Diablo III Players Got What They Paid For

Posted by on May 15, 2012 No comments

Blizzard’s tight online integration with Diablo 3 has made headlines numerous times over the last couple years of its development, most recently when their open beta / stress test found that their ability to keep up with demand might be lacking. It should surprise nobody, then, to find that when the game released today, the very same “error 37″ that caused the game to be unplayable in April has come back again, and players were unable to log into Blizzard’s servers. Unfortunately for them, Diablo 3′s online integration doubles as an anti-piracy measure, and being unable to log in meant being unable to play – even single player. Some players logged in and played for a short while, only to be unceremoniously booted from their single player game because Blizzard’s servers crippled under the heavy load of launch night.

The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later. (Error 37)

Many Diablo 3 players were greeted with this message upon trying to play their new game for the first time.

These players are getting exactly what they paid for. Diablo 3′s online integration and Blizzard’s track record with heavy server loads were both known quantities. Those who lined up at midnight for the priviledge of dropping $60 on the game can’t claim ignorance, and neither can the people who paid for the game in advance so they could download it in preparation to help crash the servers along with all the other desperate fans. Despite the bad press and customer outcry over the last couple years, these people opened their wallets in record numbers, and Blizzard was counting on it.

Not for a moment did they think any significant number of gamers would actually refuse to buy the game because of the crippled single player, no matter what anyone said. Why would they? The customers are happy with their purchase, no matter how long it takes them to log in and no matter how often they get kicked from their game. Their rage is merely momentary, and their nerves are soothed the moment they’re allowed back in-game, like a junkie who forgets all the hells of withdrawal as soon as he takes his next hit.

If you’re one of these junkies, I encourage you to give this matter some thought the next time you’re staring at the log in screen, yearning for the server to come back up so you can play: what if you waited a month? Sales figures in the games industry are so focused on the first month that waiting just 30 days is tantamount to a boycott. Furthermore, the server stability issues and the most crippling bugs (like the templar shield bug that locks you out of playing until Blizzard manually fixes your character) will be worked out within that time frame. If you’re lucky, you can even catch the game on sale and save a bit of money. As a consumer, you only stand to gain: a better game for a cheaper price on top of sending a message to the publisher that you value the ability to play offline. There are plenty of other games to play in the meantime.

Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

Posted by on June 24, 2011 No comments

Sometimes, the most powerful way to say something is to not say it at all. This is so obvious, so timeless that it’s become cliché, yet when it comes to morality and relationships, games can’t resist telling all. Dragon Age has its relationship bars, Fable has its good and evil which are so blindingly obvious they don’t even need a stat bar, Bioware games of all varieties have their own good-and-evil-but-we’re-not-gonna-call-it-that bars, and even Fallout has its karma. The irony is that all of these different ways to try and add depth to the game actually detract from it.

Taking my current game, Dragon Age, as an example, each party member has a relationship bar telling me how close we are. After certain dialogues, depending on what choices I picked I’ll either see a tiny golden heart and a number telling me how much better that party member likes me now, or I’ll see a tiny, black, broken heart with a number telling me how much less they like me. As a result, I rarely think in terms of what I want to do, or what’s right. Instead, I’m more likely to think about whether or not I need more Morrigan points or more Leliana points, and act according to how I think that character would want me to. This affects even choices which have no mechanical effect. Since the basis of decision making is not moral or personal, but mechanical, when a choice is presented to me, I will always be thinking of it in terms of game mechanics, and if I should lapse and accidentally choose based on personal conviction or because I think it’s what my character would do, inevitably a tiny, black, broken heart will inform me that I am wrong and I should load an old save.

It’s perfectly fine, and even desirable, to have my party members reprimand me for acting in a way they disagree with, but stapling on mechanical effects takes away everything that’s interesting about it. The entire point of a dialogue-heavy game is to be able to pick interesting choices and choose how you want to go through the game. It’s called role playing for a reason. When you add mechanical effects, I’m no longer role playing, but instead I’m choosing based on whether or not I think I’ll get a bonus, or choosing between two different bonuses. If I’m going to sit at a dialogue option second guessing myself, I want it to be because I’m not sure which is the right thing to do, not because I think the option I’m really interested in is going to give my character 30 puppy-kicking points when my character is clearly the walking-the-elderly-across-the-street type.

This effect is only compounded by the fact that the options you’re picking are text-only, and in many games where the main character is voice acted, each choice only represents a fraction of what’s actually said. Thus, you might pick the option “That sounds really interesting,” and then your character blurts out, “That sounds really interesting. Pick that one up off a fortune cookie, genius?” In short, not only are you making a purely mechanical decision, you’re doing so on faulty information. Punishing (or rewarding) a player under such a system just makes it frustrating. It’s like spending a stat point on something called “combat” only to find out that raised your character’s dexterity, and you really wanted to raise strength. If you misspent a stat point, you’d surely load and try it again, and that’s exactly what happens when dialogue is given statistical effects. It encourages trying over and over to find the “best” choice, and not your choice.

