Entry tags:

crpgs, work

Special things
Some poor person posted that they'd like to hear my ramblings on general CRPG theory. So, briefly, I hope, one thing that has jumped out at me lately is this:

You get one special thing per level.

One of the biggest hassles on ME2 has been us trying to shoehorn way too much awesome special stuff into a single mission or level. Which, yeah, it's great that we want that, but when wanting that means we end up having to redo the level because we broke it, not so awesome.

At its base, here is what you can do in Mass Effect:

• Walk around
• Shoot stuff
• Open containers and do the hacking minigame
• Talk

Everything else is a Special Thing, which means that you should lock that crap down.

Take Feros, for example:

In my mind, there are, not counting the roads, four levels for Feros:

• Zhu's Hope, Starting
• Exogeni Base
• Zhu's Hope, Returning
• Thorian Lair

Zhu's Hope, Starting: Has no Special Things by general "Important Level" standards. You can argue that it has a lot of important atmosphere stuff that takes work, but all main game levels have important level stuff -- things flying by overhead at key parts and other things that make the world feel tense, alive, or reactive. Really, on this level, you go around and shoot stuff. Woo! No Special Thing! Easy-ish level! (Okay, technically you fight a boss-level enemy, which I know for a fact was difficult to script. And I recall bad guys popping out of the ground at some point, which may have been cut, so maybe we still have one.) Originally, this level had more stuff, a lot more stuff -- whether the colony survived was determined by you fighting back waves of geth, then taking the battle to them, then completing those food and water plots, and generally doing military stuff to reclaim territory from the geth. And based on how long it took us to make normal fights fun, what we ended up with was, "Go kill the geth." Because that worked, and we had time for it.

Exogeni Base: The Special Thing here is the damn pipe minigame. Anytime the player has to dick around with something to reach a number higher than 17 but lower than 23, and you're not playing Myst, that's a damn special thing, and wow there are so many ways that those things can break. Hell, just explaining the logic of this puzzle to the player -- that you're trying to increase the pressure of the hydraulic pumps to make a door shear off the leg of a geth dropship -- is an exercise in pain and frustration. The little cutscenes showing you the legs punching through the wall got added in late, and the lines the followers say used to be just ambients -- we had to make them into cutscenes because nobody knew what the hell they were doing, besides playing that game from Myst and trying not to get over 23.

Zhu's Hope, Returning: The Special Thing here is the "Don't kill too many colonists" mechanic. For awhile, there was a chance we would lose this, because it was horrifically painful to get working in a game where we use "knock unconscious with grenades" nowhere else. Because we didn't have a backup plan, we eventually had to get it working in an eleventh-hour save. It was ugly, though, and originally a much longer and much harder scene that we had to simplify and streamline (there were far fewer colonists that you could accidentally or deliberately kill in the final game). Again, other special stuff was in here, and got cut -- moving bridges and stuff to alter your path, reactions to earlier quests, all of that.

Thorian Lair: It's interesting for me to think about what the Special Thing was here. In my opinion, it's the creepers, and while a lot of people love this level, it's one that I've always been troubled by. I think it's the creepers because, well, we don't use them in many other places, which means Special Monster, which means Special Thing. which means that it's your thing for the level. And again, there used to be more. The level was much less linear, so you were doing a lot more hunting for the neural nodes. There were thorian organic mines on the walls that you had to avoid shooting or else you'd suffer damage. There may have been more biotic stuff with the thorian itself, but I could be misremembering that.

And here's where all that breaks down:

Generally speaking, Feros has four levels, and four special things. While I'm proud of that level, I also belive we would have been better off doing just two special things, right from the beginning:

• The opening should have just been a crapload of geth. That's how it ended up, and it got there after trying to do a whole lot more and then having to cut complexity back in order to get the combat working well.
• The Exogeni Base could easily have lost the puzzle. Just "get past the hordes of geth, get all kinds of flavor, blow up enough stuff to get to the big door, and slam that door down in order to take down that ship". It's not a bad puzzle, but was it worth the number of cutscenes we had to slam in there to explain to people why just pressing the button didn't work?
• The colonists should stay one of the big puzzles for this planet. Difficult but do-able, and if we'd cut the complexity of other areas, our designers might have had time to make more options, like "wall off area so that colonists are locked in and you don't have to kill them" or "make containers filled with toxins that Shepard can shoot in order to knock out colonists without killing them" -- other things in addition to "grenades and punching" that would give this section more power.
• The thorian creepers should have been the final puzzle for this planet. And it should have been linear from the get-go, with the thorian acid mines cut early if they weren't easy, because we don't use mines anywhere else in the game. If we'd done that, we could maybe have gotten a handle on creeper spawning, so that they weren't just curled up there on the floor in plain sight, with you able to see them but not kill them. Maybe they'd have popped out of weird spots on the wall, or maybe the entire ceiling would be covered with icky crap, and the creepers would drop down from it.

Conclusion: We could have done a couple of things really really well. Instead, we did a bunch of things, some of them very well, some of them decently, and a few at a point where the average player squints and goes, "Hunh." This is in no way an indictment of the designers on this level, especially given that I was one. We were hashing out the Unreal 3 engine, we were learning what we could do, and we were still grappling with how combat was going to work at the time a lot of important decisions were made, which is a bit like building a car while driving it. And the level we ended up with is a solid level that does its job well.
The best thing I've been able to do on Mass Effect 2 is cut extra Special Things from levels early in the game. A timed section or an escort fight or a "shoot the generators" puzzle or a "gain X points through a combination of persuades and quest completions" bit.

And still, there are levels with multiple Special Things. And in the spirit of blatant hypocrisy, there are times when I'm the one saying, "Okay, sure, we can cut it if need be, but it's mostly working, right?" and trying to keep it, while also acknowledging that the other Special Thing in the level isn't getting the attention it needs.

But there are also levels that are now very very simple, because the tech designer and cinedesigner and I were all on the same page about what the big Special Thing was -- the drama of a fantastic-looking scene that tugs at the player's heartstrings, an awesome fight that you really need to think to finish successfully.

A lot of people want to do something new. We get a lot of submissions from people who will never become employees because they want to show us they can do BioWare plots by submitting something that would never appear in a BioWare game, counterintuitive as that may seem. And yeah, I love the trick fights and the fun puzzles and all that. But there's a lot of mileage to be gained from the core things we do well: walking, shooting stuff, clicking on placeables, and talking to folks. You can make a memorable level with those four things, no gimmicks, no Special things. You can save your fellow designers headaches and give them more time to spend on the Special Things that really are worth doing. You can spend your ammo wisely.

Early next year, we'll see how we did with that.