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Comments
I got High Chaos, because I got fed up with taking the less chaotic path given its results. Straight-up murdering everyone was more practical in any case; while I generally tried to avoid detection, I didn't run from fights if I was detected. After all, I don't want witnesses.
Also, I probably got High Chaos because I'm used to Metal Gear stealth, which I think is generally better. I get that first-person perspective is greatly atmospheric, but Metal Gear's third-person perspective with stuff like proning, unarmed combat moves and infinitely respawning enemies makes for a more versatile system without giving players the capacity to slaughter their way through the games. I particularly liked the gameplay of MGS3; MGS4 was a bit easy, especially given the advanced action controls, but MGS3's limitations combined with the introduction of the camo system made for some great, tense stealthing.
I've heard good things about Thief but my favorite stealth games are the Arkham and AC games, which probably means I less want a stealth game and more want a game where I can be Batman or Spider-man as a ninja.
Also that third act plot twist was a load of arbitrary crap that was somehow also very predictable. Maybe it's because it's something every video game and their dog have been doing in the past few years.
I really like Arkham's stealth, but I wish there was a bigger emphasis on it. The combat is all fine and dandy, but I don't feel it has the depth or the tension of the stealth sections. As for AC, it suffers the same way Dishonoured does; getting found out isn't a problem since the combat is so easy. The devs want to have their cake and eat it, but with the action gameplay being so easy, there's not a lot of incentive for the stealth. A shame, too, since the mechanics to do with hiding among the general populace are a great idea.
I predicted it, too, but I'm not sure it's just because every game has been doing it. Up to that point, the plot ran really smoothly. Not in the execution sense, but in the amount of protagonist success against protagonist hardship. There had to be something in the works to shake things up -- it's just the "yes, but" and "no, and" rules in play. Dishonoured was well-written enough to be predictable but not well-written enough for me to give a damn.
The weird thing is that a lot of critics raved about it. Subjectivity and all that, of course, but I always find it really strange when really average games with high polish get that amount of praise. Borderlands had a similar critical reception. Both that game and Dishonoured are essentially fine, but I don't see what people find so engrossing about them. I can see why people would get passionate about Dragon Age, for instance, despite my misgivings about it. Or Bastion. Or hell, even the recent Final Fantasy games. But I don't feel as though games like Borderlands or Dishonoured were really trying to do anything particularly great, or be interesting, or leave any other kind of mark in terms of game design or narrative.
The following paragraphs aren't really necessary, but it's an addendum to the above; if my post is getting too long for some, then this is a good cut-off point. If not, proceed:
I generally feel as though every game ought to be different from others in some meaningful mechanical way, at the very least. If we look at video gaming's closest companions (tabletop gaming and traditional gaming), we can see a lack of mechanical repetition between different products. A lot of video games are essentially the same game with different presentation, whereas every tabletop game tries to be different from others on the market. Check out how drastically different World of Darkness, Warhammer and Magic: The Gathering are. Even if we want to use the same "genre" of tabletop game, though, compare World of Darkness and D&D. Completely and utterly mechanically different, with only the barest mechanical similarities.
So I'm often disappointed that video games are so often similar to one-another, which I feel really devalues creativity and skill in game design. I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of people, even and especially those working in the actual industry, don't understand what game design actually is. Someone who claims to be a game designer for video games ought to be able to design a tabletop game just as effectively. But the kind of game designer behind the likes of Borderlands or Dishonoured? I very much doubt they could do that. Luckily, there are games like Mount & Blade, XCOM, Dark Souls, The Witcher (2) and whatnot that proves there's legitimate game design talent in the industry. But those games are the exception, and I'm a little bit disappointed every time a Borderlands or a Skyrim gets 8s or 9s.
No. They really shouldn't. Like it or not, those are two completely different design skillsets.
At this point, I just think TES games get an automatic 8, whether they're worth a 5 or a 10.
Although, and this is my only contribution to the conversation above, Dishonored has many problems, but it pulls off its atmosphere remarkably.
That's not true at all. Strategy games and RPGs developed directly out of their tabletop equivalents. Early action games could be said to be derived from sports. Hell, sports games use the actual rules sets from, well, sports. The video game medium provides means of expression and design unique to itself, such as the controller as a standardised tool of play, or the use of extensive graphical representation over abstract playing pieces, but the essential rules of designing a game remain the same, whatever the medium.
