Football Helmet Clown Shoes Guy
Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 9:33PM I was doing some consulting on a small game that I can't really talk about, but there's a lot of customization in the game. I was discussing with a friend (the mysterious Mr. G. Phantome) how we were going to balance this thing. He imagined a future player who works really hard to make his guy into a samurai. He has the samurai helmet and armor pieces, and a decent plasma sword and everything. And then he meets...
Football Helmet Clown Shoes Robot. The terror of the metagame, this guy destroys the samurai guy. Why? Because even though the samurai looks cool, he basically sucks. The mishmash, discordant eyesore of Football Helmet Clown Shoes guy is just way more powerful. We imagined that the forums are full of outraged players, complaining about this, but they don't really grasp the game system. They keep calling for the football helmet to be nerfed, but they don't understand that the clown shoes are what really powers the build, in fact, it's really just the left shoe.
A new player starts playing and asks what pieces he should be looking for. The experienced players tell him "Dude, you want Football Helmet and Clown Shoes, for sure." The sad new guy asks if he has any other choice. "Caveman is barely viable," says the expert. "Flower hands can win too, but loses to everything else so good luck with that."
The point of all this is just that a customizeable system can have aesthetics at odds with balance or power. You have to look out that for the problem that actual experience the player will have with the game is encountering absurdly bad-looking characters. Imagine a fighting game, for example, where one guy is wearing some ugly safari outfit and the other has a huge hat that covers half his character and some enormous robe that covers the rest, so you can hardly tell who anyone even is. Yeah it's fun to customize, but some careful art direction is in order.
Magic: the Gathering
Later, for reasons unrelated to the above, I was scrolling through some images of Magic: the Gathering cards. By chance, I happend to come across the card Donate. I asked Mr. G. Phantome if he knew about how Donate (a seemingly terrible card that gives the opponent one of your cards) was actually part of one of the most powerful and dominant decks ever. He said he was not aware. So then I showed him Illusions of Grandeur, the other part of the combo. I told him to just LOOK at the cards, not even really read what they do, but just look at them side by side, and think about how they were the terror of MTG for a long time.
"Oh my god!" he said. "It's Football Helmet Clown Shoes Robot!" These cards are absolutely awful looking, and of all things, THESE were the focus of the game at that time. This serves as a warning to anyone who would allow customization: at least try to make it so that whatever ends up getting all the attention looks half-decent. Yeah I know that can be hard though!
Reader Comments (40)
I think 'Kingdom of Loathing' has a pretty good solution to the problem. It's a web-based RPG of the funnier sort. You can equip hats, pants, weapons, etc, hundreds of different kinds from each one. You can put on items in any combination you want, but if you're wearing a complete _outfit_, you get some extra power. Plus, you can have extra event while you adventure wearing the outfit, plus, your avatar looks aesthetical, plus, you can make a tattoo that is displayed on the profile page and says `I have this outfit'. Worth seeing: http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Outfit
So, basically, if you are min-maxing, you're motivated to wear complete outfits because of their extra powers.
Eh, isn't that just a different set of restrictions? Now to be competitive you *have* to use a set? Maybe it becomes more equalized because the number of people likely to use full sets is higher ... *shrug*
I also think the Guild Wars bit is a good plan for what they do. The game is basically straight up 'what makes you different are the skills you equip', and that was fine for the first one. All they really need to do is make sure there are fewer 'filler' skills and it should be great.
So, random thoughts on this ... It doesn't directly assist in balance, being that football helmet clow-shoes guy still has the same stats, but at least from an information perspective, what if you sort of 'color code' people based on their stats? That is, you give each of the primary stats a color, and then maybe you take the two highest stats of that character. Make their name display in the 'mixed' color of the two, or give them an aura of that color or something. Just somewhere, allow players to differentiate what other players are set up like. So long as armor doesn't grant abilities, it then becomes less of an issue what each individual piece adds, and more about the total.
However, again, this doesn't fix the strict min-max issue of who wins, but is it at least better than no information at all?
I suppose you're right. Guild Wars is essentially using Magic's system, and I just haven't explained it right. I thought mentioning Pokemon might help.
