Dota 2 in Depth: Drafting

Since I still haven't managed to complete any new games (Xenoblade is rather lenghty!), I want to write more about Dota 2. For my topic I have chosen different drafting (hero selection) modes that are currently available in the game. I have chosen this topic primarily because hero drafting is one of the most entertaining phases of the game to watch. The irony here being that not much happens on-screen during drafting. Nevertheless, it was indeed drafting that sparked my interest in Dota. The most interesting drafting mode by far is the one that is used in tournaments, Captains Mode. A couple of other modes are however noteworthy as well.

1. Captains Mode

This mode is the de facto tournament mode in MOBAs in general. The drafting is divided into four phases: first bans, first picks, second bans and second picks. The name of the mode comes from the fact that it is the team captain that does all hero bans and picks for their team. In the first phase, a total of four heroes are banned. This banning phase could be called a balancing act in a sense because usually the heroes that are currently considered most useful get banned. These bans tend to give away very little information, and they are fairly standard. There is typically a pool of less than ten heroes that get banned in this stage. These bans are therefore the most dependent on the contemporary meta game. Some additional information does go into this process though: match history. Knowing what heroes the enemy team is particularly strong with generally allows a captain to make the most out of their first bans.

This first ban phase is interesting because it can give off the impression that the game is imbalanced in the sense that some heroes are simply better than others. This does ring true but one thing to consider here is what we discussed last time. Sometimes the meta game shifts because of balance patches that buff some heroes and nerf others, but they also shift simply because teams come up with new ways to use heroes. Besides, banning four heroes out of the pool does have one huge advantage: it prevents the game from becoming too repetitive. From the captain's point of view, the first bans also ask a very important question: "which two heroes we are the least prepared to deal with?" Answering this question does require some general idea of what kind of strategy the team is prepared to go for. The team that picks first also has an advantage here because they can leave two nasty heroes into the pool and force the opposing team to give them one of those heroes while banning the other.

After four heroes have been ejected from the pool, teams pick their first three heroes. The process has four steps: 1) the first team picks a hero; 2) the opposing team picks two heroes; 3) the first team picks two heroes; and 4) the opposing team picks a hero. This is the phase where teams generally pick heroes that afford a wide variety of strategies because giving away too much information at this point can be disastrous. Just like first bans, these first picks are fairly standard in competitive play. It can be tricky to not give away too much information here, because after these picks, three out of five heroes in a team have been picked. The last picks in this phase tend to be more interesting than the first ones. This is where teams have to start playing some of their cards and they also have more information. There are a lot of things to consider here. There's generally 5 roles in a team, and although some heroes can comfortable fit into more than one, this is often where three roles will be filled.

That is why the second ban phase is much more context sensitive than the first one. Both teams get to ban three more heroes and the goal of the captains here is to get rid of heroes that would be the best fit for the opposing team's lineup. This asks for quite a bit of strategy sense because now is the time where a captain really needs to have a very solid idea of what kind of strategies both teams are going for. This in turn requires pretty deep understanding of every single hero in the game. Although a lot of the same heroes do show up in matches, some really wild picks have been also witnessed in tournament games. The three bans are what make this possible: the most obvious best choices are gone, so a captain has to fill their last two slots with heroes that are not the most optimal choices. This is interesting design because taking away heroes from the pool actually makes the effective pool larger.

By the time teams get to the last picking phase, a total of 16 heroes have left the pool due to being banned or picked. The last picks are done in 1-2-1-2 order, and here the team that picks last has the advantage, counterbalancing the first picker advantage from earlier. In a sense they can counter both of the first team's last picks because the last two picks need to fill different roles. The countering ability of the first team is weaker because their very last pick needs to both fulfill a role and at the same time counter the previous pick (if necessary). Of course, the very last pick of the second team cannot be countered at all. This makes it the only pick in the entire process that is done with complete information available to the picker. If you have played any decent strategy games, the advantage given by complete information in decision making should be pretty obvious.

In a way the captains mode might have risen out of necessity. It is simply not possible to completely balance a game like Dota 2 without making it dull. The captains mode is a clever design that prevents the game from becoming too stagnant. Bans force captains to look for unexpected solutions, and this way the meta game slowly changes. I think there is something more interesting going on here though. I think that Dota 2 is so interesting because of its imbalance. The captains mode is not a monkey patch to fix an imbalanced game - it's a mode that capitalizes on the imbalance as an advantage. The myriad of ways heroes interact with each other makes the hero pool a highly interconnected structure. Taking out even a single hero from the pool can massively impact the usefulness of another hero. Therefore, although the total number of bans sounds quite small, their impact on strategy is huge.

2. Random Draft

This mode is the other mode that can be considered almost tournament worthy. Like captains mode, this one also reduces the hero pool size, forcing teams to pick alternate solutions. As a measure, random draft is far more drastic: only 22 heroes from the entire game are made available. This limitation is naturally even better at preventing stagnancy. The biggest reason this mode is not used in tournaments is its random nature. The draft can be rather lopsided, sometimes giving a huge advantage to the team that gets the first pick. This is especially true if there is only one good hero for one role in the entire selection. What this mode is good for however is playing with random internet strangers. Captains mode is tricky because one player makes all the decisions and poor communication can lead to very disastrous picks (such as four heroes that no one knows how to play).

Random draft on the other hand does two things that make it suitable for quite serious play on public servers: it forces a pick order which makes counter picking a more strutcured activity than the chaos that is all pick. Second, it restricts the hero pool so drastically that every player in a team needs to carefully consider their choices against their skills. It also acts as a better catalyst for communication, because after the first picks a clearer image of available strategies starts to form in a way that everyone can perceive them. Furthermore, the most popular heroes often don't all make it into the pool. This creates some much needed variety. Seeing certain heroes come up in every other game does get a bit old eventually. Of course you can get very unlucky, and have none of the heroes you actually know come up. This is the disadvantage of random draft. However, I do consider it the best mode for playing with random internet strangers. The only thing it's not good for is practicing a particular hero, because the odds of them actually being available are quite small.

3. Least Played

This mode is not mentioned because of its tournament worthiness, but because of its ability to encourage people to practice new heroes. The system is quite simple. Every player has their 40 most played heroes banned (but only heroes that the player has three or more wins with can get banned, so effectively this can be less than 40). What this means is that every player in the game is playing with a hero they are just not very good with. It gives players a friendlier environment to get the hang of new heroes and still allow them to play against other people instead of bots. Everyone knows that everyone else is new to their hero so people generally wont get flamed for not knowing how to play their hero (there are some asshat people who choose to flame in this mode, but they are very rare). It is the mode where players are allowed to screw up because the punishment for mistakes is generally lower (because the opponents don't know their heroes very well either).

I like this mode because it allows me to play some heroes I would not even dream of trying out in any other mode. I also like the fact that people care much less about winning or losing in this mode. Furthermore, most players have played the most popular heroes too much to get them in this mode, so hero picks tend to have a lot more variety than in most other modes. The matches can also get pretty weird in this mode, far more often than in any other mode. It is entertaining, more relaxed and even a source of new ideas. Currently my biggest lament is that this mode is not nearly as popular as it was after its launch, It often takes up to five times more time to find a least played match (compared to all pick).

Conclusion

Different drafting systems in general are an interesting topic, and they have been used quite effectively in Dota 2 to improve the game. What is really interesting about drafting in Dota 2 is its impact. Like I said, it is the most exciting part of a match between two professional teams. Seeing how it plays out is of course entertaining too, but the draft is where it is really easy to get absorbed. As the captains are doing their job, couch strategists can in a sense take part in the process by trying to guess what is going on in those great minds. The most fun of course is discussing the draft with other players who are watching the match. Another important way in which drafting affects the game is its impact on how games with random internet strangers roll out. The game experience is always affected by the draft mode. It allows Dota 2 to be played in more than one mindset.

For improving one's play with a given hero, there is all pick; for the best team play experience, there is random draft; and for the most relaxing gaming experience, there is least played. Captains mode is there for those moments when a full team gets together to really play some hardcore Dota. That is how I roll anyway. There are yet other modes in the game but they are less noteworthy.

Of Pop Music and Voice Acting

This post is rather random and not directly related to games. There is a link to voice acting though. Particularly in the JRPG genre, original voice acting has been largely preferred by fans because of its higher (perceived?) quality. A more peculiar preference in the past few years has been the preference of Japanese and later Korean pop music to American or European counterparts. Fundamentally they are not that different (or using the cynical expression: same shit, different package). I believe there are two sets of reasons why such a preference might be: the rational reasons - the ones we tell ourselves - and the irrational ones - the ones that might be the actual root cause of the preference. This is a personal reflection, but is based on my reading of psychology so it applies more generally.

1. Rational reasons

We like to think we know the reasons we are doing stuff. If questioned, we can muster up an explanation for any preference we might have. In this example, we are looking at reasons I have come up with while trying to explain why, despite being something of a musical elitist, I like certain Asian pop groups. My go-to explanation is that one of the most common downfalls of pop music is its shallowness. This is particularly evident in lyrics. My understanding of Japanese is weak at best (I have studied for two years and later proceeded to happily forget most of it) and my understanding of Korean is non-existent. The logical conclusion then is to attribute the preference of Asian pop music to language. Since I have no idea what they are saying, I need not facepalm to the lyrics. I can even be very aware of the general theme of the song, but not hearing the words truly seems like a blessing.

