Alexx's Journal

Bejeweled, Warcraft Combine to Form World's Most Addictive Game

Not only have they implemented one of the world's most addictive games inside *another* of the world's most addictive games -- itself a tremendously great hack -- they have actually gone the extra mile to integrate the two for extra-synergistic addiction. The in-WoW Bejeweled can be set to pop up automatically whenever you get on a flight path. It tracks high scores across your guild. It lets you level up your Bejeweled skill as if it was a standard WoW tradeskill. There are even, god help us all, Achievements.

I'm not sure if this is the best or worst thing ever. Maybe both...

While I think World of Warcraft is, overall, a masterpiece of game design, even a master stumbles now and then. I'm in the middle of an experience that strikes me as a pretty major stumble.

My Blood Elf Paladin has recently hit Level 60, a major milestone in the life of any WoW character. Among other things, 60 is when you get to upgrade your horse to a much faster one, reducing total travel time significantly. For most players, buying the horse upgrade is a significant expense. For Paladins...

When you talk to semi-informed people about the Paladin class, one of the perks they mention is, "...and you get a free horse!" This turns out to be only approximately true. Your initial horse is, indeed, free. The upgrade at level 60, however, is anything but.

To get your L60 horse upgrade, you have to complete a seven-part quest chain. In and of itself, this is reasonable -- but this particular quest chain has lots of problems. The first two steps are trivial, "Go and speak to X".

With the third, things get annoying. You are sent on a shopping trip to pick up 4 sets of items, plus deliver the questgiver 150 gold on top of that. Already this 'free' is looking a lot more expensive than I had thought. The first of the four item stacks, Runecloth, is easy to get, any humanoid of an appropriate level range has a good chance of dropping some. The second, Arcanite Bars, can only be created by high-level Alchemist player characters, and requires rare components provided in turn by Mining PCs (who are almost never also Alchemists). The third type of item you need, Sungrass, is only created by PC Herbalists. The fourth stack is five Dark Runes -- which are fairly rare drops that are only found inside an instance, and an instance that you need to solve a long quest chain just to be eligible to enter! Moreover, the quest, despite coming with an associated scroll object that has room for unlimited text within it, doesn't tell you how to find *ANY* of this. Guide Dang It! Even if you *did* know where they came from, you couldn't possibly get them all yourself without a lot of help. In practice, I expect most players end up getting all of these items from the Auction House, where they are not cheap.

Part four of the quest is "Go kill these undead." Perfectly reasonable.

Part five is "Go get this heavily-guarded item from the Bad Guys." OK, although it isn't really reasonable to solo this part. It's not hard to complete this part with a friend or two, but I object to being forced to group up for a class-specific quest. It's much more fun to be able to share quests with other people.

For part six, we're back to a shopping trip. This time, pretty much literally. You need four items. Two of these are only available from NPC vendors, and their only purpose in the game is to be part of this quest. So that's another 200 gold down the tubes, only slightly prettied up with a microscopic fictional gloss. A third is an Azerothian Diamond, another rare Mining item. The fourth, a Pristine Black Diamond is another super-rare drop that's only found inside instances -- more instances than just one, at least, but still something you can't get by soloing. Once again, the quest gives no indication of where to find the rare ingredients. Once again, the average player is likely to resort to the Auction House. This "free" horse is looking to cost just as much gold as the ones that other classes get, except it comes with tons more busywork on top of it!

Part seven requires the player to accomplish a task inside an instance. Again, this is something you need a group for, even though you can't share the quest with them. I haven't had the time to organize such a group yet, so despite hours and hours of post-60 effort, and hundreds of gold pieces, I *still* don't have my "free" fast horse yet. And though a few parts of the quest line have been enjoyable, these are more than offset by the annoying ones, and by the overall sense of bait-and-switch. If I ever get another Paladin to 60, I may just buy a standard mount, rather than go through this nonsense again.

Also in the department of "things I don't see very often": A videogame inspired by classical Roman memorization techniques.

http://julianoliver.com/levelhead

(Link courtesy of Rock, Paper, Shotgun.)