The restrictions in question are few in number, but they're hard limits over the greater set of skills in the game. Guild Wars gained it's popularity mostly because it's few limits were similar to Magic's, and building a character for a certain job was similar to building a card deck. Your class and weapon became your "color", and decided what subset of the greater amount of skills you can use. Guild Wars 2 adds a third restriction, race, and then instead of allowing you to fill your skill bar with any combination of the total subset of your color, they limit how much of each subcolor of skills you're allowed to use. Although, this allows sharing of subcolor sets among different characters that share race, class, or preference of weapon.
To continue a simplified Magic analogy, by letting you come in with any look of armor, it's essentially allowing you to come in with your color deck of choice, but you can repaint the pictures of each card, not the entire card. As for the armor runes/stats themselves, they're all passive, and the game has a minimum number of stats, so you're generally seeing a warrior maxing out his attack, and a magic user maxing out his max mana. There was no tell for armor runes in the first game, and that was because they didn't actually affect the strategy in the game anywhere near as much as your skill choice did.
The similarity to Pokemon, although more in the case of Guild Wars 1, comes from the fact that there are over half a thousand pokemon in the game, just as many attacks, 17 types, and then there are pokemon that are two types at once. At a competitive level, you chunk the pokemon to certain groups, knowing that they're focusing in only one or two of five stats, and that because of bonuses, they're often going to use an attack of the same type as themselves, or an attack of a type that has an advantage over your own. Anything attack outside of the norm of beatdown or stall is used for specialty combinations, which quickly become known throughout the metagame and have counters develop. The armor skill analogy comes from the fact that each Pokemon can come into battle with an item, and you have the choice of any holdable item in the game. The items just vary so much in their usage that certain pokemon types or strategies will gravitate towards using certain items, like a stall pokemon will prefer something that restores their health each turn or gives added defense against certain attacks, while a beatdown pokemon would prefer an item that gives a bonus to a certain stat or type of attack.
Going back to Guild Wars 2, the fact that they added a third restriction, race, means that they foresaw this same conundrum, and are solving it by creating a larger number of base differences before armor choice even becomes an issue.
Of course, now I remember that armor is divided into three groups, heavy, medium, or light, the choice of which you get is decided upon your class. This probably means that many of the armor attributes will focus on stats that each group of classes find useful.
Alternately, you could restrict some costume options based on a single primary attribute (class / primary weapon / etc.) This ensures your samurai can't equip the clown shoes, no matter how optimal they are for your build. This also gives you a steady stream of DLC opportunities: "Clown Shoes fans will be excited about our new Rainbow-Lace Cleats, which provide a much-needed stamina boost to Football Helmet users."
The 'set bonus' mechanic is the one used in WoW to encourage people to use full sets which determine how your character looks: head, chest, shoulder, legs, hands.
This system works well to still allow interesting scope for customisation in two ways:
1) There are many other item slots but they do not have a huge impact on how your character looks (rings, bracers, belts, boots etc)
2) There are 2 and 4 set bonuses so you don't need to wear all 5 of a set. You can mix and match. Some people only choose to wear 2 pieces for instance.
Just a note that Kongai very intentionally does NOT have a set bonus for playing an all-vampires team or all-martial artists team, or whatever. That would only serve to reduce the variety of possible decks, and would be bad for gameplay.
I'll emphasize again that I think you WANT the look of something to hint at its function in a cutsomizeable game. So letting you change all the pictures on your magic cards sounds like a terrible idea actually. If you make sure that the most hideous combinations are not dominant gameplay-wise, you're half done anyway though. If clown shoes + football helmet is not some super dominant thing, then it won't be everywhere anyway. If you imagine that it's "perfectly balanced", as in, the same exact power level of all other good combos of things, then you'd only see it about as often as other good (gameplay) combos. Throw in just a few natural synergies within an archetype, without even needing heavy-handed stuff like a set bonus (MTG Elf decks...barf) and you nudged it a bit further away from hideous aesthetics.
Also if for some reason you're stuck with bad art on something, maybe go the extra mile to make it NOT part of a totally dominant combo the entire metagame warps around.
