Bytica

YOU KNOW, I FORGOT how much more fun the new “open notes” make bass guitar in Guitar Hero.  I’m so used to Rock Band’s bass being the boring stepbrother of the guitar, and I played so little of GHWT, that it took me a little while to regain the hang of strumming without holding any fret buttons down. “Disposable Heroes” may not have an insane solo on bass, but the open notes help crazy a uniquely crazy note chart that feels like way more than an easy version of the guitar chart. If you’re playing GHM, don’t just dismiss the bass campaign as a waste of time — you might actually find it more fun than the guitar charts.

So all I have left now is the drum campaign, and then multiplayer and full band achievements, which I’ll be getting to Monday before posting my review. Although the game still doesn’t feel as polished as Rock Band, it’s a lot more fun than GHWT so far.

AFTER WHIPPING THROUGH THE GUITAR CAMPAIGN, I decided to do the Expert vocal campaign to see how it might have been tweaked since GHWT. There are a few welcome tweaks, like the multiplayer locater being moved to the left so it’s easier to see, or the way your % is completed, so you automatically get 100% if you get “Excellent” on every phrase.

But the thing I don’t understand is why there still isn’t a vocal meter that fills up each measure to show you how close you are to maintaining your streak or not. This was by far the biggest complaint the expert vocal community had with the vocal system, and I can’t imagine it would have been that big a deal to implement. If you can put in a meter that tracks how close you are to the next star rating (which is a nice addition), this should have made the cut somewhere.

IT ONLY TOOK 16 SONGS and less than 2 hours, but I just completed Guitar Hero: Metallica’s Expert guitar campaign. Before anyone freaks out and thinks “WTF! How short is the game?,” the reality is that Neversoft added something really smart here: the ability to zoom through the campaign as fast or slow as you want.

The 49 songs are spread out over 7 or 8 arenas of 5-10 songs each, and you only need to complete 2-3 songs in each area to move on. So you’re never screwed by something like “Raining Blood,” and you’re never stuck playing some long-ass Ted Nugent song. The campaigns in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games have always been sort of artificial roadblocks standing in the way of people enjoying the game the way they want, and I think this approach is an extremely elegant solution.

Aestetically, I really like the look of the Metallica characters — the animations are still weird, but the models look eerily close to Hetfield, Ulrich and the others. The opening scene that opens the campaign is kinda cool, but otherwise the game features the same type of animated cutscenes that debuted in GH3.

At this point, I’m torn as to what to do next. Do I keep playing guitar? Do I try out vocals? Do I start shooting videos? There’s just so much to do here that I could easily spend a week getting an initial feel for it all before even looking for a expert band. Good stuff so far.

AFTER 4 YEARS of plastic guitar games, the one I’ve wanted the most — and I know I’m not alone — has finally arrived. Guitar Hero: Metallica is now sitting in my Xbox 360, and I’ll be spending a good part of the next few days taking videos and doing some strategy guides for it.

The first thing I had to do was unlock the Hyperspeed “cheat,” which speeds up the fretboard and actually makes it easier to see separation between the notes in crazy solos, which helps your brain — well, my brain, at least — recognize patterns that might otherwise look like random clusters of notes. For people who don’t visit ScoreHero regularly, you can activate Hyperspeed by opening up the cheats menu and entering GBRYYRGG.  This allows you to choose 5 different settings for Hyperspeed, and you can even use different settings for different instruments, which is something I’d love to see Rock Band add.

There’s also a code to turn the fretboard black — YRGRGRRB — which would have been useful in GH Aerosmith, where it was sometimes hard to notice the blue notes on the blue Aerosmith background. The code I don’t see around yet, however, is an Unlock All cheat, which is a necessity for parties where people haven’t gone through the campaign. There was a Quickplay unlock code in GHWT, so I have to believe one will pop up sooner or later.

In less than four years, Harmonix has successfully birthed not one but two extremely successful franchises that have both moved to a yearly format. First there was Guitar Hero, which Harmonix developed in 2005, and them moving on to MTV in 2007, where they developed Rock Band. Even though it was bright and early Friday morning, Harmonix designer Dan Teasdale had a pretty nice turnout for his GDC session, entitled “Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap,” where he talked about the challenges of designing games with a sub-yearly development cycle.

