HDTV Resolution — Is 1080p really necessary?

In the world of Televisions today, there is pretty much only one format being sold in large numbers any longer: the high-definition television.  Although the mechanism of delivery can vary (Plasma, LCD, LED), all high definition TVs come in the same dimension (16 across by 9 high, proportionally, aka 16×9) and they have one of three resolutions: 720p, 1080i, and 1080p.  Frequently, stores trying to sell you their “bigger and better” models will tell you that only 1080p is “true HD”, but actually any TV definition greater than the standard broadcast definition of 20th century television is considered high definition.

What exactly is meant, though, by “high definition” vs. “standard definition”? Well, the meaning can vary in different countries, because each region has its own standards. Since I’m American, I will focus on the United States. In the U.S., the NTSC standard was used until last year, and that standard is what we call “Standard Definition.” Regular old “tube” TVs, such as the ones you would have seen everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s, the “standard def” TVs (SDTVs), had a sort of “gun” that fired a fraction of the image at the screen.  The gun started at the top left of the screen, and painted (very quickly, far too quickly for you to see it with the naked eye) a line of the image about 1/480th the size of the screen, across the screen from left to right.  When it got to the end of the screen, the gun dropped down one line, and painted from left to right again.  The gun was fast — all 480 lines were painted in the screen in just under 1/30th of a second, and this is what we call one “frame” of video. The gun would then go back up to the top, and start again… painting all 480 lines on the screen about 29.9 times a second.  If you get really close to an SDTV, so that your face is almost touching it, you can see these lines on the screen.

To increase the resolution or “definition” of the image, one would have to increase the number of lines. Smaller lines mean better resolution, but at first the technology to do that was hard to develop. As one way to fudge it, the idea of “interlacing” was created. With interlacing, the TV paints only half of the image each frame. It paints every even line first, and then every odd line second.  When played back fast enough that your eye can’t pick up the difference between the two “half frames,” the effect is a better apparent resolution (to the human viewer). But if you were to pause or slow down the video, you would see artifacts and distortions.  Artifacts can also appear at real-time speeds if there is a lot of fast motion in the video field — because the two half-frames are separated enough in time that the image has moved slightly, causing the odd and even frames to be “off” by a fraction.

This then gives us our two basic formats. Progressive scan projects the full image resolution, say 480, all at once in the frame. So a 480p set shows you 480 lines from top to bottom, from lines 1-480, every 1/29.9 seconds.  Interlaced projects half the resolution per frame, but usually does it twice as fast, so a 480i set would show you lines 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, … 479 during the first 1/60th of a second, and then lines 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, … 480 during the second 1/60th second.  In practice you are getting 480 lines in about 1/30th of a second either way, but they are being delivered in slightly different fashions.

I’m not going to spend any more time discussing the interlaced formats.  What I’m going to say for the progressive scan could be said for interlaced as well, so I will leave it to the reader to figure that part out.

Now back to HDTV and what resolution one really needs.  Both 720p and 1080p sets paint way, way more lines of image on the screen than the old 480p TV sets of the 20th century. They are both considered HDTV. But because 1080p sets are printing a lot more image detail than 720p, and because they have more pixels per screen area, they are far more expensive.  Is the added expense worth it?

The answer, as you might expect, is “it depends.” There are a lot of variables, and part of what will determine it is how close you sit to the TV. If you sit right on top of the TV, larger pixels are easier to notice. Sit back a few feet, and they fade into a smooth image.  Assuming you are sitting across the room from your TV, however, the main thing that will matter is going to be screen size.  So how do you figure out whether it’s worth it?  My opinion (and it’s nothing more than an opinion) is that you want 1080p for anything over 37″, but that 1080p is not worth it for 32″ and smaller sets. At 37″ it’s kind of a toss-up, but I’d probably go for 1080p at that size too.  Now, am I just pulling numbers out of thin air? Well, no… there’s a reason.

Let’s first talk about the total resolution. The sets have a number of lines from top to bottom, but they are also generating the image in small blocks (called pixels) on each line.  A typical 720p HDTV set, for instance, has 1280 blocks of image on each of the 720 lines — for a total of about 921,000 total pixels on the TV (compare with a 480p TV with 640 blocks per line from 20 years ago, which had only 290,000 pixels — the 720p TV has 3x as much resolution!).  Meanwhile, a typical 1080p TV has 1920 pixels per line, or about 2 million pixels on the entire screen — almost 10x the resolution of an SDTV!  Wow, that’s a lot of resolution, so why not go for the max resolution even with a small TV?  My answer is — you don’t really need it.

Let’s think about the larger TVs first. Take a typical large-screen HDTV, like a plasma TV. This will be a 1080p set that is say 48″ in size (in TVs that means 48″ on the diagonal). A 48″ TV that’s 16×9 is going to be 42 inches across x 24″ high, for a total screen area of 1,008 sq. inches.  Since this area has 2 million pixels, that means that 48″ plasma that looks so crystal clear is going to have about 1,984 pixels per square inch. Another way of saying it is that each pixel is about 1/44th of an inch.

This is your key value. If you think that 48″ plasma TV with 1080p resolution looks good (and most people do — I sure do), and you want an image that clear, then you need a screen that gives you pixels 1/44th of an inch across.  The reason is that resolution is about the size of the pixels, not how many (total) there are in an image.  In other words, for a given screen size, more pixels is always better (because it means they are smaller), but for different screen sizes, although more is better, sometimes you don’t need more.

Let’s take a look at my cutoff size, 32″. My 32″ LCD HDTV is 720p, not 1080p. Poor Chessack, right? He has half resolution! Well, actually… I don’t.  A 32″ TV that is 16×9 will measure about 28″ across and 16″ high, and is therefore 448 sq. inches in area. Since it’s a 720p set, it has 921,000 pixels in 448 sq. inches, which amounts to 2055 pixels per square inch.  Look back up at the number of pixels the 48″ TV has. Notice anything? That’s right… there are actually a few more pixels/square inch in my 32″ 720p TV than in a 48″ 1080p!  Indeed, each pixel on my TV is 1/45th of an inch across, vs. 1/44th of an inch across on the 48″ 1080p set.  Therefore, my TV’s resolution works out, in practical terms, to the human eye, to be just as good as a 48″ 1080p plasma set — because the pixels are about the same size, and it is pixel size that determines image crispness (aka. resolution).

