The rhythm game genre has been dominated by games that use a visual component to explicitly keep the player on track and on beat. Because of this, most rhythm games closely resemble puzzle games, where winning or losing is based on how well the player can keep the rhythm. The problem lies with turning rhythm into a visual display, with arrows and colored buttons taking the place of beats. When one takes rhythm and puts it into the visual space, the importance of it as an aural experience is diminished. This can be seen in games such as Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, where success is not based on how well a beat is kept, but rather, based on how many “notes” were hit correctly. This may not seem like a problem, since having a good sense of rhythm helps immensely when playing such games, but if one were to remove all of the aural elements of Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, the games are still perfectly playable, and it is quite possible to succeed by simply memorizing the patterns of buttons that appear. By creating a visual component to a rhythm game and using it as a mechanic that determines the success or failure of the player in the game, the developers of these popular rhythm games take the aural element’s importance away, which is quite strange when one realizes that the genre is called the rhythm game genre.
In essence, the problem with most rhythm games being made today is their emphasis on performance as a means to success. This may be a staple of almost every other genre, but in rhythm games, it holds less sway than it should. The best rhythm games involve being able to feel a rhythm and exploring said rhythm through a method that does not involve musical instruments. Rhythm games have the potential to allow users to explore ideas of rhythm and music without having to learn about music or how to create it.
The game Reset by Robin Burkinshaw attempts to do this by structuring the visual space around the aural space. The game involves the player piloting a spaceship while various asteroids and enemy ships try to destroy the player. These obstacles appear in time on the same rhythm as the music, and the visuals increase in intensity as the music grows progressively intense. However, Reset does not provide any motivation for the player to do well while avoiding these obstacles. The music remains the same for each play through and the only "score" available is presented at the end, and seems almost arbitrary. A large part of any game is to provide justification for playing it, and Reset fails at this.
However, the SSX series of games uses the aural space in a much better and more dynamic way. In the SSX games, players control a snowboarder in an environment that is, in terms of physics, greatly exaggerated. What always struck me about these games was how well they motivated the player to maintain a sense of motion or "flow". From the courses that played like roller coasters to the trick system and its rewards, the SSX series was always concerned about how well the player maintained his state of motion and how well he or she was able to navigate the course without interrupting this motion. A large part of this feeling came from the aural space.
At the beginning of a race, the player starts with no boost. The music reflects this state, existing in the most minimal form possible with only a beat and a couple harmonic lines. In order to move to the first level of boosting, the player must do tricks until he or she fills his meter up, and in order to stay at that level, the player must do 4 "super" tricks without crashing. Once this level was achieved, the music would add a few more harmonic lines, a vocal pat, or a melody. This feedback in the aural space encouraged the player and gave the player motivation to maintain his sense of motion, provided that the song was aesthetically engaging and in tune with the visual space. As the player reached higher levels of boost, more parts to the song were added and eventually, the whole song played when the player reached the final level, allowing him to boost as much as he wanted for a certain period of time. The layering of instrumentation provided feedback and encouragement for what the player was doing.
The SSX series did not only use the aural space as a form of encouragement, however. The games also created a tension and release mechanic through its use of music while the player was doing tricks. In the exaggerated physics of the SSX games, the player stays in the air for a long time compared to other games when he or she launches off a ramp. This allowed them to do multiple tricks, and created a dynamic that involved how many tricks a player was willing to do before he landed for fear of becoming to greedy and crashing. When he or she launched into the air, the music track's vocal parts and bass parts cut out, leaving only the middle frequencies while the player was attempting to do tricks. The game put a "flanger" effect on this middle frequency, creating a sort of distortion that fit very well with the sensation of flying through the air. Depending on how the player landed, all of the parts would come back in triumphantly, or the piece would start back in its base mode with only a beat and a few harmonic lines. If the song was good, the player would want the first effect and would try as hard as he could to maintain the flow of music. This effect is similar to the moment in a piece of dance music where the percussion cuts off and the listeners are left with only the vocals and melodic lines, more commonly known as a "breakdown". Most producers will build up to a climax with added melodic or harmonic lines, rehashing themes that have been established before in the song, and once that climax is reached, the artist brings back the percussion with all of the lines present, letting them loose all at once and creating a portion of the song where the listener can let himself go.
