Rreevviieeww

Just thinking out loud today.

I still wonder about my "reviews," and my effort to get ideas across without too much time investment (so I have time for work) while providing something substantive and conversation-inspiring to get my feed of "industry conversation."

Is the present approach fine? I spent several posts on Demon's Souls with thoughts as compartmentalized as possible and though it was manageable this way, I wonder if the split post format gets too incoherent. Not that I can go back to creating a huge post; it just makes me wonder if I should continue with it or spend less time on brief-but-interesting ideas (perhaps a designer-oriented approach with Kotaku's (loved/hated) review style) and let those interested ask for detail according to curiosity.

What reviews haven't I done yet? Bayonetta, Borderlands, Mass Effect 2, and Bioshock 2 come to mind. Any preference?

Next!

Unity 3 was announced. I'm excited to see the full list of features, particularly to see if networking has improved, but the 360 and PS3 support news is way cool. I so love the tool. Just yesterday, I scripted the following:

• Changed thin floors in all random tiles so they can be shot through to mimic firing through grating.
• Fixed minimap to correctly update "rooms visited" when not open.
• Added avatar health and shields, with shield regeneration a la "every shooter," including HUD presentation.
• Added enemy damage from enemies that get too close to you.
• Added health pickups.
• Added random % chance for enemies to drop said pickups, with hack to make sure they drop in movement path.

I still can't believe how much fun it is to finally get my hands dirty in this stuff. Empowering and fun.

More Kwedit

I mentioned Kwedit in a previous post, and thought you might enjoy seeing Colbert's take. It was interesting that I got an official response when I posted about it, and I'm enjoying the public's reaction.

Demon's Souls, pt.7: Feedback

The following comment on the Demon's Souls review seemed worth a larger post:

Elias: Interesting. Do you think its more original mechanics would work well in a less daunting, more accessible game? Maybe some but not others? Which?

Hum. Off-handedly, of the most novel systems:

Messaging System

Unless you had a narrative reason for reading messages from other players, this system might pop you out of the experience. If you care about context, you also need some type of message-choosing if you want it to keep in your narrative, else 1337-speak beware. Finally, the presence of this system depends on how much of your game is difficult enough to warrant hints. This wouldn't be my first choice for a system to port.

Joining Games to Assist
The novelty of this system came from how it strongly encouraged you to play with strangers but still felt like a single-player game. I might describe the basic requirements as (a) the host is in a special position to host (e.g., is alive, or found a random drop), (b) adding players helps you accomplish a highly desirable goal that is difficult to accomplish otherwise (e.g., stay alive, or access special powers/content) (c) players disappear after helping you accomplishing that goal, (d) added players can't subtract from your experience (e.g., no audio support so players can't disrupt things with their blather, or no real way to trigger bad events), (e) and players gain something desirable for helping (e.g., life, or the ability to pick up players too). As long as these goals were met, it could be a positive addition to a any game. Your goals needn't prevent a negative (i.e., dying).

Interestingly, you could probably recreate the exact setup for Demon's Souls including its death focus, without actually making the game a hardass. For example, if you pass a level without dying, you get a "leader bonus", and the more players join your game when "leading," the more bonuses you and your party get; you can also become a leader by helping a leader with some task. This would mirror Demon's Souls' experience without needing to making the base experience overly challenging, so long as "leader play" is important enough that it provides incentive toward this kind of use.

Invading Games

As a rule of thumb, this would be too stressful for a casual experience, but if you have a "versus" multiplayer component you want players to experience, the "play as someone else's boss" idea is an awesome way to introduce it, provided (a) it feels like part of the single-player experience, (b) is infrequent enough (e.g., once), and (c) something about the situation makes your opposition less stressful (e.g., less health in Demon's Souls, or easy repeatability and early occurrence in Guild Wars).

Demon's Souls, pt.7: The End

Demon's Souls was frequently frustrating to the point of my wanting to quit, but as I hung on long enough to understand the mechanics under play, I was able to enjoy the novelty and fun of many of its mechanics, and appreciate the excellent presentation of game convention interpreted into a world full of grim realism, buoyed by interesting gameplay, audio, art, and technology. It really is the full package, though it would be difficult to blame anyone for not having the patience and time to experience it.

As a game designer, I wonder whether the absence of information did Demon's Souls any favors. The lack of information was the biggest hindrance to my enjoyment, and though I can see how not understanding the consequences of its world could mimic reality and even bring a community together, that community is diminished for latecomers (me), and game conventions could probably have been explained without breaking context. Even explaining the idea behind not sharing information might have been enough.

Upon completing the game, I was unsurprised by the wave of relief that washed over me -- not an inappropriate feeling after playing the role of a small hero standing up against the forces of an all-powerful demon -- but confused by my urge to play it again on its harder difficulty. It was as if I had finally taken down a most horrible opponent, and while still grasping the hilt of the knife I struggled to kill it with, exhausted, angry, and still overwhelmed with frustration, I had to beat it once more just to twist it.

