07 Apr 2007
Penny Arcade’s post today stirred some thoughts on the whole concept of “unlocking” in games.
It’s pretty standard practice these days. Not all of the content of the game is available at the beginning and you have to do something to make it available. In some situations that’s totally natural. In a sense the whole RPG game mechanic is based around unlocking content. But when the content isn’t naturally tied into game balance it does raise some questions.
The source of this recent round of discussion has been around Guitar Hero II. When you pop in the game, only a handful of songs are available and you have to beat them to unlock more. And you really have to crank up the difficulty if you want to be able to unlock everything. This isn’t anything new – the first Guitar Hero was this way and so are many other rhythm/singing games. But is this cheating you out of content that you should be able to access right out of the box?
I have mixed feelings about this. From a singleplayer perspective I enjoy the challenge of having to work through a progression of harder and harder content. I like that it took some work to get my reward (as long it was fun, not work). But from a multiplayer perspective I find it extremely annoying when I can’t just jump into the action with my friends right out of the box. Warioware, for example, requires that you essentially clear the entire singleplayer experience before being able to do any multiplayer at all.
So essentially I feel that unlocking is a nice incentive for personal growth, but should never get in the way of social gaming. And when you think about those personal milestones, we already have a system to reward those: Xbox 360 achievements. So in the modern world of account-based gaming is the whole concept of unlocking irrelevant? I think partially yes, but not completely. In my recent run through Saints Row I liked the fact that completing activities netted me both achievement points and new outfits, cars, weapons, and whatever. But in this case the bonus content is the minority, not the majority. So I think there’s still a place for unlockable content, but only on the periphery. Solve those whole personal milestones with non-gameplay currency (i.e. achievement points).
06 Apr 2007
Played on Xbox360
I actually finished Saints Row a couple weeks ago, but I felt compelled to keep playing it because there was just so much extra stuff to do (links: GameSpot, GameSpy, GameFly). The game is an unabashed GTA clone, but it’s a pretty decent one. It nails all the core elements of driving and shooting, and gives you plenty of varied missions. It doesn’t hit the strong thematic stride of Vice City or San Andreas, making it feel more like GTA III but with more contemporary gameplay.
In many areas the gameplay is even more polished than the latest GTA game. Your map is very interactive and lets you set waypoints that will actually map out driving directions. The customization allowed on your character is very impressive, enabling you to craft whatever thug your heart desires. But it’s not all an upgrade - Saints Row definitely suffers from a lack of a mid-mission check point system. There’s nothing more obnoxious than a difficult mission that starts over with a long cross-city drive every time.
There was nothing particularly wrong with the story, character models, or voice actors. They were all passable, and sometimes even good. But the dialogue suffered from extreme Mountain Dew syndrome. It’s as if someone decently talented wrote the script, but then afterwards marketing came through and marked it up with “cock sucker” this and “muthafucka” that. And I’m not even talking the casually swearing - that’s a given. It’s more the random Tourette’s outbursts. Basically every cut scene had at least one, and it was totally unnecessary. As if a game revolving around gang violence wasn’t “hardcore” enough.
The radio stations have always been one of the most entertaining parts of the GTA series, and here Saints Row falls short. The track selection just isn’t that good (and I mean in quality, not quantity). In Vice City I would find myself still grooving to a song even after the 20th time; in Saints Row most of the tracks grew tiring a couple seconds in. The one exception was the classical station - which is always perfect for gang banging. I have a great memory of toying with a policeman by letting him chase me on foot as I slowly backed up to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries.”
The side missions in Saints Row are definitely noteworthy. These aren’t just the tried and true taxi and ambulance circuits. There’s ho stealing, drug running, depraved senator escorting, and much much more. But my favorite was “insurance fraud,” where you throw yourself down stairs and in front of cars to make the most believable injury with the most witnesses. If that’s not fun, I don’t know what is.
Saints Row is graphically pretty buggy. So much so that someone even wrote a musical about it. I also thought it was odd that when your cars got beat up sometimes instead of a crumpled hood they looked more like a wrinkled shirt. But whatever - none of the bugs ever got in the way of the gameplay.
Overall Saints Row was a pleasant experience. The content of this type of game is totally violent. And juvenile. And offensive. And socially backwards in about every way. But it’s fun. It’s true, I wish there were more game developers that picked up the sandbox format and applied it in a less delinquent way, as with Simpsons Hit & Run. But in the meantime since I personally am not in danger of gang banging in my real life, I’ll gleefully continue pimping hos and rolling deep in my virtual one.
30 Mar 2007
Gamasutra posted a great article on Rethinking the MMO. If you’ve ever played one of these games, it’s worth a good read.
I’ve pulled out some quotes that spoke to me:
“To make matters worse, the game mechanics do not often require players to adapt in a meaningful way, leading to repetitive encounters where the player performs the same set of actions every time.”
“Players will spend hours at a time churning through feeble, ineffectual opponents rather than taking on more risk, because the game rewards them more for adopting this style of play.”
“it is natural for players to want to empty the cookie jar of quantifiable accomplishment as quickly as possible, even if they get a stomachache in the process.”
“Players should not have to choose between building their persistent entity and doing something fun.”
“There is rarely creativity involved, and the only meaningful customization is typically a series of one-time choices made at the start of the game (character creation)”
“Although they are still constrained to the path dictated by the designer, there are few interesting experiences between the start and end, the trip is painfully slow and entirely predictable, and the whole point of the journey is to get to a destination, not to enjoy the ride.”
“In the land where everyone’s a hero, heroes are commoners. In a game where gaining power is the primary goal of the game, this design flaw is significant.”
