What Would Matt Do

(Yes, I did make a new word there, thanks for noticing!)

Scrap #1: Odd company gives interesting results plus a correction

I say odd company because it sounds like an interesting idea…if your game is based purely on numbers publishers come up with:

As for "FutureNot’s" potential success, Zatkin analyzed it and says it’s "a surprisingly decent game" that could sell 216,000 copies in six months. He notes that most developers won’t make a blockbuster like "Halo 3," which has sold more than 3 million copies so far.

See, EEDAR is a company that can guesstimate how much money a particular feature in a game will make you. Want to add coop multiplayer? They predict a 12k in sales in the hypothetical game that Forbes cooked up. They do this by breaking down features in 6000 previous games, comparing sales, and coming up with numbers.

Except that it might be a pretty big load of shite. I get what they are trying to do, but it’s the exact same thing I’d hate to have to deal with as a designer or developer. Managers all over the world want a tool like this, but I just can’t see it working. How can they look at a game like Bioshock and tell me a multiplayer mode would have added such and such sales? It’s all guesstimate work and it can’t work across genres and types of games. Not to mention, it’s VERY guesstimate work when it comes to games that are full of bugs or missing promised features, but are used to figure out how such and such feature affected sales. For instance, say a game crashes a lot. That it’s buggy will get around and sales will be less, but how is that going to affect the results EEDAR’s data? There are so MANY different ways to look at a data and factors that should be taken into account I just can’t see this being of actual value.

But I can see it being used by many past the developer/designer level. Publishers all over already use this kind of maybe-it-works data. They can guesstimate, pretty well, how much adding features will cost. Maybe. But they don’t really know how much that will add in sales. With the data from EEDAR in hand, they will be much happier, even if the data has real potential flaws in it (see comments above). To be fair to publishers, I’m sure they already have made up numbers and charts for this kind of data. They love numbers that justify their decisions…

In the original article, they say only 4% of games make a profit, but that number wasn’t quite true and they released a correction.

Scrap #2: This is exactly what I thought Left 4 Dead would be like

I didn’t buy L4D. I’m one of the minority in my gaming group because of that choice. Most everyone I have friended to play TF2 with on Steam is playing L4D. I didn’t buy it because I played the demo and while I really liked it, I just can’t see it holding up longer term or being diverse enough to keep my interest. From bluh.org:

The game is good at mixing things up.  Things rarely happen exactly the same, and you can’t really prepare too much for what will happen, or expect things to go the same way twice.  Which is really great when you are playing on a high difficulty, as it keeps the game fresh. 

Which is sorely needed, because it is a very limited and very repetitive game.  Not to say it’s not still fun… but after you’ve played for a half hour, you’ve seen everything.  There’s the odd new event, and the scenery changes, but really, after a half hour, you can safely say you’ve experienced the game.  I’ve put five hours in it, and seen two of the campaigns through to the end, and I feel like if I stopped playing today, I wouldn’t miss much more.

I can’t really speak to more of the game than to say I agree with pretty much everything Charles said in that write up compared to the demo. For an asshole, he has decent game opinions. I especially like the ideas of getting rid outlines and seeing flashlight beams for reals. Needs a lot more options for hosting the game like that.

As for the demo… Did Valve really turn off the demo after the release? Really really? That seems pretty low to me…

Scrap #3: Are you low on X-men knowledge?

I know a lot about the X-Men and I even learned a few things from this bad boy. Good read.

What Would Matt Do: In order, I’d stay as far away from EEDAR as I could. I’d play Left 4 Dead if it was $20-$30 instead of $50. And I still wish Marvel wasn’t fucking everything up so reading comics could be good again…

I’ve played a bit of Far Cry 2 now. Probably 5-10 hours or so. I don’t know if I’m going to be playing again any time soon what with all of the other games out there to try and FC2 not quite making the grade. Here’s why it’s not quite the game they wanted…or least it wasn’t on the regular difficulty level (I hear it plays differently on different difficultly levels?).

