Mechanic Analysis

Stealth Game Spotting Deconstruction

Celia WagarLeave a comment

This is ultimately a fine-tuned taking apart of how enemies spot you in stealth games. Might read a bit dry, enjoy.

In a conference on stealth, the Monaco developer mentioned that he red to at all times if possible have every bit of feedback to the player and all decisions be completely binary. Either yes or no. This is in contrast to a stealth genre that is seemingly devoted to more obfuscation and more gradient perceptions. His stated reason for this design decision is because in a gradating system players must learn to get a feel for the interactions which makes it difficult for beginners to act with much certainty, where completely binary interactions make it immediately extremely clear how the system behaves. I think this concept of binary versus fuzzy feedback is worth exploring. A companion idea worth relating to this is that as people have more choices they become overwhelmed by those choices and incapable of judging the choices they are making very well. A similar phenomenon might be at play here. Though as a corollary, as more choices are open, the range of expression becomes wider and more precise. I have been a fan of analog information in the past, but it may be worth investigating the benefits of its opposite, digital information. Analog information may be an easy way to create a wealth of meaningful playstates, however the difficulty of reading some forms of analog information may be its downfall. People are hardwired to recognize the rate of descent on falling objects and calculate their future positions, but something like realizing how far sound travels from you is very hard to perce ive in a digital 3D space. It may be that human minds are only good at processing certain forms of analog information and poor at processing others that have less tangible effects. Obvious example being the aforementioned process of objects moving through space, angular velocity, and the affects of physics on them. Worse analog perceptions could include things such as temperature, volume, or something like top speed versus acceleration in F-Zero, as those are represented more abstractly from their real world counterparts in a game, and some of those have no spatial visual representation. It may be possible though to augment our perceptions of those by mapping them to something spatial and visual such as a bar that fills in proportion to the fuzzy value. Back on stealth games, Mark of the Ninja is not as binary as monaco, but almost all its interactions are also extremely distinct with only small gradations where gradations exist at all. If investigations were done of more games in this respect then it may be possible to devise an overarching theory of information feedback for stealth games, or more games where information feedback is especially critical.

Worth noting is this conflicts heavily with my proposed perfect stealth spotting system, which took the complete opposite approach by making all the information as fuzzy as possible.

As a deconstruction, mark of the ninja had only 2 states of light, in the light and in the dark. The guards have 3 vision cones, one for the dark which is extremely close to them (1), one for the light which is further out (2), and one for the light that activates partial spottings, which is even further out (3). Enemies without night vision could only spot you if you were within cone 1 while in dark, or if you were within cone 2 in light. With night vision they use cone 2 all the time. Cone 3 was unused unless you were in light or I think if the guard has night vision, triggering partial spottings. Partial spottings have the guard mark your current location, then they move over to that spot until they see you or are standing on the same X coordinates as the partial spotting point, then they enter a routine where they stand in place and look around, giving up if they don’t find you and returning to their prior positions. Sound is completely binary, emanating from running footsteps and a few other sources. The source of the sound will mark an partial sighting spot, resulting in the same routine playing out. Sounds never result in alarms, only getting seen in cone 1 or 2 triggers an alarm. On normal game mode, cone 1 is displayed visually, as are partial spotting points, and sounds that can trigger guards, such as footsteps, distraction items, grappling, and environmental objects. Between these there is a set of extremely predictable and understandable behaviors while still offering a large range of potential game states.

To compare, Metal Gear Solid 1 did not have states of light, and had only 1 cone of vision, displayed on the minimap. Being in this cone would trigger an alert phase, as would assault of a guard or being seen by a camera. Creating a noise such as by stepping on a loud floor tile or tapping on a wall would trigger an investigation phase for guards close enough to hear it, causing them to move over to check out the source of the sound. If they see the player, they will initiate an alert phase, and if not they will return to the standard route. An additional and case specific example would be creating footprints in the snow, which would cause the guard to enter an investigation phase, following the footprints. This system is even more binary and more simple than Mark of the Ninja’s, and characterized the game’s emphasis on pattern memorization to get through the stealth challenges, with a few additional means such as the cardboard box, chaff grenades, and deliberately creating distractions to draw guards. Metal Gear solid displayed the viewcones and positions of guards on the minimap at all times, except during full alert status, where the radar would “jam”, preventing them from telling where enemies were. The radar would also jam when chaff grenades were used, or in certain areas such as revolver ocelot’s boss battle. The radar’s effectiveness, having both the map and enemies and yourself displayed on it, enabled players to play almost entirely using it alone.

