Roleplaying vs. gaming… is there tension?

Well after my “open letter to Cryptic”, I will admit that I did end up buying and am still playing Champions Online.  I did this for a few reasons. First, when I stopped playing it (after my post was written), I found that the game-play had grown on me, and I found myself missing it.  Second, a few of my friends play it, and the only other MMO that many of my friends play is WOW, and I just hate WOW. Finally, Sims 3 had gotten a bit tiresome after a solid month of play, and I needed a break from that. CO provided that break.

Of course, I am a roleplayer so I went around looking for roleplaying, and found it at a place called Champions Online Roleplayers, or CORP for short.  Through them I found a Supergroup (guild) of RPers, and I have been enjoying playing with them, as well as with my pre-existing friends.  Along the way a few interesting debates have cropped up in CORP’s forum. Most recently someone posted about roleplay vs. game mechanics.  The original poster argued that things like levels have no “RP” validity, and we should ignore them. He also argued that the duel system in game had no “RP validity” because powers in the game were not perfect representations of the conception in the player’s mind, and therefore the duel should be done by “consent.” Finally he said that mission content was all “out of character” because, if I beat Psimon, how can it be that you beat him, and 100 other people beat him? So basically all the missions we do have “never happened” to our characters.

I whole-heartedly disagreed with this, and said so, and along the way a large debate sprang up.  Finally one person voiced his concern this way:

My main problem with this is what do you do with characters who have long histories? Why should a character with 50 years of well documented backstory be “right out of Xavier’s Academy”?

Here was my response:

It’s up to you, as a roleplayer, to figure out how to get that working right. Nevermind CO or an MMO… play Champions, the PnP RPG. I bet you most GMs would not allow you to build your character on 500 pts when everyone else has to start with 250, just because you happened to write a longer backstory. In our game group I and every other person who GMed would have said, “That backstory is great and all but you still need to adhere to the 250 point total, 50 active point single-power restrictions.” If you’re Thor the Thunder God, then you need to figure out how to deal with it. YOU need to figure that out, not the GM, and not the other players.

Look… you have a fully open pair of eyes here. You know going in that the game is going to MAKE you start at level 1 with a newbie character, even though you may not be a newbie player. You know you will be as weak as possible to begin with and you’ll only start with 2 powers, neither of them a defensive power. Knowing this, you have the choice of what origin to make up, and so if you decide to make up Thor the Thunder God who is supposed to have 97 powers and be powerful enough to knock down skyscrapers, then knowing he won’t be doing that for 30-odd levels, you should be clever enough to come up with a reason why he either (a) doesn’t have those powers just now, even though he had them before and will have them again, (b) has been “depowered” for some reason, or (c) is choosing not to use powers he has, for some reason (a “prime directive” from the gods maybe).

My point here is, you know what the rules are going in. Knowing those rules, if you choose to make up a character who can’t possibly exist within the parameters of the game, it’s rather disingenuous to turn around and (basically) blame the game for not fitting into your character conception. It’s not like the character conception was forced on you or was produced by some objective process beyond your control. You made up the character with the huge backstory and the supposed immortal-level powers…. even though you knew the game wouldn’t let you actually play out those things. It’s your choice, so figure out how to make it work.

Years ago I actually played the “real” (from the comics, and I mean from the actual DC universe) Supergirl. In our game multiverse, each comic company’s universes “existed” and could be crossed into. There was a crossover with DC and Marvel, and the LSH was part of the guest cast, and Supergirl ended up crossing over and then staying in our game universe permanently. She started out as an NPC, but then became a PC. This being the “real” Supergirl, there was the small issue that in the comics, at the time, she could toss asteroids around and fly to the center of the universe in a single day, but of course in Champions with about 300 pts total (as the campaign was then), there was no way to do that. So, I had to choose what to do. It was simple enough… the transfer to our universe “depowered” her — the “lines of reality” in our universe don’t work the same way, so now she can only toss around trucks instead of asteroids. She fit into the universe, but was still Supergirl.

See my point here? I fit my concept into the parameters of the game. If you want to play a roleplaying *game* you really sort of need to do this, or else there’s no point to playing the game. After all there are MUXes and MUSHes and stuff out there where RPing happens in text only, by consent only, and you can play however you want, so if that is your goal, why wouldn’t you do that, rather than play in a game that has rules and a “game system?”

It seems to me the real challenge of playing an RPG rather than just roleplaying in a freeform unbounded system, is to find a way to play your character correctly (as you see it) within the parameters set out by the game. I mean any fool can use 10,000 points and zero rule restrictions to make up Superman. But to make up a viable, credible, Superman character with 250 pts in the Champions rules? That is damn tough to do… and I for one always got satisfaction from doing it.

In CO, I am playing a PC who is supposed to be completely impervious to harm in the Superman/girl fashion, and also impossible to imprison or hold bound in any way. Can I actually do that in the game? No… no game would let you. So I compromised by just making her very, very tough, and saying that the “holds” are really just slows — they don’t hold her like they do everyone else they just “slow her down.” Obviously this is fiction on my part, but it lets me fit her concept into the game world.

It doesn’t bother me to make this compromise. Again I have always felt that making such compromises is part of the art of the roleplaying GAME… It may not be the art of roleplaying, since one can RP without a game. But once you stick the “G” on there, as in RPG, you are playing a game… games have rules… and the goal is to work within the rules, to use the rules, to get the best RP experience you can. And frankly I prefer RP gaming, to just RP without rules. It gets too freeform for me. I like rules and organization.

