Design Blog

Thursday, November 26, 2009

The Intention of Design

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. It's been a while since my last post, my new job is pretty busy, and pretty awesome. Here's something I've been writing up in the meantime:

-----

This is a topic that came up when a friend told me the story of a City of Heroes character named "Twixt" and another story about an Everquest character known as "Fansy the Famous Bard". This eventually led me to another article about how David and Goliath works in real life.

The gist of these two stories was that the player's of these characters became the most hated people on their servers... and they did it all by playing by the rules that the designers developed. It brings up some interesting questions about the goals of designers versus the goals of the players, and how even when the two goals sometimes match up, things still don't go quite right.

For reference, here are the articles

Twixt (City of Heroes)

Fansy the Famous Bard (Everquest)

How David Beats Goliath

...

...

...

Now that you've read them (you did read them right?) let's break each part down.

Twixt, the Outcast
The Twixt case involves a player (specifically a university professor) who noticed that players in a certain server of City of Heroes/Villains did not tend to PvP in the designated PvP zones. Instead the players preferred to chat with the people the game designers intended to be their enemies while fighting NPCs that happened to be in the zone as well. The professor in this case decided to go against social convention and play by the designer's rules.

He PvPed villains. And he did it really well. So well in fact that for breaking this particular social agreement between the players, that he ended up being ostracized by both camps. The whole time, by following the game rules.

Now it should be obvious that this would happen. If someone breaks a social convention that is established and followed by many people he will likely draw a lot of their ire. What makes the case of Twixt so interesting was that what he was doing was EXACTLY what the designers wanted him to do. As a result, despite many other players complaining about him, the developers never acted against him. In fact, the player behind Twixt reported several people for threatening him, and as far as he knows, they have stopped since then.

The professor in this case was studying human behavior, and certainly deviation from social convention gave him a lot to work with, however, I'm more interested in how the game design factored into all this.

While my experiences in City of Heroes are somewhat limited parts of the article and the professor's paper seem to imply that the PvP zone was simply more lucrative for players to engage in NPC combat rather than combat with other players. This is a design issue, and this is the truly important takeaway from the article in my opinion. When players do not play the game as the designer intended, and more so, actively ostracize those who do find the best way to play with your rules as in the case of Twixt, then there is a problem with the design and it needs to change. There are many ways that this could have been accomplished, but there are two overall goals that a designer can follow in this kind of situation.

They can either change rules to force the players into the correct behavior, or they can change the rules to make the players' behavior the correct one.

Now, I'm not going to say one or the other is more correct, since I think this depends on the situation. And really, in any game, players will ultimately discover more than a designer or a tester will find during the games production. What matters though is how the game and the designer react to them. Now in the case of City of Heroes, I would say that changing the rules to encourage the correct behavior would have been the best choice. The game already has many zones where players can kill NPCs and if players were continuing to do so in PvP zones, then the first thing to look at is how the rewards are assigned. The players in this case could clearly tell that it was better to attack the NPCs, so it's up to the designer to make it better for them to attack other players to preserve the intent of the zone.

Fansy, the Rebel
The case of Fansy is a similar case of following the rules of design, however this case ended differently from that of Twixt. Like Twixt, Fansy existed on a server where certain social conventions had occurred. The server that Fansy was on had a specific rule set which seems to have precluded the players to choosing the "evil" faction in this game. (The website refers to it as "no play nice rules" and that it would probably have "many unfair battles".) With only 11% of the server being on the "good" side, much of the server was taken up by these "evil" characters. Fansy was one of the exceptions, and made it his quest to defeat the bad guys.

However, because he was excessively outnumbered in this case, he took advantage of certain server rules which made him invulnerable to certain enemy skills while he low level (presumably to prevent newer players from being killed off too early). With this invulnerability to direct attacks from the other faction, and not having enough power to defeat them in a direct confrontation, he used a "monster training" strategy, to lure high level monsters into his enemies where they (and occasionally he) were killed.

What's interesting is that, while this type of behavior is not very sporting, and probably not necessarily how the designers intended the game, this was still a valid tactic, and apparently there was even a GM who told him that this tactic was perfectly legal. Even one person who was personally against him, still had to admit that the server he was on had "no rules". Another person compared Fansy's actions to other legal game techniques that are frustrating to other players, such as going into the enemy zones at low levels and preemptively defeating monsters that they use to level in order to deny them that resource.

Fansy's adventure terminated differently from that of Twixt however, as the designers changed the rule that kept Fansy invulnerable to higher level players. They removed this ability across the board for zones deemed "mid-level" and above. This was a case of the designers changing the rules of the game to fix the problem. While this does seems like a somewhat heavy-handed solution, I won't say that it was the wrong one, especially given my low familiarity with Everquest.

What's important about this story is that unlike the Twixt story, Fansy was doing something that was NOT intended by the designers (but still playing by the designer's rules). This seems to be the important distinction on why no action was ever taken against Twixt. For the designer, it's very important to remember that your intent with the game rules is not something that the player necessarily has to follow, even if he plays by your rules.

Bringing it Together, David and Goliath
The final article talks a lot about how underdogs can overcome those in power. One of the big points it makes is that David should not follow the established conventions if he hopes to beat Goliath. Goliath in these situations is much more powerful when operating under these conventions and David will most certainly lose if he follows them. This article brings up two actual games, basketball and a naval game, and shows how David can win by going against Goliath's preconceived ideas about how the game should be played. In the case of the basketball game the coach instructed his less skilled players to play full-court press the entire game, which the other teams were not used to, but is perfectly legal to do. For the naval game the winning player used strategies that no real fleet commander would ever use in a real war but within the scope of the game they were the most efficient.

