Digital Initiative

As anyone who’s listened to more than an episode or two of the Aggrochat podcast can verify, I have what you might call Strong Feelings about World of Warcraft. I’ve been all over the spectrum with the game, and have landed in a kind of complex position. Possibly worth mentioning, if the post title didn’t give it away: I’ve been playing WoW again, a little bit, and it’s given me some context and ability to articulate how I feel about the game. Maybe you feel similarly.

A few major different thought bubbles form when WoW comes up:

First, and importantly (though it’s something that often gets dismissed so I can move onto the parts that I find more interesting), WoW is definitively an excellent game. There is a reason it is as successful as it is, and quite frankly any attempt to deny that it’s a great game is simply blindness. It isn’t without flaws, and there are other reasons to dislike it, but it’s the pinnacle of a certain type of game that competitors have tried to top for a decade and failed. It has more than ten years of evolution, to the point where it’s reached that magic MMO point of being multiple games all at the same time, all appealing to different people and bringing them all together into one place.

Second, WoW has a lot of history. It has, quite frankly, an unwieldy, overwhelming amount of history that is scattered throughout its playerbase. Some things have to give somewhere, and WoW has made it choices as far as what it wants to give up to make the game more focused and less crushed under its own weight. It knows it’s alienated some of its players with these choices, and it’s okay with that. I’m one of those players.

Third, WoW is dated. It felt dated when I last played in Pandaria, and four years later and many other games, coming back to WoW feels like installing an old, nostalgic title, even though it just released a new expansion. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to see if you haven’t played many other, similar games, but there are a lot of little details and quirks that have become de rigeur in online games at this point that WoW feels very behind in. Movement is one of the biggest ones. Most online RPGs now have quick, dodgy movement as a core mechanic, and usually many, many other baseline, easy to use movement tools. Ground-targeted short-range teleports are standard, characters stick to the ground when they move, slow-falling (or removal/elimination of falling damage) is implemented in a wide variety of ways, gap-closers and gap-openers are commonplace, the list goes on. WoW has had very tight, very responsive-feeling controls since its creation, but it hasn’t kept up with movement options. Most interesting to me here is the Demon Hunter, a class that, for no extra cost, gets double-jump and a gliding ability, as well as multiple forward dashes, a backward dash, and at least one targeted teleport (albeit tied to another ability and on a lengthy cooldown). The Demon Hunter feels far more modern than any of the other classes, and it’s shocking to me that there wasn’t a similar revamping of movement for every class in the game, not just the one new one. Add onto that little quality-of-life things like a lack of one-button looting, no talk-to-NPC or quest-acceptance keybindings, and a constant need to click into the gameworld rather than letting smart-targeting handle that for you makes the UI feel clunky, even with (fundamentally required) addons.

As an offshoot of the game being dated, there are a lot of places where the fidelity is surprisingly low. Few if any characters move their mouths when they speak, animations are jerky and don’t flow into one another, most armor is just a texture painted on one of a small number of models, with a couple of exceptions (shoulders) that stand out and bear the weight of a character’s appearance. It’s a throwback to when games pushed the limits on hardware frequently, and WoW could play on virtually anything. As the desperate need to keep up PC upgrades just to play games have slowed down thanks to console gaming (which is pretty much a good thing for everyone, certainly PC gamers’ wallets), lots of games have caught up to a modern hardware standard, and WoW, despite touch-ups where it can, sits pretty far back as far as visual fidelity goes. Playing WoW, FFXIV, GW2, Blade and Soul, and ESO in rapid succession really makes the fidelity more apparent, which brings me to the next big thought.

Fourth, while graphics aren’t everything and fidelity doesn’t necessarily make or break a game, the lower fidelity and lack of ability to do subtle, nuanced graphical effects means that WoW has a very hard time being subtle. NPCs to talk to and objects to interact with stand out garishly and blatantly; the game basically shouts at you where to go and what to do. Not a problem when there’s a possible chance you might miss something, but considering the fairly few quest types in the game (kill X, click on X, talk to X) and how many of them you do (I’ve done at least a hundred quests just going from level 100 to level 106), it starts to feel like every quest is a tutorial.

