An unexciting E3

Reading this week Well Played column on Kotaku, I wondered why I wasn't excited at all by E3 this year ?

Here's what I know about E3 2010 :

• Sony and Microsoft are moving to motion controller, great, what a surprise. It's been one year since their first announcement. Sony has his Wiimote clone and Microsoft has a camera capturing the movements of maximum two players.
  If I summarize, the first is not much more than a Wiimote, so we could play Wii games in HD and the second prevents us to play with more than one friend at a time. You see something exciting their ? Playing in HD or with fewer people; I'd rather keep my Wii.
• Nintendo will reveal his 3DS but since I learned the 3D could just be an aesthetic feature, I lost my hopes. I was dreaming of 3D interaction with the stylus, something very cool as three dimensional touchscreen and allowing new gameplays.
• Also there will be a lot of new games at E3, but a lot of them are only sequels of sequels : Gears of War 3, BattleFront 3, Resistance 3, Killzone 3, Zelda XX... Not so exciting.

Well this was perhaps a quick and negative overview, but it make me wonder what E3 is all about now.

Of course it's perfect to do business, to shake hands and build huge booth too show your huge games. But an indie developer could have quite the same coverage with a little internet trailer or a developer diary video and no money spent.
Moreover E3 is the moment chosen for every big announcement, reducing the impact of everyone of them.

We could argue that its an occasion to gain visibility in front of general media, but I won't buy it. In fact video games are now a regular subject in magazines and newspaper, whatsoever in business, entertainment or crime pages. They don't really need this kind of event to be spoke of.

This remember me an initiative that was taken one or two years ago, when big editor use the money they didn't use for E3 to build their own mini-events. This way every editor had his shot with the media and made the noise they were waiting for. Perhaps it was a good move ?

To finish, some games announcement and even trailers has been revealed before E3, as Vanquish or Spider Man Shattered Dimensions are the first two examples that come to my mind. What is the meaning of E3 if new games aren't revealed during the show ?

So here is my question : at an era of fast and abundant information could E3 be has exciting has it was 10 or 15 years ago ? Is it still worth the costs ?

In fact, with Onlive or Gaikai new online services, the next big video game show could be online.
Everybody could play the new game demos and access the conferences live during their play sessions. It will be obviously cheaper and easier to set up. This will also allows attendees to avoid waiting queues before playing or watching the next big thing; and small developer to increase their visibility. I can't wait for it !

Sell your soul to offer your heart

Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Diablo, Fable and many more have shrunk down their RPG mechanics and content in order to reach more cutomers and to be more competitive. Others like Bioshock and Dawn of War II have at the contrary use RPG to give a bit more depth to their game.

Is the recent trend of simplified RPG mechanics a give up or a smart move for the genre ? Could it be use with other genre ?

Diablo was one of the first to use only a part of the RPG genre. It takes the most understandable RPG elements -character customization and progression- and melts them with a frenetic action game. Years later a lot of games followed this path.

The Mass Effect success was in part due to his TPS combat system. Using this feature allowed Mass Effect to appeal to a wider audience than the RPG players. In fact RPG as they're known are a scary genre for mass market consumers. Introducing a simple known and understandable gameplay as a TPS combat system give the game a chance to reach TPS customers and then to charm them with RPG mechanics.
Then Mass Effect 2 hit the market and despite its poor equipment system and its new TPS gameplay, it has improved strong RPG systems like dialogs and choices.

Fallout 3 was also mostly marketed as shooter; a bloody one. This politic scared RPG fans but excited the console FPS player base, resulting in 5 millions unit sold. Despite his marketing Fallout 3 is still a strong RPG at heart : character customization, numerous secondary quests, branched dialogs...


More recently there was also a common tendency to put RPG elements -mostly character customization and progression- to new genre.
For example there was Dawn of War II with a squad looking like a typical RPG group, or Bioshock with his character's powers and Dante Inferno with its light equipment system, even Call of Duty Modern Warfare multi-player offered the possibility to gain rank and unlock new classes.
That's a lot of RPG in our modern video-games !


Well, I asked in the first paragraph "Is the recent trend of smaller/simplified RPG a give up or a smart move for the genre ?". I definitely think it's a smart move.

RPG have always struggle to charm the mainstream consumers, in part because of the undeserved bad reputation of his pen and paper counterpart. And mostly due to its complexity.
Take the character creation phase, first thing you do in an RPG, you're asked to choose who and how you want to play whereas you didn't played the game for now !?
Imagine you create Super Mario with 0 in dexterity, Super Mario couldn't jump and the game would be like hell ! Some novice RPG players live that, most won't came back to the genre.

This way I think that simplified RPG or small RPG features in other genre are a good way to accustom players to our beloved RPG. In the meantime it will be easy to drag them into greater RPG experiences.


