OH RPG GAMING SITES NO!

Quote of note, in regards to Dragon Age: Origins having homosexual romance options:

"David Gaider must really get a kick out of writing homosexual relationships.

In any case, I'm not going to buy this game. I don't consider being flirted or stalked by fags as entertainment in the slightest sense. "

-- Surlent, a totally heterosexual dude who is not even a little curious about why it felt good when he played center in football and the quarterback didn't go in shotgun formation and cupped his taint, the quarterback's muscular fingers lightly brushing the tight surface of Surlent's uniform around the ass, just before shouting, "Hike!", and now he pays women to put on football helmets so he can achieve an erection.

Fortunately, others responded appropriately. I added a brief, "Methinks the homophobe doth protest too much," and the mods noted that the user had received a warning. Sounds like your basic "One asshole who gets kicked in the shins by the rest of the group" situation.

And then we got this in response (emphasis mine):

"Why would you warn Surlent? He just stated an opinion. Unless you warned all of the gay approvers too. That would be okay, I guess. I mean if you're going to warn everyone who is heterosexual and dislikes homosexuality, you'll be warning half the male population of this website. To me, calling someone a homophobe is as demeaning as calling someone a faggot. Since you allowed homophobe then faggot/fags should be allowed as well. You can't pick which group to be intolerant to. Please let me know if RPGWatch is going to take a stance against people who dislike homosexuals, because I would have to leave too."

-- crpgnut, who puts a smiley after correcting "homophobe" by saying "homonauseated would be closer" to show that he's just joshing around, lol, I hate gay people, roflqueers.

To me, calling someone violent is as demeaning as punching someone in the face! To me, charging someone with manslaughter is as demeaning as committing a murder! To me, being called a racist is as demeaning as using the n-wo... Oh, wait, stupid straight white people whine about that, too.

Every time I wonder why it's so damn hard to get a gay-friendly plot or character into a game, I just have to look to the Internets for an answer.

I finished another Mass Effect 2 playthrough over the weekend. Every time I play this game, it's looking better. The endgame had me on the edge of my seat, which is absurd, since I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.

I think that people are going to be really impressed by the combat. The overall balance has moved from wars of attrition (whittle an enemy down and hope that if you're on Hardcore, they don't spam Immunity) to fast nasty firefights. Even popcorn encounters can turn deadly if you're an idiot who doesn't use cover or pick the right tool for the job... but on the upside, you can really take down enemies fast and hard when you know what you're doing. Everybody, you and your enemies, is more dangerous.

Of course, half of the official forums are filled with people concerned that because our combat is better, we're less of an RPG. In Mass Effect 1, you were an impoverished vagabond pawing through crates for your next meal or a good set of Incendiary ammo mods until about level 20, at which point the balance of power shifted, ammo mods started rolling in, you ended up with more money than stores willing to accept it, and you got to purchase the Spectre Weapons and Auto-Win the Game.

I've been really impressed with how far we've come in Mass Effect 2. We haven't said much about it yet, and this post will not be the post that breaks out all kinds of exciting news on the subject, because, you know, not my system. I'll spoil journals instead. We still have them. An awesome person figured out a way to make them auto-pop on screen so that even those of you who never ever ever ever look at your journals (I'm looking at you; seriously, I had to write a lot of entries, but do I get a thank-you?) will see the occasional helpful hint pop up. It's a massive improvement (unless it turns out to break the game memorywise or something, in which case it will be cut and I will weep sad designer tears and then move on). On the upgrades and mods front, I dumped a bunch of money into it and really liked the results. And due to the awesome balance of our money system, I could not just buy everything and Auto-Win the Game. I had to, you know, think about the way that I played and what I wanted to emphasize.

Same deal with character advancement. It's less about "Hey, make sure not to take First Aid or the Persuade skills, since you get those for free! Max out everything else!", as the official walkthroughs would say, and much more about figuring out what you want your Shepard to be. It's been a long time since I agonized over spending my points quite this much... or grinned in triumph as a new or upgraded power completely changed the field of battle.

And all of that makes us good competition for Borderlands, except that we're single-player, which means we're toast unless there's a compelling story.

I will preface this by saying that I'm a wuss who tears up at least once per Pixar movie (yes, even Cars, why does everybody sneer at Cars, did you not all see the part where McQueen goes back to push the King through the finish line, what the hell, people?), and accept that this is just going to sound like another dev shilling his game, because... well... I'm a dev, shilling my game... but it's pretty awesome.

Key moments, key choices. Written, then looked at critically, then rewritten and edited to be stronger and better and sharper and then stripped down to do just what they need. Give that to VO teams who do the impossible on every project (imagine doing 10 to 20 CG movies in terms of length, and also, by the way, branching dialog that makes it much harder for an actor or director to intuitively get the sense of how the scene is playing, and oh, the main character was written by seven different writers with a pair of editors pulling hard to keep the voice consistent). To directors who have to know the game inside and out to provide crucial context, to actors who are willing to throw themselves into a role and trust that we're going to do them justice. To audio folks who do a great number of things I don't understand, the audio equivalent of Photoshopping, to make things perfect. Bring that back to the Cinematic Animators and Cinematic Designers who turn it into movie-quality scenes, again with the added player-control factor. And the art teams that make the characters, the levels, the audio folks who actually make the lines have consistent volume and the background music fire correctly and... and all of it.

