Today I just got the new copy of Games for Windows and the cover story is about a game called Demigod which as me extremely excited. The first exciting thing is that it’s from Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games, the guys who brought Supreme Commander which was pretty innovative. The most exciting part however is that it’s a game inspired by the mod for Warcraft 3 called Defense of the Ancients which is fantastic and highly addictive.
For those who haven’t played Defense of the Ancients, it is basically a mashup of RTS and RPG elements. You are one hero on a squad of up to 5 heros each played by a human player. You are also on a team fighting against another team, each team is sending legions of minion units out to battle on the field of war. You both assist your team and fight the other teams heroes and prevent them from assisting their team on to victory. It’s kinda hard to describe but is fantastically addictive and I’d really recommend trying it out if you have Warcraft 3.
Another interesting part is that Gas Powered Games is funding it all themselves and plan to self publish. They’re also very much into white boxing the gameplay to make sure it’s extremely fun before tacking on art resources and such. The article in Games for Windows gives a great read on it so I’d really recommend picking it up if you can.
I’ve been really stoked about Eye of Judgment since I heard about it and I still am now that it’s out. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Eye of Judgment is a collectible card game (CCG) for the Playstation 3 (or is it PLAYSTATION 3) that allows you to view 3D renderings of your cards monsters and units and battle against the computer or other players online. It uses the Playstation Eye peripheral to view what cards you’re playing on the board and register them into the game world that is a virtual representation of the board. They also sell booster decks of the cards that you can purchase in game shops and such to make different decks. Wow that sounds complicated when I write it out. Perhaps this cheesy video will help.
Sadly, I don’t yet have a PS3 myself but I’m sure I’ll acquire one soon and this game is certainly putting the pressure on me. First you must understand that I’m a huge CCG fan and was once (and probably will be again in the future) a rather hardcore Magic The Gathering player, so I think about CCG games a lot and they’ve intrigued me for a long time. I’ve even got a game design I did for an online one sitting around that I hope to make one day.
Anyway this game sounds pretty great but I have heard negative aspects of how the game design isn’t that deep and the decks that come with the game are pretty bland so perhaps it’s not quite living up to it’s potential but it is certainly innovative and I’ll applaud that.
The Eye of Judgment Card Hack
The game only recently came out and some ingenious players have already figured out that they can hack it to be able to get any card in the game. Basically they scan the cards into their computer and print them out. This shouldn’t work and it’s an obvious method that the developers would have thought of before hand, and they did. You see they made some special “magical?” ink that they used to print the cards that the camera was supposed to detect, apparently though this doesn’t work at all and a normal inkjet printer can reproduce the cards well enough for the camera to recognize them and you can basically use any card and as many as you want using this technique. There’s more info on the printed cards here. It also looks like you may not even have to go through all that much trouble.
Obviously many people will think this is cheating unfair and such but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute and explain why it’s not really that big of a deal. First of all any CCG designer worth his salt knows that your game has to be balanced under the assumption that all players will have unlimited access to your card base and therefore can (and will if it grants an advantage) play with the maximum number allowed of in their deck. The reason for this is because any hardcore fans of your game will go to any length to obtain exactly the cards they want for their deck and typically how difficult these are to obtain is irrelevant. This goes back to Magic and it’s limit of 4 of any one card in a deck, as I understand Eye of Judgment has a similar requirement, thus having all players have access to all the cards shouldn’t degrade from the entertainment and fun value of the game and will probably only put a hurt on the profit margins. Any big tournament level player of Magic typically doesn’t think about whether they have particular cards when considering what deck they want to play in an upcoming tournament.
Secondly, CCGs have a long tradition of proxying cards, proxying is the process which a player will take any mundane card write on it or otherwise mark it to indicate it actually represents some other card which they don’t actually own. This process originally necessitated because of the extremely rare power 9 cards and other rare cards in Magic the Gathering which can cost $1000+ each, obviously limiting them their accessibility to the greater base of players of the game and thus granting a somewhat unfair advantage to owners of these cards. Proxying Magic cards is a pretty standard practice these days and many tournaments even allow this practice for the older formats where the cards are much rarer, more expensive and hard for players to obtain because of the limited print runs of cards before the games popularity took off. Wizards of the Coast doesn’t allow proxying cards in any sanctioned tournaments however.
