Some days ago I tweeted about RPGs without combat. What would be left if [insert random rpg here] would not have combat?

Combat in RPGs is fine if it serves a purpose. For many gamers, the purpose of combat is leveling up, beating bigger monsters over and over again. Many gamers enjoy those things and decisions the combat offers. To me, games need to provide interesting decisions. Combat can be interesting. Choosing whether to attack good guy is an interesting decisions. Choosing best weapons for the next fight and planning attack can be interesting. Many things can be interesting.

But hitting a giant scorpion, running away and then hitting again that scorpion over and over until it dies is not interesting. That’s boring hit’n'run tactic where (1) I know I win if I do this and (2) I know I die and game is over if I don’t do this.

In Fallout 1, combat for me was most often only a roadblock. Combat kept me away from enjoying the story and seeing new things. In Fallout 1, combat wasn’t often so interesting. Seeing new guys, using some drugs that made your guy “combat drug addicted” during combat was pretty cool… but overall I didn’t really need all that combat.

In some games, combat is the very essence of the game. Monster Hunter series for example is built around the combat and is the meat of the game. In MH, I liked the combat.

In Fallout 1, the story and decisions were much more interesting and combat (to me) felt unneccessary.

In Battlefield 1942, combat was definitely okay. The whole game is about combat, and training your own skills in the combat field.

But what about RPGs? When we check top selling RPGs, I can almost bet that there’s 7 out of 10 some sort of “Diablo” clones. Those hack’n'slash games to me aren’t rpgs…

Why RPGs require you to combat & grind so that you can then progress with the story?

Why not progress & enjoy the story and decisions without combat?

Thoughts?

Last night, my bro and I played a fierce NHL ’12 match (PS3, mics on). The match was really tough, first I managed to get 2-0 lead, then he managed to get even to 2-2 and even take lead 2-3. Few minutes before end of the game I managed to score 3-3, so it was time to play overtime. The next one to score wins the match.

Overtime was tough fighting as well. Luckily, my bro got penalty and I managed to rule the match in his area. I managed to trick defenders, pass to superior forwarder while goalkeeper was on ice. My attacker had clear shot, nothing could possibly go wrong.

…except stick broke when he took the shot.

Goddamn broken stick! The stick went to pieces, puck went to corner where my bros defender got it… passed to one of his attackers who got break-away situation and scored overtime goal. He won 4-3 on overtime.

So, the tiny feature that made the difference:
NHL ’12 (I think it was introduced in NHL ’11 though) has this new feature that there’s small chance your player’s stick will break when he takes a shot. It doesn’t happen often, but it does every now and then.

If there wasn’t this feature, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. I would have won the game and it would have been yet another played match, forgotten.

But thanks to that stick break, there’s now drama. There’s a story to discuss (or “laugh” like my bro puts it). Seemingly minor feature “stick can break” made a huge difference. I thought I had certain win… and then boom, my dream was broken.

Amazing thing.

Is there such minor, tiny – almost “useless” – features that your game could have? Features that can generate new kind of gamer experiences?

It’s been rumoured that Valve might be bringing something called Steam Box. Rumour has it that it basically could be some sort of PC/windows system that would “replace” console. You would use a controller to play games… and I’d suspect if such thing appears, Steam shop would be well integrated there.

If there would be “PC console”, I think it could work…:

• If there was a proper controller. PS3 bluetooth based wireless controller is superior. If Steam Box is ever made, it would require this.
• Controller based UI without keyboards or mouse. This I see hugely important: the reason why I like playing my PS3 is that I just press couple of buttons and it’s all good. Nice big TV, comfortable sofa. With PC, I need to go to my basement and mess with mouse and keyboard and stuff. It would be hugely important to have user interface that you can easily control: PS3 has great, simple user interface.
• If it would play movies and such too… now that would be a big deal. PS3 is a really nice media player as well, but it’s sometimes bit hassle to play movies from the hard drive. I first need to do magic in my PC, and then move my Moomins to PS3 before watching. If Steam Box would be PC powerered… all this might become simpler.
• Moddable parts: strenght (and weakness too) of PC is moddable parts. Bearing in mind that Steam Box is all rumours… I feel that if it ever was done, and if I could easily change or add a new hard drive… or increase memory or change video card, then it might be interesting take on console world. In a way it’s bad as things get bit complex to develop when there’s no standard device, but in a way that might be such a new approach into console gaming that it might be fun.