And yeah, rah rah team, I know, but damn. I walked through the beginning of a romance with a character, and watching Shepard and the character banter back and forth, the body language, the lighting, the dialog, the acting... it was the first time I think I've looked at one of our dialogs and thought, "Wow, that's sexy." Not boobs-and-pistols Bayonetta sexy, but "two characters obviously interested in each other and testing the waters" sexy. (Caveat: not written by me. Written with significantly more skill than I'd have had.)

I saw a squad member drop to their knees crying, and it worked. I felt bad and wanted to help. At some point -- and it ain't writing, or at least it ain't just writing, it's the VO team and the voice actors and the artists and the cinematics folks all pulling together with programming support that gives us more animations and higher quality than we've ever had before -- at some point, we passed through pixel-town and made characters that people are going to feel an investment in.

Also, one time I biotically knocked an explosive crate into a bunch of husks, at which point it exploded and blew them off a ledge, and that was pretty cool, too.

In summary, I am very happy and feeling really good about going back to the >100 bugs I have waiting for me, because I know that this game is worth fixing at least 60 of those and dumping the rest on my wife, the editor. (Love you, sweetie!) And also, when your biggest regret in terms of cut content is that you had to remove something the generic krogan shouted during combat because it violated German laws regarding mistreatment of corpses, you know the game is in pretty good shape.

I started a new playthrough of Mass Effect 1 at home this weekend, with the blatantly metagamey plan of hammering AI Hacking with an engineer until it got unlocked as a bonus skill due to the achievement, and then starting an Infiltrator with AI Hacking. It's the first time in quite awhile that I've played the original Mass Effect, and it is fascinating.

The official forums are populated by people with concerns that the folks who made the game they love are going to screw up the sequel. This post? Not for them. I've made a few passionate and honest posts about how I think we're improving the gameplay by cutting what didn't work before, and some people are reassured, and others accuse me of being arrogant, selling out, or lying. At this point, I'll be on the official forums to answer questions, and I will get my general Mass Effect chat fix elsewhere. There's an awesome LJ community, and I've always enjoyed the Penny Arcade forums.

But anyway, I was talking about the original Mass Effect:

Holy sweet mother of heaven, that first couple of hours has too much talking. Great on the first playthrough, invulnerable to the magic X-X-X-X skip buttons on the seventh or eighth. I'm fully aware that as the guy who had to play this when there was no sound and only placeholder animation, I am a bit jaded when it comes to these groundbreaking cutscenes and dialogs. That said, I'm only on my second real playthrough, and I can only imagine what people on the tenth playthrough are doing. In Mass Effect 2, we can skip cutscenes, and there are far fewer non-skippable conversation lines, at least right now, and I hope we manage to keep that when we ship. Our big plot dialog is also a whole lot shorter, at least if you want it to be shorter. So there: win.

And then there's the loading. How many times have I run into a weird pause while we loaded a new area? How many elevators did I ride even on my quick-and-dirty playthrough to unlock and hammer AI Hacking as quickly as possible? It was a massive improvement on the clunks and crashes before we released ME1, as I remember, and still... I look at it now and can't imagine how we thought it was okay. What we have now, the clever layout of loading tunnels and carefully checked art and conversation assets -- it works. You run around seamlessly. People are going to pick up ME2 and, well, ideally, not even notice this, because what this is is the absence of something bad.

Much has been made of the removal of crouching in ME2. Right now, the removal of crouching is a big bonus. "Hey, there's some cover! Wait, why am I not going into the cover? Oh, I have to crouch?" Are these truly valuable things to think to oneself? In ME2, I run around, I hit cover, I hit "A", and then I move into a cover position appropriate to the height of whatever I'm next to. I think that people hearing about the loss of cover think that Shepard will be moving through the entire game standing fully erect (but enough about the romances), but in fact, ME2 Shepard is ducking and weaving and generally behaving intelligently because we built the game from the ground up with the new cover scheme in mind instead of moving through two or three different schemes before settling on what we shipped with last time.

I do not miss the reticle. I like it being assumed that my Shepard has maxed out the skill of whatever weapons I'm trained with, and letting me spend my points on something else. Like, ideally, AI Hacking.

I do not miss the health bar. I know that it seems less realistic to people, but I think that those people are doing a bit of a 3rd Edition D&D denial thing. Is it really more realistic to have non-regenerating health? To have those injuries be real injuries that are then magically instantaneously healed by medi-goop? In the new format, at least I can assume that an injury is just a momentary state of windedness, the result of shots knocking the wind out of me as they penetrate my armor, and that if a follower goes down, that's a "real" injury. (And then, slapping medigel on them is just pumping them full of drugs and giving them some quick synthetic skin, something that will just get them back to the ship so that they can get real medical treatment.) I don't see any real "this is less realistic" thing here, and the health bar is just one more thing to juggle.

The soundsets I am still enthusiastically kicking in the shins for ME2 are already worlds beyond what we had in ME1.

The faces on the NPCs are better in ME2 -- I see how much handwaving the CineDesigners had to do in ME1 now to fake the things that the system couldn't do, and those are things we can actually do for realsies now.

And the story? The story for ME1 is great... and I think what we're doing is a fantastic next chapter. Our ME2 dialog is a bit tighter, a bit more conversational, but for all the "It's darker" mentality, it's clearly the same world, with the same people. We're a little less shiny than ME1, which means that there's a bit less sense of wonder -- and I miss that, yeah. We make up for it with, I think, more humanity, more of a sense that these people you're clicking and talking to and killing are real people, and that's a combination of writing and CineDesign and Art and even the Level Designers giving us levels that support what we need to do to make that happen.