In Dishonored there is a much more fuzzy system in comparison to the two above. The spotting algorithm’s state is clearly displayed above each guard and civilian’s head as a three stage alarm. If the player is spotted from a long distance away, the NPC will stare in the direction of the player and will fill up one or two bars of the alarm meter. Creating a loud sound somewhere in the vicinity of the NPC will cause a stage 2 alert immediately, and they will stare at the source of the disturbance. As they continue to stare at the player, the alarm stage will build up and eventually reach stage 3, at which point they will cause a full alert and chase after the player or alert other NPCs. The rate at which this alert status builds is proportional to the player’s distance from the NPC and the level of darkness they are in, with it being impossible to be completely invisible to the NPC unless they are out of the NPC’s vision cone. NPCs in Dishonored never investigate disturbances by moving around except during full alert, in which they will chase the player based on the last known location, investigate the area for a short while afterwards, and eventually return to their routes. Once an alert has been called all guards on that area of the level are permanently on stage 1 alert status, meaning they will respond to the player much more quickly in the event of a future spotting. If a player appears very close to an enemy there is a grace period before alarm is called where if they can dispatch that guard immediately, such as by assassinating them with the sword, the alarm will not be triggered at all, and they can stealth kill the guard in one hit as if they were doing it from cover. There is a similar grace period on partial sightings where one can blink away and be forgotten. It might even be on full sightings too, but I cannot remember. I’ll need to investigate more if I ever replay the game. Dishonored’s more fuzzy system is more difficult to read than the prior two, which made interpretation of it a bit more difficult for me. To alleviate this, they added an ability called Darkvision, which could be used at the cost of mana to view the vision cones of guards. Darkvision’s mana cost was only 25% of the bar, and was only a temporary cost, so in general you could bring it up at nearly any time at minimal cost. It also allowed you to view guards through walls if they were close enough.

Thief 2’s system is significantly more fuzzy and complicated than any of the prior systems. I do not understand it well enough to evaluate it at this point. I believe there are at least 5 viewcones involved, but I do not understand their operation or ranges. (found this gamasutra article, I guess I’ll have a look through this at a later point. Though I think it got adjusted in the transfer to Thief 2 from Thief 1, as thief 1 had a really irritating detection system that wasn’t very clear, and Thief 2 seemed easier to read.)
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2888/building_an_ai_sensory_system_.php

One thing worth noting after my playthrough of Thief 1 and most of Thief 2 is my analysis of the different surfaces that can be walked on and the alerting sounds they produce.

Noises have an apparent range based on the type of noise they are, with jumping being the loudest, and having the furthest range. Noises are dampened by doors, and do not operate strictly on line of sight like vision, and can go around corners. The four distinct classes of movement are all crouching movement, standing walking movement, standing running movement, and jumping. Soft surfaces such as Carpet, moss, and grass can be traversed in any form of movement without producing any sound, soft dirt I believe can be traversed in any way except for jumping, which creates noise. Harder surfaces such as soft stone or hard dirt are silent when crouching or walking, but will make noise if you run. Hard stone will make noise if you walk, and I think wood will too, though I am not completely sure. The loudest surfaces, tile and metal, will make noise regardless of the type of motion across them, but can be traversed silently by crouching and mashing the movement keys to continually reset the phase of the walk cycle so the sound never plays. It is theoretically possible to do this at higher rates of movement, but the walk cycle is much shorter the faster the movement is, so the amount of time the key can be held down is shorter as well. I imagine a macro might be able to silent run if it spammed motion keys on alternating frames.

There are three guard states, aroused, investigating, and alert. In the aroused state they will comment on slight sightings or disturbances, and I have no idea how slight this is. In the investigating state they will actively investigate the area that is of interest until the cooldown timer runs out. In thief 1 guards are immune to backstabs and the blackjack in this state, in thief 2 they are vulnerable to both. In the alert phase in both games they cease to be vulnerable. Quieter noises in the investigation state will mark a new place of interest and reset the cooldown timer, and louder noises will cause an alert. Guards in the investigation phase periodically update their place of interest to be wherever the player is at regular intervals, even if the player is perfectly concealed in total darkness. This effectively mangetizes guards to the player’s position, so the player must avoid guards even while cooldowns are going off. On tile floors or bright areas this can be very tricky. In the neutral state, quieter noises will provoke an aroused state, and in that state they will provoke an investigation state, which has the effect of creating an escalation as noises continue. When an alert state and the post-alert investigation state cools off, guards will return to their original patrols in the aroused state, and so are easily provoked, at least in Thief 1. In Thief 2, they seem to be in a neutral state instead.

Physical Information and Counterplay

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Physical information is characteristics of an action a character can take in a game that establishes it physically for the player. Physical information provides a closer analogue to the physical act the character is performing and making the action less vague or abstract with relation to the rest of the system. Examples of how an action can be made to feel more physical include giving it anticipation and recovery times, articulated hitboxes that more closely reflect the state the character is in, addition or subtraction of momentum as well as carrying over momentum from state to state. The opposite of imbuing an action with physical information tends to be more arbitrary flags such as type weaknesses, characters snapping onto others (especially if the snap-on range is large), having lock-ons, hitscan, randomized attacks (tend to fit similar design space as each other, function identically), “bad animations”, (list incomplete, think up more examples from games). There is a relationship between what I am coining as physical information and Game Feel or Kinaesthetics. Coincidentally many things that improve Game Feel or Kinaesthetic also give the game a greater tactical depth, which is the focus of this article.