What I've said there is mostly just balancing the game ok, and that alone gets you at least pretty far in this problem and preserves the very important concept of making things function like they look. I could picture something like that, and in addition, there are some slots where tons of items all have the same stats really, and that slot is just for looks. In this particular game, I think there might be a small set of abilities that you could think of like guild war abilities, but it's so small that you could probably just display the ability icons in the HUD, rather than try to tie them to football helmets or any other specific item. This is kind of similar to the rings or trinkets example from WoW that someone mentioned, but even better because it would be analogous to having the guy's "ring abilities" displayed very clearly next to his lifebar or something, because there's so few of them (like 3 maybe).
TLDR:
As you see, I think it's very important that you be able to look at the screen and see what the heck you are really up against. So my summary so far is to use a hybrid technique where in some slots, form does fit function. In other slots, they are mostly there to make your guy look how you want. Also, a few slots have little or no form (rings) but make it very clear what is in those slots with HUD.
The wow trinkets (rings or whatever that affect stats but don't change visuals) is really just avoiding the problem or papering over the cracks. I think those types of hud icon explanations are called affordances in visual design speak. It sounds like it could be useful for taking up the slack in your theoretical game Sirlin and so a little added like you suggest would be reasonable, but I'm sure you agree the fewer the better. They don't solve the original problem and that problem really intrigues me. I'd love to find a solution that didn't require any icons on the hood. I suspect you feel the exact same way.
In my head I'm thinking of a fast paced medieval action game, where player stats are visually represented on the players with their armour and such. It's really customizeable and it's all going well until a meta game establishes itself and everybody is running around with a horrible juxtaposition of heavy armour chest and shoulders, light armour leg braces and that specialized jousting visor that it turns out actually has an indispensable bonus to your recovery time. If you want a REALLY customizeable game then I assume the designers just have to expect the player-base to come up with these crazy gear mixtures that they didn't expect to be good when they were making the game. The designers need a system that will keep the aesthetics looking good even when the players start making mad, unexpected combos.
Colour and shape is what's driving visuals so I suggest exploring both.
Football helmet clown shoes robot guy (or my light armour, heavy armour and jousting helmet guy) looks daft but if you could customize all the colours it would help a bit. If football helmet clown shoes robot guy's gear was all black with silver trim then that would at least look a bit better. So there is one non stat slot that could be altered on purely aesthetic player preferences.
For shape I suggest shape trim options (I'm struggling for a better description) that can be applied to visually unify a player's gear, much the same as colour would. Say have x number of visual styles that could be applied to your armour. An example of a style would be ''evil-sophisticated spikeyness''. The spikes don't do anything themselves but they help even out any juxtaposition of your armour set without being so visually dominating so as to obscure what armour pieces you are actually wearing.
This is probably something that would just need an artist to get all clever on and I probably don't have the visual vocabulary to explore it in detail. It might prove to be very difficult and subtle for the art team to get right. The thing about the shape trim idea is that it might limit the level of detail on the game items (armour in this case) that are available. Does the number of shape trim options limit the number of base armour piece designs that would be visually representable? That's a question for the art team I suppose.
One last thing, does all this alteration of colour and shape of equipment lower the desirability of the individual pieces? You're less likely to fetishize that level 50 dragon chest plate if you know that when you get it you're going to paint it and stick on some spikes. Maybe less fetishizing is a good thing though.
Yes to everything you said Torsten, and yes you know how I feel on those things. There still should be a few things (in my example, a helmet slot that just adds boring stats) that are there just to help you play dress-up doll, but yeah probably not many of those.
Modifying the equipment you get is a nice idea--could very easily have technical issues!--but is interesting as a way of letting people smooth things over. Also nice point that it could reduce the "fetishizing" of the items. Not sure how I feel about that, maybe it's ok, shrug.