It’s a big thing that bugs me about the play experience. In roughly the same timeframe I’ve been playing WoW, I’ve also been playing Guild Wars 2. I’ve gotten one WoW character from 98 to 102 (Demon Hunter), and one character from 100 to 106 (Monk). I’ve gotten two characters from 40 to 80 in GW2, quite a bit of progression on multiple others, and still had time to spend unlocking masteries and completing the lengthy main story on my existing level 80 character. One of the big things that WoW used to pummel older MMOs into the ground — its relatively quick, painless levelling — now feels slow and ponderous, and like I have very little freedom. The game feels like a slave to its own paradigm, adding ten levels because That Is What Expansions Do without making those ten levels meaningful in any real way. Indeed, everything scales to your level, so the levelling process feels even more meaningless and like a bizarre chore you have to do if you want to play with your friends. I don’t seem to be learning anything in the 10-level process to prepare me for endgame, either; I haven’t gotten any new abilities since level 100 (my Artifact weapon skill) and I haven’t seen any meaningful enemy mechanics to learn how to counter. In a four hour play session, I got my GW2 Thief from 62 to 80 and maxed out his crafting skill from 0 to 500, completed a map, and got a full set of level 80 gear to be going on with, while also doing some character hopping and some story quests. In the same four hour play session in WoW, I got from (the end of) 102 to 106… and I was a lot more focused in WoW.

Fifth and finally, tied to that last paragraph above, I’m intensely frustrated by what WoW represents in the gaming space. In achieving a stranglehold on the market, it’s had a severe chilling effect on everything else in the genre. What was once a widely varied, highly experimental genre is now… much less so. If I want to play an RPG with some progression and some group mechanics and actually have anyone to play with, I’m playing WoW. I’ve wanted to give group content in other games a shot basically since I picked them back up and haven’t been able to, but the sheer number of people playing WoW means I’ve wound up in groups virtually every time I’ve logged in. I feel like I’m renting friends on a monthly basis, where if I don’t pay up and log in, I don’t get to play games with my friends, and I better enjoy the game they’re all playing or I don’t get to play along. I haven’t decided which feels lonelier: playing a game I enjoy with just too few people to be able to do the more interesting stuff or playing a game that everyone else seems to like and I don’t. Currently I’m doing both, in the hopes that together I can fill the hole that neither one can fill separately.

For now, I’m playing WoW. I’m legitimately enjoying some parts of it, but the shine is wearing off. I can predict the stories, I can see the shape of the systems, I feel like I’m well past being surprised. Maybe I’m wrong, and I think it’s important for me to brush up on games that are relevant even if I don’t personally enjoy them. As was true in Pandaria, the storylines that don’t involve the Alliance or the Horde are often very good, and there are plenty of cute jokes littered throughout. Class mechanics have become far less unwieldy (FFXIV could learn something about button efficiency) and there are plenty of nostalgic nods to previous eras of WoW.

I’m just not as invested as everyone else is, and I know how that story ends. I’ve seen it happen enough times by now. I’m already on the edge of it now– I know I’m going to check out when the game asks more of me than I’m invested enough to give, and then doesn’t let me play meaningfully with my friends if I don’t do whatever it takes, be that a gear grind or a rep grind or whatever. I’m already behind in that regard, simply by dint of not being max level and able to do whatever they call max-level dungeons now, and it’s hard to work up the wherewithal to grind more quests to get there. In a move I find personally extremely frustrating, it became incredibly easy to run normal-mode dungeons with higher-level friends, but the exp gain from those is pretty paltry, so levelling through dungeons is infeasible. So, I grind for now, trying to catch up, so I can play with people I know and like and don’t get to play often enough with.

I just wish this didn’t feel like the only choice I have if I want to play games with some of my friends.

I had an off-the-cuff thought during the podcast this weekend that keeps resurfacing in my head. We were talking about music, and I asked how many songs off of an album needed to be good for that album to feel like it was worth it. Pretty much universally, the answer was “about three”. It’s been sitting with me ever since.

I’ve been looking at media in general, and how much of it I have to really like to stay engaged. There’s a song on an album I own that’s three minutes and fifteen seconds long. At about the 2:45 mark, it cuts into a different vocalist for a segment that I really dislike. It’s jarring and ruins the track for me. I now skip that track entirely, even though I like the first two and a half minutes of it. In the same vein, I haven’t played MGSV in days for a relatively banal reason. It’s not any of the objectionable things in the game, it’s that I have a mission where the drop off point is way too far away, and I just can’t be bothered to go through the hassle.

So, I need about 25% of a music album to feel like it’s worth it, but if the last thirty seconds of a track isn’t to my liking, I skip it. I am willing, and in fact expect, to sit through the first few episodes of an anime before making a decision, yet if a game hits a lull, it becomes harder and harder for me to come back to it (see also: grinding of any kind). My tolerance for parts I don’t like varies widely from medium to medium, and sometimes wildly within the same medium.

