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[PATV] Wednesday, January 16, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 5, Ep. 19: Depth vs. Complexity
As someone who's spent thousands of hours between Grand Strategy games and Dorf Fort I can't help but feel you're wrong when you uphold them as things not to strive for, sure their rulesets are complex, however once you learn the rules of these games you usually find they are exceedingly simple and intuitive to play, the interfaces are designed for usability and functionality rather than trying to work with initial intuition.
Rather than being the wrong thing to strive for they simple target a different audience, one who can deal with a functional and usable interface rather than a initially intuitive one.
I mean, just look at Dort Fort, within 3 to 6 keys you can be doing anything from building a kennel, to ordering an area dug out to building a 10 square long wall. It might not be intuitive but I'll be damned if that isn't exceedingly useful in it's own way once you learn the rulesets of the systems involved.
Good episode. Makes me question some ideas I've been having.
Namely, are there ever any times where irreducibly complex rulesets are fun. If you have the core game, which is reasonably understandable, but simple, is it reasonable to add spectacle to the game through a complex system which is designed to be obtuse just to throw unpredictability into the game. The player would always be able to use the core system to play and counter anything resulting from the complex system (so long as they can identify what's coming), but simply thrashing at the complex system or mastering it would add more gameplay variety.
The idea was, learning through random trials what the complex system did was to be reasonably rewarding and fun, but the more I think about this episode and this idea, the less I see this complex system adding tbh.
I think this is a great episode. A good example of this dichotomy in action: League of Legends vs. Dota 2. I'm generalizing here, but I would say that Dota 2 is slightly more complex than League of Legends and is therefore enabled to have slightly more depth. Both games have the fundamentally same mechanics, but the slight difference in complexity fosters both a change in challenge and therefore a change in the core aesthetic of both games. This explains why League has many more players, but almost everybody who switches from LoL to Dota says that Dota is just in some ways "more fun". Overall, I think your individual preferences for how you weight depth and complexity (in a game theory sense) determine which types of games you'll play.
There are other factors at work here too. I got into Dota about 6 years ago, when me and my buddies would spend all night at the local LAN centers trying out the all of the different games / mods / maps. Dota is much easier to get into when it's just you and 9 buddies who have no idea what's going on. So maybe I would have ended up a LoL player.
I've been throwing myself into learning DotA2 over the last month, a game with limitless depth but which is oppressively complex for the first timer.
What's interesting, I think, is that the complexity seems to stem from the game's age, and the people who've played it before me. I mean, the game on the surface isn't THAT complex. Four buttons and a mouse. 5 heroes vs 5 heroes, creeps marching towards towers, crush their base to win it.
The complexity, then, stems from being expected/required to know what the game looks like when played well. Who/when/how to lane, and with whom? What's a jungler? What's warding? Which one is the carry again, and why isn't it my Lich? Because you need to know how the game operates and what all the roles are, even at the lowest skill bracket, the game has a remarkable amount of complexity impressed upon it in the form of some seven or so years of knowledge.
A refreshing return to EC's bailiwick, I got a bit nervous when I heard "Irreducible complexity" bandied about but I had nothing to fear. This is insightful stuff as usual and I have..."faith" that we won't be going back off the rails with a religious discussion whose depth this particular show isn't equipped to plumb.
I don't want You guys to ever be afraid to approach a topic that pertains to gaming or a discussion games for fear of backlash. That said, it seems clear religion implies too much personal baggage to expect a thorough unpacking in the space of these excellent but compact animated clips.
I'm glad you guys gave up looking fail discussing religion. Best move in 3 episodes.
It's also a shame because it was a topic they brought up because it was an auctioned request, by some guy called Ben I think.
They could have succeeded if they hadn't brought up their opinions on science in their discussion about religion, then hadn't followed up with a 'we're totally right!' video afterwards.
The actual topic, how religion is handled in games had a lot interesting discussion points from fantasy to real world equivalence, symbolism, religion as a game mechanic (like in Civ) or even games being used to evangalize like the hilarious Left Behind RTS.
Not to mention how it can be used as part of a narrative, though the church being a front for a terrible ancient evil/conspiracy is practically a fantasy RPG cliche right now.
I'm half tempted to make a vid of my own but ironically my spare time is being taken up by both an Ironman science fiction novel project and getting a 1500 point Thousand Sons/Chaos Daemons army built and painted. So, no promises there.
Have left PA forums.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
This is pathetic. I guess chess is also a bad game because you have to learn the rules before you play.
The problem with modern setpiece designers (as distinguished from games designers, who are decidedly a dying breed) is that by and large none of them ever played any of the games they love to whine about. And they also apparently have a strong aversion to taking a few minutes out of their lives to read something.
I still want an apology from Extra Credits to us non-religious types for being hit over the head for the previous three episodes. The way they slandered their entire community for being "hostile to religion" as well as their idiotic definition of faith and their condescending attitude should not be forgotten.
The whole online shooters with multiple weapons thing is actually not really a source of much depth; while in theory it could create it, in practice it isn't. Such levelling is pure pavlovian grinding, and the variations between weapons is often quite minor from an experiential point of view.
