Backseat Designer: Mass Effect 2's Ammo System

The Mass Effect RPG is hardly the only way these games have been bouncing around in my brain for the past several weeks. I've held off on posting this, because I couldn't find any kind of statement by the ME2 design team explaining their rationale for adding reloading and ammunition mechanics to the combat. I'd hate to have overlooked something while hashing out this proposed alternative. Happily, one of the slides from Christina Norman's recent GDC presentation lists what I'll assume were the primary factors:
-"Encouraged using different weapons" (Gives the combat more variety & tactical depth.)
-"We could make weapons more powerful with limited ammo" (I'm guessing she's referring to 'feel', though this also expands on the weapon-switching tactics. It's a shame they wound up treating new weapons like clear upgrades, rather than letting variables like this create more interesting choices when it comes to your weapon loadout.)
-"Stopped bullet spraying" (Shooter gameplay gets brainless very quickly when you're running low on reasons to worry about making each shot count.)

Other benefits I would name:
-Finding time to reload=tactical gameplay. The player's mental muscles get a better workout if their plan of action for the next 5 seconds has to account for the need to reload. It's a significant part of the shooter formula- look at the Call of Duty series, where the tutorials go out of their way to stress how the choice of when to reload also includes the option to switch to a sidearm.
-Maintains intensity. Waiting for your weapon to cool off was definitely a buzzkill in ME1. Most of ME2's improvements in this area come from the reworked controls, powers, defenses and enemy behavior; still, reloading also helps.
-Pushes the player to remain mobile during combat. Hang back during ME2's larger engagements, and you'll soon find yourself hungrily eying the pile of thermal clips beneath your enemies' feet. The option to shift positions so as to scoop up more thermal clips presents players with another dynamic challenge.
-Rewards exploration out of combat. This would be the one benefit this proposal would have to give up, though the level designers didn't really leverage it anyway: Some thermal clips could have been placed as hidden goodies, a lower-key version of the minerals and credits.

So what's going on in that youtube clip up above? Here's the details for my proposal.
-You always carry a small number of spare thermal clips. The exact number's obviously something playtests would determine; I'd envision having 2 at the start, 2 obtained by researching upgrades, and 2 more for those who equip spare ammo packs (or 'extra cooling units'). If we're hypothetically applying this to ME2, you could put the 'blueprints' in Mordin's recruitment mission and the disabled collector ship, with the armor upgrades on Omega and Tuchanka. There could also be several research upgrades providing small boosts to your clip's cooling rates.
-Eject a clip from a weapon and it'll start to cool off at a steady rate. You can't load a clip until it cools off completely. My initial playtest estimate would be 15 seconds for a fully-used clip to 'recharge'. I'd originally written out a lengthy explanation for how the GUI could convey all the relevant information in an intuitive fashion; then I remembered that I had access to a copy of After Effects, and could just show people what I was talking about. Something the above video doesn't demonstrate is that once a clip is fully cooled, it blinks white (with an appropriate audio cue) and loses the red aura.
-Clips inside your unequipped weapons also cool off, albeit at a slower rate. Regularly swapping weapons thus reduces your need to reload without making it irrelevant. The classes that spend more of their time shooting things are also the classes with the larger arsenals, so I think this could balance them out nicely. The fiction would be that a firearm's heat vents are open while it's in the 'folded' state. If I had to guess, I *think* it'd be best to still have a fully spent clip 'overheat' and not be usable until fully cooled (or until you eject it and load in a fresh one).
-Picking up a thermal clip swaps out your hottest spare clip for a cool one. Most enemies could still drop clips, and there'd still occasionally be one or two on the ground/shelf/convenient waist-high rock formation. You might also have the player stop and take half a second to pick up clips a la recent Resident Evil titles, just to add to the challenge a little.
-Bolt-action weapons like the Claymore and Mantis only expend about 1/3 of a clip, but 'overheat' with each shot. So you still have to reload (or swap weapons for a moment), but each clip cools off quickly. This is just a way to 'translate' these weapons so as to preserve their unique pros and cons (which are wonderful, the sort of thing that ME3 could expand on beautifully. I'd love to launch into a tangent on this topic, but it'd take up a post itself). The ammo capacity upgrades for shotguns and SMGs could translate in a similar fashion, altering the weapons so that their ejected clips are only half as hot.

