The Anti-Progress Attitude

Maybe read Archon Shiva's summary of this post first:

The way I read I, the original article had nothing against this release of Third Strike - he agreed with all design decisions that went into it, and I'm pretty sure David's not actually opposed to unlockable artwork. What he did attack was the attitude of some players that tweaking an unbalanced game into a balanced one was a net loss. At no point was it hinted that the original balance shouldn't be part of the release, or even that a rebalanced mode should have been in: he just said he feels the proper reaction is "too bad they didn't have time/budget to add it, but that's life!", rather than "thank god we didn't get a rebalanced mode selectable at the title screen, that would have ruined everything!"

This review of SF3:3rd Strike Online at 1up.com should be considered shameful. It casually embraces an attitude that's damaging to the quality of games we get to play. What's so wrong with what's said there? This (emphasis added):

Do the developers make adjustments to characters like Chun-Li and Yun -- who are leaps and bounds more powerful than the rest of the cast -- rebalancing them as to give characters like Q, Sean, and Hugo a fighting chance? Some argue this would allow newer players to ease into the game and even provide a fresh take on the series, possibly revitalizing the competitive scene.

At the same time, if they make changes to the game, even the slightest rebalance, players such as myself who have literally been playing the game for 10 years now, might feel it's an inferior port and not play it at all -- opting to continue to fight it out at the arcades or even on the PlayStation 2.

It's great that Capcom made such an effort to translate the game to a modern console. It's great they used the only reasonable kind of networking for a fighting game (GGPO). Well, strike that. It would be shameful and embarrassing for any fighting game to not use it, so it's more of a "phew, they did an obvious thing right there." It's great they did an obvious thing right with the way the button configuration screen works. There's really a whole lot of positive stuff to say here, and I agree with those saying those positive things. BUT...

There's a problem: 3s is one of the worst balanced fighting games around. I mean that literally. It's hard to even come up with worse balanced fighting game than it, yet if you throw a stick at a pile of fighting games, you'll hit a better balanced game. James Chen had this to say in 2008 about the Evolution tournament results:

Street Fighter III: Third Strike - This year [2008], in the Top 8, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, and Yun. In 2007, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2006, we had Yun, Yun, Yun, Yun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2005, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Yun, and Yun. I don't think there's anything left to say about this game.

Yeah it's pretty appalling. It's

Click to read more ...

Portal 2

I was with a group of game designers and I said, "Probably I'm in the minority here, but I was really disappointed with Portal 2." To my surprise, everyone there (about 10 game designers) agreed, and not a single person was willing to take up the contrary position. I'll explain the complaints, but first I'd rather say what is great. This is all about the single player mode, by the way.

Mechanics Spoiler

I think the mechanics are great. SPOILER of mechanics. I'll just casually mention some here, and you can skip this paragraph if you'd rather not know them ahead of time, in a strange world where you have somehow not played this game yet. Anyway, there are beams that you redirect through portals, bridges made of light you can extend through portals. There are three kinds of liquid goo that you can spatter around the world, each with different properties. I really liked the kind that let you portal off of otherwise unportable material. There are force fields beams that carry you over pits, and you can redirect those through portals. All of this stuff is great. My letter grade is A or A+ here.

Good Stuff

The beginning of the game was probably pretty difficult to design. It has to kind of feel like the old game, also it has to have easy stuff that's like the beginning of the old game so new players know wtf is going on mechanics-wise. It also has to introduce some sort of story and tell us where and when (and who!) we are, relative to the last game. I think it succeeded on all these fronts. Another A grade.

The end (not like the last minute, I mean the last 20% or something) has to put together stuff we learned and give challenges that are more complex than the earlier ones. There's a lot of mechanics here, so it might have been hard to figure out just how to put these together for us in the last several puzzles. I think this was done very well, too.

Subtractive Design is Needed

What's the damn problem then? Everything sounds pretty great! Well, there are three things. The first is that there's this pretty long middle section of the game that kind of throws away what is good about Portal. Instead of small environments where you can portal off of almost anything, it's large environments where you can portal off of almost nothing. These environments look great, so whoever implemented them did a great job, but their very existence makes for a worse experience, in my opinion. Sometimes these parts felt more like a "Where's Waldo" puzzle of just finding the tiny thing that I'm allowed to shoot a portal on.

One designer raised the point, "Whether the environment is large with few portable surfaces or small with many portable surfaces, it's solving a puzzle either way. In both cases, there is usually going to be one correct solution to the puzzle, so does the objection really matter?"