Both of these players met with similar fates to Twixt and Fansy as well. The basketball team was forced to change their playstyle when a referee who didn't like their playstyle started calling four times as many fouls against them. The naval game player was asked by the organizers of the tournament not to enter again because his strategies were "not really in the spirit of the tournament". For these situations, those in power worked to coerce the players into playing their way or not playing at all. This is a somewhat more extreme example of enforcing the intent of design than the previous two examples since it involves going after the players themselves instead of the designer changing the rules. However because these examples were not video games, its possible that this approach was less feasible in the context of the problems (though I'm not entirely convinced of this).

-----

So that was three different articles, all tied together by the same thing. INTENT of design versus design RULES. These examples all show that developing robust game rules can go a long way to preventing behavior which deviates from the intent of the designer. It also puts a great burden of responsibility on the designer as it should be clear from these examples that players will always try and seek out the best way to use the designer's rules to their advantage, regardless of if this type of gameplay goes against the designer's original intent.

There's a second facet of this too, and that is for situations where you discover that your rules do not accurately convey your intent and have the chance to change them. I think that when these situations come up, it's better for the designer to try and develop better rules that accurately convey his intent rather than simply trying to develop rules to stop the player. And that even developing hard rules to stopping players is better than making players who go against your intent feel unwelcome in the game as in the case of the player in the naval game.

A game is nothing without its players, even if they don't want to follow your rules, the fact that they are playing in the first place is an indication that they find the design fun. Design needs to work with players in order to convey the intent of the designer, but it should do that through the rules, rather than through mandates to the players.

-----

That was a long one this time. There are a lot of games I need to play this holiday season and a lot more I want to talk about. Although I may be busy with my awesome job as well, I hope to find more time to talk about these issues.

Labels: design intent, design philosophy, game mechanics, PvP

posted by Saikyo at 11:05 PM

Sunday, August 16, 2009

The Problem With PvP

I've been a fan of fighting games (especially Guilty Gear) for a while and now that I'm working on Guild Wars I find that there are a lot of parallels in terms of how the players approach the games and how new players get into them. After a bit more analysis I found that the reason for this seems to be a core of understanding the nature of competitive play.

To put this idea simply, it's that "PvP, by its nature, is designed to reject potential new players."

An adendum to this is: "The rejection rate of new players will increase with the game's lifetime."

Now, by PvP in this case I'm refering to any game which has direct competition between players based on skill. Fighting games are the purest example of this, but MMOs that have battlegrounds and balanced tournaments as well as sports games. However this also extends to just about every other method of playful competition including real world sports. I think in general the idea that competative activities can be hard to get into is obvious, but games have an additional layer to them.

Here is the process as I see it:

Stage 1: The Level Playing Field

In any PvP game that is first introduced, all new players start at the same skill level. Any new player has just about any chance to win as any other player. Obviously some players will grasp the rules of the game better than others and perform better, but in general at this point there exist no high level strategy of techniques and players work with simply their normal understanding of the rule set.

In fighting games, this is the absolute beginner stage where players mash buttons in an attempt to win.

Stage 2: Complexities Emerge

After a certain amount of time in the game a portion of players start to break off as "skilled" and have mastered all of the low level ideas of the game (punching, jumping, dashing, etc), and move onto developing more complex strategies and techniques. For fighting games this takes the form of things like wakeup games, high/low mixups, and intentionally wiffed moves.

At this point players who have not grasped these aspects of the game begin to lose more often. This is the stage at which you start to see complex behaviors develop, as designers, I think this is something we need to design into our base mechanics so that the game can reach this next level.

Stage 3: The Metagame

The metagame refers to the game that exists outside of the game. Generally this refers to elements of competative play which become determined by players rather than the designers. If a certain strategy or combo is seen as effective then it will start to be duplicated. The differece between competative players and non-competative players is that competative players will actively seek out the most efficient method for winning, even if it is less fun to play and especially if it is easier to execute for its effectiveness.

This is when specialized player terms begin to develop in a game. Game specific elements such as Wave Dashing, Roll Canceling and Burst Baiting start to show up at this time as a result of player experimentation and drive for efficiency. Generally at this level the true level of balance that the designer has achieved will become apparent.

This stage is also the one at which a barrier to entry becomes apparent. While competative players who have been playing since the beginning have gotten to the point where the previous low level elements have become simple, new players now have an even higher skill and knowledge bar to attain to become competative. This is the level at which new players start to be detered, due to the difficulty of learning everything as well as the low chance of winning against players that understand the metagame well.

Stage 4: The Slippery Slope

The final stage of PvP games comes when the influx of new players trickles to a halt or at least a slow drip. At this point new players are generally turned off from attempting this game due to the high time commitment required to compete on an even level with veteran players. The conundrum is that you have designed your game to be balanced, then this is exactly what should happen. But the problem is that if new players lose 90% of their matches or more because the game is filled with veteran players then the game has sealed its own fate by locking out any new players.

Even well designed PvP style games begin to decline at this point, and to some extent that's okay. No game is meant to last forever, but for many companies who produce these games it's valuable to be able to keep selling copies as long as possible between releases.

-----

So what can be done to prevent this kind of thing? Looking at some real world examples we can see a few solutions. Real life sports such as basketball and baseball separated players into leagues of relative skill levels. Even though NBA players would easily crush junior high basketball teams there are systems set up so that they only play people at their own skill level. Similar to this games sometimes use a ranking system to make sure that new players are not matched up with players of a higher skill level. This is a great solution and works in a lot of situations for many games since it allows new players to start out the game in an environment where their chances to win are approximately 50/50, and the large barrier of time to develop skills can proceed at its own pace. Players in these kinds of systems can choose to quit whenever they feel like it if the competition becomes too difficult.