However, you don't find me listening to, say, Spanish or French pop music. Another theory also involves language. More precisely, the way it sounds. Japanese and Korean sound quite different than most European languages. Japanese at least is a language with very short syllables and heavy on the use of consonants. It certainly gives singing its own flavor. The flow of voice is indeed different. This theory is equally likely to not hold. This is actually where I run out of theories that are in any way related to the music itself. The rest go into the irrational category, and are linked to entirely other factors. The reason a lot of people prefer Japanese voice acting in Japanese games is more founded on reality though: some years back, the translations were indeed done with a shoelace budget and the (lack of) acting was quite simply horrible. Lately though I have heard some quite convincing translations, even some that I prefer over the originals (FFXIII).

2. Irrational reasons

The reasons given in the previous section are prime examples of rationalizing behavior. Humans do this to overcome discomfort that arises from cognitive dissonance. In my case, the fact that - against my general taste in music - I find some pop groups to be acceptable or even good creates dissonance. In this case the conflict arises from my attitude ("pop music is commercialized shit for the masses") and my liking of some pop groups (that are likely more commercialized). According to theory, there are a few ways to reduce the discomfort caused by this conflict. One is to fix my attitude, another is to refuse liking said groups and the third way is to find reasons why there are exceptions to the rule (i.e. this doesn't count because...). However there needs to be some explanation why I have come to appreciate these groups in particular and not other groups.

The Western culture is focused on the individual - we prefer to be distinguished from our peers. Therefore liking something that is exotic compared to the norm can be appealing. Such preferences can also be used to identify oneself as belonging to a particular subculture. There was this whole big thing among young teenage girls in Finland some years following the wake of rising popularity of anime and manga. Japanese visual style rock bands became very popular among this subculture, or more like, it created its own subculture with a certain fashion style. Although no such strong culture around Asian pop music exists in Finland, it is indeed more popular in my corner of the internet. However it is less of a group thing and more of a continuous exposure thing. My exposure to Asian pop music is indeed several magnitudes higher than my exposure to Western pop music for instance.

Continued exposure is also a possible answer to why pop music in video games sounds better - even when heard outside its context - than other pop music. Of course I can construct theories that it is indeed somehow fundamentally different, but chances are I prefer it because I have been exposed to it while playing the game (I am looking at you, Persona). The same goes for anime opener songs - which were indeed the first instances of Asian pop music I deemed acceptable. Continued exposure to discussion about Asian pop music can be linked to the availability bias: it is the only kind of pop music that is discussed, so there must be something special about it. This statement is very unlikely to be true in objective terms but alas, we function based on our very subjective perception of the world.

Western pop music is less available in this sense because there is nothing really prodding me to find good artists. Furthermore, it is quite possible that my attitude has not really changed - there is only the loophole exception for Asian pop music. However it may also be that comparison is in a way disjointed such that Asian pop music gets assessed in a different frame of reference than its Western counterpart. This is actually something that might explain why Japanese voice acting sounds better in games: in our Western society our primary source of Japanese voice has been anime, not movies so the reference point for voice acting quality is in fact much closer. On the other hand we are very used to hearing the English language in movies where acting is typically done with much higher budgets. The low budget voice acting in translations seems therefore especially weak in comparison.

For music this would mean that Asian pop music gets in fact compared to Asian music in general (which I do not listen to all that much) instead of Western music (which I listen a lot to). This reference point alienation is furthered by the fact that both J and K pop have been distinguished into their own genres. Although the usefulness of music genres can be argued, I would be massive amounts of not surprised if they have been found to affect the way we think about music. The thought "I want to listen to jpop" immediately excludes pop originating from any other country. Thinking is wacky that way.

Conclusion

This post belongs to the series "just blogging (for no apparent reason)" and is not all that much concerned with games. However, music preferences and game preferences naturally go hand-in-hand. Is there anything here a marketing person wouldn't know? Likely not, but as a thought experiment it was fun. If you find this stuff interesting, you might want to check topics like cognitive dissonance and cognitive biases. There's a lot of cool stuff to read there. You might even find something to use in either your game or its marketing.

Dota 2 (Overview)

OK. So my friend - who has been going on and on about Dota 2 ever since its release - decided to do me a "favor" by giving me a beta access key. Suddenly the pace at which my "games to play" used to get shorter came to a near-halt. Instead my Steam profile tells me that during the past three months, I have played Dota 2 for something like 400 hours. This outcome was not exactly unpredictable; there is a very good reason I have limited myself to single player games for a very long time (the occasional fighting game aside). As you might have guessed, I get engrossed in my games a lot. This is a good trait for a game designer to be sure but it is also a very dangerous trait. It's easy enough to control with single player games because they ultimately end. Either I reach the end, or I get all the achievements - it doesn't matter which, there is always a point where I can put the game away and mark it as "done". The problem with multiplayer games is that they don't really have an endpoint.

In this article I have decided to ramble about random things that pop into my mind. Mostly about Dota 2. I am not going to explain the MOBA concept. Go play one or read a Wiki article. This article is more overview-y. I might do some more detailed pieces about game mechanics. Maybe.

1. Studying as a way to play

I'm a scholar type gamer. Let's face it: my execution sucks. I have never been able to do the really tricky things in fighters even though I have played them for quite a long time and have been somewhat successful on a national level. My reaction time and my manual dexterity are just not up to the task. That is why I play a lot of slow-paced or turn-based games where the advantage lies in knowledge and cunning. I used to be a regular GameFAQs junkie, even reading guides that had no real relevance to my own playing. I wanted to know how others play the games I have just completed; I also wanted to know stuff that the game failed to reveal to me. I used to write guides myself too. I would discuss this stuff with anyone willing to participate. I still do. For a scholar gamer, playing the game is just half of the fun. If I look at my all-time favorite games, they are all games that inspire studying.

Being an extremely complex game, Dota 2 demands study. At first the huge amount of information is just overwhelming. At the time of writing there are almost a hundred heroes in the game, each with their unique abilities and varying attributes. On top of that there's even more items, a lot of them with their own distinct purpose. Sorting all this out takes time and experience, but even more so, it requires studying. I was at about 300 games when I could finally tell what every hero and item in the game can do from memory. I still check details almost daily. But it is not the amount of information that makes studying Dota 2 so compelling. The real complexity is in the way all this information interacts. There are five heroes on each side of a match, and every other hero in the game affects how you should play yours. The beauty of this is that the complexity here is so immense that there is no guide you can read that could cover your situation.

Unlike MMORPG's that have their loathed cookie-cutter builds, these do not largely exist in Dota 2. Therefore even a rather new player like myself is compelled to theory-craft. The fluid nature of Dota 2 can be witnessed by following tournament and league matches between professional teams. The list of most played heroes is living constantly, and new surprising lineups come up all the time. Teams figure out entirely new ways to play some heroes and suddenly those heroes are the new thing. Because everything is so situational, there are basically endless possibilities for a scholar gamer to improve their game simply by studying, theory-crafting and experimenting. When watching pro matches, I find myself constantly trying to figure out why they did what they just did (e.g. why did they pick hero X and not Y).

Because of this constant evolution, most written information is not up to date. It is often useful, but you can usually theory-craft beyond it. Likewise, the most current information comes from watching tournament and league matches, but it is often situational; again with the theory-crafting. The beauty of all this of course that it really pays off. You can easily tell when players have only played the game and never bothered to study it. They go for their standard builds and have very little concern for overall strategy. They choose their heroes based on what they want to play without paying any attention to picks made by other players. They fail to grasp when they have a massive disadvantage in a particular matchup. They even struggle with very basic concepts. Any player in the know will immediately take advantage of this. Although Dota 2 has some degree of technical skill, it is easy to outplay opponents with pure strategy.

It is the studying aspect that really keeps me interested in Dota 2. It also is linked to enjoyability of the game.

2. Goals of playing

Enjoying the studying has a very strong psychological background. The brain is simply wired to reward learning, and Dota 2 is excellent at showing results. At least my experienced rate of improvement has been very high. Reality may or may not agree, but it doesn't really matter to the brain. Another psychological concept that I have experienced is the difference in orientation. On the very highest level of orientation, there are two modes to do things: task-oriented and ego-oriented. The former happens whenever I play with a practice mindset, e.g. learning a new hero, practicing to use a certain skill, trying out a new build or figuring out a counter to a hero I lose a lot to.The latter happens whenever I get too obsessed about my own performance scores or winrates. I am most vulnerable to this when I'm "just playing" with no real goal. Let's just say that when playing a game like Dota 2 you should never ever play for no reason.

Being task-oriented means paying attention to the thing that you have set out to do and simply getting better at it. Basically this means that whatever happens, you will never be disappointed with the outcome. Either you have realized a new flaw or - better scenario - witnessed some clear improvement. Note that this is not the same as playing with "just do your best" mentality. Whatever you are doing should still be aimed ultimately at winning the game. You just shouldn't be obsessed about the outcome: this will only make you cranky and, most importantly, play worse. Whenever someone gest a rage fit in the game, they are very likely playing with an ego-orientation. When you are ego-oriented towards a task, your sense of self-worth hinges on the outcome of the activity. This makes you likely to take a loss personally and blame others in your team for playing poorly.

