<![CDATA[Official Unearthly Games Forums - All Forums]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/ Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:09:13 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[The Curse of Technology for Modern Competitive Games?]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=487 Sun, 11 Jul 2010 10:42:22 -0400 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=487 Under the Microscope by Saracen

As you guys have probably noticed from the number of posts on these forums that link to TeamLiquid posts... TeamLiquid is a great site that provokes interesting discussions that often go well beyond its jurisdiction of StarCraft. The above article is yet another contribution from TeamLiquid.

Before I give my response (I gave a bit of one in the thread, but I wasn't too interested in getting into it with the StarCraft 2 fanboys), I want to link to a few other posts in the thread that have some good, worthwhile addendums:
Hmk, so now my response, xD

I think, to tackle this, you need to consider StarCraft. It is a game that was released in 1998, it came as Blizzard's third RTS, its first outside the WarCraft universe, and the first RTS from any developer that really tried to put forth truly asymmetric factions. Actually, if we go back and look at a lot of its features, "for the day" I think they were quite modern and pretty good- you've got accuracy for units attacking up high-ground, a vision system that is impacted by cliffs and doodads, acceleration (as opposed to just a simple move speed), advanced GUI mechanics (the "Magic Box" was no mistake- it was a designed attempt to have units react to the player's orders in an intuitive fashion), unit-attacks (consider the Protoss Carrier and Reaver, as well as Vulture Spider Mines), and a damage and armor type system.

Regardless of all those things, StarCraft's singleplayer campaigns were great for their time, and are still great in many ways (actually, StarCraft's Terran campaign I can vouch is a damn great story even in novelized format, xD), an element that was forming into a trademark of Blizzard's. StarCraft also introduced some proper UMS support (compared to WarCraft 2's severely hacked-in UMS; of course, not like StarCraft didn't require quite a bit of hacking on the tool side for a lot of what most of us are familiar with as StarCraft UMS). Those two elements alone could have (and, well, to be quite honest did) driven the game to great heights. At a bare minimum, they provided the foundation for interest in StarCraft's multiplayer offerings (as did its usage of Battle.net- Blizzard's first RTS game to do so; WarCraft 2 Battle.net Edition was released after StarCraft).

So with all of this, we consider what in the world happened to make StarCraft skyrocket to being the greatest competitive eSport of all-time. My first contention is that the units were designed to fulfill roles for their faction. They weren't designed to counter other units or even to be "balanced". In the process of filling their roles, they naturally countered other units, in some cases drastically so. StarCraft never made any apologies for this. In fact, some of StarCraft's unit and ability designs are so unapologetic that one must ask if the game was ever designed for MP at all or if the intent all along was to make the player feel awesome controlling each of the factions in the SP campaigns and against SP bots and whatnot. That sounds somewhat preposterous and certainly patches and Brood War do show us that Blizzard cared for MP, but I think it's a valid path of inquiry nonetheless (what I wouldn't give for a documentary on the making of Brood War; I've heard the usual scraps here and there about piecing it together on napkins at the local diner, but nothing that gets into the depths of game design).

The natural outcome of such harsh and unforgiving design is that the game is... well, harsh and unforgiving to play, if you're playing to win. Competitive players play to win. By definition, they do whatever it takes to win within the confines of the ruleset given to them. When StarCraft's multiplayer community first began forming, I'd imagine that StarCraft's interface (by which I am going beyond just the GUI here and including unit response and etc as well) was quite shiny (Age of Empires 2 allowed you to select more units, but other than that I tended to find StarCraft's GUI more functional and StarCraft unit responsiveness was way better than Age of Empires 2's) and so there'd be no greener grass. As competitive players moved in to exploit the game's every flaw, they found a game that required a considerable amount of skill and practice to leverage winning strategies. As the linked article basically goes on to state, those are the pillars required for competitive play.

So while that brings us back to the article, I think it's worth pointing out that StarCraft didn't try to make itself tough to play. There are quite a few things the game probably didn't try to do yet proved exceedingly well at doing. I think Blizzard legitimately tried to put forth a state-of-the-art RTS, and they did. But state-of-the-art in 1998 was not ideal. The GUI limitations, pathfinding, and "bugs" (Mutalisk stacking is commonly cited, but I'd prefer to cite Reaver Scarabs and Vulture Spider Mines here) made the game harder to play, therefore requiring more practice and skill for players to excel at it. These were inflative to the game's depth.

Now looking to the present. StarCraft is an incredibly simple RTS. Comparing its combat systems and other under-the-hood systems to Company of Heroes' or Dawn of War 2's is like comparing my desktop computer to an Apple II. So now that we are in the present, we'd like our computers- and our RTS games- to have all the nice amenities of the present. Blizzard knows that eSports is great and all, but how many of you reading this still play StarCraft 1v1, on ICCUP or anything? Probably not many. But how many of you own StarCraft? I'll bet quite a crapton more hands just went up. As mentioned before, while StarCraft's legacy will be that of one of the greatest eSports of all-time, StarCraft itself is more than just an eSport. Blizzard knows that and wants to cater to that- they want to make a game with an appealing campaign and a game that anyone can sit down and enjoy.

But that's a problem for StarCraft 2. In the process of making StarCraft 2 enjoyable for the average RTS gamer, Blizzard needs to modernize the game's interface. No doubt many of you heard the outrage over StarCraft 2 having MBS (Multiple Building Selection), Automine, and Unlimited Selection. I know I did, and originally I scoffed at those crying fits about it. I don't know if I'd say I was wrong to scoff. I don't know if I say that I still scoff. But what I do know is that there was something to those concerns. And that something is that StarCraft's skill requirements and rewards are propped up by those interface limitations (and those are just three of many that Blizzard has screwed with). As I said before, the game is damn simple at its core. Since the Beta started, a lot of friends of mine, many who either never played RTS games or who played barely any or never took any seriously, got interested in SC2 and decided to pick-up the beta. First-hand, I helped many of my friends learn the game, and they enjoy it a fair bit. And most of them are in Diamond league now (not from constant cheesing or anything stupid like that either). However, teaching those same friends other strategy games, such as Dawn of War 2, proved a completely different beast and still does. Bluntly, Dawn of War 2 is more complex than StarCraft 2 by a long shot (despite that much of the RTS community considers DoW 2 to be just the kind of RTS that is too simple or "over-simplified").

So when Blizzard pulled the rug of age out from underneath StarCraft's interface, they yanked out a lot more complexity and depth than they bargained for. They made the game fun and playable for a "new generation", but for proper competitive gamers, much of the challenge was taken out. Furthermore, as the article that spurred this topic highlights, they ran into the issue that with interface improvements increasing the reliability of spells, attacks, etc... they found that Overpowered Thing A counter Overpowered Thing B if Overpowered Thing C doesn't interfere and all of this is decided by player skill and awareness... is actually a big issue. As the article goes on to note, Blizzard has indeed basically sliced out the vast majority of the most exciting situations in Brood War.

Up to here, I completely agree with the article. Brood War is exciting to play and incredibly exciting to watch because you can *see* the skill required and the skill in action, and the effects of that skill are drastic. As well, nifty micro is appreciable and there is constant tension with it- microing a Shuttle/Reaver harass against a Terran is a process with HUGE risk/reward. The Protoss stands to kill SCVs, snipe Siege Tank and other units (preventing the Terran from mounting a deadly early push and allowing the 'toss to expand), and just all-around do a lot of damage. At the same time, if the Reaver is dropped within range of a Siege Tank in Siege Mode, it is going to be toast. Likewise, if the Reaver is dropped on a Spider Mine, if a Turret or Goliath or etc manages to put the Shuttle in a dangerous position, etc... Basically, the Reaver and Shuttle aren't immune, but nor is anything that's going to kill it, and it's a battle of micro on both sides. Also notable is the conflict of Vultures versus Dragoons. If Vultures attack-move against Dragoons, they're not going to do much. But then, Vultures just attack-moving against Zealots doesn't work amazingly either. However, it is known and assumed that a Vulture can kite an infinite amount of Zealots- Reapers and Hellions fit the bill in StarCraft 2. However, Reapers and Hellions shy very far away the second that something like a Stalker comes up, because there just isn't anything they CAN do against such a unit. Vultures, on the other hand, hate Dragoons similarly. However, Vultures have Spider Mines, and they can use these to be as much a threat to Dragoons as any other unit.

StarCraft also has a notable, yet acceptable amount of randomness. Scarabs glitch out constantly, and can semi-reliably be avoided by the opponent if the opponent has his/her units move away from the Scarab as quickly as possible. In return for this bugginess, when they hit they're absolutely devastating, thus Protoss players put up with it. For a spectator though, watching the Scarab make its slow, wobbly way towards a line of Drones as the Drones desperately run for their lives and wondering whether it's going to hit or not... There's no parallel in SC2. Likewise, Spider Mines help protect Terran mech lines from Zealots and can generally thin Protoss ranks. However, Spider Mines can lock onto a target for quite a distance and follow that target, with the mine following in tow. In practice, this is called "Mine Dragging", and it's a constant source of pain for Terran players as Zealots and other units often manage to drag mines directly into lines of Siege Tanks, evaporating them with their own weaponry. "Zealot Bombing" is another common technique, where the Protoss player uses a Shuttle to drop Zealots on top of Siege Tanks and trigger nearby Mines to come in and blow them up- proper martyrs they are. On a less spectator-gasping note, there is also high-ground advantage, where units on low-ground have a percentage chance to miss when attacking uphill. Blizzard actually singled this mechanic out as being randomness and stated that randomness is a bad thing for a competitive game. However, many top Brood War players (yes, even Korean pros) state just the opposite. It's an acceptable amount of randomness because they still know what will usually happen, and attacking uphill is always a risk- simple as that. If you attack from low-ground, you're taking a risk, and it may or may not pay off. Cheese is quite similar there. Anyway, there is a pretty good consensus among top-level SC2 players that bringing back the old high-ground advantage would be an improvement.

Right, so again, all of that I agree with. Where I disagree is with the conclusion of the article, that it is the sophistication of the engine that dooms SC2. Blizzard introduced "macro mechanics" for all three races as a method of offsetting MBS, automine, etc... (basically, forcing players to put more APM into macro) and it has worked. I'm no fan of the mechanics as I think a couple of them are rather poorly designed and integrated and have a net negative impact on gameplay and are, in part, responsible for force composition > micro. Nonetheless, their success in what they set out to do does indicate that developers have the power to design athletic complexity into their games. Of course, when we stop and think about it that way, I don't think we need the macro mechanics example. And to be quite blunt, from a technology standpoint, Blizzard *COULD* recreate SC1's mechanics and etc in an instant with a modern engine if they wanted to.

Where I take this discussion to then as I conclude that ultimately this is not the fault of modernization, but rather of the developer, is the importance of knowing from where your game gets its depth. StarCraft's competitive success is as much about cunning tactics as it is about a swift mouse hand. For StarCraft 2 to have the same depth that StarCraft had if StarCraft 2 is to modernize its interface, StarCraft 2 must either find new methods of challenging players' mouse hands, or it must shift more of its emphasis towards tactical/strategic depth. Right now, StarCraft 2 doesn't seem like it will satisfy on either front.

But as mentioned, this goes beyond StarCraft 2. I feel it's really important for developers to look at and understand where there game's depth is coming from, and for this I want to pull two other examples- Plants v Zombies and Revenge of the Titans.