I recently read the conclusion to Joss Whedon's X-Men run. It was a decent story, but I'm mostly writing about one trope he uses in it. It's one I know I've seen in other superhero fiction over the last few years, but I can't recall specific examples. Part of why I'm posting this is the hope that some of you will either jog my memory, or provide examples of your own.

As a long time gamer (and rules lawyer), I tend to see stories in terms of their underlying (if only implied) rules systems. In general, a given hero's powers will stay within fairly consistent bounds. Sometimes a hero can temporarily exceed these bounds when the plot really requires it. Many game systems allow this sort of thing through a 'Hero Point' mechanism, whereby you can essentially turbocharge a character briefly at the cost of a rare meta-game resource.

The 'Hero Point' concept generally covers relatively small degrees of overpowering, and can be done many times without significant repercussions. Lately, however, I've been seeing a new variant in the fiction: The Mega-Overpower Sacrifice.

Here's a stab at a definition. A character may, if the stakes are high enough (at least a city full of civilians; more typically, an entire planet), use their power at an *arbitrarily* high level -- once. This use is essentially guaranteed to succeed in averting the disaster, but at great personal cost. In order to prevent abuse of this mechanic (by authors or gamers), this has to have permanent repercussions. In the best case, the power is 'burnt out', and may never be used again (typically relegating the character to NPC status). More often, the character making this heroic effort dies as a direct result.

(Of course, since we're talking about superhero universes here, 'permanent' is really more of 'for at least a few publisher-time years', until someone decides to repower or resurrect the character. But the other characters/players are still obliged to treat the loss as permanent and roleplay as such.)

So, what's your favorite example of this mechanic?

There is much to enjoy in Grand Theft Auto IV, but also much that makes me shake my head in disgust. For every aspect of gameplay that they advance in revolutionary ways, there's some other aspect that is painfully regressive, where the series is actually getting *worse* as it goes along. Here's a case study of one such element.

GTA III had a mechanic called 'Hidden Packages'. There were 100 of these scattered around the city, in out-of-the-way nooks and crannies. They were designed to reward exploration. Every time you found ten packages, you would get a gameplay reward, usually (always?) in the form of a weapon pickup at your safehouse. There were other ways in the game to arm yourself, but having the weapons be free and convenient was definitely a plus, and felt like a reward worth going to some effort for. The intermittent reward schedule was a classic addictive mechanism, and greatly lengthened the time people spent exploring.

The next installment, GTA Vice City, made only minor tweaks to the hidden package mechanic. Now, the top levels of reward were not weapons, but vehicles, such as a tank and an assault helicopter. Not a bad plan in and of itself, but also not entirely great: while these vehicles were made 'available', they were *not* parked at your safehouse, but at other locations in the city, making them somewhat inconvenient to get to when you wanted to use them. If you weren't using an internet FAQ or a strategy guide, you might not even *know* where they were parked, as the game itself never told you. Of course, few players would find so many packages without using such a guide in the first place, but it was nonetheless a disturbing indicator.

GTA San Andreas made big changes to the system. Firstly, it divided the hidden goodies into several different categories, each with between 50 and 100 elements, some of which involved some player action to trigger, not mere discovery. There were photos to take, graffiti tags to deface, and a few other categories that were just hidden. These did *not* give incremental rewards. You got a reward only when you completed an *entire category*, not missing *any* of them. This amounts to entirely negating the value of this mechanic for everyone who *doesn't* use outside information. Didn't buy the strategy guide? Sorry, Bub, you get nothin'. This entire gameplay mwchanic is just a tease.

In GTA IV, I thought at first that they had dropped the Hidden Packages notion entirely. Nope, it just underwent further mutations. Now, in keeping with their increased 'realism', the packages are pigeons that you have to kill. When you get your first one, you see a message pop up saying "199 flying rats remaining". OK, that's kinda funny. But it turns out that pigeons are completely immune to melee damage -- you have to actually shoot them. And since this game has a staggering density of policemen, odds are about 2 in 3 that a cop will notice the gunfire, and you now have to lose a 1-star wanted level. This makes them more annoying to collect, as a class, than any previous iteration.

