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I’ve been playing Warframe with a bunch of friends lately, and it’s been interesting to me to see how each of us has approached the game. While not open-world, it’s nonetheless a very open game as far as experience goes, and you can work towards various things and move various directions, none of which appear to be wasteful. You can focus on frames, mods, weapons, research, pets, and all sorts of other things that take time and resources to work towards.

Playing with my friends, I’ve been fascinated at the differences in what motivates me versus what seems to motivate others. Bel, for example, has been playing Excalibur and seems to prefer it to the point of playing it nearly exclusively. I get the impression he’s going for total mastery of Excalibur and leaving other frames for other people. Ash has a handful of weapons and frames, but virtually everything he’s got is max rank– he picks a new thing and deep-dives until he understands it thoroughly, then moves on. I, on the other hand, have gone for breadth. I’ve got 12 Warframes, with 3 more building as of the time of this post. It’s about double what anyone else in the clan has, but I also have far fewer maxed out frames and weapons.

I do the same kind of thing in Infinity. I don’t have a full collection of any of the factions I play, but I play nearly every faction in the game to some extent– enough to know what they do and how to pull it off, even if I’m not an expert at it. I play a different list that’s doing a different thing every time I play, often flitting between factions and playstyles extremely rapidly. When I start a new faction in Infinity, or a new Warframe, I generally try to pair it with an entire new suite of weapons. It varies my playstyle as much as possible from the get-go, showing me how different the game can get from what I was previously doing.

I admire the folks who pick a single class, a single weapon, or a single playstyle and play it to the exclusion of all else until they’ve mastered it completely. It’s not for me. I generally favor seeing the game as a whole, which tends to mean that I rarely master any one thing, but I’m capable with a huge variety. In World of Warcraft, most people knew me as a Rogue player. I was a fairly capable Rogue, but I knew people who’d put in the effort to master the class; I picked a niche that I could fill and stuck with it. What I did know, however, was how Mages, Hunters, DPS Warriors, Priests, Druids, and Warlocks worked, and actively worked on understanding Paladins and even Shaman, despite us playing Alliance. When Death Knights came out, I switched pretty much full time to that class, and the Monk was the only reason I resubscribed for that expansion.

For me, seeing the entire game is my motivation. I want to know about the secrets, and the different approaches that most people don’t realize. It’s the high-level strategist in me; it’s not enough for me to know the ins and outs of one particular approach, I want to know how that approach stacks up against another one, what the pros and cons are, and how I’d work them together. Being stuck playing only one thing bores me; my excitement about Infinity is because compared to other games, I can try every faction. I could never really do that in Warmachine, and the concept is laughable in a game like 40k, where you’re looking at an $800-$1000 investment just to start your first army. With that kind of investment in Infinity, I could put together workable list pairings for four or five factions at least. That’s super compelling to me.

I think this motivation is a big part of what makes me a good designer– I want to build things with lots of approaches and let players pick the one they like best. When I write tabletop campaigns, I like to imagine all the twists and turns my players might go down, and I write them out at least enough to entertain them as ideas. I’m thrilled when I’m presented (as I was in a recent session) with a situation I didn’t predict, because that’s another twist to explore and one I didn’t think of. When I’m designing scenarios in video games, or talking about how to build things, I like to know as much about what options are available so that I can make informed comments– a boss that is flatly immune to fire damage is not a great idea, no matter how much the story supports it, if a primary path a player might take involves dealing fire damage to the exclusion of all else… unless I’m trying to encourage some other kind of thing.

This extends to other parts of my life, too. I like to pick up new skills as much as possible, and try lots of new things. There’s an immensely broad world out there, and I want to understand as much of it as I can, even if it’s unrealistic to experience it all personally. I love change, because change is something new to try out, like that new faction or new warframe. It’s what keeps me going.

What motivates you in a new game? Is it different from what motivates you outside of the game?

I learned to type quickly, efficiently, and accurately playing Everquest. While other people I knew were enrolled in typing classes to increase their speed and precision, I was trying to keep up with my Befallen group, letting them know between heals that I was low on mana, and had about three pulls left in me before I needed a rest. I learned to communicate on the internet through text primarily.

When I started raiding in World of Warcraft, VoIP was still relatively new; the idea of logging onto a server to talk with internet strangers was a bit much for a lot of people. I thought it was fascinating, and quickly joined the server. If memory serves, I was one of the first, and I realized that when I spoke out loud, people would listen, largely because I was one of the only people (in a raid group of 40) who would talk aloud. Eventually, the raid required that people at least log into the server, though no one was required to talk and we kept a close eye on the chat log.

Over time, we got comfortable with each other and more and more people spoke. There was always a miniature celebration when someone who’d lurked for months or sometimes years would finally speak up– it wasn’t always great for people’s anxiety about speaking to begin with, but it was as welcoming as any of us knew how to be. We were always happy to hear a new voice, and I know a lot of people built up confidence in just talking to others through our raid– I know this because I was one of them, and I’ve talked to others.