In reality, FPSs mostly still have the problem that ultimately, there are only so many "real" weapons:
1) Ranged explosives
Rocket launchers - explosive, high damage, straight shot
Grenade launchers - explosive, high damage, bouncing
2) Grenade types
Grenades - explosive, high damage, low range, bouncing
Flashbangs - no damage, bouncing, blinding
Smoke Grenades - no damage, bouncing, obscuring
3) Sniper rifles - extreme range, weak in close quarters, high damage
4) Assault rifles - flexible range, automatic fire, moderate damage
* Scoped rifle - basically an automatic sniper rifle, has worse damage than the sniper rifle but automatic fire but ultimately falls into this category
5) SMG - mid to short range, automatic fire, low damage
6) Shotgun - mid to short range, high damage
* Automatic shotgun - lower damage for higher rate of fire
7) Pistol - weak backup weapon, high speed, mid range, low damage
* Hand Cannon - stronger backup weapon, tends to be lower speed but higher damage
8) Melee - very short range, moderate to high damage
* Sometimes you can substitute a better melee attack for another weapon type
That's about it really. And every FPS has them. Really anything beyond this tends to be completely pointless from an experiential point of view, and very often the SMG is pointless itself as it ends up overlapping with the assault rifle and the shotgun too much and thus not really having a role at all.
The only real ways around this are to make unrealistic weapons. But most games lack those, so the above is basically what there actually is in the actual game, and that's all the depth there is. Most of the time one of the variations is just better than the other one as well, which further reduces selection - either the pump action or the automatic shotgun tends to be just better than the other, the hand cannon is often just better than the pistol, and one of the assault rifles tends to just be better at what it does than the other one, rendering the other one more or less pointless. So in reality very often there are maybe 5 classes - the rocket user, the grenade launcher user, the sniper, the guy with the assault rifle, the shotguner.
This is, incidentally, why people say that they keep releasing the same game over and over again - because virtually all of the games of that sort are basically the same. We've seen the same thing back to Counterstrike. Crysis 2 was interesting to me precisely because it took those standard elements and added superhuman abilities into the mix - the addition of cloaking, the ability to move much faster than in many such games, to jump higher, to soak more damage, and the various other similar elements really helped add to the game's depth. While these did add to the complexity as well to some extent, they added a lot more emergent gameplay, and made matches much less predictable. Even if the game was very similar to the various other modern shooters, the additions to the game helped distinguish it. Likewise, L4D and L4D2's assymetric multiplayer is very interesting, even though it just uses the standard weapons for one team - the other team is very different, and the goal in the game is very divergent.
I will also note that there ARE games that take turn-based strategy and make it real time - RTS's. And they are ridiculously intensive on players, which is why there can be such enormous skill gaps in competitive play. The best RTS player is ridiculously better than the worst.
I've been throwing myself into learning DotA2 over the last month, a game with limitless depth but which is oppressively complex for the first timer.
I disagree. The game has a lot of complexity, but ultimately when you get right down to it, all of the DOTA clone MOBAs are all very similar, and all sort of break down in similar ways. This isn't to say that they are bad, but I would argue that those games have actually fairly limited depth. Not that they're shallow games, mind you, but they're not as deep as is often claimed by their adherents.
First- excellent episode, very enjoyable and relevant- a number of games come to mind where Complexity and Depth are confused heavily... games like the Darkfall MMO which had an amazing potential for depth, but had such a clunky UI that is was not very accessible to a wide player base (hence the player base dwindled). The amusing part was seeing the die hard community troll the heck out of the players who just couldn't wrap their heads around the UI as if they were not "good players"... it poses question of who you want to play your game (are you making it for everyone, or for a core set of individuals?)
The open question I would have to the latter point is... if you are looking to make a game for a specific core audience, then does the balance of complexity versus depth change? There are those out there who relish the opportunity to learn a massively complex rule set... to study it and master it... do we no longer design for them at all?
Second- I am posting for the first time today because I simply could not take the blatant "forum troll" comments regarding the religion episodes (yes, I have fallen into the trap).
@Trainwreck141- I am not a religious individual, not baptized, never set foot in a church- Do not lump me in with you as "non religious types". These videos offer a perspective- you can choose to agree or disagree with the perspective, but develop an actual argument that doesn't require inflammatory remarks to make a point.
@katalaiscute- The videos were obviously not "fail" because they prompted a tremendous amount of discussion... Fail would have been everyone closing their web browser before the videos even finished, but you watched them and you participated in the conversation (probably without adding much DEPTH to the conversation, but hey, you contributed nonetheless)... Welcome to a community, and congrats on making these videos a complete success.
And for everyone else- If you are not willing to even try and understand another point of view... well, just look at our world today. Look at the turmoil in the middle east. Look at the unnecessary bloodshed and violence that runs many societies. The root cause of this violence is typically intolerance (many of you will actually point at a different religion as the cause... but the root of it is intolerance as a doctrine of their religion). If we can't take the time to understand each other and truly listen to the thoughts, opinions and values of others, then we will never be able to truly function as a peaceful society.
That is it for this "non-religious type"- back to watching and reading.
"I still want an apology from Extra Credits to us non-religious types for being hit over the head for the previous three episodes. The way they slandered their entire community for being "hostile to religion" as well as their idiotic definition of faith and their condescending attitude should not be forgotten."
It wasn't slander. At no point did they use "all" referring to the pushback comments (so no "entire community". Furthermore, I disagree with you, so please don't speak for me to rhetorically enhance your outrage).
