GDC 2012, Day 3
Friday, March 9, 2012 at 10:26PM The Last 10: Going From Good To Awesome
Benson Russel of Naughty Dog talked about how they polish their games. As he said this, everyone in the room thought to themselves "Blizzard...Blizzard..." But actually this was about Uncharted 3, and not Starcraft.
Benson explained that polish is not something you just hope happens, that it has to be scheduled and planned for. He showed a diagram of a normal company's production schedule. It has some pre-production, a very long production phase, then alpha, beta, and ship. Then he showed Naughty Dog's version of this, with the same total length because the point is the relative lenghts of each phase. They have a much shorter production phase and a longer alpha phase and beta phase. There is even an additional "hands off" phase after beta and before ship.
The shorter production phase ensures that any core mechanics are figured out even sooner than they sometimes are at other companies. He also said this kind of scheduling requires a "hard alpha," like you can't half-ass it. The alpha really does need to have everything there in a rough form and the entire game playable from beginning to end. Once it's all stitched together enough to play it all through, and everything in place (at least roughly), alpha becomes the polish phase and for them lasted 4 months on uncharted 3. He said they would like it to last a bit longer next time. I think beta also lasted 4 months, but I'm not sure on that. The "hands off" phase is actually after the polishing is done. At this point, it's only the QA department and programmers playing it, and the only purpose is to find major showstopping bugs. On Uncharted 3, during this period they actually did find a very difficult to detect loading bug that would have caused the game to crash on 25% of the Playstation 3s out there.
To show us what "polish" means, he showed several example videos of Uncharted 3. He had videos showing a bug, and then showing the same scene when the bug was fixed. It was often small stuff, but that's his point, really. That you can't let a bunch of small bugs drag down the overall feeling of the game, it all adds up. He had to play most of these bug videos twice so we could even *see* what the bug was. In one, the main character is in a tunnel and sees rushing water coming, turns from it, and runs. As he turns, there is an animation glitch (over in a fraction of a second) before he runs. In another example, the scene starts with a stationary camera, then the camera moves in to show the action. The bug is that during the part where it's stationary, there is accidentally one frame (yeah, one frame) where the camera moves forward. In another example, an NPC throws an enemy to the ground, but the enemy is then right under his feet, which doesn't really look right or make any sense. The corrected version has the enemy fly a couple feet to the side, so he's not directly under the guy who threw him. Another example showed that one scene where the main character falls into a new environment has the background ambient lighting set to a wrong value during part of the fall. And yet another example showed a scene where for just one frame, the screen was pure white for no reason.
So yeah, they fix all this stuff during alpha and beta. And they even have a person on the team, not the QA team but like the real team, whose job it is to look for these polish issues. They have a fairly high ranking person do this because it's not just about spotting the issues (though apparently he is great at that), it's about making a judgment call about how to fix or what to fix. There is often the issue that fixing something might be really easy or really hard (is it worth it?) and the other issue that fixing something might be low risk or high risk (is it worth the possibility that the fix could fuck up other parts of the game?).
Benson also explained that as alpha and beta go on, it is (intentionally) harder and harder to get changes approved. At first, it's like a free-for-all. Everyone fix everything they can, go! They monitor bug counts and everyone does their best to keep their bug counts down to at most X bugs, set by their project managers. By looking at these bug counts, they can see if any particular team member is overwhelmed, and maybe needs help fixing stuff, and if another team member doesn't have many to work on. Also, seeing the rate of fixes helps them estimate if they are on track to ship on time or not.
So at some point in all that, they institute a rule that from then on, they have to be more careful about making lots of changes because ship date is getting closer. So you have to get the approval of one of three executives (including my friend, game director Justin Richmond, haha go Justin) to change something. A bit later on, you need two approvals. After that, you need all three of them to approve any change. This is just good sense, if you've ever been on a software project before. They are reducing their risk screwing things up at the last minute this way.
BURN THIS MOTHERFATHER! Game Dev Parents Rant
In the annual rant session hosted by Eric Zimmerman, developer's break out of their prepared scripts to tell us passionately what's bothering them. I think this is an important part of the conference overall, because we get under the surface about what's really going on. Except...we totally didn't this time and it mostly sucked. I am more upset about three things before breakfast than half these people were about whatever they are supposedly "ranting" about.
Graeme Devine started us off just fine, at about 80% or so on the rant-scale. He is sad that the world of game development that we're passing on to his daughter sucks. He blames us, the veterans who shaped this industry. He says a good thing we have going is that our indie scene is actually doing interesting stuff, and reminding us that it's not all first person shooters or whatever. He says it's good that the IGF celebrates indie games and that it actually gets the winners a publishing deal on xbox. We *should* be encouraging our new blood in this very way, so that's great! What isn't great is when those same innovative newcomers go on to make their second game. At that point, they are given the same shitty treatment that the rest of the industry gets, which he incidentally thinks sucks too. He says in our industry today, if you want to make something on the scale of a couple million dollars, people are so paranoid about risk that they're only willing to back FPS, RPG, and RTS. (Editor's note: uh, I don't know about RTS. I mean that ship has sailed and Blizzard won. But yeah I get the point.) He's mad that interesting projects are exactly the ones that deserve a couple million dollars, not the things that actually get funded.