I'll start with the latter before someone goes, "That TV series?". No, it's an indie tower defense game. Disclaimer that I have only played the demo. Anyway, Revenge of the Titans actually treats player attention as a resource. Resources are collected by the player manually clicking on the Refinery, structures are all individually, manually-placed (that's not atypical for a tower defense though), and all weapons need to be manually reloaded (which, yeah; also consider that you'll want to preemptively reload many of those so you're constantly watching them), etc... The game has tech paths that unlock better weapons, towers, etc... and also ones that can automate processes. Basically, you can direct research points towards having the computer do stuff for you, because the game is designed such that even if you play like a pro StarCraft player, your APM should still be lacking. Of course, the better your skill, the less you'll need to invest in automation (if at all).

Plants v Zombies is then like a simpler Revenge of the Titans (yes PvZ came first). It's very simple, very straightforward, and it shouldn't stress any hardcore gamer's APM. But, basically, it shifts from the game being purely about designing your defense layout to also testing your mouse athleticism while you do that. But PvZ only tries to cater to casual gamers and wants everyone to be able to accomplish the task, so the difficulty is tailored as such.

Both those games are notable for recognizing that they want to expand their depth in that area, and they do that. On the flip side, games like Company of Heroes don't care about APM and put in plenty of automation to help- it's all about positioning and strategy. But that's fine because they bulwark that incredibly well.]]> Under the Microscope by Saracen

As you guys have probably noticed from the number of posts on these forums that link to TeamLiquid posts... TeamLiquid is a great site that provokes interesting discussions that often go well beyond its jurisdiction of StarCraft. The above article is yet another contribution from TeamLiquid.

Before I give my response (I gave a bit of one in the thread, but I wasn't too interested in getting into it with the StarCraft 2 fanboys), I want to link to a few other posts in the thread that have some good, worthwhile addendums:
Hmk, so now my response, xD

I think, to tackle this, you need to consider StarCraft. It is a game that was released in 1998, it came as Blizzard's third RTS, its first outside the WarCraft universe, and the first RTS from any developer that really tried to put forth truly asymmetric factions. Actually, if we go back and look at a lot of its features, "for the day" I think they were quite modern and pretty good- you've got accuracy for units attacking up high-ground, a vision system that is impacted by cliffs and doodads, acceleration (as opposed to just a simple move speed), advanced GUI mechanics (the "Magic Box" was no mistake- it was a designed attempt to have units react to the player's orders in an intuitive fashion), unit-attacks (consider the Protoss Carrier and Reaver, as well as Vulture Spider Mines), and a damage and armor type system.

Regardless of all those things, StarCraft's singleplayer campaigns were great for their time, and are still great in many ways (actually, StarCraft's Terran campaign I can vouch is a damn great story even in novelized format, xD), an element that was forming into a trademark of Blizzard's. StarCraft also introduced some proper UMS support (compared to WarCraft 2's severely hacked-in UMS; of course, not like StarCraft didn't require quite a bit of hacking on the tool side for a lot of what most of us are familiar with as StarCraft UMS). Those two elements alone could have (and, well, to be quite honest did) driven the game to great heights. At a bare minimum, they provided the foundation for interest in StarCraft's multiplayer offerings (as did its usage of Battle.net- Blizzard's first RTS game to do so; WarCraft 2 Battle.net Edition was released after StarCraft).

So with all of this, we consider what in the world happened to make StarCraft skyrocket to being the greatest competitive eSport of all-time. My first contention is that the units were designed to fulfill roles for their faction. They weren't designed to counter other units or even to be "balanced". In the process of filling their roles, they naturally countered other units, in some cases drastically so. StarCraft never made any apologies for this. In fact, some of StarCraft's unit and ability designs are so unapologetic that one must ask if the game was ever designed for MP at all or if the intent all along was to make the player feel awesome controlling each of the factions in the SP campaigns and against SP bots and whatnot. That sounds somewhat preposterous and certainly patches and Brood War do show us that Blizzard cared for MP, but I think it's a valid path of inquiry nonetheless (what I wouldn't give for a documentary on the making of Brood War; I've heard the usual scraps here and there about piecing it together on napkins at the local diner, but nothing that gets into the depths of game design).

The natural outcome of such harsh and unforgiving design is that the game is... well, harsh and unforgiving to play, if you're playing to win. Competitive players play to win. By definition, they do whatever it takes to win within the confines of the ruleset given to them. When StarCraft's multiplayer community first began forming, I'd imagine that StarCraft's interface (by which I am going beyond just the GUI here and including unit response and etc as well) was quite shiny (Age of Empires 2 allowed you to select more units, but other than that I tended to find StarCraft's GUI more functional and StarCraft unit responsiveness was way better than Age of Empires 2's) and so there'd be no greener grass. As competitive players moved in to exploit the game's every flaw, they found a game that required a considerable amount of skill and practice to leverage winning strategies. As the linked article basically goes on to state, those are the pillars required for competitive play.

So while that brings us back to the article, I think it's worth pointing out that StarCraft didn't try to make itself tough to play. There are quite a few things the game probably didn't try to do yet proved exceedingly well at doing. I think Blizzard legitimately tried to put forth a state-of-the-art RTS, and they did. But state-of-the-art in 1998 was not ideal. The GUI limitations, pathfinding, and "bugs" (Mutalisk stacking is commonly cited, but I'd prefer to cite Reaver Scarabs and Vulture Spider Mines here) made the game harder to play, therefore requiring more practice and skill for players to excel at it. These were inflative to the game's depth.

Now looking to the present. StarCraft is an incredibly simple RTS. Comparing its combat systems and other under-the-hood systems to Company of Heroes' or Dawn of War 2's is like comparing my desktop computer to an Apple II. So now that we are in the present, we'd like our computers- and our RTS games- to have all the nice amenities of the present. Blizzard knows that eSports is great and all, but how many of you reading this still play StarCraft 1v1, on ICCUP or anything? Probably not many. But how many of you own StarCraft? I'll bet quite a crapton more hands just went up. As mentioned before, while StarCraft's legacy will be that of one of the greatest eSports of all-time, StarCraft itself is more than just an eSport. Blizzard knows that and wants to cater to that- they want to make a game with an appealing campaign and a game that anyone can sit down and enjoy.

But that's a problem for StarCraft 2. In the process of making StarCraft 2 enjoyable for the average RTS gamer, Blizzard needs to modernize the game's interface. No doubt many of you heard the outrage over StarCraft 2 having MBS (Multiple Building Selection), Automine, and Unlimited Selection. I know I did, and originally I scoffed at those crying fits about it. I don't know if I'd say I was wrong to scoff. I don't know if I say that I still scoff. But what I do know is that there was something to those concerns. And that something is that StarCraft's skill requirements and rewards are propped up by those interface limitations (and those are just three of many that Blizzard has screwed with). As I said before, the game is damn simple at its core. Since the Beta started, a lot of friends of mine, many who either never played RTS games or who played barely any or never took any seriously, got interested in SC2 and decided to pick-up the beta. First-hand, I helped many of my friends learn the game, and they enjoy it a fair bit. And most of them are in Diamond league now (not from constant cheesing or anything stupid like that either). However, teaching those same friends other strategy games, such as Dawn of War 2, proved a completely different beast and still does. Bluntly, Dawn of War 2 is more complex than StarCraft 2 by a long shot (despite that much of the RTS community considers DoW 2 to be just the kind of RTS that is too simple or "over-simplified").

So when Blizzard pulled the rug of age out from underneath StarCraft's interface, they yanked out a lot more complexity and depth than they bargained for. They made the game fun and playable for a "new generation", but for proper competitive gamers, much of the challenge was taken out. Furthermore, as the article that spurred this topic highlights, they ran into the issue that with interface improvements increasing the reliability of spells, attacks, etc... they found that Overpowered Thing A counter Overpowered Thing B if Overpowered Thing C doesn't interfere and all of this is decided by player skill and awareness... is actually a big issue. As the article goes on to note, Blizzard has indeed basically sliced out the vast majority of the most exciting situations in Brood War.

Up to here, I completely agree with the article. Brood War is exciting to play and incredibly exciting to watch because you can *see* the skill required and the skill in action, and the effects of that skill are drastic. As well, nifty micro is appreciable and there is constant tension with it- microing a Shuttle/Reaver harass against a Terran is a process with HUGE risk/reward. The Protoss stands to kill SCVs, snipe Siege Tank and other units (preventing the Terran from mounting a deadly early push and allowing the 'toss to expand), and just all-around do a lot of damage. At the same time, if the Reaver is dropped within range of a Siege Tank in Siege Mode, it is going to be toast. Likewise, if the Reaver is dropped on a Spider Mine, if a Turret or Goliath or etc manages to put the Shuttle in a dangerous position, etc... Basically, the Reaver and Shuttle aren't immune, but nor is anything that's going to kill it, and it's a battle of micro on both sides. Also notable is the conflict of Vultures versus Dragoons. If Vultures attack-move against Dragoons, they're not going to do much. But then, Vultures just attack-moving against Zealots doesn't work amazingly either. However, it is known and assumed that a Vulture can kite an infinite amount of Zealots- Reapers and Hellions fit the bill in StarCraft 2. However, Reapers and Hellions shy very far away the second that something like a Stalker comes up, because there just isn't anything they CAN do against such a unit. Vultures, on the other hand, hate Dragoons similarly. However, Vultures have Spider Mines, and they can use these to be as much a threat to Dragoons as any other unit.

StarCraft also has a notable, yet acceptable amount of randomness. Scarabs glitch out constantly, and can semi-reliably be avoided by the opponent if the opponent has his/her units move away from the Scarab as quickly as possible. In return for this bugginess, when they hit they're absolutely devastating, thus Protoss players put up with it. For a spectator though, watching the Scarab make its slow, wobbly way towards a line of Drones as the Drones desperately run for their lives and wondering whether it's going to hit or not... There's no parallel in SC2. Likewise, Spider Mines help protect Terran mech lines from Zealots and can generally thin Protoss ranks. However, Spider Mines can lock onto a target for quite a distance and follow that target, with the mine following in tow. In practice, this is called "Mine Dragging", and it's a constant source of pain for Terran players as Zealots and other units often manage to drag mines directly into lines of Siege Tanks, evaporating them with their own weaponry. "Zealot Bombing" is another common technique, where the Protoss player uses a Shuttle to drop Zealots on top of Siege Tanks and trigger nearby Mines to come in and blow them up- proper martyrs they are. On a less spectator-gasping note, there is also high-ground advantage, where units on low-ground have a percentage chance to miss when attacking uphill. Blizzard actually singled this mechanic out as being randomness and stated that randomness is a bad thing for a competitive game. However, many top Brood War players (yes, even Korean pros) state just the opposite. It's an acceptable amount of randomness because they still know what will usually happen, and attacking uphill is always a risk- simple as that. If you attack from low-ground, you're taking a risk, and it may or may not pay off. Cheese is quite similar there. Anyway, there is a pretty good consensus among top-level SC2 players that bringing back the old high-ground advantage would be an improvement.

Right, so again, all of that I agree with. Where I disagree is with the conclusion of the article, that it is the sophistication of the engine that dooms SC2. Blizzard introduced "macro mechanics" for all three races as a method of offsetting MBS, automine, etc... (basically, forcing players to put more APM into macro) and it has worked. I'm no fan of the mechanics as I think a couple of them are rather poorly designed and integrated and have a net negative impact on gameplay and are, in part, responsible for force composition > micro. Nonetheless, their success in what they set out to do does indicate that developers have the power to design athletic complexity into their games. Of course, when we stop and think about it that way, I don't think we need the macro mechanics example. And to be quite blunt, from a technology standpoint, Blizzard *COULD* recreate SC1's mechanics and etc in an instant with a modern engine if they wanted to.