Now, pretty much all of my in-game communication is over voice. When folks are all playing the same game, voice chat is hopping and busy, with people congregating into one or more channels to play games together, or even just chat while we play. It’s so embedded into my sense of gaming that I (and others) have arranged our gaming spaces so that we can sit on voice and play games together, even if we’re on a console and not the PC. It’s like an extended living room where we’re all playing together, except better, because we can customize it for our own comfort.

I occasionally run into other folks who are reticent to log into voicechat, or shy about speaking. I understand it; I was there once. My approach now is the same as it was then– if someone feels like joining the server, great! If not, no worries. If we’re doing something where they absolutely need to listen, I’ll ask that they log in and listen; but no one is ever required to say anything. At this point, it’s pretty comfortable, I think, and I hope people feel welcome joining us.

I get a lot out of being able to communicate verbally with my teammates while in a group. It makes the experience feel a lot more “multiplayer”, to me, to the point where even playing with others in a game without voice, I feel like I’m playing solo. If I feel like playing alone, I’ll simply not log into voice, though more often I’ll join voicechat even playing a solo game.

One of the things I really want is the ability to loop services like Teamspeak and Ventrilo into my consoles. One of the things that keeps me off of playing games on my console is my inability to use the VoIP server that my friends hang out on. I would pay good money for a controller with a push-to-talk button and a plugin for Teamspeak. If one of the major consoles released with Teamspeak support, I’d likely use it exclusively for my console gaming, and I’d get to spend more time on my comfy couch.

At this point, I can’t imagine not having the group of folks to log in and “play games with”, even if we’re all playing different games. When voicechat is quiet, or there’s a lull when people aren’t around, it often feels like something’s missing for me.

I had a conversation with a friend recently about Infinity tables, and how important layout is when playing that game. As far as tabletop minis games go, Infinity isn’t unique in having a lot of the game hinge on terrain, but it’s a lot more honest about it. The game is obviously unplayable with poor or no terrain, and both players will realize this quickly.

Compare this to a game like 40k or Warmachine. In 40k, Dark Eldar want terrain to hide behind if they aren’t going first. If they are, they run a serious risk of getting shot off the table before getting to do anything. In Warmachine, several factions have a lot of Pathfinder units that benefit from rough terrain or forests or both– a board with none of these suddenly becomes an uphill battle for them, and factions without Pathfinder struggle on boards with a lot of terrain. It’s an unequal distribution which causes issues at the game level and skews the “competitive” selection of units for both games.

Spending a lot of the weekend playing Warframe made me think about Infinity terrain as well. Levels in Warframe are randomized, but they’re highly interactive. Maps are made up of cells (or tiles) which are hand-designed, attached to each other through connectors (hallways) and the occasional smaller room, all put together to form a map for a level. It’s a surprisingly elegant system, and despite how important level design is in the game, it’s still able to put together random maps in a fairly compelling way.

It makes me think of Infinity tables. There are major set pieces (cells) with scatter terrain (connectors) and smaller buildings (rooms), all forming the game board. Mostly, these pieces are hand-placed by one or more players before the game starts, and they then circle the table, eyeballing sight lines and other details, before deciding that the table is fit to play on and starting a game. Because of this, Infinity draws a lot of attention from passersby, because the tables it’s played on are generally very intricate.

Infinity tables that are fun to play on follow a general set of rules:

• No unavoidable corridors running the length of the table.
• No sniper towers that can cover the entire board.
• Plentiful cover and places to hide behind, out of sight.
• Good opportunities to use every type of weapon– from short range to long range.
• No obvious choke points.
• (Advanced) One side should be slightly more advantageous to start on than the other.
• (Advanced) Objective locations for the missions to be played on the table should be relatively even.
• (Advanced) Multiple tiers of elevation, and ways to reach them.
• (Advanced) Multiple exits from points on the board, to prevent getting locked down.
• (Advanced) Models of all sizes need to be able to maneuver.

It’s a lot of rules, but a lot of players who are used to the game just sort of internalize them. Very rarely does anyone go down a checklist of the above, but you’ll occasionally see someone look at a table and say “hmm, this is too open” or “this is too crowded”. Playing the game enough, and getting experienced enough, allows you to see the problems with a table once you’re practiced at it. it’s not easy to do– I played a game recently with another very experienced player where we both thought the board looked reasonable until we started playing on it.

The same attention and care goes into level design elsewhere. When League of Legends was first released, people criticized it for “only having one map”, and games are often judged for not having an adequate number of maps to play on. I remember Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament, and the large number of maps those games had, of which maybe two or three ever got seriously played. The single map of League (and the smaller numbers of maps in other games) tend to have a lot more going on, and are carefully and thoughtfully created.

Game spaces are really important. They need to be functional, navigable, and visually appealing, and varied enough to stay fresh and not get boring. I remember complaints about the original Halo, and its endless samey levels towards the end of the game, and the major complaint of the first Assassin’s Creed that it got too repetitive. It’s telling that some of the biggest changes in those two games were in their level design, with AC going to an entirely new location with new architecture and Halo varying its levels much more in its sequels.

Probably a lot of my care for good level design comes from a childhood playing Thief. That game’s area layouts were the lynchpin of the experience, and made the game in a lot of ways. I pay attention when levels are interesting and matter, as opposed to being irrelevant, or an afterthought.