Legacy skills through the Looking Glass.

I didn't know what he looked like either.

To a late 90's Looking Glass fan, the following quote from an interview about Dishonored would seem perfectly ludicrous:

http://games.on.net/2012/09/dishonored-interview-arkane-on-stealth-ai-player-choice-and-much-more/

GON: When I was talking to the guests, they all just started shouting at me to go upstairs immediately and check the diaries. So I resolved that I wasn’t going to do it, just to spite the game.

Julien: (laughs)
GON: Is that something that you find people doing? I expected the clues to be a bit more vague. Did you find this doing playtesting? Did you put it in because people didn’t know what to do?

Julien: Yeah. We try not to lead the player by the nose, but at some point we found that if we don’t give a little information, people just get lost and don’t know what to do. It’s just overwhelming. So we tried to add this element that gave just a hint, to help a little. But we try to do it as little as possible.

GON: It’s cool because there’s a lot of ways up the stairs, but it still felt a bit railroad-ey. What did people do before you put these clues in?

Julien: People would just walk around. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn’t. They’d say “Okay, I can’t go upstairs.” They wouldn’t do anything.

Even from a modern vantage, it's easy to look at the above passage and laugh. But what's really going on here? Are players that stupid, or are a whole younger generation of shooter fans unconditioned to meet  to even modest exploration/decision making tasks?

I would say not likely--given there is a related and hugely popular set of sandbox games that revolve around exploring and deciding all you want. Something else is at work here. Is it the legacy skillset of current shooter fans working against them?

It's taken for granted that legacy skills (keyboard&mouse/two stick aiming) are required for first person shooters now, but what has now been completely bred out of an entire generation of shooter players is any desire to explore or not follow strict orders. I think a whole lot of young shooter players out there don't know how to play a single player shooter and not take shouted orders from a COD NPC Bro.


What do we expect, if it's all the diet FPS players have had for the better part of 6, 8 years? In COD and BF3, you get an abrupt mission over if you should deign to stop taking orders from your NPC comrades, sometimes even if you hesitate for a second. Shooter players are now conditioned to obey NPCs, in exchange for a jarring and sudden mission failed screen.

Taken in this light, the above quote seems a reasonable response from a tester. An NPC has just told me I can't go upstairs. I'm enjoying this game so far, do I really want to slog back through a load and the last checkpoint, just because I want to try, in utter futility, to push past my given bounds?

But in a game like Dishonored it isn't futile. You should be trespassing and trying to find your way out and around in spaces you're not usually allowed. The trick is to prompt the players who have been conditioned with swift punishment for straying off a linear path into accepting their widened freedom, and to encourage them to take advantage of it.

A small observation I know, likely not worth the space I've devoted to it here, but it struck me that legacy skills involve what you might also call legacy expectations: what kind of affordance have I been given in all the shooters in the past 5 years, and why should I expect any different of the game presently in front of me?
It seems to me a call to developers to take the poverty of modern linear shooters and reignite the expectation in players for better things, more decision making than which real-world analogous shotgun or LMG to pick for a multiplayer loadout.

There have been a lot of people pessimistic about Dishonored despite it giving every appearance of being a return to form for developers who have always believed in this kind of approach to games. I don't think it's fair to criticize them for having to re-educate a vast majority of their potential player base what it is like to call your own shots in a shooter environment.

Missing what might have been: a thought about meta-spoilers

An 8 year old sketch. A pretty decent
Geoff Darrow bite if I say so myself.

The neologism "meta-spoilers" is intended to get after that peculiar issue common to both game developers themselves and hardcore game fans: nostalgia for the path not taken. For game developers it is a constant companion, sometimes threatening to grind game production into endless series of retrenchment, feature creep, muddled design, etc.

But because I am pursuing a policy of open development, modeling after the pioneering work of Mount & Blade's development and current peers like Wolfire, this also applies to fans. I think open development is absolutely the best policy for small developers, and might actually do some big developers quite a lot of good as well, if they could only wrest their freedom to speak to fans back from their marketing departments. But there are some downsides as compared to the traditional model.

