Free Candy For Everyone

The first talk I attended at GDC this year was Ken Levine’s talk, Storytelling in Bioshock: Empowering Players to Care About Your Stupid Story. It was perhaps not the best idea since I still haven’t managed to find the time to play Bioshock, though I’m very eager to do so. There’s always another game in the pile, and I just keep forgetting about it for one reason or another.

The game won a lot of acclaim - it’s Metacritic rating is insane, 96/100! And take a look at some of these reviews - I don’t know that I’ve ever read something so glowing - IGN says

This game is a beacon. It’s one of those monumental experiences you’ll never forget, and the benchmark against which games for years to come will, and indeed must, be measured…BioShock stands as a monolithic example of the convergence of entertaining gameplay and an irresistibly sinister, engrossing storyline that encompasses a host of multifaceted characters. This is an essential gaming experience.

Now I’m wondering why I’m not playing it and playing it now! Well, regardless, I hadn’t played yet but went to this talk since I knew it had been so well received. I figured there’d be general things I can learn about story without knowing the specific examples. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure some major plot mysteries were revealed in the talk. I’m sure it isn’t ruined for me or anything, but I’m going to try to avoid telling anything about the story in this write up so you guys can experience the game as intended.

Ken’s talk was really well done. He’s a good speaker and he moved things along. I was focused on him the whole time and the hour just flew by (not something I can say for all the speakers I saw today). But enough meta, on to the talk.

Ken talked in various ways about how we should do what we are good at and avoid what we aren’t. Technology advances have led us to be able to build incredible, beautiful environments. He talked about looking around at his hotel room and thinking “We could build this.” We’re not yet past the uncanny valley in regards to creating truly human characters, but we can build believable worlds. Rather than forcing the player to watch your cutscene, let them do what is natural and look at the world to reveal the story. This is where their attention is most of the time anyways, so put the story there for them to find.

Players are predisposed to not care about your story, no matter how much detail you put into it. Ken put it as “more details suck more.” As time went out, they made their story simpler. They started out with dozens of characters, the story took place over 50+ years. There were love triangles, it was way too complicated. Ken quipped: maybe it would have worked as a bad novel, but never as a game. Then followed “The Great Character Massacre of 2006″ where they combined and wiped out major characters all over the place. They ended up with the idea that each character was a representation of a theme. Whenever one character showed up, it was to explain the civil war that had occurred. Another was to detail the impact of events on the little people. Rather than expand these people’s roles, they had a very specific focused position.

Push Vs. Pull
Cutscenes push the story at the player. They have no control over them, they happen when they happen. Games have the ability to make the player pull the story to them. The issue with this is that this means players could miss some of it. But this is actual a powerful way to make your game accessible to different people. You let people opt out of the story, and for those who choose to pursue the story it will be that much more powerful because they did choose it.

He talked about there being three levels of story. The basic level is just what do I need to do, where do I go? People that just want to come in and blow stuff up and don’t care about anything more can absolutely do that. Ken talked about how making this work made the game work for the casual gamers, the Madden fans. You need to attract these people or you end up with critically acclaimed games that sell 150K units (referring to past Irrational titles without specifics). The next level of story is “Oh yeah, gotta kills this guy, he runs this place, etc”. Actually knowing a bit more about the why. The final level is for the hardcore fan who wants a novelistic level of detail. They look at every poster and find every nook and cranny. All these details are there for everyone, but they can’t get in the way of the experience of people from the first group.

Audio was a huge part of conveying the story. They tried to fill the audio space as much as possible. They had some PSAs that you’d notice if you were paying attention. Large portions of the story were told through audio. An interesting point was that crucial characters are talked about for quiet some time before you meet them. He mentioned the character Steinman, who when you meet him is just an AI running around with a machine gun. But you’ve gotten so hyped up by what you heard up to that point that he’s so much more than that in your mind. During the Q&A section, one audience member spoke of how he had to put the game down for 2 days before encountering the character to psych himself up for the experience.

Bioshock is essentially a mystery. Telling the player what’s going on in your world isn’t always a good idea. Mystery and ambiguity are powerful. Asking questions is more interesting than answering them. He cited Lost and Cloverfield - “It’s Godzilla with less information.” The audience wants some questions answered, but it’s like trying to keep a balloon up in the air. You keep tapping it up, and if it gets too high (too many unanswered questions) you lose your audience. If it gets too low (not enough mysteries left) you lose them as well.

