pretend to be them, playing out the martial arts moves and riding skateboards and fighting imaginary bad guys.

The key thing with roleplay though is that it involves improvisation. You aren’t given a strict script to follow. Rather you take on the goals and motivations of a persona and are then placed in a scenario where you get to improvise your responses based on how you think that the persona you’ve taken on would do so. The outcome is a result not of a set script but the organic melding of the situation, your responses and the responses of any other roleplayers. (Which is why roleplaying is generally at its most dynamic when there is more than one human involved. The interactions between the two can give rise to fascinating and unpredictable outcomes.)

So, coming back to video games, for a game to be said to involve roleplaying it must offer the player something along those lines. Obviously computer games are limited, when two humans are roleplaying with each other they have the vast powers of the adaptable human mind to draw on. Computers, even the fastest of the modern era, are amoeba by comparison. A computer game will not be able to offer total adaptability but it should attempt to adapt to some degree to the players choices, to allow them some degree of that improvisation.

Now. Did those first dungeon crawlers have much roleplaying? Not really. Ok, you had a choice in which helmet to equip and what weapon to use. Is that really more roleplaying than can be found in Doom? What about the Might and Magic games? What about Icewind Dale? Did you make many choices about the scenarios that you encountered in the game and did the game respond to those choices? Or were you limited to choices like what clothing to wear and which weapon to use to kill the Troll? Is choosing a class more roleplaying in Baldur’s Gate than it is in Battlefield? Why, because there are more numbers?

So this is the real problem. There was no clear cut definition of a RPG when the term was coined. Games which resembled pen-and-paper RPGs (which in turn resembled table-top wargames) were called ‘RPGs’. As gaming evolved, so too did designs. Some RPGs with real roleplaying emerged. Some people really, really loved them. Loved them so much that when they stopped being made their hearts broke and were filled with bitterness, and now they can know no love, nor happiness, nor comfort.

These heart-broken types will try to argue that only the games with actual roleplaying should be called ‘RPGs’. That we need to redefine the genre, retroactively demote 90% of the games that have borne that moniker to ‘action games with stats’ or something. But that is useless, communication is meaningless without a shared context. If you don’t have that you can’t really communicate, so stubbornly changing your personal definition of a genre while the whole world thinks it is something else is just an exercise in pointlessness.

So what are we left with here? Muddy waters, that’s what. People just cherry-pick their favorite features from RPGs to help them define what is and isn’t an RPG. Stop me if you’ve heard any of these :

- It isn’t an RPG if you can’t create your character from scratch (Witcher)
- It isn’t an RPG if you don’t have turn-based combat. (Action RPGs)
- It isn’t an RPG if it is first person, and you have a gun. (Deus Ex)
- It isn’t an RPG if you don’t have an inventory (ME 2)
- It isn’t an RPG if the player’s twitch skills have any real influence (Deus Ex)

Which are really all just arguments about which features from the master list of ‘features which have been in games that were called RPGs in the past‘ REALLY count and which only count if you’re stupid. Ie, it’s a ‘my opinion vs your opinion argument’. Destined, as all such arguments on the internet are, to go round and round in circles forever.

The only argument worth making is that that RPGs can be classified as such only if they have roleplaying as defined above. And that isn’t going to fly. It is too nebulous for most gamers. While the heartbroken types might be nodding along with that, most gamers focus more on the trappings of RPG legacy. Character creation. Character progression. Loot mechanics. Setting. (I read an article the other day that said the reviewer thought on first glance that Alpha protocol wasn’t an RPG because it wasn’t fantasy or sci-fi. Unfortunately I’ve yet to figure out how to strangle people through the internet.).

For such gamers, the core essence of RPGs cannot be separated from those mechanics, even though every game these days seems to include ‘RPG elements’. Even if the game plot is on rails, if it has those mechanics most will call it an RPG. (I include myself in that list, Might and Magic 6 was an RPG dammit!)

But the reverse is an issue too, before you get smug Mr Hardcore. If ‘real roleplaying’ is what counts when considering whether an RPG is an RPG, what about other games that have roleplaying but not the usual mechanics? Would the the hardcore be prepared to let Heavy Rain into the genre? I hear you can make choices during play that affect the story and characters. Sounds like pure roleplay to me, if the claims are true. But people would prefer to call it an interactive movie, or an adventure game or whatever. Because it doesn’t have those same trappings of RPG legacy.

No, we’re left in a world where this is the only thing that holds :

‘RPG’ is a communication shorthand term for a game which shares common features with the other games classified as ‘RPGs’.

So an ‘RPG’ is a game which plays mostly like all the other games which have been called RPGs, and it may or may not contain actual roleplaying. Hoo-fucking-ray for clarity.

So, I promised to answer the question : Is ME2 an ‘RPG’?

If you go by ‘how similar its feature set is to the feature sets of other games in the genre’, probably not. The feature set in ME2 is closer to the third person shooter genre feature set than the commonly understood RPG feature set.

But what it is, is a roleplaying game. It has more roleplaying than BG2, than Icewind Dale. Scene to scene, you do more of that improvisation I discussed earlier than most games in the RPG genre ever allowed you.

