tempest in a teacup

Some of you are probably aware of the imminent launch of Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition for PC. You’re probably also aware that the PC version uses Games for Windows Live to facilitate its online features. However, what became clear yesterday that was hitherto unknown was the game’s form of DRM.

Essentially, if you’re not signed into an online GfWL profile, you lose access to all but fifteen characters on the roster and can no longer save progress in things like Challenge Mode. This is essentially Capcom doing its best Ubisoft impression, or would be if it weren’t for the fact that Ubisoft has in fact ditched its always-on DRM for its more recent PC releases like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Needless to say, it’s completely asinine, especially considering that GfWL has offline profiles to deal with this kind of crap in the first place.

What this means is that people without Internet access (for instance, at a tournament venue with unreliable Internet access) won’t be able to use over half the characters in the game. This is just a massive deal-breaker all around, and judging by the comments on the post I linked above lots of others seem to agree. There are several legitimate use cases for needing to be offline while playing games – in fact Ars Technica covered one angle I hadn’t considered a while back with their article about deployed soldiers being unable to play their favourite games because of a constant connection requirement.

But whatever – I’m not here to pontificate about the evils of DRM, as there are plenty of places you can go to for that sort of thing. All I wanted to say is that if you were looking at buying the PC version of Arcade Edition, and this rubs you the wrong way, go leave a comment on that news post or send an email to Christian Svensson to let Capcom know how you feel about this issue.

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I recently bought Bethesda/Splash Damage’s new FPS Brink in the hope that it would be able to replace TF2 for me. After about ten hours of playtime I could see it had some merits, but that there was something about it that just didn’t feel right. I wasn’t really able to put my finger on what it was…I mean, all that parkour style movement was nice but it didn’t really seem to be useful for anything since my aim went to shit every time I tried to use it to become harder to hit. On top of that CS-style tactics seem to reign supreme – take cover, aim for the head, drop people in two bursts, which isn’t what was implied by Splash Damage’s publicity at all. I believe the phrase ‘Move more than you shoot’ was bandied about a lot, but this isn’t the case at all.

Well, leave it to a long-time competitive FPS player to cut through the bullshit and lay out exactly what the design problems with the game are. The following are two posts from Kaizoku (the discoverer of Kai jumping in Left 4 Dead) on the Brink Steam forums about why exactly the game seems to be a letdown for so many:

The game does not lend itself to movement based combat, as a veteran quake player and a fan of UT games I’ve seen what those games do to make combat skilled and movement based, rather than cover based. A lot of the issue is the mechanics around firefights, they don’t reward movement based combat, and the guns really aren’t functioning on a "sustained aim" system as they have plenty of recoil and spread.
The game doesn’t know what it wants to be, CS or Quake, so it’s using elements from both, and they’re conflicting.

…

When I referenced "sustained aiming" it is a reference to an archetype of FPS, one being sustained aim and another being first strike determination and the mechanics that surround those. I used CS as a synecdoche for the "first strike" archetype, those archetypes are explained below:
Sustained aim games are usually movement based combat, in that you aren’t using cover to keep yourself alive, you’re dodging and moving around or using the game’s movement abilities to stay alive. These games nearly *always* use no recoil minimum spread guns, the reason being it’s very hard to keep the crosshair on people in those games (relatively), and you are rewarded with damage based on how long you can keep the crosshair on someone. These games also usually give players higher HP pools (relatively) than other FPS’s, meaning you have to sustain your aim on a target to get the kill through dodging and keeping your cross on them.
The you have first strike determination games, which are the most popular right now. CS, CoD, Battlefield, these all fall under first strike type FPS’s. This means that nearly always the game is cover based for defense, meaning if you are without cover, there are no movement abilities and your character doesn’t have good enough speed or movement to stay alive and needs to use terrain or cover to defend themselves. These games are often "realistic" with their guns, using recoil and spread to off-set slow character movement. At the same time, player hp pools are (relatively) lower and headshots/locational damage is rewarded. The first shot is the most accurate from these guns, and tends to determine the outcome of a firefight.
Brink mashes these together in a seemingly contradictory way, taking counter-rationales in the elements they use. They have an advanced movements system, and player movement is a bit faster than most FSD (here on in, first strike determination) games. However, both recoil and spread are present, not just present, but prevalent. These elements contradict in their reasoning, as you remove recoil and spread to reward players for being accurate in fast-paced movement combat, you don’t penalize them for moving and dodging, and you don’t make them hope their recoil and spread stays where they are aiming. They also (relatively) increased player HP pool, advertising a near elimination of 1HKO’s (by the way, there’s still a lot of those) but if you get a headshot (locational damage also being quite important) it can be a FSD situation.
The movement and firefight mechanics conflict in how they reward and penalize players, and it really doesn’t make sense in precedent, rationale, or function.