Then there were really disappointing non-rants. One about how someone's kid plays games too much and how she tries to set limits like no games mon-thurs, or tries to withhold food, or unplugs his internet connection. She wonders what external rewards she can use to get him to do real-world things, given how hard the competition is from rewards inside World of Warcraft like new gear that she's competing with. Uh...what? How about it's great that your kid plays games and he's learning a lot from that actually and that he might turn out just fine. I played games and didn't have a mother busting my ass about it all the time. Also, if you think external rewards are what he needs, rather than internal motivation, I don't even know what to say. But if you want a passionate rant, then it should have been me eviscerating her entire presentation.
Then there was some boring thing about some boring thing.
Then it was Jason Della Rocca's turn. Note that this session started with Eric Zimmerman setting up the mics, and casually mentioning that he was glad Jason was up there with him, because Jason is a "superior masculine sample." Come to think of it, Jason is quite manly and charismatic. Also, he's done enormous good to our industry, has helped me personally, and is generally wonderful. You know what he's not wonderful at? Ranting. He is sad that we all got a pretty good game literacy education because we started with simple games like Pong and then games got more and more complicated as we got older, but now kids might start out with random iPad games that are kind of too hard for them. Why Jason thinks that some babies possibly playing overly complicated games is the most BURNING issue he can "rant" about is beyond me. After the session I asked him what's up with his "rant" being like a semi-boring thing he's barely sad about, but not really. He said it's "because he's Canadian."
Then there were some mysterious mystery ranters. I totally forget the first guy's name, so sorry. I've seen him speak before, too. Anyway, this guy fucking RANTED. I mean he cared and cursed and talked intensely. I was actually so excited about that, and thinking about how I'd write about him knowing what rant means, that my mind drifted and I forget what he talked about. I guess that didn't work out well. I think it was various useless bullshit distinctions that make him mad like "what is a game?" and "wait, this isn't a game," as if expanding the definition to include things outside of *your* games somehow cheapens your work. He says we decided on "video games" as an overarching term a long time ago, and get over it. He probably said a lot of other stuff like that.
Chris Hecker guest ranted too, at about 75% rant-intensity. Hecker talked about the three-way between the press, game developers, and game players. The core thing he's mad about is that we keep making the same games over and over again. I'd like to interject that even though we already had RTS games, I think it's fucking awesome that Blizzard made a polished one in the form of Starcraft 2. And in fighting games, there *still* are hardly any that are really good enough in my opinion, so it makes sense to keep going. Innovation in entirely new genres is great, but so is refining current ones. So this kind of rant, I just don't know about it. I mean I guess there's a problem, but it seems overstated.
Anyway, Hecker explains that all three parties cause this problem. He showed a review of some FPS with Black Ops in the title, and "the good" section was like super long. "The bad" section was "campaign too short." Hecker thought "the bad" should say "also you bought the same fucking game 6 months ago." He faults players too, for *wanting* the same game over and over again. And he faults developers the most, because while the other two parties count a lot, only developers can actually *make* other kinds of games. So it's kind of up to us to show how good other kinds of games are. And he says the problem here is that great developers throughout our industry's history have very often said "I make the kind of games I love to play!" Hecker responds "please want to play some other fucking types of games." I forget if "fucking" was in there, but it should have been.
Jade Raymond of Ubisoft I think might have gotten a misprinted invitation to speak at a "quiet and polite pontification session" rather than a rant session. She calmly mused about the world issues we faced in the last year, like some war somewhere, and the occupy movement, and internet censorship laws, and so on, and how we really should use games to speak about some of these issues, but mostly we don't. She mentioned several games that missed opportunities to join in this dialog, including one of Ubisoft's own games (I think Splinter Cell?) In that one, there is an interrogation mechanic in the game, and she explained how it could have been used a "frog in the boiling water" thing where in order to be successful at the interrogation, you have to do more and more terrible things each time, and eventually you do some monstrous thing that doesn't fully hit you until afterwards how terrible it is, because you've been conditioned to go along with it all. Actually that does sound interesting. I think the content of her presentation was fine, though I think I'm not doing it justice here.
Frank Lantz ranted at about 60% intensity, but his actual subject matter was ranty enough to get full credit. He faults game designers for not having enough ambition and for thinking way too small. He pointed to metacritic and some other chart site and said it's common practice to measure success that way. Like if you're top of those charts, that's success. But Frank thinks it's thinking way too small to even accept the model we have of churning out new games and sequels to those games and content packs to those, as if it's all this consumable, throw-away stuff.
How about a game that someone designs a city around? How about a game that you can see from space, because it's affected society that much? How about a game that lasts 500 or 1000 years. He says there ARE games that we build cities around (as he showed a picture of sports statdiums). There ARE games that are over 1000 years old that we still have (Chess, Backgammon, Mancala). There are games that so mainstream that they permeate culture and that even presidents play (many pictures of Poker). And we're content with top of metacritic? Really?
Frank showed a fictional man and woman from the future, in their spacecraft discussing games. The woman says how she thinks the games of the 21st century were really great. She thinks they showed all sorts of themes about what we liked, and they were fun, and there was all the running and jumping and shooting. They were just great. Then the camera pulls back, and she says "it's your move" as we see her move a piece on her Chess board. Frank says that it's entirely possible that "Chess will *lap* us."
Frank's son then "ranted" about how he doesn't like dialog trees in games, except actually he does. Frank's son is totally cool, but this is another example of how a "rant" session should include actual rants. Like, things people are actually really fucking passionate about.