That is why I say that at 32″ and below, you don’t need 1080p.  The image on a 32″ set will look exactly as crisp at 720p as it does on a 48″ set at 1080p — and 720p sets are much cheaper.  In my view, 32″ TVs with 1080p resolution are a rip-off. The stores (and manufacturers) only make them because they know people want “the best” and can be fooled by the larger-sounding number.  Note that I’m not saying a 1080p 32″ set wouldn’t have better resolution than a 720p — it would, by a lot. But your eye probably wouldn’t be able to see it unless you sat with your nose pressed against the TV set, and the 720p set’s resolution is just as good as a 48″ TV’s resolution would be at 1080p.  If 1080p is an acceptable resolution (with 1/44th inch pixels) for a giant set, then why isn’t 720p resolution with similar 1/45th inch pixels acceptable in a smaller set? In my view, it is.

Before I close, a quick word about 37″ TVs. You can probably get away with 720p there, though at that size my eye starts seeing a difference between 720p and 1080p. A 37″ set will be about 576 sq. in, giving pixels about 1/40th of an inch across.  Intellectually I feel like my eye probably shouldn’t be able to see a difference between that size and 1/45th inch pixels, but I feel like I can start to see the difference here. Maybe it’s just my mind playing tricks on me. At any rate, by the time you get to 37″ and above, there will start to be a visible difference in image crispness between 720p and 1080p. Below that (32″ and less), most people just will not see a difference.

And so, my recommendation is summed up like this: At 32″ and below, 1080p is absolutely not necessary, and I think people who buy 1080 sets in this size range are being taken to the cleaners.  At 42″ and up, 1080p is probably necessary for a true, crisp, HD-looking image (by the time you get to 42″ sets, a 720p image would have pixels 1/34th of an inch across or fully 33% larger than on a 32″ set).  At 37″ you are straddling the fence. 720p is probably OK, but you may notice a boost from 1080p. I’d probably go for 1080p at this size… but not below it.

Review: NCAA Football 2010 (Xbox 360)

As a life-long football fan, I have played many football simulation games over the years. It all started with Mattel’s electronic football. Later I got Realsports Football for the Atari 5200, which was a huge step up, but still (as one can see from the graphics) not very realistic.  These early games just let one simulate a single game, with a reduced number of players (not the 11-on-a-side that you have in real-life football). Their goal was to retain the basic feel of the game, but they did not have the ability to make it very realistic.

Later, in the 1990s, I got better computer (a 486/33) and a better version of football simulation, called “NFL”, which gave the player the ability to play all the professional NFL teams (with randomly generated players, of course) and follow an entire season from exhibition games to the Super Bowl.  This game was a lot of fun, but ultimately the AI was limited, and there was a trick to running successfully. I found out that because the defense pretty much only played man-to-man coverage, if you motioned a receiver from one side to the other, the defender would follow, leaving a hole on the vacated side that you could run to. The result wasn’t necessarily a break-it-for-a-TD big-gainer, but you could reliably get at least 5 yards per carry, and this made it basically impossible to be stopped.  I therefore was able to score on every possession (if I chose), and this made the game too easy and I lost interest.

I didn’t touch football games for over a decade after that, instead trying other sports like hockey, baseball, and tennis. But finally when I got my current desktop, I decided to try the current installation, which at the time was Madden NFL 2007 (despite the title, this game was released in 2006, not 2007).  It was miles ahead of the earlier versions, with not only excellent graphics and great sound, but also with good AI for the teams, coaches, and players on the field. I was able to eventually master it on easy mode, though I found that it was too hard on the harder modes for me to be able to win.  I eventually gave up frustrated by the lack of a good challenge for me — the easy mode was a walk-over, and the hard-mode was unwinnable.  I was also disappointed with their “superstar” mode, in which one creates a single player almost as a “character” in an RPG, and plays that player (and nobody else on the team) for an entire multi-year career. It’s a cool concept, but I hated the “behind the helmet” view and was annoyed that I could not switch into the other views that you can use in the rest of the game.  Upon hearing that this had been fixed in Madden 2008, I mistakenly tried buying that game too, only to learn that the ability to switch cameras was in the console version only, and had not made it into the PC version.

I gave up on Madden at that point, but I had always heard things (some good, some bad) about the other football game from Electronic Arts — NCAA Football.  It seemed to have problems not too different from those of Madden, but one thing that it had going for it (in my view) was the college football theme. I’ve always preferred collegiate and amateur sports to professional sports, and particularly enjoyed going to college games when I was a graduate student. There’s something different about the college football experience. Maybe it’s the band, or the younger crowd, or the fact that the guys on the field are part-timers rather than full-time professionals, so they play a little differently (they make more mistakes, which leads to break-away plays more often).

And so, when I got my Xbox 360, the second game I bought, and the first one I got at full price, was the current incarnation of NCAA Football… NCAA 2010.  I have greatly enjoyed the game, though it does have a few of the draw-backs the older versions of Madden suffered from — most notably, the inability to realistically or usefully change camera views, this time in any mode of play.  Since the computer can show you the play on the fully rendered 3D fields from any angle, I think this is a mistake on their part, but fortunately on a widescreen TV, this is somewhat mitigated (you can see more width of the field than on a 4:3 aspect monitor).  Below will be my (highly opinionated, as always) review of this game offering from EA.

Graphics – 10/10

The graphics in NCAA Football 2010  are first-rate.  You can see show on the ground with footprints as players run around in it when it is cold out. You can see dirt building up on uniforms when it’s raining and the field is wet.  You can see scratches on the players’ helmets.  Everything is well rendered, including the stadiums, cheerleaders, and even (to a degree) the crowd.  The game was designed to be played on a high-def TV, and on my HDTV, it looks fantastic.