Sports, playground games, traditional games, contemporary tabletop games and video games are all derived from the same principles and thrive on the same virtues. Clarity, simplicity and versatility are major requirements for any long-lasting game, with the complexity coming from the combination of the latter two aspects when placed in contact with human creativity. This is why football, chess and, say, Starcraft have all been highly survivable. They're actually reasonably similar when you break them down to their simplest core elements, but they're expressed through different mediums that provide them with different opportunities. The biggest difference between those three games is probably the win states more than anything else; imagine if chess was based on how many times you could get a neutral king piece across the board, or if Starcraft was based on defending a vulnerable unit while defeating an enemy's equivalent.
While it's true that there are advantages and limitations within each medium, and those effect game design, they're peripheral elements rather than part of the core discipline. Even first-person shooters are paintball on your TV, in essence.
I'll give it that.
Query: Would you expect, say, ZUN, a specialist in shoot 'em ups, to be able to design a tabletop game? If so, why? And if he couldn't, is he a bad designer simply because of that?
YES. FINALLY VLR IS HERE.
I have been like this:
FOR MONTHS.
Absolutely.
Shmups contain a lot of geometric elements that work well in a tabletop context. Usually, elements such as dispersing ranged attacks use even, consistent angles, such as thirty or forty-five degrees. That kind of even angle is easy for players, even in a tabletop context, to intuitively calculate. Touhou is also a top-down shmup without a third dimension of mechanical depth, which is the default state of affairs for tabletop strategy games.
Touhou almost has a board game hidden in it already, but one can't think of it in terms of literal adaptation. For instance, a Touhou board game would be just as much about moving pieces representing your danmaku as moving your character. Much like a strategy board game, Touhou is about finding geometrically optimal solutions to obstacles, but combines that focus with fast-paced, real-time gameplay. The most useful skill in Touhou is knowing how to maintain aggression while being outside the threat of your adversary, which is equally true of XCOM, Warhammer and even actual swordsmanship. That might seem general, but lots of games don't provide the capacity to do that; a good example is Mario platformers, where success doesn't come from winning battles but successfully navigating the environment. Given that the standard method of defeating an enemy is jumping on them, you have to be extremely close to the enemy threat in order to overcome them. In many cases, avoiding enemies is a more optimal solution altogether.
But yeah. Touhou is similar in many ways to a tabletop strategy game, but with the pacing of something like tennis. Such is the capacity of video games, but the core design remains closely related to both of those.
... Sure Alex, whatever you say.
Except one requires skill of motion and hand-movement and reflex, while the other requires skill in planning and strategy. I don't know enough about Game Theory, but to me it seems reasonable to say that a game designer can't automatically be able to make a tabletop.
^^ Alright then. What's the difference between a projectile in a top-down shooter and the same thing in a tabletop game? Time. You can use exactly the same measurements and exactly the same rules for resolving damage, but time has to be handled differently in a real-time context and a turn-based one. Something like a bullet hell shmup and a tabletop strategy game might seem to be hugely separated because the overall experience is so different, but they rely on many of the same mechanical principles.
It's easy to get caught up in the shallow trappings of mediums and genres, but those things aren't the nuts and bolts. Chess isn't far removed from fencing, and neither are all too different from Monster Hunter. Video games aren't special; they're simply the first time that mechanics have had a means to be imposed and enforced digitally, with previous examples of games placing rules on human behaviour or using abstracted game pieces. I don't know if anyone else here has significant experience in sports or martial arts, but you should at least understand how similar video games are to playground games, which use real spaces and people as their medium but use an equally limited set of rules (or mechanics) in order to create the experience of play. There's even game modes; think about how tag has a variation wherein a tagged player joins the team of "it", becoming a second "it", and so on and so forth until everyone is caught. Or think about how common the rule of "no getbacks" is -- that's pretty much an ability cooldown.
^ The fact that you automatically presume that "game designer" means "video game designer" first and foremost speaks volumes. The first commercially widespread video game for home consoles was Pong, which is of course an adaptation of Ping Pong, so the actual design of the game was established long before there were video games to speak of. In fact, there was an industry crash before the famous '83 one -- that happened in 1977, directly as a result of a huge amount of competing home consoles that only played Pong. The earliest RPGs aimed to be direct "ports" of D&D to the new digital medium. Even today, other kinds of games get ported to the video game medium with minimal or even no changes; sports games are the obvious example, but Baldur's Gate is a highly celebrated RPG that was a remarkably complete use of the D&D rules of the time in a video game.