Since movement and control are so important, those should probably be the most strongly signified by the character's look - if someone is a slow tank, nothing shows it more than the character being fat or large. Usually, whenever I see a fat character in a fighting game, I know they're the most likely to be a grappler or just have great endurance without the grab game. Taking that another step, you'd have to make sure that the character's neutral animations and weapon (or lack of a weapon) signify what moves are possible - you might not need to know exactly which moves the character has equipped from what is available to him/her (if say, you used the earlier example where someone is wearing a karate suit and you know he could do an uppercut reversal, a spinning kick, and a fireball, you might not have to know ahead of time just which moves the character has if you know exactly what the properties of the 3 possible abilities are - just that the character gets to choose 2, and you're prepared for all 3). If I have a sword, you know I could do moves 1-9, but I only get to bring 6 into battle with me, somewhat like pokemon, and the way I move around, you should tell that I'm based in swordplay, even if you can't see me holding the sword because of camera angles or whatever. If I'm 8ft tall, semi-fat, and holding an axe, you should be able to tell that I'm going to move and attack a certain way, even if I'm dressed as Santa. As long as somewhere, you can see exactly what the Santa suit offers, or know that it offers nothing as far as gameplay because your abilities are all based in your stat allocation and weapon choice, does it still cause a problem if you can look like anything you want?
If it does, what else needs to be done?
Or maybe this is going too far into the extreme where you lack customization options besides visuals - if there are abilities you can equip that alter how you act, you need visual cues to which ones you have, just like you need visual cues to your movement and attacking actions. It's one thing to use a sword that always animates a specific way with specific properties on the moves, but it's too complex when you can now change a move around and make it come out 3 frames faster or have 1.5X the hitstun, or maybe even add frames 1-4 invincibility on startup, especially if you can do this to all of the 5 out of 10 moves you can bring into battle with you if you're using a system like that. While gameplay could wind up being really diverse if it's done really well (with all of the useless crap cut out - keep it to just a few weapon types and character types and let the customization options make the characters diverse, rather than putting in a bunch of weapon choices and character options, and then layering on a bunch of equipment or abilities that barely do anything), you're going to have a hard time getting newbs to pick up the game if they have to memorize 1/2 of it just so they can walk instead of craw in the competitive scene, and that's not a good thing.
There's also another issue where it might feel too limiting to leave a player with a single weapon choice, but that might be the only way to keep it fair with that much diversity between weapons. Give the player too much freedom and now a sword with moves 2,3,5,6,9 and a bow equipped with arrows that have effects 1, 2, and 4 becomes the most effective combination in the game, even if the axe happens to be a seriously good weapon with moves 5,6,9, and 12, and partners well with the chain-scythe (it just falls behind in dealing with the widest range of possible scenarios, so even while it's a powerful and fun combination to use, other combinations can do the same job almost as well, and can cover so many other scenarios that there's not much incentive to use this one). It'd be kinda like comparing Millia to Dizzy in Guilty Gear. They both have great oki and some similar strengths, but Millia overall seems to have more going for her and is probably easier to learn.
In the free game GunZ, you can melee with a sword, 2 swords, or a knife. There isn't much reason to use a knife unless you want to use 2 heavy guns (dual bazookas for example) because the swords outclass it by a large amount (knives can't block anything while swords can block melee attacks and projectiles from the front, swords and knives both have an unblockable attack, but the knife one is unsafe on whiff and unsafe on hit if they tech, while the sword one is pretty safe on whiff, gives you a setup for potential knockdown or a kill on hit and still gives you options if they tech, ect). If you wanted to use 2 bazookas, the knife is pretty much your only melee option (and since you have more movement options with your melee weapon out, you can't afford to skip this), unless you want to take a huge hit to how much armor you have (have to skip chest armor as is when carrying those things, and you'd probably have to go without pants to carry a sword).
Overall, pistols in that game are just outclassed by magnums, rifles are just better than dual wielding uzis or using machine guns, and shotguns are useful overall because of how they work... there's like 7 different projectile weapon types, but 3 just sort of suck and don't get used at all. It's only made worse because you can choose to single or dual wield certain ones, and there's no point in comparing a single pistol to 2 of them at once the way the game works, and the pistols suck anyway compared to the magnums for damage or rifles for speed. A rifle is more accurate, has about the same firing speed (actually, one rifle has an amazingly fast firing speed and probably the best accuracy period) and does about the same damage as dual wielding uzis, so why use the uzis when they weigh 2X as much?