I’d argue that a game with actual roleplaying is an RPG, regardless of feature set and the legacy of previous games in the genre. But you can’t access an inventory in ME2. And we all know that is what really makes an RPG, right?

Right?

Rich Hudson mentioned the difficulty of creating an interesting and original combat system for an RPG, and I have to agree with him. Sure, you can make up new damage attacks, buffs/debuffs etc, but that is just slapping a new layer of paint on an old idea, one we’ve seen before.

So how do you spice up combat? Well, I’m not intending to (or claiming that I could!) create a comprehensive guide with this post (this is one of my quick posts for the week, sorry, I’m busy working on SoW ) but the place I’d start is looking at combat resource types.

Once you strip away the graphics and animations, most RPG combat is about managing 2 resources, health and mana. You get various tools to damage one or the other of those two resources of your opponent while protecting or restoring those resources for yourself. Pretty much everything you do in combat is about manipulating those two resource types.

A way to spice it up is to introduce new resource types and/or create new methods of acquiring/manipulating/spending those resources.

Some people might gasp as the heresy I’m about to utter, but World of Warcraft is a great example of this. One thing WoW does nicely is create classes that ‘feel’ different to play, mainly due to the different resources they use. Some are your standard health/mana classes. But then you have warriors who generate Rage when certain combat events happen, based on their current Stance (aggressive stance gets you Rage when you hit someone, Defensive stance when you take damage), resulting in gameplay designed around building and maintaining your Rage levels during combat. Rogues employ combo points and finishing moves, Death Knights have a small pool of Runes on cooldowns which power their spells in various combinations, turning their gameplay from spending a capped resource into maintaining a good ‘rhythm’ of Rune use so you can keep your cycle of abilities going.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Diablo 3 team have said they are going to try give each class a unique resource type, it’s a great way to differentiate classes. So if you’re trying to spice up your combat, consider a new resource type. Maybe you have mechanics based around Fear/Morale? Magic powered by the souls of the dead or sunlight? There are many avenues to explore.

If you’re wondering, SoW does make use of a special resource type or two. I’ll talk about that another time…

Mini-games in RPGs : The Suck, am I right? Mini-games should be kept out of RPGs or at least restricted to a few once-off puzzles, right? Well, except for the combat mini-game. THAT one is fine.

Wait, what? Combat isn’t a mini-game, surely?

Yes, it is. Or rather, it shows that the issue isn’t as clear-cut as all that. What is a grown-up version of a mini-game? The answer is : an integrated subsystem of the gameplay.

Combat isn’t roleplaying. It is easy to ‘roleplay’ without having a set of mechanics designed to model combat scenarios in detail. You could abstract out the whole set of actions into a single combat roll, or a set of combat rolls, informing the player of the outcome after it resolves, in a similar way to handling a lockpicking or persuasion skill check. But few if any roleplaying systems are made without some section of the rules designed to model combat, a legacy of how RPGs evolved from wargames perhaps, or it could simply be that humanity is a violent species and our fantasy games tend to revolve around letting us explore experiences we feel drawn to but can’t or fear to experience in real life, adventure and violence and danger and power, things that combat offers in spades.

Whatever the reason, combat mechanics are generally a large and fundamental part of gameplay in most RPGs, and few people think “aw shit, another boring mini-game” every time they have a combat encounter. I think this is proof that mini-games CAN work, and it also allows us to analyze how a mini-game should work, if you want it to be greeted enthusiastically by your players. I’m going to post up the points I think make for a ‘successful’ mini-game, if you have any points to add feel free to put them in the comments.

Now, a mini-game can still be enjoyable without having all of the following points, I simply think that you need all of these for the mini-game to feel ‘seamless’ to the gameplay. Ie for the player not to consider them separate to the fundamental experience, a diversion. Or worse, a complete waste of time.

*It is worth noting that combat, as a mini-game itself, can fall prey to any of these issues, which generally results in the combat feeling unsatisfying, perhaps even turning the player off the game entirely if combat is the main focus*

*Also note, optional mini-games are excluded. If it’s something the player can choose to trivially circumvent, such as Arcomage here or Pazaak in Kotor, that’s fine. I’m talking specifically about mini-games which are fundamentally integrated into certain gameplay paths ( such as lockpicking) and are repeated throughout the game.*

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1) Complexity. Often the simplest mistake with mini-games is to make them too simple. The type of person who buys a complex and deep roleplaying game isn’t going to be happy if the game forces them to play tic-tac-toe every 20 minutes. Sure, that person might enjoy the occasional game of tic-tac-toe, but anything too simple lacks challenge and variety, especially on repeated play-through’s of the mini-game. Your mini-game doesn’t need to have a gazillion moving parts, it simply needs a large enough solution space in comparison to how many times the player will encounter it.

If you only encounter a puzzle once in the game, a single solution is ok. The more times the player encounters it, the larger the solution space needs to be to provide variety, novelty and challenge. Chess is a good example, there aren’t that many types of pieces but the solution space is vast, enough to have kept humanity enjoying the game for centuries.