To start, Teasdale mentioned two stereotypes of game the game industry: that publishers love franchises with yearly installments, and that developers have the exact opposite sentiment — that yearly games are the devil, that you can’t innovate and push the industry forward with yearly timeframes. From here, Teasdale launched into an exploration of the Harmonix design process, which he broken down into several main categories.

The One Question

The first challenge is how to maintain one design vision with a group of 100 people. As Teasdale put it, it becomes sort of a “miracles to-do” list: read people’s minds and get everyone on the same page. And the way they accomplished this was with what they called “the one question” — something that the design team could always keep in the back of their mind, and keep them aiming at the same target. For Guitar Hero, it was “Does It Rock?,” and you can see that mindset permeate every aspect of the game, from song selections to the artwork.

But for Rock Band, the challenge seemed a little tougher. At first, the question was “is this different compared to previous games?” But that felt vague, and the team was stumped until someone pulled out a video of The Who’s “the Kids Are Alright,” and Teasdale showed the breakdown section in the middle of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” where Roger Daltrey just screams “Yeaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!” before the band comes back in. It’s lights, it’s screaming, it’s rock and roll. And this summed up what Harmonix wanted the game to be: “Is this an authentic band experience?” And so that helped steer the direction of the game, where you’d create a band, play arenas and basically live the life of a touring band.

As development continued, the team picked out little things that would help sell the authentic band experiences. It meant no powerups, no minigames, and no guitars on fire, but things like big rock endings, solo bonuses, and being able to cover for and rescue bandmates from failing.

Content vs. Design

Teasdale spent some time stressing the importance of truly separating content from design when it comes to making a game on a short schedule. He used the example of Guns ‘n Roses’ “Shacklers’ Revenge,” which arrived at Harmonix on July 2. The game was supposed to go to general master less than two weeks later, which represented a problem, since the song would be connected to various aspects of the game: world tour setlists, challenges, etc. But Rock Band was set up in a way that the developers could just throw new content at the game and the mechanics would sort it out. In this case, “Shackler’s Revenge” contained tags like “rock,” “00’s” “Los Angeles” and the game automatically arranged where it needed to go. And so getting new GnR turned into a huge win without having to tear the game apart.

Playtest Feedback

Teasdale started this topic by talking about some stats Harmonix had on what difficulty level players were playing at. As Harmonix expected, the largest amount of people had completed campaigns on Easy, then a large amount had completed Medium, and then only a tiny percentage had completed Hard or Expert. But what surprised Harmonix was how small a percentage of people had completed any campaigns at all, compared to how many people were playing the game. To Harmonix, the World Tour was the core of the game, and only a tiny fraction of their players were bothering to finish it.

And so Teasdale stressed the importance of learning from your community. Initially, there were plans to have a 4v4 competitive band mode in Rock Band 2, but it turned out virtually no one was playing the other competitive modes (like Score Duel or Tug of War). But as it turned out, people liked competing against scores, and so the Battle of the Bands challenges was born, where there was a new daily event for players to chase high scores, a feature that required relatively little effort to implement and offered a bigger payoff.

Of course, trying to learn from your community can be a double-edged sword. Teasdale posted a screenshot of a ScoreHero post soliciting requests for Battle of the Bands ideas, with one particular post droning on forever about what was broken with the game instead of just offering what was asked for: a cool theme and songs to go with it. The reality, of course, is that some segment of your audience isn’t adept or interested in following instructions or offering proper feedback (usually lumped under the label of “insane”), and so there’s the challenge of finding feedback that’s actually useful.

The Future

The challenge for Harmonix now, Teasdale said, was how to keep innovating while still churning out titles to satisfy its publisher. Obviously, there’s the Beatles game coming out later this year, although details on new features are still slim. (Later in the Q&A, someone asked if Harmonix had considered new instruments like a keytar for future games, which Teasdale wouldn’t comment on.) Not only does Harmonix have its own games to compete against, but Teasdale put up a comical screenshot of the future landscape of rhythm games, showing the insane barrage of Guitar Hero games in the pipeline. Teasdale mentioned the Rock Band Unplugged for the PSP, which marries Amplitude-like gameplay with a Rock Band narrative, and a desire to keep improving the current games, such as plans to add star-tracking to RB2 via a future patch.