We were all quick to say, "Yes, it matters." The best articulation of this point was that in a small room with nearly all portable surfaces, you are surrounded by choices that are wrong. It takes thinking to figure out what would be a right thing to do. But the feeling is not the same in a large environment with very few portable surfaces. There, you have very few choices and you can solve a puzzle by performing the only real legal moves, not even knowing exactly why it worked. Sometimes not really having to think about it.

Why do these large areas even exist at all? My guess is that there was an executive decision to sell a boxed $60 game, and that game design should just figure out what to do. I hope I'm wrong in that guess. A more sensible approach would be to make the best game possible, and sell it for whatever price made sense. At $60, I am guessing Valve thought people needed to feel a more grandiose experience. And further, that the game needed to be at least a certain length and a series of small test rooms would feel too monotonous for $60's worth of length, whatever that means. So to vary the experience, maybe they thought, "What if you could portal around a Half-Life-like environment?!" Nice idea maybe, but I think some subtractive design would have removed that, for the better. There's something pleasing about the idea that the Portal 1 world is all portable, except for specifically marked black material. The long middle section of Portal 2 teaches us that any old random material is not portable, only the white texture is portable. It just feels sad, like it's not following through with the really bold concept of "if you can portal off everything, how is there still a game?" Portal 1 answers that, but Portal 2 is like afraid to fully embrace it during this middle section.

Objection 2

The above was my strong objection. There were two other objections by other designers. One was that the game is just too easy. I hadn't thought much about that, but when he said that...yeah it did seem pretty easy overall. You could say the market has spoken, and they want easy games. That's not a very satisfying answer to me though. A game like Rez shows how it can be hard (score attack, trying to get 100% shot-down), easy, or even zero difficulty with "traveling" mode. What if I wanted a harder Portal 2? Why can't I have that?

I'll tell you why I can't have it. Because if a puzzle is too hard, it will stop all progression. There is no way around it, given the structure of the game. I think this is where Portal can learn something from Braid. Braid faced that same design problem, but it had a different solution. In Braid, you can progress past a puzzle you're stuck on, you can just skip it basically. Maybe something will click for you later, and you'll go back and finish it (you want credit for all those puzzle pieces after all!). This type of structure allows the designer to make harder puzzles and get away with it. I kind of wish Portal 2 had done this.

Objection 3

This brings us to the last objection I heard, and it's the most subtle one. The objection is that Portal 2's underlying goal is sort of the wrong one. The design goal appears to be to give the player that "aha!" moment (ok, great) but to not care too much about how he got there. The claim is that a better goal would be to primarily care about the transmission of an idea from the designer to the player. This is a pretty interesting point, so let's look at what's really being said here, and how it differs in Braid and in Portal.

Jonathan Blow has said publicly several times that Braid is not about making the hardest possible puzzle. He isn't afraid of having a hard puzzle, and as we discussed earlier, giving the player a way to skip a puzzle, keep going, then come back later allows the puzzles to be harder than they'd be allowed to be in a strictly linear game. Anyway, he says the point is to have INTERESTING puzzles, which is a different concept than hard ones. Braid is trying to communicate ideas about time to the player. When a new mechanic is introduced, the puzzle is usually something that makes the player realize the logical consequences of whatever time-thing is going on. By realizing that, the player can solve the puzzle.

Let's go back to Portal now, and use some more concrete examples. One of the very first things in both Portal 1 and Portal 2 is situation where you see the orange portal in front of you, on the other side of a pit. You have the blue portal gun, but not the orange gun. (Or maybe you do have the orange one in the Portal 2 version of this, I forget). Ok so you shoot a blue portal right next to you and this lets you come out the orange portal, on the other side of the pit. Yay!

But now there's a left turn and another pit between you and the way out. The very first moment I saw this in Portal 1, there was a split second where I thought, "Ok, so I need the orange portal gun." I was thinking that I just came out of an orange portal, so I need to put an orange one on the far wall. But of course after just a moment, I realized that's not true. All I need is the blue portal gun because I can go *in* the orange portal I just came *out* of and it will lead to the room's exit as long as I put a new blue portal past the second pit.

Another way of describing this is that in this moment, I learned the concept of using one central portal to go in and out of, while you move the position of the "satellite" portal. This is almost too easy of a concept to write so much about, but it's an example of the right kind of thing. I don't think this first "puzzle" had any challenge whatsoever, but it caused me to think something and understand something, so it was a very good thing to have in the game.