One last set of bullet points- the advantages this proposal would give.
-Changes the mechanics to match the fiction. Mass Effect 2's in-game rationale for the use of cooling clips ties beautifully into the game's overarching plot while providing a simple, easy-to-grasp explanation for the mechanics. Yet people are still baffled, and not just because said explanation's tucked away in the codex. To quote Tom Francis: "That’s not how it works. You can run out of cooling clips for your pistol and still have 245 for your sub machinegun. There’s no way to use the pistol until you find more cooling clips for it: so weapons do have mututally exclusive clip types."
-Helps the IP regain a measure of the lost originality. This was the thing that made infinite ammo so cool in the first place- it was the setting's originality made manifest in the form of unique gameplay elements.
-Adds interesting tactical depth to the gameplay. As always, this is just theory. But keeping track of your total ammunition is more of a healthy play habit, with the interesting moment-to-moment challenge only really cropping up when your ammo runs low. This would help give players an engaging cognitive workout on more of an ongoing basis, with players planning out their actions so that all but one or two clips will be cooling at any given moment in time (so as to maximize their "enemy being shot in the face" rate).
-Reduces the workload for level designers. Rather than having to place a hundred thermal clips in every combat mission, they can plant a clip or two in the middle of most firefight arenas- or any other visible location that'd be interesting to try and advance towards while the bullets are flying, especially if it wouldn't normally be the smart/conservative thing to do.

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Backseat Designer: Laying down the ground rules.

For those who don't know my background: Rather than trying to land a career in one of the relevant industries, I just to dedicate my spare time to 'honing my craft' as a game designer, pushing myself to regularly tackle new challenges (with a pragmatic focus on tabletop games). No plan beyond that, I didn't even have any idea whether the skillset this would produce would carry over to video games (turns out it does, as my experiences with the Global Game Jam have verified). Just "become a better game designer."

One of the not-so-surprising results of this approach is that I now automatically analyze any game I see in action, especially when I'm playing it myself. This isn't about critiquing the game (or at least, passing judgment on it)- I'm getting two things out of the process. First, it helps me learn from other designer's work; I'll notice that the experience is (or fails to be) fun/compelling in a way I can't adequately explain, and start working out just how the game pulled that off. The second reason I do this is to give my mental game design muscles a workout- spotting areas of the game that could be improved on (be it from bad to passable or good to great) and then working out precisely how one could carry those improvements out.

Of course, anyone can say "Gosh, it should would be nice if this game was even cooler." Playing the backseat game designer (or as Tom Francis calls it, amateur hour) calls for a higher standard- one that involves several self-imposed rules.

-I will be mindful that my ideas are untested. Game mechanics never work quite like you envision them. Sure, you can get better at anticipating how they'll play out (one recent example for me was the playtests for Court d'Capitate last christmas, which astonishingly revealed that the rules worked almost exactly as I'd planned). But that's still a long ways from knowing what the experience will be like for the player, i.e. whether it will be *fun*.
-My ideas cannot require additional development resources. The only alternative to changes which would cost a pittance (at least as far as I can see) in terms of time and effort is ideas which could have saved resources, assuming the dev team had used them in place of the existing approach. In cases where my ideas are intended for future sequels, I must at least stop short of advocating something the dev team would need to go out of their way to fit into their development process.
-I must be able to clearly explain how my proposal will benefit the game. If I can't explain my reasons to both fellow game designers and laymen in a clear and concise manner, I'm not going to be an effective part of any team game development effort.
-I will not let the benefit of hindsight go to my head. Even if it turns out that I have managed to come up with a better approach than someone who worked on a game full-time, that still doesn't mean I would have done a better job in their situation. (But [companyname] should totally give me an unpaid internship so we can find out.)

Any other pitfalls I'm neglecting to consider?

Image drawn by Tim Kreider. Hope no one minds the profanity.

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Jade Empire's Fighting Styles, Part II

Image by Jason Engle.

The last post discussed the relevant aspects of Jade Empire's design, and explained the mechanical changes to the game's fighting styles that (in my opinion) would improve gameplay. This time I'm providing the hard details, for those who're already familiar with the game.

To review: The different factors for each style are no longer upgraded separately. Instead, each style also provides a passive secondary benefit (usually a small one, i.e. 5%/style rank for general benefits or 10%/style rank for ones that come up less often). You constantly receive the secondary benefits of your 4 chosen styles, regardless of which open you're using at any given moment. Switching in a new power mid-combat gives you that power's secondary benefit after a delay of several seconds.

MARTIAL
-Legendary Strike: Improves the speed of power attacks.
-Leaping Tiger: Improves the speed of your evasive moves.
-Thousand Cuts: Improves the speed of basic attacks.
-White Demon: Improves the damage of power attacks.
-Viper Style: Increases recovery time for basic attacks.
-Iron Palm: Reduces recovery time against enemy basic attacks.