Combat in almost all video games is built on a series of counters (MMOs with their DPS shit can suck a dick). Games are based on a series of what beats what. The most simple possible example is a binary guess, like left or right, and above that, rock paper scissors. Beyond this it is possible to further differentiate options to produce more subtle counters, such as by introducing attacks of different speeds, consisting of different startup frames, active frames, and recovery times. Attacks with short startups are more likely to counter attacks with longer startups if they’re thrown out at the same time, simply because the faster to come out attack will reach the active hitting portion of the animation sooner than the slower to come out attack. Attacks with quick recoveries are less likely to be punished, again because it is harder to attack those fast enough to catch them while they are vulnerable. By diversifying the startups of attacks, one can create a wider range of situations that play out, like interrupting a slow attack with a faster one, punishing a big attack with a slow recovery by starting your medium speed attack late so it just catches them at the end. With a diverse range of attacks time-wise, a more diverse range of counters is possible with less actual moves, because now attacks can counter each other on the basis of how the player times their inputs, so there can be different outcomes for using the same attacks.

To add further diversity, attacks can have different hitboxes relative to each other. One attack may be a low kick done while crouching, another a downward facing attack while jumping, and another might be a standing punch. These 3 archetypes represent the standard triangle of counters in King of Fighters. Jumping attacks done during shorthops go over low kicks, allowing the player to hit opponents who try to crouch and attack. Standing attacks however will punch the opponent out of the air, and typically get good startup times to boot, where jumping attacks take time to first jump then attack. Low kicks however reach really far, and the crouch usually keeps characters below the punch hitbox, countering standing punches. Add into this that there are many variations of these various attacks that all have their own ranges and speeds, and the range of counters possible gets even more dynamic. With variable hitbox positionings, it is possible to beat out faster attacks with slower ones simply by outspacing them, hitting them from afar. Things get more interesting when one considers how attacks may increase the range a character can be hit at, or a character moves during their attack.

Add this: hitboxes getting longer when people do attacks

Of course, all of these principles also apply to 3rd person action games or most other games with melee attacks. Demon’s Souls and Dark souls are really clear cut examples. In Demon’s Souls, I played almost exclusively with bastard sword or the dragon bone smasher (then zwei on my first dark souls playthrough). One thing in common about these weapons is that they all have an R2 attack that is a long range overhead swing that knocks down if it hits. Against lower level enemies, these attacks can be deadly, though they have a long startup. What I got really good at was measuring how fast the enemy was coming at me, and timing my R2 to hit them just as they came into range. Even though I had a speed disadvantage against nearly all enemies, I could triumph over them with good timing. However when I went into PvP play, I found this tactic was not only poor, but almost useless. The overhead swing has a far reach and superb damage, a guaranteed kill in many situations, but against an online opponent who could anticipate it coming, it was far harder to land. Especially because its hit area was only a straight line, allowing people to avoid it easily by moving to the left or right.

Another example from a nonfighting game is Chivalry. Chivalry is a first person melee action game, where players swing melee weapons such as swords, maces, axes, polearms, and flails. Players have 3 attacking options, a broad swing across, a thrusting attack with extra range, and an overhead attack which does a lot of damage. Without a shield, most classes must time their blocks close to when attacks are incoming, and all blocks are directional relative to the angle of defense. Within the same weapon class, most weapons have relatively the same swing speeds, but across classes there are different ranges and swing speeds, from extremely quick daggers, to slow battle axes. The most basic tactic is simply attacking first to catch the opponent in startup and avoid trading blows. Beyond that one can feint an attack and punish by attacking late, moving away from the person while their attack is going on,

Super Armor is another element of creating a more diverse range of counters, because hitstun is an important part of establishing counters in the first place. Super Armor is essentially when an attack is capable of ignoring hitstun (but not damage) usually during its startup or active phases, allowing an attack to out-prioritize other ones. This is sometimes also accomplished with invincibility frames, such as with most rising uppercut moves in fighting games. Super Armor and invincibility frames allow characters to tank or ignore hits, and attacks featuring them usually have other drawbacks to balance them out, such as dragon punches having a short range and long recovery, or super armor being broken by attacks that hit more than once (like in most fighting games) or of sufficient strength (like in smash bros, and dark souls). Attacks featuring super armor are usually given to slower characters, with the idea being that the character may take damage from trading attacks with their opponent, but their attacks are strong enough to come out ahead in the trade, in addition to stunning the opponent, possibly providing combo opportunities for greater damage, and knockdown or other positional advantages after the attack. Focus attacks in Street Fighter 4 have super armor on them, allowing them to absorb 1 hit as temporary damage, but they are powerful attacks and on counter hit or level 2 or 3 of charge, they will crumple the opponent, allowing for nearly any followup attack. Focus attacks can be used to predict incoming single hit attacks, absorb them, and counter attack for a lot of damage. Potemkin in Guilty Gear has a dash attack with a powerful finisher and one hit’s worth of super armor, which allows him to rush at the opponent and crush them, even if they attack back. In most scenarios this can overwhelm an opponent. It also provides knockdown which is really helpful for Potemkin.