I have found it really useful to always ask myself "what will I get out of playing this match". It is really easy to become ego-involved in the game if you are "just playing" it. This does a lot to explain the bad reputation of MOBA communities in general (they are considered largely not friendly towards new players; I'll get back to this). Always practice something, and you will always get something out of every game. Although I will very likely never be good enough to play in a serious team (I am playing the "I'm too old for this shit" card here), I nevertheless try to practice towards the goal. Playing occasional matches with four friends also boosts motivation considerably because that is when all your knowledge and skill is really put to use. In public games with random team mates the unwillingness of others to cooperate often results in some weird ways to play the game that are not really viable in real team vs team matches. When it is you and four of your firends you get to practice the most important aspect of the game: effective teamwork.

3. About the players...

What you usually hear about MOBA games is that they are hard games to learn and while you are learning, everyone will cosntantly tell you exactly how much you suck. I also went into the game in a "brace for impact" mode but it turns out this is largely a dated stereotype. True, players do rage from time to time but it is in no way as common as it could seem from the talk. As we just speculated, this raging could happen largely because a lot of players are rather ego-oriented about the entire thing. Another problem with ego-oriented players is that they tend to be rather ignorant too. I think it is essential to make a clear distinction between two types of "bad" players: inexperienced and ignorant players. Although I do not openly flame people, I am not above getting really annoyed at one of these groups: the ignorant players.

I have no complaints about playing with inexperienced players who are willing to learn and communicate. Even if we directly lose the game because of an inexperienced player, there is no reason to rage at them really. If they are someone I know I usually point out later how they can improve their game. I will take an inexperienced communicating player over an experienced ignorant one any day. I don't even rage at ignorant players unless they start raging at either me or another team mate. Well, I don't rage really, just snark at obvious flaws in their play. Still it's not constructive criticism, just a snide remark that their own play wasn't particularly shining either. But I do rage about ignorant players, like right now in this blog. There used to be this joke about how our game design study group gathered weekly to rant about bad players. Let's just face it: I don't like ignorant players in any game. Not very adult of me, but whatever.

I find it impossible to fathom how some people can play a game for hundreds of hours without giving a shit about even the most basic concepts. To me it seems like a big waste because they are not improving at all. Why play a game if you are doomed to suck? Even worse, they don't even realize how bad they are playing. Dota 2 is tricky that way. If you don't stop to think, it is easy to find a lot of explanations how losing the game was not your fault. Your team mates can be noobs, the opposing team has OP (overpowered) heroes etc. At least there is no randomness in this game to blame (there is a clever trick, I might cover it in another post). The problem of course is that when players fail to notice how they failed, they really cannot improve either. It is very hard to admit failure for players who are ego-oriented, because admitting failure hurts their self-esteem.

This is usually when I get told "but we are having fun". To this my response is to find someone else to play with. Still, this casual attitude is more understandable than the attitude of the most obnoxious players. In Dota 2 these are largely ignorant players who think they are good in the game, and their primary reason for playing is to "pwn" (get a lot of kills). Whereas a casual player will just shrug at a loss, this obnoxious type will get on with the raging. Obviously they are not taking the game casually, but they also show no interest in actually trying to improve their game. This is what truly perplexes me. To me it seems like being stuck in an infinite loop of un-fun where over 50% of the matches you play will suck (because you lose). I guess to each his own, but judging by my own ego-oriented streaks, the un-fun part really rings true. There are also the occasional trolls, who I have equal difficulty understanding.

One tricky thing about team-based games is that the development of an individual player's matchmaking rating is always to some degree dependent on their team mates. This is particularly true in Dota 2 because a bad teammate not only fails to contribute anything, they actually hurt the team because enemies get experience and gold for killing them. Although statistically the chance of getting bad teams is equal to getting decent teams, games that are lost in hero selection are not very couraging (it is quite possible to pick a lineup that has no chance at all). Another problem with the matchmaking system is that a lot of matches are rather lopsided. Either your team loses so badly nothing you do can affect the outcome, or your team steamrolls over the opponent with no challenge at all. Both types of games are rather bland. Overall this is a problem that cannot be really avoided when matchmaking among so many players.

4. The hidden lore

What makes Dota 2 hard is that the game is not exactly what it seems like on the surface. Or, rather, it is about many more things than it might initially seem. A very simplistic initial impression might be something like this: you get to choose a hero, then you proceed to farm levels and items to become a killing machine, then you take your enemies out. This is not exactly false, but it is definitely not true either. Let's just walk through over game phases to get some insight into what is not immediately apparent from playing the game.

Hero selection is the very first thing to do in a game. The most commonly played mode is All Pick, where every player gets to freely choose whatever hero they desire (exception: the same hero cannot be picked twice). So you just choose a hero you like and everything is go, right? Well, obviously, no. If everyone does this, it is entirely up to chance whether the lineup makes any sense at all. In truth, every pick should serve some purpose. For instance, there is only limited amount of farm available in the course of the game. If everyone wants an equal share of the farm, no one will come out strong. The problem in picking heroes in public games is that picking a really effective lineup requires communication before anyone picks anything. Why? Let's take a look.

Heroes are divided into several roles. Most importantly, there are more roles than there are players in the team. This means all roles will not be covered. As it should be, most heroes are at their best when played as part of particular strategy. Another important variable about heroes is their time frame. Put simply, this indicates which phase of the game that hero will be the most powerful at. This has very serious implications on overall strategy: a team consisting of mid-game heroes has to play aggressively to secure victory before their heroes run out of potency. There is also another role system, the 1-5 roles. The number means farm priority: role 1 gets majority of the farm, while role 5 gets practically nothing. While this may sound bad for the role 5 player, what it really means that a team should always pick heroes that do not need farm.

On top of all this, counter-picking needs to be considered too. You also need to consider lanes: these are positions that the heroes take at the early stages of the game. Not all heroes are suitable for all lanes so that's another thing that needs to be considered. The trickiest heroes in this sense are those that absolutely need to get into a given lane. If one of those is already on the team, picking another is simply stupid. In a sense All Pick is a stupid mode because there is no forced pick order and, theoretically, the team that picks last has the advantage of seeing what their opponents are going to play. This doesn't really show though, because in public games picking resembles a rather unstructured random process. I highly dislike players who wait and wait before picking and then make some really dumb pick that has no synergy with the rest of the team. Whereas if they had actually picked first, the rest of the team could have reacted to the pick.

So we are not even in the game yet and already there have been a lot of ways to screw up. Welcome to Dota 2. Laning is the next phase. This is a relatively static phase in the game where teams face each other in the game's three lanes, usually 1-2 heroes per lane. It is important to consider who goes where, as we just discussed. Laning two heroes who need farm together for instance is a bad idea, because they will be stealing from each other. Heroes who need farm should instead always lane with heroes who don't. Another thing that can go wrong in the early game is the purchase of starting items. There are a few items that help the entire team, but does not buff the hero who buys them. As you might have guessed, no one really wants to buy these. Someone usually buys the courier, because the little critter is criticial (otherwise heroes would need to run back to base to buy stuff).

There are also wards. They sound rather unimpressive: all they do is sit in a position where you put them and provide vision of the area. The importance of vision seems to be one of the hardest concepts for many players to grasp. Another type of ward is used to reveal wards placed by the other team; they also reveal invisible units in their vicinity. If there are heroes who use invisibility then these wards may get bought, but the more important, vision granting ones often go unbought. It is actually somewhat hard to truly realize the importance of vision at first. I bought wards because my friend told me that it is a thing I should do when playing a support hero. But it really took me quite some time to actually see why wards are important. The importance of vision in a game that features a fog of war may not be shocking news to strategy game folks but somehow it is quite hard to grasp in Dota 2.

But here is the thing: if you have no vision of where the enemy is moving, the only sensible thing is to assume that they are coming to kill you right now. If you don't assume this, you have no way to prepare for it and you die. Preparing for it usually means having to retreat from your farm and do nothing. Both options are really bad. Vision also works the other way around. There is no way to go and kill a "lone" enemy hero if you cannot be sure that his four friends are not hiding nearby (does not prevent people from trying - they usually die). But as soon as you see where they actually are - boom, dead enemy hero. Overall, the fact that you "saved" money by not buying wards is not much of a consolation when the enemy team can just roam freely all over the map killing whoever they want and there is nothing you can do about it. The problem with buying wards is that it should always be done by heroes who don't need farm. If they don't do it, the team is basically screwed because either they go without vision or someone who really needs money has to spend it on wards.

The game still hasn't even started and there are yet more ways that we can have screwed up. Fun times. The next opportunity to screp up consists roughly of the first ten minutes into the game. This is called the laning phase, and it involves killing a lot of creeps (small squads of AI controlled units that march along the lanes to fight enemy creeps). The mind-boggling thing about creeps in the laning phase is that you do not want to kill the enemy creeps as quickly as possible. No matter who makes the kill, everyone in range will get their share of the experience, but the money - the actual farm - goes to however got in the hit that killed the creep. So there is no benefit in killing the creeps quickly. Instead, it hurts your team a lot. There are towers in the lane, and in the early game these things are deadly to heroes. The closer you are to your own tower the better. The lane gets pushed or pulled based on whose creeps die faster, so in fact you want your own creeps to die faster. You even want to finish them off yourself to deny farm from the enemy.