And I also asked "Could it be use with other genre ?" . Yes it should ! Take small and simplified parts of other genre and melt them together. Do it with caution,  prototype smoothly, iterate gently, something great could happen !

What about a bit of real time strategy in my racing game ? Or a bit of tactic in my FPS ? And a bit of music game in my platform game ? Etc ! As I share it with you earlier, Idea are new combinations, don't be shy and try.


So I'll conclude with  this article title, taking Fallout 3 as an example :
Sell your soul -make your RPG looks like a shooter to reach customer- to offer your heart -make the rest of the game as RPG as you can to reach your expectation-.

Making of a card game : the skeleton

First I must say that the first article about my card game was about a new version of it; a kind of second iteration. So don't be confuse when I'll start presenting you a quite different version of the pitch.

Yes it's awkward, anyway I think a lot about how to share with you my journey trough the making of these games and I'd start with a piece of my work which is not in an advanced enough state to be used as a material for my writing.

Enough explanation, let's talk about my first card game. Not a very good one but a finished one. It will be better as a source of examples. It contents many flaws I think, but that's not devaluating the lessons learned.

First the pitch : "Create a RPG pen and paper experience without a game master"

After brainstorming on this pitch I ended up with ideas and objectives.
- Give each player the possibility to build his character.
- Give each player a personal objective.
- Build a system which automatically narrates the players's journey.
- Force the players to play together in order to win solo.

Let's see the rules I found around these objectives.

• Give each player the possibility to build his character
  Each character will be build around three elements : Origin, Class and Destiny.
  Origin : give the player a special power and three characteristics : Charisma, Fight, Cunning.
  Class : give the player an other special power and three characteristics : Charisma, Fight, Cunning. Moreover class could influence some parts of the player journey.
  Destiny : give the player his personal objective; this card is hidden from the other players.
• Give each player a personal objective
  See Destiny above.
• Build a system which automatically narrates the player's journey
  Events will be drawn in order to build a new story each turn.
• Force the players to play together in order to win solo
  Each Event is a challenge requiring to match its three characteristics to be achieved :  Charisma, Fight, Cunning. Most Events can't be achieved solo, forcing players to cooperate.
  Events have consequences which could help or prevent each player to reach their objective. This way each player must carefully choose when to participate or not to an event.

You can already see one flaw in my rules; the strong likeness between Origin and Class. I'll discuss this later, as I said, I already have started a second version of this card game.

The game seems also very static and deterministic with not much place for treachery, strategy and tactics. That's why I choose to introduce Action cards. They give randomness, tactic and strategy to the game.

• Action cards give the player a special action and/or characteristics modifier. Action cards can be played at any moment and can be put on an other card in order to modify it. Action cards are removed when the card they modify are or at the end of turn.

Now we have the core rules of the game. Most of the other rules will come by testing it with friends or just by emulating a game in our mind.

But in order to be playable this game need content, in our case cards with characteristics, power, action, consequences... This will be our next subject, a tough one.

What did I learn writing the first set of rules of this game :

• See your ideas as objectives, then build rules that could match them.
• Don't blame yourself if your ideas are not 100% new, forced novelty could ruin the entire thing.
• Seek coherence, each rule must help the others to make sense.
• Run games in your mind, then search your rules for flaws and correct them.

A Technique for Producing Ideas

I'm quite busy recently but I'd really like to share with you this tiny book made of golden advices.

The knowledge I'll share with you know is easy to find for nearly five decades or if you prefer so, half a century.
Written by James Webb Young this book (A Technique for Producing Ideas) gives a simple method to find and use good ideas.

As I like to do it, let's go for a small personal summary of this technique.

The basis :

• Ideas are new combination of material.
• In order to help the birth of new combination, you need to build relationships between materials.

The technique :

1. Gathering and sorting raw materials
   First there is two different kind of material; general and specific. The general material is directly related to your personal interests; who you are and what you like. But the specific material is specifically matching with the subject you are searching an idea for.
   Then don't hesitate to classify and order your materials using any storage you prefer like notebook, computer... You can even try to sort them in different ways until you find the best organisation for your current subject. 
2. Focus your mind on your materials
   Now you can start to think hard about your materials and push your brain to the limit. Write down any piece of idea coming from this step.
   Also J. Webb Young advices us to do this step twice. In fact from his experience, the brain has a second wind so push harder when you think your done. Who knows what could came to your mind !?
3. Let your subconscious works for you
   That's as easy as doing anything you like : reading, watching a movie... or sleep. Above all you must stop thinking about your idea.
4. Eureka !
   Yes it should be as simple as that. The idea will brilliantly come to your mind when you're the less ready for it. Write it down as fast as you can !
5. Shape, grow and use your idea
   That the final stage; the stage during the one your idea will fought for life in this world; fighting through requested innovation, feasibility, budget, etc.

That's all, just five tiny steps.