It’s important to have hitstun in a game with melee combat because without it, there is no motivation to use any attack other than the one with the highest damage per second and miss as little as possible (in dark souls, that would be the R1 attacks). Having hitstun in place allows attacks to interrupt one another so that counters of speed and timing are even possible. Having the wrong amount of hitstun on an attack can similarly be frustrating, as I can attest to, playing Ganondorf in Smash Bros Melee. Ganondorf’s Down B attack in Melee is powerful, but has relatively low hitstun and long recovery times, especially true for the air version hitting the ground, which has really small quake boxes, so it is tricky to hit people with, and more frequently than not, even on a successful hit, the hitstun would be so low that the opponent could full on counter attack it before ganondorf recovered.

Spatial dynamics for 2d & 3d games

Celia WagarLeave a comment
You dislike 2D beat-em-ups, but enjoy 2D fighting games?
 
Absolutely. 2d fighting games have high and low blocks, they have crouching, they have attacks that hit at different heights and moves that go above and below each other. 2d beat em ups have none of these elements, in exchange they have a Z axis that lets characters move forward and back, and no attacks that really move along the Z axis. Characters can’t face forward or back in most of these like you could with an overhead game like zelda, so they can’t attack into the foreground or into the background, so they don’t make use of space.
 
I’m curious about what you said to that guy about spatial dynamics and 2D beat-em-ups lacking them. In what way do 3D brawlers have these dynamics, and before that, what are these dynamics in the first place?
 
it’s it obvious from my explanation? In a purely 2d sidescrolling game game, like metal slug, you have all this shit going on on the 2d plane. you have bullets that move across it, the character can jump and crouch around various obstacles. In a 2d overhead game, like Zelda, Ys (the 3d Ys games too, like Ys Origin), or a shmup, you have a similar thing going on, you can have all these different enemy sizes, projectile sizes, the characters can move at different speeds, a lot of different stuff can go on.
 

In a 2d beat em up, every character is like a flat piece of cardboard, characters aren’t square or circular, they’re more like a line drawn on the ground projected upwards. moves aren’t high or low or mid, they’re all a line projected a fixed distance in front of the character. More than that, the characters can never face backwards in any way. They don’t have 8, 6, or even 4 facing directions, they have two. They can only attack two ways, forward or back, and all their attacks only vary in startup time and strength. They can’t attack across the Z axis at all. Even though 2D beat em ups allow jumping, the lack of spatial dynamic in the rest of the game makes the application of these jumps limited where a game like Ys Origin or Oracle of Seasons can actually have a semblance of aerial combat.

 

In a 3d brawler game, you can fully move around the 3d environment, the character can attack in any direction and face in any direction. the attacks are capable of having specific hitboxes rather than being a projection of a line stemming off a projection of a line.

 
I don’t get your point about spatial dynamics in 3D brawlers. Spatial awareness is very important in something like VF. Distance is what defines a 2D attack, but in 3D you’ve got stances and positions, e.g. is that roundhouse kick coming from the L or the R. In response you must react or position accordingly.
 
Aaaagh! No. Virtua Fighter and Tekken get it right! I swear I need to draw some diagrams to demonstrate what I mean. Virtua fighter and Tekken completely have the character’s hitboxes represented in a three dimensional space. I’m saying that in the camera behind the back type of games, if you have a perfect lock-on system that never ever faults, then the only factor that matters is 1 dimension, distance between the two opponents. When you have something like a 2d fighter, you can have 2 dimensions matter, distance + height, which exponentiates the number of possible interactions you can have.
 

Virtua Fighter and Tekken let you move back and forth in 3d space in addition to this, and have moves that sweep across or track the person left, right or both.

 

The trouble is, this is still kind of a shallow 3 dimensional interaction, rather than it being relative to 360 degrees of possible rotation, you have kind of a left/right/mid thing in addition to the full 2d plane. However when you move into a behind the shoulder type of 3d camera, a common occurrence is you get these lock-on systems, like in the DBZ fighters, or Rise of Incarnates (some shitty PC soul calibur spinoff I played the alpha of) where everything is perfectly locked onto the opponent. Imagine if in a 3d fighter every single move had full left/right tracking, there would be no point in making it 3d or having side-stepping anymore because everything effectively exists everywhere on the Z axis. Extreme lock-ons in behind the shoulder type of fighting games have a similar effect, it converts a 3d game into a 1d game.

 

Like, compare to Dark Souls, that game’s combat ends up being mostly 2d, because there’s almost no jumping in the middle of combat, especially not over people’s attacks, and there’s almost no ducking under attacks either except in extremely rare situations, there’s also a lockon system, which makes it so you always face your opponent, so dark souls is ALMOST a 1d game in that similar way (barring like terrain shenanigans), but characters become unable to rotate when they start swinging their weapon, so in that short period of time you can move around them. This is why a lot of dark souls matches end up being circle strafing, because if someone swings, the other guy moves around it while one is locked on. So it adds this great dynamic to sometimes not lock-on, and instead free-aim the direction of your slice, making dark souls slightly more 2d than it would be otherwise. In multiple enemy combat, you of course have multiple enemies all in different positions, so that’s very 2d.

