Tamrielo

In the heyday of the WWII shooter, I remember hearing a lot of people asking why on earth we were inundated with the same sort of games, and why the really big blockbusters are all so similar. It’s something I was never sure of myself, until I learned about something called Hotelling’s Location Model. Any economists reading this will likely chuckle to themselves, and will probably correct the next bit of what I’m going to talk about in the comments.

Ever driven out into the middle of nowhere? I’m talking miles and miles out, past the boonies into those little towns that don’t appear on most maps, just barely in range of maybe two radio stations, which are both playing the same country music. Ugh, you’d think they’d, y’know, play some different stuff and cover different audiences. Or, you’re checking out local restaurants and realize there are two nearly identical restaurants right next to one another. What are they thinking, aren’t they hurting themselves by being that close?

Here’s how it happens. Say there’s a beach, with a bunch of people spread out on it, more or less evenly, because they all want their space.

The City Council decides that it will issue a permit for one person to sell ice cream on the beach, on two conditions:

1.) The City sets the prices of the ice cream– this is to benefit beachgoers with a minimum of beach crowding, not line some monopolist’s pockets.

2.) The ice cream stall must set up no earlier than 10am, allowing time for the beachgoers to enter the beach and get settled. No parking at the entrance and advertising as people come in.

(What we’re doing here is controlling two variables: price and market. We want to look at WHERE the stall goes.)

So, here’s our beach:

Our ice cream vendor can set up on the boardwalk along the top there. Where along it does our ice cream vendor want to set up shop?

It’s easy– sell ice cream to the most number of people, which means minimizing the distance they have to walk to get ice cream. Right in the middle.

Pretty straightforward. Our ice cream vendor sells ice cream, everyone is happy, except for those people out at the edges who need to walk halfway across the beach to get ice cream. They petition the City Council to allow more vendors, and the City decides to let another vendor set up shop.

Now there are two vendors. Since each vendor is stuck with the rules above, the only way they can make more money is by selling more ice cream, which means being the closest vendor for the largest possible number of people. One of them is, inevitably, going to get to the beach first and set up shop. Where should that first ice cream vendor go?

Answer: Right in the middle. These vendors are competing, they want the most customers. You might be thinking that it’s better for the two vendors to split up, maybe divide the beach in half, something like this:

It’s a good thought, and if the two vendors are colluding, this might happen. If they’re both in it for themselves, though, and the first one takes that quarter-length spot, here’s the best place for the second one:

In that position, the second one is the closest vendor to the biggest portion of the beach, and is going to come out ahead. If the first vendor sets up right in the center, so will the second vendor, just barely off to one side, and each will have half of the beach.

As the model goes, it applies to things other than physical location, too. If a clothing store offers a certain variety of products, and another clothing shop opens, they’re going to stock very similar products, hoping to hit the broadest segment of their piece of the market. If one offers a better selection (read: has a bigger chunk of the beach), it’s going to do better, and both stores will fight to keep up with one another, ultimately winding up very similar. It’s how you get the same country music on the same two stations out in the middle of nowhere, the two coffeeshops right across the street from one another, and years of military shooters, all incrementally different from the previous generation but still in nearly perfect lock-step with one another, until everyone is tired of them and a new kind of blockbuster crops up.

 

This returns me to the bit at the top. No one here is being an idiot, the decisions are very carefully considered. The end result doesn’t appear to make sense at first, but it absolutely does once you puzzle it out. All of those military shooters, all of those country music stations, all of those shoe shops are looking out for their own best interests– and any deviation from that is extremely risky.

There’s the saying: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” It’s a good saying, but I think there’s a followup:

“Never attribute to stupidity that which is part of a system you don’t fully understand.”

A lot of things that seem unintuitive at first suddenly make sense when you see the whole picture, and it’s really, really hard to see the whole picture. Certainly there are mistakes that people make on the individual level, but when you’re talking about really big systems with lots of moving parts (like the video game development economy), there’s a lot of stuff that it’s really hard to see.