The SSX series did a very good job of motivating and encouraging the player to maintain these moments, and ultimately, pursuing this line of progression in rhythm game development will be a much more interesting and rewarding endeavor than continuing to force the player to perform well in order to "succeed". If the player is to be rewarded in a music game, the player should be rewarded with more or better music, rather than a score screen at the end of the song telling him how "well" he did. Music games should be about preserving these moments of tension and release, using them as goals or rewards for players to strive for, and providing challenges that justify these rewards.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Trends in Real Time Tactics Games
Dawn of War 2 and the many DOTA clones popping up create an interesting exploration of the role of tactics in real time tactics games. In this case, I will define a model of real time tactics as any model in which resource management plays a key role in combat. However, these resources must be statistically represented and freely available to the player, for fear of being able to define Street Fighter as a real time tactics game (Street Fighter can be considered real time tactics if the resources that you manage are your health and frames lost or gained by using certain moves).
The ancestor of all real time tactics games is obviously Blizzard’s Starcraft, where high level play involves a high number of Actions Per Minute (APM), using these to directly control units. Blizzard released what they thought was a real time strategy game, but as the skill level of tournament players increased, the system revealed itself as a real time tactics game. Although I am not fully versed in the development of Starcraft, I am convinced that most of the constraints that led to the real time tactics nature of Starcraft were technology based. In other words, the reason players have to use control groups is because they are only able to select 12 units at a time or 1 building at a time, and the only reason this constraint was placed was because the level of simultaneous calculations for an ever-expanding unit pool was simply too much. It is possible that Blizzard intended the high APM nature of Starcraft to be the de facto standard of play, but until I am told so by someone with inside knowledge, I will assume that this was unintended.
However, developers took Blizzard’s vision to mean a localizing of scale and increasing of APM. The Command and Conquer series displayed a model similar to Starcraft’s in that the skill level of players was determined by their ability to produce a high number of APM while being aware of the larger picture. Blizzard later changed their vision to match their rival developers with the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which reduced the unit cap but increased the number of active abilities each unit had, and introduced the Hero unit, which had to be micromanaged well in order to perform to its fullest potential.
What all of these games shared was the inclusion of resource gathering units. Until Relic’s release of Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, the standard for resource management involved actual player-controlled units that collected the resources needed to build combat units, and different playstyles involved disrupting an opponent’s resource gathering force in order to slow their unit production and gain the upper hand. What is important to consider is that until Dawn of War, the vision of resource gathering manifested itself in player controlled units that were given direct orders by the players themselves. Of course, most of the gathering process itself was scripted by AI due to complexity issues (most developers wisely tend to put the complexity emphasis on the combat) but the units themselves still existed.
Most players tended to neglect the resource gathering units after their initial orders were given, only giving them orders when they were under attack or had gathered all of the resources in the vicinity. This all came to a head when Relic released Dawn of War, and ingeniously did away with these units, assuming that players would want them to always be gathering resources.
Relic changed these units into control points, which would accumulate resources on their own. In one fell swoop, resource units were taken out of the real time tactics picture and replaced with nodes, while keeping the sense of resource management intact. Instead of keeping the player’s attention on his gathering units, the player is instead forced to pay attention to the nodes that populate the map, and attacks on these nodes are akin to attacks on their resource production. Thus the resource management component of real time tactics is maintained, and the emphasis is shifted to the combat needed to keep the resources. Construction of buildings for unit production was still required, however, but the combat would almost never reach the base unless the objective was to destroy all buildings for victory.
Company of Heroes took this model and refined it as well as expanding on features that were underdeveloped in Dawn of War such as unit morale and terrain. It also expanded on the increasing role of hard counters in real time tactics games, realistically modeling the effect of small arms on armor and so forth. Company of Heroes remains the pinnacle of real time tactics games, striking a tight balance between unit and resource management.
However, both Company of Heroes and Dawn of War introduced a mechanic I find very disturbing, and that is the inclusion of “victory points”. These victory points are determined by an odd number of nodes on the map that are placed in balanced areas of the map, allowing each player equal access to all of the points. If a player controls the majority of these nodes, then the opponent’s victory points count down, and the first player to reach zero victory points loses.
My problem with these victory points is that it removes a level of player versus player combat that I find crucial in any multiplayer game, and that is the feedback level. In Starcraft, victory was attained by destroying all of your opponent’s buildings and crushing their units in the process. On a fundamental level, the sight of destroying buildings and wreaking havoc on a defenseless player’s base provides enough incentive to win the match. As the skill level increased, though, it became easier to see when you had made a mistake that would lose the match for you, and this visceral feedback was reduced as players started quitting games before they had officially ended, seeing that their decisions had produced a losing result.