But skill discrepancies can still cause problems even in these kinds of systems. Skilled players can often have a difficult time getting their friends to join them due to the skill barrier. If you prevent skilled players from dropping down levels to play with their friends then the system itself becomes a barrier to players. Similarly the ability to measure a player's skill level becomes difficult in video games as well, since players can simply buy another account or throw matches in order to get a low rank again. If too many players engage in this behavior then the ranking system becomes irrelavent since it does not reflect the skill level of the players anymore.

At the moment, there really isn't an obvious catch-all solution for the problems, and to some extent the solutions need to be developed to the case at hand. This somewhat extends into my ideas about game design patterns, but that can wait for another day.

Labels: design philosophy, game mechanics, guild wars, guilty gear, PvP

posted by Saikyo at 6:06 PM

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Anime Expo 2009

From July 2-5 I was in Los Angeles to check out Anime Expo 2009. It was a really fun trip and I had a ton of fun. AX is considered to be the biggest anime convention on the west coast and there were an estimated 44000 people in attendance this year. I saw some great bands, played some games, saw some movies, checked out some previews for things to come from the anime industry and even attended some informative and entertaining workshops.

But the best part was that I got to meet Daisuke Ishiwatari and Toshimichi Mori. Ishiwatari is the designer for Guilty Gear as well as the composer for BlazBlue, while Mori was the lead designer and artist for BlazBlue.

I also got the chance to ask the two of them some questions about game design during the two panels that they had. Because the question/answer period was quick their responses weren't that detailed, but they offered some interesting ideas about the games they worked on.

When I asked about what they felt was important in designing games, Ishiwatari said that he felt it was important for games to have either cooperative or competitive elements to them, since these were the things that would keep players playing the game for longer. After the queestion, Mori then asked me if I was trying to get into the game industry. I think he was a little surprised when I told him that I'd already been working in it. I hope I can design something in the future that will impress them.

Later at the second panel I asked them what the biggest design challenges they had when designing BlazBlue and Guilty Gear. Ishiwatari said that for Guilty Gear the biggest challenge was adapting the game for arcades, since the original game was designed for consoles. He said he did a lot of research into the kinds of things that would get players to keep putting quarters into the machine. Mori said that for BlazBlue the most difficult thing was getting good networking for the game. For fighting games like BlazBlue this kind of thing is fairly difficult, though I've heard that in general BlazBlue's online play is fairly solid.

-----

All in all, it was a great trip and it was pretty neat to meet the creators of the games I've been enjoying for so long. I hope I can make it to Anime Expo next year as well.

I'll end this post with a quote from Ishiwatari from an earlier interview:

"I look forward to seeing new designers come into the industry with a burning passion to create."

Reading this I'm motivated to keep working hard in order to live up to his expectations.

Labels: anime expo, blazblue, design philosophy, game industry, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 9:33 PM

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Blazblue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 5

BlazBlue releases on the 30th of this month in the US so today I'll be finishing up my multipart design analysis of the game.

First I'll be rounding out the cast analysis.

-----
Carl Clover - Auto Maton

Carl's ability is rather unique in terms of the fighting game genre, though there was a character in Guilty Gear who had a similar ability. The gist of Carl's drive is that it allows him to control Nirvana, a robot that shares the battlefield with the other characters. This allows a Carl player to control essentially two characters at the same time. There is a meter associated with this however, which recharges when Nirvana is inactive and depletes when Nirvana is active or taking damage. Depleting it completely prevents Nirvana from being used for a long period of time while she recharges. While Carl's Guilty Gear counter part, Eddie, had a similar ability, Carl's is unique in how Nirvana occupies space and absorbs hits.

When inactive, Nirvana is like a piece of the background. she doesn't move and both players can walk right through her. When active however, players can no longer pass through her and Carl can even push her around by running behind her. Additionally, in this state she can absorb projectile attacks. Interestingly enough however she will not absorb non-projectile attacks for Carl, these attacks will hit both Carl and Nirvana.

The balancing issues here are rather interesting, as the dynamic of a fighting game is partly defined by the number of opponents that fight at once. Going against this trend opens up all kinds of opportunities for game breaking setups that need to be addressed when designing the character. The ability to attack both high and low simultaneously as well as the ability to attack a player from both sides at once are both dangerous results that can result in unblockable combos. For the most part Blazblue addresses these concerns by increasing the reliance on Nirvana by the player. On his own, Carl is an incredibly weak character having some of the lowest damage and health of the entire cast. Most damaging moves or combos rely on the player to use Nirvana for the damaging hits. This does however have the result of making Carl very difficult to learn to play while at the same time incredibly effective at high levels.

-----
Hakumen - Zanshin

Hakumen isn't necessarily an interesting character because of his drive attack, which is basically a set of counter moves, but more because of how that factors into his overall character design. When activating Hakumen's drive, the player can activate a series of counter stance which have differing activation times and effects, but only if the enemy attacks Hakumen during this state.

The real interesting part about Hakumen is how his super meter and special moves work. Hakumen does not have a normal super meter, instead he has a small meter and eight special "orbs". The small meter fills up automatically over time, and faster when taking damage or attacking and when it fills up the player gains one orb. Additionally certain counters using Zanshin will also give you a free orb. All of Hakumen's special moves and supers require varying numbers of orbs, from 1 all the way up to 8.

This turns Hakumen into an interesting defensive and offensive character at the same time. On the one hand, a Hakumen player needs to wait for the orbs to do many of his combos. On the other, he never stops building his offensive options. Due to his overall low speed and high average damage, Hakumen tends to be played as a defensive character however, though this works well in conjunction with his drive attack, which promotes an active defense.