But that’s me.

An open letter to Cryptic Studios

In a few days, Cryptic Studios, the creators of City of Heroes, will be launching their new game, Champions Online, which is loosely (and I mean, very loosely) based on my favorite pencil-and-paper RPG of all time, Champions (by Hero Games).  This weekend I downloaded the open beta to take a look at it, and it wasn’t pretty.  Here is an open letter to them, that I’m sure they will ignore, but it will serve as the only “review” I will do of CO, since I am not going to buy the game based on what I saw this weekend.

Dear Cryptic,

All throughout the last couple of years, reading your forums and your press releases, I could see the direction Champions Online  was taking, and as time went on it looked less and less like something I would be able to enjoy (at least long enough to warrant a subscription). I got tired of arguing with people and especially with trying to make you folks understand my point of view, so I moved on to other games, other things, etc.

Just the other day someone informed me that open beta had started, and as it had been a while, I decided to be optimistic and give the game a try, hoping that I had been wrong and that the game had turned out great.

I’m sorry to say that it really is as bad as I expected, and I probably would not find it worth my time to buy and subscribe. On the off chance that you folks might get some constructive feedback from my decision, I post this open letter here… and that, in all likelihood, will be the last your company will hear from me.

And so, why I won’t be playing this game after trying it out in Beta:

#1 Reason: My computer just can’t handle it. I have a 4 year old P4-3.2 GHz with 256 MB nVidia card (7800GS), and although the game is technically playable with ALL the graphic settings (and I mean, each and every one of them) turned down to nothing, it’s still a slide show in crowded areas, and my frame rates are not what I consider acceptable. As I have never in my life bought an entire computer just to play a video game (the idea of doing it is just ludicrous), this is basically the only reason I need. There are, of course, others. But I will suggest that Cryptic may have aimed a bit too high on the sys-reqs for this game. They’re pricing a large chunk of the audience out of the game (not just people with older desktops, but also nearly the entire laptop market, which is huge).

#2: The game feels clunky and unfinished. Yes, I know it’s beta. But it’s open beta. Launch is mere days away. At this stage in COH’s development, the game felt smooth, polished, and complete. Even in closed/early beta, the game looked solid and polished, the UI was slick and clean, and everything worked in a very intuitive manner. I’m honestly shocked by this, as I did not expect such a sloppy feeling to come out of the same company that made COH.

#3: The UI is a mess. It’s ugly, hard to use, and unintuitive. Again, see for reference, COH. That is a good UI. What you have here is just… hideous. The comic font, although I realize it is themely, is atrocious and totally inappropriate for computer-screen viewing. I have never before in a game had to sit up closer to the screen just to read what the quest-giver is saying. Just yuck, all the way around, on the UI.

#4: The open-world system is just unacceptable at this stage, given the instanced-mission method pioneered by this company. I’m happy to have other players around the world itself, but when I am doing a mission or quest, I want to own that mission (or, I with my team-mates). It is simply unacceptable to me that I have to stand in line to rescue an innocent or destroy an object. Not only does it utterly and completely destroy immersion, but it wastes my time, and I will NOT pay to have my time wasted. If COH did not exist, if it had not been made by this VERY company, I might not find this so completely intolerable. But when Cryptic pioneered the clearly superior instancing system, it is inexcusable that they abandoned it for a WOW style open-world system. I refuse to play any MMORPG at this point that doesn’t have significant privatization. ” I have to stand in line for content” = “I do not play the game”. Period.

I would like to point out that if #4 were not true, #1, the main issue that absolutely prohibits my purchase of the game (performance issues on my older machine) might not be true either. After all, COH is pretty resource intense and in the Atlas Park costume contests I used to lag like crazy. BUT… In COH, 90% of my time was spent in mission — just me, a couple of friends, and the villains spawned for us. And guess what? My system can handle it, and handle it without trouble! My frame rates in-mission were always excellent. So, if CO had simply gone with an instanced setup instead of this tired old open-world baloney, I might actually buy it. I could probably live with the UI, with the clunky animations, with having to turn all my options down, if I could play with a pleasurable frame rate. If they had instanced missions as the bulk of the content, that would be possible. Since they don’t, I have to play in the open world, which is unacceptable in the first place, and which triggers the performance issues in the second place.

As a result of these things, I simply can’t justify spending $50-60 on this game, let alone a monthly fee. I truly do regret this, as I love superheroes, and I love the Champions universe. But without instancing and with poor performance, there is just no point to buying it.

Sincerely,

Chessack

Review: The Sims 3

Perhaps one of the most successful and best-selling game franchises of all time is The Sims.  There have been many different boxes with “The Sims” released, starting with the original The Sims, then followed with The Sims Online, The Sims 2, a variety of expansion packs, and stand-alone side games like The Sims Castaways (which are not part of the expansion sequence).  The most recent addition to this game is The Sims 3, which came out in early June 2009, and which I purchased about a month ago.

I will preface my statements by giving a little background on my previous experience with the Sims games.  I began being “a Simmer” (as those of us who play the game avidly call ourselves) about a year ago, upon purchasing The Sims 2 Double Deluxe. This game included the original game and two expansions — Celebration Stuff (a “stuff pack” that includes no additional gameplay features but includes additionally items like furniture, clothing, etc) and Night Life (an “expansion pack” which includes what a stuff pack would, plus additional game features — in this case dating/recreation activities).  I enjoyed the game immensely, enough that I purchased, in rapid succession between August and the following holiday season, the University, Pets, Bon Voyage, and Open for Business expansion packs, and the Glamour Life and Kitchen/Bathroom stuff packs.  I had a great deal of fun with The Sims 2, and decided that I might well want to buy The Sims 3.

