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The Glowing Circles of Destiny

September 17th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · RTS

Warfare is, ultimately, about area control. You need to seize and hold specific regions and kill anything that prevents you from keeping them. Tactics will decide how you go about taking control and exercising your material influence in a given zone.

So why do RTS games insist on glowing circle of destiny? Whether it’s moving a unit to the final spot in a scenario or capturing a flag, “x marks the spot” is the prevailing design meme.

I’m playing World in Conflict‘s campaign at the moment and it’s pretty good for what it is. It does a good job of giving you reasons to be where you are, though the interpersonal dramas are not very interesting. I don’t care that Lt. Plotpoint needs to get money home to his mom, or that Col. Hardass and Cpt. Goofus have issues. The narration is good at communicating the panic that would certainly follow a surprise Soviet invasion, and the opening couple of missions are excellent retreat and regroup missions; overwhelming force is not an option.

Objective points are marked by linked circles. You seize them and machine gun nests are then built to protect them, and/or you move on to the next circles. But if I am holding all the surrounding buildings and have eliminated all immediate threats to my position, why do I need to be in the circles for things to move forward? Even more ludicrous, objective point fortifications are built faster if I cram more units into the circle. So even if it makes no tactical sense for me to stick my demolition guy out in the open where he could be sniped or to mass all my light armor in a clump where an artillery strike could neuter me, the game’s vision of objective control rewards this insanity with faster machine gun support.

It gets sillier. An early mission in the campaign requires you to take control of a gas station. Naturally, there are objective circles around the station. But you can destroy the gas station if you want – all you need are the objective points. Then, I assume, the game guesses that you have what you are supposed to have.

Now, I’m no computer coding genius, but is this reliance on glowing circles technologically necessary? Of course, you have to mark control of areas one way or another, but this isn’t a situation like Civ or Company of Heroes where control of the tiles or resource points have direct consequences in planning.

Objective points like this do contribute to transparency. It is immediately clear what needs to be done. And clarity is essential in games that can have a lot going on. But when a game as warlike as World in Conflict uses the glowing circles it feels a little off to me.

Not that I have many better ideas. Zone control could be done, with the zones marked on the minimap – eliminate all enemies in the area to take control. Maybe some sort of radius of control around an objective instead of the circles.

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Thoughts on a Ballpark

September 17th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Design

Saturday night, I went to the Braves-Nationals game, probably my final game at RFK. Next year, a new stadium opens on the waterfront, paid for by the tax dollars of the citizens of Washington DC, because I guess they have money to throw around in the hope that it will lead to business development.

I will be glad to see the end of RFK. It’s a terrible park. Hideous architecture. Lousy overpriced concessions. The video monitors and out of town scoreboards are too small to follow. The concourses are very narrow, so it can be a real pain getting around when it’s crowded. Sure, a night in any ballpark beats a night not at a game, but every time I go to RFK, I love Camden even more.

But as I sat in my seat for the final inning (7-5 Nats win, by the way.), I realized that the sight lines were great. Here I was in section 511 and I could see the entire field. The players didn’t look like ants, either. Considering the vintage of the stadium, I’m pretty pleased that I never missed anything that happened on the field.

So the ostensible reason to go to the game – to see the game – was met more than satisfactorily. It was the other stuff (food, drink, visuals, etc.) that I hated, and it’s not strictly baseball stuff. It’s enough for me to consider my RFK experiences unpleasant, though.

There are a lot of things in video games that are like ballpark concessions. Though not necessarily part of the “game”, they contribute to the entire experience. As a game strictly understood, Bioshock is a shooter like many shooters that have come before. But the music, art and theme lift it above the run of the mill variation on pistol/shotgun/beehive arm. It’s come to the point where you can’t make a game without sound or illustrative imagery any more than you can open a stadium without hot dogs. It’s expected.

And, as I age, I learn to appreciate how the art design of a game (“graphics” if you insist) are so integral to the entire experience. I’ve written before about how the “graphics/gameplay” dichotomy is a ludicrous simplification of the art of game design, and I think that real life has more to say to us about how good experiences are wrapped up in things not necessarily inherent in the core experience.

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On the Origins of Species

September 13th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Design, Wargames

Via Scott Krol, Gamespy has an article from John Keefer about the wargames of the past and their connection to the cons we know and love.