 

https://i0.wp.com/i.imgur.com/hIBzxvZ.png
Here’s a picture I just drew up. I didn’t have time to include examples like DBZ, Dark Souls, Naruto, or Chivalry. (Also those are harder to draw with good perspective.)

 
You can jump over and under moves in those games to. It depends on how defined the combat system it. In Naruto everyone has a sort of generic hitbox, if you will, whereas in VF/Tekken, the characters have very detailed models with specific points and areas on their bodies.
Yes, the naruto point is exactly what I was addressing, happens in the DBZ fighters too, everyone feels like they have a very generic hitbox, probably because they do, and because that lock-on prevents the hitbox shape from really mattering.
 

What I really want to see is someone conquering the whole 3d fighting game thing (not because current fighters are insufficient, but because it would be interesting in its own right), to make a fighting game in full 3d where all the hitboxes matter and you can have that intense level of articulation, but that’s a very tricky thing to do from a control standpoint. I think Chivalry really comes closest to that type of ideal, but it’s simple and awkward in a lot of ways. Blade Symphony works in a similar vein, but both have a weak type of counterplay compared to what you get in traditional fighters and that’s a tricky design problem to solve on PC. DMC or Bayonetta would run into a similar problem if it were made multiplayer, along with the lock-on being too accurate, you’d have to introduce more moves that shoot off into the diagonals or sides to really take advantage of all the space around the players, having them avoid things on the 2d plane that is the ground, as well as try to diversify the block zone thing, because you block omni-directionally, which is lame.

 

In DMC though, you’d at least get away from the lock-on problem in the up-down thing, like when people jump, because characters don’t angle their attacks upwards or downwards like in DBZ or rise of incarnates. So you can go over other people’s attacks by jumping over them, so you get 2D gameplay on a plane composed of the distance to the other player, and your height. Only Chivalry has distance on both axes, and height involved so far.

I’m not convinced by your argument against 2D brawlers. How many have you played? All the things you accuse them of not having are there. What does “you can’t face backwards” even mean? Look at GH, that game is basically a 2D brawler in 3D.
 
No it’s not. God Hand’s gameplay, if you imagined it from an overhead perspective, does end up being pretty 2D, but it doesn’t abide by nearly the same limitations to its moveset.
 

Here, I ended up drawing a picture to try to illustrate my point.

Godhandversus2dbrawlers

Life Systems

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How do you feel about life systems? There seems to be this idea that they don’t belong in modern console/PC game design since they’re a hold-over from arcade games. I’ve feel this idea that there are certain things that just shouldn’t be done anymore to be shallow but I’d like to know what you think

It’s completely dumb. Life systems are just another way that games can checkpoint themselves. The only reason life systems are looked down on is that most modern games featuring them make them superfluous by only setting you back a small amount for losing all your lives, like NSMBW or NSMBU, and the others don’t exist.

The transition away from lives as a type of currency against an overall failure, or being set back multiple checkpoints is concurrent with a transition away from the concept of overall failure and checkpoints that set you back much further than a few feet. Very few modern games, excluding roguelikes, want you to suffer consequences for failure. Suffering severe consequences for failure means the likelyhood of you seeing the ending is very small, when the likelyhood of you seeing the ending in games without severe consequences is already very small.

The other thing is that lives are not immersive. They’re anti-immersive. They’re very blatantly artifice. The industry wants to move away from reminding people that they’re playing a game. The two most common representations of lives are like a shoot ’em up, where you lose a life and the character instantly respawns and you keep going, such as space invaders, touhou, ikaruga, dodonpachi, or a run and gun like contra or metal slug. Losing all your lives will mean restarting the game from scratch or from the beginning of the stage if it’s more of a home console game. Or like in a platformer such as megaman or mario, where you have a limited set, losing a life will send you back to the beginning of the screen or to a mid-level checkpoint, but losing all your lives will send you back to the beginning of the world (mario) or the whole level.

Seeing your character die and instantly come back like in Shmups or Run & Guns, doesn’t make any sense from an immersive point of view. In a game like say an RPG or an FPS, you load from a save, you recover from the last checkpoint, and it’s sort of implicitly taken that the session where you died didn’t really count. The “story” of the game that sticks with people is that the character miraculously defeated swarms of thousands of enemies single-handedly, leading to Gordon Freeman being taken as a messiah in HL2. The alternate takes get cut, those are your story, not the character’s story, and the developers silently hope you forget that story. If you’re dying and respawning, then all illusions that you’re watching and vaguely participating in a story instead of yourself acting are shattered. Arcadey games are the ones most separated from immersion because early games were heavily influenced by the artifice of Pinball. They operated on a more limited narrative syntax, had scores, flashing lights, lives (also carried over from pinball actually, pinball even coined the term 1up).

Modern creators don’t want to create games, they want to create worlds, and in order to do that, lives have to die, no matter what merits they may have.

Re: live systems. Sorry, I didn’t get what you were calling “completely dumb”. Life systems or the industry looking down on them?