Where I take this discussion to then as I conclude that ultimately this is not the fault of modernization, but rather of the developer, is the importance of knowing from where your game gets its depth. StarCraft's competitive success is as much about cunning tactics as it is about a swift mouse hand. For StarCraft 2 to have the same depth that StarCraft had if StarCraft 2 is to modernize its interface, StarCraft 2 must either find new methods of challenging players' mouse hands, or it must shift more of its emphasis towards tactical/strategic depth. Right now, StarCraft 2 doesn't seem like it will satisfy on either front.

But as mentioned, this goes beyond StarCraft 2. I feel it's really important for developers to look at and understand where there game's depth is coming from, and for this I want to pull two other examples- Plants v Zombies and Revenge of the Titans.

I'll start with the latter before someone goes, "That TV series?". No, it's an indie tower defense game. Disclaimer that I have only played the demo. Anyway, Revenge of the Titans actually treats player attention as a resource. Resources are collected by the player manually clicking on the Refinery, structures are all individually, manually-placed (that's not atypical for a tower defense though), and all weapons need to be manually reloaded (which, yeah; also consider that you'll want to preemptively reload many of those so you're constantly watching them), etc... The game has tech paths that unlock better weapons, towers, etc... and also ones that can automate processes. Basically, you can direct research points towards having the computer do stuff for you, because the game is designed such that even if you play like a pro StarCraft player, your APM should still be lacking. Of course, the better your skill, the less you'll need to invest in automation (if at all).

Plants v Zombies is then like a simpler Revenge of the Titans (yes PvZ came first). It's very simple, very straightforward, and it shouldn't stress any hardcore gamer's APM. But, basically, it shifts from the game being purely about designing your defense layout to also testing your mouse athleticism while you do that. But PvZ only tries to cater to casual gamers and wants everyone to be able to accomplish the task, so the difficulty is tailored as such.

Both those games are notable for recognizing that they want to expand their depth in that area, and they do that. On the flip side, games like Company of Heroes don't care about APM and put in plenty of automation to help- it's all about positioning and strategy. But that's fine because they bulwark that incredibly well.]]> <![CDATA[Pathfinding in My Game Design?]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=485 Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:39:23 -0400 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=485 Yeep]]> Yeep]]> <![CDATA[Custom Content in StarCraft 2]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=484 Mon, 24 May 2010 00:53:23 -0400 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=484 Linked for Truth

Oh, and yaymesk (valued community member of SAMODS for quite some time, and as some of you are aware, SAMODS is one of the big reasons that Unearthly even exists right now and we owe them great and continued thanks; that, and just about all SAMODS community members are pretty awesome like Mesk =).

(Oh, and for additional SAMODS trivia, the basic idea for two of Wartide's races/factions came from a SAMODS member, Milldawg)

Anyway, really good and interesting post (obviously). Particularly interesting to me because I'm really interested in the evolution of the creation and distribution of custom content, specifically in RTS games. Well, I guess that's obvious giving my operative capacity in Unearthly and our currently-planned projects, but beyond that, WarCraft 2, StarCraft, and WarCraft 3 were the three games that made me even consider video game development and to really want to actually become a developer.

Yes, even WarCraft 2's incredibly simple map editor was a catalyst. WarCraft 3 was sweet icing (at the time, anyway). It's one of my priorities to extend those kinds of experiences to new generations of kids, gamers, and budding developers.

As part of that, it's quite logical to not merely copy the success of WC3 and etc, but rather to extend and evolve it. Before Blizzard even announced the existence of SC2, my considerations have been superior integration of content into the game's networking framework and yes, even allowing modders to make some money (without getting into details to reveal what I would prefer there, I will simply say that I disagree with what Blizzard has said about how they are handling that in SC2). Of course, there are other areas I am interested in improving and doing differently, and many of those are rather tangent to SC2's approach, but I cannot get into details.

Nonetheless, what scares me about Blizzard's implementation is, besides that it will greatly hurt SC2's modding capabilities and custom scene, which will be quite sad in and of itself, I fear that Blizzard's poor implementation of such core evolutions described above could cause developers and/or gamers to shy away from such evolutions, which I think will hurt us all.]]> Linked for Truth

Oh, and yaymesk (valued community member of SAMODS for quite some time, and as some of you are aware, SAMODS is one of the big reasons that Unearthly even exists right now and we owe them great and continued thanks; that, and just about all SAMODS community members are pretty awesome like Mesk =).

(Oh, and for additional SAMODS trivia, the basic idea for two of Wartide's races/factions came from a SAMODS member, Milldawg)

Anyway, really good and interesting post (obviously). Particularly interesting to me because I'm really interested in the evolution of the creation and distribution of custom content, specifically in RTS games. Well, I guess that's obvious giving my operative capacity in Unearthly and our currently-planned projects, but beyond that, WarCraft 2, StarCraft, and WarCraft 3 were the three games that made me even consider video game development and to really want to actually become a developer.

Yes, even WarCraft 2's incredibly simple map editor was a catalyst. WarCraft 3 was sweet icing (at the time, anyway). It's one of my priorities to extend those kinds of experiences to new generations of kids, gamers, and budding developers.

As part of that, it's quite logical to not merely copy the success of WC3 and etc, but rather to extend and evolve it. Before Blizzard even announced the existence of SC2, my considerations have been superior integration of content into the game's networking framework and yes, even allowing modders to make some money (without getting into details to reveal what I would prefer there, I will simply say that I disagree with what Blizzard has said about how they are handling that in SC2). Of course, there are other areas I am interested in improving and doing differently, and many of those are rather tangent to SC2's approach, but I cannot get into details.

Nonetheless, what scares me about Blizzard's implementation is, besides that it will greatly hurt SC2's modding capabilities and custom scene, which will be quite sad in and of itself, I fear that Blizzard's poor implementation of such core evolutions described above could cause developers and/or gamers to shy away from such evolutions, which I think will hurt us all.]]> <![CDATA[Deciphering Balance]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=483 Tue, 18 May 2010 03:51:18 -0400 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=483 "Over-nerfed" by Artosis

(and because the site seems to be down now, here's a link to a thread on TeamLiquid that has the first part of the article and the core of its premise- link)

The article is quite genius in its analysis of the SC2 Beta phenomenon that many Westerners have often attempted to use as leverage to back-up various claims about balance this or balance that. Granted, the article is also Game Balancing 101, but it is a caveat rarely articulated so well to the general gaming populace. And it is also a principle of balancing and design that designers themselves often forget.

How do we evaluate the data and feedback we get from our strategy games? More specifically, what are the caveats we should observe when considering the balance of our game?

The first, and most important consideration is what skill level we want to balance the game for. For a strategy game, balance should always be targeted at the highest skill level. If the game wants to limit the skill level and be more casual, then facets of the game's design other than balance should promote this.

With that said, there can be some discretion. The easiest case of discretion to consider is that some very easy strategy that relatively low or mid-skilled players can execute consistently and easily should be counterable with a reasonable amount of skill. If only the very best player can execute the counter while nearly all other players struggle to reliably execute such a counter, then the counter likely requires some innate talent and cannot be "learned"- forcing players to have some innate talent to counter a strategy which does not require such to execute is generally unfair and counter-productive- even for games whose sole aspiration is eSports, as the point of the game should be to test the skills of both players, but clearly in such an instance the skill of only one player is being tested.

Extending from this, we can immediately see that skill matters. Comparisons of the effectiveness of strategies, builds, units, etc... all must be taken in the context of skill. Ideally, two players of the same skill level will play each other to a stand-still. In reality, this is never truly feasible because skill as most people think of it is actually a composite quantifier. Skill itself is composed of many skill subsets, whereby a player can be better with one build than another, better against one faction than another, etc... Nearly always will these factors toss a match-up in one direction or another. But more importantly from a designer and balance perspective, strategies are going to generally take different amounts of skill and to counter. As long as these counters exist and are obtainable, this fact is generally ok, as generally players can learn the counters and practice them and improve their game, up their skill level in that area, etc... Player growth basically.

Fomenting and requiring player growth is a good thing.

At the same time, designers must be wary of strategies that push such slight skill imbalances too far. To consider this, we will delve into some theoretical math. This math is quite too perfect for actual usage, but it conveys the theory and provides rough guidelines for employment in real-world conditions.

We are considering a strategy that may be imbalanced. The first question we need to answer for this is whether the strategy can be countered or not. If we know it can be countered, then we can proceed with this evaluation. If we do not know for sure if it can be countered, we need to resort to other measures.

If the strategy is counterable, we must briefly consider the case of discretion mentioned above- is this strategy relatively easy to execute and does the counter require the player to have some innate (and extremely uncommon) talent to pull off against inferior opponents? If so, we can leverage our discretion to immediately acknowledge that this is an imbalance.

Instead, if we find the counter to be feasible then once again we proceed. To go farther, we will need to consider a way of quantifying and ranking player skill. The development of such evaluation for the real world is a Rational Discussion all its own and then some- TrueSkill and ELO are just two of many advanced systems developed to determine this. We won't bother with either since learning the math and mechanics of those is not our present intent. Instead we'll use a simple system that ranks players from skill 0 to skill 100. Higher is better.

Thus, consider that this strategy requires skill level 25 to execute. To counter this strategy requires skill level 50. Thus, we can immediately see that at low levels of play this will be perceived as imbalanced. However, we deem skill level 50 to be quite attainable by all players with the will to learn and some effort. In an ideal situation, these values are flat- the effectiveness of the strategy does not scale with the skill of the player leveraging it, and thus we can consistently say that as long as a player can reach skill level 50, then he/she can counter it.

Most situations are not ideal. However, of these the easiest situation to consider is that both the strategy's skill and the counter's skill scale linearly. Specifically, if skill 25 is the lowest that a player can have to successfully execute the strategy and skill 50 is the lowest that a player can have to successfully counter the strategy, then a player of skill 26 executing the strategy will require a player of skill 51 to counter it. We can quickly see that this is a problem. How will anyone counter a player of skill 76 implementing this strategy? The countering player would need to be of skill 101, which is by our own definition impossible. Therefore, this is clearly an imbalance. And it is helpful to know that this is the case where both the strategy and counter scale at the same rate, so if the strategy scales at a superior rate then we have the same issue. Therefore, that case is also a clear imbalance.

The more nebulous case is when the counter scales better with skill than the strategy. We then must consider where the two overlap. That is, when the skill of the player executing the strategy can be countered by a player of equal skill. Consider our skill 25 strategy versus the skill 50 counter example again. If we the counter scales normally but the skill only scales at .25, then we find that a skill 59 player will be able to successfully counter a player of skill 59 executing the strategy. Mathematically:

59 - 25 = 34 (that is, the strategy requires skill 25 but our player is 34 skill above that)

50 + 34 * .25 = 50 + 8.5 = 58.5 (if skill 50 counters skill 25 and the strategy scales at a rate of .25 while the counter scales normally, we have 34 extra skill to put towards the strategy which will earn us only 8.5 effective extra skill points; this means the counter will only require a skill of 58.5)

59 > 58.5

Since our rates are currently unchanging, we can reliably state that past skill level 59, the counter will always prevail between opponents of the same skill level.

