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9 Apr 04
Today we're continuing our Friday highlights series with the classic Starcraft (official site) from Blizzard Entertainment. If you recall, each Friday I look at one game focusing on its strengths in the hope that these can be building blocks for better games down the road.
Starcraft is perhaps the most played strategy in the world. It's constantly mentioned as one of the best games of its genre and perhaps all time. Hopefully I'll be able to find a strong point or two. First a quick point about Blizzard. There's a reason they have the great reputation that they do. It's not that they have the most original concepts out there or that they have the most powerful game engines, but rather they know how to polish a game until it shines. The won't ship before it's ready, and then they'll keep trying to make it better afterwards. This tends to result in award winning games. Oh and Blizzard never forgot about the Mac.
On to Starcraft, as the follow up to the highly successful Warcraft II, Starcraft upped the ante by bringing three sides to its war. The first and perhaps biggest strength is the balance. Each side and each unit is well balanced. There's a place in the army for each unit and units are rarely made obsolete by progressing up the tech tree. There's a good balance between offense and defense. Risks must be taken to be successful.
On the flip side, each side feels remarkably different. From the interface changes to unit responses, the player instantly felt immersed in the side they had joined. The differences in sides dictated changes in gameplay when switching sides. If you treated your protoss zealots as disposable as a zergling, you'd soon find yourself overwhelmed. The terran mobility added with ability to build bunkers encouraged one play style while the protoss shields practically demand engage and retreat tactics, and the Zerg's healing and burrowing abilities along with some cheap units foster yet another. Beyond that though, you could still focus on offensive or defensive power and balanced air/ground units to practically none of one or the other.
Starcraft also excelled by offering layers of play. The tech tree was fairly straightforward but offered enough different routes to meet your priorities. The game could be played in a very simple and straight forward manner, or players could take advantage of different units and their special abilities. Units could be countered with mass or with a unit counter. All the automated defenses had weaknesses that could be exploited. Troop transports meant that even when you've found the enemy bases, you could still be attacked from unexpected directions.
Finally Starcraft offered great gameplay in both single and multiplayer. Single player offered a deep narrative with a real sense of purpose behind the missions. The characters were interesting and worth watching. Though not every mission was pure fun to play, you still wanted to get through them all to see what happens next. The single player campaign also did a good job familiarizing the player with the three sides and how to use their abilities. So you could be ready for multiplayer. Multiplayer offered ladder play and tournaments. There were new game modes as well as interesting dynamics that occurred in team play. The fact that so many people still play it today speaks volumes. Just looks at the percentage of people in the forum that have it on their challenge list. Designers could do far worse than shooting at Starcraft as their goal.
Jason
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8 Apr 04
So are games an art form yet? Well, not quite, but we're getting there. We're freeing up creativity. What will that mean to the next generation of game designers? I'm going to try to look at two areas. One is options that will be available and the other is the directions they might take.
So what options are available? Well, there are too many to think about. Score one for art. We'll try anyway. Simply there could be new genres, new types of interactions and new experiences within old forms. If you think about it, the real time strategy genre grew out of overcoming the processing hurdle. Once the PC's were powerful enough the genre exploded. Let's go back to my ultimate wargame genre. If you make it online and seamless enough, you could be the grunt on the front lines then walk into a command tent. There you take over tactical control of fire teams based on objectives from strategic command. Back at HQ they're working out the coordination of air, naval, ground and armor forces. They're securing supply lines. Maybe they're coordinating with space command to keep supplies coming in. Space command has their hands full trying to impose a blockade on the enemy while getting reinforcements landed on the planet. Plus there are those pesky space pirates. Then the Galactic President is working to make sure the war effort is funded. He's sending spies on missions to keep tabs on various alien factions. One of those spies has just found his way into the Asvalia central command. He's releasing a stream of nano bugs while trying to avoid detection by the security droids. Meanwhile his ride off the planet is negotiating a bribe with the orbital patrol to let him land his ore hauler. If nothing else, we can get emergent game play that way as genres fuse together to create more than worlds, but living universes.