The industry looking down on them. I don’t mind life systems at all. It’s just kind of funny that people reject them so hard lately. I really think it’s because of a collective push for immersion, which I’m frankly not a fan of.

Right after answering that I tweeted about this concept: Imagine when you die in a game you get a commander or something pulling you out of the field, and debriefing you, in the process telling you how many chances you have left to complete the mission. Maybe you earn more chances by performing well.

I’m sure that, if written and presented well with a bunch of unique lines of dialogue so people don’t become overly familiar with the commander’s lines, the crowd that dislikes lives would still like this presentation; even though it’s exactly the same mechanic, just a different wrapping paper. The thing they dislike about lives is literally none of the actual operation of lives, it’s the fact that it’s game-y and an artifice. They don’t dislike the concept that you have a counter that ticks down every time you run out of health and undoes one of your checkpoints sending you back to a further one when the counter runs out. They don’t even consider it that way. They dislike that our collective presentation of this in video games is so blatantly artificial and not fitting into the concepts of the fictional worlds in question. “Megaman collects a copy of his own head allowing him to come back from being literally destroyed? Why are Megaman heads littered everywhere? How is he storing his heads? What device is being used to resurrect him?” There’s no answer to these questions but contrivance and these people get mad over that.

I don’t see why lives would matter outside ‘arcade-style’ games. In an FPS you have a checkpoint system, so having lives would be pointless. I mean, say you were playing Half-Life, and ran out of all your lives, what would happen? Would you restart the entire game? That would be terrible pacing.

Most games where you had to restart the entire game when you ran out of lives were games that were only 30 minutes long if you won, like shoot ’em ups or run & guns. The exception is Mario 3, which I think had limited continues, and once you ran out of those you had to start from the complete beginning. Even then, there was a life counter in addition to a continue counter.

You’re thinking too far in the bounds of the games you’ve played before. Most first person shooters create a presentation style where there is no view of a continuous game. You have these save states you can save and load to at any time. Imagine if the presentation style was a bit different for a first person shooter, like how Quake has episodes. Imagine you started a quake episode with a limited number of lives, you couldn’t save or load in levels, and there was a dialogue between levels that automatically saved what level you were on and let you quit out or continue. All restarts were from the start of each level, and when you die it asks if you want to retry the level you were on sans one life or quit out of the episode. When you run out of lives, you have to try the whole episode and the levels inside it over again. Only real issue there is that episodes are maybe a bit long for this type of thing.

In a game like Half Life, all the areas are continuously connected, there’s no overworld or dialogues between levels, from a presentation standpoint it’s not clear where you’d go back to when you die in the first place (made further ambiguous by the crazy save-state system you can use at any time), let alone with a life and game over system in place. In these types of games, you’d need to implement a more clear checkpoint system for it to really make sense. Like how Borderlands and Far Cry have checkpoints you revive at when you die.

Issue with Save States

Celia WagarLeave a comment

So what are your thoughts on manual save points?

If you mean saving and loading from any point at any time, fuck it. Most people think It’s a point of convenience, and I think at best that type of thing should be like a suspend state (a temporary save deleted when you load it, so you can put the game down whenever you want and not lose anything), not something you can do at will.

When playing games that allow me to do that, I only use autosave points, or I try to make saves intermittently. Otherwise you end up in savescum territory, which is unpleasant to play, it removes a lot of the risk of numerous interactions by letting you just try things out and not lose anything for dumb decisions. If you have a checkpoint backing up every action you take, then you don’t need to be consistent (ie. good) at anything you do, you just need to be able to do it once by fluke or otherwise.

The thing that has to be recognized is that save systems are not just a user experience thing. They’re a game mechanic as much as checkpoints are, even if from a presentation standpoint they’re kind of presented as a thing outside the game. It may be nice to let people save and load to any point, but it also undermines the challenge and continuity of the game.

The only real exception I make to my save state rule is in games that have tedious things to do that aren’t really skill challenges, like collecting items in Thief, where I’d reload, pick up up the dozen items since my last save, and then get to the fun part with a guard. I don’t think there’s really a way to make that work without save states regrettably, not that I’ve thought about it very hard (maybe a dark souls approach where items you pick up stay picked up and you respawn from a single checkpoint per level? but then that would encourage running around grabbing items and getting bopped on purpose, so you could ignore how the item placements force you to go all around the nonlinear level doing stealth challenges from different approaches). Future Thief style games might just want to tone down the collectathon element so that they have less items to collect and the ones that are there work more in tandem with the stealth challenges. Like, only count the loot collection total from the bigger prizes and allow smaller steals like, pick pocketing, as a bonus.

Comeback Mechanics

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you believe that comeback mechanics have a place in fighting games or do you believe there’s an alternative in getting new players interested?

I don’t believe comeback mechanics help new players. I think that they just make the results of matches more inconsistent. Comeback mechanics (like ultras or Xfactor) are tricky enough to use that a first time player or even a low level player won’t be using them terribly well.