The AI

Why knock the AI when I’ve also got them in the good things area? Because they respawn like angry mosquitoes when you leave standing water outside. Literally. See, in FC2 you drive around this huge country side a lot. This huge country side is filled with a bunch of random annoying guys (like the internet) with guns (less like the internet). Ok, well, fine. It’s a warzone, I’m a mercenary, I’ll do what I do. Basically, kill the shit out of things. I do that, take the supplies I need and move on. Pretty straight forward. Except, when I have to drive back by there I find a whole host of new guys there. As if they are cloning them in the back somewhere and as soon as I’m out of sight, the little bastards are popping out of the water, running to the guard post and then nochalantly pretending like they’ve been there the whole time. So, no matter how many times you kill them, you get to do again as soon as you go back. Awesome!

The original design vs. what we got

They, the developers, either originally designed a more hardcore game where saving was only available at safe houses or they altered the difficulty levels post design or something, but a few things just aren’t well done. First, you don’t need save points, so you don’t need safe houses (until later in the game when they have supplies…if you’re a right and true bastard). Second, while some of the game seems based on making it feel more realistic, other things aren’t. Repairing a vehicle for instance…as long as the vehicle hasn’t exploded, you can just get out, open the hood, twist a wrench a few times and it’s back to new! While that might be a better mechanic than having vehicles die and you have to hoof it a lot, there should have been some other way to solve this problem without it feely so gamey. Third, why can I only carry 4 weapons, no matter their size. Great arbitrary way to try to make the game harder…

Story?

Ok, yeah, the game isn’t big on story. Completely understandable since it’s an FPS. They often think deep story lines have cooties. Fair enough. But what about a story line that you’re literally thrown into, and then never hear about again? I’m going to spoil something right now (since it’s in the first 5 minutes of the game)…you’re hunting the Jackal. And you meet him right away. And he doesn’t kill you, even though he knows you’re there to kill him. Ok, fine. But then? You never hear from him or where he is again. And you start doing random jobs for random people for…no reason. Yeah, it’s that esoteric. Then, you make buddies…that aren’t really buddies so much as people that want things from you for very little reward. That are also physic. As soon as you take a job, they know and have a counter or altered job already setup. It’s almost as if this entire country was just waiting for you to appear…

Ok, so, those aren’t great things…but you know what? Far Cry 2 is still pretty fun for awhile, and if modding tools exist, the real Far Cry 2 could appear. If no other game was out right now, I’d probably still be playing it. And I will most definitely go back to it at some point. See, it has these really good things. Stealth works, the AI is fun to play against, when they aren’t spawning constantly, and the graphics are amazing.

Now for some developer comments as seen on Pentadact (right after the author’s comments):

I’m missing something fundamental about the buddy missions. Namely, why? And also, why? Why do they want to hurt the APR/UFLL much more seriously at enormous risk to my health and for no extra reward? And why do they think I will want to? It can’t be that they’re die-hard UFLL or APR supporters, because my next mission will be against that faction and they will again demand that I take enormous, preposterous detours to commit mass murders.

Hmm…I agree completely, but what does the developer say (these are taken from the original blog’s comments)?

Thanks for the (cheeky) comments. I would very much liked to have done a better job of realizing the buddies and making them more present and meangingful in the game. At least you can shoot them and make them go away if you don’t like them. I don’t like Michelle much either and after the third or fourth time I had her as a buddy I secretly painted some sandbags with her brains when no one was looking.

So the best way to deal with your buddies is to kill them…interesting. What about why they ask you create massive destruction for what appears to be (yet again) no real reason?

As for the other ‘why’ why do the buddies want you destroy medicine or defoliate a jungle?… The answer is because they are bad fucking people. They are self-interested, dangerous assholes. Are they really different from the warlords and their goons? It’s completely fine if you don’t want to do that stuff. It’s completely fine that you think they are monsterous. If you don’t want to do that stuff, if you think it’s ‘bad’, you don’t have to. Your reputation will stay low, you’ll have access to medicine for longer, you won’t find the battlefield quite so littered with wounded. But make no mistake – you’re motives here are not to end this conflict. Don’t be so high and mighty, errand boy. You’re a killer. You’ve probably killed and burned and stabbed more people than all of your buddies combined. Why do you think you are the one we hired to kill the Jackal and not one of them :)

So…they ask you to do horribly destructive things with no real logic or reasoning behind them because they are bad people? Are bad people stupid as all get out? Because that might explain things a bit…

I do understand his talk of lack of time and polish. That happens on every single software project known to man. That doesn’t excuse things, but it does give some understanding. Far Cry 2 though…well it could have been an outstanding game instead of just another decent one. If modding exists for it, I think with a bit of work, you could make one of the most amazing single player games to grace our screens.