-----
V-13 - Sword Summoner

Her name is actually pronounced "Nu" like the Greek letter. (Which incidently is the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet.) She is the last boss of the normal arcade mode game and has a somewhat strange drive attack. When activated, she summons a sword at a specified location that flies a certain distance forward. The drive button can be chained into itself twice, which shoots two different swords. Multiple versions of drive can also be chained together so a player can press drive twice, the forward and drive twice, then down and drive twice.

The result of this sword summoning ability is that her effective attack range becomes skewed. There is a blind spot for her drive attack right in front of her but generally she can attack players from entire screen lengths away. Combos with the drive attack tend to look very strange as Nu stays a modest distance from the enemy while assaulting him with swords from all directions.

Nu is considered to be one of the top characters in the game because of this ability. Despite the blind spot in her drive ability, it's generally useful because the risk/reward ratio is very good due to the high damage and pressure that the swords can achieve. The gameplay style that results from this mechanic is also fairly different from a standard "poking" character style as well since the swords can combo into each other, allowing high damage combos while staying safe from retaliation.

-----

And that brings us to the end of my BlazBlue segment. I hope it makes sense now why I'm so interested in this game. A combination of incredibly original gameplay mechanics coupled with colorful characters and a lot of extra features not common to fighting games before it make BlazBlue one of the definitive fighting games for the year.

There is still a question of balance of course, and to this effect it may not be surprising that many hardcore fighting game enthusiast find BlazBlue to be a poorly balanced game. The variety of spectactular new mechanics were likely very challenging just to come up with much less balance. However despite this, I think it's important for designers to push new ground like this in all aspects of their work. I think even if the game isn't considered to be balanced well at the moment, future iterations as well as continuing improving strategies will help push it to a level that casual and hardcore players can both appreciate.

Now if only my pre-order would get here faster...

Labels: blazblue, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 12:11 PM

Monday, June 8, 2009

Blazblue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 4

And now today we continue with the long delayed Blazblue posts! If you remember we are discussion the individual character drives and why each is a radical departure from traditional fighting game mechanics.

-----

Rachel Alucard - Sylpheed

Rachel has my favorite drive, because it's one of the most unique ones I've seen yet. Her drive ability is to create wind on the battlefield. She can create wind in any of the 8 cardinal directions on the joystick by pressing the drive button in conjunction with that direction. The wind lasts for several seconds and affects the movement of both her and her opponent. Rachel uses a special wind gauge to determine how many times she can use this drive before it runs out. The bar stocks 4 uses of wind, and actively recharges as long as Rachel is standing on the ground and not defending.

Now this drive would be interesting on it's own since it affects the movement of both characters when its used. For example a player can use wind to blow himself at the enemy or use wind to blow the enemy away. While the wind affects both characters, it affects them more strongly when jumping, so it's possible to use it to mess up an opponent's jump in attack as well. In fact some of Rachel's moves and combos require wind to get the maximum effect.

I said it would be interesting on it's own, but in fact there is also more to it. Rachel has a set of projectile moves which are also affected by the wind. One of them shoots a projectile in an arc which has three variations on the ground and in the air. The wind affects these projectiles so the player can determine where they land. In some instances it's actually advantageous to blow a projectile back towards you to hit an enemy. The second projectile actually does nothing on its own. It just sits there and slowly floats upwards. However when the player uses wind, it becomes an active projectile, which can hit the opponent or cancel other projectiles. This creates a dynamic multi-directional projectile that can even come from behind the enemy.

The originality of this drive as well as the fact that Rachel's movelist builds upon the mechanic is what makes it my favorite.

-----
Arakune - Crimson

Moving on to the next drive reveals not only an interesting mechanic but also a very oddly designed character as well. Arakune has the appearance of an amorphous blob and as a result many of this attacks change his shape in addition to his size on the screen. This has interesting effects on the gameplay since he even dissapears completely when performing a forward dash.

His drive ability is a set of moves which "curse" the opponent when they hit. (One variation curses even on block.) Once cursed, a small meter appears that represents how long the opponent is cursed for. After this point pressing any of the attack buttons (including drive again) causes a small bug to fly on screen from a preset location to attack the enemy. This action also causes the meter to deplete slightly although it can be renewed by connecting with another drive attack.

Outside of this very different drive attack comes a very different style of play. While most characters focus on combos (and Arakune does have combos) his drive mechanic and moveset seem to support a style of play which involves tricking the player into blocking incorrectly. Since the bugs can attack from multiple angles, this allows Arakune to switch sides with the enemy several times using his unique array of teleport and short movement skills. The bugs enhance this ability to do strange and different combos when the opponent blocks incorrectly.

-----

Bang Shishigami - Burning Heart

Bang has a more natural feeling drive attack, but this is offset by several other game mechanics that he has and how they factor into his overall playstyle. His drive attack causes him to do a slow and telegraphed powerful attack. However the start of the attack guards against incoming attacks. Some version guard against more types of attacks than others, but all of them guard against something.

This "guard point" style is actually present in other games so it might seem strange that I still call it very unique. The reason for this is the other systems linked into this guard point system. First, when Bang successfully guards an attack with his drive he has the ability to instantly teleport before finishing the attack. This allows for movement options if the guarded attack has more hits coming and allows Bang to even appear behind his enemy while completing the attack. Second is that the attack itself is linked to one of Bang's supers commonly refered to as "Bang Install" which completely changes his base mechanics. Activating the move requires the player to land 4 hits with his drive and changes his movement options to allow dashes in 8 different directions as well as allowing him to move through opponents. This causes him to become even more mobile than Taokaka, however it also strips his ability to block attacks, making the guard points more important. Bang becomes a unique character because of how his drive mechanic factors into his other moves.