A significant amount of video game design doesn't actually have anything to do with video games, and another significant portion of video game design isn't so much new "design", but the modification of prefabricated systems. That leaves us with a minority of game designers that actually know what they're doing.
I'll just give an example that a mechanic which works on computer doesn't have to work on tabletop. Try using Avenger Minigun in tabletop Fallout, the rules are pretty much lifted from the original, and then tell me about rolling and adding 40d6.
As they say: "oh you".
That isn't a mechanic, just a silly calculation. The actual mechanic here is the randomisation of numbers. So while the numbers would have to be altered for tabletop (like, I don't know, X + 2d20 or something, or even simpler), the essential concept was initially born on the tabletop. This is what I'm talking about when I mention shallow surface elements, because a mechanic isn't a calculation or a control setup, but a factor of gameplay.
In short, rolling dice isn't a mechanic, but randomising numbers is. You have to ensure that the way those numbers are calculated is appropriate for the medium. For instance, 40d6 isn't really appropriate anywhere. We don't calculate multiples of six as effectively as we calculate multiples of ten, so a video game would be more effective basing its randomisation off imaginary d10. But forty dice is obviously way too much for an actual tabletop game. So the rules for the minigun in the video game used a legacy calculation from a different medium, which was then ported back to the medium the concept came from and then it was even more fucked up.
But hey, that was early days for vidya RPGs.
(scratch that)
Alex, normally I agree with you, but this is wrong.
The difference between a projectile in a video game and a tabletop game is that in a video game, whether it hits is determined by whether the gun is actually pointing at the target, while in a tabletop game, the gun doesn't even exist and you're just imagining it does, and there need to be a bunch of calculations performable by a human in a reasonable time that allow the players to decide if the imaginary gun is pointed at the imaginary target.
Having to be reasonably executable by a human is a big deal when it comes to TRPG design (not taking it into account is one of the many, many reasons why FATAL fails), and it's something the developers of The Witcher 2, Dark Souls, etc. have never had to think about, ever.
Why don't we ask that Bee guy for his opinion? He does game design, doesn't he?
Can't wait to beat VLR and see all the MIND BLOWING SHIT, so I can finally know and talk to people about it.
God dammit I leave you guys alone for ONE NIGHT and what happens
Alright. Alex, I'm sorry, but...no.
The two genres share some basic prerequisite skills in forethought, number crunching, and general story setup, but you apply and tune them in completely different ways to adapt to different storytelling media, resources, and action focus. Trying to lift a set of mechanics from one medium can form some of the basic scaffolding of another and define a very loose control flow (as it did for most western RPGs for a long time), but it'll be an imbalanced disaster unless you're literally just porting the tabletop game itself into an online room or something.
Hell, look at Baldur's Gate. It's about as close as you'll ever get to tabletop-to-video, but to get it to work they had to fundamentally futz with pretty much everything to get something halfway playable, and most of the legacy mechanics they didn't futz with wound up getting dropped in future Bioware games. A real-time video game tends to perform actions hundreds of times more frequently than a tabletop, can handle concurrent actions far more fluidly, and periods of just waiting for a round to end are considerably more awkward. Character death is far, far more punishing when you're looking at a 100-hour game with dungeons full of instakill traps that you can only randomly detect, so we got quicksave, and the game subsequently had to be tuned around save scumming because they were afraid to lose the more cripplingly random elements of D&D (which nearly every Bioware game since has ditched) but didn't want to trivialize it. The permanent death rule wound up getting dropped altogether in BGII because the game scaled so far beyond regular D&D boundaries that dying in that convenient (0, -10) area was rarely going to happen anyway. People new to the genre often didn't understand that you're expected to rest in the middle of dungeons, and were reluctant to use Vancian spells in a long crawl.
I mean, that's just the tip of the iceberg for one game that made a point of remaining as faithful as possible to tabletop rules and came out well-loved for the time but aged rather poorly once the genre matured. And again, Bioware wound up dropping half of the legacy D&D mechanics as time went on specifically because they realized it made for unnecessary irritation in a PC game with completely different pacing and scale (if you want another example of how blindly porting mechanics is a bad idea, look at Morrowind, because OH DEAR GOD THAT RNG, HOW THE FUCK AM I MISSING A GODDAMN SILT STRIDER). Actually getting a tabletop or PC RPG to not suck takes wildly different design principles, and someone who doesn't have experience messing around with a genre will run into a hell of a lot of pitfalls.