Apparently the last act of the game had too many of the mysteries solved. The player knew too much and so it solved. He felt that the levels were some of the best in the game, but without that driving narrative question the player experience was diminished.

Ken claimed he pissed off some people on the project because his story came in very very late. But he went on to defend that lateness. He feels it is important that a writer be open to the game and let the game tell him what the story should be. By looking at what the level artists and designers were doing he would get inspired to go back and create new things. Opportunities come up if you’re open to engaging with the development. The story gelled 8 months before ship. This had a cost on production, as a lot of things depend on the story. But he spoke disdainfully of a game writer who expects to finish their script a year in advance and throw it over the fence, done.

His closing slide told us to:

Respect your audience
Trust mystery
Empower the gamer

Ken did talk a lot about specifics from the game but I’m going to hold off on commenting on any of that until I actually play the game. I think his big points about letting the environment tell the story and letting the player opt in to the story are understandable without having played the game. I really have to go play this game.

Once again, I’m trying to play too many games and I can’t keep up with them all. Every night the big question is “What games am I going to play today?” I know, it’s a tough life.

Today, the answer was Culdcept Saga. I played the demo in December and was fascinated by this bizarre fantasy board game/collectible card game hybrid. I picked the game up yesterday and so far I’m hooked. My only complaint is that matches take so very long. If you lose, you might have just wasted over an hour playing a game that you’ll have to fight all over again. Well, I assume you have to replay it if you lose. I’m haven’t lost one yet since I figure that would be a bad idea.

In addition to that time suckage, I started Rogue Galaxy last week, a really cool PS2 RPG that I’d been wanting to try for a while now. Combat is real time, which is not something I really like in my RPGs, but the other mechanics are cool enough that I’m enjoying it anyways.

On top of that, I’m still playing World of Warcraft. Sunday nights are still the time for the Crazy Cattle to get together and run 5 man instances. Yesterday we actually ran the final two 5-man dungeons in the game that we hadn’t visited yet. We hit up The Black Morass and The Arcatraz. I feel as much of a sense of completion as I’m ever going to feel with this endless game, I suppose. You’re never really done, so finishing up a certain chunk of content is pretty darn good.

And lastly, I’m still leveling up another WoW alt with my LucasArts co-workers. I’m just about to hit level 53 with my shaman Myrendra. It’s looking like I’m actually going to get all the way to 70 with her, which is sort of a surprise to me. I thought we’d have lost interest long before now. But leveling is just so quick, and we have such solid group attendance that it’s been going well.

Too much to play! I have GDC coming up this week and a vacation next week which will keep me from playing any of these games for a while. Time to get more Nintendo DS time in, I guess!

I’ll be going to the Game Developer’s Conference for two days next week. My favorite conference, I’m looking forward to seeing talks about AI, Character Animation, and Game Design. I’ll try to blog the talks I see, though I’m going on vacation to Hawaii just after the conference wraps, so there might be a slight delay.

I was playing WoW the other night and running battlegrounds as has been my wont. I’m finding playing on a PvP server isn’t that much of a different experience from playing on a PvE server, but the people are very different. People are just much more aware of how to maximize your gameplay - how to play your class, what stats you should have, what you should do if jumped in a dark corner by the evil Alliance.

This makes for much better battleground experiences as well. However, some things are the same everywhere. To recap for the uninitiated, Warsong Gulch is a game of capture the flag. 10 players on each side try to steal the other side’s flag and run it back to their own base where their own flag must remain. All to often each side grabs the flags and hides forever. Then we spend 45 minutes trying to take it back from each other.

Blizzard has a change live on the PTR for WSG -

• When both flags are held, the flag carriers will receive 50% increased damage done to them after approximately 10 minutes and 100% increased damage after approximately 15 minutes.
• Flag carriers can now be tracked 45 seconds after picking up the flag.

This is trying to address the turtling problem. I’m not sure how it will pan out, but maybe they should try implementing the bug I experienced this weekend as a feature instead.