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2) Increasing Challenge Over Time. It is an accepted principle of game design that the game should ramp up the challenge as the player masters the mechanics, offering an enjoyable rhythm of increasing challenge followed by increasing reward/psychological payoff. Yet so often this is forgotten when it comes to the mini-games, they stay static. Which is actually the same as saying they get easier and easier, as the player masters the mini-game. If these mini-games are mandatory, they become annoying time-sinks.

Ideally, the mini-game should increase both the challenge AND the range of options open to the player over time, in the same way that combat will increase enemy difficulty but also give them new moves to use in combat.

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3) Supports the Theme and Feeling of the Action Being Undertaken. The gameplay of the mini-game, how it plays and ‘feels’, should be consistent with whatever action or task the player is trying to perform that the mini-game is an abstraction of. Even though a mini-game is an abstraction to some degree for the sake of gameplay, you want the gameplay to give a similar ‘sense’ as the thing being modeled. When you’re trying to hack a computer or pick a lock, playing a game of Mastermind or Hangman or whatever is generally immersion breaking.

Turn-based combat in an RPG is obviously an abstraction but it conveys that ‘chess’ feeling of making tactical decisions on a battlefield. Even though it is an abstraction it doesn’t hurt the feeling of being in battle, it supports it. If you’re trying to model computer hacking, try to create gameplay that gives the player a feeling of penetrating security systems via different hacking attacks rather than a simple pattern-matching memory game.

I’d like to take a moment to point out a type of mini-game which suffers more than others from this problem : dialogue mini-games. The problem is that human speech is incredibly complicated. If you abstract away from direct speech then you can get away with making ‘character interaction’ more mechanical, see the way diplomacy is handled in 4X strategy games, where nations make demands and threats against each other. But the minute you’re face-to-face with an NPC and trying to create the sense of actual conversation, the mechanical and ‘gamey’ nature of mini-games tends to destroy any sense of verisimilitude.

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4) Tied to the Roleplaying Layer. All gameplay systems make use of some set of skills the player has, they wouldn’t have any gameplay otherwise. However, to successfully integrate your mini-game into the overall framework of a roleplaying game, it needs to tie into the roleplaying layer. In other words, it has to involve a mix of player ability and character ability. Your character can’t be an expert lock-pick simply because you personally are good at tic-tac-toe.

Exactly what the balance of player-to-character skill should be in any system is a matter of taste, but I’d say the character influence cannot be so trivial that player skill can easily counteract it. If that is the case, it is no longer integrated into the greater roleplaying game, IMO. Which makes it feel disjointed, separate from the whole.

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So those are the 4 points I think you need to meet in order to avoid the loathing heaped on mini-games. Can we achieve that in all areas? I don’t know. Certainly we can do better in many areas than the current RPG standard. The Thief series showed us the possibilities for deeper stealth gameplay. Games like Space Rangers 2 and Storm of Zehir have added trade and exploration layers. The Ultima series have shown us that morality can be handled with more sophistication than the simple Good/Evil meters that are common these days.

But in other cases it may be better to stick to simple skill checks/no checks if you can’t meet the criteria above, whether due to lack of resources, because that isn’t your game’s focus (Diablo 3 shouldn’t have lockpicking system, for example) or simply because the problem itself is difficult to solve. Better to use a system that doesn’t get in the way than one which actively detracts from the experience. Until we can synthesize human speech, for example, avoiding dialogue mini-games entirely may be the only workable solution.

Bobisimo made this comment, in response to my gushing about Alpha Protocol :

Part of me worries that this means “If you piss off NPC “John Doe”, then Faction A will love you and Faction B will hate you. But if you make NPC “John Doe” like you”, then Faction A hates you and Faction B loves you.” Not that it matters to me all that much, I’m already sold on the game. And to be fair, I’m usually more impressed than less impressed when it comes to Obsidian and the final product.

A very valid concern. Especially given that the way most games handle “moral actions” is by breaking them down into a simple binary split. Good/evil, paragon/renegade/ light side/ dark side. Then putting all the “good” NPCs in one bracket, the evil ones in the other, and making it so they like actions which fit in their bracket but not in the opposite.

The problem is the simplification of the player’s choices and NPCs into two very artificial categories, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Once you’ve done that, your system becomes little more than a trivial exercise in min/maxing to attain whichever result you want for your character, ie to be the saint or the bastard.

The first problem is that there is no overlap between the two categories. They are binary, and mutually exclusive. Can’t really be both ‘good’ AND ‘evil’. In real life we know you can be, that choice are more granular than that, that simple terms like good and evil aren’t enough to describe all the subtleties, to take into account differing points of view. That sometimes, the ‘good’ choice actually amounts to choosing the lesser of two evils.

By breaking the system down further than good/evil, by having the NPCs rate you on factors like how strictly you adhere to your mission specs, which other NPCs you make deals with to achieve your goals, how much of a mess you make achieving your goals, you introduce the possibility of ‘fuzzy’ results, where the NPC approves of some aspects and disapproves of others. Some may value discretion or discipline, some may value getting the job done no matter what.

