Rgames - a tavern for artisans

So, as a I said in the last post, I’ve got a design of a FPS/RPG mix going through my mind for some time now, and I’m planning to bring in cold print (or better, in electronical print, because this is a digital Blog *insert laughs here*), but since I use to have mind blockades very often when I’m in front of the computer, working on a piece of, well, sh*t (don’t mind if I use vulgar words in the future). Those blockades usually happen when I wander from the subject to something else, whilst I try to stay in the same pace as before and then some complete fag on the IRC distracts me with stuff, so I basically lose the thread, ending up writing an incomplete, steaming pile of sh*t like the post earlier. After having made a break, freshed up with new ideas, I’m getting the impression that the mandatory “make breaks between blocks of an hour of gaming” doesn’t only count for epileptics… maybe I should do that more often. Although it will be pretty difficult for me, a completely crazy Internet addict.

The FPS/RPG then. Most FPS’s on the commercial market seem to be focused mainly on newcomers, since they seem to be pretty simple in design, having less smaller gameplay elements, in exchange for a straightforward gameplay, without any complex hacking and slashing. Team Fortress 2 for example removed lots of elements, which served as an emblem for the Team Fortress gameplay. The biggest change is that the TF team removed grenades. Grenades in the “original” TF’s (Quake:TF, TF Classic, Quake3 Fortress, Fortress Forever) can be thrown independently from the weapon hend in the hands right at the moment, by pressing either the key “F” for the primary grenade or “G” for the secondary grenade. There are different types of grenades for every class, some harmful, some less harmful but tactically very useful. Mastering it is the key. Although it can be very frustrating to achieve that goal, grenades are still an important element in the Team Fortress games, making it a bit more special and more fun. Another good example of a simple FPS is Halo. Yes, Halo. The best merchandised and “most innovative” game ever, the actual reason why the XboX is the top dog in the console market, and yet, it lost against Valve’s Orange Box in terms of sales figures (though Valve advertised Half-Life2 as “the best game ever made”, which of course points at their huge ego, but their marketing campaign was still less agressive than Microsoft’s pseudo-religious, artificial war for oil, err, money). Halo is a pretty simple game, albeit it was the first game that incorporated vehicles in a decent matter, it is still pretty simple. Shoot aliens, get into a vehicle, shoot aliens, shoot aliens… *yawn*… and shoot aliens. Isn’t that exciting? It must be exciting for all those 360 gamers, paying 100 bucks (or at least 100 Swiss francs) a year so they can scream bullshit into their 360 headset while grinding (!) through the Halo gameplay. It’s almost as bad as World of Warcraft or other retarded MMORPGs. Except that Halo needs slightly more skill, but less brian (do-you-see-what-I-did-there?). It may have been innovative in some ways back then, but it surely isn’t nowadays. Just look at Epic and their Unreal Tournament 3. The design seems pretty simple from outside. But you’ll get a huge boner because of excitement once your inside.

What I think most designers don’t really understand (or don’t want to understand, since they’re forced to create dumb games for mainstream gamers) that grinding actually doesn’t depend on the complexity and depth of a game: Not at all, the more possibilities and different to accomplish a certain task exist, the less said task will get boring and a burnout of that particular atom (read below post first!) can be avoided, though too complex gameplay may confuse the player, or even frustrate him. A good balance between complexity, simplicity, “grinding”, difficulty, and of course, the required skills is to be achieved. Whilst most RPGs are “grind-tastic” (to quote Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation), FPS games can contain lots of variety, but still be simple in design. All FPS (even TF) are pretty simple as a whole (lol, I need to kill stuff), but contain lots of fun details (like the grenades in TF, the hoverboard in UT3, or the artillery in ET/ETQW, etc.) What every designer needs to keep in mind is the in-detail gameplay, which contains all those small elements. It’s just as important as the overall strategy involved in a team-oriented FPS. Shooters also depend a lot on the setting and level design. They get designed with the game design in mind, but they should still contain enough variety, brought by savvy design, gimmicks etc. The design should allow that kind of variety, unless you really want to spawn a dead community.

That being said, let’s start with the actual game idea I’m having in mind.

It’s simple. There are two teams, the “good” (Agathoi) and the “bad” (Kakoi), who need to accomplish certain objectives with teamwork. A player starts without any kind of specialization and with pretty basic equipment, I call it “the alterable form”. After some time of accomplishing those objectives within the team and gaining experience points, the player decides which way he wants to go and distributes his obtained experience points in a specific way. While an efficient skilling can be really useful, the main aim stays the accomplishment of said objectives.

To someone who’s new to online gaming, or respectively online FPS gaming, the above graphs might look pretty boring and indeed very repetitive to him. But unlike other games with pretty static patterns, like jump’n'run games or single player RPG’s (even most MMORPGs consist of static patterns), online FPS’s can vary a lot in the actual game experience and may differ from the written design in some situations. I’ll be trying to reduce repetition and exterminate grinding as good as possible. And naturally, the progression ingame will be a lot more complex than the graph illustrates. I don’t know what to write, so that’s enough for today…

Cheers.

Greetings! Do you also have such moments, where you sit in front of the computer, full of energy and stuff to do something, but you simply don’t have an idea what to write. You had a flash of inspiration just a while ago, and and as soon as you sit down, the picture in your head disappears. Or when you have an idea as an exception, but you simply can’t make it real, since you know that it wouldn’t be possible. Pretty depressing.