Demanding an apology for their opinion, using air quotes, and saying their definition of faith was idiotic (because it can be assigned to scientists) are all open signs of hostility to their position. You've just got done calling them idiotic and wrong. Maybe there's some version of religion you're not hostile to, but they can't divine that through your words. Taking those words at face value, their response was proportionate. You may still disagree with it, and that's fine, but the response was proportionate.
Hope you stop being mad soon, sir. It's a bad way to stay.
@chjonson - I think you missed the point the episode makes. Complexity doesn't make depth. Complexity makes complexity. Two games in a given genre, one being more complex, doesn't mean that the more complex game is deeper solely because of the added complexity.
> episode topic; depth vs complexity in video games.
> comments about religion.
It seems the religious and nonreligious crowd aren't so different: neither side can give it a rest until people stop "being wrong on the internet" and start catering to their own point of view.
@Titanium Dragon
However, on the same hand, while there are only a handful of weapons you can find many different roles.
While there are a few optimal combinations, there are several sort of "specialists" you run into while playing. Things like "the Knifer", "the Sniper", "Camper", "Noob Tuber", "Grenade guy", "Double shotgunner", and others only come together in games with a set of simple rules that allows you to do what you will with them. They're things we all know about in online FPSs, but they're a result of the depth of the mechanics. When you go back and look at even the early call of duty games where you had classes or limits placed on what you could do, there was a lot less depth to the gameplay. If you were this kind of class, you did this, and if you were that kind of class you did that. The depth/complexity ratio comes from not teaching people each class but from teaching people to do one thing and then giving them the skills and tools to do it how they want.
For most games, I'd agree with this design philosophy, but here are some games that break it that, in my opinion, would be worse if they focused more on reducing complexity:
Dwarf Fortress - Yes, you mentioned this one, but look at it this way: More and more things are being added all the time. Ridiculous amounts, in fact. And it's going to continue that way for a long time. If they started making the interface accessible now, they would have to keep redesigning it. All the time. Dwarf Fortress couldn't be the amazing thing that it is if accessibility was the focus. An interface redesign is actually planned for late stage development, if I recall correctly, it's just not a priority because the developer thinks long term.
X-Com: So many things in this one, yet not as many meaningful choices as you'd think. Just look at all the items, or how you can level up your soldiers. In the end, not that many items are truly useful, and it's often the case that you just throw your guys at the meat grinder instead of levelling them. Yet, somehow, this makes the game better. It makes the world feel bigger, even though the choices aren't "meaningful" per se. Somehow, streamlining this loses something, albeit something that's hard to pinpoint.
Dota 2: This might not fit my argument, I'm not sure, I don't know the game well enough. But: There's no tutorial, ridiculous amounts of information you have to know and it's tough as nails to get into. But then, it could be argued these things do create an immense amount of meaningful choices, so, again, might now fit the category here.
Twilight Imperium 3: Why not just play 5 games of Eclipse? Becuase this is freakin Twilight Imperium 3, baby!
Elder Scrolls Games: This is a case of the games getting streamlined over time. I, for one, consider this streamlining a good thing, but there is something that rubs me the wrong way. To this day, I keep looking at Daggerfall, and it's giving me a feeling that Skyrim could never hope to achieve. Again, random dungeons and random world make it borderline unplayable to the average gamer (I include myself here, I can't actually play the thing) but I still admire Daggerfall and I'll probably remember it more than Skyrim.
Disgaea series: I dare you to streamline this
Roguelikes: Nethack -> Diablo II -> Diablo III - I guess you could consider Diablo II a sort of golden middle ground between the two extremes? Or maybe that's giving it too much credit.
Dominions 3: The Awakening - No comment neccessary on this
AI War - WTF is this?
Anyway, this post isn't meant as a counteragument to the video. It's just that even with the best guidelines, there comes a point where you have to know when to break them. No design philosophy can ever be universal (except, of course, when it does)
@Randomloki if you want an example of what you're talking about with the "How does your target audience affect the complexity you want," look at Dungeons and Dragons. Specifically, look at how many DnD 3.5 fans flipped tables over 4e for being so much more trimmed down.
4e is not a bad system in and of itself, and it can arguably be just as deep as 3.5 depending on the situation, but simplifications to systems like classes, skills, even the much loathed and debated alignment system, the fact that these were simplified at all created outrage.
Even years after 4e launched, a majority of tabletop gaming fans prefer to play 3.5 (or the 3.75 known as Pathfinder), and while I'm having trouble finding solid information on sales of the system, I'm unconvinced that their attempt to market to a more general audience has made up for that.
For me, this has always been a massive problem in Fifa 13. I always get the feeling the game isn't telling me something with skill moves, or I need a spreadsheet open in front of me to use them or that basic attacking and timing just isn't suggested at you. Hell penalties were only properly explained in the most recent fifa, and I don't even know how many have been released.
Lack of accessibility of that depth -- overly complicated mechanics with no means of grasping them before you have to be a master of them -- are brutality incarnate. Sometimes the experience is compelling enough that you're willing to deal with the constant need to consult outside documentation just to even get started (Minecraft, DOTA, DF), but I've encountered plenty of times where whatever was compelling is too far out of reach and too frustrating to reach for to bother.
