Play It Again, Sam

When you read a review for a game, or even just talk to someone about a game, the concept of replay value seems to crop up frequently. Normally this refers to choices made over the course of the game (as in Kotor or any other Bioware game) which can be made differently in subsequent plays through. Or it may refer to the various so-called emergent gameplay elements found in open world games like GTA. In either case it boils down to the same thing: play this game again and it will be different. I play through quite a few games, from the really short Max Payne 2 through to ridiculously long games like Final Fantasy X, and it has never occurred to me to play through a 50 hour roleplaying game again because I didn't see what happened in the alternate quests if I played evil. As with many of the systemic problems with modern games, I think the root cause of the idea that a game should be long or change on subsequent play throughs is caused by the fact that games are expensive. I don't hold to the same philosophy, but the majority of gamers seem to be of the opinion that if a game costs four or five times as much as a movie, then they should get ten or fifteen times as much entertainment out of the product. This is probably somewhat dependent on an individual's dispoable income. If somebody only has enough money to buy three or four games a year, then they will still expect the same hours of entertainment as somebody who can affor to buy a dozen or more, at which point the quantity of a game becomes at least as important as its quality.

That tangent on relative entertainment economics aside, back to my original point. The shorter games I tend to play through multiple times because most of the enjoyment I get is in the short term gameplay elements. Diving around shooting guys in slow motion in Max Payne is fun, really fun, and if I get bored after a few hours I can stop playing because I've already finished it before. Any game that lasts over 20 hours is going to contain a lot of slog, like the non-stop random encounters of a JRPG or the cross city transit in a GTA, which I'm content to play through once, but if I want to just see the alternate ending, I really don't want to play two hundred uninteresting random fights first.

I guess what I'm saying is that people rewatch movies and TV shows and they re-read books, and with the exception of choose your own adventure books, these never change. People don't reconsume media in the hope of a different experience, they do it because they want to relive the good experience of the first consumption. I would rather see a developer put all of their effort into 10 hours of brilliant game than 50 hours of pretty good game or 200 hours of mediocre game. If it's good enough, I'll play through it again because it's good, not because I wasn't allowed to see it all the first time through.

Bad Design Choices Of 2007 Part 3

Last one for the time being. Assassin's Creed was a game I enjoyed and played a lot. The time I spent in the cities climbing around and fighting city guards was fun. Then there were the horse sections. The basic idea is a good one: the space between cities is large and basically dull so provide Altair with a horse to ride on to cover the ground more quickly. Horses are sprinkled liberally throughout the countryside, you jump on one and ride off into the sunset. For some unknowable reason, nobody else in the whole world rides a horse. As it turns out, this is probably for the best, because it means none of the soldiers will be able to chase you down when galloping on the horse. One of the important parts of Assassin's Creed's gameplay is the idea of social stealth, if you run, you're more noticeable than if you run, jostling people in a crowd attracts attention and so on.

When on a horse, however, Altair automatically attracts the negative attention of the guards. Quite what is suspicious about a man on a horse moving at a trot is never clearly articulated, but apparently medieval knights just found men on horseback innately disturbing. The only way to avoid this is to use the "stealthy mode" button which has the side effect of making Altair move at about, oh, pedestrian speed. As a result, you either walk and don't alert the guards, or try to take advantage of the fact you're riding a horse and get chased around the countryside by angry knights.

So Ubisoft, when you come up with a gameplay element designed to bypass something boring, the answer is not to replace it with something annoying.

Bad Design Choices Of 2007 Part 2

Super Mario Galaxy was one of the most lauded products to come out last year. Many people observed that it would have still been a great game even if it hadn't had the Mario licence. I'm of the opinion it would have been a great game only if it hadn't been a Mario game. I'm sick of Mario, it's not a world you could sell to people today, it's about a plumber who fights a turtle to say the princess of the mushrooms.

Anyway, that's not what I want to whine about. Galaxy is in general a good game, but there are a few little niggles with the camera and so on that take a while to get used to. Then there's the thrice damned health gauge. Like many games, Galaxy gives you a few health points to play with, which in this particular case are replenished by picking up coins. When you are reduced to your last piece of health, the relevant part of the screen starts to pulse gently to remind you that Mario is almost dead. To go with it is a continuous beeping noise to also remind you. A loud, continuous beeping noise that plays until you pick a coin up. I have an alarm clock that makes a similar noise, deliberately designed to rouse people from sleep and fill them with enough rage to get out of bed on cold winter mornings. But that didn't stop the people at Nintendo making it part of their otherwise whimsical world.

Already got all the coins in the level? Too bad. Beep, beep, beep. Been running around for the last five minutes trying to find a coin to shut the game the hell up? Unlucky. Beep, beep, beep. If the coins were as prolific as in the old Mario platfomers, it wouldn't be a big deal, but there aren't a lot of coins in a level of Galaxy, and several minutes or more can easily pass between coins.

So, Nintendo, when you've already provided a continual non-intrusive visual reminder, you can leave out the audio assault. I don't want it or need it.

Bad Design Choices Of 2007 Part 1

It's totally understandable in Guitar Hero games that unlocking songs requires playing through the career mode. I understood in Guitar Hero 2 when there were songs that only became unlocked as encores, which required playing the game in a higher difficulty than Easy. After all, unlockables are a part of video games and have been since time immemorial.