Ultimately, it was an interesting look as to how a successful developer looks for ways to keep pushing their games forward while still working within the confines of a system where they need to produce titles in a relatively short timeframe.

At Dan Teasdale’s Rock Band 2 GDC session Friday morning, he mentioned that Harmonix was looking towards adding a patch that would add star-tracking ratings to Rock Band 2 as well as future titles. It was pretty vague — there was no mention of timing or what other features might be in such a patch — but it’s a feature many dedicated Rock Band players miss from the old game, so it’ll be nice when it finally arrives.

I actually let out a little “whoo” at the news,  which was mentioned in a Destructoid post on the same subject, which leads me to wonder: if it was important enough to report, why was I the only one cheering? C’mon, kids, snark is easy. Show some balls!

(As for the rest of Teasdale’s talk, I’m doing a short writeup on it, which I’ll be posting shortly.)

ONE OF THE MORE POPULAR SESSIONS at GDC was Blizzard designer Jeff Kaplan talking about quest structure in World of Warcraft. Entitled “The Cruise Director of Azeroth,” Kaplan talked about how the quest team set out to create directed gameplay without sacrificing the freedom of feeling you’re in an open world.

Kaplan started by pointing out different forms of directed gameplay from other games: the overhead arrow in Bioshock leading you towards your next objective; the on-screen tooltips in Team Fortress 2; even the World of Warcraft achievement system, which sets a wide range of goals for players to achieve in the world. Kaplan also showed a scene from the opening of Half-Life 2, which directed the player in a number of ways, including guards that prodded the player to a security checkpoint, and lighting that subtly highlighted where you were supposed to go.

But what Kaplan wanted to focus on was directed gameplay through quests, which to date have been amazingly successful within WoW. According to Kaplan, in the roughly 20 months covering July 2007 - February 2009, over 8 billion quests had been completed by WoW players – an average of 16.6 million quests a day – and that was just in North America, not counting other parts of the world. This represented a major success, considering the teams’s initial quest goals. 

When WoW was early in development, the current MMO leader was EverQuest, which had about 1200 total quests, including several expansions. The WoW team set their goal at 600 quests, many of which went into the low-level 1-10 areas, thinking people would find things to do from 20-60, like kill mobs and group to do dungeons. But company playtesters complained the lack of quests beyond the early levels made for a boring game, that having an empty quest log felt broken. And so the team kept adding more and more quests, to the point that WoW’s release had 2600 quests, and then up to 5300 for the Burning Crusade expansion, and then 7650 for Wrath of the Lich King.

With such a major focus on quests, the team set about improving the general quest experience. Historically, many MMOs hid their quests, where l33t players would scour the world and then post their findings on a forum to tell people about all the cool stuff they found. Blizzard went the other way, putting a big gold “!” over questgivers. As Kaplan explained, the hardcore MMO community erupted, crying that this made the game way too easy, but to the WoW team, the idea of hiding the core content made little sense.

This concept continued with the layout of the quest log, which started with a story-like blurb but then also a Cliffs-notes like summary of the actual quest objectives. Instead of making the player check a quest log to see if they got a necessary item off a mob, the game made an obvious quest update right in the middle of the screen.

(I actually thought Kaplan was a little off target here, implying the reason gamers kept checking their logs was because they thought the game might be cheating them, not giving them credit. Personally, I’d guess it’s often because games throw so much crap at you that it’s hard to remember what you were looking for. Yes, I know I need meat, but which was it again? Lean wolf meat? Tender meat? Raw flank? Did I get the right one?)

Finally, one of the keys to the quest log was showing the rewards right in the quest pane, reinforcing the idea that questing was really the “smart” way to play. You could do other stuff, but WoW continually urged to quest by showing that it would be worth your while.

The final section of the presentation focused on mistakes Kaplan said the team had made (or thought they made). Here’s a rundown:

“The Christmas Tree Effect” – you know when you run into an area in WoW and your mini-map lights up with 12 different !’s for questgivers? Kaplan stated that was bad quest design, that the player just grabs everything, runs into the zone, swings wildly and gets quest drops by default. Having too many quests in the same area at once reduces the player’s focus – giving fewer quests keeps the player on a general path without making them feel restricted.