For example, I got Hero Academy recently and asked my friend to join me in it. He'd never played before, while I'd played a few games. I did horribly the first few times because even with its minimalist tutorial, you are expected to grasp the depth ASAP or end up in an unwinnable state early on. When he tried the game, he felt overwhelmed by the amount of strategy and rules he was expected to completely understand from turn one, and decided he was never going to play again.
If there was some way to ease the player in before they are savagely murdered in a pure PVP strategy game, it would help quite a bit. A single player campaign that doubles as a tutorial, for instance, like Starcraft uses. It's not fair to just say "If you don't immediately understand and love this experience, screw you, it's not FOR you" when these are entirely solvable problems.
I am one of those that tried Dwarf Fortress a few years ago, really wanting to like it, but I just couldn't get into it due to its interface. I lasted 20 minutes.
As far as Dota 2 goes (from my beta impressions), was anyone else confounded as to how to purchase items in their first game? I've played Dota, LoL, HoN, etc. and I was really surprised by how unintuitive their user interface was for something like that. It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to purchase the in-game item. Hopefully it has changed, but it feels like that is one element that is unnecessarily confusing because the developers got too used to how it worked for them. It feels like unintuitive interfaces were allowed to exist simply due to the existence of highly complex gameplay, which are two very separate things.
I am one of those that tried Dwarf Fortress a few years ago, really wanting to like it, but I just couldn't get into it due to its interface. I lasted 20 minutes.
As far as Dota 2 goes (from my beta impressions), was anyone else confounded as to how to purchase items in their first game? I've played Dota, LoL, HoN, etc. and I was really surprised by how unintuitive their user interface was for something like that. It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to purchase the in-game item. Hopefully it has changed, but it feels like that is one element that is unnecessarily confusing because the developers got too used to how it worked for them. It feels like unintuitive interfaces were allowed to exist simply due to the existence of highly complex gameplay, which are two very separate things.
Are you guys going to do an episodes similar Depth vs. Complexity as it relates to meaningful experiences generated in a multi-player environment. It's an interesting point about how mechanics based around the presence of other players work in a single-player setting and vice versa, It'd be an interesting subject for you guys to explore and I think it may have a some merit as a topic.
Um, you guys missed the BIGGEST, most GLARING example of depth / complexity: fighting games (specifically, their controls). Seriously, more threads and discussions on Smashboards have resulted from arguments about the series depth / complexity ratio than from almost any other topic. You completely missed how complexity of controls limits the depth of the game (and no, I don't think it should just be rolled into UI). When I read the topic for the week, I was *begging* for a section about complexity of controls, and you guys completely neglected it.
Good video, nice to see a return to a discussion of game dynamics.
The only thing I might disagree with is the 'depth' of modern multiplayer shooters. There is no disputing the fact that the game mechanics are designed in a way that makes the experience last a very long time, but a very large amount of that is content restriction. When you load into your first deathmatch you may only have access to three guns and a choice of two grenades, but as you play you begin to unlock more weapons, add ons, new ways to play.
Certainly when you do unlock this stuff some of it adds real depth, but I don't believe it's all that much. Is your 500th match really going to be all experientially different from your 1st? The progression mechanics employed by these games certainly offer a lot of longevity to the content, in much the same way that social games do, but longevity is not the same thing as depth.
Brilliant return to form after the hyperfail of the last couple episodes. Personally, I think engagement is subjective and, while you should always try to design an engaging game, for me elegance is what makes the RULES engaging. The rest is just window dressing and aesthetics which, as important as those things are to initially engage a player, aren't required.
Being a chess nerd: I have to say that chess is the first game that comes to mind when I think of a game with a bad "tutorial" that makes it very difficult to reduce the fairly complex, and incredibly deep, rules underlying not only basic play but more complex strategy. One the biggest questions in chess, and one that many people have made lots of money answering, is the question of how to teach players how to play chess. As of right now, there are many options but no truly elegant solution: To get to a point where you can understand the game of chess to a degree where you can begin to really confidently make decisions, the key enjoyable aspect of the game, requires a fairly large time investment of fumbling around not really knowing what you're doing and trying to process a massive amount of information. Again, there are systems to mitigate this, but in truth I've yet to see a system that ever makes the initial process of learning actually *enjoyable.* Which probably explains why more people don't play chess.
And on one last note. again as a chess nerd: I have to point out that most chess players prefer the top-down digital interfaces found on most chess computer programs to a real-life 3-dimensional board simply because it's a simpler, more elegant interface that makes it harder to overlook things. /Major Nerding
movement
` effects cone of fire/deviation
` sometimes effects sway
recoil
` consistency
` direction
` amplitude
sway
` consistency
` direction
` amplitude
deviation
` minimum/maximum
` inflation by shot
` deflation by second
` unaimed/aimed deviation
speed
` aim speed
` reload speed
` switch speed
` movement speed when aimed/unaimed
magazine/belt capacity
range
` muzzle velocity
` damage fall off
` recoil/sway pattern
` deviation
` player's marksmanship
TTK (time to kill)
` damage per shot
` rate of fire
` overall weapon accuracy
` overall player accuracy
granted there has been many cases of FPS game not taking advantage of all of these, that and a lot of inexcusably dumb design decisions such as BF3s AUG which has the highest muzzle velocity of all the ARs, little deviation, and lower than average fire rate however it kicks randomly to each side making it impossible to anticipate it's recoil. making it a sub par CQC gun with an inexplicable marksmanship characteristics.
you say SMGs generally overlap in range too much with shotguns and ARs. This is true however the advantages SMGs generally bring to the table is the highest movement speed, aim speed, reload speed, great unaimed accuracy, and accuracy while moving. and you say revolvers (assuming that's what you mean by hand cannon) are generally better than autos, well autos have high mag caps, faster reloads, are easier to use because of their fire rates, deep mags, and none existent recoil.