However, then something happened that made me not want to buy The Sims 3, although it might seem unrelated. I bought Spore, and was confronted with the Draconian digital-rights management (DRM) software (i.e., copy-protection) in the form of SecuROM, packaged with that game. I was also highly disappointed in it (see my other review on Spore for details).  I swore off any and all EA games because of the DRM issue, and stopped following the progress of “TS3″.

Then a month or two ago, I was browsing through game reviews and I discovered something — the DRM features of TS3 were not as objectionable as those of Spore, thanks to the concerted outcry of rage and frustration that EA had faced due to Spore’s DRM.  Assured that, if I bought the DVD version (but not the download version) the game would not contain any DRM that could act as a rootkit or harm my DVD drive, I took the plunge in early July and bought The Sims 3.  I have enjoyed the game, although it is certainly not without flaws.  What follows is my rating of the game and my overall impression of it.

Graphics/Visuals – 10/10

The game is visually extremely good.  The Sims look very realistic, as do all the features of the world they live in. Shadows look good, tile sets are outstanding, and the various world objects look 3-dimensional and solid.  I have no complaints about the visuals and think they are top notch. If you liked the graphics in The Sims 2, this game builds on those, so you will not be disappointed.

Sound – 9/10

Sound in the Sims 3 is good as it was in the earlier game.  We have a number of improvements here, including the ability to choose from 3 different voices for your created Sims and to alter the pitch of each voice to create a truly unique sound.  The Sims still speak “Simlish”, which is the nonsense language that they have used for years, and the voice acting for these Simlish phrases is good.  The other sound effects are good as well, and things like doors opening and closing, cars driving off, and the like are all good. My only quibble here is the music that comes with the game, which is very annoying and repetitive and which I was forced to turn off.  I would have liked some better music, personally.  But it’s not that different from the musical style of The Sims 2, so I can’t complain about it too much.

Customization – 10/10

The Sims 3 reaches new highs in this series with the customization of many game features (the tag line is “cusomize everything” but that’s a lie… there are a number of features that for no reason any one can figure out, EA decided not to let us customize, such as the color of railings or fences).  Customization starts in Create-a-Sim (CAS), where you can choose everything about the features of your Sim, from hair to skin tone to body type to facial features.  Some of the Simmers on the TS3 forums spend their time trying to use CAS to make replicas of famous people and they frequently get quite close.  In addition to customizing Sims, which you could do (though not to quite this degree) in The Sims 2, you can now customize most of the objects in the world.  Like a wallpaper pattern? You can copy it onto a chair, even if it didn’t come with that chair model in the game.  This allows people to mix and match patterns, colors, and game features. Like a pattern but not the colors? Change just the colors! In The Sims 2, there was some limited ability to do this, but it cost Sim money (Simoleons). In TS3, customizing like this is free.  The customization here is excellent and I give them top marks for it.

Gameplay – 8/10

The gameplay of TS3 is similar to its predecessor and highly enjoyable. However, although the game has made strides over TS2, it still has one major weakness, which is why I docked them a point: a little too much micro-management is still required.  As an example, I put a water sprinkler in the garden to save my Sims the time of having to water their plants. Sounds good, right? But Sims also like to “play with the sprinkler,” and most of them will do it preferentially over anything else if there is one on the lot. I have to keep them very busy or else they will all end up playing in the damn sprinkler instead of doing other things.  I shouldn’t have to keep micro-managing them to the degree that I do. When my Sims turn Elder, if I can, I try to get their “Lifetime Wish” fulfilled and then let them do whatever they want… But playing in the sprinkler all day every day is a non-starter, and I find that I have to keep “canceling” the “Play in Sprinkler” action over and over again.  It’s silly and I shouldn’t have to micro-manage them like this.

The other issue is that needs and work still take up too much time for the Sims.  Although they do help you by giving you reward bonuses that can help slow down the need decline, if you want your Sims to be “successful” (that is, master their job, make money, improve their houses, etc), you are going to have to make sure they are constantly working skills, fulfilling wishes and needs, doing their job… and there is not a lot of time for fun activities like going to the park or fishing.  Although TS3 does move the bar decently in the right direction, I’d still like to see less focus on needs, work, and skills, and more focus on recreational activities (of the sort you would have in the Bon Voyage expansion).  They’re a lot closer here but there is a bit of a way to go.

One thing that also forced me to dock points was a lack of what I consider important features from the previous game (TS2) in this one.  Chief amongst these are the Sims’ memories (which are totally absent here, and were a charming and useful feature in the predecessor) and the ability to create your own neighborhoods and your own community layout.  In particular making my own neighborhood is a crucial feature, and I will not consider the game to be complete without that.

User Interface – 7/10

The overall UI is fairly good in this game, but it has some issues.  The camera movement has some annoying features to it, and it doesn’t seem to want to recognize my middle mouse button, which makes rotating the view a hassle.  They don’t allow you to do your own keybinds (why in the world a game released in 2009 doesn’t allow you to bind each function to whatever key you please is beyond me), so I can’t rectify the situation by doing my own keybinding.  I suppose I could buy another mouse to try it with but I shouldn’t have to buy a new mouse to get a feature to work… I should be able to re-bind it.