Gameplay – 8/10

The gameplay is decent, although it has issues in a few areas.  One persistent problem I have when quarterbacking is the lack of responsiveness of the “A” button in particular. The “A” button is used to hike the ball, and is also used to throw to the “A” labeled receiver (usually a tight end). I have no issues with any of the other buttons, but for some reason after hiking, the “A” button almost seems to become disabled briefly, because almost every time I try to throw to the “A” receiver, I have to hit the button twice. This almost always results in me either getting sacked for holding the ball too long, or throwing an incompletion or interception.  It’s gotten to the point now where I just have to discount the “A” receiver — which is very aggravating if he is the one who has managed to get open.  This may perhaps be just a problem with my particular game system or controller — there’s no way I can tell if that’s the case.

A second, somewhat larger issue, is a repeat of what I mentioned above happening in Madden NFL Football — namely, that the easiest mode (“Freshman”) and the next harder mode (“Varsity”) create too large of a leap in difficulty.  I can run and pass all over the defense and sack the quarterback 37 times a game on “Freshman.”  Put it on “Varsity,” and doing the exact same things, I can’t get within 5 yards of the quarterback all game, the offense runs all over my D, and I can’t complete a pass or run for more than 2 yards per carry.  The difficulty should not change this wildly when upping it a single step.

One nice aspect of the game play that I think is new this year is something called “setup.” This is where the offense’s play calling can set the defense up so they are thinking one thing, and you can fool them with another. An obvious example would be if you do a few successful run plays in a row, the defense starts thinking “run”, and you may find that your play action pass out of the same formation you’ve been using to run is “set up” — meaning that you can fool the defense with it. Your chances of being successful go up, supposedly. This seems to work, in the sense that these setup plays usually will get you decent yardage. I’m not sure what is happening though — either the computer is forcing blown coverage, or perhaps your catch % goes up, or something.  It’s hard to tell much other than that it works.

Overall, the gameplay is pretty good. The game makes you feel like you are right there, on the field, playing with the other players in the stadium.  The play is realistic so that you feel like you are really playing an actual football game.  It looks and feels very good. I enjoy all aspects of the game — running, passing, and at least the run stopping version of the defense.  Pass defense is impossible, at least for me, but always was in Madden as well. I just leave that to the AI. Speaking of which…

Playcalling/AI – 8/10

The AI is about the same in NCAA Football as in Madden for most things.  The computer is pretty good about reacting to your formations — they will put in a nickel package against your shotgun formation with 4 wide-outs, for example, and they will bring the run blitz on 3rd and inches.  It’s not overly easy to fool the AI, even on “Freshman” mode, and as you raise the difficulty, tricking the AI becomes much harder.  When playing against you, the computer is acceptably intelligent.

When playing on your side, unfortunately, it’s a bit of another matter, at least in the game’s version of “superstar” mode, which is called “Road to Glory.” In this mode you pick one player, your star athlete, and you play him, and only him, for 4 seasons, trying to break records and get great stats for him (winning the game is useful, of course, for recognition, but you can easily play a “Barry Sanders” type player who is awesome at his own position on a horrible team, and earn good stats).  The problem here is that the AI seems to make pretty stupid decisions much of the time. I’ve only played the RTG mode with one team — South Carolina — so far, so perhaps it is just the old “chicken curse” of the Gamecocks that was deliberately programmed in (because the real-life Gamecocks have pulled some head-scratchers over the yeears), but the AI coach calls plays for the team that frequently make no sense. For example, when you’re up by a touchdown already and you’re at 4th and goal, most coaches would go for a field goal and be happy to be up by 2 scores, especially late in the game. Not your AI coach, though… he’s going to go for it.  And when he goes for it from 4th and goal at the 9, he’s going to call a play that’s sure to fail, like an option — an option where the fool of a quarterback, instead of tossing the ball to the Heisman-trophy-candidate all-NCAA running back who has broken every record in the books on the ground, will keep it himself.  You can guess what happens in such a situation.

I think the most frustrating aspect of RTG is that you can play a position that the computer will not utilize fully — so for example, you’re playing a running back, and the computer passes the ball over and over again.  The game mostly follows the established patterns of the coaches, and probably this means that USC passes a lot. However, there should be a way for me, as player, to go in and set the game so that the computer is biased toward running if I want a lot of touches. After all, it’s my game and my road to glory. Why shouldn’t I be able to demand the ball more?

And so, the AI is pretty good, but it definitely pulls some head-scratchers when it comes to coaching decisions.  I’d like to see them improve this aspect of the game.

Performance – 10/10

Performance on my Xbox 360 with my TV is excellent. I have not had any issues. The game is as smooth as silk, and was clearly well optimized for the Xbox platform.

Sound – 8/10

The sound is good, although there are some issues. First, they seem to have had a band record all the main fight songs of the various schools. At first I did not realize this was the case… I played South Carolina, and I have only ever gone to their home games, and heard their band (except for a few cases such as when the Georgia band visited our stadium).  The only band music I’d heard, therefore, was the USC band’s, and so the songs just sounded familiar, and I didn’t give them much though. Then, however, I started playing the Wyoming Cowboys, and noticed that the band music was all different.  I have not played other teams but I surmise from this that they have music from all 120 bands in the game — which is very cool. And it sounds great.

However, the music while you’re in the menus is obtrusive and annoying, enough that I had to turn it off (well, down to 0, which amounts to the same thing).  Also the menu music is much louder than the game music, which forced me to keep fiddling with my sound volume settings, and there really is no reason for this. The game should be at the same volume level all the time.

Overall, however, the sounds are realistic and well done, and this is a solid aspect of the game.

User interface – 7/10

The user interface (UI) is hard to rate because there are so many components of it. There is the in-game component (what you use to run your plays). There is the menu component (how the menus work outside of the game). And there is the recruiting component, where you locate, call, and offer scholarships to the best prospects you can find.  My overall impression of this is that the in-game controls are mostly fine, but the menu and recruiting systems need work.  Some menu items are very hard to find — there were a couple that I found once and then went bananas trying to find again. This might have been less of an issue if the instruction manual had been of any use, but it basically is not. They explain nothing in the manual (this is the standard case these days, unfortunately), forcing you to “learn as you go.”

