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An Adventure of Sorts

May 18, 2011 in Reviews

Magicka is a game which has crept up on myself and my game-playing friends, and taken us all completely by surprise. It isn’t a perfect game, but it is one of the most innovative – and definitely the funniest – games I’ve played to date.

Magicka: An Adventure of Sorts

This Arrowhead Studio project was released on Steam at the beginning of the year. Were I forced to fit it into a genre or theme, it would be something of a ‘fantasy adventure shmup’. Take bits from World of Warcraft and dungeon-crawlers like Baldur’s Gate, smother in a Monty Python glaze, and you’re getting close to a recipe for this delightful oddity.

"Magicka" 's selection of spells is not only vast, but spectacular.

The game allows you and up to 3 friends to pick up wizarding staves and don colourful robes, and embark upon a quest to rid the land of marauding orcs, led by Warlord Khan. In fact its entire premise is summed up within minutes by the game’s delightful narrator, Vlad – a mentor who literally hands you a bullet point list and shoves you on your way to play the game.

Following a short introduction, in which we learn of the corrupted wizard Grimnir and his wish to unite the world’s magicks, we are ushered through the halls of a wizarding academy in order to attend a party in our honour. Jocularity has its pitfalls when wielding arcane forces however, and the party is accidentally dropped into the castle’s dungeons. An obstacle course follows, in which on-screen popups and handy switching devices teach the new wizards their craft.

It is at this time – in co-op games of Magicka at least – that all hell breaks loose, and the game designers are well aware of this. Grant four players some cartoony avatars and the power to set things aflame, and chaos can only ensue. Indeed my party of 4 had to replay the tutorial 4 times, simply because we kept ‘accidentally’ destroying each other.

To the game’s real credit, its formula does not change from here on out. Ever the lurking mentor, Vlad (who assures us that he is most definitely not a vampire) guides our valiant wizards from village to city to forest, most of which run rampant with goblins and other foul creatures. Rid an area of its foes, recover, and move along; its formula leaves the game experience very open to player input, best sought through voice chat.

Combining beams of complimentary magic can devastate enemy ranks; crossing opposites will reduce your party to bloodied chunks.

The players are quickly given a full suite of 8 elemental forces (water, life, shield, cold, lightning, arcane, earth and fire), which can be combined to form different spells. Some of these ‘magicks’ can also be learned later on, often after defeating certain groups or bosses. By encouraging us to experiment, the game further establishes its light-hearted and laid-back approach, making for some spectacularly gory battles indeed. It’s hard not to learn a valuable lesson in crossing opposite forces, when attempting to heal someone who’s casting an arcane spell. I didn’t think seeing dismembered chunks of wizard spatter across the battlefield could be so funny.

Above all else, Magicka is a game experience, and its writing acknowledges this. The FMVs are short but hilarious, and its characters and parodies are truly memorable. It is, however, an experience to be shared, and while group play can be a tricky environment in which to learn the game’s nuances – in which case a solo run through the tutorial might be wise – the game is very tough upon a single player.

Its challenges do not – as far as I can tell – scale depending on the number of wizards present. Indeed, having so many criss-crossing magic beams on screen at once may lend further difficulty to the game, but it’s as nothing compared to the overwhelming difficulty curves a solo player will have to climb, even early into the game. Indeed I would struggle to recommend this game to anyone looking for a comical, solo game; try Psychonauts instead.

We as a group also had some difficulty with the game’s default controls, and as I understand it, a patch which allowed users to alter these key bindings does not always come bundled into the Steam download. A verification of files later, and I was able to fix the developer’s controversial choice: to place self-healing functions on the middle mouse button of scroll-wheel peripherals.

Pre-empt the control issues however, find some friends to play with, and you’re set for a laugh a minute. Magicka manages to be  technically impressive game indeed, and its magic abilities are delightfully complex, but simple in their logic. They and the other gameplay elements allow players to have their own fun with a game rich in cult parody and memorable battles.

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Achievements in Digital Media

August 9, 2010 in Theory

John “Kaseido” McKnight recently wrote about a proposed ‘achievement’ system for Second Life which, some believe, might help shift online world demographics from a niche, free-form crowd to the lucrative gamer market. So soon after The Internet Crashed had posted an interview with Gary Ballard, this idea had me musing on notions of genre and medium again. I hope to draw a divide where social achievements can and cannot enrich a digital experience, but by doing so I must first separate MMO games from their ‘offline’ predecessors.

A Trio of Media

“MMO’s [sic.] need to be thought of as a medium, not a genre of video games. You take an experiment like Second Life and put it up against a refined, Skinner-box profit machine like World of Warcraft and you’ll see two very different experiences. Both have elements of game, but such widely varying goals that they can’t be considered in the same genre at all. You have to view them as two examples of different genres within the medium of an online multiplayer experience.”