Demon's Souls, pt.6: Multiplayer

The multiplayer component in Demon's Souls was great -- perhaps the most novel and impressive part of the game -- and I want to describe a few moments that made me happy. There are no story spoilers per se, but you could call them gameplay spoilers if you want to experience it first hand, without me flavoring them.

Message in a Bottle
I've mentioned that players can leave messages on the ground that others can read, to get clues about traps, trouble, or treasure. One of the ways the designers incentivize using this system is by making the game nasty, making players' messages valuable. But that alone would make the exchange one-sided, where players who read messages get something, but players who leave messages get nothing. Fortunately, this is not the case. If you leave a message and someone reads it, and they flag the message to indicate that they "liked" it, then that flagging will give the person who left the message a boost of health and mana. It is a really cool thing when you are inches away from certain death, to see that someone just recommended your message, and you return to life and victory.

Battle Buddies
Once I understood how the blue phantom thing worked, where I as a dead player could help a living player, or as a living player, pick up dead players to help me, I really had a lot more fun with the game. Enough that I wish the system was much more explicit. But after awhile, death didn't seem that bad. I could just reverse in a level to just before a boss fight, solicit my services, get picked up by a player, help them kill someone I already know how to defeat, and get my body back. Then, as a living player, I could pick up some blue phantoms to show me the ropes in the level I'm on. And there really was something appealing to having random strangers in your game. There is no default microphone support, and no easy way to get your friends in the game, and the randomness of it was pretty interesting, for some reason.

Standing Ground

You would think that forced PvP (when a dead player, or "Black Phantom" invades) would be an outright downer in a game as difficult as this, but once you get used to the harshness, and the fact that you spend most of your time dead, the invasions really add something to the game. It really is intense -- your heart rate goes up -- when you see the message that your world has been invaded, and you know that they will be at a disadvantage against you since they are "dead" and have a fraction of your life. To boot, it motivates you to play with other blue phantoms, since they can see when black phantoms invade, and will help you hunt them down. It really is a blast once you get into the swing of the system.

Who's the Boss?
But my favorite, favorite, favorite moment was when I was in the game and found myself suddenly invading another player's world without intending to. A cinematic played, suggesting that I was summoned from the dead by some lich. I was in an arena of sorts, surrounded by chairs, and I could hear noises outside that sounded like game combat. All of a sudden, a player entered the room, and I started fighting to defeat him. He defeated me, and I just returned to my game where I was sitting. It was an odd experience, but later in the game, I came upon the lich king, and saw that he was guarded by another player. This lich king essentially summons other players at random to be your boss fight. It's incredibly fun to defeat another player to complete the fight, and incredibly fun to be the boss. What a great feature.

Wrapping up the review in my last post.

Demon's Souls, pt.5: Fairness

At one of the few times I was about to quit Demon's Souls, I turned to reviews for a boost. After all, if so many gamers hadn't already christened the game, I wouldn't have given it as much time as I did. I wanted to know why I should continue playing.

While watching reviews, one of the things that struck me was all of them claiming something to the effect of, "Demon's Souls is hard, but it's fair," and that "you always feel like you died because of something you did, and could have prevented." Mmm, no.

It's true that most of the combat damage in the game can be avoided with extreme care once you understand how enemies fight -- enemies teach you how they fight by killing you; the game simply doesn't offer much leeway for getting hit, nor does it offer many initially readable cues. However, there are many environmental situations that are designed to kill you without giving you any cues. For example, you walk across a bridge only to learn that a dragon will swoop across and kill you with its fiery breath. In another area, trying to run between swoops, I find out that if you are too efficient at running between breaths, you also die. In another section, I walk forward only to find the ground beneath me collapse, and I fall to my death. In fact, the game loves death falls, and puts them all around you. You will fall many times, whether because an enemy knocks you off the edge, or you think it's a place you can land on only to find out it isn't, etc. All of these scenarios can be very frustrating.

Presumably, though, the reason for these scenarios is the feature that allows players to leave messages of warning for each other in the game world. If the players had nothing valuable to warn each other about, no one would appreciate the system. This design intention works. When another player warns you adequately, it feels great. Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of spam in the game, and players cannot custom tailor their messages, making their hints rather inadequate. In one particularly frustrating moment, I went through a large section of a level and saw a message to "attack" some weakened planks nearby. The intention was good, since it was to release a bunch of boulders down a ramp that trample the enemies on it. But without understanding the situation, I attacked and was trampled myself. In scenarios like the dragon above, there was a message letting me know a safe location, but the predetermined hint messages had no way to warn me of going too fast. In another dragon scenario, I wanted to explain which type of fire breath to wait for before running, and where to run, but I had no way to compose that message.

Was it a sympathetic design notion? Yes. Did it make me appreciate the multiplayer component? When it worked. Would I use the term "fair" to describe it? No. The game is unfair on purpose, and really didn't need critics defending it.