As it stands, it’s worth a buy from the bargain bin or if you’re out of other games to play.

What Would Matt Do: I’d read the rest of the comments by Clint. They are all insightful and interesting, if not a little bit revisionist and spinnie, but still good. I’d also keep Far Cry 2 and give it another shot when I have more time or when a patch fixes a fair amount of the issues.

Yeah, I haven’t been updating as much as of late. It’s because I’m so busy/lazy… But, I have been playing a fair amount of Warhammer. And it’s been good…and bad.

Before I get to my opinion though, lets read what SJ liked and didn’t like:

Instant PVP. You can do the PvP thing immediately following character creation, and what’s more, not completely suck.  Thanks to upranking you can sort-of kind-of contribute from level 1. Which is appropriate – the game still gives you a reason to level upward. The same applies to equipment – you gain access to a baseline of equipment through “renown gear” unlocked through PvP, but you’ll want to supplement it.  And entering a “scenario” (instanced PvP battle) is as easy as clicking a big helpful logo button. No fuss, no muss, no running somewhere, you get teleported to a battle, then teleported back. Makes no sense from a fantasy immersion standpoint, but then again, neither do instanced battles, so whatever!

And most importantly, you can advance your character this way as well. You gain experience and money through simply competing in scenarios, and level-appropriate gear can drop from other players as well.

That’s really THE feature of Warhammer and it’s what will probably keep me coming back again and again. I agree completely with Lum here. I like some of the other thing he mentions, but I’m not really that worried about the open groups thing or the Tome of Knowledge. The open groups is useful sometimes, but the Tome just doesn’t do anything for me beyond letting me pick a title. I don’t go for achievements either though, so your mileage may very.

On to what he didn’t like, and it’s a much more damning list imo:

Grindgrindgrindgrindgrind. Yeah, this is the big one, and what is going to kill retention for Warhammer if anything not with the initials “WotLK” does. Anecdotal evidence from beta testers all claim that the levelling curve was radically “adjusted” immediately before the game shipped. This was a mistake. If there’s any game that shouldn’t be afraid of their users reaching max level, it’s Warhammer. Yet the last minute holy-crap-we-don’t-have-enough-to-keep-people-busy reaction from a development team seems to be a time-honored tradition of late. One could make a case that with many games, levelling is artifically accelerated in beta, then tuned to the release version just before shipping. That pretty clearly isn’t the case with Warhammer, since after the 2nd “tier” of content… you run out. Note: this is when you make levelling faster, not slower. It’s probably no coincidence that one of the first rewards granted to underpopulated realms has been faster levelling speed. That shouldn’t be a reward – it should be the default.

Yep, that’s the big one, no question about it. What a god damn pain in the ass the leveling is once you get out of tier 1. And I hear it only gets worse as you level up. I see grinding as a flaw in any system. I don’t like it Disgaea type games and I don’t like it in my MMOs. Which is why I burn out on them well before the end game most every time. If your game requires leveling, it will eventually lose me, one way another. WoW, for instance, has a lot class and style and a mess of pellets, which really helped disguise the grind for awhile. But after playing enough and seeing behind the curtains, I just can’t stomach WoW anymore. It’s all grind.

He lists a pile of other problems and I agree with every one of them, the most damning after grinding being either the boring as hell PvE or the class balance in PvP depending what kind of game you prefer. The PvE is boring as all get out and even worse in elvish lands (as mentioned above). But the PvP is my real problem… Playing a Witch Elf is great…sometimes. You’ll often help break healer/caster lines in back and sometimes you’ll even take down a tank or two if you find them by themselves…but you’ll never compare to a Sorcerer. They can stand back, way back, and do a mess more damage than you can. Not the end of the world…except, why play a MDPS class if you aren’t as good as your RDPS counterparts, at least in some way?

