Beginning on Jan. 21st I will be changing jobs from Senior QA Tester for Dungeon Runners to Associate Designer for Dungeon Runners.
I
am
STOKED!
This really is a dream come through for me. And I think this gives me a bit more impetus to keep up posting here. I have some ideas for upcoming posts including
So yea, short post, but high excitement
By this point, I think that most of the people who are going to play Team Fortress 2 have, and overall it seems the opinions is that it is a pretty good game.
Ok, scratch that: its an excellent, fun, well-balanced, humorous game that was more than worth the almost decade wait. While most of the reviews and discussions out there on the interweb talk up the balance, classes and map types, I have seen precious little on the art design of TF2 outside people calling it "quirky." Well.. "quirky" if you happen to not be on a server or the forums where the drivel of 13 year olds calling it "ghey" runs rampant.
Before continuing, I suggest viewing this video interview about the art direction and design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.games.net/video/bts/112042/team-fortress-2-art-design/
What struck me from playing TF2 since watching this video is how justified the direction is, namely two key features:
Each of these two features provides an immediate communication to the player. A player can recognize any class from the simple character outline and a player can recognize which base he is in by the materials the base is made of (wood for RED and metal/concrete for BLU). Now of course, this is a simplification, but at the same time it is not. The art design, while having great depth, also has surface-level qualities that convey information.
TF2 is a strategic, team-based/class-based FPS. When I am in a match, I don't want to have to think about what class the player is that is running towards me. This was an immediate problem with Quake Wars: Enemy Territories; from the demo, I spent inordinate amounts of time trying to determine the class of a player because they all looked alike. TF2 solves this problem for me. Even better, I did not recognize the extreme nature of this aspect until I tried to play after having my eyes dilated. I could not read the chat text, CTF score and my ammo, but I could unmistakeably identify the players on the map from their silhouettes.
Most aspects of TF2 have the players entering, or "pushing" through the opposing team's base. In the shipped Capture the Flag map "2_Fort", there is never a question which team base you are in. If you end up taking a teleporter without knowing where the exit it, you can quickly get your bearings and direction from looking at the surrounding textures. The same concept applies to any of the control point maps. There is immediate communication of area information to the player simply by looking at the wall.
What troubles me, however, is how much of this immediate communication will be lost in the player-created mods. Already there are roughly 10 player-created maps, using a hacked version of Hammer (the SDK is not yet out). Of these maps, 1 is good, 1 shows promise, and 1 is a decent port of an old TF map. The rest are crap. And even in the good map, none of these maps take into account the simple texture identities of "wood = RED" and "metal=BLU". Actually, that is not exactly true; there is a port of the CS:S rats map that does use this communication; but it has other serious issues of compatibility with TF2.
And finally, I fear that the class communication will be lost when players start creating custom models. For a time I had wondered why there were not female versions of the 9 current classes. Then i realized that the simplicity of communication would be lost. At the moment there are 9 classes and 9 silhouettes and all of them are distinct from one another. To move to 9 classes and 18 silhouettes would complicate the identification system on a very basic level; the immediacy of recognition would be delayed just enough.
Some very good friends of mine recently surprised us with a Wii. To say i was surprised is an understatement, but man am I happy. Another friend is letting me borrow Twilight Princess so I'm finally able to try out the newest Zelda incarnation.
It's funny, the first thing my friend Phil said when he loaned me the game was "It gets a lot better once you get off the leash." I sure hope so, because the "tutorial" section is awful. OK, maybe awful is a little harsh, but it is certainly flawed. The biggest complaint I have: the mandatory fishing.
I was initially excited about the fishing, and I hear that later it gets better. However, its placement as a challenge that must be overcome in the tutorial was a mistake. Up to this point, the player has received instruction in how to accomplish each task from moving the character, equipping items, riding the horse, even stopping a run-away goat. But there are no instructions for fishing for the player.
I tried to just "wing it" at first, with very little luck. I figured out for myself the bobbing marker denoted when a fish was pulling at the line, but there was no indication when a fish had hooked. After wasting 20 minutes trying to pull something from the water, I was able to secure a fish by sheer chance. The problem was it did not progress me through the tutorial; I was sure I needed to pull up a fish for the cat so it would return home (etc...) but to no avail.
I actually went to look up online what to do (so frustrated) and found out I needed to pull up TWO fish. OK, so I try turning to the instruction manual for any tips on fishing. And while there are indeed instructions on fishing, they do not relate to the fishing pole that the player is using in the tutorial.
Awesome.
I was able to pull up a second fish, eventually, by the same sheer luck as the first time.