Now if you are considering playing Eye of Judgment online you must realize you will now be playing against players who have access to every possible card in the game in multiples. People will abuse this hack to gain an advantage because it is the nature of a player to take and use any advantage available to them, as Raph Koster tells us in Theory of Fun for Game Design. Now every player may not abuse this initially but some will, and since some will others who normally wouldn’t will be forced to abuse this hack to even the playing field. Eventually nearly every player will be abusing this and any new player to the game playing online must do likewise to keep up. This is a process that has occurred time and time again in multiplayer games and really society in general throughout history.
Ultimately the rules of the game change. No longer is it a game about collecting and skill begins to play a much larger role in the game in the long run since personal wealth and ability to acquire cards becomes a non-factor. What Magic has taught us though is that this isn’t really a bad thing and much fun can still be had when the game becomes a game of skill and less a game of chance, this is of course in theory as Eye of Judgment probably doesn’t have the depth and finesse that Magic has and ultimately the game design of Eye of Judgment and it’s ability to be a fun game will be the ultimate test.
It’s also possible that if they’re serious about this game they’ll figure out how to fix this with the next set or possibly even with some software update and the whole argument becomes a moot point until some fancier hacks are discovered. Either way this is an interesting story to watch.
If you are interested in CCG design then stick around I’ll certainly be discussing it more in the future. CCGs are one of my pet genres so I intend to come back to them quite a bit in future posts.
I’m super stoked about Fallout 3 and love game design so this is right up my alley and possibly yours. The Fallout guys have decided to hold a contest where you design a perk for the game and the best one will be chosen and put into the game. I’ll probably try to come up with a few myself as this is pretty exciting. You can find the contest page here and I’ve pasted more info below.
Celebrating 10 Years of Fallout!
10 years ago the original Fallout was released and forever changed role-playing games. Now is your chance to be a part of Fallout history. We’re giving you, the fans, a chance to design one of the perks for Fallout 3!
No, we aren’t going to tell you about any of the perks that are already in Fallout 3. First, that would spoil it, and second, we don’t want to color your ideas with anything we are, or aren’t doing. It’s a clean slate for you. Be creative.
Think of something in the spirit of Fallout. What would you really want your character to be able to do in the game? Don’t worry about any stat requirements or the level you would get it at. Just design a cool perk and we’ll fit it in where it could go.
Part of what make Perks great are the Vault Boy images that goes with them. You can choose to use one of the generic icons we’ve provided to go along with your Perk if you’re not artistically inclined (that won’t hurt your chances of winning, in case you’re wondering) or you can choose to upload a drawing, sketch, photo, or creation of your own design. Send in a photo of yourself in the appropriate pose, sketch it on a napkin and scan it in…whatever you want.
If you win, you’ll get your Perk in the game, your name in the game’s credits, AND your choice of the grand prize from the Prize Vault: either the PC or the Console flavor.
All entries must be in by 11:59 pm (Eastern time) on October 31, 2007. We’ll announce the winner of the contest, and all the other awardees, in November.
PC Grand Prize:
Your choice of an ATI or NVIDIA video card
Logitech G15 keyboard
Logitech G9 mouse
Logitech G51 Gaming Speakers
Vault Boy bobblehead
Vault Tec lunchbox
Fallout 3 t-shirt
Vault Boy decal
OR
Console Grand Prize:
Xbox 360 Pro
Logitech G51 Gaming Speakers
Vault Boy bobblehead
Vault Tec lunchbox
Fallout 3 t-shirt
Vault Boy decal
We’ll have plenty of prizes for runners-up and honorable mentions, and we’ll also pick from all the entries at random to give away some additional prizes just so everyone has a chance to win something. Prizes will include great stuff from our friends at NVIDIA, ATI, Logitech, and Microsoft, as well as Fallout schwag.
You can enter as often as you like, but you can only enter the same perk once, and you can only win once. All entries subject to the terms and conditions of the contest. Make sure you read them before you enter.
Good luck to everyone. We look forward to seeing your ideas.
Business Week has a great piece look at some basic fundamentals of game usability. They list 10 lessons which game designers need to know and should follow in their games. You can read the article here.
I think this is a fairly good list and is definitely something to keep in mind when designing your games. I can remember lots of times even I have just quit playing a game because of various usability problems where I otherwise probably would have continued playing.
The guys from Penny Arcade aren’t around this week and are having guests write their articles for them. Tycho from Penny Arcade ran into Raph Koster and posed a design challenge to him to come up with a MMO based around players building buildings, actually getting in there doing the wiring, plumbing the whole lot.
One thing Raph said that I really think is an important way of looking at games is this.
Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn’t deserving of the name. In an MMO, we nest games pretty deep, because some games are short-term and some are long-term. In something like WoW, the smallest games are things like “hit Heal on time.” Then you get ‘kill the foozle,” and above that “kill a hell of a lot of foozles” and above that “make yourself stronger by picking the right gear” and in some cases “make your guild stronger” and so on.
I think that is a very insightful way of looking at how to design games, as mini games within themselves. The whole article is worth a read because the MMO he comes up with does sound like it could be kinda fun even. He came up with it in only 3 hours too.
I think the idea of doing mini designs and then showing them off is kind of cool, maybe I’ll do those occasionally here. Through up rough sketches of game ideas for anyone to read and pick apart that may be fun
Also Raph is working on a new project called Metaplace which looks to be very interesting. It promises to enable the players to design and create their own MMOs.
Lord British (or General British as he likes to be called these days) has made his development team for Tabula Rasa write an essay about ethical parables within Tabula Rasa (essay quoted below.) Providing players with ethical dilemmas has always been a big thing for Garriot in his Ultima games and I think it’s a very interesting topic for game makers to explore. Movies have been exploring different persona’s ethics for a long time and it’s good when games start looking within the human psyche as well.
Still i can’t help but think that when the difference between good and evil means the difference between me getting that +4 Longsword of Death Dealing I need rather than some crappy +2 Slingshot of Monkey Torturing I may have other things swaying me to make a particular choice other than morality.
Ethical Parables in Tabula Rasa
Players of most massively multiplayer online role-playing games today usually aren’t faced with any great variety of missions that really impact your character or how you play. The most you’re faced with is what kind of reward you’ll get or, at most, which of the two factions you’ll support against the other. It doesn’t really have any effect on you in the grand scheme of things and you’ll probably forget about the whole thing in a month or so. Instead of that static, boring type of storytelling, we wanted to create a more immersive story with Tabula Rasa, one that the players could interact with, where their actions could have long reaching consequences. We call this form of story-telling interaction the ethical parable and it is one of the hallmarks of a Richard Garriott game.
Ethical and moral dilemmas are something we definitely wanted to incorporate into the design of Tabula Rasa from the very start. The entire goal is to give you pause and allow you to think about the choices that they make in order to accomplish a mission. This way, at times, you will not be limited to one single path but may have multiple paths. We want you to think about the larger story and how your actions can affect this story down the road. Now you have the ability to play the game the way you want to play it. This in essence is the parable–a type of story that allows you to explore moral lessons or decisions.
We won’t be throwing these ethical parables at the players in every mission, but we definitely want players to get a taste for them early on in the game. We’ve placed a few on, the first major landmass that players will encounter in Tabula Rasa. One of these early missions involves the delivery of pharmaceuticals to soldiers on the front lines. While the supply commander, a rather straight-laced and stand-up kind of individual, would rather these pharmaceuticals be distributed to the soldiers in a formal, organized system, there’s a man who stole a whole bunch and has been selling them to the soldiers for a nice profit. Your decision to either turn in the thief, or help him distribute the stolen goods, not only affects the mission outcome but determines how the NPC soldiers will interact with you from then on.
Another mission of note is for players with levels in the mid-teens. As you progress though the game and are redeployed to Foreas Base, you’re told that the AFS has a Bane prisoner who is currently undergoing interrogation. This will start a chain of missions as the Bane prisoner reveals more and more information, allowing you to attack the local Bane base, kill a key Bane soldier, deal with some traitors, and possibly even defend the prison from attack.
At the end of this mission chain, you’re now left with the choice of what to do with the prisoner. On one hand, he’s one of the evil Bane, who wiped out most of humanity and forced people like yourself to fight for survival on a few scattered alien worlds. It doesn’t deserve to live… or does it? As a mere soldier, the Bane was just doing what it was supposed to do, no more and no less, and cannot really be held responsible for what the leadership of the Bane did to Earth. What would be the harm in letting him live, and more importantly, what more could you learn from him? If you were a prisoner, wouldn’t you want to be treated humanely, instead of being executed for telling you what you wanted to know?
These are a couple of examples of the parables we will present in Tabula Rasa. Some of them will have little or no long-term impact, and others may influence the way you experience the game. We want to give you the choice to play the game the way you want to, without hemming you into one specific path. This way, we’ve created a better, richer, more immersive game experience for you to enjoy.
. Now every player may not abuse this initially but some will, and since some will others who normally wouldn’t will be forced to abuse this hack to even the playing field. Eventually nearly every player will be abusing this and any new player to the game playing online must do likewise to keep up. This is a process that has occurred time and time again in multiplayer games and really society in general throughout history.