I loved ME1. I was proud of ME1. And we are going to make ME1 look ugly and clunky and dated when we throw ME2 out for public consumption.

( Long work blather. )

Some days, I have kind of an awesome job.

So there's a game, Shadow Complex, that was inspired by Orson Scott Card's Empire and which trades heavily on Card's name. And some gamers are refusing to purchase Shadow Complex because of Card's homophobia and their wish not to give money to someone like that. And the creators are very sad about the closemindedness of those gamers.

Peter David, the writer for Shadow Complex, offers his advice: "If anyone wants to boycott the game and thus damage me or (development studio) Chair while doing nothing to change Orson's opinions, that's naturally their right. Or...They can display the sort of tolerance for someone who is different from them that they feel is lacking in Orson and thus prove they're better. Your choice."

You think Peter has an opinion on which one is better? You think maybe he's trying to give us a subtle nudge in one direction?

I'm not advocating a boycott. I don't even have Xbox Live, so one could say that I am viciously and unfairly boycotting all of the Live content, if one wanted to extend the term "boycott" to the degree that Peter does here. Because, you know, the article specifically notes that the gamer credited with starting the movement has in no way advocated a formal boycott. He's just said, "I'm not buying it." 

But beyond that... you know what damages you, Peter David? Getting you fired. Cutting your health insurance. You know, things that actually have a non-zero negative effect upon you. Me not buying your game? Doesn't actually do much.

There is a carrot, and there is a stick. Me not buying your game is me failing to give you a carrot. Learn the difference.

Acting as if the only way to prove that I am tolerant is to buy your Orson Scott Card fanfic sidescroller, and that anything else constitutes an attack upon you, smacks just a teensy tiny bit of entitlement.

Unless... wait, people, do you think he's on to something?

Major presses, your failure to purcase my unpublished novels is a direct attack on not just me, but my family as well, and while I can accept attacks on me as part of playing in the big leagues, attacking my wife and children is over the line. Either these attacks, in the form of you not buying my books, stop immediately, or I suppose we'll have our answer about the integrity, or lack thereof, of the editors in the publishing industry. The choice is yours.

We'll see how that goes.

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.

( Mass Effect 1 Spoilers )
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.

someone on the me boards is asking an interesting question. shepard finds imprisoned queen insect alien, her people thought extinct. player frees her or kills her (last time her race invaded galaxy, but this was thousand years ago, and cause of war unclear).

on boards, poster is asking whether you killed her or freed her... and how old you are.

i think it's cool to have been part of a game that raises questions like these.

This phase of the VO process is, I believe, like running from the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. You run. You run fast. The boulder moves behind you at a steady rate, and as long as you keep running, you are good. Sometimes you pick up a little speed, and you gain some ground on the boulder, and you think, "Hey, sweet, this is fine!"

And then you see a rock in the path. Today, the rock was our designer toolset crapping out because the sheer size of this game is doing things to the database that no database should have to put up with. So hey, no saving for an hour while everyone scrambles to put that out. (The tools guys were excellent. Again, this is not "Oh, sucky tools." This is tools built for text games that are now handling text and VO and cinematic animation instructions and all kinds of fun stuff.)

Or another rock, a critical "Hey, take a look at this," problem that eats a key couple of hours. And you stumble, and right yourself, and keep running.

And the boulder? The boulder does not slow down.

Someone asked me today if I'd listened to some of the stuff that's gone off to be recorded. I hadn't, because really, once it's off to VO, it is officially behind the boulder. I am not concerned with "behind the boulder". I am concerned with the boulder, and what it will do if I do not keep running at a speed equal to that of the boulder, on average. Later, when everything is recorded, at least first pass-wise, I will come back to the temple and look through the hallways and see what the boulder has left behind.

That all sounds negative. It's not. Somebody played a line I'd written today that had one of our most jaded and cynical people laughing hysterically. Another bit, which I wrote at least half on a dare from my wife, is actually getting into the game, and the people who find it are going to squee like nobody's business.

I think we're near the top of the hill, for reals this time. All but one of my big major plots are out of my hands, and all but two of the characters with whom I was lucky enough to have a hand. (One of the two is just getting a final editing pass. Getting the other is next week's big task, and wow, it's going to sting, but I had the one-sentence revelation that told me what I needed to do to make the character work.*

And there are some tiny small bits, the equivalents of the people arguing in ambients as you walk by or the tiny little roleplaying plots that break up the action here or there. But I've signed off on those, so they are mostly, as far as I am concerned, behind the boulder.

This is going to be a fantastic game. And with antibiotics kicking in and an actual weekend off last week, I'm actually feeling it again.

Until the next rock pops up in my way, anyway.

* Tangential, but I describe most of my character writing the way I describe my attempts to sing: I can't actually do it. I just impersonate people who can. I can only sort of carry a tune on my own, but I can nail the high notes in the Les Miz song "Bring Him Home" provided I'm doing my impersonation of Colm Wilkinson. With characters, I need an easy "Oh, it's like this." A broad stroke, an "Oh, it's Kaylee from Firefly" or "Denzel Washington in Training Day, as played by a small white woman." An impersonation. By the time I'm finished with the character, it's not an impersonation any longer, but the broad initial stroke gives me a set of parameters within which I can work and flesh out who this person is and what they would say or do in a given situation. It's what I do with most of my characters in my own writing, and it's worked well so far for me at BioWare.