This is a good start, but we need more to make the system work better than plain good/evil. We need to work to ensure that NPCs aren’t polar opposites. If one NPC values Discipline and Ruthlessness, another shouldn’t value the direct opposite, Freeform and Compassion. There should be overlaps and oppositions, but approval/disapproval ratings of NPCs should overlap. You need to work to ensure the player can’t simply choose a faction of NPCs and always be able to pick the options which greatly satisfy that entire group.

The final thing that is needed is the possibility of obfuscation. So my character did something mean out in some backwater where nobody could possibly know about it. Why then does everybody treat me like I’m a jerk? The ability to ‘cover your tracks’ is an immensely satisfying, even vital component of this system, in my mind. It boils down to mapping the path of information flow from the player to the NPCs, and to giving players the ability to block or redirect that information. The holy grail of that kind of design is the ability to actually play a manipulative evil character, instead of just a brutish bully.

Will AP achieve this? I dunno, but I think that is what they’re trying to build, and I for one am excited.

(Here’s a picture of a random Venn Diagram I googled. Enjoy it. It demonstrates…um…overlapping categories. Just thought I’d throw it out there.)

I mentioned that I’d post up some of the ideas I have for introducing time constraints into an RPG, if I was going to do them. Well, you can find them here. Yes Kris, on the forum. It’s a better place for that, should it turn into a discussion. Also, space wise. If you want to leave comments on the blog instead, go for it

But yeah, standard disclaimer, these are just ideas, NOT official SoW design concepts. They could be, if I wanted to take the time to implement them, but I’m wary. Read the thread for more details.

Thanks to Twitter and John Romero (I follow the posts of a number of game developer and gaming interest groups), I stumbled across the blog of Jordan Mechner (hidden behind the deceptively-named url of http://jordanmechner.com ), the designer of both the original Prince of Persia and the Sands of Time reboot.

Now, if I was to create a list of my top 10, all-time favorite games, Sands of Time would be on it. I consider it a masterfully crafted platformer. The puzzles, the storytelling, the gameplay mechanics and the pacing all came together to create a wonderfully enjoyable gameplay experience. Many games are flawed gems, I look past those flaws for the elements I enjoy. But occasionally you get a game where all the elements flow together in harmony and it is the gameplay equivalent of listening to a skilled orchestra, every note in its place. Only a handful of games have achieved this impression for me. Sands of Time is one of those.

Anyway! To the point man, to the point. Jordan Merchner was one of the designs of SoT and that makes his advice worth listening to, in my book. And, fortuitously, he has some advice for other game designers! Which I’m going to repost for your reading pleasure, with my comments posted alongside! Hoorah!

First up, Tips for Game Designers :

1. Prototype and test key game elements as early as possible. (I didn’t focus enough on this)
2. Build the game in incremental steps – Don’t make big design documents. (Got that one)
3. As you go, continue to strengthen what’s strong, and cut what’s weak. (Ties in with 1. Greater prototyping focus next game!)
4. Be open to the unexpected – Make the most of emergent properties.
5. Be prepared to sell your project at every stage along the way.
6. It’s harder to sell an original idea than a sequel.
7. Bigger teams and budgets mean bigger pressure to stay on schedule.
8. Don’t invest in an overly grandiose development system.
9. Make sure the player always has a goal (and knows what it is).
10. Give the player clear and constant feedback as to whether he is getting closer to his goal or further away from it.
11. The story should support the game play, not overwhelm it. (This is a tricky one for me, since I love story, but I agree. Story and gameplay are not the same thing. It’s easy to lose focus on gameplay for storyline, for me.)
12. The moment when the game first becomes playable is the moment of truth. Don’t be surprised if isn’t as much fun as you expected.
13. Sometimes a cheap trick is better than an expensive one.
14. Listen to the voice of criticism – It’s always right (you just have to figure out in what way). (I hear him on this one. The trick with criticism seems to be NOT to take it directly, but to try understand what lies behind it and how/whether it applies. Taking it directly is like being strapped to horses running in different directions. )
15. Your original vision is not sacred. It’s just a rough draft. ( Salute. My vision has changed a number of times, I keep revising. )
16. Don’t be afraid to consider BIG changes. ( Ulp. I’m considering some even now, but it’s scary to contemplate the effort. )
17. When you discover what the heart of the game is, protect it to the death. ( I want to say ‘a strong, branching storyline’. But story isn’t really gameplay. So can I count that? )
18. However much you cut, it still won’t be enough. ( Truth! Did you know, SoW is less than a third of the scope it was when I originally planned it? Triage, triage, triage! )
19. Put your ego aside. ( But it keeps my head warm )
20. Nobody knows what will succeed.