This logic is kind of counter-intuitive, so I get it that not all players grasp it. However constantly attacking the lane creeps is way too common. Yes the whole concept is rather mind-boggling but it's the very basics of the game. Yet it is one of the most common screw-ups (on my skill level). Another thing that has to be kept in mind during laning is: who gets farm and, more importantly, who does not. It is not enough to secure farm for the team; farm needs to be secured for the heroes who actually need it, and at the same time should be denied from enemy heroes who need it. To put it simply, heroes have different bang-for-buck factors. So by taking farm from a hero who needs it more, you are effectively stealing from your own team. It is not as simple as "I get money, we get money". This again is very hard for some players to grasp.

There are several obscure concepts in the early phase of the game too. Fortunately it does get more intuitive towards the end. Not easy, but more intuitive. As we discussed, the team should have some idea when they are at their strongest. If the lineup is heavily early game focused, then they need to start pushing - attacking enemy structures - early. A late game lineup on the other hand will want to keep their structures up while their key hero is farming. A typical late game carry needs to farm 30 or even 40 minutes to become really effective. Basically this means the rest of the team needs to be able to fight one man down. Involving the late game carry in too many fights is risky because they can die and also because they lose precious farming time. They are typically quite useless early on too and will be the focus of enemy aggression.

All this requires quite a bit of knowledge of all the heroes in the game. Another thing the game requires is carefulness, but not too much of it. Because of the way hero respawn mechanics work, dying late in the game causes a hero to be out of the game for a very substantial amount of time. If someone dies solo in the endgame, the rest of the team has to fight 4 versus 5, and if they lose that fight it is usually game over regardless of how the game has been going until that point. Although some people criticize the game because it feels like the outcome is often decided early, this is not accurate exactly because of the way the endgame plays out. Even a great start can be wasted by not realizing the time frame where that advantage is useful, or by stupid deaths in the end game.

The game also has its share of obscure information and exceptions to rules (much like the English language). However this has gone on for quite a bit so let's leave something for another time.

Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons for me to like Dota 2. As far as competitive games go, it is one of the few I can actually play because it does not require too much execution. It also goes very well with my study-heavy attitude towards games because not only is there a lot to study, there is also a lot of room for theory-crafting. What I really like about the game is its context-dependency; basically the answer to most questions about the game start with "well, it depends". Players need to use their own brains to figure out what they should do. Or at least one player needs to, if there is very good team communication. However because the team captain also has to mind his own play, it is far more optimal if all players have a good grasp of what they are supposed to be doing.

It is a game I actually don't recommend if you are not willing to put a lot of time and effort into it. Although the chance of getting yelled at in the beginner level has diminished quite a bit, going into the game with no research is going to be a very confusing experience, involving a lot of dying. The game doesn't have any built-in tutorial because it is still in beta (which it has been for what, two or more years?), but players have written an assortment of guides for understanding the basic concepts and also hero-specific guides (usefulness can vary). If you have the willingness to put yourself into the game, then I think Dota 2 is a really rewarding game. Just keep what I said about playing attitude in mind.

Dragon's Dogma

This game was hyped in some circles quite a bit last year. A Japanese take on Skyrim was one description I remember, another compared it to Dark Souls in some aspects. So, truly, what is there not to get interested in? Well, tbh, the Skyrim part; open world RPGs are not my thing. In a sense the game is a digitalization of old schoold Dungeons & Dragons adventures. A party of four against ever an increasing threat of monsters. Monsters that have escaped from the pages of a D&D manual. With all the awesome games that came out last Autumn, this one did have to wait its turn until Christmas holidays. Nevertheless I truly expected to got into this. Turns out I didn't finish Dragon's Dogma during the holidays, largely because Dota 2 happened, but also because the game has its share of faults.

1. Pawns all around

The biggest distinguishing factor in Dragon's Dogma is its pawn system. It is an interesting concept indeed. At the start of the game, the player creates their own character and also their own pawn. In a sense, the pawn is even more important. Pawns can be summoned by other players to complete their party of 4 characters. This means it is not your main hero but your pawn that represents you in the community. This system sounds intriguing on paper and also raises questions like "can they balance it?". There is no hard limit for pawns that can be summoned, so theoretically you could summon a pawn way ahead of your main hero in levels. However, there is a cost that increases the further ahead a pawn is, so practically you are limited to pawns that are a few levels ahead. Equipment is not a factor in this cost though, which creates a major imbalance: a low level pawn with god-like equipment destroys everything.

A bigger fault with the pawn system is that pawns are by design void of personality. They have their collection of skills, their equipment and appearance (largely dictated by equipment) but that is more or less that. You may instruct your pawn to behave in certain ways, but there is no way to grant them any sort of personality. There is a large bunch of lines in the game that pawns can say, but they all say the same things albeit with a different voice. It is not much of banter unfortunately and gets rather repetitive. Granted it is clear that lack of personality is the intention and the game does not put much focus on character driven drama anyway. The emphasis is on survival in dungeons and the primary purpose of the pawn system is to create a game mechanic around forming a party that can tackle different obstacles. In reality the only reason I ever changed pawns was to keep them up in levels with my hero and primary pawn.

I think the problem is rather deeply rooted in the game's mechanics. Choosing a real-time battle system with AI-controlled allies severely limits what can be expected of said allies. The AI fights smartly, that much is true, and also according to the knowledge that has been gained by the pawn about their enemies. The achilles heel in this system is that skills in the game are rather bland and the difference in performance between pawns is remarkably unnoticeable. Only with casters there is any real difference in what spells they can cast. That aside, the only factor that truly matters in pawn selection is their attack and defense. Even if the game had more complex skill systems, I would not really trust an AI controlled ally to use them effectively. So numbers all the way. The problem is, this basically reduces every single pawn to just a few numbers (and bigger is better).

Another thing about AI controlled allies in Dragon's Dogma is that their equipment and skills are identical to what the player can have. The only difference is that the main hero can be trained in three hybrid classes that are unavailable to pawns. I realize that the purpose is to be able to have any roles your hero doesn't fulfill. The basic problem with this kind of arrangement is that if the pawns played really well, they would likely outshine the player. This I think is pretty bad. Indeed, one spellcaster I recruited at the end of the game downed several powerful bosses at a ridiculous speed. In the time it would have taken for my main hero to take down one health bar from a boss, that pawn took out five. The point here being is that if pawns are on the exact same power scale with the hero they will become more important in fights. The only special power the player really has over pawns is that he can resurrect them back to the fight.

If the pawns were actually on a different power scale and performing more supportive roles things just might work out better. Another approach could be to give the player better control of the overall battle strategy. The three commands in the game were just "go", "help" and "come". The AI handled the rest. While I think that yes, it is kind of cool that the pawns actually act based on what knowledge they have acquired, having the player be just one among four actors in a play might not be the best design. We can see how the increased player control works in Final Fantasy XIII(-2) paradigm system by giving the player more control over the actions their AI allies are limited to doing. Another game where AI allies actually worked as a mechanic is Star Ocean 3, curiously exactly because they were not very bright. However you could disable the AI or switch control during a battle. You also had the additional challenge of developing builds that worked well for the AI.

This is the problem I had in Dragon's Dogma. There just wasn't much of gameplay around the interesting pawn mechanic. Selecting pawns was dumbed down and in battle they were really independent. The important point is that they did not contribute to giving the player more gameplay. There is a thematic appeal to the pawns, and the fact that they do function very independently does create immersion. I am guessing this is what the designers went for. However most of the points I have raised here are not in contradiction to the immersion goal. Oh and the fact that the pawns repeat the same things all over again kind of breaks the immersion, especially because they are all saying the same things. I guess the problem ultimately is that the pawns have no real advantage over regular AI-controlled NPC allies. The disadvantage is that they lack personality and backstory, so it feels like you are traveling with glorified battle bots rather than with companions.

2. Into the unknown

I have been giving the game's primary system quite a trashing so perhaps I should talk about its better points now. The most appealing part of this game was traveling into unknown territory. I am guessing this is the Skyrim appeal. The world looks amazing and you can definitely run into some real trouble by taking a wrong turn. Seeing to the far end of the game world from atop of a mountain somehow always feels nice. Akin to the feeling you when climbing the very highest tower in Assassin's Creed, just because of the view. In Dragon's Dogma viewing the scenery has these "I have traveled all the way from there" and "Oh shit, that place is so far and night is falling" feelings. One of the best moments in the game was when I decided to explore whether the place I was in actually connected to another place I had been in before but through a different route. To my delight it did, and once again contained some amazing scenery.

What I found curious was that I actually really really liked the escort quests in this game. Escort quests are usually horrible but somehow traveling into unknown lands with a frail companion was an even stronger experience than simply exploring places because they are very likely to die if powerful foes are engaged. Running away from a Griffin on open plains and hiding inside a collapsed archway were strong moments in the game. To this end I actually wished the world would have been even larger to afford escort quests that could take hours to complete. And then I started to think about if it was actually possible to build a game that is simply one very long escort quest through this kind of plausible fantasy scenery. There are escort games that I know of (Ico comes to mind) but I don't think there is one in quite this sense.