“Too Long, Didn’t Read” – Kaplan flipped to a screenshot from a WoW quest tool showing a 511-character limit on quest text – which he thought was still too long. Players generally don’t want to read, and the longer the text, the better chance there is of them skipping it completely. The best chance you have of getting players to read is to keep things short, hence the imposed limit.

The Wrong Kind of Mystery – according to Kaplan, there’s nothing wrong with having a mystery in the context of your story, like trying to figure out what happened to two scouts in Elwynn Forest. But what you don’t want is to make a mystery out of our gameplay. Don’t just sent players into the wild with no idea what they’re supposed to do, because they’ll just give up and go do something else.

Poorly Placed Quest Chains – I could personally relate to the example Kaplan used here – the Myzrael chain in Arathi Highlands (Thottbot “Breaking the Keystone” if you’re curious). The chain spanned a dozen levels, sent you all over the continent and ended with you having to kill an elite giant (who was often hard to locate). It was the kind of quest that just sat in your log and taunted you, and by the time you bothered to do it, the rewards were pointless. Kaplan said that was something they got away from in the Burning Crusade and Lich King expansions (and succeeded with IMO).

Gimmick Quests – if anything, I thought Kaplan was a little off target here. He mentioned the addition of gimmick quests where players weren’t sure what was going, particularly some vehicle quests (he showed a screenshot of a rooftop dragon event from Lich King here). His point seemed to be that gimmick quests were bad, but I wondered if he misstated what he meant to say. Personally, I thought that the bombing run events in Burning Crusade and the dragon bomber quests in Lich King were great fun and broke up the monotony of standard collection quests; the problem isn’t that they were gimmicky, it’s that they weren’t polished. So I’m hoping Blizzard isn’t planning on staying away from these quests in the future. I’d like more of them – they just need to be tested and tuned better.

Collection Quest Mistakes – on the topic of collection quests, Kaplan mentioned one issue they found with creature density. For a quest to collect low-level raptor eggs in the Barrens, for example, the problem wasn’t a lousy drop rate, but that the raptors were spread too far apart and you had to wade through all sorts of other zebra and giraffe thingies to find them.

Kaplan also took the blame for creating what he called the worst quest in WoW – ” the Green Hills of Stranglethorn” — where you had to collect 15 pages of a book, which dropped off humanoid mobs and just ate up all sorts of space in your inventory and quest logs. I think Kaplan might have been too hard on himself here — as many audience members cheered, it sent players to the auction house to buy whatever pages they needed, and IMO if you ever leveled up alts, it was like free XP if you planned ahead.

Kaplan also went into a little detail regarding drop rates. Initially, creatures had persistent drop rates, and while it would vary from one mob to the next, they would generally shoot for something in the 35% range. Now, via subsequent patches and expansions, every creature has whatever item(s) you’re looking for 100% of the time, and there’s a progressive drop rate system that constantly massages the drop rate depending on how lucky or unlucky you are.

Overall, the talk offered a glimpse into how hard Blizzard works at fine tuning its game. Kaplan freely admitted that they make mistakes all the time, but they feel they’re their own harshest critics, and as we’ve seen over the past 4+ years, they’ve never rested on their millions of subscribers and stopped tweaking. As much fun as WoW was at launch, it’s clearly a much better game now, and I can only shudder at how many hours I’ll lose to Blizzard’s next MMO considering how much they’ve figured out in the past few years.

After 3 days, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the worst GDC Expo I’ve been to in 10 years covering videogames. There have been plenty of interesting sessions, but the actual expo floor is a shell of what it used to be in years past.

Time was, NVIDIA and ATI would have dueling stations showing off upcoming games, Microsoft / Sony / Nintendo would have the same, and there would be all sorts of weird wacky stuff on display. People would have cool chalenges running (I even used to manage a Quake 1v1 event with Kornelia at a few shows), and it was generally a fun place to check out. Now it feels like a ghost town, which leaves me wondering what E3 will end up being this year.

And just to be clear, I’m not saying it was the worst GDC ever, just the exhibit area. I’m looking at you, Dakota!