And then Designing Story-Based Games :

1. The story is what the player does, not what he watches. ( Yes. Cut-scenes are nice enough, but watching other NPCs, or worse your own character perform little scripted movies isn’t particularly compelling. )
2. List the actions the player actually performs in the game and take a cold hard look at it. Does it sound like fun? (Resist the temptation to embellish. If a cinematic shows the player’s character sneak into a compound, clobber a guard and put on his uniform, the player’s action is “Watch cinematic.” Letting the player click to clobber the guard isn’t much better.) ( Pay attention, quick-time event designers! This is why I dislike QTEs, no matter how cool the animation looks it’s still just “press a button when the light blinks”. That’s really lowest-common-denominator gameplay design. )
3. The only significant actions are those that affect the player’s ability to perform future actions. Everything else is bells and whistles.( Hmmm, I suppose. But I’d argue that those bells and whistles aren’t unimportant. Especially if you’re invested in a storyline, seeing a specific conclusion, even if it doesn’t affect your future actions, is a reward mechanism. )
4. Design a clear and simple interface. The primary task of the interface is to present the player with a choice of the available actions at each moment and to provide instant feedback when the player makes a choice.
5. The player needs a goal at all times, even if it’s a mistaken one. If there’s nothing specific he wishes to accomplish, he will soon get bored, even if the game is rich with graphics and sound. ( Agreed. Even for sandboxey games, give the player some sort of direction to follow. You should never be scratching your head wondering what script trigger you need to fire to make the next goal become clear. )
6. The more the player feels that the events of the game are being caused by his own actions, the better — even when this is an illusion. ( This is why emergent gameplay systems are so compelling. The more you feel like your input led to the output, the greater personal investment you have. One of the problems with heavily-scripted RPGs is I feel like I’m being led around by the hand, my input simply taking me on to the next stop on ‘the tour’. Trying to reconcile the desire for player agency with the goal of a strong narrative is one of the challenges I keep running into. )
7. Analyze the events of the story in terms of their effect on the player’s goals. For each event, ask: Does this move the player closer to or further away from a goal, or give him a new goal? If not, it’s irrelevant to the game.
8. The longer the player plays without a break, the more his sense of the reality of the world is built up. Any time he dies or has to restart from a saved game, the spell is broken. ( An argument for soft, accumulating penalties as opposed to binary ‘live/die’ scenarios, in my mind. )
9. Alternative paths, recoverable errors, multiple solutions to the same problem, missed opportunities that can be made up later, are all good. ( Roleplaying, yeah? )
10. Don’t introduce gratuitous obstacles just to create a puzzle. ( Hands up everyone who hates invisible walls? )
11. As the player moves through the game, he should have the feeling that he is passing up potentially interesting avenues of exploration. The ideal outcome is for him to win the game having done 95% of what there is to do, but feeling that there might be another 50% he missed. ( I’d say, for RPGs, you should always only be able to experience about 60-70% of the game in one go. About ‘passing up potentially interesting avenues of exploration’ : I’d say this can only be true of a game where there is an opportunity cost associated with your actions. This is one of the areas I keep thinking about in my design. Too many RPGs have next to no opportunity costs for things. You kill monsters for gold, which allows you to buy weapons which allow you to more efficiently kill monsters for gold. There is no opportunity cost for this cycle, it is pure profit and thus too compelling NOT to do for more players. Like the way most of us are compelled to search every barrel in games. Why wouldn’t you? There is no opportunity cost for this action, only potential gain. )

Wall of Text time kiddies. Brace for impact in 5…4…3…the one before 3…1…

Spotted a link on the Codex to a rather controversial piece Jeff Vogel posted up on his blog recently.

Well, when I say controversial, I mean most of the hardcore Codex crew immediately imploded with rage. The general response is “OMG, selling out to the casuals/mainstream! Spit spit spit!”. They’re a whimsical, fun-loving bunch, eh?

Anyway, Jeff’s point was that he believes that, as a game developer, you should make your game easy. Well, that’s the way the title makes it sound, but it’s phrased provocatively for effect. What he is actually saying is this :

A sub-optimal character played by a sub-optimal player should be able to complete your game on ‘Normal’ without dying much, if at all.

I half agree with that, actually. Before anyone starts lighting their torches and gathering a mob, let me discuss why. I don’t quite agree with the way he’s phrased it, but that is more a matter of dealing with conventions and terminology than anything else.

Firstly, lets discuss ‘Normal’ difficulty, shall we? It needs to be examined because there is a fundamental disconnect between what designers mean by ‘Normal’ and what gamers think of as ‘Normal’ difficulty. Normal difficulty for most game designers is what they think the average player of their games will find comfortably challenging. Not punishing, not a cakewalk, but moderately challenging.

Now, what do you think a gamer sees when he reads ‘normal’ difficulty? If you said ‘what I personally would find moderately challenging’ you guessed right! You win the prize, well done!

You’ve realized the obvious problem there, right? The player is going to feel unsatisfied by this ‘Normal’ difficulty in direct proportion to how much they differ from the statistical average. Now, let us return to our friend, the hardcore gamer. Take a moment to consider where such a person sits on the range of player skill levels. Yeessirrree, right at the far end, somewhere in the ‘expert’ range level.

Have you noticed how games are too easy these days? I have. It’s weird, this feeling of modern games being easy continues to grow as my experience playing them steadily climbs to over a decade and a half. An odd coincidence, don’t you think?

I mean, I play Dragon Age on ‘Hard’ difficulty and it feels just right to me. Not actually hard, the number of times I’ve died in the game I can count on one hand. But the ‘boss’ fights are challenging enough to ensure that I can’t do them on autopilot, that I need to use health potions and tactics and suchlike.