Guitar Hero 3, however, takes it a step too far. The game introduces a co-op career mode, which is good. There are songs that can only be unlocked by playing through co-op career mode. This is not good, for several reasons. First up, a lot of people with GH3 won't have 2 guitars. If you don't know somebody else with a copy of the game, then it is unlikely you'll have enough controllers to play. After all, unlike a regular controller, the guitar doesn't have a whole lot of uses outside of GH3 so buying a spare just to play through co-op career mode is not a very good option. The obvious solution to this problem is to play online. Leaving aside the fact that someone might not be forking out the annual fee to play multiplayer games on Live, there is a more fundamental problem. There is no functionality to play co-op career online. You can play co-op, but not the career mode which lets you unlock the songs.

All of this might be excusable if the unlockable songs were some of the independent music that gets put in the in-game store. Not that they're bad songs, but they're not the songs people buy the game for. Songs by the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Strokes, however are. So, for the theoretical player who doesn't have anybody to play co-op career mode with, the only option left is to cheat if they want to play Sabotage. I haven't even checked if there is an unlock all songs cheat, but I assume there is.

So, Activision, if you're going to have an unlock mechanism for songs, make sure that everybody who buys the game can get at those songs without cheating.

Back Behind The Screen

I've recently started running my first D&D campaign for a couple of years, and I think it's going to take a while to back into the extra time and effort that running a campaign takes compared to playing in one. I'm essentially a lazy person, and while there is something to be said for generating an incredibly detailed room-by-room, conversation-by-conversation adventure, I prefer to take a broad plot and then basically make it up as I go along. So the following advice is not for the diligent and meticulous, but rather for those whoe feel confident enough to wing it. My basic rule is find the balance between flexibility and rigidity, and once the parameters have been set, stick to them. I suppose a post like this should be peppered with humourous images about roleplaying, but I think Shamus over at Twenty Sided has it pretty much covered

Lie, Cheat and Steal

The player's dice provide as much randomness as you really need in a campaign, so feel free to modify your own dice rolls as necessary. Sometimes it's just not appropriate for a monster to critical hit a player, and it's your job as DM to make sure that the player's are having fun, not too scared of dying to actually go and slay evildoers. And on the flipside, the rest of the players might start getting annoyed if the wizard starts every combat by Power Word Kill-ing the big bad. Don't be afraid to lie about what the dice say.

You will at some point in your time as a DM find yourself in a situation where things are about to get bogged down, or worse have become bogged down. There are a few key indicators that an upcoming combat is going to be slow and boring for the players. One is if the enemies have multiple spellcasters, another is if there a more than three types of enemy in a single combat, and probably if there are more than 20 monsters in a given combat. Obviously mileage may vary depending on the system you're playing with, but too many enemies, too many types of enemy or too complex enemies all require a lot more thought from you, the DM and as such too much time is spent with everyone waiting for the DM to make decisions or roll dice. In combat, the DM basically has two main jobs: tell players whose turn it is, and control the enemies. A set of cards or a small whiteboard can sort out the first onewithout too much trouble. When it comes to monsters, always remember that players essentially want to know who got attacked and how much damage they took. If you've got an encounter with thirty goblin archers, and they've got about a 25% chance of hitting, roll 2d6 or 2d8 to figure out how many hit, and you've saved 28 dice rolls for effectively the same result. Got three or four mid-level clerics in the ecnounter, and haven't assiduously written down every spell they've prepared? I generally assume they've got one spell that's perfect for the situation, two at most, and the various general purpose cleric spells, plus cure/inflict. The chances of them surviving long enough to overuse their available spells is miniscule, so don't worry about it.

Players will absolutely destroy your plot, so don't spend too much time making it too detailed at the start. Plagiarise an overarching plot from one of the uncounted fantasy movies, games or novels going around. In my experience, the individual encounters (be they violent or not) tend to stick in the players' minds much more than the reason they got into the situation in the first place. Plus, players tend to like the reassuring nature of a vaguely familiar story.

Be Honest, Fair and Original

Sometimes you need to be a slave to the dice, no matter how much it messes with the players' or your plans. If players think you won't let them die, they'll be reckless and behave even less believably than usual. The occasional player death keeps everyone on their toes. The other side is sometimes powerful enemies will fail a Will or Reflex save and suffer the effects of a death spell care of a PC. Much as it disrupts your advenutre, wizards spend their entire time at early levels hiding in corners casting magic missile twice a day and hoping nobody sees them, let them enjoy themselves when the good spells start becoming available.

Players, I find, want flexibility only when it is to their advantage, and strict interpretation only when it is to their advantage. This is hardly surprising, but it can lead to tension from time to time. I find it's a good idea to play magic with as much rigidity as possible: it's magic so trying to argue what "makes sense" is an exercise in futility. The D&D rules have very specific passages about moving in combat and attacks of opportunity. Any time a player is arguing about these rules, it's because they are about to take damage and want to avoid it, so their point has probably got a flaw.

Players are in their comfort zone dealing with a dread necromancer, or being told trinket X can be found in dungeon Y, but they're likely to raise their eyebrows if you tell them they need to meltdown a powerful magic ring forged by Tauron in the fires of Mt Broom. Make sure that the story your group tells (don't ever, ever think that you'll be able to tell your story) has original characters, situations and motives. For every occasion it's useful for players to have a good idea what's going to happen next, there's three where a surprise is better for the game. And never let anybody play as a renegade drow. In fact, even suggesting the character should be considered fair grounds for immediate eviction from the game.