Fun – 8/10

NCAA Football 2010 is a very fun game to play, overall. I enjoy it immensely, and have completed over 3 seasons of my RTG star running back (who has already won the Heisman trophy), and half a season in Dynasty mode with the Wyoming Cowboys. It’s a lot of fun, but there are a few hiccups. I’d say the biggest one is the time in between games in RTG mode. This aspect frankly is an abject failure.   Basically, each and every day in between one game and another (Monday through Friday) you have to both do practice, and do an “evening” activity such as going to the library, hitting the weight room, or studying your playbook.  These things can temporarily affect your stats, at least in theory, but I’ve never seen it made any apparent difference on the field. Also, because you do them every single day, you’re talking hundreds of these in a career, and these evening activities become horribly boring. They also are just button clicks (you don’t do anything, just click “study play book” and it simulates the activity.  The practice itself is useful to work the kinks out of plays in Dynasty mode, but is useless in RTG mode, because it makes you run random plays, and each play of the practice session is different. Thus if you are having trouble getting the screen pass to work right, you can’t choose to practice it with your RTG star until you get it right (which is what one would normally do in a practice). I ended up after a few weeks of play, just “simming” all the practices  — making that whole aspect of the game effectively useless.

However, other than these hiccups, the game is a lot of fun, and I have played it for many, many hours (the sure sign of a well-designed game).  I actually managed to win against FAU with Wyoming yesterday 41-38 in OT, and I was fist-pumping with each good play and made a lot of noise in celebration when I won… almost as if I were cheering on a real team of which I was a fan.  You can’t have that kind of reaction if a game is not fun.

Overall – 8.4/10

Overall, NCAA Football 2010 is a very good game. It’s solid in most ways, and I have not noticed much in the way of bugs. I don’t use the online stuff like Teambuilder, so I did not comment on that. But as a stand-alone game it’s already very good, so I an only assume the online aspects would make it even better.  If you like football games on consoles or PCs, and you have an Xbox 360, I can definitely recommend this game.

Mass Effect Re-Review (Xbox 360)

Some time ago, I tried playing Mass Effect on my (dinosaur of a) PC, and it just was not playable due mainly to performance issues. I also had some problems with the control system, which made the game very difficult to play.  However, I said then that if I got a better-performing computer, I would re-play the game.

Well, that didn’t happen exactly, but I did get a new system — an Xbox 360 rather than a whole new PC (on the logic that it plays games as well as a high-end PC would, but for a good $1200 less).  Since Xbox games usually perform well on that platform by default (there is no sense in a publisher making a game that the Xbox 360 can’t play well because there is no way to realistically upgrade it), I thought it might be worth taking a crack at Mass Effect on that platform. As an added bonus, since it’s an “old” game (as the industry regards these things) it was cheap ($20). So I picked it up and tried it again on the Xbox.

To start with, it took me some time to get used to the Xbox 360 controller scheme. However, the performance was smooth as silk (as expected), and many of the problems I had noted in the PC game were either reduced or totally nonexistent. This explains why my friends, all of whom had played it on the console, were so bewildered when I posted a non-positive review of it.  Since my impression of Mass Effect on the console is entirely different from the impression I had on the PC, I felt it warranted a re-review. I am going to leave the old one up as a “PC review” but add this Xbox version so that people can get the sense of my impression on both platforms. As always, my opinions are mine, and mine alone, and are not intended to be professionally objective.

Graphics 10/10
The graphics of Mass Effect are excellent on the console.  Character design is realistic and top notch, and you won’t find much better visuals in any game on the market.  Special effects look good, and the models are well designed. There’s not much to say here other than that the graphics are excellent.  The overly “dark” feel I got from the PC version of the game was not present here… perhaps it was a monitor or video card issue.

Character Design/Development – 8/10
I like the basic way they have the character design set up.  There are classes, and each class gets access to certain types of weapon, certain armor, and certain “class skills”.  Not all skills can be learned by a given class, which some might see as restrictive. However, this is counter-balanced by the fact that there are more possible skills to learn than skill points to allocate.  Indeed after the early levels you only get 2 skill points per level, even though you will often want to allocate as many as half a dozen at the same time — which means you have to be very careful what to specialize in.  I also like that they allow you (for once) to pick your background from amongst a few choices (though these are still relatively narrow in range) and to pick your gender and so forth.  This is great stuff.  I only wish they had gone all the way and just given you the whole list of skills, and skill points, and let you specialize in whatever you wanted.  Realistically they give you enough choices with the classes and hybrid classes that you can almost do this anyway, so it is a good character creation system.  This seciton would get 10/10 if it were not for the limited looks of the characters.  They give you a lot of sliders to play with, but to be honest the sliders don’t seem to do a whole lot. And for the female models, I utterly despised almost every hairstyle they presented me with.  What is it with Bioware and hair?  I don’t think I have yet played a Bioware game where it was possible for a female character to have hair that came down past the top of the shoulders. When this happened in Neverwinter Nights I let it slide, since it was one of the first “3D” type RPGs I had seen. But this is 2008, people… there are dozens of games on the market with long hair possible, from the Sims to most MMORPGs.  Why can’t they put in some long hair options with this game?  The other problem with the look is typical of most loot-based RPGs, of which this is definitely one — the look of my character is determined by what has good stats, not by what looks good on her. This is always frustrating to me.  So, these guys get a 9/10 for stat customization, and 7/10 for look customization, which I’ll average out to net them an 8.

Game system – 8/10
The game system of a CRPG is the equivalent of a table-top game’s combat and adventuring (as opposed to charcter design) rules.  This is things like how to-hit is resolved, how damage works, and the like. I found to be relatively well done.  One thing becomes very clear after my full play-through on the console: this game was designed for the console, not the PC, and the PC adaptation is not as smooth as it could have been.  The controller buttons are intuitive and easily grasped, and I had no real problem managing the system.  I often quibble when RPGs use what amounts to my reflexes in place of my characters, and Mass Effect does this, no doubt. But it is done in a way that does not overly offend my sense of roleplaying. Overall, using the tight controller setup, I found the game system to be solid. It’s not a home run, but it’s not the foul tip I thought it was on the PC. It’s a solid lead-off double, I’d say.  I’ll point out here that I intuited this in my PC review, where I said “some of this could have been mitigated by the interface, which instead is clunky and, in my opinion, hard to use.”  Clearly I was right — with the better interface of the Xbox control scheme, the issues were mitigated, earning the Xbox version of the game 2 rating points over the PC in this category.