Lunch
I went to lunch with Frank and his son, and we bumped into a guy he knew from Riot at the mustard table. I hate mustard. Also I told this guy that his game tramples on the spirit of competition, and that it's shameful that it takes dozens of hours of forced grinding to have "real" character instead of the gimped ones you get when you pay. How about paying gives you a real character with no grinding?
He seemed confused. Then he said they have to do it that way because they need to have a matchmaking system where people of the same skills are matched, and it wouldn't be good if bad players were matched against the best players. I said that's an invalid argument, and that skill-based matchmaking systems are entirely figured out. They exist in chess, Starcraft 2, and a hundred other games. There is no problem in matching players of the same skills, and if there was, preventing people from buying a full character wouldn't be any kind of answer to that. "Next," I said.
He said ok but LoL is a team game and so it needs different matchmaking. I said that's also no argument because that kind of matchmaking is also solved. Microsoft's TrueSkill system expands Elo to include team-based rankings, and it's already in use in Halo. This is a solved problem and again not a reason to prevent people from buying characters. "Next," I said.
He said he'd rather not debate it, so I said ok and we went our ways. Frank later said that seemed mean, I mean that was just some guy, why say that stuff to him. Frank is ok with a lot of things though, too many in my opinion. Frank works for Zynga now, by the way, which kind of says something here. I said I thought it would really improve the entire world of competitive games if Riot employees were regularly aggressively argued with at every conference, and that if players did it too at every turn. Instead of popularizing the idea that a forced grind is ok in a competitive game (which is against the spirit of competition), maybe they could be told that's fucking bullshit. In fact, if the tides were so strong that lots of people told them that, we would have improved the entire state of competitive gaming. So how about that? You know what that is? It's a fucking rant. Why is my lunch conversation at the mustard table 10x the intensity of half the "rants" in the rant session that promised to burn down the house? I mean seriously. And while we're on that subject, why is there an entire table full of just mustard?
Experimental Gameplay Workshop
After a week of Facebook, iOS, social, monetization, clones, and "I almost died making my game," this is what reminds everyone that our industry is still cool. A bunch of crazy people showed their crazy stuff.
Steve Swink fucking blew me away. Note that Steve blew me away two years ago too, with the beginnings of his game Shadow Physics. I was sure that "Portal, Braid, Shadow Physics" would be a common phrase. For reasons possibly unrelated to game design, Shadow Physics didn't work out though. He cancelled it and started on something else called Scale. So yeah. "Portal, Braid, Scale." I asked if I can be his co-designer or something. I have always wanted to make Gödel, Escher, Bach: the game, and maybe he's doing that, sort of.
Scale is a first person game (oh hmm...maybe should be 3rd person) where you have a gun thing that can shrink or grow anything in the world. Yeah, like anything. So you can get on a rock then grow it to make it big enough for you to reach the top of a house, or whatever. You can shrink a entire landscape with a huge river, so that it's so small you can jump over the river. If you encounter two pressure plates on the ground that must be held down, but only have one rock, you can make it a huge rock that pushes them both down. You can shrink a house down so small that you can carry it around, bring it somewhere, then go inside it...and find a crack that if you shrink yourself down small enough you can go explore. You can grow a small butterfly so large that it becomes a flying platform for you. You can do a ton of other things too.
There is a conservation of mass in the world, so in order to grow something, you actually have to shrink something else. This constraint makes it actually work, as there are limits to how big you can make things. Sometimes you have to think a bit how to even find enough stuff to shrink in order to grow some other thing enough.
There's just so much potential in Scale. Aftewards Steve asked if I knew Maquette, I said I didn't, and he was surprised. He called over Hanford Lemoore, creator of Maquette, and he gave me a demo of it. It's weirdly similar, and yet not. Inside the level, there is a small model of the level. When you change things in the model, it changes the bigger level and vice versa. In the main level, there is an organge block that's big and blocking your path. You can go to the scale model and pick up the orange block there (it's small in the small model) and move it so it doesn't block your path. You can even...carry it from the model into the regular sized world.
That starts to get mind-melting when you realize that after you do this, if you return to the model (after setting down the orange block) that there is still an orange block in the model. Why? You picked it up and put it somewhere else, why should there be an orange block in the model? Because inside the model, there is another smaller model of the level. And when you left the first model with the orange block, another smaller version of you left the model's model, carrying the orange block to the, uh, model. So basically both these guys are making Gödel, Escher, Bach: the game. I think I will try to help them if they let me.
Yeah so back to the experimental gameplay workshop itself, rather than private demos afterwards of last year's entries, lol.
The game Storyteller is a very unusual and interesting puzzle game. It shows a few panels, like from a comic book, but they're empty. You have characters and objects you can drag into the frames. You are supposed to tell the correct story. The first example is like "Jim died" or something like that. You have Jim and a tombstone. If you drag a copy of Jim to panel 1 and panel 2, that's not right. If you drag Jim to panel 1 and the tomstone (but not Jim) to panel 2, then the game knows that Jim died because he appeared in a previous frame but now there's a tombstone.
The examples got more and more complex. You can drag boys and girls with hearts over their heads and they are in love. If one is not in a later frame, they are sad. There is like regular Jim and a different "object" you have that's "Hero Jim." There's some other character, regular and villain. Heroes and villains don't fall in love, so they have different logic from the regular versions. There's an old woman character who can turn a regular character into a hero. If you start with regular Jim, add a girl so they are in love, next frame have the old woman turn Jim into Hero Jim, then next frame put Hero Jim and the girl, they are both still in love. Why? Heroes can't fall in love I thought? Actually normally they can't, but each frame inherents states from the previous ones so because regular Jim loved her, Hero Jim still does.