Truly these points look like something everybody already know but don't really do.

An that's why this book is great since 1965. It remember you what to do, what you usually do; it prevents you from forgetting any steps in your process.

So which is the most important step of this method which most of us forget way too often ?

• Part 1 of course ! Gathering and sorting raw materials, is in fact the most overlooked part of the process.
  Knowing your subject and having other knowledges to mix it with is really important because ideas are new combinations !
  The less material you have, the less combinations you'll find, the less ideas you'll have.
• Part 5 is also a good answer. In fact a lot of ideas will never be revealed to the world. So don't be shy and give a try to your ideas !

Well I hope you'll try this method and give me some feedback.

Personally this technique helped me improving my way of finding ideas by rationalizing steps I did instinctively. Moreover I totally agree with the author, the first step is the toughest step and the most likely to be skipped.

About equipment in RPG

A few weeks ago I finished the Dragon Age : Origins extension Awakening. I enjoyed the trip, a bit less than Mass Effect 1 or 2 but it's not the subject of today's post.

During my journey through these games I felt something was missing. In fact empowering my character through outfits is an important part of the fun I get while playing an RPG. And more than that I like when gears help me to customize my avatar's aspect and to improve the way I like to play the game.

What I definitely didn't find with Dragon Age and Mass Effect equipement was :
- Empowerment
- Aspect customization
- Gameplay orientation
And above all this points : diversity and choices !

Now I'll try to analyze why.

Empowerment

Playing Dragon Age, the items I found wasn't very powerful.
As a result the pleasure to equip a new item was not really present. Moreover underpowered gears didn't give me the will to find better ones. And sadly the boost of power I should have when equipping a supposedly great piece of equipment from one of the most powerful boss was null.

In Mass Effect equipment was even more secondary.
I found only a dozen armor pieces. Weapons and upgrades was obtained via recipes; requiring resources and forcing me to play a repetitive mini-game on each planet I cross during the game. And aside from some damage upgrade or new weapons, the entire system wasn't very engaging and improvement was nearly imperceptible.

Aspect customization

I'll be short one this one, visual customization was very poor in Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Most of the gears had the same visual pattern declined with some very light variation. Clearly I didn't play to admire my avatar awesome outfits; particularly with Dragon Age Mage. On this precise example I remember myself finding only three different robe design.
To be fair, I want to congratulate the Mass Effect 2 colors customization feature which did a great job to palliate the lack of armor design styles.

Gameplay orientation

This point is the most important to me because it's not only related to Mass Effet or Dragon Age.
However the problem is huge both in Mass Effect and Dragon Age where equipment never appears helpful enough  anyway the game is played.

So I think we agree that having a lot of powerful gears with great visual style is useless without well designed statistics. In fact item statistics should help players to strengthen their choices and their way to play the game.

Now lets illustrates my point with some examples.

I'll start by introducing you to the "you can do everything" item breed : +10 Force + 10 Dexterity +10 Damage +10 Critical Chance +10 Dodge.
If you are a rogue you want it, if you are a warrior you want it, if you are scout you want it... only a kind of mage doesn't want it ! Good Swiss knife anyway, but what if I want the Rambo knife, without the useless stuffs ?

As I said, for me, good items should help the player making choices and improving the way he likes to play the game.
So instead of the previous items, let's make three gameplay oriented ones :
- +10 Dexterity +10 Critical Chance, for a fast and agressive character
- +10 Force +10 Damage, for an average melee oriented character
- +10 Dexterity +10 Dodge, for a quick and hard to catch character
And voila now you have three items instead of one, each of them helping the player to define his own game style. Moreover I could also compensate the lack of the other statistics to have this items even more appealing.

Of course, this is not perfect, and I'm not a fond of Critical Chance, Damage and Dodge kind of statistics because they should obviously be respectively calculated by Dexterity, Force and Dexterity.
Anyway that's far better than the elemental resistances statistics which make no sens in most RPG. They could be useless like encountered in Dragon Age or artificially used to create new needs for equipement in World of Warcraft.

What could have been done ?

- Empowerment : To give a great boost in power through equipment at some key moments through the game journey. The game would have been a bit easier from these moments, but tweaking enemies toughness to match this new power a bit later in the journey could have conclude the trick and give the player the will to find more powerful gears to feel powerful again.

- Aspect customization : I understand the cost behind more visual and aspect customization. Anyway there's a balance to find between cost and taking the power of identification through visual customization off the player's hands. So the solution seems obvious, strengthen outfit and weapons design style and create more of them.

- Gameplay orientation : To create more engaging gears that help specializing avatar the way talent trees do and to avoid the far too polyvalent items; this seems to be the easiest way to give equipment more impact on gameplay.


To conclude, I think that gears, outfits, equipement, etc, should be given more attention in modern RPG; in fact they are still a great part of the fun and pleasure the players await when playing them.