The game system doesn’t include just combat, however, and about half of it is conversation and investigation.  This end of the game is quite well done, as it is in most Bioware offerings.  The combat itself may be hyperactive, but it is punctuated by long periods of thinking and dialogue. You get charm and intimidate skills that will open up conversation options for you, allowing you to get more done without having to fight all the time.  This part saves the game system, in my view, for without it I would have rated it much lower.

Role-Playing – 10/10
For a single-player RPG, you will not find one that has a more sophisticated and interesting role-playing element.  You get to make all the important choices for your character. Their conversation interface is quite nice — a modification of the old system Bioware used to use. The old way, you would be presented with numbered options showing exactly the text your character will speak.  In Mass Effect, instead, you are given a circular “dial” where a very few words summarize what you will say, and then the character asks the question in a more verbose manner.  For example, an option might be “ask about job”, and when you select it, your character would say something like, “So what do you do on this space station, anyway?”  I like this better than the old system, because it allows you to be entertained by both your character’s statements, and the NPCs’ statements, since you don’t know exactly what the words will be.  Also, there is far less “text clutter” on the screen this way, and the game plays much more like a movie than the older Bioware games did.  Clearly, as with any CRPG, you’ll mainly be following a pre-set path, but you do have choices all along the way, and those choices affect how your character is seen by others.  They have two progress bars similar to the “light” and “dark” side bars in KOTOR, called here “Paragon” and “Renegade”, and the game will track your decisions and score you in each area.  Making choices that are illegal or morally questionable will raise your “renegade” score, whereas making choices that are ethical and legal will raise your “paragon” score.  Thus, you get to choose whether your character is a rule-follower, rule-breaker, or somewhere in between, and the game adjusts as you  make these decisions.  Once again Bioware has created a game with excellent roleplay potential for something that is a solo game.  Nobody does it any better than these guys, and that’s still true today.

Performance 10/10

I’m not entirely sure “performance” is an appropriate category on a console, since those games and systems are designed to work “right” much more so than a PC. However, I suppose Bioware could’ve so overdesigned this game that it brought even an Xbox and a high-def TV to their respective knees. However they did not. The performance on the Xbox is outstanding. It’s so much better than the PC version that it’s like they’re not even the same game. The unbearable “loading” issues from the PC did not exist on the console (loading happened very rarely and was quick when it did). The frame rate was constantly high, leading to super-smooth game-play. There were no glitches in the game at all.

Sound 8/10
The music is excellent, and the voices are, as usual in a Bioware game, well acted.  I was thrilled to find that they finally gave the main character (your character) a voice as well this time — in the past,your character was the only silent one, which seemed odd to me.  However, there is some sort of a problem with the way voices are done out of conversations.  The volume seems to be set differently for these (and to be unalterable), and to be at a much softer level.  This would not be too bad, except that sometimes as you finish a conversation, it will exit you out of the conversation “zoom” window, and the last line of the converstaion spoken by the NPC will be drowned out.  If this contains important quest information, you’ve got a problem.  I’m not sure why it did this, but it was a problem on both the Xbox and the PC.  I marked them down for this — it’s sloppy and should not have been necessary.

User Interface – 9/10

The UI for the Xbox is so much better than for the PC that it is like night and day.  The ATV, so impossible to control using mouse/keys on the PC, was easily and intuitively controllable on the Xbox (at least, for me).  The squad controls (for your NPC helpers) are much faster and easier to use on the Xbox, and I found myself actually using them (a lot) there, whereas I was ignoring them on the PC because I found them too hard to use. My only quibble is the radial menu for doing special moves or swapping weapons. I found it very difficult to pick the one I wanted easily. The cursor kept hopping too far one way then too far back the other way when trying to make my selections. The game is paused when doing this so it’s not a huge deal — you hold it in pause until you manage to corral the cursor where you want it. But it shouldn’t be necessary to fight with the left stick on the controller — basically the “trim” for this part of the interface needs to be adjusted. I marked them down a tad for this, since it’s sloppy, but otherwise the interface on the Xbox is intuitive and usable. Much better than the PC version.

Fun – 10/10
In my PC review, I said, “There’s no doubt that Mass Effect has the skeleton of a good game here.”  Oh how right that was.  The “skeleton” was there, as well as the meat, skin, hair, nails, and organs. It’s a solid, fun game, on the Xbox 360. The problem is that only the skeleton is apparent on the PC — which is why I rated the PC so poorly.  On the Xbox, I had a blast with this game, and couldn’t stop playing it some nights, even when it was time for bed. I powered through it in just over 2 weeks of hard play, and I didn’t manage to do every single side-quest. It’s well worth a re-play to try the different classes/options… and was amazingly fun. Far more fun than the PC version, which was an exercise in frustration.

Overall – 9.1/10
When you average all the scores, we end up with an A- for this game — 9.1 out of 10.  This is my highest rating yet on this blog, and I think Bioware deserves it.  The console version of Mass Effect can proudly take its place along side masterpieces like  NWN, KOTOR, and Jade Empire as “must play” games.  If you like Bioware games, or just like RPGs in general, Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 is a great offering, and is worlds better than the PC adaptation. My advice: Just steer clear of the PC version of this game and you’re good to go. Get the Xbox version (especially now that it is cheap!).

Reverse Difficulty in RPGs

This weekend, I finally decided that I would buy myself an X-box 360. I have not had the console anywhere near enough time to write a review, but it led me to thinking about something else, as a consequence of the game I purchased — Mass Effect.  Now, I already have a review of Mass Effect here, and it wasn’t very positive, so you might wonder why I bought it (a second time) for the X-box. There were a couple of reasons. First, it was on sale ($20). Second, as I said in the review, part of the problem seemed to be my dinosaurian computer system.  I heard from other friends that the game was much smoother on the console.  And so I tried it, and it is definitely much better on the console. When I finish it (assuming that I eventually do), I will be giving it a re-review.