Gary Ballard, for The Internet Crashed

Ballard’s point is a potent one, upon which Kaseido seized too – that although MMOs and games share much in common, it is almost always impossible to win an MMO, and so they are ultimately for play. The only time an MMO defies this is in player vs. player combat, when strict deathmatch rulings and the enclosure of an arena ensure that all play is taken outside normal MMO flow. A single-player console game may instead be completed once its story is run or a series of puzzles is finished. Note that for the sake of clarity, I consider the PC to be a games console too, despite the fact they run most MMOs.

I consider online games to be a separate medium indeed. The balance of constraints and opportunities open to a community-based game’s design are too many to let us treat such work as we would a console game. I currently classify these media by their chief intent: social interaction, gaming within rules, and playing.

  • Console games, typically free of social input (save for multiplayer modes), may feature ‘game’ or ‘play’. Examples would include Half-Life 2 (game) and LittleBigPlanet (play);
  • Online worlds feature no overarching goals save whatever the user brings to their own spontaneous play;
  • MMOs or online games occupy a middle-ground, since they feature directed gameplay delivered in a freeform fashion – players are allowed to embrace or disregard quests and challenges at their own discretion, and may in fact ‘level up’ without any heed paid to these features. They are also encouraged to share this experience in a social environment.

It is these differences in function and reach which I think demand careful attention when suggesting new features like achievements. The system as we understand it is, as Kaseido says, a relatively new phenomenon, though ‘offline’ achievements have featured in console games for decades. Hosting these accomplishments in an online environment has allowed players to create ‘game passports’, detailing their exploits and granting them bragging rights.

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Coming Out: Serious Gaming

July 18, 2010 in Theory

I’ve not really dealt with serious games before, on this blog or elsewhere, but an idea has struck me and I hope you’ll indulge me as I share it. Many such games deal with political ideas through education or simulation. There are very few which deal with social issues, possibly because they are a complex matter. Some such issues do appear in more generalised games, however:

Half-Life 2 deals with repression, both in its cyberpunk storyline and a thoroughly disadvantageous few minutes of play at its start. I’m sure most people will remember the City 17 station ‘metro cop’ who knocks a can to Freeman’s feet. In the mocking tone of one holding the high ground, he orders Freeman to pick it up. The player has the option to throw it back in his face, but Freeman is unarmed and easily bludgeoned with a cattle prod for his insolence. This short encounter sets the tone for a whole game about overcoming dictatorial power.

Beyond Good & Evil has a more political angle, exposing the perils of state-controlled media in a fantastical setting. Protagonist and freelance photojournalist Jade falls foul of the military during a vicious alien attack and winds up with a rebel network, out to expose far more than the government is letting on. Who’s really behind the Domz attacks, and why are innocents being abducted from the streets?

Of course, this is no less than what film is capable of dealing with, and film has the power to highlight more personal issues. What if games were tackle ideas like betrayal, love and social injustice head-on?

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Loyalty Scheme

December 14, 2009 in Uncategorized

Some time ago now, I took it upon myself to experience some new online worlds, and I noticed a curious trend in the way such games are drawing their users back in, or sending them away from daily play. This aspect to their design forms the backbone of their long-term rhythm and feel. It reminds me of the frustration in offline game save checkpoints, and the way late-90s Playstation games would drive me wild with manual checkpoints every hour compared to today’s games, often with too many autosaves. These bookmarks help define a lot about the game’s timing, from mission length to total average play duration, and even the reach of a player’s personal goals. Can my level 80 warlock complete all the available daily quests within, say, two hours? How close will the next level take me to dinner time? From Farmville to Eve Online it’s all a little different, but I didn’t regard this device all that closely until a rare thing happened; a big-name game actually broke my feeling of immersion to tell me that I could no longer play.

First, a run-down of my experiences:

World of Warcraft

I’ve long enjoyed World of Warcraft because of its depth, the easy interface and the way I can dip in and out with some new task or personal goal there to await me. I’ve played through most of the game’s zones and quest chains with one character or another, but at the time I began my cross-world exploration my ‘main’ was stuck doing PvP battlegrounds, dailies and reputation quest lines, having run the solo game’s course already. My enthusiasm really began to wane as a result of that, and a still rather small guild incapable of supporting the dungeon and heroic runs associated with ‘the endgame’. While each of WoW‘s dungeons tends to offer a different challenge to my lower-level alts., it is only with the recent launch of a ‘random dungeon’ matchmaking feature that I stood any chance of seeing new content. While PvP pits me against human opponents the settings and goals are always the same, and so it often fells to the solo daily quests to provide my sustinence.