Additionally, the interface for building and designing roofs needs a great deal of work. It is more flexible than the one in TS2, by far, and the auto-roof feature is good for the most part. However, frequently I’m happy with 90% of what auto-roof does and just want to make one tweak, but you can’t. You either have to accept the whole roof, or wipe the whole thing out and start over. Accepting “everything but the part over the garage” or selecting one roof section to destroy and change is just not possible… but it ought to be and I can see no reason why it is not.

Also, some of the information that they show you in the various panels is incomplete or difficult to interpret.  In TS2, your friends panel would show you both a graphic and numerals indicating how close your friends were both recently (that is, how strong the recent interactions have made the relationship) and in the longer term.  They have gotten rid of the numbers here and just use a graphic. Numbers would have been helpful here.

The final point, and probably the biggest one, is the horrible interface for uploading your screenshots and other game-creations to the TS3 website, and the absolutely horrifying “story” features. In TS2, these features existed in game. You could take screenshots, and then open up a “journal” which would let you add pages and write stories on the pages and paste your screenshots into them. Once your story was done, it could be packaged up and exported to the TS2 website.  Because everything but the final upload was done directly in game and on your computer, it was quick and basically effortless.  This feature has been removed, in favor of having all of it done on the website. The web interface is clunky and as you would expect slow and laggy, and it does nothing to enhance my gameplay… rather, it decreases my enjoyment of the game to have to keep alt-tabbing out of it to go to the website.  But the worst problem, and this one is utterly unforgivable, is that the game captures only full-resolution (on my laptop, 1440×900) jpeg images that are 1+ MB in size, then uploads the full image to the TS3 website, where it is somehow re-sized.  This is just stupid. The re-sizing should happen first, so the upload is faster.  However, when I tried to do this manually, the images did not look right on the website. The website requires me to put the full 1 MB image up for upload and then resizes it upon display. That’s both slow and a horrible waste of disk space.  The “create a story” interface is so clumsy that it has rendered this feature of the game utterly unusuable to me. It’s probably the worst design decision the creators made.

Overall the UI is generally usable, but as I say there are a few annoying features, so I docked them a few points here.

Artificial Intelligence – 8/10

The AI in this game is good, but not great.  Sims are pretty smart about fulfilling needs getting into the “red zone” or near it.  They are pretty good about socializing when friends are nearby (you don’t have to force it) and if you leave the autonomy fairly high they will be able to sort of “tread water” in their lives (they won’t die because you forgot to tell them to eat, for instance).  However, they are also extremely stupid about pathfinding in many cases, and they are incredibly slow to follow orders.  I think some of the slowness in following your orders may be a problem with the animation. For example, when a teenager comes home from school he will often immediately pull out his homework to do it. Let’s say you don’t want him to do it yet, but want him to, for instance, shower first because his hygeine is low. Even though you cancel the “do homework” action at once, the Sim will still walk down the hall to the nearest desk, sit down, and take out his homework. Frequently I also have to go in and re-initiate the “cancel” command, or he’ll do it anyway.  It may be that they just were stupid enough to make a really long “animation” for this particular command, but it happens with other commands as well.  Also, for no reason I can fathom, Sims, when ordered to take a baby out of a crib, will walk up to the crib and stare at it for sometimes as much as 30 game minutes before leaning down and picking up the infant.

Another thing that used to annoy me in TS2 and that they have not corrected in TS3 — and something I’d have thought would be easy to correct — is the Sims whining at you that they want to do something you have just commanded them to do.  For example, let’s say the Sim’s energy is low and she wants to go to bed.  You see the “bed” thought balloon over her head and decide to oblige her. So you click the bed and select “sleep”.  The Sim, however, is programmed to “complain at you” that she wants sleep “instead of the next action”, and the game doesn’t check whether the next action is in fact what she wants. So instead of doing the (artificially) intelligent thing and being happy that I ordered her to do what she want, she will stamp her foot and wave at me (at the camera, that is) and the “I want to go to sleep” icon will appear over her head.  Then she will groan with frustration as she does what I ordered her to do (which is… to go to sleep!) “instead” of what she “wants to do (which is, also, to go to sleep).

I am not a professional AI programmer but when I can see in a flash that something like this could have been taken care of with a simple if-else statement I get annoyed.  Clearly they could have just had the Sim check “if (ordered action == desired action)” and if it did, then just do it, or maybe even smile and say “thanks” in Simlish… and only if not, make the complaint.

However these issues are not major, and the overall AI is perfectly decent.  The NPCs in this game will behave much more intelligently than you’d seen in most games, such as the typical MMORPG.

Community – 10/10

The community, as with the TS2 community, is awesome.  The players are really helpful, and also incredibly creative and generous. They’ll help you figure out and fix problems.. they are very creative with the kinds of buildings and designs they come up with, and very generous in terms of uploading these designs to the “Exchange” part of the site, where the rest of us can download and enjoy the fruits of their unpaid labor.  I have downloaded quite a few player-made patterns and houses, and even a few player-made bits of clothing. Note, I am not talking about custom content here (hacks and the like), which I do not use, but EA-sanctioned items vetted by EA and available through the TS3 official website.  The community is great.

Fun – 9/10

The Sims 3 is a fun game. If you enjoyed the other Sims games you will probably like this one. It has some shortcomings and some features that are annoying, and the loss of the in-game journaling system is probably the most critical flaw in the game from my viewpoint. It has prevented me from making stories about my Sims, which was one of the main enjoyments I got out of TS2. However, the rest of the game is fun and it is well worth playing if this is the sort of game you enjoy. Make no mistake about it, however, The Sims 3 is a simulation game. If you like action, adventure, combat, etc, this game is not for you.  Will Wright once described it as an electronic version of playing with dolls, and it still sort of is. If you think that sounds like fun, then this game is worth a look. If not, then look elsehwere.