That’s not to say Fallout’s karma system is free from guilt, either, since even though it’s not really attached to the game mechanically, it still frustrated a great many Fallout: New Vegas players when they gained karma for killing a Powder Ganger, only to lose it for “stealing” the crap he had laying around his campfire. Merely the knowledge that the game is keeping score somehow is enough to influence a player’s actions. Real moral decisions come from not knowing whether what you did was right or wrong. We’re fascinated with morality precisely because it can be so difficult to determine, and having a game instantly determine it for us not only takes away everything interesting about it, but it can be frustrating when you disagree with how the game has judged you. Yeah, maybe you stole the Powder Ganger’s stuff, but he was dead anyway, and if you’re using it to help others, is that really wrong? Apparently so.

Furthermore, interesting narratives stem from living with bad decisions instead of loading because the game told you that you were bad. You’re never going to stop a player from loading an old save because they don’t like how something turned out, but telling them straight away or adding a mechanical punishment like making party members leave, or refusing to grant certain stat bonuses because they aren’t moral enough or their party member doesn’t like them enough is just going to force the issue. Choosing between giving the party tank a +4 constitution or not giving it to him isn’t a choice, and someone who accidentally picks the wrong one is just going to load and do it over. They’re a lot more likely to stick around and see how things turn out if you’re not so busy slapping their wrists every time they make a choice.

It’s only a real choice if a player isn’t punished for picking one option over another. True morality is not a bar with red and blue or black and white. Black and white morality is childish to the point of uninteresting. Real morality, the good stuff, the most interesting decisions of all, are stuck squarely in shades of grey. You can’t assign a point value to it because there is no right or wrong, only crippling self-doubt and second-guessing whether or not you really did the right thing. You don’t need to punish the player for choosing poorly or reward them for choosing well, because the interesting choice is itself the reward, and the thoughts swirling around in the players’ head are far more rewarding (or condemning) than any mechanical punishment can ever offer.

Never have I realized this more thoroughly than in the first (post-tutorial) area of Divinity II. Even The Witcher, which was excellent and a huge step in the right direction, was a little too obsessed with its choice-making and so it felt somewhat like the game was patting itself on the back for giving you a choice that meant something. There is no such back-patting in Divinity II, and there’s no morality, relationship points, or karma. There are dialogue options, and there are multiple paths to solving quests, but there’s no score being kept. There’s only what you chose to do, and what you didn’t.

As an example, early in the game a farmer’s wife gives you a sealed letter and asks you to deliver it to the town blacksmith. Simple enough, right? You can deliver the letter and the quest is over. You can also read the letter, and find out she’s been cheating on her husband. Then, you can deliver it anyway, with the blacksmith a little annoyed that you read it. Or, you can bring it to her husband and let him deal with her. Or, you can take the opened letter to her and confront her with what you know, taunting her or trying to blackmail her for your silence. Rest assured that whatever you do, you won’t lose morality or karma, you’ll only be playing the role that interests you most at the moment. Unlike any choice in any Bioware or Fable or Fallout game I’ve played, this choice somehow captivated me. Should I let the woman out from under the yoke of her jealous husband in order to pursue true love, or should I condemn her for cheating? If I’m out for personal gain, who can I get more from – the husband, by giving him the information and hoping for a generous reward, or the wife, by blackmailing her?

There was no omniscient god watching over my every action and tallying up my karma, nor were there party members second guessing my every action and getting annoyed that I’m too romantic or not romantic enough, and that’s precisely what made it great. The game left me to think my own thoughts on the decision, which ended up much more complex than could be represented on a point scale. If I’d gained some kind of points for delivering the letter, the game would be pushing its own value system onto me. Love conquers all, they live happily ever after, the husband had it coming anyway, laughs and good feelings all around. By not giving me points, I don’t get such easy comforts. I don’t and can’t know what was “right”, and that really gets me thinking. Did the husband have it coming, or did I just casually help another man steal away the love of his life?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to quickloading every time I see a tiny, black, broken heart with a point value telling me exactly how much farther away my juicy stat bonuses are.

Intimidation, Persuasion, Seduction, and Coercion

Posted by on June 24, 2011 No comments

I’m making my way through Dragon Age: Origins now, which is a game that never ceases to make me want to run my mouth about some triviality or another. Today, that triviality is conversation skills. In short, I think they should either be done away with, or overhauled entirely. They’re a relic left over from CRPGs’ tabletop origins, where such skills continue to thrive and actually provide a great amount of flexibility and fun, but they simply don’t translate well into a computer game and they end up a boring way to spend points.

