Healthy Skepticism

Health in video games is a way of gauging how close the player is to losing a fight; when it reaches zero, the player loses and has to start again. How a game handles health is an expression of how the game designers want a player to react when they start to lose a fight. Consider the following examples

• Doom. In essence, the player has 100 health to start with, and can only increase it by picking up medikits of varying sizes, which restore a predetermined number of health points up to the original maximum of 100. The intent is for the player to play the game in a fundamentally different way once they find themselves on low health. They will have to tread carefully and search for the next available medikit before returning to the more hectic action the game thrives on.
• Halo. The player has an almost inconsequential health bar, plus a set of shields. When the shields are low, the player can hide away from combat for a few seconds, after which the shields will quickly recharge. The intent is for the player to find somewhere to take a rest for a few moments before continuing to play in the same way they were before.
• Diablo gives the player several options. It can be played a little like Doom, being conservative until the next healing item is found. Alternatively, if you have healing powers, mana can be turned into health, with the mana itself recharging in a very slow version of the Halo method. Thirdly, money can be turned into health via potions, so the player has to decide between permanent items (weapons, armour, etc) later and potential death or temporary items now and continued play.

Shields which recharge up to full once you hide behind cover for a short period (from here on 'hide-and-recharge') is a good mechanism both for moment to moment combat, but also for level designers. In the heat of battle it means that no matter how much of a pounding you've taken, you can always duck behind a rock briefly and return to the fight at full effectiveness. From a level design perspective, each enemy encounter can be tuned and balanced in the knowledge that players will arrive there on full health. The designers don't have to make sure there is a convenient health pickup before a large fight just in case the player ate one of his own grenades killing some minions earlier on. Halo may not have been the first game to do it, but it was certainly the landmark title for hide-and-recharge, and it has spread from there into almost all shooters, action games, and basically anything else with set piece enemy encounters. 

The odd thing about this near universal adoption of the hide-and-recharge system is that the designers are all agreeing on the same design goal when it comes to health. I don't know whether what they want a player to do when overwhelmed in combat is to retreat and try again regardless of genre, or whether during the design process they just say "hide-and-recharge works well enough, we're focusing on innovating elsewhere". Whatever the case it would be nice to see some more people mess around with how health, and its best friend death, are used to reflect the atmosphere of a game. Especially when you consider games like Uncharted (an Indiana Jones-esque action comedy romp) and Modern Warfare (a much more realistic* modern military shooter) both use the same health system, yet couldn't be much more different in tone.

*more realistic than Uncharted, not realistic on an absolute scale.

When More is Less

Lots of popular board and card games have expansions. Financially they are a no-brainer and help keep board game designers housed and fed. Generally, however, I am not a big fan of expansions for two reasons. The first is entirely arbitrary and something I am willing to admit I'm in the minority on: I like new things. I would much rather spend time learning a new game, playing it once or twice and then moving on to the next one than playing the same game repeatedly and honing my abilities. While I like to win, I far prefer experiencing new game mechanics, trying to figure out why they work, where they could be improved and why so few games have good ones.

The second reason is that expansions make games worse. Dominion is an excellent game for what it is: simple to explain, enough depth to play repeatedly, and a short game time. Whether you like it depends on your thoughts on player interaction and car shuffling, but its fundamentals are sound (for the record, I do enjoy Dominion). So what about its expansions? Intrigue allows for up to six players and I am in full support of allowing for more than four players, so it gets a tick. The rest are, from a design point of view, bad.

One of the principles of good design, including game design, is to keep things as simple as possible. Snap is a simple card game but it's also a bad game, so let me clarify. Simple in this context means having the minimum number of additional game mechanics required to support the core game mechanic and provide enough depth that there is not a winning strategy. I'm going to assume, given how popular and critically well received Dominion is, that it meets this goal. If it didn't, somewhere on the internet would be a page which said "do this and you will always win" and nobody would be playing it any more. While there is more art that science to figuring out the balance of mechanics versus simplicity, I imagine most designers would err on the side of having one too many mechanics (more complicated than it needs to be) than one too few (degenerate game with a winning strategy).

The extension of this argument is that adding extra game mechanics actively degrades the quality of the game. If the expansion makes the game better then it suggests there was something broken with it in the first place, in which case it is more patch than expansion. If the expansion doesn't make the game better, then what is the point?

An Informative Day

On the weekend I got a few friends together and we had a lazy ten hour board gaming session. Alhambra, Torres, Dominion, Puerto Rico and then some Chez Geek and Zombie Dice to refresh the palate. Good times were had by all, and I got some interesting observations from the play time.