I was reading the article (and Krol’s fact checking) as I took a break from writing my review of Armageddon Empires. Then it hit me why wargaming and serious strategy gaming is often pushed off the front page of gaming coverage.

It has different parents. (WARNING: Gross oversimplification follows.)

Think about it. How many articles or photo essays have you seen on the ‘”glories” of the arcades of the 1980s? This is the birthplace of the first person shooter, the platformer, the racing game, the action sports game and the flight sim.

Role-playing games come from D&D, which came from a medieval wargame rule set married to geek icon Tolkien.

Strategy games come from the board and war games of the 1970s and 1980s.

Of course, most mainstream strategy titles have used the power of technology to almost entirely hide the board game origins, to the point where many RTS are as close to role playing games or platformers as they are to wargames. This merging of family trees is probably the root of much of the hardcore resentment of the RTS genre on one side and the spreadsheet accusations on the other.

And it could be part of why there is so much resistance to the idea of strategy games on the console. The console market is the arcade of the new century. Even though the machines work fine for turn based strategy games (I love Catan and Carcassonne on my 360) the emphasis has been on developing titles that remind gamers of things they played on their first generation consoles which, in turn, reminded people of things they played on their Ataris which, in turn, were copies of things they played in the arcade. Action games have come a long way from the coin consumers of the past, but the general idea survives – you are an army of one killing waves of enemies, gobbling health packs and ammo crates.

In this way, Armageddon Empires is a throwback; a game that would really only be feasible on a computer but looks and plays like a card based wargame. And like many of the biggest Avalon Hill games, you really need a walkthrough to understand what you are supposed to do. But it wears its roots on its sleeve; I don’t know Vic Davis beyond the occasional forum comment, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find a strong board game background. If it’s true that game designers design games that they want to play, I think we can learn a lot about the evolution of computer game design by tracking game genealogies through CVs and the like.

I’ve always liked the idea of game genealogy; the more I learn about games and game developers the more I appreciate the rare genius who can do dozens of original things in a lifetime (Reiner Knizia being the king of them all.) It’s too bad that the Mobygames credits are so incomplete. I’ve tried to update some from my own data, but then they wanted me to send scanned evidence of my changes, etc. and I didn’t get around to that.

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Don’t Do This

September 11th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · RTS

The back of the World in Conflict manual has a list of hotkeys.

The cover is a mottled brown. The middle column is printed in dark blue.

And the entire thing is in five point font.

Plus that have every control group creation shortcut printed.

Create Control Group 1: Ctrl + 1
Create Control Group 2: Ctrl + 2
Create Control Group 3: Ctrl + 3

And so on until they reach Control Group 10.

If they had shortened that list, they could have used that color somewhere else and I wouldn’t be straining my aging eyes to read the blue print.

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Another World

September 11th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · History

At moment, I’m sitting through the very long install of World in Conflict, the Cold War Gone Hot RTS from Massive Entertainment and Sierra. The box cover shows a GI dragging two little girls to safety as a helicopter fires rockets at the Statue of Liberty.

As far as settings go, this setting is pretty popular. As a late Cold War baby, I remember both amazing TV moments like The Day After and laughable drek like Amerika. And, of course, wargamers tired of refighting WW2 loved to model the Fulda Gap, through which the Red Army was expected to invade West Germany.

In fact, the first computer game that really consumed my hours was a late 80s superpower showdown, Harpoon. Naval and air warfare in the GIUK Gap, that wide space of sea between Greenland and Norway.

Of course, when most of these were made, there was still a possibility of the Soviet Union invading Europe, either [Read more →]

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Just What Game Journalism Needed

September 6th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Industry, Media

I’ve always thought that gaming journalism wasn’t doing enough to serve the already dominant 16-25 male demographic. How can we do more to attract this underappreciated audience?

Why not revive the failed PC Accelerator magazine, the lad-mag for nerds that stuck Stevie Case in sexy schoolteacher poses in 2000?

Because if there’s one thing this business has a desperate thirst for, it’s more frat boy humor.

EDIT: This issue in question is apparently a one-off, not a revival. Norman Chan, on the PCGamer homepage, writes:

[T]his magazine is our report on gaming’s current cultural climate. This includes exposes on internet memes, game cakes, conventions, competitive gaming leagues, and as you can deduce from the cover, girls.

Chan does promise another issue if this one is well received, though.

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