Of course, we must be concerned with cases where this changeover does not happen until after skill level 100 is hit, and those cases will cause us to conclude imbalance.

However, before we do that we must consider ceilings and changing rates. These are more complex and tougher to convey in simple math, so I will only bother with ceilings which can be simplified rather nicely. Taking the above example again, it's great that at skill level 59 the counter should prevail, but what if the counter actually does not benefit from any skill beyond 55? Meanwhile, if the strategy scales to skill 65... we have an issue. This issue affects not only skill 55 (where we find that the counter will not prevail), but all skill levels above it. If we have two skill 100 players, because of the skill ceilings it doesn't matter- we may as well have a skill 65 player using the strategy and a skill 55 player using the counter.

Now, of course, all of the above comparison of skill and direct imbalance checks are described in a vacuum. In reality, the situation is much more complex and there are potentially hundreds of these scenarios just in a single match. But, again, considering those guidelines can provide for a clear and comprehensive interpretation of our qualitative data.

But again, this process proves and reaffirms that player skill matters when we consider and evaluate balance. And the article at the beginning of this post I feel provides an excellent example of this. Korean SC2 players are of a generally higher skill level than Korean Terran and Protoss players. The causes of this are that more ex-pro Brood War players are active for the race than other races, thereby bringing overall skill up a little bit, but more importantly providing lower-level players with more examples of good, high-level play than any other race. On top of this, Artosis also accurately notes that in any good strategy game, it takes time for players to fully familiarize themselves with the race and to test the millions of combinations and strategies it offers. In the case of the Zerg, they have the fewest combinations and therefore a greater percentage of their combinations/strategies/etc can be unlocked in the same amount of time as can Terran or Protoss combinations/strategies/etc. This all contributes to higher Zerg win rates in Korea, but these do not necessarily indicate an imbalance as for the most part the skill levels of those Zerg players are currently higher than the skill levels of Terrans and Protoss they face.

However, Blizzard has reacted by yanking out the nerf hammer in an attempt to homogenize win rates across races. As we can see from our enlightened vantage, this may be somewhat premature.

I cannot stress enough the importance of understanding the current state of a game's metagame when considering balance. Just because the forums are lit-up with people whining left and right that there is this strategy they do not know how to counter and that no one knows how to counter it does not mean that there is not a feasible counter. Likewise, just because win rates temporarily skew towards one race or another does not necessarily mean that an imbalance exists- it often simply means that the current metagame favors one race over another and the race that is not favored needs to adapt its metagame. Designers all too often respond to these metagame shifts by exerting control over the game to fix what is not broken, often creating new, actual problems. Understanding the contributing factors behind your data mining is huge.

It is also notable that for games in very early stages, such as beta, great caution needs to be exercised with balance changes. Designers need to exercise patience as much as possible, even when the game seems blatantly broken or is not following the original vision. Often, a player will develop a counter to whatever strategy is ailing the game and often this spreads via various means to much of the playerbase and shifts the metagame. The designer's job then is to evaluate that counter, with the tools provided above, to see if it actually does effectively solve the ailment. If not, action can be considered or further waiting may be warranted to see if additional refinements or strategies come into play to affect the situation.

But I think the big take-away from all of this for designers really is that designers need to put more faith in their own intuition and ability to reason through strategies and counters and etc. If you have a continual nagging that the win percentage data and etc you're looking at and that the complaints are just ignoring some piece of design that you or your team have implemented, you're usually right. Trust that, and wait out the storm for the community to come around and for the metagame to evolve. If necessary or warranted, find some way to accelerate that evolution.

I think it's worthwhile to look back to the very beginning of the StarCraft 2 Beta where Protoss players complained they had zero cost-effective counters to Mutalisks at all- we're not talking even real-world countering where GtA units need to worry about terrain versus the mobility of air units and such. Rather, we're talking about straight-up attack-move macro counters even. Eventually, someone noticed that in Blizzard's Help GUI, Sentries were listed as a counter to Mutalisks. Lo and behold, people labbed it and found it to be quite true. Shortly thereafter Sentries became *the* way for Protoss to counter Mutalisks. Blizzard had so much as given its playerbase the answer and yet it still took nearly a week or more of "WTFSUPERRAGE" for the metagame to evolve.

Tangent to all of this is that I am working on a rebalancing mod for StarCraft 2 with some fellow designers as a side project. We aren't pretending to have the data Blizzard has nor do we particularly want it. We are ignoring the metagame as much as possible while still watching replays, streams, etc... and getting plenty of hands-on time with the "actual" game. But our focus is primarily on fixing core issues that we feel impact the game negatively on a design level. Things like the "Evil Triangle" of the Marauder/Roach/Immortal are massive concerns for us, whether they are balanced within the context of the current metagame or not. We are looking to make specific changes to open specific gameplay opportunities for players to make use of- with these tight goals, we can effectively measure our success largely without needing to focus on or care about the metagame. We can evaluate whether our units are performing their roles properly or not and if they are, that backs-up our core, overarching designs which, if done properly should be at least "ballpark balanced". With such assurances, we can then afford to sit back for quite some time to evaluate the actual usage of our changes and can consider informed changes that we have come to after watching multiple changes in the metagame rather than knee-jerking to just a few changes.

To be quite honest, I feel that the utter disregard for balance that went into the original StarCraft and Brood War are what made it great. Balance wasn't excessively micromanaged every day upon ever shifting winds and the game was designed around units that filled roles and filled them well. That led to some absolutely ridiculous balance situations and decisions (nearly every spellcaster in the game is overpowered by traditional standards and in modern days would have elicited the greatest of "IMBA" shrills; and that's before we even get to Vulture Spider Mines, Siege Tanks, Reavers, Lurkers, Carriers, etc...), but because the roles and the designs were balanced, the metagame adapted to support that balance.

That all is certainly a massive wall of text, but for those who've made it this far I'm really interested to hear what you have to say on the matter of this most delicate subject, balance.]]> "Over-nerfed" by Artosis

(and because the site seems to be down now, here's a link to a thread on TeamLiquid that has the first part of the article and the core of its premise- link)

The article is quite genius in its analysis of the SC2 Beta phenomenon that many Westerners have often attempted to use as leverage to back-up various claims about balance this or balance that. Granted, the article is also Game Balancing 101, but it is a caveat rarely articulated so well to the general gaming populace. And it is also a principle of balancing and design that designers themselves often forget.

How do we evaluate the data and feedback we get from our strategy games? More specifically, what are the caveats we should observe when considering the balance of our game?

The first, and most important consideration is what skill level we want to balance the game for. For a strategy game, balance should always be targeted at the highest skill level. If the game wants to limit the skill level and be more casual, then facets of the game's design other than balance should promote this.

With that said, there can be some discretion. The easiest case of discretion to consider is that some very easy strategy that relatively low or mid-skilled players can execute consistently and easily should be counterable with a reasonable amount of skill. If only the very best player can execute the counter while nearly all other players struggle to reliably execute such a counter, then the counter likely requires some innate talent and cannot be "learned"- forcing players to have some innate talent to counter a strategy which does not require such to execute is generally unfair and counter-productive- even for games whose sole aspiration is eSports, as the point of the game should be to test the skills of both players, but clearly in such an instance the skill of only one player is being tested.

Extending from this, we can immediately see that skill matters. Comparisons of the effectiveness of strategies, builds, units, etc... all must be taken in the context of skill. Ideally, two players of the same skill level will play each other to a stand-still. In reality, this is never truly feasible because skill as most people think of it is actually a composite quantifier. Skill itself is composed of many skill subsets, whereby a player can be better with one build than another, better against one faction than another, etc... Nearly always will these factors toss a match-up in one direction or another. But more importantly from a designer and balance perspective, strategies are going to generally take different amounts of skill and to counter. As long as these counters exist and are obtainable, this fact is generally ok, as generally players can learn the counters and practice them and improve their game, up their skill level in that area, etc... Player growth basically.

Fomenting and requiring player growth is a good thing.

At the same time, designers must be wary of strategies that push such slight skill imbalances too far. To consider this, we will delve into some theoretical math. This math is quite too perfect for actual usage, but it conveys the theory and provides rough guidelines for employment in real-world conditions.

We are considering a strategy that may be imbalanced. The first question we need to answer for this is whether the strategy can be countered or not. If we know it can be countered, then we can proceed with this evaluation. If we do not know for sure if it can be countered, we need to resort to other measures.

If the strategy is counterable, we must briefly consider the case of discretion mentioned above- is this strategy relatively easy to execute and does the counter require the player to have some innate (and extremely uncommon) talent to pull off against inferior opponents? If so, we can leverage our discretion to immediately acknowledge that this is an imbalance.

Instead, if we find the counter to be feasible then once again we proceed. To go farther, we will need to consider a way of quantifying and ranking player skill. The development of such evaluation for the real world is a Rational Discussion all its own and then some- TrueSkill and ELO are just two of many advanced systems developed to determine this. We won't bother with either since learning the math and mechanics of those is not our present intent. Instead we'll use a simple system that ranks players from skill 0 to skill 100. Higher is better.

Thus, consider that this strategy requires skill level 25 to execute. To counter this strategy requires skill level 50. Thus, we can immediately see that at low levels of play this will be perceived as imbalanced. However, we deem skill level 50 to be quite attainable by all players with the will to learn and some effort. In an ideal situation, these values are flat- the effectiveness of the strategy does not scale with the skill of the player leveraging it, and thus we can consistently say that as long as a player can reach skill level 50, then he/she can counter it.

Most situations are not ideal. However, of these the easiest situation to consider is that both the strategy's skill and the counter's skill scale linearly. Specifically, if skill 25 is the lowest that a player can have to successfully execute the strategy and skill 50 is the lowest that a player can have to successfully counter the strategy, then a player of skill 26 executing the strategy will require a player of skill 51 to counter it. We can quickly see that this is a problem. How will anyone counter a player of skill 76 implementing this strategy? The countering player would need to be of skill 101, which is by our own definition impossible. Therefore, this is clearly an imbalance. And it is helpful to know that this is the case where both the strategy and counter scale at the same rate, so if the strategy scales at a superior rate then we have the same issue. Therefore, that case is also a clear imbalance.

The more nebulous case is when the counter scales better with skill than the strategy. We then must consider where the two overlap. That is, when the skill of the player executing the strategy can be countered by a player of equal skill. Consider our skill 25 strategy versus the skill 50 counter example again. If we the counter scales normally but the skill only scales at .25, then we find that a skill 59 player will be able to successfully counter a player of skill 59 executing the strategy. Mathematically:

59 - 25 = 34 (that is, the strategy requires skill 25 but our player is 34 skill above that)

50 + 34 * .25 = 50 + 8.5 = 58.5 (if skill 50 counters skill 25 and the strategy scales at a rate of .25 while the counter scales normally, we have 34 extra skill to put towards the strategy which will earn us only 8.5 effective extra skill points; this means the counter will only require a skill of 58.5)

59 > 58.5

Since our rates are currently unchanging, we can reliably state that past skill level 59, the counter will always prevail between opponents of the same skill level.

Of course, we must be concerned with cases where this changeover does not happen until after skill level 100 is hit, and those cases will cause us to conclude imbalance.