As I mentioned a lot in the past, a clear and well structured game design is the key to a good game. A game, which is challenging and fun at the same time. A game, which can incorporate innovative elements combined with a well tried concept. That’s what I have in mind, at least. While I actually don’t have a favourite game or genre, I play first person shooters alot, and enjoy them the most. FPS games let you enjoy a massive thrill and lots of action, without any real harm, whilst it doesnt’ need to be realistic. FPS are probably the most controversal type of video games. They seem pretty simple or even stupid to outsiders, with all their violence and blood, which actually is a big part of the FPS glory that makes FPS’s so special in many ways. Violence is, in my eyes at least, a generally not necessarely needed element in FPS’s, whilst violence can be used to dramatise or underline specific events (which obviously need to be illustrated in a macabre and not very delicious way), or to give the game a particular atmosphere and touch. Just imagine a horror game without creepy environments.

First person shooters tend to be very similiar at first glance, but if you’re at least remotely connected with the (online) FPS community, you should be able to tell the opposite. Or many cases, where that rule doesn’t apply. You see, shooters have a lot in common, since they focus more or less on the same thing: Killing things. And that’s why designing FPS is so much fun. The aim is 90% the same, the execution can differ as much as possible and in involve lots of different elements from, for example, other genres.

To understand the details, I recommend to read The Chemistry of Game Design by Daniel Cook. A very nice read.

So what I basically have in mind is a cross between first person shooters and role playing games. A game, which incorporates limitations, levelling and special abilities from RPGs with, well, “killing stuff” and team-oriented gameplay based on different objectives, like in FPS games. And because words are expensive and I have no idea what I should write now, I’ll show you some awesome graphs made with GraphViz/Dot. Cheers.

Okay, so, after I successfully installed WordPress and added a theme, I’m going to move on to the first post. This site is still under heavy construction. I don’t even know how I want it to look like, when I’m finished. Let’s start with something that isn’t necessarely related to open source gaming or game development.

So, basically two weeks after the release of Enemy Territory : Quake Wars, Timothee “TTimo” Basset, apparently the only hard working bastard at ID, finished the port of the retail client for Linux. “Hooray”, I said, and hopped into the action. I’m actually very familiar with the ET and ETQW gameplay, since I played the original Enemy Territory for quite a while, which was very entertaining, actually, and I’ve also installed and played the Linux demo of ETQW like a madman, due to my impatience, as I couldn’t hold myself. The waiting time for the Linux port was quite long and I was already concerned, after reading so much negative reviews about the game, that ETQW might stay in my shelf forever and switch places with Unreal Tournament 3, that will be released on November 15th with a Linux client on the retail DVD, as Epic Games liked to point out a while ago. Then again, Epic announced a few days ago, that the Linux client will not make it in time, so the port won’t get shipped with the DVD. And TTimo also made it more or less in time with the Linux port of ETQW.

I like ETQW so far. For those who don’t know what ETQW is, it is the successor of the game “Return to Castle Wolfenstein : Enemey Territory” (click me!), developed by Splashdamage using improved Quake 3 technology. Quake Wars is the commercial successor, and probably one of the only decent games coming out for Linux this year (aside from the Penny-Arcade game and Unreal Tournament 3). And as I stated already, I like it so far. It’s nothing spectacular. It’s still Enemy Territory, after all, just with vehicles and overworked classes. That’s fine, you know. I really liked the original ET, although people tended to play only a collection of 2-3 maps all the time, which were also very similiar to gameplay by coincidence. But still, hopping and running around reanimating teammates, hacking stuff, it was pretty fun. And ETQW is pretty much the same. Just with more variety and better balancing. That’s what makes ETQW a great game. It took a succesful concept and improved it.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t got any critics for it. Far from it! What I don’t like is that Splashdamage litterally sent their fellow players with their design and art back to the stone age after promising to blast them to Narnia, twice! The levels are pretty bland and you can’t actually see the possibilites of this huge thing (litterally, though) called “Megatexture”, which got advertised from all sides. ID even reserved a trademark for it. Okay, it actually looks better than Battlefield 2142 and that’s great, too. But I’ve expected something more from those guys. The game could have been made much more dark with much more atmosphere. I always thought that there was lots of drama and violence involved in a war. Especially in a war against an ugly, ruthless, cyborg-like alien race, whose aim is to “stroggify” the whole universe. If not twice!

On the other hand, ID’s technologies were never really thought as a excellent design and art platform anyway. When ID, err, no. When John Carmack comes with a fresh new technology, breaking the existing boundaries of 3d graphics and gaming, two years after that, someone else is going to implement the same idea even bigger and better. And it’s actually the second implementation, which obviously gets more attention. I don’t know what you think, but I’m personally not very excited about ID Tech 5 (that name just screams “oohh, I’m using home-made marketing vocabulary, I’m damn cool!!”). Is it either that it’s obvious for me, that Carmack lied when he said the art assets for the tech demonstration at that Mac conference were done in just one week, since we haven’t seen something new the last months, or because ID’s platforms always failed me when it went about userfriendliness. Either way, I’d really like to see a new Carmack, that scraped a part of his hacker brain away and exchanged it with some designer material. And then we’ll definitely see a nice platform.