Overall – 8.9/10

The Sims 3 currently has the highest overall game rating of all the games I have reviewed, and I think this is pretty accurate.  Of the games I have reviewed, it’s probably the best and most engaging, though its predecessor, TS2, comes in very close behind (note: I have never reviewed it… I don’t review every game I play).  This is not to say that it is the best computer game I have ever played, because it isn’t… but it is a damn good game, and well worth it if you like this sort of thing (which I do).

The price of failure

(Note: The above was originally posted on my LOTRO blog, but since I quit that game, I wanted to move it here, because it is a general commentary on game design.)

Today I’m going to discuss a fundamental flaw in the design of most MMORPGs (including LOTRO, which I recently canceled), which is that they frequently do a terrible job at designing the consequences for player failure.  The basic idea is that if you attempt to do something, such as fight a boss in a dungeon, and your character “dies” from it (which in these games simply means the hit points or the equivalent went down to 0), there should be some sort of negative effect (after all, you “died”).  I don’t necessarily disagree with the basic premise, but as with everything else in these games, the key is in how you implement it.

The origin of the “death penalty”

The punishment you receive when your character “dies” is usually called the game’s “death penalty.” Before I get into the types of death penalties (and why most of them are a bad idea), I’d like to discuss why we have them at all in these games.  The origin, as with most things, comes from the old pencil-and-paper (PnP) game Dungeons and Dragons, or the other spin-offs like it (Star Fronteirs, Gamma World, etc).  In that game, the character had “hit points”, which means “how close to dying you are.” Regardless of how many hit points one had, whether a level 1 Wizard with 4 hp, or a level 20 fighter with 100 hp, at 0 hp, your character was considered to be “dying”, basically “bleeding to death.” This “dying” would continue until you had -10 hp, at which point, your character was dead — and this death was the real thing, permanent but for some very high level spells that might be able to raise the dead.  It was also possible to fail a “saving throw” against some sort of trauma (poison, for example) and die instantly, without regard to hit points (the rules would say, “Anyone pricked by the poison needled must save vs. poison or die”).  This was a random die roll in which you had to “beat” your saving throw or the character would drop dead instantly.

In MMORPG vernacular this is called “permadeath,” but of course, such a term did not exist in the old school D&D days.  In D&D, death was “permanent” (used in quotes because Rings of Wishing or Raise Dead spells could bring someone back to life, but these were rare and did not happen in most games very frequently)… the loss of a character usually meant you had to make up a new one for the next play session. However, in D&D, although things that could kill you were found everywhere, there was a human being, a Dungeon Master (DM) watching over things, and the DM had the power to “edit” die rolls and other things to make it so that your character only really had to permanently die if he said so (and with good DMs, he only “said so” when it suited the story — no good DM would let a character permanently die because of bad die rolls).  Our DMs were inexperienced and frequently not able to see ahead of time what bad luck might be coming, so our characters frequently died, but our DMs were very generous with Resurrection scrolls and Rings of Wishing, so frequently death for our characters was not permanent (which is why I used the quotes).

The standard in D&D, however, is “once you die, that’s it… time to make up a new character.” That standard, again, was there because a human DM was watching over things and no character could ever really die without that DM’s say-so… meaning that random or “accidental” death was uncommon (with a good DM, I would say it should have been entirely unknown).

Of penalties and permadeaths

This is really the start of the problem, however: that in D&D, losing your “hit points” or failing a “saving throw” means your character died, and died more-or-less forever. Because that was the standard, and because most computer RPGs and later online versions of them like MUDs (leading to the MMORPG) basically just copy their game system from D&D and then tweak it, the idea of the “pool of health points” which, at 0, means your character “dies”, has remained with us ever since.  Because we keep using the same language to refer to these ideas, the idea has become burned into the minds of gamers that when your character’s “able to stand and fight” bar (hit points, morale, health, call it what you wish) goes to 0, your character has “died” and in a classical sense (in the D&D sense) should need a Wish or Resurrection spell to get him back (otherwise, it’s time to re-roll).

The problem is that online games to not have living, breathing, human DMs running the show, and as a result, such death can be random, accidental, and frustrating to the player.  The early MMOs and MUDs had things like turning your dead character into a ghost and you being unable to do anything until someone came and “resurrected” (shorthand: rez’ed) him or her.  This is analogous to D&D death, and very close to the idea of “permadeath.”

Of course, these games have another difference with D&D: people pay a subscription fee to play them. If you’re going to force someone to sit around as a ghost for hours, maybe days, effectively unable to play the game, then there’s a high risk that he might stop subscribing, and the game company will lose money.  Over the years players objected so strongly to having their character either permanently unavailable after dying (especially when one could die due to lag rather than a mistake one made) or stuck in some “unable to play” state for long periods, that designers came up with alternatives.

Unfortunately, however, because we still kept the idea around that the “health bar” going to 0 = death, the idea is that “if you die there should be a severe punishment” because, after all, you really “should” be dead forever.  These punishments now come in forms such as the “corpse run,” the “repair bill”, a lowered health bar for some period of time, or “experience debt.”  People vary on whether they think these penalties should be big or small, but the main argument for making them large and “painful” to the player is because “since you should have died, there should be a big penalty to take its place.”