In Street Fighter III, IV and any fighting game beyond Street Fighter 2 (games that owe more than a passing debt to Starcraft), the impact of your decisions is made abundantly clear by your character reacting violently to a wrongly-guessed mix-up attempt or your opponent’s character crumpling to the blows you deal. Thus a player is always involved in the match on at least an emotional level, in contrast to Starcraft in which decisions made may affect the outcome only statistically, unseen to the player. Tim Rogers states it best:
“In the ideal game of Starcraft, your colorful blanket will sweep gently, smoothly, and without impediment over your enemy’s base as if it isn’t even there. You won’t have time to see any bodies left behind, because your units will be standing on top of them. You won’t see any individual explosions, because they’ll happen quickly and nearly simultaneously. In fact, if done with the right sorts of units, and when your victim is distracted elsewhere, it may happen without anyone ever seeing it.
Ideal victory in Starcraft is frictionless.”
What Relic created with their victory point system is a numerical representation of the “frictionless victory” that Starcraft pioneered. They have removed another element from the feedback required for a satisfying victory and as a result, nullified any emotional investment in the games at hand. In a world where anger is one of the only emotions that bring people to action, this development is a step taken in the wrong direction by a company that has done so much to innovate in the real time tactics genre.
Of course, this is understating the difficulty of balancing and creating a scenario where victory is the result of the enemy’s complete destruction while preventing a long stalemate, and one must wonder if this is an inherent trend of real time tactics.
I am convinced that it isn’t, much to my relief, as games such as DOTA and its clones create all the visceral feedback players need to remain emotionally invested in a game. Relic’s Dawn of War 2 attempted this by decreasing the scale of combat yet again, but went too far in this localization.
The logical end of this decreasing of scale lies in models such as the player-versus-player combat of World of Warcraft. In WoW, the only “squad” the player manages is his own avatar, and the resources managed are those involved in the use of abilities that benefit the player or hurt the opponent. Cooldowns on skills can also be seen as a resource. Thus, a well-played game of WoW Arena involves the management of these resources, ability cooldowns and knowledge of when to use these to either disrupt the enemy’s resources or gain an advantage in the security of your own. The visceral feedback is still maintained through the display of your avatar, so the emotional level is still maintained. In order to create better, more involving games, developers must realize that an investment must be made in order to motivate the player to succeed, and if the player’s emotions are what he invests, then the developer must take advantage of that fact.
The ancestor of all real time tactics games is obviously Blizzard’s Starcraft, where high level play involves a high number of Actions Per Minute (APM), using these to directly control units. Blizzard released what they thought was a real time strategy game, but as the skill level of tournament players increased, the system revealed itself as a real time tactics game. Although I am not fully versed in the development of Starcraft, I am convinced that most of the constraints that led to the real time tactics nature of Starcraft were technology based. In other words, the reason players have to use control groups is because they are only able to select 12 units at a time or 1 building at a time, and the only reason this constraint was placed was because the level of simultaneous calculations for an ever-expanding unit pool was simply too much. It is possible that Blizzard intended the high APM nature of Starcraft to be the de facto standard of play, but until I am told so by someone with inside knowledge, I will assume that this was unintended.
However, developers took Blizzard’s vision to mean a localizing of scale and increasing of APM. The Command and Conquer series displayed a model similar to Starcraft’s in that the skill level of players was determined by their ability to produce a high number of APM while being aware of the larger picture. Blizzard later changed their vision to match their rival developers with the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which reduced the unit cap but increased the number of active abilities each unit had, and introduced the Hero unit, which had to be micromanaged well in order to perform to its fullest potential.
What all of these games shared was the inclusion of resource gathering units. Until Relic’s release of Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, the standard for resource management involved actual player-controlled units that collected the resources needed to build combat units, and different playstyles involved disrupting an opponent’s resource gathering force in order to slow their unit production and gain the upper hand. What is important to consider is that until Dawn of War, the vision of resource gathering manifested itself in player controlled units that were given direct orders by the players themselves. Of course, most of the gathering process itself was scripted by AI due to complexity issues (most developers wisely tend to put the complexity emphasis on the combat) but the units themselves still existed.