This is pathetic. I guess chess is also a bad game because you have to learn the rules before you play.
When did they say irreducible complexity was bad design? All I heard was that it places more of a burden on the player. This is utterly true; Just look at board games. Each game has a unique set of rules that are irreducible and must be learned in order to play. This doesn't mean that the game has to be inherently complex. On the contrary games like Go, Chess, Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride are incredibly simple games with a great deal of depth, but their rules are still irreducible.
Irreducible Complexity is only an issue because it will reduce the number of people willing to play a game. Paradox Games have a ridiculous amount of depth, but the complexity is too high for most people to want to learn and so they inhabit a niche market. I'm sure you've tried to get people to play a Board Game and been unable to convince them. Even the simplest games feel more daunting when the rules are irreducible, but, to reiterate myself, it does not make them poorly designed games.
Also there are ways to teach people to play games with irreducible complexity and make it seem like it isn't the case. I've taught 6 and 7 year olds to play Settlers of Catan and Risk by slowing adding new information until the rules were fully fleshed out. I'm sure you learned chess gradually instead of having the rules read to you in one deposit of information.
I don't know if I agree that board games are inherently irreducible. With chess, you can start by just explaining how pieces move and capture, and slowly introduce new rules like castling, en passant, and getting a pawn to the end of the board. With Settlers, you can start with collecting resources and buying settlements and roads, and then introduce cards, cities, the robber, and harbors. When I learn a new board game I start by looking at the winning condition, what I need to do to achieve it, and the basic turn order, and then I read other rules as I encounter those situations in the game.
This is pathetic. I guess chess is also a bad game because you have to learn the rules before you play.
The problem with modern setpiece designers (as distinguished from games designers, who are decidedly a dying breed) is that by and large none of them ever played any of the games they love to whine about. And they also apparently have a strong aversion to taking a few minutes out of their lives to read something.
It's not that irreducible complexity makes a game bad. It's that it limits the amount of people willing to play said game. I myself, while I somewhat enjoying computer strategy games, loathe chess. I prefer the former over the latter because usually I don't have to learn how to do everything at once. And I do not play games with the intent to "lose" many times before I "win". My fun comes from win or stalemate in games, as well as enjoyable story, etc. The point being that the more mental weight in a game, the less likely it will be widely accepted. So long as the goal is not to make a broadly enjoyable game, but instead a specifically enjoyable game, then the game designer is fine.
But one must think of their audience; a painting, a movie, a game is meaningless without at least one viewer besides the creator. And an artist should always be thinking about, more specifically, who their audience is.
I enjoyed this episode. Then again, I also agreed with what they had to say about both religion and science.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
It wasn't slander. At no point did they use "all" referring to the pushback comments (so no "entire community". Furthermore, I disagree with you, so please don't speak for me to rhetorically enhance your outrage).
At no point did Trainwreck say "all" non-religious types. Your interpretation is selective.
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Rather than being the wrong thing to strive for they simple target a different audience, one who can deal with a functional and usable interface rather than a initially intuitive one.
I mean, just look at Dort Fort, within 3 to 6 keys you can be doing anything from building a kennel, to ordering an area dug out to building a 10 square long wall. It might not be intuitive but I'll be damned if that isn't exceedingly useful in it's own way once you learn the rulesets of the systems involved.
Namely, are there ever any times where irreducibly complex rulesets are fun. If you have the core game, which is reasonably understandable, but simple, is it reasonable to add spectacle to the game through a complex system which is designed to be obtuse just to throw unpredictability into the game. The player would always be able to use the core system to play and counter anything resulting from the complex system (so long as they can identify what's coming), but simply thrashing at the complex system or mastering it would add more gameplay variety.
The idea was, learning through random trials what the complex system did was to be reasonably rewarding and fun, but the more I think about this episode and this idea, the less I see this complex system adding tbh.
There are other factors at work here too. I got into Dota about 6 years ago, when me and my buddies would spend all night at the local LAN centers trying out the all of the different games / mods / maps. Dota is much easier to get into when it's just you and 9 buddies who have no idea what's going on. So maybe I would have ended up a LoL player.
What's interesting, I think, is that the complexity seems to stem from the game's age, and the people who've played it before me. I mean, the game on the surface isn't THAT complex. Four buttons and a mouse. 5 heroes vs 5 heroes, creeps marching towards towers, crush their base to win it.
The complexity, then, stems from being expected/required to know what the game looks like when played well. Who/when/how to lane, and with whom? What's a jungler? What's warding? Which one is the carry again, and why isn't it my Lich? Because you need to know how the game operates and what all the roles are, even at the lowest skill bracket, the game has a remarkable amount of complexity impressed upon it in the form of some seven or so years of knowledge.
I would guess notably more so than it is now. A great game to use as an example here.