Dungeons were somewhat less interesting. Fortunately they were also quite small and limited in number. By the way you better like traveling on foot when playing this game because there is not much of instant travel. There are consumables that allow you to teleport back to the world capital and you can later obtain a special waypoint marker that can be placed on the ground in a safe area. The reason I am happy the world was not that large is...

3. Repetition

This. Traveling to a new location is really cool in this game but being force to tread the same paths several times over is not. It is acceptable in some cases but not really cool in the rest. One big part of the problem is that - quest specific encounters aside - nothing changes. Every enemy is placed on the map so you will run into the same goblin ambush every time, usually on your way "there" and also "back again". There is nothing to be afraid of because you always know exactly what enemies you will face and where they are going to be, to a point that you can start figuring out routes where you won't encounter any. In some parts of the game world the whole "it's safer on the roads" is bullshit because they have planted a bunch of encounters specifically on the road. The only variation you get is the different set of enemies on the map at night time. That is all and I find it lazy and inexcusable. How hard it would have been to add randomization?

It gets worse than that though: some dungeons are also repeated. In two sequential plot quests for instance you have to travel to, pretty much the furthest end of the world into a tower and there is no way to make a single run because you have to get back to report the first quest to get the second one. I realize that constructing a world and dungeons is expensive, but really? It is borderline okay to have side quests require repeat visits to locations but plot quests, ouch. I think the main narrative at least should consist of unique trips to new locations and possibly some plausible revisits (if they spice up the journey). Although I think instant travel would have made the game worse in a way, they should have given more thought to the fact that there really is no cheap instant travel here.

Sadly repetition even carries on to the combat which is quite fascinating at the early-mid game but then just never changes. Getting all the skills for a single class doesn't take even a third of the game and after the only changes you will ever get are higher numbers in the form of better equipment (unless you want to change your class). Dunno if my class of choice was particularly dull to play (I chose the ranger type - I haven't played an archer for a long time) because all fights were more or less the same for me: hang back and release thousands of arrows until the enemies are dead. Especially true for boss fights. Occasionally I had to go in to hack a bit with knives or to revive a pawn but that was it. So I was just shooting with a bow for, whatever large amount of hours I spent fighting in the course of the game. I did like the fact that you could actually do that but yeah.

All in all boss fights in the game were bit of a grind. They had some weak points and some of their attacks or defenses could be disabled. You can scale them too like in Shadow of the Colossus (only far less interesting). Still, what it really comes down is that they just have a ton of hit points. I put part of the blame on the mechanic that uses AI allies because the optimal boss design as we have seen in say, Dark Souls, is that they deal a bucketload of damage and the player needs to know how to avoid that instead of tanking it, and they do not actually have that much health. It is just that their insanely powerful attacks make it hard for the player to get hits in. It is much harder to do this with AI controlled characters because the options are: they never avoid those attacks; they always avoid those attacks; they avoid them randomly or based on some rule. The latter is actually fine if the player has control over the factors that affect the outcome.

So boss fights eventually are just prolonged tank fests. Your pawns can even tank damage infinitely because they can be revived. Even your hero can tank damage quite well because healing items are used from a pause menu. You can even heal while stunned or while in the middle of taking a series of blows. There is just no punishment whatsoever for using items during the fight. If you look at Dark Souls again, it was freaking risky to sip that healing bottle because it took time and you could be interrupted and possibly killed while doing that. Not so in Dragon's Dogma; just stock those healing items and you are practically immortal. The only limiting factor is encumbrance which dictates how much stuff your character can carry. That, and availability of items (which is not very limited).

4. And here comes the difficulty card

During the first few hours this game will seem overwhelming. It has all kinds of systems: the pawn system, harvesting and combining materials, enhancing equipment and stuff like that. It also seems very threatening; the loading screen tips constantly remind you of how important it is to have oil in your lantern and how it is a bad idea to go poorly prepared or with the wrong party configuration. It gives the impression that you really need to take advantage of all the systems in the game to survive. Once you have gotten a bit more into the game it turns out that all this talk is just talk, at least on normal difficulty (and you are not given the option to start on hard diffculty for the first game, balls). Because there's really only 6 classes available for pawns and their class means a lot more than their set of skills, putting together a functional party is a no-brainer. Combining materials is hardly needed. The lantern uses oil ridiculously slowly.

I played almost the entire game with the same basic party configuration (me as ranged DPS, my pawn as a tank, one melee DPS pawn and a supportive mage). Most of the items I accumulated went straight into my storage and never saw the daylight again. The only combinations I did was to improve some healing items to more powerful versions (plus some experimentation to find out useful recipes). Enhancing weapons is just a matter of increasing some numbers because they have no real special statistics. This has always been a bummer for me, especially in Disgaea titles. Such a complex equipment system yet all they ever do is get better numbers. Contrast this to for instance Final Fantasy X where you put actual abilities on equipment; indeed, they don't have numbers at all!

I am quite certain that there is a lot you can do with these systems in the game. I have no doubts that a single GameFAQs guide wouldn't be a revelation. The problem is that the game simply does not require you to care about any of these things because it is just too easy. I do not know how hard the hard difficulty is. I would have liked to find out, but it was not available to me from the get-go and I am not going to go through this repetitive game again. You can select an even easier difficulty though, which I find kind of curious. How bad do you need to be to actually need that option? Here is a tip for developers: let people choose whatever difficulty they want right from the get-go. What do you have to lose? A lot of games allow players to change difficulty on the fly, so it's not like players can't tune it down if they get absolutely devastated. Still, I kind of love the policy used by From Software in their Souls games: there will be no easy difficulty - shut up and learn to play.

Conclusion

I have to say I was in many ways disappointed by Dragon's Dogma. I enjoyed the game in the early-mid game after I had gotten over the initial overwhelmingness but the longer the game went on the more bored I got with it. I did see it through, so it was not all bad. It really had a lot of shining moments too, and although there's a lot of rant here, it was far from being bad. You will also have to considered my viewpoint: I always focus heavily on mechanics when it comes to RPGs, especially if they do not have character driven drama (I am a sucker for good dialogue). If you are more exploration inclined, Dragon's Dogma is very likely to give much more to you. If exploration is not your thing, there is not much of a reason to play this game honestly. Although the plot does take some interesting turns towards the end and I kind of liked it, I would not play this game for its plot.

Global Game Jam 2013: Pulselight Steampunk

A new year, a new Global Game Jam and a new game! Hindsight is fun, so let's do this post mortem thing again too. Once again our local game development club Stage came through with the arrangements, and we got ourselves a jam in a perfect location. I think this was our biggest jam so far, which was cool. There were also more jammers who were not university students, which I also found to be nice. It's nice not feeling like the only ancient mammoth when getting a decent amount of sleep during the jam.

1. Theme, concept, pitch and teaming

GGJ continues its (new) tradition of artsy themes. Last year was a picture, this year a sound. The sound was a human heartbeat. When browsing through the jam games this year, expect to see a lot of hearts and blood. The same happened last year with the Ouroboros; there was a snake in a whole lot of games. Any good theme can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Since I immediately knew that a lot of ideas will be focused around the "heart" part of heartbeat, I decided to put more emphasis on the "beat", or - as you might guess from the title - pulse. I have been playing quite a bit of Stepmania recently, so my mind immediately rushed to think about rhythm games. Quite soon I was once again on my way to a puzzle game design, where the player would need to perform actions while staying in a given rhythm somehow.

The idea quickly started to form around a pulsating light, in the middle of the screen. The player would have to do something with the pulses sent out by the light. But what? Well, how about guiding each pulse to one or more targets? At this point there was quite a lot of Pipemania in the design, so much that the name was indeed dropped during my pitch so people would have an easier time following what the f I was rambling on about this time. The challenge in the game would be to build the power grid fast enough to hit the targets. The challenge for me personally was to somehow present this idea to people so they could understand it. That was quite the challenge indeed because no whiteboard was available during pitching (we had one, but we were supposed to write our project working titles there).

The problem with pitching is often the inability to convey a mental image of the game being developed. Especially if it is a more abstract thing. It is easy enough to convey an image if the game is "platformer with this and that gimmick" (which covers what, 30% to 50% of all jam games?) Of course sometimes the designer doesn't really know yet what the game is. My tip for pitching your game idea in a jam is to tell what the player does in the game. That is the most important thing; without that knowledge it is impossible to see the game. Some people don't need to see the game to get into an idea of course. Indeed a lot of people will be happy to just hop aboard some cool thematic aspect or a general concept of the game. Then there are people like me who want to get an idea of the game's mechanics. I call us "mechanics first" designers. What the game is about bears little importance.

In my game this year, the player places pipe sections. That is the entire mechanic. The real challenge of course is in, well, the challenge. What makes the player want to place these pipes? Moreover, what makes the player want to place these pipes as fast as possible yet into sensible locations? These questions are very hard to answer without a prototype, and really, that is what game jams are all about. The good thing about this design is that it is relatively simple to implement and should therefore afford quite a bit of time for tuning the design. This did not turn out to be exactly the truth, mostly thanks to the niceties provided by javascript (aka. the language from hell when it's time to debug).

