tempest in a teacup

I wonder when it was that developers stopped listening to good players?

Yes, I’m aware that’s a generalization – not all developers do this. However, the developers of the games that I play most often seem to, and that’s not a good thing at all.

Gaming has become a lot more popular than it was when I was a kid – everyone and his mom seems to have an Xbox, whether to play the latest iteration of Madden or the FPS flavour of the month. The immediate effect of this is that pretty much every developer has been wondering how to appeal to this newly-expanded gaming demographic. The more insidious effect has been that they’ve started dumbing down their games to appeal to this demographic.

As an example, let’s take a look at Team Fortress 2. Simply put, they removed tons of stuff that had been present in TFC in order to simplify the game and make it appeal to Joe Gamer whose only experience with FPSes up to that point was probably Halo. This included several advanced techniques like concussion jumping, several weapons (super shotguns, railguns, nailguns, all the grenades), as well as weapon-specific ammunition and armor. Even some of the seemingly innocent changes caused the game to be dumbed down – for instance, the fact that friendly fire is off and you don’t collide with your teammates makes it easier to spy check and thus severely limits the Spy’s usefulness. And let’s not forget the obvious – critical hits and random damage spread.

The result is that the game sort of works if you’re playing it casually, but as soon as you try to get better at it you start to run into problems. High level play in TF2 involves class limits out of necessity and only uses a small set of maps since most of the game modes aren’t particularly suited to it. The end result is that TF2’s high level scene is markedly smaller than that of other games like CS and Quake.

Not enough? Let’s look at another recent Valve game, Left 4 Dead. This game was sold primarily as a co-op game, and in that respect it works decently, although the weapon balance is rather poor. However, Valve also saw fit to add a Versus mode, which was plainly not designed with high-level play in mind, much like TF2. The survivors are blatantly overpowered, with all sorts of abilities at their disposal – this is in addition to the poorly balanced weapons. A team of skilled survivors all wielding autoshotguns is pretty much guaranteed to make it to the safe room most of the time. This situation didn’t really improve in the sequel – while the infected did get buffed a little, the survivors gained several more abilities, such as defibrillators to bring dead teammates back to life, bile grenades to distract hordes, grenade launchers and high-damage melee weapons.

The effect of this on high level play is that various player-developed mods need to be used to achieve any semblance of balance at all. And these mods basically remove several item types from the game and reducing the influence of the AI director in order to achieve this goal.

Now you might ask, “but SonicTempest, aren’t games supposed to be fun? Why are you treating them like SERIOUS BUSINESS?” To which I would reply: “What do you mean by fun?” What someone finds fun isn’t going to be fun for everyone else. Some people have fun messing around in 32-player low-gravity mario_kart servers in TF2, whereas others have fun learning the ins and outs of a game and mastering its nuances of its ruleset. Note also that someone’s perception of fun changes over time – at one point I enjoyed playing Pyro on 32-player instaspawn Dustbowl as much as any casual player out there. However, after 300 or so hours of playtime, about half of which have been spent playing Soldier almost exclusively and trying to learn the class as best as I can, my definition of fun has changed, based on the simple fact that my skill level has increased. This change has also led me to realise that playing TF2 in pubs is becoming less and less fun for me, simply because of all the things built into this game that hinder high level play.

The conclusion, therefore, is that developers need to design their games with high level play in mind first and foremost for them to remain interesting. Most people’s response to this approach is that it ‘alienates new players’ – which is a premise with which I disagree quite strongly. Look at games like Starcraft and Quake. These games have very high skill ceilings which is the main reason their high level play scenes continue to thrive even today (keep in mind that these games came out ten years ago!) Yet is either game any less fun at low levels of play? I played Quake and Quake III Arena deathmatch back when the games were new, and I was by no means a good player, yet I still had fun with both games. Similarly, I was terrible at Starcraft, but this didn’t diminish my enjoyment of my weekly matches with my high school friends one bit. And these games are still great fun to play, even today – I played Starcraft with my fellow interns while I was in India back in 2006, and even though I still sucked at it, it was every bit as entertaining as it was back in 1998.

Will I be able to say the same about TF2 or L4D ten years from now? I doubt it.