The rest of the classes all have their awesome. Tanks can stand their and take a fucking beating and even help protect one other person while doing it. Healers, both the melee and ranged type are gods in their respective ways (my favorite being the Warrior Priest…so much fun to play) and the RDPS guys can really dish out some serious damage. But what do the MDPS guys get… Well, I can stealth as some of them, but I still can’t come out of hiding with anything like a killing blow or even a disabling one. If I don’t attack a loner that strayed from the pack, I’m almost certainly going to die before I can even kill the one guy I just attacked from the back. At best, I’m going to do a enough damage and catch enough attention so that the healers stop healing and the RDPS guys stop hitting things and try to run or help. If I can keep their attention long enough, then maybe my guys in the front can push over their front line that is longer being healed and we can take the current battle.

But what does the MDPS guy get from that? Nothing. Just death and long respawn. People aren’t going to be doing that much when their is no personal reward for it. At least not in PUGs.

Here’s what they really need to do, play more Team Fortress 2. TF2 is created from the ground up to reward teamplay. The classes are so well refined and tuned that people are often working as a team without doing anything else other than playing their class roles. That’s a damn fine design and it’s something Warhammer PvP could really use. For instance, you don’t get RP (reknown points) for capturing a flag… You don’t get anything extra for defending someone that is being attacked. Etc.

If Mythic wants PvP to have long term legs and that to be the selling point of their game (it very much is for me), they need to tweak the MDPS classes a bit (do not, and I mean, DO NOT, gimp the other classes in the name of balance. Fix the MDPS classes.) to give them some useful way to be in group PvP. And start working on design improvements to get PUGs, the meat of any PvP game truthfully, working together. Don’t force them to, reward them for doing so.

What Would Matt Do: I’ll play more Warhammer for sure. And I’ll eagerly await the first class balance update for PvP. Here’s hoping the balance they have now isn’t a fluke, but by design…because otherwise they are just going to pooch it when they start trying to fix things.

Or I could have just titled this article, don’t be dumb. I’m not talking Palin dumb here, I’m just talking making blanket statements like your game must follow these 10 rules or your game sins if it breaks these seven rules. Why do I say it’s silly? Because if you look at either of those lists, I can name great games that break those rules. Yeah, that’s right, even the ever awesome Soren Johnson’s list.

The RPS list for instance does say should in their title, but I still can’t say I agree with everything they’ve posted. Lets take some examples:

2. Use standardised install and savegame folders

Everything goes in Program Files by default, please (and, just as importantly, there needs to be an option to install anywhere the player would rather). Don’t have your game install itself into the root of C:\ or an obscure sub-folder, and when you do put it in Program Files don’t stick it inside [Publisher name]\[Developer name] – just stick a folder directly in there under the game’s name. Gamers want to be able to find their game files easily, not have to Google for everyone involved in its creation just so they can work out what folder it’s in.

This is doubly true of savegames.

 Why do I care? Sure, it might be nice, but I don’t even like where Vista and XP have my saved games if developers followed the rules. You know where I want saved games? In a sub directory of where I chose install the game (I’m OCD about that. Games go to c:\games, demos to c:\gamedemos. That way I can track them down later). That isn’t hard and it should be a simple thing to follow.

The rest of the suggestions aren’t all bad, but they aren’t all necessary either. I have spent of long hours playing games like Company of Heroes and Starcraft that break that escape means pause rule. It took me three seconds to catch on and I didn’t think about it again. I’m not saying games shouldn’t go for that rule, but it’s not really a priority.

On to Soren’s seven sins… On the one hand, I just want to agree with everything Soren says since I’ve liked the game he’s worked on so much. On the other hand, he’s being a bit stubborn in some parts…

1. Too much scripting

Strategy games have a direct lineage from board games, and the fun of playing the latter comes from understanding the rules and mechanics of the game world and then making decisions that have consequence within that world. Computerized strategy games allow a single player to experience this same world on his or her own. At some point, however, strategy developers began to create lengthy, scripted scenarios as the single-player portion of their games. (In fact, the recent World in Conflict shipped without a single-player skirmish mode altogether.) These scenarios have a peculiar feeling – they use some of the same rules as the core game while often violating others.[...]