What new types of interaction then? Well, what if you couldn't directly interact with the game world. Maybe you had to hire intermediaries to do task for you. Maybe you are trying to create an intelligent life form, but you can only work with DNA manipulation. Maybe it's a time travel game, but you're only allowed to make changes in one or two times, but you can follow those changes effects through the years.
So what about the new experiences in old forms? We talked about what the wargame might morph into, but how about something like Simcity? You could be a mayor, but you have to hire real people to run your police department, hospitals, etc. You need to keep people happy, but balance the budget, handle your reelection campaign, and lobby the federal government to bring in the new research center. Somebody else might be playing as an anarchist or a community activist opposing you at every turn.
The direction artistic expression might go in an interactive medium are harder to predict. It's easy to say something like "experiences without narrative," but if you take the story away what do you get. Some might say that just having worlds to explore is enough. Let's stick to what people are doing out there now to get some ideas.
There are games like Rez and Stretch Panic for the PS2. Rez gives you a world made up of music to explore. The sound isn't just part of the game; it is the game. Then there's Stretch Panic. It throws you into an elastic universe. Pretty much anything and everything can be grabbed and stretched. You can launch things like a sling shot or propel yourself in a similar fashion. It's an interesting definition of a tactile world.
The PS2 must be doing something right because it also has games like Ico and Mark of Kri. Ico redefines cooperative gameplay. While the computer controls your companion, you must work together to escape a fantastic castle that neither of you could escape alone. It's fanciful art style created a modern fairy tale in a sense. When people start listing stealth action games, they often overlook the Mark of Kri. Before the Wind Waker, Kri took us into a cartoon. It was a living, breathing world with alert guards who would check out why those bird had suddenly flown up into the air. It was somewhat surreal seeing graphic violence depicted in Disney style animation, but it was totally surreal to see through the eyes of your spirit guide to plot a safe course through the action ahead.
So where are we going? If there's a theme, I predict it will be "New Worlds to Explore." As games give us more of the depth and texture of the real world, they'll also be reflecting our own world back to us. When we learn more about ourselves and our world from the experience, we can say games have arrived as an art form. We're so close.
Today's game is the Warlords Series (official site) from Infinite Interactive. Now up to the mark IV version, the Warlords series is a turn based fantasy strategy game. You run your economy and build up your armies then take them into tactical combat. It features a dynamic campaign where friends can help you get ahead, but turn on you if it looks like you're getting too powerful. Now you can carry your heroes with you and they grow from battle to battle. It's available now.
Jason
Comments?
7 Apr 04
The story so far. We're working toward games expressing themselves as an art form. I've made the argument that games are following a similar path to the movies. From that I've predicted that producing games will be less about overcoming technological hurtles and more about the vision for the experience. I also noted that when that happened for the movies they entered what was call the golden age. If the parallel holds, we could soon be entering a golden age of gaming.
I've already briefly covered modularity and middle ware as signs that games are less about overcoming hardware obstacles. Now let's look at Microsoft's XNA. XNA is what Microsoft is calling the next step in hardware abstraction. In other words, if you design a game in an XNA environment, you will easily be able to play it on a PC or an Xbox or even a pocket PC. How does Microsoft put it?
"XNA is the catalyst for a new ecosystem of interchangeable, interoperable software tools and technologies from Microsoft, middleware and game development companies. By integrating software innovations across Microsoft platforms and across the industry, XNA forms a common environment that liberates developers from spending too much time writing mundane, repetitive boilerplate code. Instead, XNA frees game creators to spend their time where it matters most —on the creativity that differentiates their games."
Amazing, leave it to a Microsoft press release to get us where we want to go. Will wonders never cease? Simply, the tools are being standardized. While the environment still requires a bit of technical knowledge to operate in, the emphasis is on the creative aspects of production.