I don't want You guys to ever be afraid to approach a topic that pertains to gaming or a discussion games for fear of backlash. That said, it seems clear religion implies too much personal baggage to expect a thorough unpacking in the space of these excellent but compact animated clips.
It's also a shame because it was a topic they brought up because it was an auctioned request, by some guy called Ben I think.
They could have succeeded if they hadn't brought up their opinions on science in their discussion about religion, then hadn't followed up with a 'we're totally right!' video afterwards.
The actual topic, how religion is handled in games had a lot interesting discussion points from fantasy to real world equivalence, symbolism, religion as a game mechanic (like in Civ) or even games being used to evangalize like the hilarious Left Behind RTS.
Not to mention how it can be used as part of a narrative, though the church being a front for a terrible ancient evil/conspiracy is practically a fantasy RPG cliche right now.
I'm half tempted to make a vid of my own but ironically my spare time is being taken up by both an Ironman science fiction novel project and getting a 1500 point Thousand Sons/Chaos Daemons army built and painted. So, no promises there.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
The problem with modern setpiece designers (as distinguished from games designers, who are decidedly a dying breed) is that by and large none of them ever played any of the games they love to whine about. And they also apparently have a strong aversion to taking a few minutes out of their lives to read something.
In reality, FPSs mostly still have the problem that ultimately, there are only so many "real" weapons:
1) Ranged explosives
Rocket launchers - explosive, high damage, straight shot
Grenade launchers - explosive, high damage, bouncing
2) Grenade types
Grenades - explosive, high damage, low range, bouncing
Flashbangs - no damage, bouncing, blinding
Smoke Grenades - no damage, bouncing, obscuring
3) Sniper rifles - extreme range, weak in close quarters, high damage
4) Assault rifles - flexible range, automatic fire, moderate damage
* Scoped rifle - basically an automatic sniper rifle, has worse damage than the sniper rifle but automatic fire but ultimately falls into this category
5) SMG - mid to short range, automatic fire, low damage
6) Shotgun - mid to short range, high damage
* Automatic shotgun - lower damage for higher rate of fire
7) Pistol - weak backup weapon, high speed, mid range, low damage
* Hand Cannon - stronger backup weapon, tends to be lower speed but higher damage
8) Melee - very short range, moderate to high damage
* Sometimes you can substitute a better melee attack for another weapon type
That's about it really. And every FPS has them. Really anything beyond this tends to be completely pointless from an experiential point of view, and very often the SMG is pointless itself as it ends up overlapping with the assault rifle and the shotgun too much and thus not really having a role at all.
The only real ways around this are to make unrealistic weapons. But most games lack those, so the above is basically what there actually is in the actual game, and that's all the depth there is. Most of the time one of the variations is just better than the other one as well, which further reduces selection - either the pump action or the automatic shotgun tends to be just better than the other, the hand cannon is often just better than the pistol, and one of the assault rifles tends to just be better at what it does than the other one, rendering the other one more or less pointless. So in reality very often there are maybe 5 classes - the rocket user, the grenade launcher user, the sniper, the guy with the assault rifle, the shotguner.
This is, incidentally, why people say that they keep releasing the same game over and over again - because virtually all of the games of that sort are basically the same. We've seen the same thing back to Counterstrike. Crysis 2 was interesting to me precisely because it took those standard elements and added superhuman abilities into the mix - the addition of cloaking, the ability to move much faster than in many such games, to jump higher, to soak more damage, and the various other similar elements really helped add to the game's depth. While these did add to the complexity as well to some extent, they added a lot more emergent gameplay, and made matches much less predictable. Even if the game was very similar to the various other modern shooters, the additions to the game helped distinguish it. Likewise, L4D and L4D2's assymetric multiplayer is very interesting, even though it just uses the standard weapons for one team - the other team is very different, and the goal in the game is very divergent.
I will also note that there ARE games that take turn-based strategy and make it real time - RTS's. And they are ridiculously intensive on players, which is why there can be such enormous skill gaps in competitive play. The best RTS player is ridiculously better than the worst.
I disagree. The game has a lot of complexity, but ultimately when you get right down to it, all of the DOTA clone MOBAs are all very similar, and all sort of break down in similar ways. This isn't to say that they are bad, but I would argue that those games have actually fairly limited depth. Not that they're shallow games, mind you, but they're not as deep as is often claimed by their adherents.
The open question I would have to the latter point is... if you are looking to make a game for a specific core audience, then does the balance of complexity versus depth change? There are those out there who relish the opportunity to learn a massively complex rule set... to study it and master it... do we no longer design for them at all?
Second- I am posting for the first time today because I simply could not take the blatant "forum troll" comments regarding the religion episodes (yes, I have fallen into the trap).
@Trainwreck141- I am not a religious individual, not baptized, never set foot in a church- Do not lump me in with you as "non religious types". These videos offer a perspective- you can choose to agree or disagree with the perspective, but develop an actual argument that doesn't require inflammatory remarks to make a point.
@katalaiscute- The videos were obviously not "fail" because they prompted a tremendous amount of discussion... Fail would have been everyone closing their web browser before the videos even finished, but you watched them and you participated in the conversation (probably without adding much DEPTH to the conversation, but hey, you contributed nonetheless)... Welcome to a community, and congrats on making these videos a complete success.