I went on-line to see if there was a FAQ explaining why I might want to kill these pigeons. It turns out that there are, again, *no* incremental rewards whatsoever. Get 199 pigeons, and you've earmed squat. Once again, you have no realistic chance of getting all 200 without outside help. Even if you *have* outside help, this is an incredibly tedious chore, requiring literally hours of largely uninteresting gameplay. [One might argue that the police chases add some spice to an otherwise dull task. One would be wrong. One-star wanted ratings are easy enough to lose that they just add more tedium. And since they effectively randomize your location, they make it more difficult to follow the directions in the FAQ.]

And what do you get for all that time investment? There is some disagreement among the FAQ writers on this topic. All do agree that you need to do this to get a 100% game completion rating. By itself, that's a staggeringly small reward. There are also many reports that it unlocks an assault helicopter. But this copter is (allegedly) parked on the roof of a non-safehouse building (again with the inconvenience), and at least one FAQ writer reports being unable to find it after killing all the pigeons.

For that matter, even if you did get it, it's not like an assault heli is all that *useful* in the actual game. Sure, you can cause some fun random havoc with it, but it would only be useful in a tiny handful of actual missions. Most tough parts in missions involve interior combat, prescribed vehicle action, or some 'the plan goes to hell' element which would preclude any use of your heli.

So there's an entire huge game system, that no doubt ate up vast amounts of design and testing time, yet only pays off for the top 1% of obsessive-compulsive players. Something that used to be an fun reward system reduced to a punishing grind. Come *on*, Rockstar, I *know* you can do better than that!

What with one thing and another, I haven't gotten as much time with this yet as I'd like; maybe 20 hours, out of what will probably eventually go to 3 digits. But I've got some initial impressions to put down.

( The Good )

( The Bad )

( The Ugly )

But hey, I complain because I love. This is a great achievement in gaming, warts and all, and I will no doubt keep at it for months. Hell, I haven't even begun to touch the multiplayer yet!

This was my Christmas present from herooftheage, and now that my XBox 360 is repaired (actually, replaced), I've been playing it on and off for the last few weeks.

The game is (largely) set during the Third Crusade. You play an Assassin (*really* O.G.) who is sent on various missions to kill both Crusaders and their opponents. These Assassins are purportedly good guys who only kill for the greater good, to bring about 'peace'. Of course, the bad guys (Templars) say pretty much the exact same thing, so we're in a pretty gray zone, morally speaking.

The gameplay is a combination of stealth and action. The stealth is only moderately engaging, but you don't have to do very much of it. The action, on the other hand, is superb! The game's big selling point is the movement system. Your character can effortlessly scale almost any building, and leap with ease from rooftop to rooftop. The control scheme is good, and the animation is peerless. Seriously, playing this makes every other game's avatar animation look like bad marionette work in comparison. The bar has been raised a *lot*.

In addition to your primary missions, the world is full of things to do and see. The levels are huge, sprawling, and non-linear. There are collectables to find, citizens to rescue, pockets to pick, cathedrals to scale, and other optional challenges to undertake. I find these free-roaming sections actually more fun than the 'story' missions.

All that said, the game is not without down sides. Cutscenes, while not numerous after the opening, are unskippable and lengthy. The combat, while visually very appealing, is not very tactically engaging. And, ye gods, the frame story...

Remember how I said that this game was *mostly* set in the Third Crusade? Actually, those sequences are all genetic memories being relived via computer stimulation by a descendant of the protagonist who lives in modern times. This lets them get away with a fairly detailed HUD without breaking their fiction, but still jars at me. The modern-day protagonist is *also* an assassin, who has been kidnapped by mad scientists who want to get a specific secret out of his genetic memories. We don't know much about him at the start, as his story also starts in media res. And very early on, my story-sense tingled, suggesting that even the 'modern' storyline is a genetic memory, and there's an external frame around that waiting to be revealed. All very 'French'.