I think that what will get players into fighting games better is creating more interesting and fun tutorials that teach real skills players need in matches. Also these tutorials should let you fly through them as fast as possible, especially for the easier ones, because it’s boring and frustrating as fuck to have to go through the movement tutorial (literally how to press directions) and have to wait for it to register everything, then sit through a “COMPLETE!” message where your character does a pose at the end and have to hit next and get greeted by a loading screen.

Skullgirls did a lot in making its tutorials more fun by having the challenge of jumping over projectiles by peacock. Like ideally the tutorials stop seeming like tutorials and it becomes single player content that helps people get better at the multiplayer too. We need less random AI patterns and more of teaching people to solve canned setups that can be applied to multiplayer. Guilty Gear XX AC+ style mission modes might be cool too, like they have one mission where you can only win with an instant kill attack, and another where only combos over 2 hits do any damage, so people absolutely need to combo to win. Another where the player is prohibited from jumping.

One of Smash Bros strong points is having great single player content. Like Event mode, Adventure mode, Classic mode. Now it has enough brand momentum that they probably don’t need to do as well with those things anymore.

The lot of improvement to single player modes will be figuring out what the actual skills multiplayer tests and putting them into single player mode in a format that isn’t just rote and dull combo trials, but actually allows people to improvise and gives them positive feedback on things they do right (like imagine a mode where you have to defend against peacock projectile pressure in different ways, or AIs tuned to play with a certain style that’s beaten by playing with another style). The only thing you can’t really teach is reads, because it’s an abstract thing to read an opponent in the first place and computers are truly random, can’t be read. Playing against them and pretending like you’re reading them is a good practice though. PPMD of smash bros fame got good largely doing that (or so rumors go). You pretend like they’re actually a smart opponent and try to read what a smart opponent would do in that situation and cover it optimally.

The big hurdle is really getting people to see the game and go, “Oh, I can play this with my friends.” Most fighting games on a basic level don’t make sense to people just stepping into them. I honestly thought that button-mashers could win against mid/high level players before I got into it

With the Ultra Combos, some people believe that because they’re easily punishable, it doesn’t matter if you gain the most powerful moves in the SF4 by taking damage. Are the Ultra Combos fair or is there another layer of bullshit to this?

What it means is that the results will be less consistent really. Ultra combos don’t help the type of newbie player that might want to get into the game but is afraid, because ultra combos are hard to use and easily punishable. If you give someone a comeback factor, the good players will still be better at using it than beginner players. What this fucks up is mid to high level play because it means leads are less consistent. It means that when you’re ahead, there’s still this reversal of fortune thing they can pull off, by being closer to losing they’re also closer to winning. This means that close matches become more of a tossup. We play sets of 3, sets of 5, first to ten, because we don’t always perform consistently, but we can get a good read if we widen the sample size. Some games like rock paper scissors, since there’s so little to it, are really hard to be consistent in. Games with randomness involved are hard to be consistent in. Games with comeback factors are harder to be consistent in. Because in all of these there’s a really thin line between doing well and throwing it all away.

Ultra combos are a little less worrisome when you consider that you also gain ultra meter by absorbing attacks with focus.

http://xenozipnotes.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/comebacks.html This is another good commentary on the matter.

Why do you dislike Chain Combos?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

In beat em up games, characters typically have movelists that look like sequences of punch punch kick punch (like in Bayonetta) and the funny thing is, the later moves in that combo will be different than your ordinary punch. If you mash slash with Dante in DMC 3 times, he will do a different move every time you press the button. This is what beat em up games call a Chain. Rather than having access to all the moves all the time, you essentially have generic context sensitive attack buttons that aren’t bound to specific commands. Bayonetta’s punch and kick buttons don’t refer to a specific punch or a specific kick, they differ based on the context of the punches and kicks that came previously.

In a fighting game, Chain Combos are very different. In fighting games, all the moves do the same thing every time you activate them. Chain combos in fighting games refer to lists of moves that cancel into one another when you hit the opponent. Like in Marvel vs Capcom 3, typically your light attack cancels into medium, cancels into heavy, cancels into launcher. In Guilty Gear, punch cancels into kick, close slash, far slash, heavy slash, dust. Another salient feature of these is that you can actually cancel from any lower move in the chain into a higher one, so you can go directly from light attacks to heavy attacks, skipping anything inbetween. So if I pick up a new character in a game with chain combos, I can see what their moves are, and use them as the situation is appropriate.

The thing is, fighting games have other types of combos too, like jump-in combos (because landing on the ground cancels your aerial attack.), juggles, links (where a move stuns an opponent long enough that you can get off another attack before they can recover), and cancels into special moves.

I think a lot of beat em ups, except Devil May Cry, end up just having you work from a dumb combo list, it’s less trying things out and seeing how you can create a combo off the situation available to you, and more memorizing and reciting whatever is on the combo list to play out the exact combo they intended you to. And for a game like Bayonetta, that combo list seriously long. I want to see more individual hits that work together rather than moves hidden behind these combo chains, because then you get drastically different moves working together rather than only specific moves coming out at the end of a chain sequence.

Regarding Unlocks

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of certain types of moves like the dodge in TW101 and MGR being unlockable instead of available right from the start?