“RPGs are about saving the world or otherwise fixing some sort of hefty problem. The objective purportedly is to alter the game world. An RPG where altering the game world would break the game therefore has a serious flaw.”
“While it is certainly debatable whether such games are evil, soul-consuming, life-wrecking monsters, the fact remains that they are more enjoyable when played in long stretches than when played in short ones.”
“Playing with others is fun; organizing and preparing is not.”
The article doesn’t pull any punches when criticizing the genre, but it’s obviously written by people that love these games and really want to see them improve. And I’m totally with them. The key things that make the MMO appealing are persistence and epic scale. But the classic RPG gameplay expanded to this model doesn’t always hold up.
I enjoy WoW. Obviously I wouldn’t play it so much if I didn’t. In this brutal genre WoW is more friendly than most. And its recent expansion has improved this even more. But there are still a lot of places where it could evolve. I hope the good folks at Blizzard are taking these issues to heart and thinking about how to give their crack more substance… while maintaining the trademark addictive aftertaste.
29 Mar 2007
Continuing from my post yesterday…
The electric vehicle doesn’t come without its limitations. The researchers described their challenge as answering these questions: “How far, how long, how much?” As in: How far can I go on a single charge, how long does it take to charge, and how much does this thing cost?
How Far: With the best battery technology out there there’s enough to almost go from Seattle to Portland and back on one charge. Lower cost batteries can still get you to Tacoma and back. In other words, it’s enough for your everyday commute, but it’s not going to scale to a road trip. For that you’d want a separate vehicle (or maybe do something like FlexCar). Which means an electric vehicle not a comprehensive solution for your all your transportation needs, instead it’s something that will satisfy the common case (daily commute, shopping, etc.).
How Long: The numbers here vary wildly depending on the battery technology. Nothing is going to be as quick as pumping gas is today, although some of the non-linear recharges get pretty close (something like 80% charge in 10 minutes). But this is offset by the fact that you could charge anywhere there’s electricity: home, work, wherever. You’d want charging stations for longer trips, but in your normal routine you could go indefinitely without having to divert to a fueling station (which depending on your viewpoint makes it more convenient). We’ve all become used to plugging in our cell phones every time we come home - it’d essentially be the same thing with your car.
How Much: Definitely the cost is going to be higher as long as these are specialized hand-built automobiles. The real question is how much they could come down in mass production. And I haven’t found reliable data on that yet. But as a hand-crafted vehicle (about 4 per day) the GM EV1 cost $40,000 (without subsidy). Which isn’t a cheap car, but neither is it an overly expensive car. With manufacturing improvements it seems that could come down a decent amount. But regardless, you have to ask yourself if the bottom line is what’s important about moving to electric vehicle technology, or if it’s something else.
Which is the real question, isn’t it? What’s the motivation?
It can’t be to find the most convenient and economic solution. That criteria leads us to where we are today. That logic will also lead you to live off of McDonald’s and Top Ramen. No, the motivation has to be to find something that’s better in the long term. And that’s almost never the easy way. There are certainly compromises we’d have to make to adopt this technology. But in my opinion they’re reasonable compromises, given the benefits.
Anyway, check out the movie. It was well presented and definitely promotes some discussion :)
28 Mar 2007
This past weekend I watched Who Killed the Electric Car? (links: NetFlix, Wikipedia). And I’m having a hard time categorizing my thoughts, primarily because I have so many of them. I may have to break this up into multiple posts, so bear with me.
Coming into this I couldn’t claim to know much about battery electric vehicles. I intuitively know that producing energy in a dedicated facility that feeds the power grid seems a lot more efficient (both in economy and in environment) than having to produce power in a space and weight constrained vehicle (i.e. via the internal combustion engine). Seems obvious. I also can guess that employing a non standard technology on the complexity of an automobile is going to be more expensive until the economy of scale kicks in when components get mass produced. But beyond that I didn’t know much.
I had no idea that California had implemented a zero emission mandate in the early 90’s and that multiple major car manufacturers had actually rolled out consumer quality electric vehicles (complete with recharging stations). This wasn’t pie in sky - this was real technology available today (or rather, a decade ago). And the whole thing got scrapped (quite literally), for completely dubious reasons.
I liked how the film explored multiple possible suspects for this failure, and in the end deemed most of them guilty. This wasn’t some over the top Michael Moore pathos where the root of all evil is Charlton Heston: it was far more reasonable. Which in the end made the movie all the more effective, because you didn’t feel like you were the target of emotional bottom feeding. The movie did conclude leaving me feeling disappointed - not with the film but rather with our society as a whole. It angers me that we are so obsessed with convenience, and so resistant to change, that we’ll cannibalize progress.
I’m not prone to conspiracy theory, but you don’t have to be to understand the sketchy behavior by the automobile manufactures and oil companies. Because honestly their behavior makes sense. They’re out there to preserve their profits. The oil companies would suffer greatly if we pursued truly alternative automobile energy options. The car manufacturers have less to lose, but change is risky business and they are content with how much they own of the pipeline. It makes sense for them to be a little wary. But their behavior is borderline criminal. And I’d be more skeptical of a documentary’s depiction of this if it weren’t for previous infractions on the part of the accused. Fool me twice…
But overall I’m most frustrated with our inability as a society to suck it up and realize that our way of life is unsustainable and that we have to make some changes. No one wants to make a compromise. We’re all content to live out our life and leave the barren wasteland to our descendents. Which is bullshit. It’s our duty as citizens and consumers to demand better for ourselves. Better food that doesn’t make us fat, better entertainment that doesn’t make us stupid, and better transportation options that keep us breathing for many generations to come.