This was something I learned about today that I thought was interesting, and thought might be worth sharing. Hopefully you found it interesting too.

Source: Digital Initiative
Everything Happens For A Reason

Part of what I did during my week off was pour a huge amount of time into my second playthrough of Persona 4. It’s basically a high-fidelity visual novel with an elaborate dungeon-crawler minigame. I love it.

It handles social interactions in a really interesting way. Whereas in a lot of RPGs, there’s no real limit to the amount of talking with friends/party members you can do, in Persona talking with someone takes time, and you have a set amount of time (one year, game time) to make friends, build skills, and do… pretty much everything you want. On top of that, everyone and everything has their own schedule and may or may not be available at different times. It’s actually impossible to fully complete the game on the first playthrough, because you have to spend time building up skills like Courage, Understanding, Knowledge, Diligence, and Expression, many of which are necessary when dealing with other people.

My playthrough was a New Game+ run, which lets me start with the money, the weapon unlocks, the stats, and the persona compendium (like a pokedex, except you can summon your pokemon from it for a fee) that I’d built up in the previous run. This saves a LOT of time building up stats and farming equipment, money, and personas, letting me focus on the relationship side of things (Social Links, in-game).

The difference is pretty stark between the normal game and NG+. There are at least five social links I missed entirely on my first playthrough, and several more that I started but didn’t complete. There’s also an entire bonus dungeon that I missed the first time through and a secret boss that I’ve now missed twice, because my timing sucked. Some of the choices you make also pretty heavily influence dialogue, so I got some very different responses from characters than I did in my first run. The structure is all the same, but the second playthrough gives me a lot more freedom to explore, and say things/make choices that I couldn’t have made previously.

All of the time spent with the characters wouldn’t be worth a lot if they weren’t good characters, and P4 has some excellent ones. I think the game suffers a little bit from introducing four party members very quickly, two of which are easily unlikable (one of which I find annoying at the start and despise utterly by the end of the game) and one of which is kind of bland and trope-y. Of the [Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, Teddie] group at the start of the game, I really only like Chie. The others (not Teddie) get deeper and more interesting later in the game, but it takes a long time, and by then you have other, more interesting party members.

The above song is stuck in my head now. It’s a mild spoiler, but the game tells you up front, within the first few lines, that you’ll be around for a year and then will be leaving. This means that, right near the end (winter in the game), you’ve made a whole bunch of friends and are coming to terms with your dwindling time remaining with them. The overworld theme, that you hear as you run around, is replaced with Snowflakes in P4 Golden (the Vita version), which adds a bunch of content included an extended ending (lasting an extra month).

That extra month serves as a lengthy denouement to the game, bringing you from the final (?) boss to the end of the game, giving you ample time to wrap things up and tie up any loose ends you might have, or just enjoying the company of your friends in the game (even if you’ve maxed out their social links, they have more stuff to do and say in the denouement). It’s savagely bittersweet and one of the best endings to a game that I’ve ever played.

It’s something I’d like to see more of in RPGs. The extended denouement really wraps up the story nicely, far better than a boss battle -> 5-10 minute cinematic -> end credits cycle does.

I’d be a proponent of moving the final boss battle forward about 10-15% in a game, and turning that ending section into post-victory endgame, where you get to spend some interactive time enjoying your victory.

 

 

 

 

Source: Digital Initiative
Binging on Persona 4

I booted up Pillars of Eternity this past weekend, and I can tell it’s a game I’m going to enjoy… eventually.

I was instantly frustrated by character creation. Choose from a bunch of stats, hope that the “recommended” stats are actually the ones you want, try to make sense out of spell descriptions without any context whatsoever, drop your character in the game world. Hope you made the right choices because going back is going to mean fiddling with the character creator again and sitting through all of the intro stuff, making sure you run around and hit all of the boxes and conversations and whatnot again.

Yes, this is a classic trope of a lot of western RPGs. No, I don’t think it’s good or worthy in any way. Contextless choice is already annoying, and making those choices important and largely unchangeable is doubly so. Expecting you to know the game before you start playing it is– I’ll just say it– bad design.