In a bold move, I'm going to put the summary first because this is a very long post. I have stayed away from concepts like strategic depth and, god forbid, fun because they are hard to define in useful terms. So in terms of easy to define properties, I think good board games tend to have:

• fuzzy player rankings
• limited options at each decision point
• no medium term decisions
• low randomness
• no elimination
• frequent activity

To expand:

Fuzzy Rankings

The first four games listed all have clear win conditions (get the most victory points) but at any given stage it is difficult to tell how many victory points a given player has. In Dominion for example it would be possible to track what every player's score is, but the victory point cards are scattered throughout the deck so it isn't possible to do a quick count. Alhambra uses a scoring track but scoring is sporadic enough that it indicates roughly who is in the lead but not the final outcome. The advantage of doing this is that it adds an air of excitement to the final tally at the end of the game. It also means that players can think they are in the running for victory for much longer, which means nobody sulking in a corner. Of course it does mean that the game can't have a victory point threshold as its ending condition (as is used in Settlers of Catan for example).

Limited Options

Puerto Rico is a game in which the players take a lot of decisions about a lot of different things over the course of the game (roles, trading, building, colonising, etc, etc). What the game does well is offer very few options to choose from at any given decision point. This streamlines the game and limits the damage of players who agonise over every decision they have to make. Providing the game is well designed in the interactions between the various elements, small decision sets should still be able to give players the ability to control the flow of the game.

No Medium Term Decisions

Alhambra allows the player to pick which tile/money they get short term, which will affect the structure of their Alhambra in the long term. However, the medium term decision of where to place the tile for maximum effect is deferred by the remodel phase so that it can become a short term decision. So what? Without any evidence or training, my suspicion is that in games people make short term decisions quickly because the risk/reward is clear and affected by few if any unknowns. Long term decisions are often made before the game even starts, or upon seeing the opening setup. Medium term decisions are the most difficult because you have a reasonable idea what will happen, but it is clouded by the moves available to other players between the time that decision is made and the next time you get to act. Medium term decisions are where the combinatorial explosions in options occur, and so are the ones that people take the longest to take. If you want to make decisions easy for people, make sure the outcome is obvious or so far away as to be of no concern.

Low Randomness

Games, especially board games, benefit from some randomness. It helps bring lagging players back into the game and means strategies have to be modified on the fly so that games play out a bit differently every time. On the other hand, you need to keep the amount of randomness low. Any joy gained from luck in a game on one player is visited in equal measure as frustration on another player, and if there is a high degree of randomness then luck becomes more important than ability. In Torres, each player has a deck of about a dozen special effect cards, with each player having the same cards. When drawing an action card, the player gets to draw three and then pick one. After that the discarded cards are placed on either the top or bottom of the deck, at the player's discretion. So there is a small amount of randomness, you might not get the card you want in a given turn, but you will almost always get a card you can make some use of.

No Eliminations

One of the worst things that can happen in a game is to get eliminated early (in something like Risk or Monopoly, for example). If people have got together to play some games, then you are left sitting around waiting for the game to finish. For those left in the game, they either lose a person for the next game, or there is somebody moping around until the current game ends.

Frequent Activity

One of the problems of the epic board games like Risk is that you often go anywhere up to half an hour without getting to do anything. By contrast in Dominion, you often haven't finished shuffling the deck before it's your turn again, while the phase/turn structure of Puerto Rico means that each player is acting every one or two minutes. This structure keeps the player's interest and I think tends to make for shorter games because there is less wasted time.

I don't know if you could build a game from these elements alone, but I think you could definitely take a game and improve it by introducing some of these gameplay properties.

Less Than Perfect

A while back, Jason suggested that a few of us get together and write stuff about video games on the internet. After I got over the shocking concept I um'd and aah'd for a while since I barely post here in the first place. In the end I agreed partially because I figured it meant that if I didn't post something for ages somebody else would, but mostly because I'm easily influence by peer pressure. So Jason got the domain, I whipped up the most awesome logo in the history of gaming blogs and thus was born imperfectpixel.com.

The three main contributors (me, Jason and Duncan) work together and waste probably too much company time talking about games we've been playing. The hope is that maybe this way we might spend some more time actually working, but given I am at work writing this it may not pan out that way.

Anyway, for the time being I'll keep stuff that is either non computer game related or more design that opinion based here, and rants and opinions over at Imperfect Pixel.

Why Can't We All Just Be Students Again?

While I'll play pretty much any game, when somebody goes to the effort of getting enough people together for a gaming session I prefer the long strategy type games. I think it's because sitting around playing these games on a table is a lot better than playing turn based strategy games on the computer. Also it's just fun to push around those little military units and stack up piles of oddly shaped tokens.

