What makes a good game? And what makes a great game?

We have all seen games that are great and I am sure we have all seen games that are good. However what is the quantifiable difference? Well all I can do is give you my opinion. For the sake of argument let us take two big titles at E3 2008 Gears of War 2 and Star Wars The Force Unleashed. One of them is great and the other is good (in my opinion). Gears of War 2 is great because every feature (innovative or not) works within the fictional rules of the game world. For instance every feature they added worked within the established characters and all in all seemed like something they would do. They did not just decide to let the player turn into a giant rhino and charge around the battlefield. This would not fit within the world as magic does not exist in the Gears of War universe.

Now that I have covered great let us move onto good. Star Wars The Force Unleashed is a good game that could have been great. However this game is a shining example of why you do not break your own fictional rules. In this game you are made to believe (as you are in the movies) that your lightsaber is somewhere around 2,000,000 degrees (basically it is really really hot). And indeed you can cut droids in half seemingly without effort which obeys this fictional rule. Yet when I was watching the demo I noticed that when your flaming hot lightsaber connected with one of the storm troopers they just said "owe" but didn't die or seemed injured. This instantly broke any fictional rule that was established about the lightsaber. Now I do clearly understand that they wanted to keep a T rating but even so there was no attempt to explain why lightsabers don't cut people in half (as they do in the movies), no story about special armor..nothing. Thus this took away in a very large way from the immersion and automatically made me decide to rent this game instead of buy it.

Obviously both of the above titles must be as close to bug free as possible and have solid controls but for the sake of the post I am looking beyond the obvious.

Gamers are Smarter

I was reading the Escapist's recent interview with a well known chainsaw-bayonet totting game designer. In the interview this game designer was talking about how gamers are smarter then movie goers, He explained his reasoning saying that most gamers are very active in the medium. They not only play games, but they also talk about the games and rant about it on forums (or blogs!). I think this is an excellent point. Game designers cannot take short cuts, because the gamers will see them.

GTA IV Believe the Hype (for the most part)

Well I recently took a nose dive into the intriguingly dark world of GTA IV, Rockstar's latest installment in the consistently controversial GTA franchise. Let me get this off my chest, I really did not like the earlier GTA games (I'm expecting flame mail for that one). All of the earlier games felt really shallow in their detail and often horrendous story telling. My biggest complaint is, as usual, an incredible lack of melee combat. Thankfully GTA IV delivers on all levels. This game is the deepest world yet. For instance after listening to the same radio station for at least four hours the radio announcer was still spouting new stuff (only the commercials repeated). The story is now about a Russian named Niko. Niko is by far the deepest character i have ever seen Rockstar put out. You almost feel for Niko in his struggle to establish himself in Liberty City and bury a few hatchets of his own. The level of depth continues to the melee combat as well. This time around your character an dodge, counter, kick, disarm, and punch his way through the city. I loved that the moves were based off of Krav Maga, and well they could have been deeper, i still felt a sense of satisfaction after beating someone down in a Mano Y Mano throw down. Aside from the main items mentioned above the citizens are also surprisingly unique as well. Each citizen depending on who they are yells different things and has a huge variety of reaction animations and dialogue. Well i won't bore you to death with examples but it is suffice to say that this game is a gem and really needs to be bought, i found the world extremely deep and enjoyable. I'll be playing this game for months to come and i hope you do the same. The only thing i would even possibly downgrade it for is the lack of realistic bullet damage. I feel that if you are going to make a dark world (like the one Rockstar created) you should have that realistic bullet damage so you really get across to the player that guns are not something to be tossed around absent mindedly they do have an impact! Now granted they do have the leg shooting ability and things to a similar effect but lets face it a point blank shotgun round is going to do a little more then knock you down!

Condemned 2

Condemned 2 is the newest title developed my Monolith, it is an action/horror game with a rather unique story. What I liked most about the original condemned was the vicious melee combat (using pipes, bricks, or whatever is within arm's reach). Thankfully Condemned 2 kept the melee combat and even improved it, with the combination moves and the finishers. I won't get to into the details of the story but let it be suffice to say that the twist involving sound is completely unexpected and rather unique. However I felt that same twist detracted from the story's believability. And what made the original Condemned so freaky was that all the enemies were (pretty much...aside from a few blue dudes)grounded in reality. But it you liked the original you will still like the blend of brutal attacks and surprising events. The graphics are also juiced up and the game looks great. Now perhaps the most controversial addition is the mulitplayer mode. I really like the multiplayer, i completely disagree with X-play on this. The multiplayer is far more engaging then most. Yes it does sometimes end up as people spinning around each other hitting each other with bricks but hey it's fresh and i am getting really sick up just shooting people online. The crime scene mode...a sort of hid the boxes and guard them from the other team mode is highly addicting. One of the little things i like is that the weapons aren't just lying on the ground they are placed in a location where you would expect to find them such as a fire ax in its red case with breakable glass i felt that really added to the immersion factor. Overall i feel this game was very enjoyable and I liked the multiplayer far more then COD4. Can't wait for Condemned 3 great job Monolith!