If that wasn't enough Bang also utilizes a supply system of "nails" which limit the amount of certain attacks he can do. He starts with 12 nails and uses them up as he performs certain moves. These moves consist of different styles of projectiles which give him strong options for attacks and a move which creates a "bumper" in the air which persists for the entire round. The presence of the bumpers is yet another unique thing about Bang as he is allowed to dash in any direction as soon as he touches one. This allows him to control his movement with a high degree of precision, but only in locations where the bumpers are.

-----

Litchi Faye Ling - Mantenbou

The last character is Litchi, who's drive allows her to control a special staff weapon that floats alongside her as she fights. Pressing the drive button sets the staff on the ground (or throws it to the ground in some cases). Pressing the drive button again calls the staff back to her, hitting anything in its way. Certain special moves also plant the staff to be called back later. Litchi's drive can be used in a variety of ways to create unique custom combos. Traditional combos with the staff involve knocking the enemy to the ground with the staff, only to relaunch them when the staff is recalled.

This mechanic is similar to a character in Guilty Gear (not surprising since its the same company) though Mantenbou adds onto the previous ideas. First is that Litchi's attacks change depending on whether or not she is in possession of the staff. She basically has two sets of moves with differing properties depending on if she is holding the staff or not. Additionally besides the special moves she can only do with the staff, certain special moves require her NOT to have the staff in her possession. Things get even more interesting because some normal moves with the staff cause her to lose possession of the staff for parts of the moves. This means that the available move list can change in the middle of combos which creates not only an intesting gameplay element, but likely a challenging aspect of this character for balancing.

-----

That's it for this week, one more post of characters, as I push to the end of the list of characters.

Labels: blazblue, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 7:21 PM

Monday, June 1, 2009

Team Based Games and Healer Classes Part 1

I was planning to write about Blazblue today, but something else came up that has been dominating my thinking time recently so I'll get that off my chest first. Blazblue updates will continue soon, since I want to finish before the game is released. It seems bad to start another multipart post when I still haven't finished my first one but I think this is worth it.

-----

Today want to talk about healer classes and their presence in team based games. I speak primarily of MMO style games like Guild Wars, as this is where the majority of my experience comes from, though I feel it has relevance to other games with healing roles as well, such as Team Fortress 2, to a lesser extent.

So my main issue with healers is that I don't believe that it's possible for them to be balanced. Certainly healers can have a degree of balance and games with healers enjoy what can be construed as balanced play with occasional updates, but I think in general the concept itself has flaws at the game mechanic level. Let's set up some premises first on which I'm basing my argument.

1. In a team based game, it's possible to focus fire. Which means that one person can potentially be ganged up on by several enemies, causing him to die very quickly.

2. Dying is bad. This is common to all games, but most of the time it carries a penalty so that players will avoid it.

3. To counter dying as a result of many simultanious attacks, the designer creates a healer class.

4. A healer is a class dedicated to the defense of his allies, while he may have some offensive skills, in general his assumed role in the team is to keep his allies fighting while being attacked.

Based on these premises, a few conclusions quickly develop:

"A healer must have the potential to protect an ally from the damage from at least three enemies."

Let's start from the beginning here. If a healer can only keep himself alive, he is worthless, if he can only keep one ally alive, then you should take another damage dealer instead. Because healing classes typically contribute very little in the way of offensive power you can consider that they add a value of zero (0) to the parties offensive capabilities. If we assume that any other class contribues equally to attack and defense in a ratio of 1/1 then a healer must contibute at least 0/2 to make him worth taking. In fact, because he does not contribute significantly to attacking which is the ONLY way to defeat opponents in most games he must be worth more than 2 in terms of defense to warrant a spot on the team.

The next logical following is where things start to fall appart:

"Because healers are worth so much defensively, they become priority targets."

This conclusion is backed up from emperical evidence. If you look at any Guild Wars PvP game or even many situations in PvE the first target is always the healer. This is because every player on some level inherantly recognizes that he is more valuable than the other classes. Looking at TF2 yields this example as well if anyone remembers the Penny Arcade strip about "shoot the doctor".

Another thing to consider here is a situation where a healer class fights any other class in a 1v1 situation. If we consider the non-healer's goal to kill the healer and the healer's goal not to get killed then the result will commonly be that the healer "wins" and the attacker "loses" even though the match is technically a draw.

Expanding this to larger groups, the case tends to be that groups with healers tend to have the advantage over groups without healers. Take a 4v4 situation where one group has a healer, assuming average players the team with the healer is more likely to win. The reason is because if a good healer can heal the damage from up to three enemies, then that one healer is already worth three members of the opposing team. Taking them away means it is a 3v1 situation. The condition only escalates when more healers are added, though there is obviously a limit (which I will address in a later post).

So in the end the final conclusion we arive at is:

"Healers are objectively worth more than other characters."

-----

Now that we've established the basic idea, the next post on this topic will go into arguments in favor of healers and why they still do not address the problem. Stay tuned!

Labels: game mechanics, guild wars

posted by Saikyo at 1:43 PM

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Guild Wars and Design Mechanics

Instead of continuing with the BlazBlue stuff today I thought I'd take a break and talk a little about some issues going on in a game that I play frequently, Guild Wars.

Guild Wars established itself as an online RPG without monthly fees, which at the time was pretty much unheard of in the MMORPG market. In fact, there really haven't been too many other games that have followed the Guild Wars model an been successful (at least not that I know of), moreso, I'm not even sure if there are any that tried to follow it. Guild Wars strikes me as kind of different from tradtionl MMORPG structure anyhow and I hesitate to affix that label to it since the game is fully instanced and is focused more on skills than on leveling which sets it appart at the base mechanic level.