Yes, too much scripting is bad. But not all scripting is bad. Just like anything, the time and place and moderation matter. Really, I’m in agreement for the most part. But I get the impression Soren wants to get rid of scripting in all games… And I just can’t agree with that. Take a look at things like Alpha Centauri… It was was mostly unscripted, but at certain points, events happened (depending on time or research, etc) and it made the player feel more involved, not less so. I’ll definitely go with his point for games like Company of Heroes. OMG. I played through that single player when I was bored. It was bad. Not even half fun bad, just bad.They just throw out all of the rules of the skirmish or multiplayer games and lock entire missions down until you do X exactly right. Weak.

7. Putting story in the wrong places

Story and games have a checkered history. Too many have suffered from boring cut-scenes, stereotyped characters, and plots that take control away from the player. Especially problematic are games which don’t let the player fast-forwarding through cringe-worthy dialogue. The worst offense, however, is when a story gets stuck somewhere it really doesn’t belong. Like in a strategy game. After all, strategy games are the original games. Humans first discovered gameplay with backgammon and chess and go; it’s a noble tradition. The “story” in a strategy game is the game itself. Picking a specific example, how much better of a game would Rise of Legends have been if Big Huge Games had given up on creating a story-based campaign and instead iterated on the excellent turn-based Conquer the World strategy layer from Rise of Nations?[...]

I agree and disagree. Yes, the story in Rise of Legends (his example) actually got in the way of the gameplay and the fun. Agreed completely. But, what if instead of the story being in the missions and was instead based on what countries you captured and how long it took you to do so? That would have been less invasive and not ruined the fun part of the game, the gameplay. My point being that story can coexist with a good single player campaign. So I think I agree with him here, kind of. Just because people haven’t managed story well in the past is not a reason to throw it out all together.

In Other News:

EA actually does realize that piracy isn’t what they normally claim it is:

"Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale," she (Mariam Sughayer of EA’s corporate communication center) tells Gamasutra.

Wait a second… so they put in this annoying DRM bullshit and now they say that bit torrent downloads aren’t actually related to lost sales? So why in the fuck are they putting DRM in the game in the first place? I didn’t purchase Spore, one of the reasons being the game didn’t seem awesome enough to deal with putting the extra bullshit software on my system. If the DRM didn’t exist, I may very well of bought it. I didn’t pirate it either, but that’s because I’m patient and I’ll either play it after it’s really cheap and the DRM is easily stripped out or when EA patches the DRM to not exist.

The overall point being though… Why include it in the first place if it isn’t actually helping sales? It probably has nothing to do with purely business reasons and making themselves and investors feel better about it rather than actual usefulness of it. Nothing at all.

And in absolutely stunning news, Epic still doesn’t want to make PC games:

Do you see the Xbox 360 as the main platform as opposed to the PC? During the whole Unreal time it was very much PC focused.

The PC right now is a fair amount different to what it was back in the day, with all the badly integrated video chips. Here’s the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC.

So piracy was a main point for you…

Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.

But when the dust has settled, is there any possibility of Gears 2 on PC?

No.

Definitely not?

No.

Hmmm… I love that they blamed piracy for their lack of game sales. I absolutely love it. I mean, sure, other games aren’t selling millions of copies on the PC (even Crysis sold over a million world wide). Oh, and the part about the people that know how to configure their systems are also the people that are going to pirate it. Awesome.

I don’t want to get started on PC game piracy again, but long story short, they are partially right and Unreal 3 was not a very good game (good engine, not a great game). If you base your withdrawal from the PC market on that, you’re dumb. That is all.

What Would Matt Do: First, quit making generlizations. Second, quit being dumb. These things alone should help a lot of people.

Update: Looks like either I didn’t read his posts correctly or Soren wasn’t clear. Either way, we are in complete agreement after this post.