Meta-spoilers don't even require knowledge of the game development while in progress. I know a lot of people who appreciate Half-Life 2 very much, but have effectively meta-spoiled themselves by perusing that Raising the Bar book once too often... a game that triumphantly exists is overshadowed by the knowledge of what might have been. And quite honestly I have exploited this very dynamic explicitly with my Design Reboots.

Open development means sharing the heartbreak. In the coming months my posts will not be lying to you--if I discuss ideas here, or post concepts, or respond to a suggestion with "hey that's a really good idea" I am not blowing smoke if it doesn't end up in the game.

Rather, it's just a part of how games happen, or get caught in an endless loop like Duke Nukem Forever's original development cycles. There's no way out from that trap. At some point the game must collapse down from the more attractive, purely hypothetical realm of possibilities into a finite game that actually is.

I am really looking forward to people getting to know what's been inside my head for a year or more, but I thought this should be said first.

Also, with some mulling it over, I will be posting devblog updates to this site, rather than spinning off into yet another page to maintain (and sooner than later stop updating as a result). All posts will be tagged, so a simple filtering will allow you to view exclusively the development updates.

Discuss this post in the forums

The Knight-Errand of the Modern FPS

Working on Darkest of Days I was slow to incorporate a common hallmark of modern shooters, the Objective text. An objective is completed, a new directive takes its place. Perhaps it was that my great intelligence is only rivaled by my laziness, or perhaps it was some internal sense of how player agency has been whittled away to near-nothing in our shooters.

How did we get to the point where the shooter experienced was meted out with bullet points on a to-do list, instead of just bullets?



Once I was a space marine, feeling each Giger-esque tech panel for secret stores; now I am a pizza boy with the Doom guy's armored pecs and inexplicably bare sixpack drawn on the front of my t-shirt, taking orders from NPCs.

Take a moment to compare: play Doom's E1M1 to E1M3 again and then any modern shooter of your choice.
Chances are the navigational complexities of the game are equal to or far less sophisticated than Doom, even 10 years or more removed from that seminal work.
So while the operational assumption has rarely changed--get to the exit, kill everything along the way--many elements are far simpler: health, weapon logistics, and direction of travel. Adult supervision.

For this marginal increase of variety and novelty with which the player is presented in the game, we pay the cost having some buzzing kindergarten teacher in the ear and the loss of even illusory volition.

In my experience as a designer in this mode, basically any time you want the player to shift modes, you send him a new objective and/or maybe get an NPC to bug him.
Then the same NPC might end up giving away the solution seconds later to the just introduced problem, because the modern player has been cowed into this passive state and can become enormously frustrated or confused the moment anything like unprompted choice or decision-making appears.
Player choice extinction.

[A small mercy with Darkest of Days is that early on we made the decision to completely forgo the radio earpiece convention. Handy as it is to cue and clue (or goad and cajole) the player, it is a lazy crutch. We may not have escaped the modern "go here, do this" ping pong player, but at least we didn't give the player a sassy or spunky NPC yammering away constantly to point out the obvious.]

Illustration derived from Ian Albert's excellent Doom Map visualizations.

Open up E1M1 again and consider it from modern vantage: first we'd have the obligatory intro cutscene, naturally, and assuming that we'd start the player in the same point, think of the additional time spent where the radio crackles and then your space marine's situation is explicated for a few minutes more.

Then we'd tutorialize the first few enemy encounters. A short, difficult-to-fail "cinematic" style chase sequence might follow. Exploding barrels explained at length to no one in particular. Then, like a newly released ex-con, the player is allowed a probationary period of fun.