Background asside, the game has been around for four years so far and recently had it's 4th Anniversary. The fact that the game still has an audience after four years is pretty impressive for one thing, but for this event they added a host of new features and game elements in an attempt to liven up the game and get people to play it.

And yet as I browsed the forums I found this amazing sense of entitlement from a lot of the playerbase which even got hostile at some of the updates that the developers worked hard to bring to this event. Obviously, not everyone is like that and I recognize that the percentage of people who complain on online forum postings tend to represent only a small portion of the audience (the people who like it tend to go and PLAY THE GAME instead), but I wanted to talk about some of the new features and my thoughs on them from a design perspective.

-----
Pet Management
An entire new area was introduced that allows players to store their captured pets and pet evolutions. As you level up pets you can unlock them permanently in this area, called the menagerie and summon them back at any time. It's useful for players who want to use different types of pets on their rangers and ranger secondaries, since it allows to you experiment with different pet evolutions. Further it provides a sink for certain resources both old and new in order to unlock pets that would otherwise be too troublesome to find or level up. As a final option players can purchase an unlock pack to unlock everything for about $10. This type of thing isn't new with Guild Wars, since they also provided a PvP skill unlock pack for about the same amount.

What is interesting about this, is that I always felt that pets were a very small part of the game. Your character has to be ranger primary or secondary to even use a pet, and for the most part, it's fairly uncommon to see pets in PvP and PvE. There is a clear expenditure of resources for this new area, but at the same time I wonder how big of an impact it ends up having, since the actual use for pets is limited to a small part of the game.

-----
Extra Storage Tabs
More storage is always a useful thing especially for people who like to save everything they pick up like me. ArenaNet has always been warry about giving more storage though since they claim it has an associated cost. Many people will tell you that server space can be bought relatively cheaply ($100 per TB was one such number I've heard), so the logic is that it should be realatively easy to add without a huge cost to the consumer. In fact this update did add a large quanity of storage to the game without any cost to the player. There is a free promotion for 20 extra storage slots on the website and new 5 slot equipment bags can be purchased for a resonable cost in game.

Oh but here is where the entitlement comes in. If you want more than the 20 free slots with the promotion which oddly enough people actually DISLIKE because it requires you to make an NCSoft account (it's STILL FREE), you need to pay $10 per 20 slot tab, up to 4 tabs. Now the thing is that storage tabs are more convienient since they can be accessed on all characters on your account, but the thing is another character slot cost $10, and characters can hold over twice that amount in their normal inventories. So it becomes a matter of cost vs convenience. I'm not going to argue one way or the other, I think the sales numbers will influence any further changes to the price, and I'm not privy to those things, but some of the complaints call charging for storage a scam because it costs a disproportionate amount.

-----
Extra Storage Bags
The equipment bags are another can of worms. Anyone can by a 5 slot bag for a modest fee but 10, 15 and 20 slot bags come at a much higher cost. You need to trade in special coins for them, coins that can only be aquired through questing. Additionally the price for the larger bags increases exponentially. The 20 slot bags cost FIFTEEN TIMES more than the 10 slots. Which is a large commitment in gameplay time, since you have to earn the coins and cannot trade them with other players.

I'm not sure how I feel about this type of incentive, and certainly there are many complaints about having to grind coins for storage, but in general the tasks required for gaining coins feels fairly entertaining for me most of the time. The notion though that players should be entitled to the 20 slot bags though is something I can't agree with. Certainly everyone CAN get them, but like most things in Guild Wars, it's a goal with clear steps to reaching it. I don't want to say this is the perfect solution (since the cost is truly does feel steep) but think people exagerate the magnitude of the issue. It's actually fairly common to set up grind for players in MMOs for more storage, you tend to earn more as you level up, so I don't see this as that ridiculous. If anything it's just a way for players to advance their characters after level 20. I find that the general design behind most MMOs is to develop a character you really like and get them all sorts of cool things. Since you can't progress past level 20 in Guild Wars, the team has made many other (optional) things players can do to advance their characters, and this doesn't seem any different.

-----
Daily Quest
This is kind of an odd little thing in my opinion. Daily quests are common to other games like World of Warcraft already, and the idea is that every day some new quests are available for some kind of reward. In the case of Guild Wars, that reward tends to be the coins I mentioned earlier as well as cash and sometimes faction (another type of currency really). The only wait to get the coins required for the equipement bags is to do these quests (there are other rewards for turning in the coins). There are three types, two for PvE and one for PvP that cycle every day, and players are limited to having three of each type in their log at a time.

This is an interesting strategy, but one that so far seems to be working well. The problem that occured after four years of being online is that certain areas of the game were basically empty and nobody except new players would be there. Older players would rarely go back to old content, and unless you had a guild or group of friends, it was unlikely for you to find many people to play these areas with.

The daily quests encourage people to go back and re-do old stuff for new rewards. So far this has revitalized areas of the game as they daily quests change every day. Certainly some of them have been far more challenging than others, but if one quest is too hard, you just have to wait a day until a new one replaces it. This seems to be an amazing way to revitalize mission towns and areas of the game that the designers feel are lacking, without actually creating new content for the areas. I'm a big fan of this part of the update myself.

-----

Wow, I talked a lot about that, so I guess I'll stop for now. There's certainly a lot more to it, but I don't want to make these blog entires so long that nobody will read them.

Labels: design philosophy, entitlement, game mechanics, guild wars

posted by Saikyo at 6:05 PM

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 3

Continuing today with more drives! They just get crazier from here.