The Goal of the Designer

What is the goal of a designer? I would argue that as a game designer the end goal should be to create a compelling experience for the end user (the gamer). The compelling experience I am speaking of is the combination of a visceral world (take Rapture or instance), and a compelling reason for a player to proceed through the game. At the point at which a game designer simply creates a world and plops the player down in the middle of it, then I really don't think the person making that game is to be considered a designer. The person creating the game needs to add a "rez a vi" or a reason for the player to exist. It doesn't even necessarily have to be in the form of a story. For instance Pong has no story but the rez a vi for the player is to defeat the other rectangle. I realize that I am in no position to make claims about game design, but I promised you my musings and here they are.

Saga Review!!

Here is the review of the game I promised. It is called Saga and it is a brand new type of MMO.

Well, it certainly has been a while since I have even heard of a new type of MMO. A breath of fresh air in this relatively World of Warcraft dominated genre would be shocking and truly something to check out. Recently I got into the beta for Silverlode Interactive’s new game, Saga, a brand new type of MMO that promises to be the shining light in this sometimes creativity starved genre. Let me start off by saying that I really respect what the guys at Silverlode are doing with Saga, it takes a lot of guts to try something different in this industry especially with the cost of games skyrocketing. That being said I am not writing this to heap compliment after compliment on Saga. I am here to write what I thought was good about the game, what I thought was bad, and why.
Starting with the good, and there is a great deal of good stuff in this game. There is no monthly fee and that is always a welcoming incentive. More importantly, the game itself is like nothing you have ever played before with regards to an MMO or an RTS. If you have ever played a game of Age of Empires, online with a group of buddies for hours on end you know how much fun it can be to build up a nation and crush you friends. Not to mention it is also great fun to ally with friends and attack other helpless people. Saga seeks to recreate this genuine fun in a much more persistent setting.
You may be wondering how the guys over at Silverlode know what makes a game like Age of Empires fun. This is a valid question and there are two answers: firstly, they are gamers too so they know exactly how much fun Age of Empires is! Secondly, Dallan Christensen wrote the battle code for the project; Dallan was a programmer on that little known game Starcraft: Brood War. Back to the point, it is honestly thrilling to create an empire from scratch and not have it disappear when you decide to go to bed. They also manage to pull off the RTS aspect of the game quite nicely.
From the start off the game you get to pick your race, flag, and name. From there it is on to assigning tasks to peasants, organizing an army, completing quests, expanding your city and becoming a dominant power. The battle system allows you to create battles with friends as allies or enemies along with organizing a group to complete quests. The center of the game is obviously strategic battles, but Saga really has a great economic system as well. Peasants work at collecting resources while you sleep, that can be used to expand your empire or trade to others through the market for troops.
One of the surprising pluses I found in the game is the idea of booster packs. Initially, I didn’t really like the idea of buying these little booster packs to get more units but after working the idea over in my head I began to warm to it. Indeed the more I played Saga the more I really came to see the idea of booster packs as brilliant. For instance online poker is a huge craze and a key component of online poker is the ability to buy in. In my mind I see these booster packs as a way to buy in, and it’s a marvelous idea.
The problem that plagues many MMO’s today is that when someone convinces his/her friend to sign up for an MMO they have found enjoyable the person who signs up has to go through a long newbie phase to get up to his/her friend’s level. The booster pack idea solves this dilemma. Your friends can agree on an amount to spend from the start so that you can all start on equal footing. Granted you still need to train your units by questing but the max unit level is 10 so you can meaningfully contribute to cooperative quests. At release the max nation level will be 35, which determines the amount of troops you can field at a time and the item level those troops can equip.
One of the complaints some gaming sites raise is Saga’s graphics. I mean granted they are nowhere near Crysis or Unreal Tournament 3 but neither is any MMO. Saga is not about being the prettiest kid on the block it is about blazing a new trail and the graphics in Saga are pretty good for the type of game Silverlode wants to make. You look at many other free MMO’s like Runescape and you see that their graphics aren’t amazing but that is not the point (if you are primarily interested in graphics what are you doing playing an MMO anyhow?). Saga easily has better graphics than Runescape and the graphics are more than enough to enjoy creating a huge army and engaging in large battles. If that was all you wanted to know about Saga then I would say go try for the beta and for sure give it a shot when it gets released.
Inevitably I have to get to the bad, as I do with every game I talk about (even Mass Effect my game of the year had its flaws). Saga suffers from a few flaws and luckily they are mostly cosmetic in nature and can be fixed with a few patches.
I found the chat screen interfered with my commanding of the troops. The problem is when you scroll up to the top left corner of the screen the chat menu pops up and keeps you from commanding your troops in that direction. Another thing I noticed was that the WASD keys were not mapped to move the map, the arrow keys were. It was just uncomfortable for me to have to move my hand and use the arrow keys to move the map; I am not quite sure why WASD keys weren’t mapped to move the map as a default. I would like to remind whoever reads this that I am reviewing a beta build so these things could all be changed before it is released publically.
The big flaw I noticed came right at the beginning with the tutorial. Saga is a bit of a hard game to get into initially because the tutorial does not immediately pop up and show you a sample scenario. I was hoping for maybe a small rundown tutorial that a user could choose to run off like, maybe simply a video explaining everything I had to start with and all the things I could do (note: I have heard from the folks at Silverlode that they are working on the tutorial levels so it is quite possible all of these complaints will be null and void at launch).
The tutorial you are given is quite brief and sets you up on a few quests and gives you a brief rundown of the buildings when you first click on them. To be fair, on the initial quests it does help you along pretty significantly but I still would have liked a simple overview of my HUD, possible actions, and menus I am sure there are those out there that will disagree with me on this and just wanted to get right into the game. I completely understand where those people are coming from but it is my opinion that some reworking of the tutorial would be extremely helpful.
In closing I did indeed find Saga to be a breath of fresh air in the MMO or RTS genre. As far as free MMOs go it is one of the best I have ever seen (if you even considered playing a free MMO check this one out). If RTS is your thing and you loved those late night Age of Empire (or should I say Starcraft?) campaigns, then Saga is the game for you, it delivers that experience on steroids. If you are someone who enjoys developing an online character and spending all of your time socializing and crafting items then perhaps look elsewhere, but for the rest of you who want a free MMO with an ingenious buy-in option in the form of booster packs, give Saga a second look. It’s definitely worth it.