Dailies are not particularly exciting. Fair play to Blizzard for giving us persistent quests to see us through the endgame drudgery at all, but they only go so far. Every 24 hours, Gemenar the warlock faces the fascinating choice of bombing Scourge again, attacking 20 vrykul again, laying mines to kill 12 snobolds again or charging Scourge cavalry at the Lich King’s doorstep.. again. There seems no room to randomise this given WoW‘s setup, and the only alternative is to play so-called ‘pickup group’ instances with strangers. The problem with these is that most of the players you’ll be placed with have run the dungeon many times before, and so the chance at a new experience is stripped down to “kill, kill, kill, loot”. It seems then that variety only comes about from applying pressure to your peers – get them up to your level so that you can enjoy new content together. This is far from being a ‘daily’ objective.

Eve Online

I downloaded and ran Eve Online‘s free trial knowing it only to be ‘a different beast’ to other online games. I didn’t enjoy the experience, as followers of my Twitter feed will know, but I found that it does deploy an intriguing training regime. Unlike Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, training is planned and lengthy. There’s no visiting trainers on every even-numbered level as you grow, handing over gold for education-in-an-instant. Instead you are given training manuals and invited to form your own lesson plan. By docking at a space station (best considered a base like an inn), you can review the manuals you’ve collected and apply them to your 24-hour schedule. It means that if you need a certain skill (e.g. the use of your shield) in order to survive a mission you’ve been given, you’ll have to abandon hope and come back to try again in a few hours or a new day, depending on your lesson plan. It’s really quite jarring, coming as I did from a world in which your only barriers are experience and in-game cash – both of which are readily available.

Most bizarre is Eve‘s bonus reward scheme. Real-time strategy (RTS) fans will be familiar with secondary objectives, such as keeping five tanks in play or capturing three buildings as you go about the primary mission. For at least the first few missions in Eve Online, there are such secondary tasks to be done and most are time-based. It essentially means that on the third or fourth quest, the new player is offered a mission with impossibly difficult enemies possessing firepower well beyond your starter ship’s meagre defences and repair capability. It soon becomes clear that you have some training to do, but the quest is counting down a timer. Take too long to train on your hours-long manuals and you lose that bonus. Abandon the mission and you are locked out of it for four hours, lest you incur a penalty to your reputation.

Whereas WoW grows tiresome because its novel content runs out, Eve Online pushes its regimens so hard as to encourage you to not to play, just to keep things a little fresh. Eve does appeal to a different sort of player of course – obligations to your own trade goals and to your corporation, if you have one, will draw you back in to see the missions through. WoW features a social culture, but its rewards are generally more personal, such as the chance to equip some great gear on your character. Despite (or because of) its logical approach though, Eve came across to me as a fairly joyless experience, preventing me from playing any more just when I’d begin to get the feel for interstellar mining and combat.

FarmVille

I’ve been playing FarmVille for a while too now – happily, I might add. Unlike online games, heavy on graphics and loading times with logins to boot, FarmVille is by design the sort of game we dip into on a daily or twice-daily basis, with objectives to match that sort of time frame. As one might expect, it involves running a farm by planting crops, letting them grow and harvesting in order to repeat the cycle. As a structure it has much in common with Eve Online, but really all it lacks in comparison is combat and exploration.

Of course, FarmVille and Zynga’s other, rather similar games fall victim to social and microtransaction pressure. Houses, larger homesteads and some decorative items are locked out unless you buy some of the game’s currency, connect with a certain number of Facebook friends or invite them to send free gifts to you. My endeavours to create a personalised, gothic farm are blocked by steep social grinding and about £20 worth of the game’s FarmVille coins, while even Eve would only deny me through having to wait around a bit.

Price to Pay

My experiences of each world have basically sunk or swum on the balance of grind versus reward.  No world would or could satisfy my every wish as and how I wanted them, but World of Warcraft and FarmVille have done for me what Eve could not and kept their promises in line with my rewards for playing. WoW has teased me with the challenge of learning every engineering schematic, exploring all the world’s geographies and discovering its stories. Schemata are a reasonable grind away, exploration is a pleasurable journey with fast mounts and the ability to fly, and its story seeps into almost every quest line. I’m constantly working towards these personal goals because the game allows me to.

FarmVille is arguably less successful, but then it never promised much in the first place. The game has placed me inside an isometric grid with the means to make money and offered some purely visual, non-interactive trinkets to work for. While my level 80 warlock can demonstrate the benefits from wearing a more powerful robe in the manner she dispatches enemies, my quaint little farmer will sow and reap crops just as easily with a gothic arch above him as not.

Eve stands out as a world in which either my pre-conceptions of MMORPGs, or CCP Games’ package, have given me ambitions which it cannot realise. That is to say that while I cannot discern whose fault it is, my dream of being a space pioneer was blocked by training schedules, financial diagrams and a very steep ability curve. The game could not intice me to play every day because I could not work to my own goals, and even the daily grind of Scourge slaughter in World of Warcraft could do that.

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