-----

Noel Vermilion - Chain Revolver
Noel's drive is pretty interesting in that it opens up interesting combo chains. Basically by pressing the drive button and different directions you can chain together a certain set of moves. There is one that hits overhead and one that launches and another that switches sides with the opponent. You can do up to 4 or so of them in a row but you're not allowed to do the same one twice in a row. At the end you can even do a finishing move that blows the opponent away! It allows players to mix up interesting combinations of moves all in a single sequence with just one button. This drive isn't quite as radical as some of the others but gives many more interesting options for the player with only a single button.

-----

Iron Tager - Voltec Battler
Tager's drive ability is basically magnetism. If he hits you with a drive move, you are temporarily magnitized for a duration dependant on the move that he hits you with. Until it wears off ALL of Tager's moves which use the drive button will pull you towards him. Add to this that Tager is BlazBlue's throw character and you've got an amazing departure from the norm. Unlike throw characters from other fighting games who try to get close to the enemy, Tager can also attempt to pull the enemy into him. Tager also has a very fast magnitizing projectile that he can fire for magnitizing enemies who try and play keepaway. This is balanced by the fact that he has to charge it up before firing (or wait a while since it chages slowly by itself). This effectively limits him to being a close range character with the option to occasionally magnitize longer range keepaway characters.

-----

Taokaka - Dancing Edge
Besides Tao's character design (which I'm a big fan of), she also has a pretty neat drive mechanic. Pressing the drive button plus any direction causes her to launch herself in an attack in that direction. This wouldn't be that unusual except for the amount of range the attack covers which is practically an entire screen length. Additionally she can cancel this drive move from just about any of her normal and special moves as well. The end result is a ridiculous amount of movement control over the whole screen. No other character really comes close to matching her sheer speed and movement options. Speed characters in fighting games aren't that uncommon and like most speed characters, Tao has low damage on her individual hits to make up for her longer combos. Taokaka really breaks conventions when put into practice though. The ability to transition between retreating and attacking with the press of a single button makes for some very flashy combos as well as movement control not common to any other fighting game.

-----

That's it for this edition, stay tuned for my favorite one next time!

Labels: arcade games, blazblue, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 7:08 PM

Friday, April 17, 2009

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 2

The job hunt is going about as well as can be expected and I've got my first design test to work on now. In the meantime I thought I'd continue my discussion of BlazBlue and the original game mechanics it introduces to the fighting game genre. Today is a discussion of the "Drive" system and the start of the individual character analysis.

-----
The Drive System

The button scheme for this game consists of 3 attack buttons of varying strength plus a 4th button called the Drive button. Now the first part isn't very unusual. Many fighting games have 3 or more attack buttons, but 3 is about the bare minimum that most games get away with currently (although Virtua Fighter only has punch and kick). Of course the problem with having less buttons is that you have to use additional button combinations and direction/button combinations to get more moves. So based on the ratio of actions the character can perform the amount of complex interactions can change.

I'm getting a little off topic here, so getting back to the drive system, the 4th button in BlazBlue is used for character specific actions. I believe in an interview someone related to the game mentioned that it is the button "that makes your character do something cool". It's an interesting button because the effect of it varies wildly percharacter. For some characters it is a separate attack, but for others it is an entirely separate mode or action that interacts with attacks. The result of this drive system is that every character has one ability that wildly differentiates them from the other characters beyond the simple special move properties common to most games.

Additionally behind each of the drive systems is a completely unique mechanic that none of the other characters really have. Some drives can be used an unlimited amount of times while others have special meters. Additionally the applications of each one are different, some have multiple moves associated with them while others only have a few.

The drive system is the crux of why I'm really attracted to this game. It screams original design and feels like a huge stretch beyond just simply giving each character a different theme. It sets them apart on an entire game mechanic level and I imagine it was incredibly difficult to balance as a result of that.

I seem to have written a lot there so I'll just do a few characters this time

----

Ragna the Bloodedge
Drive - Soul Eater
Ragna is the main character and his drive allows him to steal health from the enemy. For him the drive button acts as a separate attack button. Each attack that hits using this button drains a small portion of health fromm the enemy. I found this to be a really crazy idea for a fighting game when I first heard about it. Generally ways to heal are rare in fighting games since the matches are decided based on who loses all their health first. Any way to heal is generally very difficult to pull off or has very small rewards. (In awkward contrast suicide style moves which drain the player's health tend to be much more common.) The fact that only Ragna has these types of attacks is a pretty bold move on the designer's part, since this kind of ability is one that can easily be either too powerful or too weak to be useful. So far tournament play from arcades seem to suggest that it was balanced fairly well. The drive attacks steal life and Ragna was created with lower than average health and an offensive oriented playstyle to compensate.

As a final twist Ragna also has a special mode called Blood Kain that causes him to actively lose health gradually while increasting the amount of health that his lifestealing takes. It's an interesting tradeoff though from what I've seen most players find it to be too risky to bother using.

-----

Jin Kisaragi
Drivce - Frostbite
Jin's drive as the name implies freezes the enemy. It's similar to Ragna in that it is done in the form of an attack and can be used indefinitely without penalty. Freezing in fact has been done before in some other fighting games and I think it's tends to fill the role of stuns in other games. Jin's is no exception, but the number of freezing attacks he has in comparison to other games seems to be much higher, but is balanced by the fact that two freezing attacks in a row will not freeze in succession.

Now as I said the actual freeze mechanic has been done before, but where it gets interesting is how its combined with another mechanic common to games. I guess I'll call it the EX mechanic. Certain special attacks, when performed with the drive button drain 25% of the player's super gauge in order to launch a more powerful or upgraded version of the attack. In addition to the freezing mechanic, this gives players a many more moves to work with when playing Jin and allow them to plan effective strategies through the use of their super bar (since the bar is also used for the roman cancel and super move).