For any given bit of entertainment, there’s a threshold where the parts I don’t like outweigh the parts I do, and I check out. It seems simple and obvious, but it’s also something that’s gone entirely unevaluated. What are the exceptions? Can I predict this? I feel like if I can understand what the mix is like, I can better understand both myself and the media I consume.

Trying to pin it down is frustratingly elusive, though. When I try to analyze my thoughts across media, I find myself immediately making excuses, about how one thing is different in some specific way. I know enough about psychology to know that there’s almost certainly a pattern I’m not seeing– or more likely, not letting myself see– but knowing it’s there and trying to make sense of it are two very different things.

I say a lot that good design is about knowing what people haven’t yet realized they like. The real magic of good design is being able to elicit a positive, wholly unexpected reaction from someone, and I feel like if I could tap into my own mental hangups and processes, I could start to get a handle on how to better approach design. If I could precisely (or even roughly) pinpoint where people check out, where a piece of media loses people, I could develop better intuition for how to avoid those pain points.

I am opposed, fundamentally, to the idea of “I’ll know it when I see it” design. It asks a designer to magically intuit something that the requester can’t even articulate. It’s like telling a chef to “make some food, I’ll know if I like it once I try it”. It’s why I started taking notes on the things that I loved and didn’t expect to, and the places where I find myself checking out of something. I’ve tried to get better at articulating precisely why I like or dislike something, because it’s from those evaluations that I learn and grow, and can tell other people what I like and don’t like. It’s meant I need to have a constant mental cycle active, monitoring my own reactions as they happen, and drawing connections. When I talk about my “designer brain” always being on, that’s what I’m referring to. It’s comforting at the same time as it keeps me from ever fully engaging with something.

I’ve gotten so used to that background process running smoothly that it’s jarring when it runs into something it can’t or won’t process. I’m still mulling over the idea from before– how much of something can be bad or uninteresting before I stop caring? Why and how does it change across media, even across different entries in the same medium? Why do I get frustrated at stretches of fruitless-feeling running around in MGSV and, in that frustration, switch over to trying fruitlessly to solve challenge puzzles in The Witness?

So, it took a while to actually get all of the pieces I needed for this board. Specifically, I last posted about this board almost two months ago and it’s taken me this long to finally obtain everything. This weekend was a lot of painting and adaptation work, but I’m pretty happy with the end result:

You’ll notice a few things at a glance, first and foremost how my measurements were off. I’d originally planned a short piece, a long piece, and a gate on each side. The actual measurements of the pieces put a section of wall perilously close to (and for a short distance, inside) the stream. What looked like reasonable measurements on paper turned out not to fit in reality.

SO! Back to the drawing board as far as layout goes. I had a few games with friends over the weekend and played around with some board layouts. I knew I was going to need this iteration step anyway to get to a good place with the board, and since all of my original preplanning went kind of out the window, more thought was going to need to go into layout before I finalized anything.

The layout above, as it turns out, is a disaster. The whole map bottlenecks around a single gate, and players starting inside the walls have a huge advantage in most scenarios, while starting in opposite corners makes for a lot of really awkward positioning and very few compelling decision points.

Kodra helped me work out an alternate layout, suitable for at least trying:

It shortens the wall and opens up that quarter of the board a bit more. This is a shot taken after some more work has been done, so there are trees on the board, but you can see the rough similarities to my original design. One wall piece goes unused, but the space works a lot better.

In the first iteration, the larger building on the left was swapped with the small tiled-roof building in the bottom-center, but we quickly found that that made for a significant bottleneck problem between the wall and that building.

One major thing that came out of it over the course of three games was that different lists would approach the space differently, which is exactly what I want, and there were multiple ways to set up; both sets of opposite corners are interesting and compelling (also good). A big takeaway is that the side of the river opposite the main walled complex needed something to make it more defensible– it’s wide open with no cover, making it a fairly poor starting location and vulnerable to ranged attackers. It made movement on that side fairly predictable– deploy as far forward as possible, run to use the big wall as cover because you have no other options. It made an inordinate amount of play happen right around the wall corner, which isn’t bad (bottlenecks aren’t automatically awful), but would really cut into the replay value of the board.

Looking at the board from a different angle yields a better result, though we didn’t play on this layout.