However, before we do that we must consider ceilings and changing rates. These are more complex and tougher to convey in simple math, so I will only bother with ceilings which can be simplified rather nicely. Taking the above example again, it's great that at skill level 59 the counter should prevail, but what if the counter actually does not benefit from any skill beyond 55? Meanwhile, if the strategy scales to skill 65... we have an issue. This issue affects not only skill 55 (where we find that the counter will not prevail), but all skill levels above it. If we have two skill 100 players, because of the skill ceilings it doesn't matter- we may as well have a skill 65 player using the strategy and a skill 55 player using the counter.

Now, of course, all of the above comparison of skill and direct imbalance checks are described in a vacuum. In reality, the situation is much more complex and there are potentially hundreds of these scenarios just in a single match. But, again, considering those guidelines can provide for a clear and comprehensive interpretation of our qualitative data.

But again, this process proves and reaffirms that player skill matters when we consider and evaluate balance. And the article at the beginning of this post I feel provides an excellent example of this. Korean SC2 players are of a generally higher skill level than Korean Terran and Protoss players. The causes of this are that more ex-pro Brood War players are active for the race than other races, thereby bringing overall skill up a little bit, but more importantly providing lower-level players with more examples of good, high-level play than any other race. On top of this, Artosis also accurately notes that in any good strategy game, it takes time for players to fully familiarize themselves with the race and to test the millions of combinations and strategies it offers. In the case of the Zerg, they have the fewest combinations and therefore a greater percentage of their combinations/strategies/etc can be unlocked in the same amount of time as can Terran or Protoss combinations/strategies/etc. This all contributes to higher Zerg win rates in Korea, but these do not necessarily indicate an imbalance as for the most part the skill levels of those Zerg players are currently higher than the skill levels of Terrans and Protoss they face.

However, Blizzard has reacted by yanking out the nerf hammer in an attempt to homogenize win rates across races. As we can see from our enlightened vantage, this may be somewhat premature.

I cannot stress enough the importance of understanding the current state of a game's metagame when considering balance. Just because the forums are lit-up with people whining left and right that there is this strategy they do not know how to counter and that no one knows how to counter it does not mean that there is not a feasible counter. Likewise, just because win rates temporarily skew towards one race or another does not necessarily mean that an imbalance exists- it often simply means that the current metagame favors one race over another and the race that is not favored needs to adapt its metagame. Designers all too often respond to these metagame shifts by exerting control over the game to fix what is not broken, often creating new, actual problems. Understanding the contributing factors behind your data mining is huge.

It is also notable that for games in very early stages, such as beta, great caution needs to be exercised with balance changes. Designers need to exercise patience as much as possible, even when the game seems blatantly broken or is not following the original vision. Often, a player will develop a counter to whatever strategy is ailing the game and often this spreads via various means to much of the playerbase and shifts the metagame. The designer's job then is to evaluate that counter, with the tools provided above, to see if it actually does effectively solve the ailment. If not, action can be considered or further waiting may be warranted to see if additional refinements or strategies come into play to affect the situation.

But I think the big take-away from all of this for designers really is that designers need to put more faith in their own intuition and ability to reason through strategies and counters and etc. If you have a continual nagging that the win percentage data and etc you're looking at and that the complaints are just ignoring some piece of design that you or your team have implemented, you're usually right. Trust that, and wait out the storm for the community to come around and for the metagame to evolve. If necessary or warranted, find some way to accelerate that evolution.

I think it's worthwhile to look back to the very beginning of the StarCraft 2 Beta where Protoss players complained they had zero cost-effective counters to Mutalisks at all- we're not talking even real-world countering where GtA units need to worry about terrain versus the mobility of air units and such. Rather, we're talking about straight-up attack-move macro counters even. Eventually, someone noticed that in Blizzard's Help GUI, Sentries were listed as a counter to Mutalisks. Lo and behold, people labbed it and found it to be quite true. Shortly thereafter Sentries became *the* way for Protoss to counter Mutalisks. Blizzard had so much as given its playerbase the answer and yet it still took nearly a week or more of "WTFSUPERRAGE" for the metagame to evolve.

Tangent to all of this is that I am working on a rebalancing mod for StarCraft 2 with some fellow designers as a side project. We aren't pretending to have the data Blizzard has nor do we particularly want it. We are ignoring the metagame as much as possible while still watching replays, streams, etc... and getting plenty of hands-on time with the "actual" game. But our focus is primarily on fixing core issues that we feel impact the game negatively on a design level. Things like the "Evil Triangle" of the Marauder/Roach/Immortal are massive concerns for us, whether they are balanced within the context of the current metagame or not. We are looking to make specific changes to open specific gameplay opportunities for players to make use of- with these tight goals, we can effectively measure our success largely without needing to focus on or care about the metagame. We can evaluate whether our units are performing their roles properly or not and if they are, that backs-up our core, overarching designs which, if done properly should be at least "ballpark balanced". With such assurances, we can then afford to sit back for quite some time to evaluate the actual usage of our changes and can consider informed changes that we have come to after watching multiple changes in the metagame rather than knee-jerking to just a few changes.

To be quite honest, I feel that the utter disregard for balance that went into the original StarCraft and Brood War are what made it great. Balance wasn't excessively micromanaged every day upon ever shifting winds and the game was designed around units that filled roles and filled them well. That led to some absolutely ridiculous balance situations and decisions (nearly every spellcaster in the game is overpowered by traditional standards and in modern days would have elicited the greatest of "IMBA" shrills; and that's before we even get to Vulture Spider Mines, Siege Tanks, Reavers, Lurkers, Carriers, etc...), but because the roles and the designs were balanced, the metagame adapted to support that balance.

That all is certainly a massive wall of text, but for those who've made it this far I'm really interested to hear what you have to say on the matter of this most delicate subject, balance.]]> <![CDATA[More Piracy Discussion]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=482 Fri, 07 May 2010 23:31:34 -0400 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=482 "Another View of Video Game Piracy"

Not much more input here other than LFT- Linked For Truth.]]> "Another View of Video Game Piracy"

Not much more input here other than LFT- Linked For Truth.]]> <![CDATA[Interview w/Dustin Browder on SC2 Beta]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=481 Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:00:01 -0400 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=481 Link

While this was just posted online pretty recently, as you can see it is from GameInformer so I presume it was in the magazine a few weeks before being posted. Either way, the interview is from before March 12th as far as I can tell because Dustin Browder talks a lot about Warp Gate rushing at one point and that was more or less fixed in Patch 5 by a massive nerf from 60 seconds research time to 140 seconds research time.

Anyway, I've been following the StarCraft 2 Beta pretty closely, playing it a fair bit, watching and reading a lot of coverage on it, partaking in discussions on it, etc... As a developer and particularly a designer, it's very interesting to watch this game take shape as it is the successor to the most successful eSport of all time and one of the greatest games of all-time- and that game was originally designed largely on napkins (not to mention being massively redesigned after a poor showing at E3 practically a year before release). Duly noted that diligent patching that stretched to 2001 and beyond are what brought the game to become a palatable and durable eSport, but the basis of it was established well before then.

So, bringing this conversation back to the specific interview linked to at the start of the post, the answer to the second question makes me reel back in horror. Now, if I were sitting here and just reading that answer before having played the game or having much experience with it in any other way, I would probably just cringe and then shrug, taking an "if it works..." attitude although still viewing the comment negatively. However, having played the beta a fair bit and having read and watched tons on it and of it, I have to say that the approach Browder described is very, very bad- or, at a bare minimum, very bad for SC2.

Dustin Browder Wrote:We didn't set out with any goals in mind, and I'm sure that this will upset the fans terribly. What we did instead was that we said, "We want to make a bunch of cool units, and we're going to make each unit as cool as we can possibly make it, and then we'll see how it all works together, and we'll tune as necessary from there." So it was never our intention specifically to do anything exactly with the races. Our goal was to make the units as interesting as possible and as different from one another as we possibly could.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad! So, let's evaluate this and why it's bad and why it's turned out to be bad. Factions have roles that must be fulfilled by units. No matter how you design your units, in order for a faction to be balanced and to function properly, these roles must be suitable fulfilled. However, when you concentrate primarily on designing the units before you consider filling the roles and how a race deals with its roles, you destine your "unique and awesome units" to eventually be crammed into these roles. When that happens, they often start to lose their uniqueness and, as well, you may be cramming less than ideal units into these roles.

So, looking at StarCraft 2, the best two examples of units having a severe issue with this problem are the Roach and Marauder.

The Roach started as a pretty interesting and rather unique unit. In fact, had it gone through into the beta as it was originally designed, I think it could have been a really interesting, unique Tier 2 harass unit for the Zerg that could also prove an interesting solution to breaking enemy static positions because of the combination of its burrowed movement, strong damage (although long cooldown), and high armor and sizable hp regen (aka very good for durable hit-and-run; somewhat similar to the Lurker that it arguably replaces in that it's one of the few Zerg units that might still be expensive to field and might still need to be fielded in sizable numbers but it's not completely expendable nor is it a caster). However, when Blizzard integrated the Roach into the game, for some reason they had a burning desire to move the Hydralisk to Tier 2 and to shove the Roach into Tier 1. As such, the Roach then needed to be massable. Because it now became massable its original vision was no longer balanceable in its given role. Therefore it has been continually nerfed to have mostly regular regeneration unless burrowed (although that doesn't really kick-in until Organic Carapace in Tier 3), its hp has been (well, at least seemingly) buffed sizable so that it can tank a fair bit of damage but keep its armor relatively low so that Tier 1 units can deal with it (and as of the last patch its armor is even lower now), and finally its burrowed movement has been nerfed to a point where it just isn't too useful. It's become a rather boring unit because it has been molded, kicking and screaming, into a role.

Looking over at the Marauder now, we see a unit that is individually interesting and a bit unique as it's beefy for a Terran infantry unit and has an attack that can slow enemy units- severely altering how Terran infantry deals with melee units (before it was either sheer numbers of Marines or Firebats, whereas now Marauders' slow could be used to kite enemy melee units), and it's also more effective against armored units so ostensibly it gives Terran bio some late-game staying power. The problem? This proved to fulfill a few too many roles it seems and the Marauder turned into a super-unit. It was literally the only thing in the Terran arsenal that could reliably deal with Roaches and therefore was a requirement in TvZ which further led to it needing to remain beefy to preserve TvZ balance. In other match-ups, it was just all-around beefy and in some ways, sorta out-of-place and definitely going beyond the role that it *should* fill- in fact, it still is really. In the most recent patch, the Marauders' slowing ability was changed to require an upgrade- while in practice this really just delays the usage of mass Marauders slightly, from a larger standpoint it again just makes the Marauder more of a boring unit and actually screws with one of its roles (early Zealot pushes/rushes from Protoss players are much stronger now). Also, in an earlier patch, when Terran players leveraged Marauders' sizable health and armored status to form a wall for their Marines to block Banelings (as Marines die very quickly because Banelings do extra to light armor), Banelings were buffed to do more against armored to break this tactic, again making the Marauder more boring and in the process rewarding less micro depth on the part of the Zerg player. More or less, the Marauder is being systematically morphed into a bland, boring, but necessary unit despite its interesting origins. What would be the best retweaking of the Marauder now for both balance and fun? Probably increase the Marauder's gas cost to be less massable but decrease mineral cost to foment more Marine-heavy bio compositions for Terrans. Meanwhile, leave the Marauder's attack as-is but nerf its hp and add slow back in as a standard ability that does not require an upgrade to use. This then leaves the Marauder as a support unit to Marines that allows for some micro-based kiting ability against enemy melee early on while later giving Terran bio more firepower against heavy units (Ultralisks and etc) but still preserving the fragility of Terran bio.