They’re core mechanics, it’s kind of pointless. It’s additionally silly how enemy step (jump cancel) was an unlockable move in DMC4. If you’re going to lock those mechanics away then you’re asking for trouble. Especially for something like unite guts. The theme of beat em ups is that the character has all the actions they need to overcome any sort of challenge within the levels available from the get-go and the only upgrades they receive are more powerful moves. Holding things like that back are just poor planning.

I honestly think all the unlock systems for moves in those types of games are kind of pointless. Having these as unlockable distracts from the intrinsic joy of mastering the system. People value accomplishments like clearing hard mode for their own sake. While people feel a type of contentment with finally unlocking everything, it’s a hollow achievement in comparison. Having the character change over the course of the game can help create a variety, a difference of feeling from when you first pick up the game and when you finish it, but I feel like those sorts of changes should be connected more directly to in-game challenges, like earning a new weapon in devil may cry by beating a boss or tracking down a new weapon in a remote area in dark souls, both of those have a more direct pattern of completing an action to receive a reward rather than ambiguous things like money systems between missions. It’s less like completing a grind to succeed and having more definite goals. It also wastes less of your time with repetition.

Regarding the unlock systems, in which types of games does it work fined in?

In general I think progression based unlocks work better than buying it from an amorphous shop, as a general rule. As for what games that sort of thing works well in… I’d think games where you don’t have very definite goals or stage based progression, such as Just Cause 2 or another open world game. The sort of idea is that the player will go all over the place and do whatever they want to do, and having a definite progression path based on accomplishing specific challenges at specific points in time wouldn’t go over very well. Though that doesn’t really justify the idea of being able to buy any of your upgrades at any time, because that seems more of a trade-offy grindy type of thing.

Unlock systems with point buy make sense in games where you’re forced in some way to specialize, because there’s inherently tradeoffs to getting one thing over another, and it comes across better thematically when different upgrades make the character more differentiated from other possible characters. In devil may cry, you eventually end up with all the upgrades, that’s the intention, so grinding for points to buy things is more of a holdover goal, preventing people from getting at the juicy part of the gameplay they really want to do. The notion is that there’s a limited number of these points and you can only get so much for them. Dark Souls softly enforced this with multiplayer, because people tried to stay around the level that other players tackling the same area were at so they could co-op and invade, so people had to make tradeoffs. Then Dark Souls 2 ruined that and everyone just went with optimal gear all the time.

What’s dumb about upgrades in console brawlers? You play well, get money, earn new abilities, and to compensate, enemies (should) get harder or more complex. It’s about progression of the player’s abilities and also a way to teach more complex movesets to players without overwhelming them.

I can agree it helps teach complex movesets to new players by limiting them to only moves they understand one at a time, but I dislike the grindy aspects of it, and I’d really hate to play a fresh game of DMC or Bayonetta and not have some ability I used all the time. Like not having the teleport on Trickster style, or the stinger attacks for bayonetta. That’s especially painful in MGR where I have to play the prologue and I can’t air parry. God hand gets along a bit better with it, because you’re limited in how much you can customize the moveset, you have to pick and choose between options rather than having all your options at once (and god hand starts you with more of a “full toolkit” to begin with), but games like DMC or bayonetta everything is always available if it’s unlocked (barring like equipment stuff). Given they fully intend to let you take that stuff back to the beginning of the game to have fun with it in the early areas, I don’t really see the point in locking it off from the player.

Making Good QTEs

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Since QTEs have become more controversial in gaming now, would you say games like “QTEs” in DMC4 and Mario and Luigi series are good ways of implementing the “mechanic?”

There are QTEs in DMC4?

I wouldn’t call those things QTEs in the first place. They’re mechanics with a consistent operation that fit into a larger schema. Quicktime events are when the game’s camera cuts to a cutscene and you are required to press an arbitrarily defined button within a certain window. The whole reason QTEs are bad is because they’re arbitrary and separated from the other mechanical interactions. They’re all or nothing and reinforce none of the core game skills.

QTEs aren’t there because anyone thought they would be a good game mechanic, they’re there because developers wanted to represent actions that are not possible among the existing game mechanics because when you have complete control of a scene you can make actions look a lot cooler. Then the button prompt gives the more bare of senses that the player did something, connecting them to the otherwise disjointed action onscreen.

The only game with good “QTEs” is God Hand, because they’re barely QTEs. Enemies have grab type attacks with unique animations and you always do the same input, shaking the stick back and forth, to escape them. Some enemies like demons can be countered by pressing the action button, but this is a context sensitive action and you’re not locked out of your other options to do that. There are mash QTEs too, but those are primarily for pummeling enemies that are already stunned, and Gene actually speeds up or slows down during them relative to both how fast you’re pressing the buttons and his momentum (it takes him a while to speed up the punches from when they’re slow and a while to slow down from when they’re fast, so if you dip in mash speed briefly, but recover, he won’t slow down very much). You only enter these voluntarily, or to escape one of the faster grab type attacks. They all consistently use the same inputs. They all serve a purpose in the gameplay and create a diversity that wouldn’t be possible without them.