The first section of a game is a tutorial anyway: why not put that before character creation? Let me get a feel for the controls, how various spells and abilities function in the actual game, and then make better-informed choices based on that. Most of the time, it’s entirely justifiable within the game’s story, and if you can make a more exciting intro sequence, possibly not even using the character(s) you’ll actually create, you can justify whatever.

When mimicking a classic style but making it more modern, I think it’s important to look at all of the pieces of what that style does and how/why they work (or don’t!). Just doing it because of genre conventions is a good way to wind up with a very same-y sort of game. That isn’t to say that you won’t necessarily retain some of the genre conventions, because a lot of those are developed over years of iteration and provably work, or provide familiar, comfortable anchor points for your players to hook into, but keeping them without reevaluating how necessary they are to your construct tends to make things awkward.

I will say that Pillars of Eternity looks fantastic, and the controls are delightful thus far. Having picked up the remakes of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2, Pillars feels more modern and more advanced right out of the gate. I really want to be able to play it co-op, the way I played the old BG games. The UI is slick, movement and actions are responsive and feel pretty good, and the visuals are detailed without being cluttered.

I’ll eventually sit down and get into it, once I have the patience to sort through characters and replay the intro five or six times to settle on a class I like. Despite my initial frustrations, it’s absolutely looking like it’ll be a game that I’ll put some serious time into.

Source: Digital Initiative
Pillars of Eternity and “Classic” Mechanics

The first thing people usually think of when I mention “encounter design” is boss fights. Big, fancy battles in custom-made arenas, usually at the end of a dungeon. For a lot of games, they’re the only encounters that matter, and we’ve been trained to think of them that way.

In fact, if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ve probably heard people talk about “trash mobs”, all of the encounters leading up to those boss fights (read: the only encounters that matter). There’s nothing to make them interesting or rewarding, there’s often no compelling mechanics, it’s just enemies that you have to beat to get to where you really want to be. Gotta do your chores before having fun. Gotta take out the trash.

This line of thinking has led to a lot of reduced complexity in encounters. We’ve so focused on the boss as the only end goal that it’s seeped back into game design itself.

Here’s a map of Molten Core:

Linear design with offshoot tendrils that contain bosses at the end, all spiraling into the center, for the Big Boss Fight at the end.

Here’s an earlier dungeon, from Everquest– Befallen:

WAY less linear, still offshoot corridors but there’s no obvious linear path through the place. In fact, people don’t even play it the same way they play Molten Core; it’s an entirely different dungeon experience.

Don’t believe me that the “boss fights are the only thing that matters” mentality affects the design side? Here’s (part of) Befallen in EQ2:

 

Kind of a big difference.

I do a lot of encounter design in my tabletop RPGs, where I have a bit more control over things. I take a lot of my inspiration from stealth games, where there are (ideally) multiple ways through an area and you can make your own path, figuring out who you fight, who you don’t, and how to approach each area.

I very, very rarely have boss fights. I think in a nine-month campaign, I had two, and I’ve had entire campaigns go without a single boss fight. Instead, all of my encounters are cranked up. If it’s a non-life-threatening encounter, it exists to whittle away my players over time, because I’m probably not letting them rest for a while. If it isn’t doing that, it’s going to tax them.

I think this has a lot to do with why I like stealth games so much. Every encounter is relevant, and how you approach it matters. There’s no such thing as “trash” in a stealth game. Even if you silently drop someone, you still often have to figure out if anyone else saw you, or what will happen if they find your victim. There’s little room for thoughtlessness.

If an encounter is just “trash”, if it serves no purpose other than to waste your time and offer no meaningful reward in return, I think that’s bad design. FFXIV vastly improved the fun of running dungeons when they added money drops to every mob, often in not-insignificant amounts as you get higher in level. I think they’ve failed in making treasure chests worthwhile, particularly when it comes to pulling encounters that aren’t on the linear path just to access the chest, but with any luck they’ll improve that.

Source: Digital Initiative
Encounter Design