Taken to this extreme, you might wind up with a ton of useless crap in the game that's just wasting time in development and not contributing to making the game good, but taken too far the other way, it's like there's not enough customization. Might as well just make 20 characters that are balanced against each other and all act differently, and then let people put whatever clothes on them they want.
Another possible solution is to have *a few* visuals for each stat. IE, the uber-broken Headbutt attack that the Football Helmet grants, is also provided by the Stone Mask; the spammy juggles provided by the Clown Shoes can also be accomplished by equipping the Red Sandals. Meanwhile the Samurai Helmet's Clarity bonus can be found on the Neon Visor and Third Eyeball hats, and the Green Sandal's lackluster Dash attack is also on the Goat Hooves. That allows you to have 4 different visuals for mr FHCS, and SIX different combinations that yield the Samurai's abilities. And that doesn't even touch on the double-jump provided by the Cowboy Boots and Yellow Sandals, or the firebreathing from the Oni Mask / Scorched Eyebrows / Dragon Skull headpieces, etc
It's not quite as easy to tell-at-a-glance as the "missle launcher only shoots missles", but far better than "he's got a missle launcher cuz it looks cool but he might actually shoot lasers/poison darts/chipmunks/black holes instead". Hopefully not too much memorization depending on the number of options :) (people would just have to complain about "Headbutt Spamkick" on the forums, knowing he could be FootballHelmetClownShoe OR FootballHelmetRedSandal OR StoneMaskClownShoe OR StoneMaskRedSandal when they actually meet him online)
This doesn't solve the problem if the game in question is a CCG however. Solving the goofy-looking Illusions/Donate combo by printing Donate AND "Demonic Gift" ... is not optimal <_<
Sirlin, have you been trying to play Tekken 6 or Soulcalibur 4 because Football Helmet Clown Shoes guy describes the customization mechanics of either game in a nutshell.
And let me tell you, Namco needs to drop that for something more viable like say: a basic 'you have 100 points to use on abilities or statistical boosts and armor is just cosmetic'.
It's all the more bizarre that SC4 did this when SC2/3/Soulblade's whole 'this weapon has X stats and abilities' was perfectly fine.
If you're going to allow a huge amount of customisation to the extent that football helmets and clown shoes are available, you're going to want to give people some independant method of determining what they're up against anyway. Sure, eyeballing works fine when everyone is wearing hybrid samurai/knight outfits or a gi, a leather jacket and a green beret, because you know the first is an armoured mid to heavy weapon user and the second is a lightly armoured light weapon user or unarmed brawler, or whatever, but what exactly do the clown shoes and football helmet do together on the robot? This is, after all, about a mash-up that does something which isn't obvious and intuitive.
Having some purely aesthetic slots makes sense, but you're basically containing the problem rather than solving it. What about having a system where the player can wear only one or two custom items using the Guild Wars idea? You transfer the football helmet and clown shoes stats to the Uncanny Valley Cranial Unit and magnet boots and wear them with the rest of the robot set, but you can't make a schoolgirl outfit with the full FHCSR build. You sacrifice some of the information, sure, but your opponent knows they're essentially dealing with a robot, and since the UVCU and magnet boots aren't competitive, they know those're the wild cards. Of course, this brings in the interesting game of sacrificing valuable items to hide which items are your wild cards: "No one would re-spec jet boots with clown shoes stats, that's just ridicu- Do I hear squeaking?". But, how big of a problem/how much fun this can be depends on how many functional slots there are in total are relative to the custom item limit and how powerful any one item is.
Yes, I am aware that Soul Calibur when from a beautiful game to a visual disaster. Too bad.
Are you saying SF4's Gouken's alternate costume with the hat is bad? I like it :(
Soul Calibur is the exact game I think about when I think aboug aesthetical abominations.
And to al esser extent, Tekken. Nothing takes me out of the game more than looking at a character wearing an inner tube to a fight not because it fits the character ot scheme but because someone thought itwould be funny and chose it as customization.
Again, I say just leave goofy stuff out in the first place to an extent, but that doesn't solve the problem of when it's not an individual item or whatnot that makes the character look goofy but the combination of items. That football helmet may look fine with the football gear and the clownshoes maybe makes for a cool looking clown or something. Just together...
