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I recently finished Shadowgrounds: Survivor, the follow up to Shadowgrounds (a good $10 game). While I happily recommend Shadowgrounds to people who like shooters, I wasn’t impressed with Survivor. It had a feature set that sounded like it was aimed at me, but none of those features worked out well in practice.

Character development was foremost among the features that just didn’t work. In the original, you have an arsenal of guns and you earn a variety of upgrades throughout the game. They retained that in Shadowgrounds, but they split the weapons between three separate characters. That means the arsenal was cut into small, unsatisfying chunks that forced a specific style of gameplay. The addition of some minor stat improvement for the individual characters didn’t even come close to making up for the loss of guns.

Difficulty is one of the things that really made Shadowgrounds fun. It was challenging and I frequently teetered on the edge of death, but I rarely died. Often, it felt like a scene from Aliens, where I was desperately fighting against an overwhelming and dangerous foe. That’s gone in Survivor. The game was trivially easy, even starting on the highest difficulty. I was never in danger of dying, and it was rare to even take damage.

So, I recommend trying Shadowgrounds but not the sequel. You can find it (or the demo) on Steam or Totalgaming.net, although the demo doesn’t deliver any pitched fights.

This is the third post in my mini-series on controls.

Recently, I started playing an interesting game called Avencast. It’s essentially Diablo’s hack ‘n’ slash gameplay with an extra layer of depth in the controls. Avencast has a steep learning curve because it’s controls are quite unusual for an action RPG. It handles more like a top-down shooter where the keyboard controls your movement, and the mouse controls where you’re looking/shooting. Double tapping a directional key triggers a roll, then you can change the direction of the roll by changing your view with the mouse. You can side-step by hitting space+directional key.

As you can probably tell from that rough description, there’s a lot more dodging and quick movement in Avencast than in the typical Diablo-style action RPG. I’m going to focus on something that’s much more unique - combos. Every spell in the game is mapped to a specific key combo, similar to Street Fighter. Typical combos are three keystrokes: up left, up right, left up and so forth followed by a mouse click. Left click on the mouse triggers a blood (melee) spell, and right click triggers a spirit (range) spell.

This control system has some interesting implications, and there are two that I consider the most important for my experiences in Avencast. By having all the spells mapped to combos that use movement keys + mouse clicks, it means I never have to move my hands from where they belong - resting on the main controls. I don’t have to reach out to try to hit 9, or ALT+9 or whatever other out-of-the-way control I have bound to a specific, rarely used spell. That helps make the gameplay more fluid because I maintain a state of readiness for dodging enemy attacks. The other important element is the sense of empowerment it provides from having all the controls and spells right at my fingertips. It definitely feels like a fighting game, and in those games mastering the range of controls and attacks is part of the experience. Controlling my character this way makes the game feel more involved.

The previous paragraph comes dangerously close to contradicting my earlier post about the impact of difficult controls and how they ruin games. There’s no question that the controls in Avencast will be a huge stumbling block for many players, but they do allow you to setup simple one-click hot keys that are useful for spamming the same spell. We’ve seen better examples of this in games that use unique interfaces, such as Dance Dance Revolution. In DDR, the control system makes the game way harder than it would be otherwise - but that’s also what makes the game fun. It’s a delicate balance between using difficult controls to provide gameplay versus being difficult for no good reason. Avencast treads way too close to this line, but it does an admirable job for first title from a small developer.

All of the moves in Avencast are easily executed, so it doesn’t need the same degree of mastery as a fighting game. However, it still carries some of the same problems. There’s a short ramp-up time whenever I play after several days as I re-familiarize myself with the controls. I experienced the same thing in fighting games, and it usually took about a minute or two to get back up to full speed. Interestingly enough, I find the combos to be most useful for the rarely used spells as opposed to the common ones. This is strange, because it’s harder to remember a combo for something you don’t use as often. It works for me because the rarely used spells really aren’t that rare (every couple minutes), and it makes me feel like I’m doing something major. If I want to quickly spam a spell I can use a regular hotkey.

I’m enjoying Avencast enough that I expect to finish the game, which is something that’s becoming increasingly rare for me lately. Numerous nights of Street Fighter and Soul Calibur made it easy for me to adapt to the new control scheme. Avencast’s controls enable gameplay, while Gothic’s blocked gameplay - that’s the key difference. This first outing is far from perfect though, and there are a number of areas where the controls are clunkier than they should be. For some people, I expect Avencast’s controls will be just like Gothic’s were for me, and that’s a bad thing.

Still, I find the controls in games to be an interesting subject, as you can tell from this rambling stream-of-thought post. Maybe someday I’ll collect my thoughts on the subject in a more coherent and complete manner… but that would require a distinct lack of laziness.

As a designer, I feel like it’s my job to panic. Designers are in a unique position where they possess all the right knowledge about the game to evaluate a problem and how severely it will impact the game. During beta in Pirates, I ran across a handful of issues that were believed to be minor until I laid my eyes on them and my head exploded. Many of the issues MMORPGs face are minor quirks and oddities, but sometimes those open up huge potential holes if you know about the related systems. That’s why I say that it’s part of my job. With that, I present you the Design Panic Meter:

I blatantly stole this idea from a Feature Commitment Index that I see posted around the office. Originally, I started this as a joke but I’ve found that it’s actually quite useful. It’s a clear, concise way to communicate to everyone on the “live issues” team exactly how design regards a specific problem, especially when it comes to exploits. It also saved me from having to say, “This Is Really Bad” whenever something came up and no one knows exactly what I mean.