WEAPON
-Long Sword: Improves how quickly you start/stop blocking.
-Staff: Increases recovery time for opponents you knock down.
-Dual Sword: Increases the damage of consecutive basic attacks (escalating benefit, starts with 2nd uninterrupted basic attack and maxes out with the 4th).
-Twin Axes: Reduces damage taken by attacks that interrupt one of your attacks.
-Mirabelle neither grants nor receives secondary benefits.

MAGIC
-Ice Shard: Decreases the cost of chi strikes.
-Dire Flame: Increases the damage of chi strikes.
-Tempest: Increases speed of area attacks.
-Stone Immortal: Increases the radius of your block.

TRANSFORMATION
-Toad Demon: Increases reach of melee attacks.
-Horse Demon: Blocked melee attacks reflect damage against attacker.
-Jade Golem: Decreases the focus cost of weapons.
-Red Minister: Decreases the durations of disabling enemy powers.

SUPPORT
-Heavenly Wave: Increases the benefit of chi healing.
-Spirit Thief: Reduces the cost of chi powers.
-Storm Dragon: Increases the speed of magic projectiles.
-Hidden Fist: Increases the damage dealt to disabled opponents.
-Paralyzing Palm: Increases the durations of your disabling powers.

As always, thoughts and comments are welcome.

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Backseat Designer: Jade Empire's Fighting Styles

I'd never really given Jade Empire a whirl. I knew it was good, but never developed a hunger for it because I didn't own an xbox. It took a Steam sale price of $5 for me to get the game, and even then it was one of those "I know I ought to but don't feel like it" moments normally associated with eating your vegetables. But once I sat down and started playing, that ambivalence towards the game was quickly gave way to delight. Fantastic story, graphics that still wow by virtue of some fantastic art design, and (most relevant to this blog) some really neat bits of original game design. It always warms my heart to see an rpg system that's custom-built to fit the game's premise on a fundamental level. The implementation of these design elements has its share of flaws and balance issues, but I can avoid fixating on them when the designers' hearts were clearly in the right place.

There's already plenty of other sites offering previews and reviews of the game, so I'll skip to the subject of this particular post. Eurogamer's review of the game lays the matter out nicely:
Jade Empire's big idea is the inclusion of dozens of different fighting styles, ranging from weapon styles to unarmed martial arts styles, magic abilities, support styles that don't damage directly but might slow an enemy down or steal their Chi (which is used for magical attacks, or to replenish your health), and even transformation styles which morph you into a powerful monster.

Four of these styles can be mapped to the four directions on your D-pad, and you can access the rest of them through a pause menu during combat. The idea behind the game's combat system is that while fighting in each individual style is very simple, the combination of different styles yields a range of more interesting techniques. This almost works.

I'm in agreement- the martial arts styles are great stuff, but a handful of mechanical changes could go a long way towards improving what is already a solid experience.

You get new styles throughout the game. Sometimes you're offered multiple styles (literally or not) and must pick one, with the ones you didn't pick usually becoming available for some extra coin after another chapter or two. I especially love cases where your actions lead to someone offering you a new fighting style as an unexpected reward; the fighting style is always thematically linked to the person teaching it, as though the game was converting them into a new toy for you to kick ass with. It lends a degree of flavor to your abilities (and a sense of accomplishment to your character's development) that's far beyond what most RPGs can offer.

In light of this approach, the designers a pair several smart decisions when it comes to improving the styles you've obtained. First, they didn't make it too important. All of a style's special abilities are available from the get-go rather than having to be unlocked, and heavily investing in a given style will only make it roughly twice as damaging as the style you neglect. This keeps the player focused on choosing which styles to use and then learning to apply them effectively. Second, they gave the styles escalating upgrade costs while slowly increasing the number of points players received to spend on those upgrades. You're free to invest points in a style you've already improved or one you just received, rather than having one option be inferior.

Taking these elements into account, here's the big change I'd make: Each style gets a passive secondary benefit. You constantly receive the secondary benefits of all 4 styles you've got selected, regardless of which one you're currently using. One style grants a small increase to your attack rate, another boosts the damage of your power attacks, a third reduces the cost of chi strikes... This would probably replace the option to level up different aspects of a given style; either way, the secondary benefit would improve in relation to how much you'd leveled that style up.

Make this change and you make good on the concept of a player's individual styles combining to produce something more. It adds a layer of strategic depth, that of choosing and refining your unique approach to combat. In-game, it represents your character drawing on the fundamental lessons they've learned from the different styles they favor.

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