But this is ‘Hard’ difficulty I’m playing on, not ‘Normal’, even though it feels like ‘Normal’ difficulty to me. Clearly, this is because modern developers are sell-outs catering to the mainstream and can’t be bothered to provide me the same challenge as those games I vaguely remember from my ill-spent youth. Game designers have changed man, they’ve totally changed, and it’s so lame.

So the point I was making there should be obvious by now, as I am a total master of subtlety, no? If you’re a hardcore gamer, chances are your views on the issue are skewed just a bit and you should probably keep this firmly in mind. Since most people are the very yardstick they use to judge things against, the easiest conclusion to leap to is that the world is changing around them, instead of it being they themselves who are different (why, back in my day kids had it tougher, let me tell you sonny!). Let me be clear, I do believe that games are generally becoming easier. But the perception of this shift is being magnified by the fact that year-by-year I drift further and further away from the statistical norm of gamers.

So, returning to ‘Normal’ difficulty. If it isn’t clear by now, calling it ‘Normal’ difficulty is a silly idea, driven by a lack of understanding by game designers about the psychology at work around their naming choice. You should name it based around expected player experience in the genre, with complete descriptions elaborating on that. ‘New to RPGs’, ‘Some Experience with RPGs’, ‘Comfortable with RPGs’, ‘Veteran RPGer’, ‘RPG 9th level Black Belt Master’, that kind of thing.

Now if becomes much clearer to the player which level they should be playing at, and much clearer to designers how they should structure their challenge levels. Designers can build their games keeping in mind that the people who consider themselves ‘veterans’ or ‘masters’ of a genre are the ones who most crave serious challenge, who won’t have trouble keeping track of all the variables at work, while the ones who are starting out generally want a more gentle introduction as they learn the ropes. Now, if Jeff Vogel were to make the statement that the ‘Some Experience with RPGs’ level shouldn’t be particularly punishing to your sub-optimal players, your hardcore fanatic can read his statement without smoke coming out his ears. We hope. You never know with these guys. They’re pretty flammable. I keep a few in my basement in case the power trips and I need to do some cooking.

Before we leave the discussion on ‘Normal’ difficulty, it should be noted that, while hardcore RPGers sit on the expert end of the scale, chances are good that the game developers themselves are total masters of their own system. They’ve built it, they’ve played it for years, they know the intricacies. There is a very real danger that the developer’s perception of how hard their game is, is skewed. We saw this recently in the AoD combat alpha test. The general report from the first round by testers, including myself, was ‘dude, super punishing and frustrating’. Yet the ITS team could successfully and repeatedly overcome the combat challenges. Unsurprising. Luckily, they could use this feedback to adjust the system to a level their players find comfortable. The lesson to take away there is that, if you’re going to stick with the ‘Easy/Normal/Hard’ difficulty naming convention, you need to realize that what a developer considers ‘Normal’ should probably be the ‘Hard’ setting.

The other thing I wanted to talk about in regards to Jeff’s statement was about player death. Honestly, I believe there is a fine line there. I don’t think that seeing the reload screen every 10 minutes is particularly awesome. But it needs to be a palpable threat otherwise you lose all sense of challenge because you can beat fights while watching TV or eating dinner. The trick is to try to manage what live human GMs do in Pen and Paper roleplaying. You see, actual player death in PnP is fairly rare, too. My characters died only a handful of times in the nearly a decade that I played almost daily. Yet I had both fun and experienced challenge during those sessions. Howso?

Firstly, death in PnP is just about the ultimate punishment, not the first line. There were many ways to gradually wear away at a player, even if it is just forcing him to expend more of his resources to survive an encounter, leaving him weaker for later encounters. This was the one I most commonly faced, as a wizard character. Which spells to cast, and when, because burning everything I had in one battle meant I had nothing left for later. I learned to be frugal.

The modern trend for games to restore a character to full health/magic after a fight, and to make healing potions abundant, is the primary culprit in weakening the effectiveness of these forms of punishment in computer games. Who cares if you lose half your health in a battle, wait 5 minutes and you’re ready to go. Or drink a healing potion, you’ve lost count of how many you’re carrying, anyway. When your character resources are scarce then, ironically, the game designer has a greater range of ways to punish poor player decisions without resorting to player death. Without this, designers are left with players either coming out of combat in perfect condition or dead. Which means they end up dead a lot more, which in turn means that they hit reload a lot. And everyone loves watching loading screens, am I right?

So I agree with Vogel in that sense too. During normal gameplay, even for your sub-optimal players, you should rarely see a death screen. I’d much prefer a gradual loss of resources which allowed a player to adjust his play style to something more conservative, to play smarter. A gradual failure feedback mechanism instead of a sudden, sharp end. Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time was a great example of this. There were a vast number of opportunities for you to get the prince dead, failing most jumps would result in him plummeting to his ‘death’.