I was helping guard the flag carrier and sitting inside our base. We were chatting to the raid for progress updates and calling out tips. We got bored of turtling, so the three of us decided to run out midfield and try to draw out the opposition. That’s when we noticed that everyone was dead and no one was respawning. No one answered our chat either. We continued on our way to the enemy base where their flag carrier was hiding with a few remaining guards. We took them down, though I died along the way. I then sat in the graveyard and could read chat but not talk back. The two left alive managed to capture our flag at which point we all respawned.

Sudden death was actually a fascinating mechanic. It really made you value your heals and smart play. Sometimes, in the current WSG, dying is actually a boon. You respawn in a position that can be tactically beneficial sometimes for recapturing a flag that is running out of your base. You respawn with full health and mana. At worst you have to wait 30 seconds to spawn. And in general, this is good. But wow, there was so much more tactical thinking and tension when I realized that if I died that was it. I went down healing our flag carrier and helped make sure we won the game.

Now that’s a solution I’d be curious to see them try.

I finished Assassin’s Creed this weekend. Everyone keeps asking me if it was fun. Things didn’t change much from what I wrote when I wrote my first post about the game last week. It was a mixture of cool and repetitiveness, moments of grace broken up by vast tracks of the same old stuff.

The end of the game was a total setup for a sequel. And I’ll definitely want to give the sequel a try, so I guess I liked the game. But of course, there were things that drove me nuts about the game, so I’m going to complain about them for you!

Harassers
There are several types of civilians in the game who basically just impede your progress. The first and least troublesome are the beggar women. They run around after you and get in your way. If you get two on you it can be hard to move. They’re just irritating, plus they’re accompanied by constant voice telling you “I’m poor and sick and hungry! You don’t understand! Just a few coins, sir!” Well, I have no money so I can’t give you any coins. Leave me alone!
Next category are the crazy men. These guys mutter to themselves and shove you when you try to walk by. These guys drove me totally nuts. If you are under the watchful eye of some informed guards you have to walk slowly - “blend”. If you are doing your slow blend and get shoved into the wrong person, BAM! the guards all notice you! Even worse, you can’t swim and a few times I had these jerks push me into the water where I drowned. This is not fun!
Neither of these harassers are fun. I don’t think they add to the positive experience of the game. They make the streets a bit more alive but the gameplay they instill is frustrating, not enjoyable.

Climbing
Ok, for the most part climbing is great. You can scale buildings, run up walls, and generally get to the top of huge peaks with ease. Maybe it was bugs, maybe it was my lack of skills but there were times when I could *not* get up a building. I knew it was climbable because there was a goal point on the top but I would just keep pushing up and not move. One time I just kept coming at it from different angles for about 5 minutes before it finally just worked for no reason. Argh.

Interface
To select a target you hit the left trigger. This keeps the target selected until you toggle it off. However, the shortcut to bring up the map is to hold left trigger and push select. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up a timed quest from a quest giver, they’d give me some spiel about what I should do, the clock would start and I’d bring up the map. When I came out of the map I’d selected the guy and he was giving me some long line about how I hadn’t finished his quest yet and come back. Meanwhile the countdown timer was running. Argh!

Also, the buttons do different things when you’re in combat or not. If you lock on to a guard while you’re detected you enter combat mode. You always face your target, you can’t run, and you have attacks available to you. My problem with this was sometimes I would be trying to run and somehow I would end up in lock on mode and not understand why I couldn’t run. There’s no clear indication of what mode you’re in. Well, there’s some buttons in the upper left that tell you what pushing them does, so I guess that was an indicator. But it’s so subtle. A big colorful indicator somewhere really would have helped.

Which leads to the last comment

Color palette
The game is beautiful, I’ll start with that. But everything is the same muted colors. The only shocks of color is the red on the occasional Knight Templar you stumble across. But otherwise my memory of the game is beige and tan. It was probably realistic to the period, but my eyes become starved for color.

I got 835/1000 achievement points on the game so I guess you could say I was pretty thorough. I definitely feel like I saw everything important there was to see. I’m curious to see what they do next. I heard they spent most of their time building the technology on this game. It shows, the tech is amazing, the world is vibrant and alive with people. They’re not the smartest of people but they’re interesting and reactive. And the ability to run from one side of a city to another with only a minor loading hitch is pretty darn impressive. So I’m looking forward to what they’ll do when they’re spending their time refining gameplay in this world, rather than building it.