I did initially team up with guys who had another concept in mind (mostly: alien organism that does something) and we did a bit of brainstorming to combine the ideas. As usual though I ended up being grumpy designer and shot down a lot of initial ideas. I started the work by making a grid; whatever game we were about to build, there would be a grid so making one can't hurt. After completing my basic grid code, I went to sleep. Come morning I still didn't see much of a game around alien organism. There were also a couple of programmers in that project already, and I wasn't sure a third would be needed that much. Hence I just went back to my original idea and started working by myself. This is the fourth jam in a row where I have been a one man designing/programming team. I didn't even have an artist to start out with this time.

2. Game is hard

The title of this section is my new trademark. Looking back at my jam game catalog, I have a tendency to make games that are hard to get at first. This is something I need to work on because the initial impression usually matters a lot, and if players feel like they have no idea what is going on... well, it's not very optimal. I think the only game I have developed that has needed no explanation whatsoever was Umbrella Dream from last year's Vectorama game jam (and now I recall there is no post mortem on that one) because it was a platformer with a gimmick. Abstract puzzle games are always harder. Even if the player has some idea of what are the possible actions, the game also somehow needs to make its goal and its scoring principles known to the player. Building suitable indicators for these things is tricky. This year in particular my game was highly dependent on some animations to make it somewhat understandable (and it still isn't...).


Here is a screenshot of the game (release version, except there was a bug with scoring while taking this shot so I have 0 points, lol).

The coils around the edges are the targets, and the "heart" in the middle is the power generator. You can see a pulse traveling through the network as a white flash in the screenshot. The more lit the coils are, the more urgent it is to get power there. There is also one blackened coil in the bottom row; this one has been burnt. The "lightning" that strikes through the network from the core is aesthetically very pleasing. Overall I think the game looks very good (except the shading on some of the pipes seems to be on the wrong side). I do wonder if the game would be easier to understand if all coils were initially lit and would start to lose those glowing rings when they start to fail. This would possibly have a stronger mental image of the coil needing power from the generator.

The game's design had a lot of challenges. The rhythm idea flew out of the window almost immediately. The process of building the pipes is simply too slow to really afford really fast-paced gameplay. The initial idea was to allow the player to stack pipes to create intersections where the path would split. However this proved to be technically challenging the way I tried to implement it, so for quite a while I worked without stacking. Game was hard indeed! I allowed the player to rotate pieces to overcome the handicap. Back then the game also had delete pieces come up from the piece queue, and because stacking was not possible these pieces were really important. Granted, less so after rotation was introduced. Without rotation game was very hard indeed! With this composition the game kind of worked and I could see that it could be made fun but there were two issues.

First of all, the game was now very close to Pipemania and there was nothing really new about it. Another problem was that, given time, the grid would be full unless the ratio of delete pieces to normal pieces would be made 1:1. It was also kind of a frustrating experience to wait for delete tiles to come up when they were needed. At this point I was somewhat stuck. I had counted on the stacking mechanic as an important aspect of the game and I wasn't able to implement it. Well, I wasn't, until I did what should always be done when problems arise: I took a break. Immediately upon leaving the site I figured out a new algorithm to implement the path splitting. Sure enough, when I returned to my workstation, I had path splitting working in no time. This combined with rotation created another problem though: now game was too easy! An apparent problem with this design was that you could theoretically just create a network that hits every single border tile, effectively being capable of hitting all targets that appear.

The game over mechanic was designed to combat this issue (I did foresee this on Saturday morning already): hitting a "burnt" target overloaded the system and led to defeat. However, it was quite easy for the player to simply create a network that hit every tile that was not burnt and keep generating infinite points. Not good. The mechanic changed briefly when I failed to implement stacking: fail to hit a target in time, you lose. That was however kinda lame, and I liked the original game over mechanic much more, so I put it back into the game. I removed rotation to make it harder to create an all-encompassing network and in general harder to hit all targets in time which would burn out at least some tiles. There was another mechanic to combat the issue but it felt really artificial: occasionally, burned tiles would spawn to random locations. This meant that keeping a network connected to every border tile was risky.

The mechanic that is present in my GGJ deliverable does not have this limitation mechanism. The targets spawn pretty fast, but if the player is fast enough, they can create a network that is able to generate infinite points. This is a common problem with puzzle games at game jams. It is hard to find out the right balance in such a short time. Hamsters and Plague, my very first jam game had a similar issue: there was a dominant strategy that was not only clearly superior but also very opposed to the game's design philosophy. Took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to destroy that strategy with a solution that didn't feel completely artificial. By artificial I generally mean a mechanic that has been put into a game as a direct counter to some obvious dominant strategy but that doesn't really fit into the design's big picture. Tetraic had similar issues and I still haven't figured out a solid solution.

I already have some ideas I want to try out for this game. The fact that it runs in a browser makes it a little bit more appealing to continue the design because people might actually play it as opposed to both HaP and Tetraic that are originally XNA games and need to be installed (HaP is presently in Python, but the same problem applies, especially for Windows users). The first change that I did is not yet in the release, but it might make the game more interesting: since the entire system a rather archaic device, the copper pipes are likely to overheat and melt if exposed to use too much. In game mehcanic terms this means that whenever a pipe section is used, there is a chance the tile it is in will disappear. This would be a counter-balancing force to large networks because large networks = more maintenance (by replacing destroyed pieces). It would put pressure to the player to avoid shooting power all across the board "just in case" because wider coverage means wider destruction.

One possible problem would be that this solution might be too chaotic. This could be addressed with an animation for tiles that are being destroyed. Overall, a few more graphical effects would make the game clearer I think. I am still also kind of obsessed with the idea of making the rhythm of the pulse generator have more meaning in the game. Now it just shoots pulses at fixed intervals. It is of course great to throw around improvement ideas; implementing and testing them is the hard part. I still have 6 other jam projects in need of this, so although I have some interest, I am not holding my breath. That said, this might the most probable one to get an update because it is in the browser, and the code is surprisingly clean and modular for a jam game so it is actually quite easy to modify.

3. Working solo, the hindsight

For a lot of people game jams are about making games together. However - for I am grumpy designer - for me game jams are still first and foremost about honing my game design skills. Next time around I just might wear a "will work for design credit" tag. The biggest "pro" in working solo is that you can do whatever the f you want and can do in the given time. However looking at the creations of other teams it is quite clear that with more people a lot more can be done. Of course I scope my solo projects for my solo capabilities but it often leaves very little time for polishing anything. Jams are generally not about polishing, but it would be nice to produce something that is actually great to play from the get-go rather than after several design patches (which have a high chance of never coming out).

The fact that more people = more results might seem rather obvious but of course it is not strictly so. It really comes down to whether there is actually something for everyone to do or not. This project for instance really did not have much that another programmer could have done. Some UI widgets and the scoring system, but those took me about an hour to create. It has largely been the same with a lot of my previous solo projects; the core mechanic is simply not divisible into any sensible units that could be developed independently. The question is though: am I scoping my ideas into solo projects already in conception, or do I limit the idea after I don't have a team? Something to pay attention to I guess. Maybe in the next jam I will work with a bigger team. Another thing to work on is to pitch my ideas even better. I should probably make them seem more crazy. People like crazy stuff!

Conclusion

Another game jam is behind me. That makes eight! I wonder how many it takes to get the title "veteran jammer". Although I am not completely happy with the result this time, it shows a lot of promise and has a code framework that does not immediately repulse improvement ideas. I know from experience that if any improvements are to be made, I should make them in the coming one or two weeks. Otherwise the entire thing is likely to be just forgotten. We are likely to have yet another game jam later this spring; there's been talk about this one being a jam for polishing previous jam games. My problem of course is that I have 7 to choose from, and at least 3 or 4 of those are prime candidates for continued development. Which shall it be?

Oh and about the name: it's my homage to metal songs that have cool sounding yet nonsensible names (e.g. Blacklight Deliverance). The latter part comes from the game's art style, the first, obviously, from the initial design idea of a pulsating light.

I also finished Dragon's Dogma yesterday so the next piece will be on that. I have also been playing alarming amounts of Dota 2, and I figure I should analyze what the hell happened. Xenoblade Chronicles is sitting on my living room table waiting for its turn too...

Dishonored

Dishonored was a rare exception for me: a game I did not particularly intend to play until I read its review. Actually I did not even read the entire review in fear of spoilers. I simply looked at the score, some of the closing words and knew I would have to get this game. It was in fact my very first impulse purchase of a game on its release date for a very long time. I should not be so surprised of course; the game has a setting that is hugely inspired by Victorian England, and it has a superpowered assassin. The fact that it was a stealth game (which I am often quite suspicious towards) did have an astonishingly small impact on my decision. My liking of Human Revolution likely played a major role in setting my expectations right for Dishonored. The game was indeed very charming; not only was it artistically rather unique, it turned out to be excellent on the gameplay department too.