The apparent tradeoff is a series of varied gameplay situations that, like carnival games, the player will be allowed to enjoy to distract from an apparently wearisome core gameplay.
Here's a vehicle sequence. Get ready for a quick time event. Surmount this obstacle (but not too creatively). Woah, get ready for a cutscene, because this animation was deemed far too expensive to produce for you to miss.
Protect this NPC with a mission failure condition if he dies, only to watch his death in a cutscene immediately after.


The heart of the problem to me are these two conflicting design impulses: providing a player a specific (often "cinematic") experience, versus cultivating player choice and expression. Obviously no one game is completely one way or another, there is a broad spectrum of possibility and room for all.
I am happy to play "cinematic" styled games, but not to the complete exclusion of games built for the player. All too frequently I seem to be experiencing the outlet of a stymied screenwriter, not a game designer.

Warren Spector, in his Master Class series at the University of Texas, characterized games at their best a co-authored experience between designer and player.
This is what games do, a shared medium where the experience can only come from the two working in concert.

Games need both the designer and the player; much as an author needs a reader's imagination to give his characters life, so too the designer needs a willing subject to make believe, to give the world a spark, for it is for the player the world was constructed. Games are about interactivity, but this core designer-player interplay is often overlooked.

This is not the oft-made call for all games to feature sandbox gameplay, which is not actually the natural endpoint of game design evolution. (Chess is not improved by being played on a 128x128 square board.)


Rather, it is a call for designers to stay faithful in their role of collaboration with the player to create an experience. Rigorous, regular playtesting helps keep designers honest, as does asking this simple question: "Is this for me, or for the player?"
Is the game a railroad through a laughable third rate imitation of a film script, or something that not only rewards but necessitates the player's involvement?

Cutscenes are not what's wrong with games, but they are symptomatic of what is. Skillfully employed they can enhance and punctuate the experience; but increasingly the "cinematic" mindset blinds developers to the poverty of the core gameplay.

Not only are we railroaded through "cinematic" linear experiences, but I feel as though we lose abilities and insights we once had. The ability to make fun for ourselves. Far Cry 2 has met severe criticism for "boring" stretches, when in fact the game is one of the strongest recent invitations for gamers to truly play the game as they want to. Creative expression still has a place in the modern shooter.

Thoughts on Game Recycling

I spent about two years of my life working on an FPS called Darkest of Days.
While the release date is not yet known and the game's popular and critical reception remains unfigured, the experience taught me just what an arduous experience a production cycle can be.
As rewarding as the whole experience was personally, in retrospect something seemed extraordinarily wasteful about the whole enterprise, even at the fairly "indie" part of the spectrum. Is this how it's supposed to be?


There were so many assets created, tools furnished, lines of code completed and yet there are significant portions of the finished game we weren't happy with.

Or at least I wasn't happy with it; it wasn't the game I thought I ought to be making. However close we were to a better game is immaterial--games have to be finished, even if it felt as though we had only just laid in the foundations for a better experience.

It would be far less work to pick up where I left off and re-use assets and design concepts I am already familiar with to make a better game. Yet the way the industry works means I am assured to have to try my luck working on a completely new game, or possibly end up working on an expansion or sequel.

But the trouble with an expansion or sequel is that you are largely constrained by the scope and feel of the original game. If the original game wasn't quite what you had in mind, chances are slim to "complete" it in an expansion.

I reflected on just what a universal phenomenon this seemed to be--glimpse the game industry as journeymen laborers crafting near-exquisite works and then abandoning them. Rare is the chance any developer gets to go back and "make it right" (much of why I am keen to play the updated edition of Butcher Bay included with the new Riddick game Dark Athena); far more common is the endless parade of almost good games, a sea of reasonably good.
At best I play games that feel 90% or even 95% of what I want, yet that last 5% feels unfinished or somehow otherwise mismanaged.

It's as though a beautiful two story house is constructed, with only half the furniture is moved in and no paint on the walls, but the prospective homeowner stops there and elects to simply build another house instead. That's how modern production cycles seem to function.