So on Mass Effect 1, my main man Kaidan Alenko had a saying I just loved as I went through the game. We'd be in the middle of some fight against mercenaries or pirates or ninjas or something, and Special K would sometimes shout "Enemies Everywhere!", sounding just a little bit like the Sicilian from The Princess Bride. I thought it was kind of funny, and he did it a few times per fight.

And then I realized that I'd left Kay-Kay on the ship for the last three or four missions, and I was still hearing it.

It was actually the mercenary/pirate/ninja using a generic human male enemy soundset. Apparently we didn't have enough lines for "I see an enemy," and "I see an enemy" as a condition was firing a trigger a bit too often.

Enemies.

Everywhere.

All. The. Time.

On ME2, we're trying to avoid that. In fact, if anyone ever says something to the effect of, "That sounds like a lot of work / memory / money," with regards to something regarding sound sets, all you really need to say is, "Enemies everywhere!", and they nod hastily and sign off on the idea. It's like the 9/11 of design justifications.

All the other writers are either in charge of bigger and scarier things or are leaving for other projects as soon as we get over the main writing hump, which means that I'm working on implementation of our good friends, the sound sets. This would utterly terrify me were it not for the fact that other people, people who know what they are doing, are working on the back-end stuff. We have an awesome fantastic system that works like a cross between our normal writing toolset and Outlook's rules filters, so I can simply set up something like "When: I: See an Enemy: Who is a turian: I say this line".

And then I just write "Turian enemies everywhere!", and we're good to go.

The systems designers and programmers are coming up with some great data about how often certain conditions fire, which is good, along with playtesting the in-progress soundsets we already have. About the hundredth time you hear the same follower shout "I've got the merc!" or "The merc is mine!", it becomes clear that wow, perhaps "Engaging an enemy of type ______" is not the most useful thing to have as a high-probability trigger, because, you know, if the main enemy for the level is a mercenary gang, then, uh, you might be hearing that line a bit. Or you set it to an absurdly low priority, or you give it a huge cooldown, in which case, why is that a sound set line and not a one-time ambient line that your followers shout the first time you see them? Writing a soundset line that you then have to effectively cut means you've wasted a bunch of resources, and are dragging those resources around for the entirety of the game just in case a mercenary happens to pop out of the woodwork somewhere.

The enemies also need some tweaking. I thought I was being cool by noting the races of the party members, but you know what? I know who's in my squad. I don't need to be reminded that there's a drell in my party. I'm aware. So about the hundredth time that some pinhead shouts, "We've got a hostile drell!" or "I'm engaging the drell!" or "The drell is down!", the gloss is off the excitement of my new drell follower.

One guy played a bunch of games and obsessively analyzed their chatter and banter systems, noting which types of calls they have tons of versions of for each actor, and which are rare but special. I'm working with him, with an eventual goal of getting more of the right calls and fewer of the wrong calls. (And some calls removed entirely -- see "Enemy merc sighted", which, you know, just makes your squad buddy sound like an idiot when you're half an hour into the merc-centric merc-mission. Wow, dude, really? Mercs? Here? Like the ones we've been blasting for half an hour? Thanks for the tip!)

Finally, we're trying to get in better touch with the core benefits of sound sets. Sound sets add flavor to the level, which is great. And they can also be little rewards -- a good solid enemy death cry lets the player know he just succeeded. But Mass Effect 1 didn't do a whole lot with a third area of sound sets -- giving hints.

In Mass Effect 1, if you shot a krogan, and it went down, that guy was getting back up in a moment. But a lot of players missed that. They'd shoot the krogan, then turn to shoot someone else, and then be surprised and unhappy when the krogan rifle-butted them in the head. This was a not-fun surprise. It's not like krogan are stealthy. The goal wasn't to trick anybody. It would have been fantastic if we'd had the time and the tech to note when a krogan was getting back up in regen mode, and to have someone in your squad shout something as simple as "Watch out! Krogan getting back up!"

We're trying to get things along those lines into Mass 2. Litlte things that aren't huge by themselves, but which make combat a little more intuitive and a little more fun. If we get them, I'll be jazzed. If the system ends up not working (and things do get cut for time or because they hit the memory too hard or for any other number of reasons), it will still be at least as good as it was in Mass 1.

Minus enemies everywhere.

The English language is limited in so many interesting ways. There's no way to say "I don't care" with a positive connotation, for example. Someone comes to you with an idea about what to do on a level. You know that you don't know how to do it, you know that they do know how to do it, and you know that they care about the level as much as you do and are on the same page... and there's no way to say, "I don't care, sure, do it!" without it coming off as an attack on their stuff.

Because I don't care. But not in the sense of not wanting it to be good. I don't care in the sense that I fully trust the dude whose area of expertise this is to do his thing. I don't care in the sense that I know it's going to kick ass, and I know it's going to kick more ass than it would kick if I butted in to give a non-that-field-of-expertise opinion.  So... good not-caring. Have to work on a phrase.

Another term that is only, to my knowledge, negative in English: fan service. Not in the boobs sense, but in the "And now, for all of you who loved this character, BASK in the character development and angst and ability to stand up for that person and say stuff that suggests people should now begin high-fiving in slow motion while the end music from Top Gun plays, and... yeah" sense. The "Technically, this can't be a Mary Sue, because it's actually a character in the game" sense. And again, that sounds negative, but I really really love this plot. The tech designer has put in some fantastic combat, and the cinematic designer (well, design team, really) has made this into a fun roleplaying-heavy plot with some great chances for Shepard to get emotional. If it comes off as well as it's looking right now, some players are going to love this thing.*

So, you know, fan service. But fans need to be serviced, too.