Most players tended to neglect the resource gathering units after their initial orders were given, only giving them orders when they were under attack or had gathered all of the resources in the vicinity. This all came to a head when Relic released Dawn of War, and ingeniously did away with these units, assuming that players would want them to always be gathering resources.
Relic changed these units into control points, which would accumulate resources on their own. In one fell swoop, resource units were taken out of the real time tactics picture and replaced with nodes, while keeping the sense of resource management intact. Instead of keeping the player’s attention on his gathering units, the player is instead forced to pay attention to the nodes that populate the map, and attacks on these nodes are akin to attacks on their resource production. Thus the resource management component of real time tactics is maintained, and the emphasis is shifted to the combat needed to keep the resources. Construction of buildings for unit production was still required, however, but the combat would almost never reach the base unless the objective was to destroy all buildings for victory.
Company of Heroes took this model and refined it as well as expanding on features that were underdeveloped in Dawn of War such as unit morale and terrain. It also expanded on the increasing role of hard counters in real time tactics games, realistically modeling the effect of small arms on armor and so forth. Company of Heroes remains the pinnacle of real time tactics games, striking a tight balance between unit and resource management.
However, both Company of Heroes and Dawn of War introduced a mechanic I find very disturbing, and that is the inclusion of “victory points”. These victory points are determined by an odd number of nodes on the map that are placed in balanced areas of the map, allowing each player equal access to all of the points. If a player controls the majority of these nodes, then the opponent’s victory points count down, and the first player to reach zero victory points loses.
My problem with these victory points is that it removes a level of player versus player combat that I find crucial in any multiplayer game, and that is the feedback level. In Starcraft, victory was attained by destroying all of your opponent’s buildings and crushing their units in the process. On a fundamental level, the sight of destroying buildings and wreaking havoc on a defenseless player’s base provides enough incentive to win the match. As the skill level increased, though, it became easier to see when you had made a mistake that would lose the match for you, and this visceral feedback was reduced as players started quitting games before they had officially ended, seeing that their decisions had produced a losing result.
In Street Fighter III, IV and any fighting game beyond Street Fighter 2 (games that owe more than a passing debt to Starcraft), the impact of your decisions is made abundantly clear by your character reacting violently to a wrongly-guessed mix-up attempt or your opponent’s character crumpling to the blows you deal. Thus a player is always involved in the match on at least an emotional level, in contrast to Starcraft in which decisions made may affect the outcome only statistically, unseen to the player. Tim Rogers states it best:
“In the ideal game of Starcraft, your colorful blanket will sweep gently, smoothly, and without impediment over your enemy’s base as if it isn’t even there. You won’t have time to see any bodies left behind, because your units will be standing on top of them. You won’t see any individual explosions, because they’ll happen quickly and nearly simultaneously. In fact, if done with the right sorts of units, and when your victim is distracted elsewhere, it may happen without anyone ever seeing it.
Ideal victory in Starcraft is frictionless.”
What Relic created with their victory point system is a numerical representation of the “frictionless victory” that Starcraft pioneered. They have removed another element from the feedback required for a satisfying victory and as a result, nullified any emotional investment in the games at hand. In a world where anger is one of the only emotions that bring people to action, this development is a step taken in the wrong direction by a company that has done so much to innovate in the real time tactics genre.
Of course, this is understating the difficulty of balancing and creating a scenario where victory is the result of the enemy’s complete destruction while preventing a long stalemate, and one must wonder if this is an inherent trend of real time tactics.
I am convinced that it isn’t, much to my relief, as games such as DOTA and its clones create all the visceral feedback players need to remain emotionally invested in a game. Relic’s Dawn of War 2 attempted this by decreasing the scale of combat yet again, but went too far in this localization.
The logical end of this decreasing of scale lies in models such as the player-versus-player combat of World of Warcraft. In WoW, the only “squad” the player manages is his own avatar, and the resources managed are those involved in the use of abilities that benefit the player or hurt the opponent. Cooldowns on skills can also be seen as a resource. Thus, a well-played game of WoW Arena involves the management of these resources, ability cooldowns and knowledge of when to use these to either disrupt the enemy’s resources or gain an advantage in the security of your own. The visceral feedback is still maintained through the display of your avatar, so the emotional level is still maintained. In order to create better, more involving games, developers must realize that an investment must be made in order to motivate the player to succeed, and if the player’s emotions are what he invests, then the developer must take advantage of that fact.
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