In a tabletop RPG, conversation skills can be used as little or as often as you like, and the higher your skill the more outlandish thing you can say. Furthermore, your skill is generally competing against the perception or intelligence of your opponent, which can be great for you if you’re up against an incredibly strong foe who isn’t too bright. Experience is determined by the GM, and is often encounter based, which means you get the same, or more, experience for defeating the opponent cleverly through dialogue instead of through sheer brute force. Characters can even specialize in conversation entirely if they choose, even going so far as to learn multiple languages and attempt to defuse nearly every fight the party comes across.

That sounds different from the kinds of skills you’re able to develop in CRPGs, doesn’t it? In a CRPG, you’re limited to using such skills only where their usage has been provided for. You can bet that the farther in the game you are the higher the skill you’ll need to succeed, even if you’re using it on a simpleton. Your conversation skills often rob you of experience, because you get little to nothing for talking your way out of a fight and instead you’re rewarded for butchering everyone – or worse, you skip an entire optional dungeon full of easy exp because you talked your way to a different quest solution. There’s also almost never a way to talk your way out of a fight that’s already started, and the best uses of conversation skills are completely impossible to implement: finding creative solutions which the GM never intended, but make perfect sense. In a CRPG, there is only what the “GM” (read: developer) intended. Good developers intend for you to do many different things, but you are still limited to doing only what they already thought of, and you still have to spend your valuable skill points for the privilege. If it were even possible to spend all your points on such skills, to do so would be foolish, because you’ll never be able to talk your way out of everything (Arcanum has come the closest, but it’s still questionable).

CRPGs and tabletop RPGs are different beasts, and it’s clear from this comparison that conversation skills in each are just as different. It should be clear, then, that the two ought not be treated exactly the same mechanically, although for some reason they still are. There are two different ways I’d address the problem, although both would require a bit more work from the developer which is probably why you haven’t seen them much (if at all) before. The first way would be to make conversation skills more interesting and powerful in their own right, while the second way would be to do away with them entirely and replace them with other, already existing skills. Both would require lots more attention to dialogue trees, which is honestly pretty labor intensive, and is it really worth going down that path if what’s already there seems to be working? (That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is yes.)

The main drawback here is that conversation skills will never be as useful or interesting as their tabletop counterparts, and so they’re not an interesting skill to sink points into. This could, theoretically, be fixed by making them more interesting to sink points into. To that end, I’d propose rolling every conceivable conversation skill into one, and at each level you unlock a whole new aspect of the skill. 1 skill point gets you intimidation, which only works on people weaker than you. 2 skill points gets you bribery, which doesn’t work on the honorable or the wealthy, and costs you money besides. At 3 points you get seduction, which can work on many more people, but they have to be able to be attracted to the character doing the talking (opposite sex, homosexual, whatever). With 4 skill points you unlock persuasion, and that’s when you really get to the good stuff. Rather than paying off the guard, you can persuade him that he’s not being paid enough and he quits on the spot. Rather than killing or arresting the crime lord, you convince him to turn himself in. At 5 skill points, you become a silver-tongued god. Bribery can be accomplished with an IOU that you never intend to fulfill. You can seduce anyone, even if they don’t normally swing that way. The guard doesn’t just quit, he attacks his former employer. The crime lord is so mortified by his own actions that he commits suicide. That sounds like a skill that’s a lot more exciting to put points into, provided you can expect one or more of the options to come up in nearly every dialogue. Plus, the expectations are clear: you know you’ll never be able to bribe an honest lawman, or intimidate someone arrogant and powerful. In most games, who can honestly say what the difference between 2 skill points and 3 is?

The other idea would be to get rid of conversation-specific skills entirely, and share the dialogue love with all kinds of other skills. I’ve seen this tried before, but it’s often in addition to a real conversation skill and not instead of one. Intimidate should be based off of strength, while seduction options unlock with a high charisma or attractiveness. You could also intimidate someone if you happen to know a lot about bombs, or if your sword skill is exceptionally high. The benefit of a system like this is that you’d see unexpected options pop up as a pleasant surprise and a reward for playing the kind of character you wanted to play – a far cry from the disappointment of wanting to play a conversation-focused character and having the options never pop up when you really want them to. Although this was the idea I intended to put forward at the outset of this post, through the writing of it, I have to admit the former idea sounds a lot more exciting and easy to implement in a creative sense. From a design standpoint, this might be a bit narrow and it could be difficult to figure out how to shoehorn in a skill-based conversation option to a particular dialogue. Then again, perhaps that’s the point, because it’s not like conversation options are appearing everywhere in the games that have come out so far.