There's a pretty interesting set of mechanics to make puzzles, so I think this game has a lot of potential. On a purely logical level, it could offer fun challenges. On a fun level, it's often pretty funny how the story you're supposed to tell unfolds, and the game sometimes puts speech bubbles and narration on the comic frames that reflect what's going on as you solve it, and that's even more funny. It's fun to watch someone else play.
Glitchhiker is a game that was created at a game jam by 6 people in 48 hours. The game is now dead, permanently, and this session was a remembrance of it. It was an arcadey game that intentionally looked slightly glitchy, and your goal was to score at least 100 points. This is kind of a masterpiece in a way, because it shows how you can take a mundane thing (some generic running / shooting thing to score points) and make it a very meaningful, memorable, impactful thing.
Why is it any of that, you ask? Because the big idea here is that the game itself had lives, not the players. The game had a pool of 100 lives, and anyone who played it was using up one of those lives by playing. By scoring 100 points, it gave a life back to the system. By scoring 200 points, it gave another life back. This is "massively multiplayer" in the sense that even though multiple people can be playing their own copy of the game, it's still pulling (and refreshing) that same pool of 100 lives. As the game got lower and lower on lives, it got more and more (intentionally) glitchy, including graphics, sound, and even gameplay bugs becoming more frequent.
Players were told that when it reached 0 lives, the game would be dead and would never be playable again.
The "never playable again" part is actually for real. I missed the actual tech thing behind this, but it was something about a randomly generated password encryption thing that prevented the developers or anyone else from ever accessing the game again after it died. They thought if anyone were ever able to play it again, it would not have the same meaning, as it would just be resurrected over and over. Dead means really dead to them.
The entire point of this, I think, is to look at the way players experienced this game. To play it at all is a RESPONSIBILITY. Some people said they didn't want to, because if they failed, they would have taken away some other person's chance to play it who might have enjoyed it more. People who did play it and failed to score 100 points felt guilty. One excellent player was able to get 200 points multiple times, and played it continuously for 6 hours in an effort to help the game survive. By the way, the game lasted 6 hours, and it was killed by a drunk Canadian.
Keep Me Occupied. This is an arcade game physically built, designed, and programmed by some passionate people who supported the Occupy Oakland movement. One joked that it would be impossible to explain such a big social movement to the audience in only a few seconds, but he did a pretty good job of it. He said imagine the people who make the rules for a system are also the ones who the rules benefit. He showed a picture of Notch making Minecraft and another Photoshopped picture of Notch excitedly holding up an enormous check for tons of money from the mega Minecraft tournament victory.
Anyway, they are passionate about the social change behind this movement, and told us briefly about other social movements in our history. They have almost always involved large groups of people physically coming together into the same space, as that kind of face to face communication and camaraderie is extremely powerful. The pictures of those gatherings look a lot like the pictures of Occupy Oakland.
One particular movement from history was notable to them, the labor movement. They showed a picture of "our grandfathers and grandmothers" holding up a sign that says "8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of rest." They pointed out that the 8 hours of leisure they were fighting for...that's us. That's what we do, is provide that leisure. Our industry is only even possible due to the social change those before us fought for. So they said they felt they owed it to those courageous people to do something about our current social problems. They would make an arcade game and put it in the common building the Occupy Oakland was using. This building provided free food, medical attention, library services, and leisure as a break from the intense goings on. They thought that if they could do their part to get more people in there, it could result in those people realizing there are real and valuable services offered in that building too. Though police apparently raided or destroyed the building or something, the physical game they made survived and was there on stage.
The designer said for the game design, he was inspired by the board game Risk Legacy. In that game, you apply stickers and other changes to the board as you play, so that future plays have different starting conditions based on your past plays. The "Keep Me Occupied" game has a similar idea. It's (on purpose) incredibly simple so that even non-gamers can play it. It's just a map of doors that each need switches held down to open. So you and another player work together (in the spirit of Occupy Oakland) to get farther and farther. I think there's a time limit, too.
The catch here is that when you die or lose or time runs out or something, you STAY there forever, even for all future players. So even if you completely suck, you can end up holding one of the switches for the first doors, forever, helping all future players get farther. It's really a poetic take on what cooperation means.
It was also interesting how they physically got the arcade machine where it needed to go. There was a march to bring furniture to the common building, as a kind of statement, and they were part of it with their arcade machine. This was actually really difficult because it's heavy and unweildy. It got lots of attention, and people played it as it went on the march. (There was some battery or something that powered it? Not sure.) Strangers offered to help them push it, seeing that it was heavy. At one point, the layout of the path meant they couldn't go that way with the arcade machine, and had to take an alternate route. Strangers helped them navigate that route, helped them rejoin it, and the whole experience of this was meaningful to them. There's something striking about them experiencing the spirit of cooperation as they transported an arcade game that itself is about cooperation to a social-political gathering that is also about cooperation.
Then they played the game on stage, but due to technical difficulties, they couldn't have the video on the big projector screen and on the screen the players could actually see. So they had the audience split in half (half for player 1, half for player 2) and provide directions to them with pointing our hands. This was yet another example of cooperation. Frank Lantz whispered to me that it's ironic that it would be far more efficient if just one person directed them, instead of this giant mess of people that is obviously doing a bad job and confusing them.
Twirdie. This is a golf game. It is the most interesting golf game ever. You type in a word, and then the distance your ball goes corresponds to the number of times that word was said on twitter in the last minute. I'll let the awesomeness of that just sink in for a moment.