And for everyone else- If you are not willing to even try and understand another point of view... well, just look at our world today. Look at the turmoil in the middle east. Look at the unnecessary bloodshed and violence that runs many societies. The root cause of this violence is typically intolerance (many of you will actually point at a different religion as the cause... but the root of it is intolerance as a doctrine of their religion). If we can't take the time to understand each other and truly listen to the thoughts, opinions and values of others, then we will never be able to truly function as a peaceful society.
That is it for this "non-religious type"- back to watching and reading.
Ben?? I knew it....
It wasn't slander. At no point did they use "all" referring to the pushback comments (so no "entire community". Furthermore, I disagree with you, so please don't speak for me to rhetorically enhance your outrage).
Demanding an apology for their opinion, using air quotes, and saying their definition of faith was idiotic (because it can be assigned to scientists) are all open signs of hostility to their position. You've just got done calling them idiotic and wrong. Maybe there's some version of religion you're not hostile to, but they can't divine that through your words. Taking those words at face value, their response was proportionate. You may still disagree with it, and that's fine, but the response was proportionate.
Hope you stop being mad soon, sir. It's a bad way to stay.
You already do, video games are the mini-games of life.
STEAM
> comments about religion.
It seems the religious and nonreligious crowd aren't so different: neither side can give it a rest until people stop "being wrong on the internet" and start catering to their own point of view.
However, on the same hand, while there are only a handful of weapons you can find many different roles.
While there are a few optimal combinations, there are several sort of "specialists" you run into while playing. Things like "the Knifer", "the Sniper", "Camper", "Noob Tuber", "Grenade guy", "Double shotgunner", and others only come together in games with a set of simple rules that allows you to do what you will with them. They're things we all know about in online FPSs, but they're a result of the depth of the mechanics. When you go back and look at even the early call of duty games where you had classes or limits placed on what you could do, there was a lot less depth to the gameplay. If you were this kind of class, you did this, and if you were that kind of class you did that. The depth/complexity ratio comes from not teaching people each class but from teaching people to do one thing and then giving them the skills and tools to do it how they want.
Dwarf Fortress - Yes, you mentioned this one, but look at it this way: More and more things are being added all the time. Ridiculous amounts, in fact. And it's going to continue that way for a long time. If they started making the interface accessible now, they would have to keep redesigning it. All the time. Dwarf Fortress couldn't be the amazing thing that it is if accessibility was the focus. An interface redesign is actually planned for late stage development, if I recall correctly, it's just not a priority because the developer thinks long term.
X-Com: So many things in this one, yet not as many meaningful choices as you'd think. Just look at all the items, or how you can level up your soldiers. In the end, not that many items are truly useful, and it's often the case that you just throw your guys at the meat grinder instead of levelling them. Yet, somehow, this makes the game better. It makes the world feel bigger, even though the choices aren't "meaningful" per se. Somehow, streamlining this loses something, albeit something that's hard to pinpoint.
Dota 2: This might not fit my argument, I'm not sure, I don't know the game well enough. But: There's no tutorial, ridiculous amounts of information you have to know and it's tough as nails to get into. But then, it could be argued these things do create an immense amount of meaningful choices, so, again, might now fit the category here.
Twilight Imperium 3: Why not just play 5 games of Eclipse? Becuase this is freakin Twilight Imperium 3, baby!
Elder Scrolls Games: This is a case of the games getting streamlined over time. I, for one, consider this streamlining a good thing, but there is something that rubs me the wrong way. To this day, I keep looking at Daggerfall, and it's giving me a feeling that Skyrim could never hope to achieve. Again, random dungeons and random world make it borderline unplayable to the average gamer (I include myself here, I can't actually play the thing) but I still admire Daggerfall and I'll probably remember it more than Skyrim.
Disgaea series: I dare you to streamline this
Roguelikes: Nethack -> Diablo II -> Diablo III - I guess you could consider Diablo II a sort of golden middle ground between the two extremes? Or maybe that's giving it too much credit.
Dominions 3: The Awakening - No comment neccessary on this
AI War - WTF is this?
Anyway, this post isn't meant as a counteragument to the video. It's just that even with the best guidelines, there comes a point where you have to know when to break them. No design philosophy can ever be universal (except, of course, when it does)
4e is not a bad system in and of itself, and it can arguably be just as deep as 3.5 depending on the situation, but simplifications to systems like classes, skills, even the much loathed and debated alignment system, the fact that these were simplified at all created outrage.
Even years after 4e launched, a majority of tabletop gaming fans prefer to play 3.5 (or the 3.75 known as Pathfinder), and while I'm having trouble finding solid information on sales of the system, I'm unconvinced that their attempt to market to a more general audience has made up for that.
For example, I got Hero Academy recently and asked my friend to join me in it. He'd never played before, while I'd played a few games. I did horribly the first few times because even with its minimalist tutorial, you are expected to grasp the depth ASAP or end up in an unwinnable state early on. When he tried the game, he felt overwhelmed by the amount of strategy and rules he was expected to completely understand from turn one, and decided he was never going to play again.
If there was some way to ease the player in before they are savagely murdered in a pure PVP strategy game, it would help quite a bit. A single player campaign that doubles as a tutorial, for instance, like Starcraft uses. It's not fair to just say "If you don't immediately understand and love this experience, screw you, it's not FOR you" when these are entirely solvable problems.