1. Easy does not equal bad

Let's get this immediately out of the way: Dishonored is by no means a hard game. This is largely evidenced by the simple fact that I - with my rather low patience for stealth in general - was able to complete almost every missions without raising a single alarm or killing anyone. This gets me to a point I have discussed previously: not all games need to be hard. Dishonored is more about creativity than execution. The tools the player has at his disposal are simply so damn powerful that he is more or less a god of stealth (or murder should he so choose!). It is exactly this effortless creativity that makes the game feel so open. I rarely felt I was being guided to use a certain path, or even that I was given a limited number of paths to choose from. I just felt like I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. Although the game is very different from Assassin's Creed, in this one particular aspect they are very similar.

"Modern games are too easy" as an argument for why they (modern games) suck is something I'm rather tired of hearing. Difficulty simply is not the only possible way for games to create a powerful experience. Even player taxonomies clearly state that challenge is the primary reason for playing only for a certain part of the gaming audience. The actual problem that often gets attributed to lack of difficulty (which I also do, and often, when RPGs are concerned) is that the player is not provided with any incentive to use their wide variety of abilities. However difficulty is not the only way to create this incentive as is shown by games that depend more on player creativity. Games like Dishonored. Admittedly, the game's primary superpower, Blink, is so damn good that there was little use for the other powers. However the game's perceived degree of freedom is so immense, that it is absolutely possible for a roleplay oriented player to go through it in a very different manner.

Interestingly, if the game was more difficult, there is no guarantee that the degree of perceived freedom could be maintained. In a way difficulty always comes with a tradeoff: dominant strategies. In a way difficulty in itself controls player choice in a way that is harmful to a game's roleplaying appeal. If a game is hard enough, certain choices tend to be emphasized because they have higher utility in beating the game or can even be practically mandatory. Although we can argue that such games should be designed in such a way that are choices are equal, they rarely are. I will be the first to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong here in a more broader sense, but if a game wants to appeal to a roleplaying audience then it must be acknowledged that too much difficulty will be hurtful to it. You might argue that the most hardcore player will always find a way to do exactly as he likes. However, the roleplaying audience is not guaranteed to have the patience for training so much! (for the sake of clarity, by roleplaying I now mean playing a role, not the act of playing a computer RPGs)

All that being said, I think in general the stealth game genre benefits more from letting the player make it through in their own style. Increase of difficulty in these games more or less simply increases the number of retries it takes to get through a given segment and can end up being more about memorizing enemy routes than anything else. By providing the player with superpowers that let's them mess with the natural order of things, Dishonored makes stealth easier in a welcome fashion.

2. Speaking of controlling the player...

One thing that I do not like about a lot of stealth games is that although they advertise freedom of choice, the game has built-in values that ineherently make certain choices more encouraged than others. Often the player is encouraged to not kill anyone and stay out of sight. The more the game emphasizes this, the less there is perceived freedom. Dishonored is by far one of the least offenders. The game does not give any in-game rewards for being a sneaky pacifist. In fact it only does one thing (in-game) to encourage the player to find peaceful solutions: the game's ending is affected by how many people the player kills. Not being detected is just gravy and makes it easier to not kill anyone. So it indeed does feel more like I actually could be killing people off should I so choose.

Although Dishonored fares quite well, this is often messed up in similar games. A lot of games offer greater in-game rewards for being stealthy which is practically saying that the player should do so. This is typically explained by the fact that stealthiness indeed is harder to do in these games, and therefore should be rewarded better. There is nothing wrong with this approach, mind you. Rewarding harder accomplishments is mostly a sound design policy. However it should then be recognized that this endorses certain ways to play and therefore effectively reduces the amount of perceived freedom in the game. For instance, a lot of people have complained about higher rewards for non-lethal methods in Human Revolution (even though there is practically no difference between a lethal and a non-lethal takedown; you just push a different button!)

It would actually make Dishonored even easier if the player chooses to kill everyone instead of passing by them, largely because of one ability which makes corpses vanish into thin air (cool). Still the game's difficulty is not drastically affected by the choice of approach. Yet one nasty controlling scheme does exist in the game: achievement system. A certain playing style (killing no one, never being seen) nets you most of the achievements in the game on one playthrough. I cannot underline how distressingly common this is for achievement systems in general: they endorse a single playing style. This hints the player that there actually does exist a "correct" way to play the game. How hard it would be to include achievements for other playing styles?

Sure, not everyone cares about achievements. But for those who do, it is important to be aware of the fact that achievements do control playing styles. For this reason I usually do not look at the list of achievements before completing the game. Although they do not contain spoilers, I know that they will definitely affect my playing style.

3. First or third?

One interesting innovation for a first person stealth game in Human Revolution was its "cover camera". When the player entered cover, the camera backed up to show the player hiding in third person. I still think this is absolutely brilliant because it removes any sort of guessing from hiding. Dishonored on the other hand stays in the first person. The character does crouch appropriately and so on and can lean out of cover (which can sometimes feel rather hilarious; it's like the upper half of your body is sticking out by no one sees you). The game does a fair job of convincing me that I am actually hidden so I do not take issue with this. I still think the system seen in Human Revolution is better though. Dishonored does have better stealth controls though.

Another thing - especially on consoles - is the first person tunnel vision. Stealth games in partciular are hurt by the lack of peripheral vision in games. It is very hard to take a quick glimpse of your surroundings with game pad controls, and even with mouse this does feel a bit wonky. Third person might feel less "realistic" (because you see your own back) but it does provide a much better feeling of peripheral vision. In Human Revolution you often want to get in cover just so you can see better. Which is a bit weird again but hey, these are games we're talking about. Still it might be true that first person does create greater immersion. I'm still not convinced that it should be preferred over third person in stealth games because peripheral vision is absolutely vital for survival.

First person stealth is still mostly okay. First person melee combat is another issue though. Every game that features excellent melee combat uses a third person camera. The problem with first person is the lack of body awareness. Not being able to exactly see your character's body makes it much harder to get a good read of the combat situation. In real life fencing, precise position awareness is key to successful offense, defense and counter attacks. Certain third person games like Dark Souls simulate this quite well precisely because the player can see the exact position of their character. It is easy to see which attacks will connect and which do not. In first person this is strictly harder because the player cannot know for certain where the character's body is physically located. It often tends to make things more boring too.

Another thing that often lacks from first person games regarding sword attacks is movement. It is very rare to attack without simultaenous forward movement but in first person games the player avatar rarely moves when attacks are made. It can be argued again that the player can of course choose to do so but moving and hitting is an entirely different matter than an actual sword attack with forward movement built into it. It's a small detail and of little consequence in Dishonored because combat is generally avoided. For a game like this, Assassin's Creed should be a suitable role model for combat mechanics. Of course, it would involve switching to third person.

4. But what makes it good

So far I have been largely using Dishonored as a vehicle to get into more general topics. There is not much in the above paragraphs to explain why this game is worth more than a few game of the year awards. One definite key strength of the game is that it succeeds in hiding the fact that it is a game. For instance, most of the time I did not feel like I was playing levels that threw challenges at me - I was merely navigating an environment. Situations did not feel like pre-arranged puzzles with several solutions. Instead they felt honestly open. There are some sections where the illusion breaks, but these are surprisingly few and nowhere the magnitude of, say, Human Revolution boss fights. Instead of levels, the developers have created a world that feels like it could actually exist.

There is a certain continuous logic throughout the game regarding how guards, civilians and plague victims are placed in the levels. Patrol routes make sense (at least to the extent that they still loop without variation). Places are never heavily guarded just to throw an obstacle to the player's way. Instead if they are heavily guarded, there is always something that is important in respect to the game world, not the game. All this supports the perception of freedom in the game because most approaches to a specific place for example are actually feasible. The player is allowed to use their eyes to see possibilities instead of being forced to search for hidden routes or discussing with NPCs to reveal new approaches. Whenever I traversed a route to my target I felt it was truly my own route. This is a powerful feeling.

Speaking of powerful feelings... superpowers! The thing about mystic superpowers is that you don't need to explain how they work, and they can do anything without feeling out of place. Sounds like a cheap shortcut and it kind of is but it works. Dishonored does not have many powers, but they all serve a purpose (admittedly, some more than others). The signature ability, Blink, is a short range teleport that has quite limitless potential. Moving around the open environments using Blink is one huge reason why the game feels so open-ended. The simple mechanism of getting from point A to B without being in any of the intermediary points is quite amazing. It opens up so many unpredictable routes that it is almost ridiculously overpowered. However the act of using it is just so delightful that the imbalance between powers did not even bother me.

There are other powerful tools. Seeing through walls has been done quite well. It is not overpowered, but highly useful. I did use it quite a bit, although of course not as much as Blink.Of the remaining powers, I did not even level up all of them, and used the animal / human possession once or twice during the entire playthrough. If you are into stuff like that, you can find a lot of use for this ability though. The remaining abilities seemed too combat-oriented for my playing style so I found no use for them. I might consider playing the game or at least some missions in a more violent manner just to see how the other side of the game system works.