So you type like "Obama" and it goes really far. They typed in "GDC" and it went only 9 meters, lol. (So 9 tweets.) That's actually the point, right there. They said that at first people use words that are from their own little worlds, but they very quickly start thinking globally, they start thinking what matters on a big scale, what might be going on in the world right now.
The two developers played an actual game against each other on stage. One opened with "Beiber" and said "you guys may laugh, but this guy has been a powerhouse all throughout development." He said it's interesting that you want to open with your strong words--your Beiber's, your Kardashians and so on--but then you want less popular words so you don't overshoot the hole. One of them used "ninjas" when he was very close to the hole, as he said it's a real solid word that always has low, but not too low number.
They said it's interesting that there really is such a thing as mastery in this game. You really can get better and better at it. And by getting better, you are understanding this data set (the set of all tweets) that is so large that you wouldn't think you could understand it at all. So this illustrates how a game can teach you something on a very deep level because it's all about you interacting with the system over and over and learning from each of those interactions.
Another hilarious note is that in playtesting, someone brought their 6 year old kid, who played the game 2 hours straight and beat the parents by the end of it. He was a super star tester and was one of the best players of the game. His dad used "driving" and the kid said "people don't tweet about driving, duh." Ironically, later in the presentation when the developers played each other, one chose "traffic" and it didn't move the ball nearly enough. No one tweets about driving, come on.
The audience was completely engaged in this game. *I* was completely engaged in this game. It's really fun and interesting. They said often in playtests, groups gather together to help each other play, like "hey SXSW film festival is huge now." Or "it's tax season now" or "MLB will be big right now for sure" or "Try BP, or oil or oil spill or ducks" after the oil spill disaster. Somehow sharing knowledge about the world was fun. And even a 6 year old kid who didn't know about any of these world events and who doesn't use or read twitter found it fun to master the system anyway. I want to play this game.
And that is all for GDC 2012. I'm so exhausted from this entire week.
Reader Comments (46)
Thanks you guys. Targie, I think I will write a separate post just on Twirdie. It's great!
Don't get me wrong.
I totally agree that from competitive perspective grinding to get the actual competitive experience is complete bullshit.
But I think that most players are not competitive gamers and there are other aspects of those games besides competitive. For those grinding is ok, or even helpful on making fun experience. A game of Lol is actually all about grinding in 45min - all you do is try to get richer then the other team to beat them up and destroy their base.
(I see there are other non-competitive aspects where it does still hurt, like new friends with low level - that's just bad and stupid, i play with my lo-lv friends, but if skill gap is not enough skill + stats gap is just horrible)
I do think that Lol without grinding would be a better e-sport, but might be a worse game for non-hardcore players. Make less money, be less popular, and eventually end up worse competitive game than it could have been if the grinding stayed. I see it as a price, that's not that high, for a game to be both really popular, free to play and have good competitive elements. I believe that game that managed to go freemium and not use any pay to be better then other mechanics deserves a bit more then complete rejection because of grinding.
If there is a way to make grinding meaningful for non-competitive players and not affect actual competitive experience (like level that would change just the looks not stats of character or sth like that) it would be great. But the solution that would satisfy both competitive and casual gamers is not to make everyone start at lv 30 and skip grind. Also i think good e-sport game would benefit from being casual gamer friendly in a way to make it more popular.
Maybe the gap between money making freemium and good e-sport will eventually rip Lol apart, but from my experience they're doing surprisingly good mixing those two ways. Having a ton of content you can buy that does not affect gameplay and balancing almost 100 champions so that no one dominates the scene and less powerful ones are buffed to make them more viable.
Hi David, it's always a serious pleasure to talk with you, I'm glad we got a chance to hang out at GDC.
You briefly paraphrased our argument about Riot, but I would like to give my point of view.
I understand that you are passionately committed to the ideal of the "true spirit of competitive games" and I respect that. But, as you fully admit, Riot is responsible for building, maintaining, and evolving a deep, competitive game, a game that enables and supports a huge amount of serious, high-level, competitive play. I believe someone who works on a game like that deserves to be treated with respect. This doesn't mean you shouldn't express your opinion, you definitely should. But the smug, hostile, arrogant manner in which you spoke to this guy is not something you should be proud of. I know you see it as a demonstration of your conviction to your ideals, but look around you, the world is *full* of people proudly proclaiming their convictions in other people's faces, how often does that behavior impress you as admirable? You also seem to think that this behavior is effective, that by aggressively harassing and shaming people who work on LoL you are more likely to achieve your goals. Perhaps this is true, but I am almost certain it is not. I believe a civil discussion that starts by establishing a common ground of shared understanding and then addresses conflicts vigorously but respectfully is far more likely to be effective.
How many people at GDC give a shit about high-level competitive games? How many people are there to create deep, serious, competitive games for a large community of players? Only a handful. It made me deeply sad to introduce two of them to each other and have the encounter turn immediately into hostile, sanctimonious, finger-wagging and embarrassed defensiveness.
I say this to you out of deep respect and friendship. I, too, believe in the true spirit of competitive games. I, too, have my convictions, and this is me trying to express them.
Hey Frank, I always love talking with you at these things.
I have to disagree there though. Like imagine that we were at a party and someone mentioned how they are part of the KKK and it's really great how hating black people is fun, and there is wonderful food at the hating black people parties that they go to. It would be amazing if they were publicly shamed and if it were socially unacceptable to be part of that. It actually already is socially unacceptable, and our world is a better place because of that.