A couple of physical takeaways on the board– while I’d hoped that the roof slats would make it reasonable to perch a model on the roof, it was more precarious than I would’ve liked. C’est la vie. More annoying was the smooth surface of the board tiles made for models sliding around pretty easily, which isn’t ideal. Luckily I’d picked up some grass flock and spray adhesive, and you can see patches of darker grass breaking up the simply painted board surface. This is more for traction than anything. I also noted that the stream was VERY shallow, and tended to make it awkward to put models in there. Making it deeper became a goal, just for more flat surface for mini placement.

I’m pretty happy with the layout above, but I also don’t think I’m in a place where I can call it permanent. This is a bit touchy, since I want to also place down foliage and there’s no good way to do that and still have the foliage move around. However, there are some predictable terrain needs that almost don’t care what the wall/building layout is:

1.) The riverbanks need cover; the stream area is too open in general.

2.) The opposite bank is way too open, and needs some kind of cover.

There’s virtually no building placement that changes these; the biggest thing is putting a building on the opposite bank which breaks up the space but doesn’t provide a lot of playable cover, just a dead space that blocks line of sight. I have a bunch of bamboo trees which work really nicely for terrain (because they’re essentially just sticks, meaning it’s easy to maneuver minis around them) which are going to pretty much all go into service of making the opposite riverbank a bamboo forest. In addition, I have a number of cat-tails to plant on the riverbanks, so the non-building side of the river will ultimately have a lot of usable cover, probably more than the building space itself.

I like this because my biggest issue has always been the building-side having a clear advantage. Now the river-side is really appealing as well, perhaps more so.

I’ve also placed four trees on the board. While these are static elements, I can still move and rotate the tiles and change up the board layout pretty easily even though the trees aren’t movable. For now, I don’t want to make any other elements static, because I’m still reworking the concept of static terrain.

One of my goals for building a static terrain board is that I can make it really look great and purposeful if I place everything in specific places. I’m finding that even without a static board, I can achieve surprisingly high quality visuals, even without significant pieces in place, like this:

This approach really needs a road to look “right”, but even without one, it looks acceptable. It’s not the highest possible fidelity, but I’m starting to look closely at the tradeoff I’d be making for that level of fidelity and wondering if it’s worth it. In carefully choosing certain low-impact static elements (the trees), I can still have a highly modular board without necessarily giving up appearance.

What I expect is that as I play more on the board, I’ll place more and more static terrain pieces, iterating on the design and determining which pieces move around a lot and which don’t. If I can, at any point, lock down a wall layout, I almost don’t need anything else to be static because I can simply put down roads and let the buildings sort themselves out. What I suspect, however, is that the walls are going to prove to be the most influential part of the board as far as play, and so they’ll have the most iteration before something is settled on.

In the meantime, I’m surprised at how well the whole thing has turned out, since I’ve never before built a board or even really worked on terrain. It’s a gorgeous board thus far, and I’m really happy with the results, even if it’s not the static board I was shooting for.

It’s not a huge secret that I love stealth games. Really, I like almost any game where winning requires you be observant and get creative with the tools you have, but good stealth games tend to excel at this. After I talked about the stealth mechanics in MGSV, someone asked me why I like that game as a stealth game but not the old Syphon Filter series, or Ninja Gaiden. It got me thinking about what I like in stealth games, and what makes one good.

1.) Messaging.

I talk about messaging a lot. Messaging is the difference between dying randomly and dying because you weren’t paying attention. It’s what makes the first ten minutes of Mega Man X some of the most brilliant tutorial game design ever and so many overbearing, annoying tutorials so painfully bad. Messaging is super important in general, but especially important in stealth games.

Stealth games are cerebral games more than twitchy action games. It means they’re a lot more complex, and need to communicate how you’re supposed to interact with them in a reasonable sort of way. You need to be able to tell whether you’re about to be seen, or whether that guard is about to turn around, or how to know if you’re about to make a huge mess of things. You need to know where you can and can’t go, because so much of stealth gameplay is about traversal and thinking about how to get from point A to point B, often while avoiding obvious paths. Messaging is what makes that work. Lighting lets you know where you should and shouldn’t be, and you need to know where you can reach and where is off-limits, because oftentimes the best route is over or under the main path (more on this later).

More important are the little clues and the way the game messages things you can’t intuit. Thief introduced the light bar, which let you visualize how much light you were standing in (since you couldn’t look at your own body to tell). Stealth games tend to have HUGE animation libraries, showing everything from sleeping enemies to reactions to minor noises to investigating to various levels of alertness. Often you’ll have enemies be neutral or hostile depending on where in the map you are, whether you’re somewhere you ought to be or not, and you’ll get warned through animation and voice that you’re approaching a place they’ll turn hostile if you enter. These animations are hugely significant in letting you know how well you’re doing, and it’s why static cameras are so frequently the most disliked “enemy type” in stealth games: they lack nuance.