But, and this is the genius of their design, that is forgetting about the titular Sands of Time. Using stored sand, the prince can unwind his mistakes, essentially giving him another try without actually forcing him to reload from the beginning of the level. So you didn’t actually die, you simply used up some of your sand resource. The sand was limited of course, you could run out, and you’d begin to play more cautiously as you neared empty, but it worked well to create a gradual failure mechanic instead of a binary, alive/dead one. As the game progressed the challenges got harder but you gained the ability to store up a bit more sand, in the same way that RPG characters gain more health but face more ways to lose it quickly at the hands, fangs and blades of enemies or traps. (There was also a neat trade-off in the fact that sand powered other special abilities so you had to choose between your super powers and your safety net, but we won’t get into that.)

So in PnP death is less common. But there is another aspect. In live roleplaying, you have a GM. And one thing a good GM learns is how to ‘fudge the numbers’ occasionally to prevent player death. You can’t do it all the time, but most GMs will, at some point, change things to keep the party from dying when a run of bad luck leaves them unexpectedly tottering on the brink. A complete party wipe just isn’t a satisfying conclusion to months of adventure, most of the time. GMs will often think of ways out for the players, things like the enemy capturing them and taking them to their camp, giving players a chance to fight their way out. The only game I’ve ever see do anything even close to that is how the Gothic games have human opponents knock the character out and take some of their gear instead of slaughtering them outright.

But, returning to the idea of ‘fudging the numbers’, some players will instinctively hate the idea of anything like ‘level scaling’. Well, I think they’re wrong. The problem isn’t that concept of adjusting the game to the capabilities of the player, it’s the way it has been presented in games like Oblivion, slapping the player in the face with how artificial it is. It has to be done cunningly, as a human GM would. The best example of how it is possible to do this well is Left4Dead, by Valve. Smart chaps, Valve.

That game has an ‘AI Director’ running things in the background, acting like a human GM. It analyzes how the players are doing, altering the challenge level they face gradually to keep things exciting. It doesn’t do this in a crude, obvious way. Zombies are spawned in their dozens regardless, it’s hard to tell as you’re playing that the horde is 20% larger than it was previously, or that there are 30% more special zombie encounters this time. It is also more cunning than simply creating a global increase in enemy difficulty. As any good designer knows, in order for a game to be fun you have to mix difficult challenges with easier ones in order to create a fun rhythm, an ebb and flow to the action. Keeping encounter difficulty uniform results in boredom. But the AI director is again adjusting this mix, throwing in more high difficulty spikes for experienced players. It’s very clever and I am quite keen on L4D2, where the director can not only do the above but can actually change the layout of levels, even the weather. Valve have done something very clever with this series and I really think more games should emulate that design. It’s a wonderful use for AI that makes you ask the question “Why haven’t more designers thought to use global AI managers in games outside the strategy genre?”

So, to summarize, I agree with Jeff, sorta. We need to better categorize difficultly levels to match gamers with the level they will find most satisfying, understanding what drives the different types of player. We also need to understand how our design decisions ripple throughout our entire design. In order to return death-as-a-punishment to its rightful place as the most feared (and rare) punishment you can inflict, we need to make design decisions that allow for gradual, accumulating punishments for a player within the game context, instead of outside it, in the meta-layer of menus and loading screens and quicksave slots.

Blizzard is really an amazing game company. If you can have one goal, as a game developer, I would say it should be to “be like Blizzard”. I watch the press that comes out around their products and events and I’m always impressed.

Blizzcon 2009 happened a week or so ago, for those who don’t pay attention to these things. Amazing to think of that, that there is a lone PC developer whose products are so popular, so close to the heart of gamers that they can host a convention specifically for their own products. Can even charge for pay-per-view live streaming of the event.

Id used to be like that, iconic, before they got beaten at their own game (cutting-edge engine tech, being the driving force in FPS games) and fell by the wayside. But Blizzard keeps getting it right.

“Why?” is a good question to ask. Why is Blizzard so successful? “How?” is another good one. We’re all either wannabe game devs/designers or deeply interested in the field, so analysis of their success is a worthwhile exercise.

It’d be easy to say “Blizzard is successful because everyone is playing World of Warcraft, generating them Scrooge McDuck levels of income”. But that is looking at an effect, not a cause. WoW is such a success for Blizzard because of their skill as game developers. With 11+ million subscribers, it’s easy to forget that at the time WoW was initially released, the biggest success in MMOs was Everquest, with 750k subscribers, a number which seemed immense at that time. To so dramatically overtake the previous best indicates that Blizzard didn’t simply reap the rewards of being “the newest MMO on the market”, stealing the existing customers, it expanded the market significantly.

But WoW is the latest in a stream of successes. The Diablo, Warcraft (RTS) and Starcraft franchises have all been home-runs. One hit is a fluke, a streak of hits is a pattern. What are the common elements of this pattern?

1) Polish, and a commitment to take the time necessary to achieve that polish. Blizzard’s motto is “when it is done”. In an industry where it is standard to rush a game to market in order to meet Christmas deadlines or some such, Blizzard makes sure their titles make a great first impression and continue to make a good impression thanks to a high degree of “shine”. Some people will dismiss this aspect. They shouldn’t.