I have written about the two schools of FPS design before (although nowhere near as thoroughly as this) in my old blog entry comparing Call of Duty 4 to Painkiller (although if you want to go with multiplayer FPSes, Counter-Strike vs Quake III Arena is a much better comparison), and I agree with the thrust of Kaizoku’s argument. Generally I found the parkour-ish moves in Brink to be most useful when attempting to flank or find alternate routes, but not really in actual combat.

I’ll probably keep playing it for a bit longer, since the novelty hasn’t quite worn off yet, but it seems clear at this point that this is a game that needs some rethinking in terms of base mechanics. Until then I’d recommend holding off on getting it.

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I haven’t been writing much recently, and it seems very much like something I should start doing again, if only because all these opinions bouncing around in my head need an outlet of some sort. So I’m going to write about games I’ve been playing recently – seems like as good a place to start as any.

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I was on vacation in Singapore lately, with the only computing devices at my disposal being my iPhone, my parents’ 2006 iMac and my slightly newer laptop. As it turned out, said laptop was completely incapable of playing pretty much anything I threw at it (with the exception of Civilization V, but even that started to chug as my game progressed further). As a result, I ended up trying out a game that has made an absolutely ludicrous amount of money based off word of mouth alone.

I am, of course, talking about Minecraft.

Simply put, this game is about building stuff. You collect raw materials, use them to build tools which you can then use to mine other raw materials which you can use to build other tools and items which you can use to mine other raw materials which you can use to build other tools…

I think you get my drift.

That said, Minecraft tries to throw a few curveballs at you through the addition of a day-night cycle and AI monsters. At night, said monsters spawn in non-illuminated areas and start roaming the map, looking for you and your precious buildings. Of particular note is the iconic Creeper that will run towards you in its best imitation of a suicide bomber, with similar effects. These monsters (or mobs, as they’re called in Minecraft lingo) will spawn in dark areas even in the daytime, so management of light becomes important. You can also craft weapons and armour that will let you deal with mobs, if you so please.

My only question is…what does it all lead up to?

The only purpose of the game is to survive and keep building stuff. Your penalty for death is to lose everything you’re carrying and return to your spawn location, but this doesn’t seem like a really big problem since you can store away materials and tools in a separate stash. On top of that anything you’ve built stays around (unless of course it got blown up by a Creeper) so all you really need to do is make some new tools and you’re back in business.

A friend of mine told me that this game was ‘like playing with Lego.’ My problem with that analogy is that when playing with Lego bricks you start with an end in mind, either from the instructions that came with your model kit or from the plans that you drew up yourself to build some magnificent sculpture using commodity bricks. Once you’re done, you’re done, and the fruits of your labour are visible for all to see. In Minecraft, you build and build with seemingly no end, and since death carries relatively minor penalties all there is to do is keep building.

Games that go on forever without victory conditions have one massive drawback, in that eventually you end up seeing everything the game has to offer (or feel like it, anyway) and quit out of boredom. SimCity has this problem, which is why I eventually gave up on it in spite of loving SimCity 4 to pieces for its complex economic simulation. With Minecraft, I hit that ceiling after about an hour of playing. Since there isn’t anything to do beyond mining and building to find new materials to allow you to mine and build even more stuff, eventually you get bored. The AI mobs’ purpose is basically to slow you down, nothing more.

If death in fact resulted in losing all your stuff (and the Minecraft wiki assures me that once upon a time, it did), then we might be looking at a contender for a decent survival game, but as it stands it’s not much of one. That said, Notch now has my $15, so I hope he makes good use of it.

On a side note, while trying to take screenshots for this post, my graphics card driver crashed twice. Almost like it was trying to tell me something.

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