Another notable example is the Thor, which Browder talks about a bit. However, he does not discuss how the Thor has been retweaked to now primarily serve two roles- ground support for Siege Tanks (specifically, using his Barrage ability to deal with Immortals in TvP) and light armor anti-air, which is really more anti-Mutalisks than anything else (as Phoenixes can just use their special ability to lift Thors up and deal with them easily because Thors are so expensive and decidedly not-massable). An immediate problem that comes to mind is that both of these roles are really only effective against one unit each. Otherwise, the Thor isn't really worthwhile against much else (occasionally useful at acting like a mobile Missile Turret in that his ground to air damage per second can be just enough to allow your Vikings to win an air-to-air fight and/or deter such a fight from ever occurring although a Missile Turret could do the same thing and the Thor isn't that much faster than one xD), as while his ground attack is pretty powerful it's not nearly as devastating as the Siege Tank's and the Thor is just way more expensive and not as massable. Dropping Thors to take out enemy Command Centers/Hatcheries/etc with their special ability is useful but rather cheesy and easily-countered. More or less though, the Thor is a unit victimized by both being tweaked and tuned to fulfill required rolls in a balanced fashion as well as trying not to infringe on what would be the Goliath's territory- that is, Blizzard doesn't want to make the Thor too similar to either the Goliath or the Viking, and this is the core reason why it's not being tweaked to be more massable.

However, speaking of the Viking, it is noteworthy that they are one of the relative successes of this style of design. They are an interesting unit and they actually can and do provide air superiority, while making for nice harass units when not dominating the skies. Their only serious issue currently is that they sacrifice a lot of speed to be able to do this, while gaining a nice bit of range though. The trade-off leaves them extremely vulnerable to Mutalisks when/if caught in the open, but then even Wraiths were not a great counter to Mutalisks when/if they lacked ground support. The only serious issue I have with the Viking currently is that its ground-to-ground attack seems necessary for Terran mech to deal with Immortals and some Zerg threats; again, it infringes on the turf that the Goliath would usually deal with and thus prevents such a unit from being implemented.

Browder's response to the last question on page 2 I find to be excellent and Blizzard's approach here is well ahead of that of most other RTS developers and I feel that other RTS developers can and should learn from Blizzard here. We'll have to wait and see how well it works, but on paper it's great.]]> Link

While this was just posted online pretty recently, as you can see it is from GameInformer so I presume it was in the magazine a few weeks before being posted. Either way, the interview is from before March 12th as far as I can tell because Dustin Browder talks a lot about Warp Gate rushing at one point and that was more or less fixed in Patch 5 by a massive nerf from 60 seconds research time to 140 seconds research time.

Anyway, I've been following the StarCraft 2 Beta pretty closely, playing it a fair bit, watching and reading a lot of coverage on it, partaking in discussions on it, etc... As a developer and particularly a designer, it's very interesting to watch this game take shape as it is the successor to the most successful eSport of all time and one of the greatest games of all-time- and that game was originally designed largely on napkins (not to mention being massively redesigned after a poor showing at E3 practically a year before release). Duly noted that diligent patching that stretched to 2001 and beyond are what brought the game to become a palatable and durable eSport, but the basis of it was established well before then.

So, bringing this conversation back to the specific interview linked to at the start of the post, the answer to the second question makes me reel back in horror. Now, if I were sitting here and just reading that answer before having played the game or having much experience with it in any other way, I would probably just cringe and then shrug, taking an "if it works..." attitude although still viewing the comment negatively. However, having played the beta a fair bit and having read and watched tons on it and of it, I have to say that the approach Browder described is very, very bad- or, at a bare minimum, very bad for SC2.

Dustin Browder Wrote:We didn't set out with any goals in mind, and I'm sure that this will upset the fans terribly. What we did instead was that we said, "We want to make a bunch of cool units, and we're going to make each unit as cool as we can possibly make it, and then we'll see how it all works together, and we'll tune as necessary from there." So it was never our intention specifically to do anything exactly with the races. Our goal was to make the units as interesting as possible and as different from one another as we possibly could.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad! So, let's evaluate this and why it's bad and why it's turned out to be bad. Factions have roles that must be fulfilled by units. No matter how you design your units, in order for a faction to be balanced and to function properly, these roles must be suitable fulfilled. However, when you concentrate primarily on designing the units before you consider filling the roles and how a race deals with its roles, you destine your "unique and awesome units" to eventually be crammed into these roles. When that happens, they often start to lose their uniqueness and, as well, you may be cramming less than ideal units into these roles.

So, looking at StarCraft 2, the best two examples of units having a severe issue with this problem are the Roach and Marauder.

The Roach started as a pretty interesting and rather unique unit. In fact, had it gone through into the beta as it was originally designed, I think it could have been a really interesting, unique Tier 2 harass unit for the Zerg that could also prove an interesting solution to breaking enemy static positions because of the combination of its burrowed movement, strong damage (although long cooldown), and high armor and sizable hp regen (aka very good for durable hit-and-run; somewhat similar to the Lurker that it arguably replaces in that it's one of the few Zerg units that might still be expensive to field and might still need to be fielded in sizable numbers but it's not completely expendable nor is it a caster). However, when Blizzard integrated the Roach into the game, for some reason they had a burning desire to move the Hydralisk to Tier 2 and to shove the Roach into Tier 1. As such, the Roach then needed to be massable. Because it now became massable its original vision was no longer balanceable in its given role. Therefore it has been continually nerfed to have mostly regular regeneration unless burrowed (although that doesn't really kick-in until Organic Carapace in Tier 3), its hp has been (well, at least seemingly) buffed sizable so that it can tank a fair bit of damage but keep its armor relatively low so that Tier 1 units can deal with it (and as of the last patch its armor is even lower now), and finally its burrowed movement has been nerfed to a point where it just isn't too useful. It's become a rather boring unit because it has been molded, kicking and screaming, into a role.

Looking over at the Marauder now, we see a unit that is individually interesting and a bit unique as it's beefy for a Terran infantry unit and has an attack that can slow enemy units- severely altering how Terran infantry deals with melee units (before it was either sheer numbers of Marines or Firebats, whereas now Marauders' slow could be used to kite enemy melee units), and it's also more effective against armored units so ostensibly it gives Terran bio some late-game staying power. The problem? This proved to fulfill a few too many roles it seems and the Marauder turned into a super-unit. It was literally the only thing in the Terran arsenal that could reliably deal with Roaches and therefore was a requirement in TvZ which further led to it needing to remain beefy to preserve TvZ balance. In other match-ups, it was just all-around beefy and in some ways, sorta out-of-place and definitely going beyond the role that it *should* fill- in fact, it still is really. In the most recent patch, the Marauders' slowing ability was changed to require an upgrade- while in practice this really just delays the usage of mass Marauders slightly, from a larger standpoint it again just makes the Marauder more of a boring unit and actually screws with one of its roles (early Zealot pushes/rushes from Protoss players are much stronger now). Also, in an earlier patch, when Terran players leveraged Marauders' sizable health and armored status to form a wall for their Marines to block Banelings (as Marines die very quickly because Banelings do extra to light armor), Banelings were buffed to do more against armored to break this tactic, again making the Marauder more boring and in the process rewarding less micro depth on the part of the Zerg player. More or less, the Marauder is being systematically morphed into a bland, boring, but necessary unit despite its interesting origins. What would be the best retweaking of the Marauder now for both balance and fun? Probably increase the Marauder's gas cost to be less massable but decrease mineral cost to foment more Marine-heavy bio compositions for Terrans. Meanwhile, leave the Marauder's attack as-is but nerf its hp and add slow back in as a standard ability that does not require an upgrade to use. This then leaves the Marauder as a support unit to Marines that allows for some micro-based kiting ability against enemy melee early on while later giving Terran bio more firepower against heavy units (Ultralisks and etc) but still preserving the fragility of Terran bio.

Another notable example is the Thor, which Browder talks about a bit. However, he does not discuss how the Thor has been retweaked to now primarily serve two roles- ground support for Siege Tanks (specifically, using his Barrage ability to deal with Immortals in TvP) and light armor anti-air, which is really more anti-Mutalisks than anything else (as Phoenixes can just use their special ability to lift Thors up and deal with them easily because Thors are so expensive and decidedly not-massable). An immediate problem that comes to mind is that both of these roles are really only effective against one unit each. Otherwise, the Thor isn't really worthwhile against much else (occasionally useful at acting like a mobile Missile Turret in that his ground to air damage per second can be just enough to allow your Vikings to win an air-to-air fight and/or deter such a fight from ever occurring although a Missile Turret could do the same thing and the Thor isn't that much faster than one xD), as while his ground attack is pretty powerful it's not nearly as devastating as the Siege Tank's and the Thor is just way more expensive and not as massable. Dropping Thors to take out enemy Command Centers/Hatcheries/etc with their special ability is useful but rather cheesy and easily-countered. More or less though, the Thor is a unit victimized by both being tweaked and tuned to fulfill required rolls in a balanced fashion as well as trying not to infringe on what would be the Goliath's territory- that is, Blizzard doesn't want to make the Thor too similar to either the Goliath or the Viking, and this is the core reason why it's not being tweaked to be more massable.

However, speaking of the Viking, it is noteworthy that they are one of the relative successes of this style of design. They are an interesting unit and they actually can and do provide air superiority, while making for nice harass units when not dominating the skies. Their only serious issue currently is that they sacrifice a lot of speed to be able to do this, while gaining a nice bit of range though. The trade-off leaves them extremely vulnerable to Mutalisks when/if caught in the open, but then even Wraiths were not a great counter to Mutalisks when/if they lacked ground support. The only serious issue I have with the Viking currently is that its ground-to-ground attack seems necessary for Terran mech to deal with Immortals and some Zerg threats; again, it infringes on the turf that the Goliath would usually deal with and thus prevents such a unit from being implemented.

Browder's response to the last question on page 2 I find to be excellent and Blizzard's approach here is well ahead of that of most other RTS developers and I feel that other RTS developers can and should learn from Blizzard here. We'll have to wait and see how well it works, but on paper it's great.]]> <![CDATA[Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising Update]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=479 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:18:26 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=479 2.1 Patch Notes

Melee/Ranged Toggle w00t!!!!!!