Now, forced grinds in competitive games aren't quite the same as racism, yeah I know that. But still, I think it would be a better world if such a view was such a complete joke that it met with backlash at every turn. I'd *love* to live in that world. So yeah I'd encourage gamers and developers to actively shame anyone threatening what competitive games are really about. And they aren't about forced grinds. I think what we need is far more shaming over this, not less.
Let's try another analogy -
You and another person are anti-slavery advocates who are both committed to furthering the cause of abolition and human rights. But you don't like his sideburns. "I refuse to associate with anyone who would desecrate their god-given face with that foul and crass abomination! Let the slaves be damned!" That's what it looks like to me.
This is fun!
Yes that's useful point of comparison. So on one end of the spectrum, we have the racism example where society is better off without that. On the other end, we have the sideburns example where it's not a societal thing at all, it's a personal preference. So now we can figure out where the actual issue falls.
If you want sideburns, it doesn't affect me at all. But we are in real danger of losing an entire class of games, and in my opinion, arguably the most important class of games, by the forced-grind thing. The tides are turning against things like Street Fighter and Starcraft as companies like Riot popularize the idea that it's perfectly ok to put forced grinds in a competitive game. (Or MTG popularizing collectable stuff in a competitive game, just as vile). The point is it's not *just* preference, it really is affecting things on a very large scale. It's kind of crazy to even raise money for games that don't have forced-grinds and collectability right now. It's affecting the future of games, including the games I like the most. So it actually really is more like the racism example (affects society) than the sideburns example (only personal preference). If the kind of tightly balanced closed system games that I think are valuable are even going to exist, that's going to be possible when the public says "enough of this bullshit about competitive games that aren't true to the idea of what competition means." If companies knew that they couldn't get away with that, they'd stop this trend. But right now, they absolutely can, and collectable gems in SFxTekken 2 are a very real possibility.
Thought it might be relevant, BLC about a year ago went from being grind-free to introducing a system of runes and masteries similar to LoL's in order to gain popularity. So yeah, a perfectly good game was kind of ruined because of this trend.
I think Frank has a point. Consider this psychological phenomenon: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
Making grinding socially unacceptable is a perfectly fine goal, but your forceful approach isn't going to get us there. It might even do the opposite. Instead of shaming grinding, you should try popularizing non-grind. Yeah, I know, far easier said than done.
The reason these grind/pay-to-win models are allowed to fester is that people tolerate them and continue to pay for them - especially the younger generation with lots of free time to whom grinding systems give an edge. Gamers of today simply don't have the same attitude towards defeat as the generation that grew up with the SF2 series. When most modern gamers lose, a desire to learn from their mistakes is the absolute furthest thing from their minds. They don't know the feeling of getting destroyed by a newcomer and then intently watching the following matches to figure out what he's doing and how you can beat it. They have no respect or knowledge about improvement, and see it simply as a means to an end - and these grindfests are a literal manifestation of that attitude. They want the "destination" of being able to beat up on newer players without learning to enjoy the journey of discovering and experimenting.
In other words, I think these games may be the symptom more than the problem.
(Side note: how about an article about this? http://i.imgur.com/XlTtv.jpg)
Fluffing Shrift: I was thinking instead of writing articles about it, I will let competitive games as we know them die out. People seem really into apologizing for the badness of it all, so I guess that's what they'll get.
Just to throw in some support of grind-hating, I hope it's ok to link to myself -
http://www.agoners.com/index.php/why-i-hate-level-up-systems/
The comments there are all related to the same issue. I really recommend people watch the Jonathan Blow lecture:
http://edtech.rice.edu/www/?option=com_iwebcast&task=webcast&action=details&event=2349
"Video Games and the Human Condition" where he explains that his concerns go even further beyond those of myself with regards to competitive games.
As an aside - why doesn't LoL add an "access to everything" subscription rate? There doesn't seem to be ANY drawback to that.
It is absolutely uncertain whether society would be better with a M:tG or LoL with different business models. In both cases the thing you dislike hasn't prevented the games from providing a large community of serious players players with high-level competition.
I am happy to grant you that the games might be better, more beautiful, more true to a particular ideal of competitive aesthetics. At the same time, they might be smaller, less active, reach fewer people, or might not exist at all. (In the case of Magic, the thing you dislike was central to the origin of the game.)
You might prefer that theses games not exist at all than exist with such ugly, distasteful flaws. Fair enough. But to claim this as simply wanting to improve society rather than an aesthetic opinion is absurd. Like the abolitionist who hates sideburns you would happily see a net loss to society if it meant removing an offensive blight that drives you crazy (and that most people aren't as bothered by.)
Again, I basically *agree* with your opinion on this issue. I think you should be able to skip grinding in LoL. I'm just suggesting a change in rhetorical approach I think will be more effective. Sputtering tirades from the pulpit are, quite honestly, unconvincing.
Just want to mention I'm a passionate gamer that played LoL for some time but dropped it simply because the leveling is sooo boring. If you gave me 5$ for every game until I hit 30 I'd consider to install it again. Not sure I'd really play it, but maybe you could convince me.
This is not because I hate the game or genre. I love dota, I love dota2 and I have lots of friends playing lol. I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy being 30 and play with them. The way there is what stops me.
I think this grind is also here for new players.
I mean, the runes before lvl 20 are less effective, giving the characters less damage or less attack speed etc...