For soemthing like an MMO, I find that lessening the factor of individual items seems to be a plausible solution as well as more reliance on visual cues.
A lot of movement in games like MMOs is based on race, a distinction that plays a far lighter role than class, in most cases. And also something that can be determined easily by a characters appearance.
I have always wondered why not base such things as idle stances, running/walking animations and emotes etc. on CLASS instead of race. When I played WOW, I had to use outside tools in order to get something to display what class was running at me from a distance so I could prepare accordingly. It seems to me that observing a lumbering running animation signifying a warrior or a ninja-esque agile looking run for a Rogue would be a far better approach.
Maybe then, also, exaggerate one more visual element to further give people a visual cue. To me, the weapon would be the logical choice. More focus on centralizing visual communications would make a far smoother experince. I'm not saying limit such things to ONLY these two elements, just primarily.
Character animations in this sense would, in comparison to Magic: The Gathering, serve as the "Color." The indicator of what you're going up against. The weapon would, I guess, be more akin to the card description, though not as intricate or detailed, it would still give you another element to observe and bounce decisions off of.
The purpose of centralizing these things in such a way is to free up various other visual elements so more focus can be put on making those look good and mesh well. With a class based game using the approach I described, I could then allow players further customization over their characters appearance so they can pick out what they WANT to look like as oposed to being stuck looking like everyone else because that's the right "build" for X endeavor.
Characters can equip leggings, arm bands, headbands, chest pieces etc. etc. etc. but those could all be subsequently covered by other skins. And the skins available could get more and more elaborate at higher levels.
Hmmmm....
Well this immediately made me think of the custom characters in Soul Calibur IV. The costume pieces each had their own set of stats and making a character with the stats you wanted usually led to some truly atrocious looking creation. Luckily there were 2 different game types for custom characters - one in which the stats are not taken into account, and the other in which they are. In other words there is a mode where you can just make a character you like and play them without worrying about stats, but if you want to play that other mode where costume stats are taken into account... well prepare to look ridiculous.
Sorry, late to the party. Anyhow, I thought I'd chime in with the Penny Arcade and Order of the Stick takes on the matter. Clearly this is not a new problem.
Incidentally, this discussion reminds me of the early days of Ultima Online, where the "plate helm and robes" look was ubiquitous. Of course, the outfit was completely nonsensical and driven by the game rules governing skill usage. That is, it was a side-effect of the other broken aspect of the game, the skill system. While players might start out with customized skill sets, they all eventually converged on a common build and the common appearance that maximized its effectiveness. Even more amusing, new players would quickly copy the look hoping to deter would-be player-killers by making themselves visually indistinguishable from high-level players. So much for asymmetric gameplay or visual distinctiveness.
As for mismatched gear, some games tackle this problem by assigning set bonuses, but of course there's occasionally the other problem: what if you *don't want* the set bonus?
To be entirely fair to Magic, Donate/Illusions was never supposed to be a combo in the first place. It was the result of insufficient development early in the game's history. Donate is a classic "good bad card" - the card was actually designed to be a weaker one, and ended up being insanely broken because it could be paired with cards like Illusions of Grandeur.
That being said, it is definitely true that it is the case that stupid-looking characters can be hideously powerful. But then again, maybe the solution is to make sure that nothing looks THAT stupid?
Psychological goals of appearance are different in team games with bigger battles than 1-on-1 or 2-on-2. Some people want to be targets; a standard recommendation for tank archetypes for team play is "wear clashing colors or anything else that might draw the eye to you." There wasn't significant customization in netrek but you'd still see people pick weird ships and behave oddly as an attempt to get the other side to chase.
But as level of play goes beyond casual and pick-up groups, if the number of people in sight are small, well, they've probably heard the "look obnoxious" advice too. Still a factor in large-scale or confusing battles. Which makes me wonder why my little squishy healer wears pink instead of the tank....
Haha. At least Donate goes to the graveyard, hopefully to be buried under another card soon enough ;)
Also it's pretty fitting that the guy in the Donate art is basically doing a trollface.