The Danger of Games

Below is a copy of the post I wrote for my philosophy class. It is about the danger of games and the duty of game designers to remain story tellers an not gods. Enjoy!!

I have dreamt of being a part of the interactive industry since I was twelve. So when given the choice to write about what ever topic I saw fit to write about it was only natural that video games, and more specifically their unique interactive characteristics, came to mind. Philosophically video games pose a very interesting dilemma. Video games are unique from any other medium in that they are interactive, player decided how the main character acts and how they achieve their goal or ending (or in the case of games like Mass Effect endings). However what happens when, not so far in the future, games become so interactive and realistic that those playing the games have trouble differentiating the real from the virtual? What happens when everything in a game world tastes real, smells real, and even feels real? I am by no means the first person to think of this dilemma, the movie the Matrix poses a similar question, but I think it bears further thought as graphics become so much more advanced, and controllers more and more interactive (look at the WII for instance). I wonder whether people will ever want to leave these virtual paradises? Indeed if the only thing that makes like real is being able to touch, taste, and smell the world around us why would you leave a virtual paradise? There must be something more to life them simply what we can sense. I think that thing is the sheer unpredictability of life, the anger, the deceit, the mortality that makes life diverse. Without all of those things we become like the gods of the Iliad, spoiled, infinite beings with no sense of loss or death. Without that sense of loss all our choices in life mean nothing, they are merely passing thoughts that you act out because it is convenient at the time. So, though I am the biggest advocate of the interactive industry and I believe game have a huge potential as a storytelling medium that can bring these deep questions (like the ones posed on this blog) to people who otherwise never consider them, I think there must always be a line so that the player always knows what is real and what is not. Even if it is just simply the death of your avatar that snaps you out of the virtual reality, otherwise game developers corrupt their purpose. If no line is draws a designer becomes a god and not a story teller. In the spirit of Homer I say being a story teller is a nobler goal.