On a broader scale, this isn't even limited to differences in media. Like, I could probably flesh out a solid platformer, RPG, adventure, puzzle, or shmup -- but putting me in charge of an FPS, RTS, or fighting game will be asking for trouble because I'm terrible at playing them. This means while I could tool out some of the more basic operations and leave placeholder numbers, I have little sense of how to tune them appropriately in the long term. When we put together dev teams, we have to take each other's specialties into account. If I were put on the team for a genre I'm not personally that adept in (not out of the question -- parent companies are often reluctant to hire more people, and studios have to work with what they have), I'd be assigned to the more basic stuff like UI, game settings, record-keeping, putting core functionality in place and letting someone else worry about the numbers involved, etc. Which is, well...exactly what happened.
For the record, one of the very first questions the lead programmer gave me during my interview was "what are your favorite games?" This sort of thing is why. Not only does it give him a good idea of what project I'll work most naturally in, but typically what few new hires happen will be selected in large part by matching with their current or next big project.
I dunno, "finding geometrically optimal solutions to obstacles" is what I find myself continuously doing when playing Touhou, picturing the combinations of time and position that will make the bullets simply (and elegantly) flow past you, with dexterity only setting the risk involved in performing the chosen solution. The aggression thing is quite useless outside stages and some spellcards, though.
On the other hand, Alex, you do mention pace and real-time gameplay as if they weren't fundamental parts of loads of videogames (and I assume fencing). I can see a tabletop game making one go "this is a tactical version of Starcraft", but I really have a hard time imagining one that replicates the experience you get from having your armies duke it out as you're controlling them. In fact, Starcraft itself wouldn't feel like Starcraft if you had to pause to order your units.
Alright, this will take me some time:
In some tabletop games, like RPGs, this is true. In others, specifically tactical wargames, you have to have line of sight to a target without objects that interfere with that. So while a shot in a video game might be calculated via its rate of fire, the tabletop equivalent would use the abstraction of a turn, but still using very literal measurement values. Outside the turn as an abstraction of time, that way of making a shot is about as literal as you can get for the context of the game.
And? I'm not saying a game designed for tabletop and a game designed for vidya are necessarily or ought to be the same thing, but that the same essential principles and skillsets apply. Mechanics can be adapted across contexts to provide reasonably similar experiences, and many can be adapted wholesale.
As an aside, I'm not generally a fan of the number crunching that goes on in some video game RPGs. A system ought to be understood easily by the player, so as much as I can enjoy a JRPG, I often find myself playing them more or less "blind", with no real idea of how the different values relate. I think a lot of video game RPGs could stand to be more like their tabletop equivalents in terms of calculation.
As above. I'm not saying 100% conversion from one medium to another is a thing you want, but that the same essential skills apply when designing a game. You spend a lot of time talking about the differences between Baldur's Gate and the core D&D rules it was derived from, for instance, but a lot of that stuff (such as resting) was and is peripheral to the core mechanics -- the way numbers are derived, the way character building works, the order of combat and whatnot. Of course you have to change things to adapt them to a different medium, but those things are usually reasonably obvious.
We can see this isn't true, though. BioWare spent years making multiple adaptations of D&D for the PC, and while they were altered, the core rules/mechanics remained consistent (according to the edition of D&D being represented). You absolutely have to do some different things, but "wildly different design principles"? I don't think so. If that was the case, then Neverwinter Nights would've sucked, or, hell, I couldn't play a decent game of chess on my computer.
I'm not just talking about the relationship between video games and tabletop games, though, but video games and sports, martial arts and whatnot. Remember that Pong was initially an adaptation of a sport and was the first truly popular video game in the home. Video games owe almost as much to sports as they do to tabletop games, and to other facets of reality besides. So when considering how video games relate to other mediums, we also have to consider how they relate to sports, which are already games that operate in real time.
For what it's worth, while fencing is real time, there are "constructed turns", kind of. It's not just a factor of time, but behaviour; since actions occur at the same time or very, very close together, where one is acting "before" or "after" will be determined by their strategic (or reflexive) choice of action. Real combat sort of, kind of has "turns" in that actions take a minimum amount of time to initiate and complete, even if those turns are fractions of a second. An intermediate fencer throws an attack in .2 of a second, for instance, where an experienced one only takes .15 of a second or even .1 of a second. We fight in real time, but ultimately our actions can be roughly calculated along these timings.