In no way am I trying to say that people in other positions don’t understand games well enough to judge the severity of a problem… but designers are aptly suited to running around and flailing our arms in panic.

EDIT: In case it wasn’t clear, panic is bad!

We just presented our first really challenging, non-PvP group content to the public and it was received quite favorably. It’s almost like group problem solving is a fun activity in MMORPGs. Shocking.

Ben Zeigler posted some thoughts on a book entitled The Science of Happiness. While there wasn’t anything surprising in his comments, it provided a good overview of how we respond to MMOs. I’m going to pick up a copy.

This is the first in a short series of related posts on the subject of game controls.

Every so often, I encounter a game that’s incredibly difficult for all the wrong reasons. While those reasons vary, controls is the one I’m going to talk about today. Gothic 2 is going to be my punching bag today, because it holds a unique place in this aspect. I’ve earned a reputation for being quite good at games and I like a challenge, but Gothic 2’s newbie experience repeatedly beat me down. My arch nemesis, the Load Game screen, greeted me two out of every three times I ran into a rat, wolf, goblin or bandit, always imploring me to give it another shot. And so I did.

But why did I keep dying? It wasn’t just because the combat was challenging. The learning curve was harsh, but that was something I could overcome. My deaths were often the result of arcane controls that prevented me from performing the desired actions. Movement and attacking was difficult and unresponsive in general. It’s been a long time so it’s hard for me to remember all of the details about combat. Simple functions - like enabling quicksaves and binding a key to “use healing potion” - were features that could only be enabled through INI files. Why are those options locked away in an INI file? Is there a reason that I shouldn’t be saving my game, and therefore it should be inconvenient to do so?

The other elements of Gothic 2 were appealing enough that I kept going at it even as I was frustrated, and it might be the only time I’ve had to cheat to make it through a game. That actually came later, because I eventually got tired of dealing with the controls but I still wanted to finish the game. Now I’m going to go out on a limb and make a controversial declaration: difficulty should come from gameplay, not controls. Despite that, I’m indebted to Gothic 2’s punishing difficulty, and I’m really only using it here to setup the points I really want to discuss. I’ll explain why in the next post.

I’ve been catching up on my reading, and I came across some interesting articles. Recently, Ryan Shwayder at Nerfbat wrote about MMORPG nostalgia. One line I find particularly intriguing:

“At some point, every MMO designer who ever played EverQuest back in the day has wanted to recreate that experience word for word. Some have even tried and failed.”

It brings up a point that I feel is worth mentioning: I am the exact opposite. After playing MUDs for many years before Everquest came out, I was sorely disappointed. EQ was setup in a way that made players endure horrible things, and I was eager to see the genre evolve. WoW was a big step forward, but I was still disappointed by the beta since so much of EQ was visible in WoW. I hoped they would have taken a few more steps than they did. WoW just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time.

It’s ironic, because I can probably thank EQ for my current job as a game designer. At the time, I had grown completely jaded due to my experiences on MUDs. I reacted so strongly that it helped drive me, and I believed that the design of an MMORPG should respect its players. It was a good game for its time and its audience, and it was definitely an accomplishment to create… yet that didn’t make it feel any less wrong. There’s something unsettling about the way it treated players and their time. Where other people think back on EQ nostalgically, it sparks my memories of a laundry list of things I never want to place in a game. Time is a finite resource, and the thought of designing systems that waste large amounts of people’s time makes me sick to my stomach.

In case you haven’t read Ryan’s post, it’s about how nostalgia is a dangerous source of inspiration in MMO design (which almost contradicts the entire point of my post!).

Many years ago, when I first saw an item with +chance to find magic items, I immediately reacted, “Wow, that’s cool!” I never thought through the implications, but hey, I wasn’t even in high school yet. By the time Diablo II rolled around, I had grown to believe it’s a horrible mechanic everywhere I’ve seen it used. By now I’ve played Diablo II to death, and it’s only reinforced that belief. Now, I still think that magic find is a cool stat - it’s just always used improperly. In Diablo II, magic find gear sent me spiraling into the abyss. When I’m playing that style of game, I want to find cool loot… and I want to use the damned loot. Games create a catch-22 situation when they have heavily impactful +magic find gear. If I play using normal gear I’ll miss out on a lot of loot, then I’ll discover I need the +magic find gear to find more new stuff. I’ll find all sorts of cool stuff if I’m wearing full suit of +magic find gear, but I can’t use any of it… unless it has more stats and equal/better +magic find. Otherwise, I’m gimping my future loot gains, and it’s only a matter of time before it completely washes out.

It creates a “screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t” feeling that I don’t want in my games. Magic find isn’t evil on its own, but rather it’s how we use it that’s the problem. Magic find improves the items you get, allowing you to use better gear. Which means it should appear in a place that doesn’t conflict with its bonus. Distribute it through achievements, temporary rewards, difficulty settings, you name it - just don’t put it on my equipment.

This diatribe brought to you by Hellgate: London, even though I haven’t played it in months. I found myself using crappy gear in Hellgate so that I could get more loot, and it hurt my gameplay experience. Switching to powerful gear feel any better, because then I was just screwing over my loot.