And of course it might require some millions of people to purchase the thing…

It’s all rumours at this point, but Valve might be doing a big favor to world with this thing. It opens up development possibilities for indies for sure. Xbox, PS3, Wii and other consoles don’t like indies as PC does… so having a PC console would rock quite well.

Waiting to hear more about this matter.

“PC gaming is dead”, yeh right…

As far as I remember, I’ve never really paid attention to how many hours of gameplay certain games have. I’ve always read from reviews if the game is long or short. Recently, buddy of mine described that Skyrim is epic game with huge amount of content and places to explore. This was enough for me to describe the fact that Skyrim can provide hours of gameplay. I don’t know if it’s 10 or 20 or 152 hours, but something pretty big. I know my buddy, and when he says that there’s tons of stuff in game, I know what he means.

Portal 2 on the other hand is relatively short game. People describe it as short and that’s enough for me. Short, medium, long are pretty close to the accuracy I can accept for games. To me, seeing that game has 20 hours or 100 hours of gameplay doesn’t tell much about length of those games. If one game is 8 hours and other 16 hours, which one is larger? I doubt that 8 hours game is half as short as the other game. I doubt that very much.

It’s different with movies and books. Movies can be 2 hour long. Books can have 400 pages. These tell you something about how much stuff there is.

But for games, the “game is 12 hours long”, in my proud opinion is:

• Very subjective figure given by developers, and doesn’t really tell much about how much stuff there is.
• While time as unit is quite same to all of us (who don’t travel as fast as light), then 60 minutes to you is pretty close to 60 minutes to me. But, when you and me play game X, you might say that it provides 7 hours of gameplay and I say 14 – we both are right.
• Accompanied with other information (ranging from game budget to different reviewer’s opinions to filesize to whatever factual information), we can get some idea whether game is “2 hours long” or “perhaps closer to 30 hours long”.

Bottom line is, these estimations are given by developers.

The same developers who say that “adding feature X is no biggie, I’ll knock it together in 2 hours” and when you come back 3 days later they say “I’m 90% finished, but there’s some bugs that appeared after adding feature. This might take couple of hours more”.

To summarize: I never paid attention to “hours” listed. I don’t see much idea why they are used or generally accepted as a way to tell “how big game is”.

What you think?

I’ve stopped buying books in physical format (can make exception on Terry Pratchett). I only buy books in digital format. And Amazon is doing superb job. Here’s my reason for buying kindle books only from them:

• I really like Kindle app. It’s hassle free. I can get samples to ipod or ipad or to my computer and sync between devices. I can buy stuff for ipad, read it in ipod and check library in PC. It’s just super cool.
• Kindle app user interface is good. Has everything I need and more.
• I don’t need night lamp anymore. Ipod touch is great device with proper backlight, so night time I read my kindle books using this tiny device. It’s convenient.
• The catalogue is huge: I can get the book I want in 76% of the cases. I do wish people would transform their old books to kindle formats, and have sent authors info on this. Maybe one day I get 100% of the books via kindle store.
• Ok prices. Sure, the prices could be always lower than paperback versions, which is bit like slapping my face… but I don’t complain. It’s not that big price difference anyway. Convenience is what matters me most.
• My bookshelf is always with me, even when I’m offline. (As long as I have battery left…)
• My digital book library takes heckofa less space than my physical lib.
• I don’t know if there’s DRM. For once, I’m happy to be a customer who can buy stuff without hassling with visible DRM. For example, if Amazon goes down (it doesn’t, just stating an example), I can still access my books. If my network connection goes down, I can access my books.

I simply don’t have any reason not to buy physical books (except for Terry Pratchett, since there’s no kindle digital Finnish version available – and for the fact that the hardcover versions look good on my house, they are decoration too) and thus I’m buying only Kindle books.

They have made pretty close to everything right (small thing with the book prices that should be lower for digital versions compared to physical and second minor thing is that I’d like to fetch & download book samples via kindle app), and totally got my money.