Mass Effect, as you might know, is a Bioware game, which means it’s a computer RPG.  It is like most other RPGs in that you start out as a beginning (“Level 1″) character and the character slowly becomes more skilled and gains better equipment over time.  You can select from about 6 different classes. I chose (again, because I thought it was an interesting class last time) the “Infiltrator”, which is kind of a mix between electronics powers and soldiering skills.  What I like most about them is the sniper rifle.  I was reading up a little about the class on the Bioware forums, just to get some advice on the types of skills that help the most, and someone made a comment that was interesting, and got me thinking about RPGs and the difficulty level. The comment was, “It gets easier as you level up.”

Before I go any further, I want you, gentle reader, to think about that statement, because it is a general truth of how most RPGs — from Dungeons and Dragons to MMORPGs to Mass Effect — are structured.  Let me repeat it: It gets easier as you level up.  It’s true for almost all RPGs (the one exception I can think of is the Pen-and-paper game Champions), and I think it’s a bad thing. I want to discuss why I hold that opinion.

What do I mean by “easy”?

I’d like to discuss why this happens, but first let me define “easier” relative to “harder.” The ultimate failure in an RPG is for the character to die. In pen and paper games this is often permanent. In computer games it usually “resets” you somehow — you load from a save game, or respawn at a spawn point, or lose some experience, or something of that nature.  Therefore, death is the ultimate consequence.  Speaking in general terms, therefore, a hard game would be one in which death was frequent or difficult to avoid, and an easy game would be the opposite.  I recall my first D&D adventure. There were just two of us — my friend Stu, who was the DM, and I, who was the player. We wanted a “full party” but there were only two of us, so we each made up five characters, and then I played all 10 by myself, while he DMed and ran the NPCs.  It was a lot of fun, but even with multiple raise dead scrolls and all sorts of DM intervention and assistance, only 6 of the 10 PCs made it out of that (very long) adventure alive.  That’s a 40% mortality rate of our level 1 characters.   In the next adventure, of which I was the DM and he played all 6 characters, there was only 1 death by the end (one that “stuck” after scrolls and the like, anyway), so that’s only a 17% mortality rate.  Clearly the second adventure was easier than the first.  Our final adventure with this group had no deaths out of five, or a 0% mortality rate. I’d call that one the easiest.

Therefore, having an “easier” time in an RPG means “you have an easier time keeping your character alive.” The battles are less likely to be lethal. The enemies are easier to defeat. The traps are less likely to be sprung, and if sprung less likely to kill you.  And my assertion is that these things become easier as you level up the character.

Why it gets easier as you level up

There are a few reasons why RPGs become easier as your character levels up, quite apart from the obvious cause in any game — the gamers become more experienced.  In a regular, non-RPG, this is the only thing that really makes a game easier — you get better at it.  Turn on Madden NFL or Major League Baseball XXII, and set the game to “normal.” You will find over time that the games later in the season seem easier (notice, I didn’t say “get”, I said “seem”), because for a given (e.g. normal) setting, the game’s difficulty is constant, but after playing 16 or 100 games, or however long the season is, you, as a player, are better. That’s always going to happen, in any game, because humans learn by doing.

However, in RPGs, there is another layer of experience gain layered on top of the experience of the player, and that is the experience of the character.  As a character levels up, many things happen. He usually gains more hit points, and that makes him harder to kill.  He gains attack ability, which gives him (1) more options of ways to defeat enemies, and (2) the ability to damage enemies more or faster. And he will gain non-combat skills, like trap detection or conversation manipulation skills. This will make it easier to find and disarm traps, or to convince NPCs to do the character’s bidding.

These changes, these advances in character power, make the character less likely to die than he was in earlier adventures, and thus, make the game easier as you go.  A higher level Infiltrator in Mass Effect, to use the first example, has an easier time of it because his snipe ability gets better.  A higher level wizard in D&D can cast Power Word Kill, and one-shot kill an enemy, or Meteor Shower, which is like a multi-cast fireball.  At first level he was lucky if he could fire a single magical crossbow bolt out of the palm of his hand once a day.  At higher levels, the thief or rogue can detect traps from across the room while half asleep. At low level he could stare right at the trap and miss it.

Hopefully, as the above paragraphs indicate, this is something that happens in most RPGs. It happened in Dungeons and Dragons. It happens in Mass Effect. It happens in most MMORPGs. The characters’ survival rate goes up as they gain experience, because the experience gains lead to character improvements that make the game easier to play.

Why are games designed like this?

By now, I will assume I have convinced you that RPGs get easier to play as the character levels up. I hope you’re already thinking about where I’m headed with this, which is that games shouldn’t be designed to get easier as you go forward.  But before we get there, you might want to wonder why games are designed in such an obviously reverse orientation (you would expect challenge to go up as players get more experienced, not down). There are some reasons for this, which are the following:

• Easing players into the game. Although it’s true for pen and paper, this is especially important for computer RPGs, where the game is played in real time and there is little chance to think (as there would be in a Pen-paper game). The player has to learn to react quickly to his surroundings or else his character will die.  If you started characters with 20 or 30 abilities, all showing up as buttons on the hot bar, the new player would be overwhelmed.  In video games, then, it makes a certain amount of sense to start the character out with only one or two simple abilities, and then add one every couple of levels.  The new ability can then be practiced for a while until the player becomes comfortable with it, by which time he’s gained a few levels and it’s time for a new ability.  I have no objection to this line of reasoning and I would not suggest changing this aspect of it — go ahead and start with few abilities and then increase them.
• Lower level characters don’t need mega-abilities. Many games withhold the “mega” powers, like Power Word Kill or Meteor Swarm, to the higher levels because, for lower level characters, these abilities would be overkill. When a single dagger does enough damage to 1-shot an orc, there’s no need for Power Word Kill, a spell whose main claim to fame is that it can one-shot an enemy.  You need that in the higher levels, where it would take 100 dagger strokes to kill a foe, and one-shotting him is therefore very useful.  I have no problem with this line of reasoning either.
• Characters become more powerful as they gain experience. Most games are designed to follow a story much like a fantasy novel or a comic book. It is a standard convention of the genre that older, more experienced characters are more powerful.  Although this is a sound principle, this is where the wheels start to come off, because “being powerful” becomes equated with “being harder to kill.” And since the main thing that makes an RPG difficult is dying, becoming more powerful = harder to kill = easier to play.  And here is where we get caught in the inescapable quicksand of pretty much all RPG design with the possible exception of Champions.  When characters become more powerful the challenges need to become equally more powerful. And I will grant that RPGs try to do this… The Malta in COH, a level 45-50 enemy group, are more powerful in absolute terms than the Skull gang. But the problem is that the power increases of PC vs. NPC do not match, so that a level 50 PC is 50x as powerful as a level 1, but the enemies are only maybe 25x as powerful… making the high level enemies an easier challenge for the player, than the low level enemies were.