The fundamental flaw in most death penalties

In my view, there is a fundamental flaw in most death penalty systems, including LOTRO’s, and it’s this: they make the game harder.  Now, if your goal is to “punish” the player for failure, then they work to do that, but I think it’s a foolish way to punish the player.  The reality is, barring some just really bad luck or a lag spike, players who are attempting a battle and die, have lost the battle because it’s too hard for them to win.  If you then do something like, lower their total hit points for the rest of the instance, it will make the battle even harder to win, which means that if you lose once, you probably won’t win again, until the penalty wears off.

I understand that the “good” players often cackle with glee to think of bad players suffering, and want it to happen more.  But I don’t believe that game designers should build a game to cater to schadenfreude.  The reality is that if an encounter is too hard for the player to achieve at full strength, it is simply cruel of the designers to sap strength from his character bit by bit after each loss, so that his character is weaker and weaker each time he attempts to succeed.  Yet that is frequently what happens in the MMOs out there.

Now, LOTRO, in addition to the “dread” mechanic, which saps your morale but only temporarily, has the “repair bill” mechanic. This is a hugely popular method of the death penalty that many games now use.  The idea is that when you die, or in LOTRO, “retreat”, there is more damage done to your gear, and it is more expensive to repair it.  However, I again think this is a mistake, because what happens is that bad players end up with a larger repair bill, which means they are relatively less wealthy than the good players.  Now of course, the good players will say this is rightly so, they should be richer since they’re better. However, I’d argue that the good players don’t need the wealth as much as the bad ones do… because you can make up for weak play with better equipment, but good equipment costs a lot of money.  In other words, a weak player needs more money so he can prop himself up with better “stuff,” but the game ensures that he’ll never have it, because his frequent “deaths” mean a high repair bill and thus no money.

Before someone accuses me of trying to “redistribute the wealth” of the game, that’s not what I’m suggesting. I am, however, suggesting that money is being sapped from the players who can least afford it — the bad players.  That means, in my view, that the death penalty needs to be different.  The problem is that most other penalties I’ve seen, such as corpse runs or stat penalties, are either also worse for weaker than for stronger players, or are so trivial most gamers won’t accept them as the game’s penalty.

I’m not sure what a good death penalty should be, really, but I know the ones we have now are not good because they take someone who is already having trouble with the game on “normal,” and basically set it to “harder” for them. This is backwards… as a DM you would ease up on people having trouble, not make it harder for them. The game should act the way a good DM does… instead, it acts like the bad ones who sit there cackling with evil glee as a host of player characters loved by their owners dies one by one, the bad DMs who think it’s fun when their players aren’t having any fun. You all know the type I mean.

So far the best death penalty I’ve seen (although I’m not a huge fan of it either) is the one from City of Heroes, mainly because it doesn’t make the game harder for those who are struggling in the first place.  When you die in that game, you get “experience debt,” and your only real punishment is to level more slowly. Although this might be mildly annoying to the player, it does not make the instance you were doing any harder in the immediate term. Your difficulty level did not go up from dying. On the contrary, it’s exactly the same as it was before you died.. you just get a little less experience for doing it.  If there has to be a death penalty, this is probably the least objectionable one I have seen.

Do we even need a death penalty?

I’d really like to ask, however, whether we really even need a death penalty in these games these days. If we think about the origin of them, the reason we have a death penalty is because we have death in the D&D sense. But do we need to have this in a modern RPG that is run by a powerful computer? Remember, “hit points” were instituted by D&D because the game was played with pencils, books, and scrap paper. Since players had to make calculations on the fly in a matter of seconds, having a single integer represent “how alive you are” and subtracting small integers from it (rolled on D6, D8, etc) was about the only way one could do it.  Today, however, when these games are run by multi-core computers with gigs of RAM and very complicated computer programs, why are we still characterizing the game system as your character having a pool of hit points and he dies if the pool hits 0?  Can’t we do something better than that at this point?

Even if we keep a pool of points, we could use the Champions method of “Stun and Body” — stun-based damage knocks you out, but doesn’t kill you. Body damage kills you — but is much more rare.  It’s very hard to kill a character in Champions. In fact in about 20 years of gaming, I only had it happen on actual die rolls once. People were KOed left and right, but killed? Never by accident, by die rolls — only, except for one time, as part of a story (and the one time was one villain NPC killing another one, which I hadn’t planned on but which worked so well as part of the story that I let it stand).  You could let people fall unconscious, and then if the group wins the fight, the survivors can revive them — and why should there be a penalty for that. If the whole group gets defeated, why do they teleport somewhere and have a repair bill? Why not have them be captured, and now have to fight their way out of the dungeon, find their gear, and get back to the battle at hand — all the way (hopefully) having a good time and earning experience points?  Surely there are lots of other ways we could do this, rather than just having a pool of hit points and the rule that “if you die, you get teleported to a safe spot and lose a lot of money.”

Wrap-up

I’m sure some people may be reading this and thinking that I am whining about dying too much and having a huge repair bill in LOTRO. Nope. I rarely die in LOTRO, at least while soloing. I’ve got an excellent sense of what my character’s limits are, and as a Warden she does a pretty good job of staying alive even when I make a mistake, thanks to all her self-heals and dodging skills.  I’ve managed to survive bad pulls, and get through fights I know I probably shouldn’t have expected to survive.  Her repair bills are pretty light, and she’s made some decent money.

No, I’m arguing this from a game design perspective, because I can see the the unintended (or perhaps unwisely intended) consequences of the design.  I think when you have a situation where you already know that the player in question is having difficulty (enough that his character is losing the fight), it makes little sense to turn UP the difficulty meter on him and expect him to somehow win this time.  It’s not only not going to happen, but it will leave the player extremely frustrated… as several posts on the LOTRO forum indicate just this morning.