And so a thought returns, a kernel of an idea.

Keel from Quake 3, done in Painter IX.

The thought occured years ago while I was enraptured by Quake 3, and the nagging thought returns now as I contemplate Unreal Tournament 3, two games removed significantly in time but not in concept or execution.
Quake 3 is a clean machine, a very "pure" game in ways that other id titles have not been, but at the time it was the first id game to eschew a proper single player portion.
(Which was difficult for a lot of FPS devotees at the time you'll remember. Most have returned to providing some token singleplayer game in addition to emphasized multiplayer, but this shift now seems paradigmatic for shooters as a whole.)

The thin scrim of fiction for Quake 3--a line or two in a vestigial manual to needlessly justify a multiplayer-only DM/arena game--was an obvious afterthought, yet it hinted at a far more interesting game made from the same constituent parts.
What if you did make a game about great warriors doomed forever to combat in strangely abstract arenas, a sort of self-commentary on the deathmatch genre?

Or what if you built a game out of an existing game, that was neither a sequel nor a mod? Something that re-used all the interesting world building, assets, characters etc, but went somewhere else with them? Why start all over again?

The thought recurs with Unreal Tournament 3 and its ilk.
My primary complaint with the game is much as it was with UT2k3 and 2k4--namely that game's visual fidelity far outstrip the interest that its traditional multiplayer mechanics give me.

An environment from Unreal Tournament 3.

It took me a good 45 minutes for a cursory glance around the levels that ship with UT3. It's a beautiful game with a surfeit of visual ideas and settings; deeply generous in a way that most games aren't, delivering and endless array of the kind of stunning visuals that Epic has become expert at creating. Yet the gameplay itself provokes no similar reaction.
This is not a complaint that UT3 was made into the game it was, I enjoy it for exactly what it is. (As a friend once pointed out, many gamers' criticisms can be likened to criticising basketball chiefly on the grounds that it is not football. This is not my intent here.)

But the thought persisted--if a game is a nearly-finished house, why couldn't someone move in and, with comparatively minor effort compared to what it took to raise the house in the first place, make it their home? Move some furniture, paint the walls?

Perhaps I'm not making any sense here, but it's a thought largely unarticulated until now so you'll forgive my lack of concision.

But there would seem to me a middle path, something between the land of fierce indie development (relegated to artistic sidescrollers) and the impressive world-building (but conservative linearity) of AAA big budget development.

Some might consider this the purview of mod development but that's not the shape of what I have in mind. There are too many amateur connotations to that word, and not enough fundamental change to the identity of the game in a "mod", despite the look remaining much the same.

Kana, from Unreal Tournament 3.

I'm thinking about what it would be to make a "new" game with mostly old parts. The unexplored connotations of what that great big spacestation level in UT3 could mean, the wide-open rolling plains with already excellent vehicle handling. Imbue all this great art and set dressing with some meaning, rather than completely interchangeable visual glosses. Build a new world from the old one.
And by "meaning" I mean gameplay mechanics, not Story.
(I think most misguided design impulses come from that tourist hag Story, but that's a discussion for another time.)

So picture a single player quasi-free roamer, or even a co-op shooter, re-using as much of all the phenomenal work already there as is applicable, but in a very different play style... the actual design sketch here I'm afraid will have to wait for another update.

Players say that what they really want is deep and engrossing gameplay, not just another empty graphical funhouse ride. But how would they really feel if they had "seen it all before" with the production art, but were really given a brand new game to play?
Could you build something more than just a "mod" that successfully alters the meaning and gameplay content with mostly the same assets?



The above was written and then left in a draft about three weeks ago; some of these comments seem oddly prescient to me in the wake of 3DRealms' demise. However misguided, there was a team dedicated to getting a game finished just so.
A cautionary tale?

Also, my friend Steve Gaynor recently wrote on the subject of what he calls "Single-A" game development, a far more coherent thought on a similar track. Please have a look.