(Digression: French videogames have acquired a reputation for a certain degree of artsy surrealism. This leads to the word 'French' being used as an adjective within the industry. BioShock was a 'French' game, despite being made in Quincy.)

Later: I have now finished the game. The final twist was not nearly as cool as I had hoped. The modern-day frame story got no closure, just dropped some tantalizing hints about a sequel, then stopped dead. I still enjoyed the base gameplay enough that I want to *play* that sequel (if it ends up getting made), but the story really disappointed.

During the course of the game, I had an interestingly evolving relationship with one specific sound effect, which I document here because of the game design insights involved. When semi-alert guards are watching you, there is an insistent beeping noise, which rises in frequency the more alert the guard is. At the beginning of the game, I found this to be incredibly annoying, intrusive, and useless. Also ubiquitous, as you have to travel through areas which are heavily seeded with guards. As I played more, I started to realize why (I thought) they had done it: to punish players for not using the game's stealth mechanic. But this was clearly a bad move, since a) moving slowly in stealth mode isn't generally fun, b) even during the beeping, the guards didn't usually become alerted, and c) running like a madman to escape alerted guards *is* fun.

Roughly halfway through the game, things gradually changed. It turns out that, in a fairly typical move, the designers had tuned down the reaction times of the guards for the early sections of the game, to allow players time to learn the systems in a less punishing environment. Once they turned those reactions back up to what the 'meat' of the game meant them to be, my reaction to the 'alert alarm' changed radically. Now, the noise *couldn't* be ubiquitous; whenever it happened, I either needed to go into stealth mode (which makes the beeping shut up), or *very* soon the guards would go into full combat mode (which also turns off the beeping). The insistent nature of the alarm was no longer annoying, but welcome, as it was a clear indicator that my state was going to change soon, one way or another. With all the game systems in place, stealth mode also becomes more interesting; there are more ways for it to fail, and more significant consequences *for* failure. You still don't want to spend lengthy periods in stealth mode, but the time you *do* spend in it is more suspenseful

So what's the takeaway lesson here? If your games scales in difficulty over time (as most do), then you need to make sure that your feedback mechanisms scale appropriately with them. When they made the early game more forgiving in terms of gameplay, they inadvertently made this one feedback element more punishing.

Later: Hm, seems it wasn't (just) a late / early thing; it was also a country / city thing. The alert mechanic doesn't work well when the player is on horseback. You *want* to gallop, but always alert guards when you do. I mistook the problem for an early/late one because the game allows for instant travel between 'known' cities, so by the end of the first act, you no longer have to travel by horse -- until one sequence shortly before the end, when you have to go somewhere new, and the alarm proves just as annoying as ever.

So here's the new takeaway lesson: when you have radically different gameplay modes, feedback that works well for one may not work for another, at least not without radical retuning.

Go play Passage. It's short, and worth it. Works on Windows, Mac, or Unix.

(Sadly, this game really relies upon visuals to work. kestrell (and other blind readers of this blog) can read some discussion of it here and here. Others may also want to follow those links, but I *strongly* recommend playing the game first.)

MZD's first book, _House of Leaves_ was a phantasmagorical revelation, playing complex literary formalist games with the nature of book-as-artifact, while simultaneously being a gripping horror novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was really looking forward to his next book, which I have finally gotten around to.

A brief digression: my wife kestrell being blind, she will often ask me to identify a book (that she wants to scan), and along the way asks, "Is this the right way up?" For _Only Revolutions_, that answer will always be yes. It's structured as two books that interpenetrate each other. There's a yellow side and a green side, but they are both 'right'. The narrative of your current side takes up the top section of each page, with the narrative from the other side lurking upside-down below it. Each page features two page numbers in the center-outer margin, one for each direction. The inner margins of the page each feature a date, and a series of phrases that evoke historical events of that period. (If, like me, you slept through high school history, many of these have an echoing familiarity, without actually conveying any meaning.) The rest of each page is taken up by the 'story', with each half being narrated by a different character.