The problem is that these games tend to be very fragile when it comes to different numbers of players, and when a game takes most of the day to play you're going to struggle to find the people. Card games (I'm thinking of Munchkin, Chez Geek, etc) are normally more robust about how many players are involved and are lot simper to get into. As a result it's easy to find anywhere up to seven or eight people willing to sit down and play some Munchkin, and if two or three people don't show up you can still play.

If you want to play a round of Game of Thrones, on the other hand, you need five people. You can try to play with four, but House Stark is going to slap the other three players around like the German soccer team playing Australia (yeah, I went there). Worse, what if someone asks if they can invite someone else? You always need to add to your little black, if nerdy, book of game playing friends but in this case there's no room at the inn. And while I enjoy watching people play games sometimes, I think I draw the line well before watching six hours of Civilization.

Getting people into a room in the first place is only a part of the problem. As we grow older and people get things like spouses and children and other things that can crop up unexpectedly in an emergency fashion, the odds of keeping everyone in the room for the full period of a game drop away to near zero. While I don't begrudge people having lives per se, someone dropping out of a game early is the surest way to ruin it.

The solution: a big strategy board game that has genuine support for a wider number of players and maybe drop in and out support too because having the perfect number of players for long enough to finish a game is a fragile thing. Shouldn't be too hard. If there is one already then somebody should tell me what it's called. And buy me a copy.

Family Matters: Motivation in Mass Effect 2

One of the major parts of Mass Effect 2 are the quests each member of your crew gives you which will allow you to secure their loyalty. They aren't mandatory, and as near as I can tell have no connection to the main plot but do give you insight into the various NPCs and let you shoot guys in the face. While generally fun, a thematic similarity emerges as you play through these loyalty quests.

Warning: moderate Mass Effect 2 loyalty quest spoilers follow.


Miranda: You help rescue her sister from the designs of their overbearing, obsessive father.
Jacob: You go looking for a distress beacon, only to find out that his father has gone mad with power.
Samara: You help her kill her serial killer daughter.
Thane: You help stop his son from committing murder.
Tali: You help defend her against treason charges, which it turns out were actually the result of actions by her father.
Jack: You help her blow up the facility where she was raised.
Garrus: You help kill a former squad mate who betrayed him.
Zaeed: You help kill a former squad mate who betrayed him.
Mordin: You hunt down a former student who betrayed him.
Grunt: You accompany him on his rite of passage. Also, he hates his 'father', the scientist who created him.
Legion: You retrieve or kill the heretic Geth who were working with the reapers.

Aside from the chance that  all the writers on the Mass Effect 2 team have some serious unresolved family issues and a history of poor decision making when it comes to friends, there must be some reason why the loyalty quests draw from such a small pool of ideas.

Family provides a convenient narrative shorthand for strong emotional connections, which saves having to invest resources into establishing more unusual significant NPC attachment to people, places or ideologies. In some ways it is understandable, after all if it took an hour or so of conversation and events to establish a crewmate's motivations, most players would not engage with all the stories.

On the other hand, BioWare did choose a science fiction setting littered with alien species. Having all of the species with whom the player has any serious interaction both physically humanoid but also humanlike in culture, morality and emotions feels lazy. The only one of the quests that explores any situation that might be considered 'alien' is Legion's despite seven of your eleven crewmates being from alien cultures.

I'm really enjoying Mass Effect 2, it's as good a game as I've played in a long time, but I think BioWare might have done better by having half as many crew members and being able to spend more time investing in more diverse characterisations.

Sibling Rivalry: Mass Effect vs Dragon Age (Part 2)

In the first part of this piece I covered the areas of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect which are non-interactive: the setting, the player character, the NPCs. In this part I want to look at the parts where the player has to press buttons and move the mouse around. For the record I have played both on PC, so I can't speak to the console versions.

Unmoved
The first difference, and a fundamental one, in the two games is the basic interface. Mass Effect adopts a standard third person shooter UI, with the player taking direct control over Shepard. Objects such as crates and doors are interacted with using a standard 'use' key.

DA:O provides two modes of interaction. The first is a control scheme that is used in many PC RPGs in which you have a cursor moved by the mouse that is used to click on places in the environment you wish to interact with. To move, you click on a part of the landscape and the player character moves, etc. While this has been a long used standard in PC games, it subtly removes the player from their character. Rather than "I'm going to move to here," it feels more like "I'm going to select that guy and tell him to move over there." Although this is minor, in what is purportedly a character driven narrative it adds a level of distance between the player and the actions taken by his character. The second interface is a cut down version of the one used in Mass Effect in that you can take direct control of the character, but interacting with objects in the environment still requires the use of the on screen cursor.

Add to this the fact that you can take direct control of any member of your party and the connection between the player and his carefully constructed avatar is expertly severed.