I am not against fishing (and optional activity) as a required mechanic for passing the tutorial but it's implementation does not fit:
With a little bit of tweaking I think the fishing could have fit well, but it seems like it was shoehorned in towards the end of development. I would even be OK with its current form if either:
I really hope that Phil is right and the game improves once I shed the tutorial leash. This will remain to be seen.
It looks like this will be one of two posts about tutorial design from a strange coincidence.
I ended up checking out Portal last night, and it is great fun. It's so simple, clean, sharp and funny. Of the initial 19 stages however, at least 14 are tutorials or at least feel like a tutorial. Each of the levels introduces a single puzzle element and sets up how to solve it. The problem, however, is each puzzle has only a singular solution.
Once the puzzles begin to get complicated, it seems like they are simple assemblies of each of the introduced elements and are solved independent of one another. So instead of multiple small tutorials, we get one conglomeration of them.
Now of course, good game design builds off of introduced elements, and Portal is no exception. Don't get me wrong, it is a very good game, but I feel the tutorial experience comes off as overlong. Perhaps since the game is about puzzle solving, the player is more aware all they are doing is solving the recently introduced puzzles one at a time. Other games tend to wrap this solution finding within the context of another conflict (i.e. a Boss fight for a level that taught the player a new mechanic); in Portal the puzzles are the conflict.
There is a great deal of discussion lately about player choice in a videogame: whether it is important, necessary or even wanted in order to enrich a player experience. This is not a new discussion, but has come back into focus thanks to the darling Bioshock and the upcoming Tabula Rasa along with Fable and pretty much anything from Bioware. I'm hoping to not be too high-minded here, but it is an interesting topic in my opinion.
A good starting point is to pose a question: What makes choices worthwhile? To paraphrase a friend, "Too many games make the player feel like they are taking a test, rather than making a choice that matters." Games must engage the player - draw them into the world - in order to make the questions and choices seem relevant. Books have been doing this for ages, so why cannot videogames? Many videogames, and RPGs especially, create a hybrid experience for the player: they are 1 part movie, 1 part book. A player will at one point find themselves engaged in a struggle (often a battle/fight with a monster) at one moment and the next reading four pages of quest text that explains what they just accomplished. Too often the transition from one to the other is far too abrupt, and the player feels they are simply reading a book while a movie is going on in the background. The experience can feel generic... kinda like taking a test.
The missing element seems to be connection. The player is typically not asked to establish a connection between them self and the game world. Part of what is missing is the build-up, the environment and the atmosphere. A player should feel connected, involved naturally, they need to know the rules of the world without being explicitly told. This is something that Bioshock does quite exceptionally, where it tells a story without telling the story - everything from the protest signs to the posters and graffiti to the contrast of the bright neon to the broken and flickering lights. There is enough imagery to allow the player to imagine what the world once was and compare that to what it is. Further the player understands why the world of Rapture looks how it does. This helps to foster a feeling of meaningful choice when the player is confronted with the Little Sisters; they know what they have been used for, what the people in the city of Rapture allowed.
Creating situations where a player must choose between two or more options is in itself a psychological metagame. But again, this is only successful when the player is inclined to consider the choice. If the choice comes up and is poorly executed, big block o' text or horrible voice over, then there is no incentive. Each of these aspects pulls the player out of the game environment and back into reality - disconnecting them from the experience and all of the rationale that has been built by their experiences thus far. This is where the hybrid experience of a videogame can fail an RPG gamer.
I am hoping to use "Designing down the middle" as a new discussion series on compromise in design.
Restrictions. All games have them somewhere because every game has bounds. But what about when some of these restrictions on game systems seem arbitrary. I'm as good as the next person in looking through the game to sort out why a restriction is in place - most often it is a balance concern or simple engine limitation. But what about those that don't seem to have a rhyme for reason?
An example: Limitations on number of quests a player can have at once in an RPG or MMORPG.
This is especially annoying in a single player RPG although I could see the reason being memory management. I cannot be sure if it is the same problem with an MMO but I should hope it is not. It seems that it is simply a design decision that was reached at some point to 'help' the player keep their quests organized. I could buy that for a minute, but I would rather see a smarter system for handling the large number of quests rather than an arbitrary cap placed onto the whole shebang.
Worse still, an example. LOTRO (everyone's fav) allows a player to hold 40 quests total at once. However, they recently added an entire new quest type: repeatable reputation quests. The jist: you collect dropped items from mobs, turn them in, get rep, repeat. Each region has one of these and the problem is that if a player wants to pursue rep in each region, he has to have them accepted... and they take up precious quest space. Similarly, the questline for the main Story mission arc takes up quest positions. Pretty shortsighted if you ask me.
So what is the compromise here? Did the designers skimp on creating a better quest handling system? Or did they determine that there needs to be some balance in a player's activity and that limiting the number of acceptable quests would urge players to move on to other tasks?