You notice how I put 'story' in scare quotes? The bulk of the writing is poetic, but not in a positive way. The language is elliptical, allusive, and opaque. After an hour of reading, I still had *no idea* what was going on, so I stopped. The two narrators appear to be describing the same 'events' from differing points of view, but I don't have any real notion what those events *are*. There are no defined characters apart from the protagonists, and there is no defined context whatsoever. Without that grounding, any 'events' are meaningless, and even the protagonists barely rise above ciphers.

While _House of Leaves_ played a lot of similar structural games, and left a lot of unanswered questions, most individual chunks of it were comprehensible on the level of basic narrative: characters, events, and settings which might be mysterious, but at least were basically recognizable. _Only Revolutions_ doesn't have that baseline of normalcy. As it turns out, I require that baseline as a bare minimum for enjoyment.

Well, at least that was my reaction to the opening few sections (of each side). Mileage obviously varies. A coworker of mine has had a copy on the outside edge of his desk for months, bearing a post-it that says, approximately, "Please take this and read it, it's the most moving book I've read in years." I shall have to ask him why he thinks so. But for my part, this book, despite being a gorgeous physical artifact, is Not Recommended.

Tangentially, this business of context being of vital importance to storytelling is something I've been thinking about ptofessionally for quite a while now. Quite often, the games which get lauded for their 'story' have stories that are just as thin as an average game; what they have that makes them special is a fully-realized *setting* to *contextualize* that story. BioShock's story may be a few notches above average on the merits of pure story, but what puts it over the top for people is how completely realized the city of Rapture is. Without that supporting context, it would fall a lot flatter, and the seams would be way more apparent.

I haven't actually played for a few days, but during a quiet day at work, I read some intriguing news about upcoming changes. Blizzard is concerned about the widely perceived (relative) suckiness of the 20-60 experience, and is taking measures to address it. These measures are unfortunately going to be fairly brute force, but they are much better than nothing. Basically, they are just going to turn up the XP dial on those levels, so that players progress about 30% faster. I would have preferred new and improved content, but this is clearly a much easier change to implement, and one that was probably easier to justify to their accountants.

(Of course, the downside of this is that the min-max-er side of my brain now thinks that any playing time in those level ranges is 'wasted' until such time as these changes take place. I shall try and overcome this.)

In addition, several (but not all) formerly Elite mob groups in those level ranges are going to lose their Elite status. Two examples that were called out were Stromgarde Keep in Arathi Highlands and the Crushridge Ogres in Alterac. The general reasoning appears to be that, in those relatively-sparsely-populated levels, it's difficult to get a PUG together for just a few group quests, and this problem will only get worse as they speed up the leveling curve. Makes sense to me. I eventually did do both those quest areas, but only way over-leveled and solo, and only because I was a completist.

On a similar note, this week's incremental patch, in addition to unlocking a bunch of holiday content, also installed a large number of new graveyards in zones where they were formerly sparse, thus making corpse runs there much less punishing. And I've been noticing new flight paths turning up in various parts of the old world as well.

All these changes point to an interesting trend. When WoW first came out, many pre-existing MMO players derided its mechanics as simplistic, and its gameplay as too easy and free of real risk. Hardcore PvPers referred to the non-PvP servers as "carebear". Yet WoW was a great success and continues to be. Since launch, they have moved further and further in this ease-of-use direction, with only occasional forays into a more punishing one. Nor have they overshot yet: 9 million active accounts and still climbing.

During production of BioShock, one of our primary goals was to make a game that, while strategically deep, was still extremely accessible: our mantra was "Does this say 'Yes!' to the player?" Blizzard seems to have embraced a similar philosophy. And as much as the grognards grumble, it seems to me that this is clearly the way the medium moves forward. I, for one, welcome our accessible overlords!