Why making the game easier as the character levels up is a bad idea

Now I’m going to get to the point of this whole post: Why this is a bad idea.  The reason should be blatantly obvious but I will spell it out.  Although you can sometimes have a level 1 character played by an experienced player, you will pretty much never (under normal conditions) have a level 50 character played by a newbie, and all new players generally have to start out at level 1.  The player is gaining experience as the character does. It makes no sense to present the most difficult challenge to the player and then make the game easier as the player gets better. That’s why so many RPGs and especially MMORPGs get boring in the upper levels.  The game is super hard early on because you are weak, have few abilities, and can die in one shot (Magic-users in 1st edition D&D with 1d4 hit points, anyone?).  Then as you gain levels, it slowly becomes easier as the character’s ability to soak up hits increases.  What’s going on here is that higher level characters give their players much more margin of error. But a wide margin of error is needed by new players, not veterans — so why are we increasing the margin of error as the character (and by extension the player) becomes more experienced?  That’s what I call a bad idea.

Before anyone tries to claim that this lowering of difficulty as you go up in level is an illusion, I want to provide a few examples of how it’s not just all in my head.  The two I will use will be Dungeons and Dragons from pen-and-paper, and City of Heroes from MMORPGs.

In Dungeons and Dragons, weapons do a fixed amount of damage. A dagger always does 1d4. A longsword always does 1d8.  Higher level enemies might have a small additive bonus to their attack (e.g., 1d4 +2), but that’s all. Hit points, however, go up much faster than damage bonuses do. In 1st edition AD&D for example, most NPCs got +1 to hit and damage per level, but even the weakest class (in terms of hit points), the  Magic-User, got +1d4 hit points per level, meaning that he rapidly outstripped the dagger’s damage. Thus a level 1 mage attacked by a dagger-wielding kobold had a 1 in 4 chance of insta-death. By level 10, that mage would have (on average) about 25 hit points, but the level 10 kobold (still wielding a dagger) would be doing 1d4 +10 (at most), averaging less than half the number of hit points per blow as the mage has, and making it impossible to one-shot him.  (We are leaving aside spells the mage could use to buff his hit points, whether the mage has a CON bonus, and other possible weapons, just to make the example easier).  Now, later editions of D&D have done some to correct this, but the problem still remains: at low levels, one or two hits can kill you. At higher levels, it takes a dozen hits to kill you. This dramatically increases the player’s margin of error, making it much harder to die by accident at higher levels. But again, it’s the new players that are more likely to make mistakes, so why aren’t they the ones given the higher margin of error?

Or, consider the game City of Heroes. I played a martial arts/super reflex scrapper to level 50.  Then I played more characters. Then I made up another MA/SR scrapper. At level 1, I had a much harder time surviving than I had with the same (essentially, other than name/costume) character at level 50. Why? Well, first, over level 25, I had health and stamina, which helped my character recover faster. Over level 25, I had “Single Origin” enhancements which could basically double the power and accuracy of my character.   Enemies get a little more versatile as you go up in level in COH, but they don’t become more powerful relative to your character. It takes about 3 kicks with martial arts to bring down a white conning enemy at level 1, and about 3 to bring him down at level 50.  Because living long enough to deliver 3 kicks is harder at level 1 than at 50, that means the game at level 50 is easier. In fact, at higher levels I used to talk on the phone or watch a video while playing the game, and not die once in a long mission. If I tried that at level 5 there would be a lot of face-plants. And remember, I’m not talking about back when I was a new player… I mean after I already had gotten the same character type to level 50.

I could give a lot more examples, but for the sake of space I will end with those.  The point here is that RPGs, by their very nature, almost always get easier for the player as the character levels up. This is a bad idea, because it’s the new player, not the veteran, who needs the easier experience, and yet it is the level 1 experience that is, in most games, the most difficult to survive.

Solutions

So what possible solutions are there?  When giving the reasons why the difficulty goes down as level goes up, I didn’t really disagree that the reasoning in most cases was sound. We do want to ease players into the game by giving them less options and thus hopefully less confusion. We do want to have characters grow in power as they gain levels. But there needs to be some sort of increase in the power level of the enemies as well, perhaps also an increase in AI… something to make the difficulty higher as you level, and lower at the start.  So here are my basic suggestions:

• Give the best AI to the highest level enemies. A few games give a token nod to this idea, but I’ve not seen anyone do it well yet.  The higher level AIs should be smarter, not just more powerful.
• Give new characters (and new players) some “panic buttons”. Things like (full h.p.) healing potions or scrolls of invincibility seem to only crop up at higher levels, when the characters are able to cast those same spells or do those same things. Here’s a news flash for game designers: a high level character is probably never going to need a scroll of invincibility. He is already nigh-invincible. The guy who needs it is the level 2 with the newbie player, who doesn’t realize that poison arrows are done as a “save or die” roll.
• Give low level characters a bigger margin of error. This really has to do with the problem of hit points and “how many hits” you can take.  One way or another designers need to make sure that level 1 characters can take as many hits as level 10 or 20 characters.  If you are expecting a new player to be able to make all the right decisions or else die in one shot, you are asking for trouble in terms of player frustration.  I veteran player may know how to deal with potential one-shots. A new player will not.
• Start the game out slowly and then speed it up. One big problem with computer games is speed.  Right now the idea is to give players few abilities to start with and then add more abilities as they level up. This effectively “speeds up” the game slightly as the player has to train himself to consider more and more options over time.  But it’s not the only way to speed things up. You could have things actually go more slowly at lower than at higher levels.  Have enemies attack, for instance,  once every 4 seconds at level 1, every 3 seconds at level 10, every 2 seconds at level 20, and so on.  (I am not suggesting these actual timings but just the idea of having it speed up over levels.)  Let the player ease into the speed rather than easing into the options.  Too often the game play speed doesn’t change, so if the player is having a hard time at level 1, there is no remedy but to somehow level until it “gets easier” (that is, the character lives long enough that the speed is no longer an issue).