As far as Dota 2 goes (from my beta impressions), was anyone else confounded as to how to purchase items in their first game? I've played Dota, LoL, HoN, etc. and I was really surprised by how unintuitive their user interface was for something like that. It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to purchase the in-game item. Hopefully it has changed, but it feels like that is one element that is unnecessarily confusing because the developers got too used to how it worked for them. It feels like unintuitive interfaces were allowed to exist simply due to the existence of highly complex gameplay, which are two very separate things.
As far as Dota 2 goes (from my beta impressions), was anyone else confounded as to how to purchase items in their first game? I've played Dota, LoL, HoN, etc. and I was really surprised by how unintuitive their user interface was for something like that. It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to purchase the in-game item. Hopefully it has changed, but it feels like that is one element that is unnecessarily confusing because the developers got too used to how it worked for them. It feels like unintuitive interfaces were allowed to exist simply due to the existence of highly complex gameplay, which are two very separate things.
But anyway, great series, great episode
I am disappoint.
The only thing I might disagree with is the 'depth' of modern multiplayer shooters. There is no disputing the fact that the game mechanics are designed in a way that makes the experience last a very long time, but a very large amount of that is content restriction. When you load into your first deathmatch you may only have access to three guns and a choice of two grenades, but as you play you begin to unlock more weapons, add ons, new ways to play.
Certainly when you do unlock this stuff some of it adds real depth, but I don't believe it's all that much. Is your 500th match really going to be all experientially different from your 1st? The progression mechanics employed by these games certainly offer a lot of longevity to the content, in much the same way that social games do, but longevity is not the same thing as depth.
And on one last note. again as a chess nerd: I have to point out that most chess players prefer the top-down digital interfaces found on most chess computer programs to a real-life 3-dimensional board simply because it's a simpler, more elegant interface that makes it harder to overlook things. /Major Nerding
even with "realistic" shooters there is tons of depth and complexities in shooting mechanics.
In a decent shooter there are tons of stats to consider how you use a weapon.
just with the three basic autos ARs, SMGs, LMGs in an ADS shooter these are generally things that have to be taken in consideration.
stance
` effects cone of fire/deviation
` effects sway
` effects recoil
movement
` effects cone of fire/deviation
` sometimes effects sway
recoil
` consistency
` direction
` amplitude
sway
` consistency
` direction
` amplitude
deviation
` minimum/maximum
` inflation by shot
` deflation by second
` unaimed/aimed deviation
speed
` aim speed
` reload speed
` switch speed
` movement speed when aimed/unaimed
magazine/belt capacity
range
` muzzle velocity
` damage fall off
` recoil/sway pattern
` deviation
` player's marksmanship
TTK (time to kill)
` damage per shot
` rate of fire
` overall weapon accuracy
` overall player accuracy
granted there has been many cases of FPS game not taking advantage of all of these, that and a lot of inexcusably dumb design decisions such as BF3s AUG which has the highest muzzle velocity of all the ARs, little deviation, and lower than average fire rate however it kicks randomly to each side making it impossible to anticipate it's recoil. making it a sub par CQC gun with an inexplicable marksmanship characteristics.
you say SMGs generally overlap in range too much with shotguns and ARs. This is true however the advantages SMGs generally bring to the table is the highest movement speed, aim speed, reload speed, great unaimed accuracy, and accuracy while moving. and you say revolvers (assuming that's what you mean by hand cannon) are generally better than autos, well autos have high mag caps, faster reloads, are easier to use because of their fire rates, deep mags, and none existent recoil.
When did they say irreducible complexity was bad design? All I heard was that it places more of a burden on the player. This is utterly true; Just look at board games. Each game has a unique set of rules that are irreducible and must be learned in order to play. This doesn't mean that the game has to be inherently complex. On the contrary games like Go, Chess, Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride are incredibly simple games with a great deal of depth, but their rules are still irreducible.
Irreducible Complexity is only an issue because it will reduce the number of people willing to play a game. Paradox Games have a ridiculous amount of depth, but the complexity is too high for most people to want to learn and so they inhabit a niche market. I'm sure you've tried to get people to play a Board Game and been unable to convince them. Even the simplest games feel more daunting when the rules are irreducible, but, to reiterate myself, it does not make them poorly designed games.
Also there are ways to teach people to play games with irreducible complexity and make it seem like it isn't the case. I've taught 6 and 7 year olds to play Settlers of Catan and Risk by slowing adding new information until the rules were fully fleshed out. I'm sure you learned chess gradually instead of having the rules read to you in one deposit of information.
It's not that irreducible complexity makes a game bad. It's that it limits the amount of people willing to play said game. I myself, while I somewhat enjoying computer strategy games, loathe chess. I prefer the former over the latter because usually I don't have to learn how to do everything at once. And I do not play games with the intent to "lose" many times before I "win". My fun comes from win or stalemate in games, as well as enjoyable story, etc. The point being that the more mental weight in a game, the less likely it will be widely accepted. So long as the goal is not to make a broadly enjoyable game, but instead a specifically enjoyable game, then the game designer is fine.
But one must think of their audience; a painting, a movie, a game is meaningless without at least one viewer besides the creator. And an artist should always be thinking about, more specifically, who their audience is.
I enjoyed this episode. Then again, I also agreed with what they had to say about both religion and science.
At no point did Trainwreck say "all" non-religious types. Your interpretation is selective.