* Bear in mind, my feelings now in no way correlate to the players' feelings when we ship this thing. I was really in love with some plots that people have called out as the absolute stupidest in Mass Effect 1. I'm aware of that. But if I dwell on that too much, I'll never reach. So I'm assuming that everyone is going to love this as much as I do.

This week, much like last week and, I think, the week before it, was writing followers -- the "Hey, let's talk about my childhood" conversations that make or break that dude who hangs out behind you and off to one side and occasionally shoots at the bad guys or hogs the best cover spot on the wall. I can't talk about them in any real detail (although I believe confirming that the game will have followers is, you know, not dangerous), but I'm really proud of how they feel right now. I've gotten to make somebody that people are going to love, and I've gotten to make somebody that people will have long acrimonious discussions about, and both of those are all kinds of fun.

Next week, I dive back into plots, which is a nice change of pace. After spending two weeks having people talk about their feelings, I'm looking forward to writing deep compelling lines like, "A blast that size will wipe out the entire colony!" or "We need to shut down those power generators to disable his shields!"

(I will try to write them better than that.)

I interviewed a potential writing candidate last week, and then went to lunch with him and other folks, including Dan, an old buddy from a previous project. It was fantastic.

Candidate: So writers kind of divide up tasks?

Me: Oh, yeah. I mean, on Mass 2, Mac is the lead, Chris is the IP guy, Brian is the character guy, Luke is the plot guy, and I blow stuff up.

Candidate: Um.

Me: Yep. Everyone else handles complex and nuanced character choices and moments of perfect beauty. I blow up helicopters.

(everyone laughs except Dan)

Me: See, you all laugh, except for Dan. Because he's edited me.

Dan: He's kind of telling the truth.

Me: I mean, it's like, look, once you've blown up one, you've already got the visual effects and the animation and all of it. Couldn't we just reuse it a couple of times, show it from different angles or something, kind of make it fresh and new?

Dan: It's really good that you're at least focused on reusing assets.

Me: I do what I can.

Once again proving myself to be the Michael Bay of whatever writing team I'm on.

It's coming up on half past midnight. Hopefully the Damsel will be home from editing soon.

I finished Puzzle Quest Galactrix awhile back but was unmotivated to write anything about it.

Which, honestly, is kind of a review in and of itself.

There's so much potential greatness. I love the new board, with its shifting gravity and complex strategic options. I love that attacking people makes my faction rating shift, and selling things to them makes it shift as well. I love the number of minigames available for mining, haggling, crafting, and scouting out rumors. I love the consequence-free failure that encourages you to take risks and experiment. I love the ship as the means of upgrading. Hell, I even love the use of energy bars for power limitation and the turn-recharge system to prevent ability spamming.

And yet, at the same time, I am dazzled by the sheer number of bass-ackward decisions that were made, decisions that I, a peon junior designer, can look at and go, "Oh, yeah, easy fix."

I played the original Puzzle Quest. I enjoyed it a ton. There was only one minigame I didn't play into the ground, and that was the pet training. You know why? Because it was timed. I don't think that I was alone there in being somebody who didn't want you bringing that timed crap into my turn-based strategy casual RPG.

So naturally, what minigame is a prerequisite for unlocking jumpgates and traveling from system to system? A timed minigame. One which gives no reward for completion beyond "Yep, you can go to that new system," no money, no XP, nada.

(There've been complaints about the minigame itself, but I figured out how to not suck at it reasonably quickly. (For those who haven't played it, the goal is to match a sequence of colors -- somewhere between 12 and 24 -- within a time limit. It has to be done in order, and while there's no penalty for getting other colors, you can't move onto color X+1 until you've gotten color X. And if you get a chain, something that you ordinarily like to get, where stuff keeps firing off all by itself, then you sit there helplessly while the clock ticks down.) I consider the game fair, and I wouldn't be bothered by having had it as a minigame for some other system.)

At the same time, you spend a lot of the game racking up Psi points, given by the purple gems. Psi points do... nothing. Well, that's not true. A few abilities will use them to do pissant damage or something similarly unimpressive. Their major purpose is this: if you've done a set of quests, you can, when attacked by an enemy ship, sometimes spend Psi points to avoid the fight.

You know what the best and most interesting minigame in the game was? THE FIGHTING. You know what I don't want to avoid? THE FIGHTING. I want to test out my new cannon. I want to see if my denial-of-turn strategy can actually let me take down enemies with impunity. Yes, I can imagine how it could have been annoying to be attacked every time I entered a hostile system, but there are two easy ways to not have that happen:

1) If you complete that Psi quest, you never ever ever get ambushed by people ever again, unless it's part of a mission. You don't have to bother spending Psi points at all.

2) Once you hit the Beta Centauri system, you can mine in a manner that breaks the game not merely on a balance level, but on a level indicative of what Dolph Lundgren's character said he was going to do to Rocky thanks to evil Soviet drugs (as opposed to the good American ones that Stallone was taking). Your faction is affecting by you selling stuff to people. You can fly into a system, blow up an enemy ship to get to their sales area, and then dump a crapload of crystals and alloys and radioactives on them, and they will start throwing parades for you the next time you come in-system, even as you coast through the still-smoking debris of the last five ships you blew up.

So we have Psi Points, which accomplish absolutely nothing, and we have the damn open-the-jumpgates minigame, the only timed minigame in the game and the one that you absolutely cannot ignore.