YOU’D THINK BY NOW THAT GDC would be properly prepared for Gordon Walton sessions. One of the elder statesmen of game design, Walton is now at Bioware Austin working on the new Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, and took time out of his schedule to give a talk entitled “10 Things Great Designers Exhibit.” The room was quickly packed beyond capacity before the session even started, with attendees lining up against the walls and sitting anywhere they could find space for the fast-paced chat, as Walton blazed through what he considered common elements among the good designers he’d worked with over the years.

10. A Passion for Games. Walton was of two minds on this category. While he felt passion was huge and he’d always hire someone with passion over someone without, he thought most people gave it a little too much weight. In fact, he categorized someone with a lot of passion and little else as “the world’s most dangerous type of person – highly motivated but totally incompetent! Your potential for damage is infinite!”

9. Breadth and Depth of Knowledge.  Here, Walton emphasized breadth over depth – many of successful designers tend to know a little about a lot of things. This is important because, as Walton put it, most innovation is synthesis of existing knowledge – the more you know, the better chance you have at finding innovative ways to combine it. “Knowledge,” in Walton’s terms, covered many things: game knowledge, platform knowledge, and knowledge outside of games as well.

8. Problem Solving and Analytical Skills. Can you deconstruct complex problems? Do you have good logic skills?  A big part of problem solving is having the right approach, without falling into the trap of overanalyzing it or coming up with a needlessly complex solution. “A lot of games is about ‘good enough’” Walton said.

7. Flexibility. A major part of game design, Walton said, is being able to adapt to constant constraints, whether they’re business or player-related. You never know when your publisher might require something new from a game, or your player testing might reveal important changes that need to be made. Any good game can be sunk by a designer who refuses to deviate from his original plan.

6. KISS. Instead of “Keep it Simple, Stupid,” Walton’s use of this stood for “Keep It Super Simple.” Don’t overcomplicate!

5. Player Empathy. Can you distance yourself from the product and see it from the player’s viewpoint? It’s easy to settle on one view of the game, but as Walton said, “your audience is not you, and your audience is not uniform.” Different players will see different things, and a good designer needs to be able to understand varying player mental models.

4. Continuous Learning. A huge part of creation is knowledge integration. The more you know, the more you can draw on to integrate. Walton asked the designers on hand (there were many in the crowd) if they managed to read at least one book a month, and recommended they do so.

3. Teamwork. With the exception of the smallest casual or mobile games, almost all videogame development today is done by teams of 2 to 200 people. You simply need to be able to work with other team members and remember that it’s important that the team succeeds, not you.

2. Positive Mental Attitude. Walton joked that it’s more than possible for the curmudgeonly and grumpy to get great work done, but …. who wants to be around them? Enthusiasm and a can-do attitude is infectious, while the opposite can actually be a detriment to the whole team, no matter how talented the individual.

1. Clear Communication. Design, said Walton, IS communication. Clarity of communication drives the fastest implementation of ideas and the most effective iteration.

Walton wrapped up the talk talking about where he saw design heading in the future. The two main trends, he thought, were split between designers with specialized skills handling big games, and designers with a wider variety of skills managing smaller games. This was followed by a somewhat (unintentionally) comical Q&A session where two aspiring designers showed a complete inability to communicate a question in under 60 seconds, and then the room-clearing question “don’t you think you sort of need to be a bit of an asshole to be designer?”  Sometimes it’s pretty easy to see why some people give the talks and others are in the crowd.

I always try to catch Valve sessions at GDC, because almost everyone recognizes how far ahead of the curve they are when it comes to game development processes. Valve’s Mike Ambinder gave a talk this morning about how Valve playtests its games, which is very involved but boils down to a very simple process: prototype -> playtest -> collect feedback -> iterate -> repeat until the game is fun.

I won’t attempt to recount the whole session here, in which Ambinder ran through seven types of testing and data collection, ranging from basic observation to surveys and even emotional and biomechanical feedback (not many companies outside Valve can afford a camera setup to track players’ eye movements). A big part of the talk covered the downsides of each type of testing, and where they can often produce false results (people often can’t tell you why they do the things they do, which makes it more important to watch what they do than listen to what they say) and how to avoid them.

I ran into several other developers while leaving the session, who all admitted they were there because Valve seems to do this kind of stuff better than anyone else. To which I usually agree, but still wonder: what went wrong with TF2’s Scout update?