Quote:===============================
Chaos Rising Update 2.1 notes
===============================

New Features

Global
• Support for screen resolutions with a wider aspect ratio than 16x9, such as those used with AMD's Eyefinity technology
• Stance Toggle option has been added for switching between ranged and melee unit behaviour in all game modes

Multiplayer
• New Map: 2p Judgment of Carrion
• New Map: 2p Ice Station Obelis
• New Map: 4p Desert Showdown
• New Map: 4p Judgment of Carrion
• New Map: 4p Selenon Fissure
• New Map: 6p Argent Shelf
• New Map: 6p Judgment of Carrion
• New Map: 6p Calderis Refinery (Free-For-All)
• New Map: 6p Judgment of Carrion (Free-For-All)
• Added Librarian Unit to tier two of Space Marines
• Added Weirdboy Unit to tier two of Orks
• Added Tyrant Guard Unit to tier two of Tyranids
• Added Gene Stealers Squad to tier two of Tyranids
• Added Wraithguard Squad to tier two of Eldar
• Added the ability to play against owners of Chaos Rising who are playing as the Chaos Race
• Added Free for All and Team Free for All Victory Point game modes to Custom Games
• New target priority system implemented so that idle units prefer attacking enemies they specialize against
• Vehicle wrecks now remain on the map and provide cover

The Last Stand
• Added the ability to play with owners of Chaos Rising who are playing as Chaos Sorcerer or Hive Tyrant

Campaign
• Added the ability to transfer save games of completed Aurelian Campaigns to Chaos Rising
• Added the ability save during mid-missions (Chaos Rising Campaign Only)
• Wargear tooltips in both campaigns now contain significantly more information such as attack speed, accuracy, etc
• New 'Invite a Friend' button added to the bridge to easily invite friends to a co-op game

Campaign, Last Stand and Global Bug Fixes

Global
• Various general performance and memory optimizations
• Various stability fixes to front-end menu screens

Campaign
• Fixed issue where a drag-select starting on a wargear item would "stick" even after releasing the mouse button
• More enemies now have the updated unit decorators
• Cyrus' Deep Smoke ability has been retooled; Cyrus now drops a smoke grenade when he infiltrates or reveals himself
• Thaddeus' Ranged Specialist trait will now also add a passive chance to stun with any ranged weapon
• The Chapter's Fury ability has been reworked to charge up from taking damage
• Thule's Might of the Ancient ability has been renamed "Mighty Strike"
• The Force Commander's Drop Bays and Orbital Barrage traits have been combined into a new trait called Orbital Command
• The Force Commander has a new trait called Inspiring Shout which replaced Orbital Barrage's position on the Will path

Multiplayer
• Maps are now listed in alphabetical order
• New tutorial loading screens have been added
• Various minor ability functionality and balance tweaks
• Various text updates for clarity and accuracy

Army Painter
• Space Marine Red Scorpions chapter added
• Chaos Red Corsairs warband added
• Chaos Alpha Legion warband added
• Chaos Death Guard warband added
• Chaos Emperor's Children warband added
• Chaos Iron Warriors warband added
• Chaos Night Lords warband added
• Chaos Thousand Sons warband added
• Chaos Word Bearers warband added
• Chaos World Eaters warband added
• Khorne Red color added
• Chaos army paint schemes can be created by owners of DOW2 or Chaos Rising

Last Stand
• Fixed issue where players would lose ability functionality if revived after dying while entering a building
• Fixed problem with player collision when standing on closing gates
• Fixed an issue where the screen would turn black permanently during the transition between wave 19 and 20 under rare circumstances
• Last Stand heroes can now be rotated in the hero select screen

Front End and Options
• Custom games list can now be sorted by clicking the 'Players' header
• Fixed an issue where a player's Trueskill on the leaderboards screen would be one game behind the Trueskill displayed on the Player Statistics screen
• Fixed the total number of wins/losses displaying incorrectly on the leaderboards
• Fixed a variety of issues with rendering after changing graphics options
• Default resolution on first launch will attempt to match desktop resolution before falling back to lower resolutions
• Ultra settings have been disabled for users running 32-bit versions of Windows unless using the /3GB OS startup switch

Balance Changes and Multiplayer Bug Fixes

Global
• Repair no longer works on ambient buildings
• Artillery projectiles now fire at the location they were firing at when they begin their wind up animation, this makes it more difficult to hit moving targets
• Units under the effects of the Phase Shift ability can no longer repair other units or buildings
• Units can now be damaged by grenades while entering a building but before fully setting up
• Looted Tank and Predator Tank no longer shoot continously without enemy targets while moving towards the destination of an attack move order
• Unit and ability FX can no longer be seen through the fog of war (some exceptions)
• Fixed issue where queued actions could sometimes be resumed upon reviving a hero unit
• Camouflage abilities can no longer be used in buildings

Map Changes
• Angel Gate: Destroyed buildings at the top of the map to prevent garrisoning issues
• Outer Reaches: Moved some objects to prevent units getting stuck
• Greentooth Gorge: Added impasses to prevent units getting stuck behind bases

Orks

Global
• Added the Weirdboy unit to Tier 2
• Roks global ability now costs 500 Waaagh
• More dakka will no longer work on some units who have no ranged weapon
• More dakka will no longer work on unconscious units
• Ork global abilities order on the Select Hero screen now match their order in-game

Kommando Nob
• Remote bomb placement no longer keeps Kommando in suppressed animation state
• Kaboom damage no longer works on invulnerable targets.
• Kommando Nob's Rokkit Launcha damage reduced to 65 from 72

Mekboy
• Banner no longer gives bonus to recharge times

Deff Dread
• Deff Dread health has been increased to 650 from 450
• Deff Dread Burnaz and Bitz upgrade cost has decreased to 180/20 from 200/20
• Burnaz and Bitz now adds +400 HP
• Deff Dread cost has increased to 250/70 from 250/45
• Burna damage reduced to 40 from 90
• Burnas can now use Attack Ground
• Special attack no longer cut through immunities and armor

Stikkbomma
• Stikkbomma stun bomb cooldown reduced to 30 seconds from 60 seconds
• Stikkbommba grenade damage has been adjusted over their effective radius, does more consistent and higher damage.
• Stikkbomma HP increased to 200
• Stikkbomb damage increased to 67 from 58

Tankbustas
• Min range added to Rokkit barrage

Warboss
• Warboss Powerclaw now does 190 damage, up from 150
• Warboss’ Shoota ability now does 50 damage for the duration of the ability, up from 28
• Weapon skill reduced to 70 from 90
• Knockback shot can no longer target vehicles
• Knockback shots changed to weapon knockback instead of ability knockback

Stormboyz
• Bomba boyz attack no longer hurts immune units

Sluggas
• Burna Upgrade increases health by 10% instead of 20%
• Burna upgrade cost 85/20

Banner
• Ork waaagh banner now has the Frazzle ability which stuns nearby enemies and buffs the speed, attack and defense of nearby allies
• Ork waaagh banner no longer gives bonuses to ability recharge times

Nob Squad
• Can now attack buildings with their default weapon

Looted Tank
• Max speed reduced to 5 from 7

Eldar

Global
• Added the Wraithguard unit Tier 2
• Eldritch Storm now costs 500 Psychic Might
• Weapon platform teams can now garrison buildings

Webway
• Holo-field ability added to farseer webway gate, when activated cloaks nearby units.
• Webway gates are now permanently cloaked when playing as the Farseer hero

Warpspider Hero
• Entangle will no longer work on unconscious units
• Units affected by group teleport are immune to knockback
• Crack Shot can no longer be used on units without a ranged weapon
• Heavy gauge filament can be toggled in buildings
• Heavy gauge filament no longer changes weapon damage
• Entangle no longer works on vehicles

Farseer
• Cannot be knocked back while levitate active
• Weapon skill reduced to 70 from 90
• Mindwar damage type is now melee heavy instead of piercing

Warlock
• Warlock’s merciless Witchblade now drains 15 mana per hit, down from 30
• Destructor damages units in buildings
• Weapon skill reduced to 70 from 90
• Cloaking shroud now affects vehicles
• Providence should now properly make you invulnerable
• Warlock no longer leaps and knocks down enemies
• Warlock now charges enemies

Avatar
• Avatar of Khaine sword damage increase to 340 from 250
• Cost decreased slightly by 20 power
• Build time decreased to 75s

Warpspider
• Warp spiders now only seek cover in a 2m radius to lower the time they spend between teleporting and firing at enemies

Wraithlord
• Wraithlord weapon upgrade icons now disappear when one is researched
• Wraithlord cost has increased to 450/120 from 450/80
• Wraithlord health has increased to 1200 from 700
• Wraithlord now does splash damage on its melee attack

Rangers
• Kinetic shot cannot target units immune to knockback
• Kinetic shot now does weapon knockback instead of medium weapon knockback
• Infiltrate ability has no cooldown

Shuriken Cannon team
• Energy removed
• Can garrison structures
• Squad health increased to 825

Brightlance Weapon team
• Squad health increased to 825

Banshees
• When fleet of foot is used with an exarch added, squads takes 50% reduced ranged damage for the duration.
• Aspect of banshee increases HP by 30% from 25%

D Cannon
• Projectile now fires at the location that was targeted when the D cannon begins its wind up animation. This makes it more difficult for the D Cannon to hit moving targets
• Can garrison structures
• Squad health increased to 825

Guardians
• Guardian warlock damage reduction aura effect changed to 0.825 from 0.75

Falcon
• Speed reduced to 6 from 8

Fire Prism
• Improved toggling between fire modes
• Speed reduced to 4.5 from 6.5

Space Marines

Global
• Added Librarian unit to tier 2
• Orbital Bombardment now costs 500 zeal
• Blessing of the Omnissiah now repairs less HP to vehicles
• Added the ability to upgrade Space Marine Turrets to Missile turrets

Force Commander
• Stormshield wargear now grants the Force Commander a 20% ranged damage reduction bonus
• Force Commander power fist wargear damage increased from 145 to 170
• Force Commander terminator power fist damage increased from 145 to 170
• Force Commander artificer armour now grants 20 energy as well as addition HP
• Fixed an exploit allowing the Force Commander to give a never-ending defense bonus to allies from a Webway gate
• Force Commander in Terminator armour now has a lightning claw upgrade

Techmarine
• Techmarine melee damage increased from 14 to 18
• Techmarine now has a melta gun wargear option in tier 2
• Bionics now effects a 360-degree area with reduced damage
• Proximity Mine can now be cancelled while building

Devastator Marine Squad
• Now has a Lascannon upgrade in tier 2 effective against vehicles

Dreadnought
• Dreadnought now has a multimelta upgrade effective vs. vehicles and heavy infantry
• Dreadnought cost increased from 500/90 to 500/140
• Dreadnought HP increased to 1200 from 800
• Dreadnoughts now do splash damage with their melee attacks

Tactical Marines
• Tactical Marines now have the Kraken Bolts ability which increases their weapon damage by 20% against targets with heavy armour
• Plasma gun damage decreased to 65 from 70

Razorback
• Razorback damage increased to 110 from 95

Predator
• Predator now has a dual linked lascannon upgrade which is effective vs. vehicles

Terminators
• Terminator powerfist damage increased from 47 to 68
• Terminator cost reduced to 300 Zeal and 600 Requisition
• Cyclone missile barrage damage reduced to 40 from 80, no longer knocks back retreating units

Assault Terminators
• Assault Terminators now have a lightning claws upgrade
• Assault Terminators HP increased from 1500 to 1800
• Storm Hammer damage decreased from 85 to 75
• Assault Terminators cost reduced to 300 Zeal and 600 Requisition

Tyranids

General
• Tier 2 Carnifex has been reintegrated into the tier 3 Screamer Killer and remains in tier 3
• Added Genestealer unit to tier 2
• Added Tyrant Guard unit to tier 2
• The global ability ‘Mycetic Spores’ now deploys a Ravener Brood and has been moved to the Ravener Alpha
• The global ability ‘Spore Mines’ has been moved to the Lictor Alpha
• Tyranoformation now costs 500 Biomass

Hive Tyrant
• Hive Tyrant Crushing Claw damage increased to 120 from 73

Ravener Alpha
• Corrosive Devourer damage reduced from 180 to 135
• Corrosive Devourer cooldown reduced from 1.8 to 1.4
• The Ravener Alpha can now construct the Hive Node structure

Hormagaunt
• The adrenal glands upgrade has been reduced in cost to 75/15 from 75/20

Warriors
• Warriors with the Adrenal Gland upgrade now provide melee Tyranid units with a boost to melee damage
• Adrenal Gland warriors damage reduced to 27.5 from 55

Zoanthrope
• Zoanthrope windup speed increased to 2s from 1.5s

Venom Brood
• The Venom Brood now provides ranged Tyranid units with a boost to ranged damage
• Venom Brood warrior no longer knockdown units with their leap

Spore Mines
• Fixed an issue where Spore Mines would not damage power nodes and power generators

==============================
/ end of notes for 2.1 Chaos Rising Update
==============================
]]> 2.1 Patch Notes

Melee/Ranged Toggle w00t!!!!!!