Yes, I'm stating it in an obvious way, but someone, at some point in the design process, must have thought, "Hey, a lot of people hate timed minigames. Maybe we could have the Psi Points auto-unlock leapgates. Or let you get a bonus that makes the timed section easier. Or... something. That lets people spend Psi Points on something other than avoiding combat, the coolest and funnest part of the game that lets people show off their new Shielded Minelayer ability."

Or maybe they didn't.

Other design elements have moments of irkfulness. I don't know why a faction system differentiates between Neutral and Liked and Loved when there appears to be no reward for hitting those levels. The shop prices are the same. You never get allies coming to your aid. I didn't notice new quests opening up. The faction system felt (he says like a jaded designer) like a system that got mostly done, until someone realized that if they put in all the faction effects, it would break other things, like the haggling minigame, and so it had to be stripped back to what it is now. I can support this (Faction isn't a minigame of the match-3 style, so if you have to neuter something, it's the easiest candidate), but it's still disappointing.

And then there's the plot.

Near the end, as part of the critical path, I am asked to go get some special crystals to make a machina, presumably one that something will pop out ex at some point thereafter. I go to where the crystals are, and they turn out to be living crystal creatures -- folks I've helped out on past missions, in fact. There's a pop-up conversation in which I discuss the horror of having to kill them and then harvest their bodies to use for stuff.

And I wait patiently for other opportunities. Like, maybe I can go back to the world where I got the quest and ask about a different way to do it. Nope! Maybe I can talk to them instead and find out an alternate path. Nope!

The only way to finish the game is by genociding the pacifist crystal people.

And I did it. Not because it was a difficult moral choice but I soldiered through for the fate of the galaxy, but because at that point, I was so disgusted with what was being propped up as a story that I ceased to see the crystal people as people and remembered that they were pixel pictures standing between me and the next fight. I had no options. This isn't a game about making choices. This is a game about blowing up enemy ships and saving the galaxy, or at least it would be, if they'd realized that you actually spend most of your time hacking jumpgates and finding alternate ways around jumpgates instead of hacking them because you just hacked three to get here and occasionally watching a jumpgate flicker and revert to unhacked status behind you as the game sends you a little "Screw you, player!" to take home.

On the other hand, I smacked down the enemy ships SO HARD. I was, much as in my old PQ tradition, annoyed if they got a turn. It's a fun combat system that rewards careful thought and minmaxing and powergaming and all those things that I love to do.

Shame they couldn't have gotten a real writer or two to do something with their story.

Someone said something on a messageboard about how most of our dialog wasn't really very good, and I took offense, because, you know, dude, nobody except a BioWare writer gets to trash BioWare writing. It's like the Irish-American family dynamic.

Then I thought about it, and I realized that the messageboard guy was actually probably right. As a writer, I get so focused on things that I stop seeing everything but a tiny fragment of the whole. I overlook all the lines that:

• Are there because we don't have custom animations and have to make up for that lack with dialog. ("Here, let me hack into their database.")
• Take the place of art we don't have, or cinematics, for that matter. ("This armor must be hundreds of years old.")
• Explain the rules of a puzzle or trick section. ("We'll need to disable the power relays in the right order.")
• Have to be duplicated for all the squad members, even the squad members who logically wouldn't say anything about what you're saying but have to do so for one of the above reasons. ("I like blowing stuff up. Maybe if we blow up that power relay, it will help.")
• Have to be written as neutral because the player could come to that line from either an angry line or a happy line. ("But enough about that. Is there anything else I can tell you?")

These are the lines that are there because it's a game, and the goal of the game is to let the player know what's going on within the confines of the resources we have available. The goal of those lines isn't to be brilliant -- sometimes it happens, and those are happy days filled with love and sunshine -- but to be transparent and fast and done. You look at those lines, and wow, they are not all glorious works of art, except inasmuch as a craftsman can sometimes appreciate the elegance with which a writer just got a bunch of ugly lines to work together like a well-oiled piece of machinery.

And if you ask a writer, he or she will rarely remember those lines. Those are the game-writing equivalent of elbows. They do their job, and if you're lucky, you never notice them any more than that, because their job was to be invisible.

(As a side note, this is hardly the only medium that has lines like this. I remember my writing teacher, Pat Murphy, talking about how sometimes you needed to get a character from one side of the room to the other, and it couldn't always be brilliant prose, and sometimes you just had to say, "Hey, if it can't be good, at least make it short," and write, "He crossed the room." Every medium has moments where the necessity of conveying the continuity overrides the desire to make something that is beautiful on its own.)

And yet, for all that, if you ask me, I will say that I think BioWare's dialog is good, because I'm not looking at all that stuff. I'm looking for the moments, the moments like the ones I live for. You hit a point in a plot and you slap down a few words, and right there, you know, you just know with absolute certainty, that that's the line people are going to be talking about later. That's the line people will be quoting to each other on messageboards or arguing about at cons. Those are the lines you remember. Those are the ones you fight for. Those are the ones that make you proud to come in every morning or stay late at night.

(And as a side note, the fact that you know it doesn't make it true. Sometimes it falls flat -- your brilliant writing didn't translate well to VO, or didn't work structure-wise in the overall plot, or came at the wrong time in the game, and the line you thought everyone would love is met with a shrug. Other times, something you toss off in five minutes becomes someone's favorite line in the entire game. These things happen -- which in no way invalidates the feeling you get while writing the line. Why gamers react the way they do is a post for people smarter than I am. This is just about the writing end of it.)