Also, I’ve spent more money on books than ever before (I’ve been a regular book buyer always), for your information. That means not only they get all the money I spend in books… but they’ve actually managed to increase the amount of stuff I spend on books.

The bottom line is that… I feel like I’m treated as a respected customer. I get stuff the way I like in nice format with decent price.

That makes it easy to buy stuff from them.

There’s plenty of lessons here for other industries as well.

I don’t know why I wrote this in valentine’s day… but here we go.

Mafia or gangster games deal with quite tough subjects. Games depict various kind of violence, blackmailing, extortion, drugs and other heavy stuff.

Before age 30 all was ok, but now I’ve been thinking if this stuff is bit too much, at least the more realistic approach games take. Pixel art gangsters with humour I’m pretty much ok with, but if there’s really realistic art, realistic setting and immersive story I’m not sure if I want to get immersed in that world.

What you think? Do you find any violent games/criminal/gangster disturbing? Why? Why not?

It’s been almost a decade since I’ve played any RPG video game. During the last ten years, I stories in games haven’t perhaps been my main focus. Especially in the recent years, I’ve concentrated my gaming around multiplayer games with shorter playing times.

I finished Fallout 1 week or two ago, and one thing particular was how the choices I made in the game were represented in the end. In the game, there was certain action (see how I don’t spoil game plot.. even when the game was made 1998, ahem) that affected certain community. I could have chose a difficult path and helped the community, but I took a shortcut. I thought “whadda hell, I can’t be arsed to help ‘em” and chose the quicker option.

In the end of the game, I had won something major, but this community didn’t do so well. Thanks to my actions (or lack of them).

I don’t know why I didn’t complete the game decade ago, but I must say that the game was fun still today. It was damn hard at times, but fun too. I actually didn’t want so much combat, as I was more interested in character dialogue, sub-stories, main story and decisions that affect the game. I liked how the game didn’t hold my hand telling me “now I must go to speak to man there (let’s mark that in your map) and maybe he will tell you about secret X”. Oh noes, I had to figure out what I needed to do.

Few times it was bit irritating to wander around, few times I needed to get save files from past to get pass certain stuff… but all in all, I actually eventually learned to like it, even though I whined about lack of auto-save earlier (in Fallout 2).

Eventually, I learned to like these things that game didn’t have:

• No auto-save (I learned to save intelligently, and it didn’t cut immersion)
• No achievements (thank god)
• No hand-holding (for a long time, finding some ammo felt like a true achievement even when game didn’t tell me “Achievement!! You found goddamn ammo! Here’s a badge for you!! Aren’t you one happy camper now!?”. No, finding the ammo was achievement. I didn’t need game to tell me that. I felt intelligent for figuring out stuff.)
• No one straight path to victory: instead, I could choose what to do, and actions affected the whole outcome of the game and story. Really nice, really nice.

And it cost just $5.99 which was a steal.

Amazing that a game that was made about 14 years ago still beats many modern games. Easily.

Sometimes you encounter bit shitty situation where:

• You have done something great
• and then some evil corporation clones your stuff.

Well, there’s few different ways to handle this:

• You can wee on their tent, and make superior PR move that gets picked everywhere around the net. (Recommended)
• You can whine how there’s evil corporations and that your stuff shouldn’t be copied.
• You can concentrate on building success that doesn’t depend on stuff that can be cloned. Match-3 games can be cloned. Tower sim can be cloned. RPGs with deep storyline is harder to clone.
• You can make shitty game that doesn’t sell anything. These are rarely cloned too.
• You can ignore em. (Pretty good plan)
• You can think what’s important, why you are making games. Profit? Passion?
• You can make gross zombie games. Big studios rarely clone those. (Hah!)

Now, regarding the “game mechanics can be cloned”. I think this is pretty good thing. Sure, ripping off somebody’s game mechanics and then cloning pretty much the whole game with different graphics is bit shitty move… but that’s how it needs to be.

Businesswise, it’s pretty profitable to be second in the market. Clone hit games, and make some changes. But that’s something hundred zillion other corporations are doing. Zynga isn’t only one cloning their way to success. If cloning was the way to go, then how come there aren’t as successful other cloners?