Conclusion

Dishonored plays most of its cards really well. It is a stealth game that is actually not at all frustrating to play yet manages to stay interesting throughout its duration. It bears no significant design flaws really. Overall it is a game I believe anyone considering a stealth game should play. Overall anyone even remotely interested in the genre, or even just the game's theme, should play it. There is so much quality design to be enjoyed. Of all the games I have played recently (sandboxes don't count!), Dishonored has the highest amount of perceived freedom of choice by far. This is achieved in an almost counter-intuitive way by giving the player so powerful tools that they can effectively break the game. Another strong aspect that supports this perception is the way the game stays true to its internal logic. The game world quite simply feels like a world instead of a series of levels.

Borderlands 2

One interesting and sharp contrast between the video games industry and the film industry is that game sequels often surpass the originals. In the movie industry sequels are often obvious cash grabs but in the games industry it is more common for a sequel to raise rather high expectations. The reason for this is relatively straightforward to see: the first game is a risky gamble with a certain budget. Within the confines of a budget and a production time it is not possible to gather the sheer amount of player feedback that is gotten after the game's release. Furthermore if the original sells, the sequel is guaranteed to have a solid budget. Additionally since the concept has been proven, the sequel only needs to enhance it. It almost seems like a lot of games need that second iteration to really shine. Sometimes the second iteration is called "enhanced edition" but in the current market situation, more often than not it is called a "2".

Such is the case with Borderlands, a conceptually very sound and mostly importantly fun game that nevertheless had a bunch of gaping flaws. Uninteresting plot, repetitive scenery/quests and rather colorless character abilities were the three primary complaints about the game. Being a long game, even though it had four different characters, its replay value was quite low. At least for us single player types. Thankfully the game got a load of attention and a sequel was guaranteed. It was indeed one of those games where you could instantly see how much better it can become. Not least because of the DLC quality: 3 out of 4 DLC adventures were significantly better written than the game itself!

1. Goodbye generic side quests

For me this improvement is perhaps the one with the most impact. In the first game, side quests were dull. Your run-of-the-mill MMO stuff: farm or kill things with a an entirely irrelevant text description of why exactly this should be done. Almost none of the side quests in Borderlands 2 are collected from bounty boards and even the ones that are still involve NPC communication throughout the quest. Moreover, side quest assignments range from mildly weird to absurd. This combined with the well-written humorous dialogue during the quests makes most of them just as memorable as the main quest itself - if not more so! On the first play through the game side quests are not done just to obtain rewards - you actually want to experience them in all their wackiness.

The importance of meaningful side quests is often overlooked by game developers. The rationale probably goes something like "people who do side quests do them anyway" which to some extent is likely to be true. Quality does trump quantity here. Advertising that your game contains a thousand quests is a clear signal that these quests are going to be generated and repetitive in nature, done only for the sole purpose of obtaining the reward. Granted, sometimes there is the element of challenge involved too but that seems to be the rare exception. At worst, such games are mere skinner boxes where the player is pressing the lever repeatedly in hope of a reward. I highly prefer the Borderlands 2 way where some quests are rather lenghty and they are fewer in number, but they all form an experience that can actually be called content without feeling cheap.

Of course it takes resources to write quality quests. Each quest in Borderlands 2 has most likely required some effort from an actual writer, and of course from the quest designer. They didn't come out of a spreadsheet. The tough truth about resources and effort in regard to side quests is that if you don't have what it takes to do good ones, how about not doing them at all? Why spend any effort at all into making some ridiculous attempts to make the game longer when you could spend all your limited resources on the core game? Each quest should provide something to the player: real gameplay and/or content. By real gameplay I mean gameplay that is unique to this quest, something that makes the player feel they are actually doing something meaningful or challenging.

Borderlands 2 mostly provides meaning through dialogue content and that is fine. The actions that are taken during side quests are more or less the same stuff that the player keeps doing throughout the game: shoot and loot. That is what we came here for anyway. Another approach that I wholeheartedly approve is the opposite: no dialogue content, just challenge. Post-game dungeons and bosses fall under this category. The connecting factor is that both of these approaches provide meaning to the player. In the Borderlands 2 approach the meaning to the player is to enjoy the more or less insane ramblings of the eccentric NPC cast of the game. Although we may look at this additional story content as a reward for completing the side quest,  I would argue that it is more meaningful to the player to do the side quest because it grants the quest giver more personality.

I care a whole lot about NPC personality. Whether they are believable or not is of no particular consequence as long as it is entertaining to listen to their banter. Because I care, it is also more meaningful for me to complete an assignment for a character. Although them liking me for it is just a piece of code inside the game's logic, the effect persists. Even research shows that humans project a personality on products even when one is not desgined into it, so it is no wonder that products that do have built-in personality can affect emotions. Since the interpersonal context has been made meaningful, there is more motivation to complete the given quest. I could go on about the personality of video game characters for another blog post or two, but we've gotten quite sidetracked already. The conclusion of this rambling is that the side quests in Borderlands 2 are successful because they are written in a way that enhances the quest giver's personality.

2. Dem skill trees

A big issue in the first Borderlands was the inability of skill choices to affect gameplay. Most skills were merely simple buffs that gave a bonus percentage to something - usually damage with one weapon type or another.While this does have some consequence (primarly, which weapons to use) it doesn't really create different styles to play. The fact that skill tree choices do not have a huge effect on gameplay might be seen as positive in more action-oriented genres, but Borderlands has strong RPG roots. And in an RPG, the way you build your character is supposed to have a large impact on how you play the game. It is about creating a character that suits your own play style. If it is not possible to emphasize play style through skill selection, the character is bound to lack identity.

This is actually of particular consequence in more action-oriented games like Borderlands because player skill is a significant factor in choosing a play style. A player who is a great sniper is likely to be more successful with a skill build that emphasizes high, single shot, long range damage even if strictly mathematically a short range assault build would be better. Because the choice of optimal play style is affected by game-independent factors (player ability), there is less inclination towards the infamous cookie-cutter builds that are plaguing a lot of MMOs. Since there is an opportunity to create interesting skill choices even without a completely balanced skill tree, the developers of Borderlands should have felt obligated to do so. It is not a surprise then than one of the most anticipated changes promised for Borderlands 2 was an improved skill system.

On the surface the skill system looks alarmingly similar to its predecessor. Each character has one active special ability and three specialized skill trees which modify stats and the special ability. Again a lot of these skills are numerical increases to some aspect or another. Skill trees are divided into levels, and taking a total of 5 assignments in a tree opens up the next level. There are definitely more skills to choose from though. While there are no additional active skills, there are a whole lot of conditional skills, some of which stack. The important difference is that a lot of skills now do clearly affect play style and that they combo with each other. Another interesting aspect is that since the game is so action-heavy, skills often work differently in use than what they look like on paper. This would be horrible without respecs, so fortunately the game offers an inexpensive way to do so. Now it is actually interesting to experiment with different builds.

Dividing each character's skills into three specific trees is a good solution in at least one sense: for players who do not want to bother with experimenting, it is easy to see which tree to build for a certain play style. At the same time, a more adventurous gamer may find that their build can be improved by taking skills from two separate trees or even all of them. The only limitation is that such a diverse skill build cannot involve any skills very deep in the trees. This might be good for reducing the possibility of overpowered comboes, although during my playthroughs with two different characters I didn't really come up with any. Regardless, one tree is likely to by any build's primary tree which defines the core play style. There are basically 3 hard play styles for each character, creating a total of 12 options (15 with the DLC character). Most importantly, builds now really feel different to play.

3. Apply polish - lots of

The improvements are not huge but together they make for a much stronger game. However it doesn't stop there. Borderlands 2 also has its share of smaller improvements, most of which are tied to giving the game more distinguished character. One of the best ideas is to give different equipment manufacturers their own identity and manufacturer ability. This guarantees that weapons in the game behave in a wider variety of ways than they would with just randomly generated stats. It is different from unique special abilities because after trying one weapon from a manufacturer the player can project how different guns from that manufacturer would be like.Ultimately it is still the hard numbers that define which weapons to use but in case of somewhat equal stats, weapon manufacturer can be a large factor in decision-making.

Another thing I liked is that there is now a lot more variation for what special abilities shields can have. The decision of which shield to choose now has more factors then its sheer stopping power. Many shields have offensive qualities which can be used to counterbalance their weaker protection. The addition of more variation also extends to enemies. On a less game mechanical note, environments are also way more varied. No more endless wasteland; we have snow fields, grass, industrial complexes and towns. Finally, the game has been finished with a lot of care paid to the details. Everything is consistent with the game's slightly disturbed character. This shows in more or less everything, loading screen tips included. Simply put, the entire package is very charming.

The game also has increased challenge built into it in the form of a new game+ and a "raid boss" which I have yet to defeat. The first DLC brought another similar challenge. I'm looking forward to killing them all at some point. Another strong point is the improved co-op play that has been made quite effortless and better supports players who are at different stages of the game.

Conclusions

Borderlands 2 is a prime example of a second iteration that really brings an already functional concept to blossom. It addresses all the flaws of its predecessor in an agreeable manner. It also goes beyond, with more effort put into writing in particular. While predictable, the main plot is enjoyable to follow and, as noted, the side quests have been superbly written. All the strengths of the original have been retained and really the only thing I missed was Lilith's phasewalk ability. Another "problem" with the game is that getting to know all characters does take a lot of time. I have yet to manage this feat but I got a strong feeling that I am not yet done with this game.