You could apply a similar analysis to nearly every other skill: they’re often uninteresting to spend points in, and worthless unless you max them out. Trade skills are perhaps the guiltiest among these. At least those, however, can be picked up by party members, whereas too many games leave conversation to the main character alone, forcing him or her to saddle the skill point cost.

Morrowind Meets Everquest

Posted by on June 22, 2011 No comments

I’ve been on a bit of a retro game kick lately, as depressing as it is to think of games that came out as late as 2001 in such a fashion. I have a bit of a bad habit of wanting to play the first game in a series before the later ones, and since the Gothic series has often been compared to beloved games like Morrowind (which, as the title suggests, is not an inaccurate comparison), off I went, back to 2001.

The very first thing I noticed was that the game controlled like complete ass. Most actions are performed by a two button combo of “use” + “up” and melee combat requires you to hold the use button while alternating pressing left and right (or even up if you’re starting to feel like you have too much health and you’d like that lizard to take some of it off your hands for you). I could go on about the design pitfalls of this “combo” system, well-intentioned though it may have been, or any other of the game’s many flaws, but honestly, the game’s old. You don’t play a 10 year old game to completion without realizing that all rose-tinted glasses have plentiful scratches, and frankly, I’m okay with that.

So instead of griping about its faults, I will praise Gothic for it’s greatest virtue: exploration. From the moment you’re given control of your character, you immediately start exploring. You’re not dumped in a safe, friendly town like in so many RPGs; instead, you’re placed at the far end of the world and asked to run to the center of it. There’s a relatively safe path for you to follow with few monsters, but you’re still rewarded for investigating every little niche and nook you pass, picking up weapons and food to get yourself started.

Like all great games with a focus on exploration, you are allowed to go nearly anywhere you like, provided you’re not too afraid of shockingly powerful late-game enemies caving your skull in with a rusty axe or lighting you on fire. Since there are no clear borders to where you should and shouldn’t be going, it gives the entire world a feeling of heightened danger, and makes the more unusual and memorable locales (like a name-appropriate gothic mountain fort guarded by harpies, or a cavern hidden beneath a ruined tower) all the more impressive. It’s a feeling I haven’t really seen captured well since Everquest, and since Gothic didn’t chase the former’s heels by all that long, I wonder if it’s something we’ve lost since that time.

You see, along with those wonderful feelings of delight and mystique were coupled feelings like frustration and annoyance. Since the game’s focus is exploration, it demands you do just that by often sending you out to the ass end of the world to fetch a trinket, or giving you fun quests like, “Get me a potion I dropped. It’s around here somewhere, so look extra hard, okay?” This game pre-dates WoW-inspired quest arrows, has no mini-map (or even a compass), and has no fast-travel options save for a couple late-game teleports. Combine these positive and negative sides with early 3D graphics and poor controls, and it’s easy to see why I cross the often-mentioned Morrowind with the original Everquest in my ultimately brief description of the game.

It’s theoretically possible for a game to have open-ended exploration along with modern devices like quest arrows, or at the very least NPCs who give you precise and easy-to-follow directions when you’re doing them a favor, but do such things detract from the feelings of accomplishment and wonder? Yes, we can ignore the arrow and explore on your own, or simply use the arrow as a general guide and wander freely, but how often do we? How often, instead, do we zone out and just point at whatever the arrow tells us to? Worse, how often do we find ourselves following the wrong arrow, or setting out not intending to follow one at all but ending up following it anyway? I don’t think this is a simple case of a nostalgic “games were better then” nor is it that new games are a simple, direct improvement of the old. I’m certain that something is lost in the transition, but neither do I really miss the strong urge to murder NPCs who have an unfortunately liberal idea of what the word “North” means.

Since I rather hate offering criticisms without suggestions, I would suggest the following: a context-sensitive quest arrow that only appears once you’re close enough. A certain amount of aimless wandering is tolerable, and even desirable, but it quickly crosses a line from exhilarating to frustrating. Quest arrows, or other blatantly obvious mechanisms which direct you unerringly, will always get rid of the latter at the expense of the former. Isn’t it possible, though, to keep both? If I’m supposed to find a dungeon entrance hidden in the forest, can’t the arrow wait to pop up until I actually enter the forest? If I need to find an item hidden in a small cave, let the arrow wait until I’m at least in the right room. Exploration is a broad feeling. I want to run around the world and find new places; I want to deviate from the path when something catches my interest. I don’t want to creep around a 12 foot room for the fifteenth time, hunting for the pixel switch that I know is there. There can be a happy medium, can’t there?