I’m sure there are other ways to deal with this, but those are four obvious ones that came to my mind as I was thinking about this. New players are going to be poor players by definition — why give them the hardest time? The vets are the ones who can handle the tougher game-play.

You may be thinking “well that sounds good but it can’t be done.” I’m not so sure. Most non-RPG based games are already doing this. Most racing games start you out on easier tracks against slower cars and dumber (in terms of AI) opponents and then ramp it up as you complete races and prove that you can handle it.  Most fighting games in the vein of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat are the same way. Arcade games have been doing this for years. Each wave of Space Invaders or level of Pac-Man was basically identical except each went slightly faster.

Right now, most RPGs and especially CRPGs and MMORPGs are designed in reverse difficulty order… they make the lower levels harder than the higher levels, which makes it so that veteran players are facing substantially easier challenges than newbies are.  I can’t see how this could be thought of as anything but backwards, and although I know it has been a part of RPG design for as long as there have been RPGs, I think it’s a bad idea… and that designers need to re-think the whole thing.

Wow that was fast…

As readers of my blog will know, I tried the Open Beta Test of Champions Online back in August. My view of it was not very favorable, and my gut instinct after that weekend was to beg off.  However, a good friend of mine was really into it, and for some reason I found, after Open Beta (OB) ended and the pre-launch period began, that I was missing it.  I’m not even sure what aspect of it I missed, to be honest. But I turned it over in my mind for the time between OB and Launch (on Sept 1) and decided that I’d go ahead and get it (as I explain in the comments of that first post).

I played the game for about two months, and I have to say for the first 10 levels or so, the first maybe 10 days, it was fun.  Then as I got into the higher levels, all the flaws I had noticed in OB started to reassert themselves — or rather, they’d been there all along but the shiny newness of the game and in particular the fun of gaming with a friend of 30 years again, obscured those faults.  I won’t get into the flaws here, as I’ve already discussed those in my earlier post.

Again, if you’ve read my blog, you know that I am a roleplayer, and that I usually try to find a roleplay-oriented guild (or in CO/COH parlance, “Supergroup”) to join, as I find that enhances the experience. And so right away, I went looking for RP organizations in CO. I found a site called “Champions Online Roleplayers”, or CORP, and they had a listing of supergroups.  I looked around for one that matched both my style and my character’s, and I found one. It seemed fairly active, and had a simple enough application process, so I applied to them.  I had an interview/RP session in a day or so, and was duly accepted into the team.  They were good people, and I had fun with them for a few weeks, until the game wore on me to the point that I started logging in only for the RP sessions. And while those are good, I’ve been down this road before, and I know enough that once I stop playing the game for its own system, it’s time to go.  I canceled my account yesterday, and thus ends my adventure into the Champions Online arena. I doubt if I’ll be back, but you never know.

Now, that’s not what the title (“That was fast”) is about.  The interesting thing about this guild, and the thing that was “fast”, is the vast difference in speed between joining and leaving it.  Although the application/approval process only took a couple of days, it took them something like a week and a half to get my board permissions set up. I had to ask repeatedly, and finally after the third or fourth time it was rectified. In the mean time, for the first 10 or so days I was on the guild, I could not read any of the private areas of the guild forum, despite the fact that I was entitled (conceptually, if not in “forum code bits”).  So, it took them a really long time (relatively speaking) to get the board permissions changed for “off” to “on.”

What I find interesting, and more than a little ironic, is how much faster they were at revoking my permissions when I informed them of my departure. I want to be clear that I left under no acrimony whatsover. I never said or posted anything negative there about the game (and I don’t think they know that this blog is in any way connected with my login on their forum, as the names are not related, and I’ve never mientioned it).  I have never said anything negative about the game on their in-game chat channels. So even though I was thinking highly critical thoughts about Cryptic Studios and Champions Online, they could not have known about those, and I had not done anything to upset anyone in the slightest (so far as I know).  I participated in their RP and my relationship with them was 100% friendly. I point this out because they had no reason to suspect, as one might suspect with an acrimonious split, that I might post anything vile or do anything damaging to their forums.  And yet, literally within a few hours of posting my very simple resignation — a resignation in which, even on the point of departure, I did not criticize the game, citing only a “lack of time” as the reason for leaving — my posting status had been changed to “retired.”  I realized this mainly because the number of visible forums upon logging in changed from morning to afternoon. At that point, I thought, “Wow, that was fast!”

I want to make it clear, that I have no problem with them revoking my membership status. They should have done so, and I don’t mind that it was done at once.  It shows they are on the ball. But I thought it was slightly humorous that they were so efficient at revoking membership, while they were so slow at awarding it.  It seems to me they’d be better off doing the reverse.  When a new player comes in, you want that player active and involved ASAP. At once. You don’t want the player to have to wait days, or more than a week, to be able to read guild posts or make posts himself.  Although I liked the group there was a general lack of efficiency in the admin corps, and I wonder if this doesn’t show why — they’ve got their priorities a bit skewed, perhaps.

At any rate, both my membership status change, and more generally my membership in both guild and game, were pretty fast. And now I’m looking for something else to fill the time with (game-wise). For now I am trying to work on a Sims 3 Legacy. I’ve never taken one past the 3rd generation. We’ll see how it goes.