A lot of people who wish they could write video-game dialog think about the shiny bits. Sometimes they'll even make snarky comments about BioWare's dialog (or Obsidian's, or Bethesda's, or anyone else's), saying that they could do better. Nine times out of ten, they're a) wrong, and b) looking at the shiny bits, the bits that are the reason you want to come in every morning. They're missing the hinge-lines, the structural-support lines, the ugly clunky necessary bits that make the whole thing go. Maybe they could do that. I can. But it's not the ubiquitous skill some people expect.

And if you're lucky, I think, you get one great line per day. That's what you fight for. A whole lot of structure and necessary stuff and "Oh, what if you come back to talk to this guy again after getting the plot but not completing it yet." A whole lot of hinges and structure, all so that you can have one line in there somewhere at the end of the day that makes you say, "Yeah, they'll remember that one."

I was at work from ten to midnight last night (after the boys were asleep), and on Sunday as well. I got, I don't know, two or three lines on each of those nights.

Those were good nights. Higher than average. Those are the crunch nights you live for.
 

I hit this today in the context of work, but it's true in any kind of writing, for me, anyway.

For me, the sign that I've written a minor character well is when I find myself saying, "Okay, yes, he's technically only there for one plot, at the end of which he dies horribly, and that's the point of the plot, he's purely there to show that another character is really dangerous and powerful... but man, it'd be cool if I could figure out how to bring him back later."

I don't do it, because I only have so many Joss Whedon Death cards to spend, so I have to use them sparingly... but I really liked some of the tiny little characters I made in this plot.

Or maybe I just like minor characters in general. That seems to be what I consistently hear from my readers, anyway -- in first drafts, my major characters might have huge likability or motivation or consistency issues, but man, people would love to read more about Eponyme, the sidekick with unrequited love issues and a tendency to name things after herself.

BioWare has announced the MMO that some of my buddies in Austin have been busting their asses on. At least some of their hard work can finally see the light of day.

Today's game:

Outrage at Mass Effect being chosen as the top Xbox 360 game by IGN or outrage at Connecticut legalizing same-sex marriage?

EPIC FAIL! (Answer)

Dear god, someone put this (deciding group) out of their misery. (Answer)

It's like watching a bad movie and knowing the outcome of the lead's decisions before the film ever rolls. (Answer)

...a big joke and completely out of touch... (Answer)

This is an outrage... Disgusting and infuriating...  (Answer)

What the hell are they thinking... (deciding group) i have lost all my respect for you ....... (Answer)

The good news is how hard I long it took me to find really enraged comments for either.

Had approximately half a work week this week, given that the boys were sick, as was our daycare provider. That said, it was a good and productive week, and a lot of things began to come together for the project.

Without going into the kind of details that get me fired, one thing that I'm particularly jazzed about is the team getting over a major story hurdle. When you've got a lot of time to clean up the story while waiting for the engine to come together, people tend to fixate on things. One of the things we've spent the last year or so trying to do is avoid cliches.

(I will pause for the snarky people to say something about BioWare games and cliches.)

What's come about this week is a major shakedown in which everything is looked at with fresh eyes, and we've finally gotten some real buy-in with what some of us have been saying for awhile: that by trying so damn hard to avoid the cliches of the type of game we're trying to make, we're making a story so complex that it takes a crap-ton of time to explain the intricacies so that the player understands it... and as a result, even the tightest, coolest story gets bloated by infodumping. The reason we have cliches is because cliches are instantly understandable. The best way to deal with them in a game with limited resources isn't to avoid them, but to take advantage of them, let them fill in the details while you make a few critical tweaks that give the story the originality that people will remember.

(In football-western-land, you could, for example, tell a story about a team that went 7-9 last year and has a decent offense that crumbles in the red zone and a defense that is good at shutting down big plays but can't make turnovers or stop opposing offenses on third and short, in a setting with impending statehood resulting in people buying up land and causing friction with tribes that moved here under government treaties. That's a great, nuanced story, and if that's all you've got going, it could work just fine. If you're trying to work within a word-count budget, though, or you've got other story elements you want to explore, though, that's a whole lot explanation for the sake of originality. You could have a surface story of "Bad team last year, you're the new owner who's supposed to turn it around, and also, corrupt small-town sheriff whose thugs are running wild," and 1) the fact that you're combining two cliches makes it more original right off the bat, and 2) you can put most of the complex crap in the story anyway, but as background that's there for the people who look for it.)

Maybe I'm just jazzed about this because it's pretty much my own writing style. Take something familiar, tweak it.

And yes, I know that some folks would prefer that it be all-original. The problem with that is that it's hard to make that accessible to new gamers, and getting new gamers is vital in today's market. You can make that game as a small company, appealing to a niche market of people who already know all the tropes of the genre and are eager for something new. As a large company, though, that doesn't fly as an original product. If you're lucky, you can get the originality into a side plot, or downloadable content. Sometimes that stings, but that's the price of working at the company that makes the big games. (And there are enough benefits to working here that it's more than worth it for me.)

So that's where we're at. Time will tell, but it feels pretty darn good right now.

Looks like we're gearing up to write next week. We've got our tools where we need them, and we've got a story that is going to hit hard and often. Now we just need to, well, do it.