A more complicated example is concept of momentum through a portal. At some point, Portal 1 shows you that if you put a portal way down at the bottom of a pit and fall into it, then you can come out of some other portal somewhere else really fast. Maybe fast enough to fly across some other pit. Again, that puzzle isn't really about it being hard, it's about communicating that idea to me. That idea is a tool, and I can now use that tool in my arsenal as I progress through the game.

Portal 2 does have moments like this, but I almost think they are a side-effect rather than the entire point of the game design. There are so many other moments that are more like shooting around at whatever available where's-waldo surface, and somehow progressing. Progressing in a situation like this can be "wow, it worked!" and it seems Valvle polished up those moments to be all they can be. But "wow, it worked!" is just not the same depth of experience as "wow, I get it now!" Portal 2 does have those moments, but I think it has way too many of the "wrong" kind of wow.

To put it another way, I felt Braid was trying to educate me, in a way. Portal 2 seems more concerned with entertaining me. Being an entertainment product, it's hard to fault a game for being entertaining, but the worst parts just feel...more shallow or something than the experience from the education moments. In both Braid AND Portal 2, the education moments are are very satisfying, so it seems that should have been more of the goal.

Despite all these complaints, I still recommend the game. It's highly polished, has great mechanics, and is...well...entertaining.

Tom Vasel Video Review of Yomi

Tom Vasel did a video review of Yomi. As I said before, he's one of the most respected board game reviewers out there, so it's a real honor to see his glowing review.

Infinity Blade: Game Design Review

Infinity Blade was the #1 paid app in the App Store a few days, and deservedly so. As a player, I have to give it a grade of A because it's entertained me more than most games do these days, including games costing literally ten times as much. I'd rather give you opinion as a game designer than a player though, and from that standpoint, I rate it even higher. What's most notable is how much the designers did with so little. A simple combat mechanic and a small map go a long way.

Infinity Blade is "Punch-Out with swords, combined with stat optimization and a hidden object game." Skip the next couple sections if you already know how it works.

Description of Combat

The basic mechanic of slashing with your sword has a good visceral feel on the iPad's touch screen. The combat itself is kind of like Punch-Out. You can dodge the enemy's attacks and after you dodge a big one, you have a chance to hit back. You can also sneak in other hits before dodging the big one, but they do less damage. You can block so that no timing of dodge is needed, but the number of blocks is limited by how strong your shield is. You get an XP bonus if you don't break your shield, so it seems best not to use it. Parrying is more fun than dodging or blocking, and it caries higher risk and a bit higher reward. To parry, you must slash at the right time and angle to match the enemy's attack. Very cool.

You also have two meters, kind of like super meters in a fighting game (simply touch them to activate when they are full). The one in the upper left always stuns the enemy, letting you hit them a few times for free. The one in the upper right lets you do a magic attack (based on which ring you have equipped) that requires you to do a gesture to cast.

Description of Stat-Game

As usual, you defeat enemies to get money and items, which make you stronger, which let you beat more enemies. The not-usual part is that the items themselves are what level up, and your character's XP only goes up as the items gain XP. Once an item has its max XP, it no longer contributes to your character's XP when you defeat enemies. The dynamic that results from that mechanic is that you want to constantly swap your items around, making sure you have decent stats, and also a decent XP gain rate. This might sound annoying on paper, but giving you something to manage between fights is, I think, a big reason why the game doesn't get monotonous nearly as quickly as you'd expect. You get to go back and forth between combat and stat-optimization often, and each gives you a break from the other.

Movement

This is really one of the main ponts I want to make. You cannot walk around freely in Infinity Blade, you can only click on the note you want to go next, and a canned animation takes you there. On paper, this sounds bad. Really though, I think it was a very smart decision. Part of the reason they did this,

Click to read more ...

Specter Spelunker Shrinks

Here's a new indie game.

My review, first the negatives. Please don't make a game with right-handed movement only, or even as a default. Please don't make a game with music that doesn't have a mute button.

The positives: I guess this is the best game of 2010, even though it's only 10 minutes long. I'm not sure what would be better, but certainly not an FPS with an RPG ladder. With Specter Spelunker Shrinks, we get a glimpse at an experimental mechanic that really does work, so that's a rare thing. Anyway, I had the shrink/grow mechanic in mind as well for a platform game, but the difference between Ken Grafals and me is that he actually executed the idea. This game is basically a prototype that's a proof of concept of the idea that vastly shrinking and growing on-the-fly makes for fun gameplay. Verdict: concept proven.

I actually think this mechanic itself is, ironically, part of a larger possible idea. Dear Ken: would you like to make the next Portal / Braid together? Not a joke.

--Sirlin