So what happens when you free a creative group from the struggle to make the technology work? I believe we'll see a flourishing of ideas and types of games that haven't been seen before. Once you stop having to worry about making the thing work, you can experiment beyond what has been tried before. The game space can go in any direction. Put simply it's a blank canvas.
Tomorrow I'll try to wrap this up with some ideas about what this creative freedom means and try to extrapolate from some of the more artistic games around today to see what might happen in the future. We'll also see if we can come up with some ideas about how games can be judged as an artistic expression.
Today's game is sort a new take on Risk. It's Supreme Ruler 2010 (official site) from Battlegoat Studios (what a great name). The world has broken down into isolationist military/economic regions. You must lead your region to supremacy through market domination and military might. The game uses authentic satellite imagery for detailed maps. The beta is currently underway.
Jason
Comments?
6 Apr 04
First off I'd like to thank everyone who sent me multiple copies of the netsky virus. You don't need to keep sending it. I suppose it is nice to know your virus checker still works. For those of you without virus checkers, please reconsider. There are even some free ones out there like AVG.
Let's see if I can make any sense of what I was writing yesterday. If you recall, we're working toward the goal of looking at games as art. Today, I'm going to try to finish the movie analogy to get us closer. We left off after the first academy awards. Shortly after that color movies came out notably in the Wizard of Oz. After that technical improvements to movies were no longer a selling point. Sure we've had progression in film, lighting, sound, editing and special effects, but even though some have tried (especially in the area special effects) movies just aren't sold to the public based on technology. Even with today's push to digital production, distribution and projection, theater owners aren't feeling public pressure to move to digital. People are more interested in the comfy seats and stadium style seating than digital projection.
As you take away the technical as an advertising point, you have to provide something to make a worthwhile experience. So we've seen strides in writing, acting, directing, scoring and editing to make a movie a complete experience. Each area of making a movie has professionals who know how to best use their equipment. The director doesn't have to build everything from scratch and teach everyone how to use the tools to make the movie. That leaves him free to provide the artistic vision of the movie.
Games aren't to that point yet. They took a slightly different path and it shows. Games started out by one person doing everything. The writing, design, coding, graphics and sound were done alone. Expectations weren't that high, but you could still pick out the games that stood above the crowd. Now games are developed by large teams usually funded by a publisher and managed by a producer. The more you can abstract the coding from the creative process, the more games look like the movies.
This can give us a look to the future of games. As technological improvement became less important to the movie viewer, movies found many ways to stand out. It could be a big star or a famous director. It could be an adaptation of a famous novel. It could capture the mood of an era. It could sync with commonly held fantasies. It could contain exceptional dialogue. It could take us to interesting places we've never seen before (but perhaps always wanted to). Movies also had different expectations of success. An art house film has different expectations than a summer action flick. The point is that if an audience could be found out there, someone wanted to make the film for them.
Now games are approaching the point where the initial production hurtle isn't limited to people with coding skills. Many companies don't build their own game engines any more, and even if they do, they don't have to start from scratch. There are scores of modules waiting to be purchased. I think that may be part of the reason EA is pulling its operations in closer. Without a need to reinvent the wheel every time, EA can make better use of its resources by having people share their technology. So what will we have as games are able to separate themselves from technological development. Well, I'm hoping the movie analogy will hold, and we'll get a golden age.
What else could today's game be but The Movies (official site) from Lionhead Studios. Yes, you get to be your own movie mogul. You can run everything from picking the scripts to handling the stars to directing the film. Yes, it's another ambitious title from Lionhead. Not only are they challenging themselves, they're challenging you to create your movies and post them on the internet subjecting yourself to critics. I guess turn about is fair play. Can you handle the pressure, and the budget, and the production schedule and the temperamental actors? Hopefully you'll be schmoozing with the players later this year.
Jason
Comments?