To summarise:
I'm not saying that something in a medium can be 100% moved to another without issue, but I think it's pretty clear that different mediums use really similar skillsets in order to design a game. Those skills have to be adapted to different sets of tools (like a playing field, a pencil and paper, or the guts of a computer), but you can apply the same general principles along the same lines in any of the disciplines. After all, I was initially responding to
this. Which isn't true. Why should any professional have the capacity to design for one medium, but not for the other? It's like saying that the skills involved in writing a novel and a comic book are different. Some are. But for the most part, good writing is good writing, irrespective of the medium. The same can be said of game design, or martial arts, or strategy or any number of different disciplines. The capacity to relate one's skills to a different context is almost universally important, and when the context is as close as tabletop and video games? I would expect that whether or not a video game designer could design a tabletop game or not to be a good test of whether they can actually design a game, or whether they're going to modify a prefab based on some totally cool idea they had.
But then you have to roll to see if the guy holding the gun is aiming it right. My point still stands.
I'm not seeing how a tabletop RPG and a videogame are going to be "reasonably similar experiences" under any circumstances. They're...different things.
Because being good at one thing doesn't make you good at everything.
How to put this...
If the makers of Dark Souls announce that they're making an RTS, I'm not necessarily going to expect it to be an amazing RTS, because while they've demonstrated a lot of competence in action-RPGs, I have no way of knowing if they know the first thing about RTS.
And, IMO, those are more similar in terms of design principles than an ARPG and a TRPG.
That is hilariously wrong. Like...I think The Name of the Wind is a really good book, and well-written. But if you put its text, or even text in the same style in the narration of a comic, that comic would be terrible. The writer would have to use the entirely different skillset involving brevity in narration and speech, proper understanding of layouts, and other things like that that are relevant to comics and not to novels.
I've noticed that people approach computer-based WRPGs and pen-and-paper tabletop RPGs with different purposes in mind, frequently. Or at least each genre's players have a different set of expectations in mind, generally.
Computer-based WRPG players seem to often focus on achieving objectives in the game. If this involves combat, then the objectives are best achieved in quick ways, or particularly spectacular ways, or totally broken ways, for fun. If this involves fetchquests, usually the quickest methods are preferred. Players (at least the ones more willing to post youtube vids and write blog posts about it, so this may be a biased sample) are often open to screwing with the mechanics, even if it is at the expense of the game's narrative coherence. As such, dying (and to some extent, being subject to random forces) is counterproductive, and makes the gameplay experience less fun to perfect.
Tabletop/pen-and-paper RPG players seem to often focus on narrative. Character deaths, while disappointing, are relatively accepted part of an evolving, unique narrative that the characters and the game-world go through. Characters experiencing narrow brushes with death is exciting, rather than being annoying headaches. While some players enjoy seeing how badly they can break the mechanics, the secondary emphasis is still on how something really crazy fits or doesn't fit into the narrative and/or setting. Satisfaction of completing objectives comes more frequently from doing so dramatically or and less often from doing so quickly or overpoweredly. Not to mention it's harder to overlevel because the GM would know their way around it.
They are quite different skills.
Novels contain a ton more descriptive content, while comics contain tons of dialogue.
v Yeah that's what I meant.
Comics don't generally contain a ton of dialogue, it's just that dialogue is usually the only/predominant form of text throughout the story.
^^Not to mention understanding panel structure to illustrate the flow of time, and using color, composition, perspective, and many other things unique to visual mediums to convey thoughts and emotions that pure prose has a harder time doing.
I think this is the crux of the issue. You guys think I'm saying "do exactly the same thing in a different context" when I'm actually saying "apply the same skills in a different context". What if The Name Of The Wind was written by the same person, specifically for a comic book (assuming a fantasy context where that might happen)? I've spent a fair few words in my previous posts describing how one would actually have to change things across mediums (such as a Touhou board game using danmaku as playing pieces, or changing calculations to multiples of 10 as a general thing), but that seems to get lost in the noise.
I get that I write a lot of long posts and it's not entirely possible to keep up with absolutely everything I say in detail, but it's getting a bit frustrating to respond to a bunch of different people misinterpreting me in a variety of different ways. I'm not, nor was I ever, saying that you do exactly the same thing in different mediums -- but that that the same skills and principles are applied.
It would not work at all.
I have no frame of reference whatsoever for what that would be like, since I know he's good at lyrical prose, which you wouldn't use in a comic, but have no idea if he knows the first thing about short-form text, panel layout, or anything else you might find in a comic book.
I know that.
You're still wrong.