-----

That's all for now, I've gotta get back to design tests and applications. I will eventually finish this segment though so stay tuned.

Labels: arcade games, blazblue, design philosophy, game mechanics, job

posted by Saikyo at 12:01 PM

Thursday, March 26, 2009

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 1

I mentioned before that I was looking forward to the Arc System Works game BlazBlue in an earlier post, and I wanted to take a little time to explain why I find it interesting. Now there are the obvious fanboy reasons for it, since it's made by the same team that made Guilty Gear, one of my favorite games, but from a design perspective, I find it facinating that the designers managed to set up a game that seems to have a good balance and yet also include a whole bunch of bizzare design ideas.

This first part is an introduction to the game and it's predecessor Guilty Gear and how the base game system has a lot of things that are a radical departure from how most fighting games are set up. After that I'll take a few more posts to go over each of the characters and how in their own way each of them expore a radically different playstyle and how it factors into the overall game balance. And hopefully at the end, I'll have an analysis of how the game compares to other contemporary fighting games and their systems.

Hopefully I won't bore anyone.

-----

So as a bit of background, both Guilty Gear and BlazBlue are 2D fighting games which have a unique anime-style artwork and fast-paced, heavily offensive battles. The original Guilty Gear game was released in the U.S. in 1998 for the Playstation and subsequent releases mostly came out for the PS2. Each game expanded on previous mechanics and usually added a few new characters. The series has enjoyed a fairly large tournament scene which flourished around the time of the third game, the first game being considered a cult hit and the second somewhat unrefined. By the third game, several interesting mechanics had been developed and refined to provide a unique game experience. Specifically the mechanics I'm focusing on are:

Perfect Guard - Removing Chip Damage
In both games the player can hold two buttons while blocking to activate a perfect defensive manuver which prevents them from taking block damage. This mechanic also pushes back the enemy during combo strings to create space. In Guilty Gear the penalty for using this guard was the sacrifice of your super meter. In BlazBlue, it consumes a separate meter which recharges over time automatically. The advantage of the BlazBlue system is that it allows players who are not as offensive to use the technique (super meter is gained in both games from offensive actions), however if this extra gauge is depleted the player takes additional damage until it fills up again. Thus it becomes a different type of resource that the player can manage.

BURST - Combo Breaker
This is a mechanic that allows the player to immeditely break a combo initiated by the enemy. It makes them temporarily invincible and then causes a knockback effect in a radius around them. Both BlazBlue and Guilty Gear use this mechanic although there are some small differences. Guilty Gear used a timer for the burst, and had it charge up faster as the player gets hit. This generally allowed 2 bursts in a three round match. There were two types of bursts, one used defensively which rewarded you with the gauge refilling a bit if it hit, and one used offensively which completely charged the player's super bar if it connected. In BlazBlue the burst is given to players every round and there is no longer a recharge timer, the player only gets one each round. The penalty for using the burst is that you can no longer use a perfect guard and your overall defence is lowered. This changes the mechanic from an ability that players tended to use early in Guilty Gear, to one which players tend to use late battle because of the strong negative drawback. This new tradeoff is interesting because it requires more strategical thought on the part of the player.

Roman Cancel - Custom Combo Creator
The Roman Cancel or Rapid Cancel as it is called in BlazBlue is a game system that allows players to immediately stop any action that hits the enemy and allow all normal movement options again. Both games use this mechanic to allow players to create specialized combos and unique actions that couldn't otherwise be created. This action costs 50% of a player's super meter (Guilty Gear has a special version of the roman cancel that costs 25%) and so the resulting action generally needs to be worth the amount of damage a super move would do, since those cost the same amount. It's another type of tradeoff that gives the player some new options.

Recovery - Avoiding Followups
This is actually a more common feature of fighting games than the last few, but I thought it was worth mentioning because of the way that BlazBlue handles it. If the player is hit into the air, he can recover by pressing a button and a direction to flip away from a followup attack. In some cases it is advantageous to wait before recovering in case the enemy anticipates your recovery, so it becomes a guessing game that keeps the players engaged as soon as the previous sequence which resulted in the recovery ends. BlazBlue takes it a step further by allowing the player to recover on the ground in different directions. This is actually common in 3D fighting games, although 3D fighting games generally do not include air recovery. Since the player can be hit during ground recovery in BlazBlue at certain points it opens up new combo options and a deeper overall gameplay.

Instant Kills - The Counter-Intuative Mechanic
Both games have the concept of instant kills moves (called Astral Heat in BlazBlue), these are manuvers which kill off your opponent in a flashy way. In Guilty Gear they were ridiculously difficult to do and resulted in the player sacrificing his entire super bar if it missed (which means no supers, perfect guarding, or roman canceling). Also because they were so powerful, most of them were set up to be incredibly slow and almost impossible to connect with. As a result, they were rare and a gimmick at best. BlazBlue's mechanic is a little better in that the Astral Heat moves are a little easier to hit with (at least the ones shown so far) and they do not remove the super bar if they miss. However as a tradeoff this move can only be performed when the enemy is at low health and on the last round. This changes the nature of the move to simply be a flashy finish to the round. It will likely see just as little use as the original Guilty Gear instant kill, due to it being more useful in most circumstances to use the super bar for two normal supers or roman canceling, but because they are no longer as strong, the moves can be made more useful and easier to connect with. Hopefully this will increase their usage.

-----

That's the end of part one. Next time I'll start going of the drive system and some characters.

Labels: arcade games, blazblue, design philosophy, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 6:28 PM