Indeed, it helps the new player to ease the learning curve by giving him and his opponents less power.
Your analogy were "Why give him a Ryu with a less powerful fireball", I think it's like the differents speeds in Starcraft. Some players will be used to the fireball spam starting with an easier spam than the hardcore one we can see at higher levels. (ok we don't really see that in tournaments but I think you can get the point)
Indeed, it provides more accessibility. Fights are less dangerous, then you can learn and make maybe a little bit more mistakes.
Of course I understand your opinion that any player with money should be able to start "at lvl 30", but it's also a matter of progress. Even when you come from Dota and absolutely rape everyone at the lessers levels, you need to learn all the chars and new strategies (because you can't play LoL like you play Dota or HoN, it's really different). The "levels" are here to provide knowledge but not "all at once".
Note that I know that's this choice is obviously linked to the free to play model and not to the "accessibility thing". But it works.
You gave a chance to Soul Calibur, playing it even if there are "unlockables". You should also give a chance to League Of Legends.
Actually Frank, it's your post and apologist rhetoric that's unconvincing. You brought up sideburns again, but we covered why that analogy fails to capture what we're talking about. I'm not affected by your sideburns. Your example was that I would be upset looking at them, but by saying that, it shows you aren't hearing the central point. There complaint isn't that I'm upset looking at LoL with forced grinding. The complaint is that LoL is contributing to a problem in all future other games that aren't LoL. That's worlds apart from sideburns, so bringing that up again seems disingenuous.
I'm not sure why you think it's so great that some bad thing is big and popular. I sure don't. You assume de facto that bigger games that lead to the ruin of the spirit of competition for all other games are somehow better. It's a false dichotomy to begin with, as LoL could simply add the ability to buy a full power character without any real drawback. Even if there were a drawback though, LoL being huge and incredibly popular puts more responsibility on them, not less responsibility, to uphold what competition is about. I find the MTG comment off base too, as collectability isn't needed at all to deliver the gameplay that it's delivering. It just further tramples on the idea of what competition is all about (hint: it's not about collecting, and not about artificial barriers of your opponents having access to gameplay relevant elements).
If we move past the actual core idea, and for sake of argument agree on it for the moment, I don't see the problem with the rhetoric either. Like I said before, if I said "hey let's put forced grinds in Starcraft 3 and collectable Blankas in Street Fighter 5" it would be GREAT if the entire world of competitive gamers responded with hatred and rage. Then those companies won't do that. Similarly, if Blizzard said "We decided no more black people will be allowed to play our games" there would be a lot of hatred and rage too. Those responses are the correct and appropriate responses to offensive things. Losing what competition is about (by introducing barriers like collectability and forced grinds into what should be our most sacred e-sports) is an offensive thing. Saying "ah it's fine, whatever" is is your vote to continue that trend. Remember, for sake of argument in this paragraph we said you're against that trend, and if you are, you certainly wouldn't vote for it with apologies. You'd want widespread shaming and backlash to occur in order to affect social change.
Froh: that argument has come up again and again. It's not a good one. We both agree that giving players a way to learn the game slowly is great. And forcing ALL players to do that does not logically follow. If you really cared about that concept of teaching, you'd have tutorials and optional beginner modes (note that Starcraft 2 does have that with beginner maps that are walled in, a single player campaign with level ups, and a very interesting set of challenge situations that teach you various mechanics and concepts). So forcing all players to spend more time than leveling up a character 1 - 60 in World of Warcraft just to get a LoL character is no kind of sensical way to approach the problem you said.
I condemn Soul Calibur for having unlockable stuff too, just so you know. I like to think there was enough backlash over MvC3 having that that that's why UMvC3 doesn't. So maybe we did some good there in teaching companies that they should have grinds and unlocks for things that *don't* affect competitive play, such as fighting games stages, costumes, concept art, titles, etc. Not for the basic and required elements of gameplay such as characters. Also it's a question of degree. LoL has orders of magnitude more grinding than Soul Calibur and enforces it across all players (90% of Soul Calibur players have the characters they want to play unlocked from the start). So while SC is an annoyance deliberately put in there by the developers, the LoL situation is affecting the whole industry on a much larger scale.
Just like with Frank, your apologies may very well lead to end of immediate equal playing fields in competitive games. Based on what most people say in response (notwithstanding a bit of support here in these comments finally), you might just get what you wished for in future competitive games beyond LoL.
Sirlin: Of course. As we've seen, every time a big video game company does something ridiculous that screws over their own customers, people say "Man, that really sucks! They'd better stop doing that!" and then continue to give them money. Capcom has long since joined the shitpile of modern companies with predatory business practices (now Blanka is really a charge character! KERPOW!!) but people aren't going to do anything drastic like stop buying their games. Competitive games require a large base of competitive players that simply isn't there anymore, and while they'll never die completely, true competitive games are likely to be a sideshow and not the main attraction from now on in the video game industry.
And I agree with Frank that by harassing people who work for these companies, you're only hurting your own cause. The industry has turned in a direction you dislike, and I agree with you on that. I'm not a fan of the modern industry's state or direction, and I haven't bought a non-indie game in at least two years. But that doesn't give you the right to hassle employees because they make games that you don't like but (you would have to admit) many others do. Would you go up to an employee of a record label and say "Hey, your label's music sucks. Why can't you make the kind of music I want to hear?"
There's a big difference between expressing your opinion through articles and crossing the line into full-blown proselytizing. Sometimes you come across like you feel the industry is obligated to cater to your personal tastes.