PS: I spent most of this post talking about FPSes, but this is something that’s becoming prevalent across all genres. A little game called “King of Fighters XII” comes to mind…and some might even say that Street Fighter IV falls into this category.

Much better:

(Also I’m such a Sonic nerd that I noticed that they used the sprite from the beta version of Sonic 2, hurhur)

More details here. No boost meter anywhere in sight, although I must wonder why they left the homing attack in. It was a necessity for the 3D games, but in the 2D ones? Not so much, except in Sonic Rush and its sequel where it made the game a little too easy.

I wonder who’s developing it…the trailer says Sonic Team, but it’s entirely possible that they’ve subcontracted it to Dimps again, much like how Capcom went to Inti Creates for Megaman 9 and 10.

Sonic is the only playable character in Project Needlemouse

I have to admit, that enemy concept art reminds me way too much of old-school enemy concept art. Having enemies with actual weak points that you can’t just hit anywhere will be most welcome.

That said, I’m not going to say anything substantive until I see some footage of this thing in action. I’ll just reiterate what I mentioned in my earlier blog entry on the subject – more Sonic CD/S3&K, less Sonic Rush, please.

Although I wouldn’t mind if they had Hideki Naganuma do the music again…not at all.

Here’s what I picked up, during both the Thanksgiving and Christmas sales on Steam:

• Mirror’s Edge (already beaten – they weren’t kidding when they said this was a short game)
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
• Prince of Persia (the new one)
• Crysis Maximum Edition
• Torchlight
• Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition

Backlog doubled, just like that :(

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I haven’t been updating because of some real-life issues I’ve been having that I’d rather not go into here. That said, here’s what’s been going on with me:

• Added some more titles to my backlog thanks to Steam holiday sales: Mirror’s Edge and the last two titles of the PoP trilogy (as well as the newest one).
• Immediately removed Mirror’s Edge from my backlog because I beat it in 3 days
• Removed Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword from my list after beating it over Thanksgiving weekend.

More significantly, I upgraded my PC pretty much as far as I think I can take it – swapped out my old Core 2 Duo E6750 for a Core 2 Quad Q9650, which is about as fast as I can take it without buying one of the ridiculously priced Core 2 Extreme models. More cores certainly make a huge difference in games like Left 4 Dead 2, and to a lesser extent in Team Fortress 2. I also replaced my 8800GTS 512 with a GTX275, which has helped with some of the more graphic intensive games that I’m still working through (like Lost Planet). I also needed a new power supply for the new card, so I grabbed a simple 650W Antec one.

Just those three parts set me back a fair amount, so much so that I think my next ‘upgrade’ will probably involve just building a new box so I can get in on all the awesome i5/i7 action.

That said, I’m tempted to download the Crysis demo again to see how well these new parts hold up.

I just dropped $700 on new parts for my computer and $24 on all four Prince of Persia games, and then I saw the following offers on our Cyber Monday page:

Uncharted 2 for $40
Planet Earth Blu-ray for $40
Hori Real Arcade Pro 3 SA for $90

…

Dammit.

Fallout 3 has finally been evicted from my DVD drive.

(Because I completed it, not because I got fed up with it)

And no, I’m probably not going to buy any of the DLC, since the game itself didn’t impress me that much to begin with. And I don’t think I’ll be missing anything…not with the backlog that I have.

I seem to have run into a bug that prevents me from progressing in the game without using a noclip cheat. WTF

Well, Doom Classic for the iPhone is a decent enough exception. It’s not perfect, but there seems to be a control scheme that at least approximates the feel of a keyboard and mouse. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, like Doom and have $7 to spare, there are certainly worse apps you could buy.

The difficulty select is very well disguised on the menu screen, though – I played through the whole of episode 1 on Normal without realising that difficulty select was even an option.

Nothing of consequence to report, really. Although I will say that I finally sat down and finished Sonic Unleashed this past weekend, and that I was pleasantly surprised to find a reference to a particular Ray Bradbury short story (that I read ages ago for school) while trying to put Fallout 3 to bed.

So right now the backlog looks something like this:

• Fallout 3
• Lost Planet
• God Hand
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin

Oh, and I installed Windows 7. Quite happy with it so far, I must say. The upgrade was surprisingly painless, even though I had to do a clean install from XP.