One of the things that we're kicking around right now is the notion of consequences for choices. We know what the story choices for major game moments are, but as the game systems start to come alive, we're talking with combat designers and systems dudes to figure out what we can actually do with minimal game-breakyness. Can we despawn a bunch of one group and spawn in a bunch of another group instead, to show that you've driven the pixies away so that the forest goblins can take over the forest? Can we affect the price of moonberries to reflect the fact that you burned down moonberry forest? Can we give you Whirlwind Attack as a free combat feat to reflect the combat skills you learned while fighting the pixies? Sometimes we can. Sometimes we can't. We'll see what makes it into the game. The talks so far have been scary-good, and we've got systems and combat guys who really love the idea of long-lasting in-game consequences for your choices, which makes it a lot more likely to happen.

What's the coolest consequence you've seen in a game? What made you feel like you were really affecting the world?

And then, just to go back on myself: I'm playing Ninja Gaiden 2, which my mother got for me as a Father's Day present. I am playing it for work, but not for a project-specific reason. I want to be able to talk intelligently with combat guys when they talk about bosses and how said bosses work whenever we bring up big-fight ideas, and as the hot new thing, this seemed like an important one to play. I've heard the combat guys on Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 using similar terms, so I don't think it's project-specific, which means yay, I can talk about it. :)

Love the combat. Every animation reinforces the fact that you're a ninja. You feel badass, and you also feel like the enemies are badass, and when you're in clusters of enemies, you have to keep moving, since they don't just stand there nicely waiting for you to finish pounding that one guy before whacking you. I'm playing on the easy mode, because I'm a big wimp who cannot handle the higher difficulties, and I've finished the first chapter (first end boss only took me two tries to defeat).

And then... then I look at the rest of the game, and I think, "Wow, we're trying too hard."

The dialog. Sweet Christmas, the dialog. I slapped on Japanese VO and English subtitles, so that I could labor under the delusion that the acting was better in the language I didn't speak. They fell facefirst into the uncanny valley, and everyone except the hero looks like a fricking idiot; the hero only looks non-artificial because the only parts of him you see are his eyes and his massive ninja-bicep arms. The rest of him is covered in pleather or a chrome Shredder helmet. The sword looks fantastic, but increased graphical realism really hits home the fact that a leather-and-chrome-clad ninja is just about one policeman short of a Village People video.

And the level design. Man, BioWare gets slammed for having levels that are too linear, and then, in this game for which I have heard praise regarding its exploration, you are walking in what amounts to very pretty tubes. You can go to the right, and advance the plot, or you can go to the left, find a box, get an upgrade for your health... and then go to the right, and advance the plot. Tubes connecting squares that have a few more enemies in them. Early in chapter two, I walked across a bridge, then tried to jump off, and couldn't. The area below the bridge is an area you can explore... but it's not, really. I'm guessing it's in a different load-chunk or something, so that when you're on the bridge, you're looking down at a nonexplorable picture of the water below, and when you're in the water, you're looking up at a nonexplorable picture of the bridge up above. Tubes. Tubes with pretty art and nice squares.

And yet... nobody cares. People will take all of that, happily, if the combat is good. Probably a message in there somewhere. Like, ya know, make the combat good. (And don't screw up the camera -- the one thing everyone has been ragging on the game about, justifiably.)

I'm also playing Puzzle Quest, and I have reached the level where I am now slightly annoyed if my enemy gets a turn.

Longtime readers of the blog may remember a very early post about scope in video game design. You start with all the ideas in the world, and then you see which ones you can make easily, which ones are worth sweating to fit into the game, and which ones aren't worth the effort required to implement, either because you simply don't have the resources to do it, or because you could do it, but then you'd ship in five years, and you need to ship in (some time measurement with a number and a period of time that would get me fired for saying it), or, really, because nobody was willing to schedule the meetings, send the e-mails, barge into people's offices, and fight the fight to get that feature in.

My computer has old files, documents about characters, story arcs, environments, combat mechanics. If I sort them by date and open up the oldest, it's like a trip down memory lane. Oh, hey, that was where the story was gonna take place! Aw, that combat rule system I really thought would make it. Wow, in retrospect, that follower was never going to be good.

So much gets cut. It's the only way that anything gets made. You aim high, and then you run like hell for the target until one group, be it level art or cinematic design or combat programming, tells you that they absolutely positively can't make it, and something's gotta go. If you're the one saying that, you almost always feel awful, which you may or may not cover with a show of anger that you were ever expected to try for this obviously impossible goal, and you have to justify the fact that you can't hit these goals. If you're not the bottleneck, then you're frustrated that your stuff is being cut by somebody else's workflow, and you try to salvage as much as you can.

There are books and games and comics I've read that I'd love to talk about, but I can't, because they're clearly out of character for me and would make it clear what kind of game we're making. If I mention playing God of War or Ninja Gaiden, that sends as much of a message as casually mentioning that I've recently read Heaven Sword, Dragon Saber, Outlaws of the Marsh, Bridge of Birds, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms might have clued somebody in if I'd been working on Jade Empire a few years back. I remember someone saying that you can learn a lot about a dev's unannounced project by looking at his Amazon wishlist. Right now, given the amount of Indigo Girls and Justice League on mine, that suggests a lesbian superhero game. Maybe I should throw Nintendogs on there just to muddy the waters a little.

I don't have much else to say, except that I wish I had more to say. I'm as much in love with our game today as I was before -- hell, more so, even, as decisions that needed to get made are finally getting made, and we've got a solid course plotted -- but this is definitely the time when you have to justify the things that are precious to you, the things you want to fight for, the things that you love enough to make somebody else do crunch-time to fit in the game.