Jibber Jabber
I've already covered the difference in the way conversation is presented in the two games, but there are also some key differences in the game mechanics of it. In Mass Effect, the conversational options are presented a few seconds before the NPC finishes talking and if you choose one before they finish speaking, Shepard will reply straight away which leads to quite natural conversations. This doesn't need to happen in DA:O because the protagonist doesn't speak. This leads to what Radix once described to me as conversation grinding: having to go through every part of the conversation tree to ensure you get the quests rather than because you're interested in what they have to say.

Hunter gatherer
Disclaimer time: I don't like loot management gameplay. I'll save that rant for another time, but suffice to say I think it adds nothing to a game. That said, both games have extensive loot management and I get the impression that Mass Effect's is more streamlined while DA:O's is more intricate. Someone who enjoys spending ten minutes picking which items to equip, which to sell and which to keep for a rainy day can decide which is better.

DA:O has a level of crafting gameplay in which players can make potions and so forth from raw ingredients gathered as they travel around the world. This level also feeds into the item management gameplay, because most of the raw ingredients can be used before being crafted, although for smaller benefits. Keeping a balance between expedience and future use adds an interesting tweak to the game.

Phenomenal cosmic power
Both games use a level based class system for progression. In Mass Effect each character has a small number of total powers, around six to eight depending on your class choice, of which half are passive and so don't need management. There is very little power dependency (for example you need four points in pistols before you unlock shotguns, but that is the extent of it) which means that you only have the powers you want and don't have to spend points on things that are of no use.

DA:O uses a much more traditional power system with a skill tree, character stats, and class specializations. I have a character at level fourteen who has more powers than I can fit alongside the health and mana potions in the shortcut bar, as do two of my three party members (the third being fairly unskilled on account of being a dog). While it is not inherently bad to have a lot of active powers, it is only good design if each power is both specific and unique. Specific in that ithas one effect, and unique in that it is the only available power which has that effect. Most of the powers in DA:O are specific, but they are not unique as there are multiple powers which have similar effects. For example, a shield and sword warrior can take Shield Bash, then Shield Pummel, then Overpower, which knock down, hit three times and then stun, and hit three times the third being critical and then knock down, respectively. The warrior now has three powers to do almost the same thing, where a single power that inflicts more hits and has a quicker cooldown would achieve the same purpose.


Overall, DA:O produces a very complicated power structure which does not translate into complex mechanical interactions within the gameplay, which means complex tactical gameplay decisions are replaced with choices which have little impact on the flow of combat. Which leads into...

Round 1, Fight
Combat is the central game mechanic of both games, and both follow the same outline: see bad guys, use powers, pick up loot, go to next encounter. This takes up the majority  of your time with the game, and so it is disappointing that DA:O's combat is so bad. It is essentially turn based with real time trappings, which is a workable but tricky genre (the Grandia games do it well, FFXII wasn't too bad at it), especially as you move close to the real time end of the spectrum.

Powers in DA:O take period of time to invoke (the activation time, listed with the power) but then they also take some time to execute, which is essentially the animation time of a fireball flying to its target, or an ogre swinging its club. This wouldn't be a problem in a turn based game, as the combatants don't move when it's not their turn, however in a real time game the instinctive behaviour when you see an ogre lift its club is to run away. Sadly, in DA:O, the point at which you see the power effect, it is too late. Run as far as you want, the ogre's club will hit you, get behind the thickest wall in the castle, if that fireball had you targeted at the end of its activation period, you're getting set on fire. The purpose of the visual part of a game is in many ways simply to inform the player of the goings on of the underlying mechanics, and DA:O does a poor job of doing this.

Given how independent and stubborn your party members are, it's remarkable how dependent they are on instruction to get anything effective done in combat. There are the tactics slots, which help a certain amount, but even then most of the time your team mates' most useful powers get no use unless you do so explicitly. This further adds to the feeling that you are a puppet master controlling a group of on screen combatants in which you have no personal interest, which is at odds with the character driven aim of the game.

On top of all of this, the view you get of the combat, no matter your choice of camera angles, is atrocious. The zoomed out view never zooms out far enough to take into account the archer on the nearby hill, which leaves you constantly switching between characters trying to get line of sight to targets so you can assign party members to actually do something.

I'm done with this guy
The aim of this piece is not to say that Dragon Age is a bad game or that Mass Effect is flawless (the fact it crashes every hour or so is quite frustrating). Nor is it to provide an exhaustive critique of either game, I haven't gone into the things that both games do badly or really what they do well. Rather it is to observe the apparent regression that has occurred from the latter to the former. Dragon Age feels in many ways like a throwback to games from ten years go, ignoring the improvements that have been made in the intervening period, even games made by the same developer a year or two earlier.