'If you really cared about that concept of teaching, you'd have tutorials and optional beginner modes (note that Starcraft 2 does have that with beginner maps that are walled in, a single player campaign with level ups, and a very interesting set of challenge situations that teach you various mechanics and concepts).'
Exactly this. There's no reason why both audiences can't be catered for.
In Starcraft there's the level-up based single-player campaign which can drip feed elements to new players
In Fighting games, you can have aesthetic unlockables to provide an incentive for single-players.
Why needlessly hinder the competitive community when you can quite easily cater for both?
I absolutely believe the casual and beginner player should be catered for in competitive games, I totally agree that there should be tutorials and unlockables.
But as an example I've been playing fighting games competitively for years now, when a new fighting game gets released I don't go into the training mode or the story mode. I hop on a train and get to the biggest launch or pre-launch event I can find, throwing myself in at the deep end. In Soul Calibur V, my experience in that regard was needlessly limited by locked characters, in a game that already had a plethora of unlockable aesthetic content, one group of players was needlessly made to suffer for the benefit of nobody. That's simply poor design.
Targie, no kidding. The initial experience of playing Soul Calibur is an incredibly boring one for all the competitive players I've talked to. It's a finding some mindless way to beat computer opponents quickly rather than attempting to learn anything. The FAQs suggest taping down the B button on your controller while selecting Aeon to grind it out fastest. Nice game. It was just as mind-numbing in SF4, btw. And all this for no real reason, as these games have lots of opportunity for unlockables and teaching modes that don't fuck up competition.
Fluffing Shrift, I've said at great length that I think shitting on competitive games with forced grinds should be met with offense. Who cares if this guy had to answer for that? It's really interesting and telling that his response was wildly invalid arguments about matchmaking. It was shocking actually, to think that a Riot employee thinks the reason a forced grind is there is that we don't know how to do skill-based matchmaking for team games otherwise. And anyway, I gave several analogies now about how widespread upsetness is how social change happens, so the problem is that more people aren't hassled over it. If you want to be part of a group that is expressing a despicable ideal, it's correct that you'd be hassled once in a while.
Also, you said I think the industry is obligated to cater to my personal tastes. If that's what you think, then it would follow that you think forced grinds in competitive game are a fine idea and that it's just my "personal taste" that competitive gaming means having immediate and equal access to gameplay relevant elements that you bought. So you'd be able to argue the counter-point that we can do without such an ideal on the own merits of that argument. So far only terrible and pathetic arguments have been put forth to apologize for these things though, so I guess that's why you tried to twist it to being about me personally. Better to stick to actual issue, which forced grinds being a bullshit concept in a competitive game, and it being wonderful for that to be called out more and more.
Indeed, your problem with LoL is already solved. In official competitions at least. LoL uses a different build that allows any player to play with any char and the runes they want. This "LAN" build is not for the public for obvious reasons, but at least, it exists.
The problem you have is, I think, linked to the runes (not buyable in real currency except with the help of the "boosts") and the levels (that open you "masteries" and slots for your "runes"). The LoL characters shouldn't be a problem cause they're all buyable.
League Of Legends started as a small project that was not aimed before the first year at the real competitive scene.
HoN chose that aspect right away and was forced to switch to a free to play model after that.
So what do you want for a real competitive game :
- People. If no people plays the game, it's not really a great competitive scene : LoL does that (mainly because of its accessibility).
- No grinding/All options right away (even if paying is needed). LoL doesn't allow that. So yeah, I agree with you that it's a problem. I think, besides that fact, that it have "acceptable grinding" which does not requires a large amount of time and offers boosts to speed up that.
You also can't really compare to WoW where level difference is so huge. I can play a lvl 1 account and do well in lvl 30 games, even if I agree it's harder. In mmos like WoW, a lvl 57 can't win against a lvl 60 at all. >> WoW don't let you play with your friends before this level. LoL allows that but not in "ranked mode". It's a huge difference because in the first game you are blocked by the game, in the second you just don't have all the advantages. In WoW, you FEEL that you are forced to grind. In LoL, you grind "naturally", just playing the game.
Is it really different ?
I think it is.
The problem with the masteries part (a talent tree) was huge for one role only that you couldn't play well at the lesser levels : The Jungler.
The jungler is the man who must kill neutrals mobs at the beginning, soloing all the part of the map that is called "jungle". It's an important role that you couldn't do at all with a good chunk of chars because you didn't have enough points for your talent tree.
Riots reacted to this problem with the remake of the jungle, allowing lowers levels to be able to do that.
So maybe they don't delete grind from the game, but at least, they're doing stuff for beginners so they're able to "compete" with higher levels.
- Competitions & rewards. LoL began to organize some competitions one year after the beta. The game was not really balanced at that time. (the perfect balance in MOBA being I think, impossible)
It's a lot better now even if far from perfect. Ranked mode gives tools to players that want to play "seriously".
To conclude, I agree with you partially. I think the grinding is not required and should'nt be there (for those who pays at least), but I don't think you must boycott a game ONLY because of this part. Except if there's a kind of rip-off for those who pays (like "unlocking a char for only a week" etc...) and/or a huge drawback for those who doesn't (like having to face a "god mode" player who chose to pay).
As for the single player campaign in SC2. If Riot now have money, don't forget that they started small. They have a real mode versus bots that actually does stuff (but stays pretty bad) since 4/5 months. So the campaign won't be right away.