I realize LOTRO is never going to change its death penalty. But I hope some day some designer will come along and ask just exactly why we need to keep using mechanics in a computer game that were originally designed to substitute for mechanics from D&D that were originally designed to help players easily play with pencils and paper.

Review: Fallout 3

After abandoning yet another MMORPG (LOTRO — my sixth in as many years, I think), I decided to try doing some solo computer RPGs for a while.  I’ve played a lot of the older good ones — Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire — which are usually Bioware offerings (although, as my review here indicates, I was not a huge fan of Mass Effect, mostly because of poor performance).  A couple of friends suggested Fallout 3, so I decided to try it.  Now, I will state up front a few things.

(1) I have not played Fallouts 1 or 2.  So I can’t possibly compare it ot those games and I was buying it on the recommendation of this game, not for the “franchise.”

(2) I tend not to be a huge fan of post-apocalyptic worlds for the basis of an RPG, mostly because the pallet is so depressing and tedious after a while.  It’s usually all browns and grays, dim skies, rubble and destruction.  And Fallout 3 is not really any different in this regard.

(3) Initially the controls seemed very much like a first-person-shooter (FPS), and although I don’t hate FPSes, I don’t love them, and I also don’t want an FPS when I am trying to play an RPG. The idea that my level 100 sharpshooter with a 2,000 rifle skill could miss an easy shot because his player’s reflexes suck has always bothered me (what are the points and levels for).  So at first I was, to say the least, skeptical.

When I started playing Fallout 3, fears (2) and (3) were realized very quickly, particularly fear (3).  I quickly perused the instructions, and then started the game.  You begin in “Vault 101″, where you find out your character has lived all his or her life, and in fact everyone has, because there is no getting in or out. The world was destroyed 200 years ago in a nuclear apocalypse, and is still radioactive and dangerous.  Of course it’s not long before you end up having to escape the Vault, and you find out that the world, although dangerous, is livable now.

At first I did not fully understand or appreciate the unique “VATS” system in Fallout 3, and I had a very frustrating time trying to shoot things with the few bullets I had in the early game.  I missed a lot (the crosshairs are very small and tolerance on aiming in “regular FPS” mode is very tight), wasted a lot of ammo, died a lot, and became very frustrated. By the end of the first day I was ready to give up.

Then I did a search in Google for Fallout 3 and “ammo shortage,” and found (amid the preening/bragging of everyone who responded to these complaints about how they have billions of ammo on hard mode and the people asking should “learn2play”) one post that helped.  The helper pointed out a few things, namely (a) you should fight melee things with a melee weapon, at least early in the game to save up ammo, and most importantly (b) never, ever shoot things in normal FPS mode unless you have no action points — always use VATS instead.

Now, I had tried VATS and thought it was simply a curiosity.  Basically when you hit the “v” key (which I quickly re-mapped to the right mouse button as I came to use it heavily), the whole game pauses, and you get the chance to select and target a “hit location” on the enemy — head, torso, right or left arm, right or left leg, and (sometimes) weapon.  You have to be somewhat close (which forces you to sneak up or take some incoming fire), and the percent chance depends on your character’s skill with the weapon, and on the angle to the target, as well as cover.  But assuming you are close enough and positioned right to get a nice high 75% or higher chance at a head shot, you have a pretty good chance of doing either good damage, or sometimes getting a kill shot.  You also hardly ever completely miss, and only one round is used of semi-automatic or manual weapons, or a few rounds of automatic weapons.

As soon as I started using VATS mode preferentially (I now use it almost exclusively unless I run out of action points, which you have to expend to target hit locations in VATS), even when using grenades.  My character stopped dying, my ammo stopped running out, and the game became much more fun and enjoyable — much more like a cool RPG and less like an FPS.  And on top of that VATS mode gives you Matrix-like camera moves in slow-motion as you blow away the head of the enemy (or shoot his arms off, or whatever).  So, when you play this game, make sure you use VATS — and use it a lot.

Now, on to the meat of the review:

Visuals – 8/10

The graphics and visuals are decent in Fallout 3, although I must point out that my computer is on the old side so I have it set on “medium.” I’m sure it would be better with the higher settings.  The visual FX are good, but nothing special for things like weapons fire.  Where the game does very well is with the VATS camera moves.  When you throw a grenade in slow-mo at a super-mutant, and you see the explosion and the guy’s legs fly off and his torso is blown up over your head… that is just damn cool.  And I never tire of getting a head-shot in and seeing the target’s whole skull fly off his shoulders (with the accompanying blood spurts).   On the down side, as I said above, the pallet is your typical post-apocalyptic “shades of gray” color scheme, the world is filled with rubble and rust and decay, and it’s all rather monotonous.  I can’t tell one place from another, really, except maybe for the city built inside an aircraft carrier (and that’s distinctive only by being entirely indoors).

Sound – 7/10

The sound in this game is OK, but nothing to write home about.  Sounds are typical for this kind of world (gun sounds, explosions, animal squeals).  The music only seems to play every once in a great while, and in between there are long periods of near-silence.  I am not one who needs to have a constant musical score playing the whole time, but getting some musical cues for different areas might have been nice.  In a post-apocalyptic world I’d expect some pretty dramatic tunes, but you get very little of that here.