And this also makes one really ponder why you are making games? Are you making games that you can profit? Or are you making games mechanics & games… that are spread all over the world? Doesn’t it make one happy that by creating something cool that everybody wants to clone… something cool that others can benefit from? Isn’t that a pretty darn sweet thing?

Or, is it so that you were doing this stuff for profit? In that case, jump to one of those clone factories and see how happy things are there.

Or do you just “want fair fight”? Well, time to wake up. This is a really open market world where best offering (not necessarily best product) wins the profits. If you do game that can be cloned by a big studio, then you knew what you were against when you first started. Or did you really think that after you make your smash hit, nobody would be interested in getting the money too?

“But this kills innovation”
Tough luck. And yes, for some genres at least. At one point Match-3 games were selling like pancakes. They were hot stuff (not sure how they do nowadays). Now, is the innovation in match-3 games killed? I suppose. There’s every now and then one new different match-3 game but I feel the market is pretty saturated.

So, if you do some popular gaming thing that can be cloned, of course you can except that there won’t be innovation.

We can cry and bite our legs off, but that doesn’t change anything. If we are worried about cloning, then we should do stuff that’s hard to clone.

We know that there’s cloners waiting for the next hit game. That’s perfectly fine. I mean, creating a clone isn’t going to guarantee success. It’s risky. Not all cloners are profitable. It takes heaps of effort too, and is not “easy way” to go.

There’s people doing games for passion, and not getting money. That’s perfectly fine too. Whining about “but rules should favor me as [insert random reason here]” is not going to cut it. If you don’t like the rules, you can go play somewhere else.

So… who’s evil?
I think it’s quite natural to think that Zynga is “evil” or “doing wrong” when they clone a game. They are a company who want to make profit. They have business strategy that is targeted to maximizing profit. They might steal an idea or two, but so does everybody else. They might clone stuff they can clone, but so is everybody else. Zynga is just doing things better than many other corporations.

I’m not saying Zynga is less evil than me (slightly richer though). They simply seem to have different values from me. I try steal every game idea I can, but I try add something unique, something of my own in the creation. I want to do something I like doing, and something I like to experience. If somebody was to clone that stuff and make profits, that’s pretty cool. Next time they need ideas, they know where to find me.

I feel that the chaps at nimblebit chose the right way to deal with Zynga’s copy & “we wanna buy you” offer. They turned this into a PR thing which favors them. Zynga can clone the game, but they cannot clone the fact that nimblebit has the “small good guys against big evil corporation” edge that can make an interesting story. Nimblebit managed to create a cool story out of the situation, and I’m pretty sure they benefit from this.

That’s the name of the game.

P.S. And if Zynga is successful, do you really think that other big players won’t notice it and challenge them? This zoo is filled with predators who are ready to attack each other as well.

I’m mainly taking an RPG game or adventure game point-of-view here, or any game where story plays very important role.

Here you go:

1. Have big loading times and use word “loading” when switching between places.
2. Show the same dialogue options over and over (if you wanna ensure that “character might need that info”, then make so that character has journal where conversation was stored)
3. Hold the players hand by (1) first letting character tell what to do, (2) then showing text telling what to do, (3) then pointing the next goal on the map regarding what to do and (4) showing hint “maybe I should go there” in the journal. (This one is tricky: on the other hand you don’t want to player to be lost not knowing what to do next… but on the other hand too much information kills immersion. Check this video ‘if Quake was done today’)
4. Making player guess what you thought that should be done next. If player knows what should happen next, but your game user interface prevents (in RPG, not talking about car driving game) him from reaching the goal, that kills immersion. There’s a great article about this at Raph Koster’s site.
5. Make character pick dialogue option he thinks is ok, when in reality the other party takes it as offense. This too can be tricky, but bear in mind that as a not-native English speaking chap, I might miss some nuances of conversations… and sometimes I might pick dialogue option that I thought was friendly, when in reality it was offensive. There’s no easy way to get past through this option though, and not sure what’s a good solution (other than accept the fact that this way I learn better English…)

Anything to add to this list? Complaints or solutions?