2.) Level Design

A good stealth game is a master class in level design. Levels in more linear games tend to look like long tubes if you zoom out far enough– the best gameplay in that kind of straightforward action game has you moving through a space where the escalation is controlled and paced appropriately, with respites and restore points timed out as necessary. Mega Man levels tend to be a great example of this done well. By comparison, good stealth game levels tend to look like fairly small boxes. Rather than huge sprawls, they’re interweaving meshes with key locations interspersed throughout. They’re incredibly difficult to make well, because each section has to have multiple ways in and out and many different paths while still giving you the ability to fire off scripting triggers and story beats appropriately.

It’s why I don’t like Syphon Filter. Most of the levels I remember from that series were linear, with single-room patrol puzzles where being seen meant game over, rather than actual spaces with multiple paths. It wasn’t a game about perception and movement, it was a game about pattern recognition, more akin to a bullet hell shooter than a stealth game. It didn’t provide choices, just demanded you find answers, which brings me to my next bit:

3.) Options.

Key to a good stealth game are providing options. Are you bad at moving quickly under pressure? Take the slower, safer route. Are you good at knocking out guards but bad at traversal? Go through the guarded route and take out your opposition. Maybe a little of both. It’s why some of my favorite stealth games are ones like Deus Ex or Assassin’s Creed, where (for the most part) you can choose exactly how stealthy you want to be, if at all.

One of my favorite stealth games was Hitman, specifically because despite the premise, it was best played as a significantly non-violent game. It let me play almost entirely non-lethally, save for the target, and in later stealth games I’ve prided myself on playing as non-lethally as possible. It changes the language of games for me from one of overwhelming offense in the face of violence to one of thoughtful conflict-avoidance and nonlethal approaches. Being able to make that choice (which is usually the more difficult option) feels meaningful, like I’m adding challenge but for a good reason. I can hold myself to a particular high standard, knowing that it’s self-imposed and not forced on me by the game.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think forcing stealth isn’t good for a stealth game; it’s the choice to remain unseen and unnoticed that really defines the genre, and leaves you to decide what happens if you fail. It’s why fail-on-being-seen is terrible, it robs you of that choice, no matter how narratively sensible it might be. Check out this segue into my next point:

4.) Expectation of Failure.

Bad stealth games throw you to game over or make you restart if you mess up, get seen, whatever. Good ones expect that you will mess up and give you ways to get yourself out of trouble. Entire mechanics are founded on finding a way out of trouble, and it means that good stealth games can make their stealth components MUCH more difficult. You’re expected to fail at some point, and then get yourself out of the pot that you put yourself in. Often, early on in the game, you’ll be put into a situation where you can’t avoid failure, to teach you how to escape and right yourself. It’s cheap if done too often, but incredibly effective (and good messaging) when done well.

You’re often much weaker than even basic enemies, or very easily dispatched by them, to make failure sting a bit (but never instantly end the game). The original Thief pitted you against guards that were both better than you were with a sword and far stronger and more resilient. A swordfight with a single guard would leave you badly injured and limping along, a swordfight with two at once almost always meant death. But, you could get by. You weren’t *guaranteed* to die, it was just very likely, so that time a pair of guards managed to spot you and pull swords meant you probably wanted to run, hide, and then work your way back more carefully. Staying and fighting was a choice, and if you were good enough and knew what you were doing, a choice you could make and come out victorious on the other side.

5.) You Are Special, But Not More Powerful.

Not special in mundane ways. In many shooters, you simply can get hit more times than your enemies can, and recover faster, so the end result is you are just bigger and better than most of what you fight. In good stealth games, you’re usually not bigger or better, but you have tools, or skills, or simply view the space in a different way than your foes. Height is an advantage, and you avoid roads in favor of rooftops (and have the skills to get up to said rooftops. You can open locked doors, or move quietly, or see in ways your enemies can’t.

As above, good stealth games are cerebral, so the tools you get are a celebration of brains rather than brawn. The exciting huge missile launcher and powerful giant axe are celebrations of brawn, the far more common celebration in games, but stealth games give you smoke bombs, and lockpicks, and water arrows so that you can prove that you’re smarter than your enemies, not stronger or tougher. It goes back to the choice thing– the very best stealth games let you choose how you want to play them, and that may not involve being stealthy at all.