When you go to a restaurant, for example, the little things such as the service, the time it takes to deliver food, the ambience, all contribute to create your overall impression of the experience. You could go to two different restaurants, eat two identical meals and have two completely different experiences. While I’m of the sect of gamers who will wade through the clunkiness of an unpolished exterior if it hides a rough gem, you shouldn’t have to. It is silly in the extreme to work for years on the gameplay of a title and then package it to the player in a way that is clunky, unintuitive or buggy. Polish is the setting which highlights and emphasizes the best aspects of your game. As an MMO, WoW does nothing particularly unusual. It simply does everything that it does with a high degree of polish.

2) Iteration, rather than innovation. I hear a general bemoaning from journalists and gamers about the lack of innovation in games. To some degree I agree with them. HOWEVER, innovation for its own sake is dangerous, you risk throwing away good systems simply because they are familiar, not because they are inferior.

A perfect example is Dawn of War. I loved DoW 1. Bought all the expansions, played it to death with workmates, knew the intricacies and stratagems backwards. DoW2 was a sure buy for me. Problem was, they completely changed the game. It was a sequel in name only. I didn’t want a different game, I wanted the same game but better. Which is essentially what I want from RPGs btw, I’m not looking to revolutionize the pants off the genre. I just want really enjoyable iterations on the RPG mechanics I’ve enjoyed in the past.

Do yourself a favour and check out the SC2 battle report videos. Blizzard have kept the gameplay mechanics familiar enough to be instantly recognisable as “Starcraft” while adding enough new features and special abilities to excite SC veterans with the expanded tactics and strategies they open up. It looks like it will be exactly as I want a new SC game to be. The same, but better! Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater please devs.

3) A real understanding of gameplay and what makes for a good game “experience”. As I said, I follow the articles and post mortems posted by the Blizzard designers, they reveal an understanding of the “how” and “why” of gameplay that is becoming rarer in the industry. The iterative way they build they games, the understanding of the psychology driving their players, the way their game systems all work to support the core experience of their games. Diablo 3′s skill runes, for example. It is a “cool” idea, sure, but it is more than that. It is ANOTHER way to tie character progression into the loot cycle, to make the grind-loot-progression cycle that is so compelling in action RPGs that much more addictive. They understand why players keep coming back to their games in a way that fellows like Pete Molyneaux and the New Prince of Persia design teams don’t. Keep telling us how 1 button combat is exciting and innovative Petey boy, I haven’t quite bought it yet.

4) Community support. Blizzard games have a tremendous lifespan and a good part of that is the support for modding. DOTA, the tower defense games, the legion of custom maps online. And, in the upcoming Battle.Net 2, a feature which has me quite excited, a modder marketplace!

On top of the Real ID system and other Xbox Live-esque features, the new Battle.net will also see Blizzard experimenting in radical areas of online service. A prime example is the post-launch StarCraft II Marketplace, which–in addition to supporting the upload of free maps–will allow users to sell high-quality maps and mods, a monetary incentive largely untested in the industry.

Fantastic. These games have already seen top quality mods like DOTA. Imagine the creators of such mods selling them for a reasonable price to the enormous Blizzard community? The full details have yet to be revealed but I see this as a major step forward. Mount and Blade, Dwarf Fortress, we’ve seen how popular indie titles can support their development via donations in the “alpha phase”, and Gabe Newell and others have talked about how game development could be directly supported by fans in that way, funding by donation.

I see this type of initiative on the part of Blizzard as a bridge across the gap between purely free mods for commercial titles and donation supported indie dev. Modders can build up their skills and support base while still making a profit, even though their efforts are built on a commercial game platform. Truly successful projects can go onto building their own titles (as the DOTA team did) or team members can use it as a platform to showcase their work for existing game companies. It wouldn’t be the first time that modders made the leap to existing commercial studios, but it is an exciting intermediary phase, a way for them to potentially support their efforts on a smaller scale before crossing the divide. I think this will be of amazing benefit for the modding and gamer communities both, helping to drive modding to new and exciting heights.

I hope the sale price of mods isn’t heavily regulated by Blizzard, that marketplace economics can drive it in a free and fair fashion. Still, quite Exciting!

5) Love. This is a bit touchy-feely, I know, but I really get the feeling that Blizzard makes the kinds of games they love and pour themselves into their titles unreservedly. Sure, they make buckets of cash. But you get the feeling when dealing with them that they are fellow gamers, as gushing and excited for their titles as other gamers are. It’s not like watching EA’s CEO talking about “positioning themselves in the marketspace”, “exploiting brand recognition” and “quarterly projections”.

So, to recap, the “Blizzard Lessons in Game Development”

1) Polish till it shines. Make sure people have the best possible impression of your work.

2) Innovation is good, fun is better. Focus on fun, innovate only as long as it supports the core experience.

3) Understand what makes players tick, why they play your games. Focus on making that core experience as rewarding as possible. Gimmicks (see “innovation”) that don’t support that core shouldn’t go into your design.

4) Support and grow your community. They are your most valuable resource.

5) Love what you do. If you aren’t passionate about what you’re working on, it shows. Gamers can tell the soulless clones from the products with heart in them. Don’t just make something because it is the current trend, do it if you really, honestly care about seeing it realized.

Ok, I’m done gushing. Here, have some pics of people in costume from the recent blizzcon. The succubus is my favorite, for obvious reasons, try to find her.