5 Apr 04
First a little site news today. Last month we surged to over 13000 page views and over 3600 unique visits. Thanks to everyone for helping to spread the word. If you have any ideas on how to keep growing at that pace, please let me know. Also, we're trying something new starting today. Innocence in the forums has requested the ability to comment on articles as they go up on the front page. I try to be responsive around here so we're going to add that to the site. Each day's front page article will be copied the front page articles section under site news on news.talkstrategy.com. This will allow commenting on each day's article. I'll also add a link at the end of each day's article to go directly to the article page. Please note that you do have to register with the site to post comments. All it takes is a valid email address, and we don't give that out to anyone.
Today we're going to talk about the games industry as a way to introduce the subject of games as art. Don't let that frighten you off. There are lots of ways to improve games for the future, but it helps you get to a destination if you know where you're coming from and where you're headed now. Please keep in mind that these are my views as an outsider. I haven't worked on a game since helping my brother work on his game for the Timex Sinclair 2048. I believe he sold a grand total of one copy. Still that's more games than I've put out. Try to just take these as ideas from someone who thinks about this stuff way too much.
The games (or interactive entertainment if you prefer) industry has been compared to many things including demonized activities like pool, comic books and Dungeons and Dragons. However, I think the best comparison is to the movie industry. Movies started off simply. They recorded every day events. Then they moved on to unusual events. Then they recorded plays. It was an exciting and immersive new experience. Soon events were created solely for the movie audience and an art form was born, sort of. How many classic movies do you know before 1930? before 1920? Movies took a while to grow up before they were accepted as an art. In fact, the academy awards didn't start until 1929. It's interesting that one of the first awards was a special award for the first major talking picture, "The Jazz Singer."
I feel that games right now are similar to the movie industry in the mid 1920's. We've moved past the simple "gee whiz, I can interact with something on the screen" phase. We've worked out standards for 2D and 3D games. Genres have been established. We're starting to move past technical limitations toward creating within the medium.
That was kind of a broad statement so let me expand on that. We've gone from chunk sprites to detailed sprites to fully rendered and textured 3D models. We've gone from bleeps and bloops to MIDI music to digital sound with voice capabilities to multichannel theater surround sound. We've moved from small limited areas to seamless expansive worlds to explore. Those are all technical challenges that have been overcome. Now we're finally getting to the point as gamers where we don't accept "hey look at our cool new engine" as a game. We expect rich and layered content regardless of engine. Don't give us pretty but hollow.
There's been a lot of buzz around the internet about how the new Dark Sector sneak peek is the first look at what will be coming on the next generation of consoles. I think it's clear we won't be approaching photo realism soon, but we will be approaching the ability to match most kinds of animation used today. Even if you didn't like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, you can't deny its visual similarity to a cartoon. Though some people love the style and some hated it, the game was largely judged on the merits of the gameplay and world it created not that visual style. The standards are getting so high that a cool new lighting effect or improved character models are not enough to generate buzz anymore.
Moving on from the 1920's, Hollywood entered what many have called "The Golden Age" of film. I feel like we're on the cusp of that now. We've seen the rise of middle ware and physics engines and licensed engines. Large games are expected to have symphonic scores and professional voice acting (perhaps even good dialogue for those actors?). The actual "how to" of creating the game is less and less getting in the way of fulfilling the artistic vision of the game.
Tomorrow, I'll try to fill out the analogy a little more and see what predictions we might make from there.
Today we're going tactical. With rumors of a sequel running around the internet, today's game is Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (official site) now available on most systems. In Ghost Recon our assault team moves away from the Close Quarters Battles of the Rainbow Six series into open assault by a military squad. Since this is a fluid tactical situation, it does away with the precise premission planning. You give simple commands to your team to execute the mission on the fly. With the longer ranges and sight lines, snipers become much more important. Keeping a low profile, seeing them before they see you and quickly eliminating threats are the name of the game. Of course the series really soars when playing with friends as teammates. Now get out there and save the world.
Jason
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