Character Design/Development – 9/10

To me this is one of the most critical aspects of an RPG.  I can live with poor graphics or sound more easily than I can live with either a badly designed, or an overly restrictive, character development system.  There is no need to worry on this score; Fallout 3 has hit a home run with their character development.  To start, you get to completely design your own character, selecting gender, facial features, etc — which I much prefer to other games where you start with a much more specific character designed by someone else.  You can place your stat points into any stat you want right at the start.  You take a personality test that evaluates your “class”, although there are no classes in the game (the game just sets up your first few skills), and you can also change the skills selected if you want.  From there, classes don’t exist at all, but rather, there is a pool of about 25 skills, and a whole bunch of perks, and you choose whichever ones you want, and put points into them.  It’s totally open-ended and freeform, which I love. Of course the drawback as many have said with such systems is that you can make mistakes, and I did with my first character (the one who died a lot). But it was not a big deal — I just started over, losing only a few hours of play, and now I have a very good character.  You can’t get much better than this kind of design system, so I gave them high marks for it.

Game System -9/10

The “game system” is how your character interacts with the game world, and the combat rules and other rules for playing out your character in the world.  Here again Fallout 3 has scored a home run. As I said above, had they simply gone with the FPS style of control, I’d probably have hated it and have given up playing a long time ago. However, once I started using VATS, I started having tons of fun.  The VATS system deserves an award, in my opinion. It lets you pause the game and think, which is critical in RPGs (as I’ve mentioned here before). It also uses the increased realism of hit locations. And on top of that you get very cool “cutscenes” each time you blow something away, which makes the game play rather like a movie.  Add to this the non-combat means of interacting with the world (persuasion, trading, lockpicking, stealth, and computer hacking) and you have yourself one heck of a well-designed system.  There is a lot here to like.

User Interface – 6/10

This one is tough to rate.  The basic heads-up display (HUD) — that is, the stuff on your screen at all times as you play — is minimalist and less informative than it should be.  There is no mini-map, but there really needs to be with all the maze-like areas they have in the game.  The actual map itself (which you bring up by hitting “tab”) is very confusing, as is their waypointing system. For example, frequently your destination is south but the waypoint wants you to go another way, such as east.  This is usually because the straight path is blocked, but then the waypoint on the map should move along with the compass waypoint on your HUD. It does not, which is very confusing at first, and annoying once you figure it out.  The interface for quests and game notes is similarly clunky and difficult to navigate.  Playing in 3rd person mode (which I’d normally prefer) is almost impossible because of the way the UI works. For instance, in 3rd person mode standing near a few things that can be interacted with, it’s almost impossible to select the right one.  Basically their whole “Pip-boy” mechanic should have been re-thought.  I found it hard to use and unintuitive.

Additionally, the controls for your NPC companions are horrible.  There is no easy way to see how many hit points they have left (you have to hold the mouse in just the perfectly exactly right place to see it); they get easily lost; they do not show up on your map/radar so when they get stuck you often have no idea where they were; and they insist on attacking everything in sight even when you are trying to sneak around and avoid combat.  The conversation options are very limited.  Now, this is 2009 people (or at least, 2008, when the game was released).  Why was Bioware able, with NWN, to give us tactical options for NPCs (such as asking them to “tank” for you) in 2002 but Bethesda can’t figure out how to do that in 2008 with this supposedly “advanced” game?  I can accept poor NPC AI, but at least give me controls so that I can get the NPC to stop doing  stupid things that get me killed.

Performance – 9/10

Given that this is an even newer game than Mass Effect, and that Mass Effect basically brought my system to its knees, I was very concerned about this game. Several of my system specs are at the “minimum requirement” level, which usually means the game will be a slide show.  For a fast-moving game like Fallout 3, this would have been fatal (as it was for Mass Effect).  However, I needn’t have worried. On medium settings my computer has no trouble with this game — it runs as smooth as silk. Frame rates are good (I haven’t logged them, but I have never seen a bit of stutter), and load times are generally very quick.  In fact, I hardly load at all except when moving between major zones of the game, and even then it takes only seconds.  For a game that should be very demanding, Fallout 3 has really done a great job with performance.

Role-playing – 8/10

Of course, it’s hard to role-play beyond the most rudimentary things in a single-player game, but there is some good stuff here. They use a “Karma” system much like Bioware’s alignment-based systems in NWN, KOTOR, and Jade Empire.  You can be a goody-two-shoes (as my current character is), or be nasty and mean, or somewhere in between.  How well you’ve behaved will govern NPC reactions toward you.  NPCs have voice acting (which is generally OK, but rarely better than that).  You get conversation options… and here is where I had to deduct a couple of points.  The conversation options are very limited and almost primitive by today’s standards.  If you play Fallout 3 and Mass Effect, for instance, there’ s no comparison. ME’s are much better.  However, in the end the game lets me play my character the way he would act (for the most part) and they get kudos for that.

Fun – 9/10

In the end, it’s all about fun, and as you can probably tell from what I have written to this point, Fallout 3 is, to me,  a very fun game.  It has most of the elements I look for in an RPG, and it does those things quite well.  I’ve found myself playing it a lot over the last few days, and I have yet to tire of it.  There is just nothing like choosing hit locations with your hunting rifle and watching your target’s head blow apart, spurting blood.

Overall – 8.1/10

Fallout 3 is a very solid offering. There is a lot here for the player who likes RPGs, and also for people who are more oriented toward action games. Other than a very clunky and rather poorly designed UI, the whole game soars above most of its competitors. If you are looking for a good CRPG, this one is well worth a try.