Quote:===============================
Chaos Rising Update 2.1 notes
===============================

New Features

Global
• Support for screen resolutions with a wider aspect ratio than 16x9, such as those used with AMD's Eyefinity technology
• Stance Toggle option has been added for switching between ranged and melee unit behaviour in all game modes

Multiplayer
• New Map: 2p Judgment of Carrion
• New Map: 2p Ice Station Obelis
• New Map: 4p Desert Showdown
• New Map: 4p Judgment of Carrion
• New Map: 4p Selenon Fissure
• New Map: 6p Argent Shelf
• New Map: 6p Judgment of Carrion
• New Map: 6p Calderis Refinery (Free-For-All)
• New Map: 6p Judgment of Carrion (Free-For-All)
• Added Librarian Unit to tier two of Space Marines
• Added Weirdboy Unit to tier two of Orks
• Added Tyrant Guard Unit to tier two of Tyranids
• Added Gene Stealers Squad to tier two of Tyranids
• Added Wraithguard Squad to tier two of Eldar
• Added the ability to play against owners of Chaos Rising who are playing as the Chaos Race
• Added Free for All and Team Free for All Victory Point game modes to Custom Games
• New target priority system implemented so that idle units prefer attacking enemies they specialize against
• Vehicle wrecks now remain on the map and provide cover

The Last Stand
• Added the ability to play with owners of Chaos Rising who are playing as Chaos Sorcerer or Hive Tyrant

Campaign
• Added the ability to transfer save games of completed Aurelian Campaigns to Chaos Rising
• Added the ability save during mid-missions (Chaos Rising Campaign Only)
• Wargear tooltips in both campaigns now contain significantly more information such as attack speed, accuracy, etc
• New 'Invite a Friend' button added to the bridge to easily invite friends to a co-op game

Campaign, Last Stand and Global Bug Fixes

Global
• Various general performance and memory optimizations
• Various stability fixes to front-end menu screens

Campaign
• Fixed issue where a drag-select starting on a wargear item would "stick" even after releasing the mouse button
• More enemies now have the updated unit decorators
• Cyrus' Deep Smoke ability has been retooled; Cyrus now drops a smoke grenade when he infiltrates or reveals himself
• Thaddeus' Ranged Specialist trait will now also add a passive chance to stun with any ranged weapon
• The Chapter's Fury ability has been reworked to charge up from taking damage
• Thule's Might of the Ancient ability has been renamed "Mighty Strike"
• The Force Commander's Drop Bays and Orbital Barrage traits have been combined into a new trait called Orbital Command
• The Force Commander has a new trait called Inspiring Shout which replaced Orbital Barrage's position on the Will path

Multiplayer
• Maps are now listed in alphabetical order
• New tutorial loading screens have been added
• Various minor ability functionality and balance tweaks
• Various text updates for clarity and accuracy

Army Painter
• Space Marine Red Scorpions chapter added
• Chaos Red Corsairs warband added
• Chaos Alpha Legion warband added
• Chaos Death Guard warband added
• Chaos Emperor's Children warband added
• Chaos Iron Warriors warband added
• Chaos Night Lords warband added
• Chaos Thousand Sons warband added
• Chaos Word Bearers warband added
• Chaos World Eaters warband added
• Khorne Red color added
• Chaos army paint schemes can be created by owners of DOW2 or Chaos Rising

Last Stand
• Fixed issue where players would lose ability functionality if revived after dying while entering a building
• Fixed problem with player collision when standing on closing gates
• Fixed an issue where the screen would turn black permanently during the transition between wave 19 and 20 under rare circumstances
• Last Stand heroes can now be rotated in the hero select screen

Front End and Options
• Custom games list can now be sorted by clicking the 'Players' header
• Fixed an issue where a player's Trueskill on the leaderboards screen would be one game behind the Trueskill displayed on the Player Statistics screen
• Fixed the total number of wins/losses displaying incorrectly on the leaderboards
• Fixed a variety of issues with rendering after changing graphics options
• Default resolution on first launch will attempt to match desktop resolution before falling back to lower resolutions
• Ultra settings have been disabled for users running 32-bit versions of Windows unless using the /3GB OS startup switch

Balance Changes and Multiplayer Bug Fixes

Global
• Repair no longer works on ambient buildings
• Artillery projectiles now fire at the location they were firing at when they begin their wind up animation, this makes it more difficult to hit moving targets
• Units under the effects of the Phase Shift ability can no longer repair other units or buildings
• Units can now be damaged by grenades while entering a building but before fully setting up
• Looted Tank and Predator Tank no longer shoot continously without enemy targets while moving towards the destination of an attack move order
• Unit and ability FX can no longer be seen through the fog of war (some exceptions)
• Fixed issue where queued actions could sometimes be resumed upon reviving a hero unit
• Camouflage abilities can no longer be used in buildings

Map Changes
• Angel Gate: Destroyed buildings at the top of the map to prevent garrisoning issues
• Outer Reaches: Moved some objects to prevent units getting stuck
• Greentooth Gorge: Added impasses to prevent units getting stuck behind bases

Orks

Global
• Added the Weirdboy unit to Tier 2
• Roks global ability now costs 500 Waaagh
• More dakka will no longer work on some units who have no ranged weapon
• More dakka will no longer work on unconscious units
• Ork global abilities order on the Select Hero screen now match their order in-game

Kommando Nob
• Remote bomb placement no longer keeps Kommando in suppressed animation state
• Kaboom damage no longer works on invulnerable targets.
• Kommando Nob's Rokkit Launcha damage reduced to 65 from 72

Mekboy
• Banner no longer gives bonus to recharge times

Deff Dread
• Deff Dread health has been increased to 650 from 450
• Deff Dread Burnaz and Bitz upgrade cost has decreased to 180/20 from 200/20
• Burnaz and Bitz now adds +400 HP
• Deff Dread cost has increased to 250/70 from 250/45
• Burna damage reduced to 40 from 90
• Burnas can now use Attack Ground
• Special attack no longer cut through immunities and armor

Stikkbomma
• Stikkbomma stun bomb cooldown reduced to 30 seconds from 60 seconds
• Stikkbommba grenade damage has been adjusted over their effective radius, does more consistent and higher damage.
• Stikkbomma HP increased to 200
• Stikkbomb damage increased to 67 from 58

Tankbustas
• Min range added to Rokkit barrage

Warboss
• Warboss Powerclaw now does 190 damage, up from 150
• Warboss’ Shoota ability now does 50 damage for the duration of the ability, up from 28
• Weapon skill reduced to 70 from 90
• Knockback shot can no longer target vehicles
• Knockback shots changed to weapon knockback instead of ability knockback

Stormboyz
• Bomba boyz attack no longer hurts immune units

Sluggas
• Burna Upgrade increases health by 10% instead of 20%
• Burna upgrade cost 85/20

Banner
• Ork waaagh banner now has the Frazzle ability which stuns nearby enemies and buffs the speed, attack and defense of nearby allies
• Ork waaagh banner no longer gives bonuses to ability recharge times

Nob Squad
• Can now attack buildings with their default weapon

Looted Tank
• Max speed reduced to 5 from 7

Eldar

Global
• Added the Wraithguard unit Tier 2
• Eldritch Storm now costs 500 Psychic Might
• Weapon platform teams can now garrison buildings

Webway
• Holo-field ability added to farseer webway gate, when activated cloaks nearby units.
• Webway gates are now permanently cloaked when playing as the Farseer hero

Warpspider Hero
• Entangle will no longer work on unconscious units
• Units affected by group teleport are immune to knockback
• Crack Shot can no longer be used on units without a ranged weapon
• Heavy gauge filament can be toggled in buildings
• Heavy gauge filament no longer changes weapon damage
• Entangle no longer works on vehicles

Farseer
• Cannot be knocked back while levitate active
• Weapon skill reduced to 70 from 90
• Mindwar damage type is now melee heavy instead of piercing

Warlock
• Warlock’s merciless Witchblade now drains 15 mana per hit, down from 30
• Destructor damages units in buildings
• Weapon skill reduced to 70 from 90
• Cloaking shroud now affects vehicles
• Providence should now properly make you invulnerable
• Warlock no longer leaps and knocks down enemies
• Warlock now charges enemies

Avatar
• Avatar of Khaine sword damage increase to 340 from 250
• Cost decreased slightly by 20 power
• Build time decreased to 75s

Warpspider
• Warp spiders now only seek cover in a 2m radius to lower the time they spend between teleporting and firing at enemies

Wraithlord
• Wraithlord weapon upgrade icons now disappear when one is researched
• Wraithlord cost has increased to 450/120 from 450/80
• Wraithlord health has increased to 1200 from 700
• Wraithlord now does splash damage on its melee attack

Rangers
• Kinetic shot cannot target units immune to knockback
• Kinetic shot now does weapon knockback instead of medium weapon knockback
• Infiltrate ability has no cooldown

Shuriken Cannon team
• Energy removed
• Can garrison structures
• Squad health increased to 825

Brightlance Weapon team
• Squad health increased to 825

Banshees
• When fleet of foot is used with an exarch added, squads takes 50% reduced ranged damage for the duration.
• Aspect of banshee increases HP by 30% from 25%

D Cannon
• Projectile now fires at the location that was targeted when the D cannon begins its wind up animation. This makes it more difficult for the D Cannon to hit moving targets
• Can garrison structures
• Squad health increased to 825

Guardians
• Guardian warlock damage reduction aura effect changed to 0.825 from 0.75

Falcon
• Speed reduced to 6 from 8

Fire Prism
• Improved toggling between fire modes
• Speed reduced to 4.5 from 6.5

Space Marines

Global
• Added Librarian unit to tier 2
• Orbital Bombardment now costs 500 zeal
• Blessing of the Omnissiah now repairs less HP to vehicles
• Added the ability to upgrade Space Marine Turrets to Missile turrets

Force Commander
• Stormshield wargear now grants the Force Commander a 20% ranged damage reduction bonus
• Force Commander power fist wargear damage increased from 145 to 170
• Force Commander terminator power fist damage increased from 145 to 170
• Force Commander artificer armour now grants 20 energy as well as addition HP
• Fixed an exploit allowing the Force Commander to give a never-ending defense bonus to allies from a Webway gate
• Force Commander in Terminator armour now has a lightning claw upgrade

Techmarine
• Techmarine melee damage increased from 14 to 18
• Techmarine now has a melta gun wargear option in tier 2
• Bionics now effects a 360-degree area with reduced damage
• Proximity Mine can now be cancelled while building

Devastator Marine Squad
• Now has a Lascannon upgrade in tier 2 effective against vehicles

Dreadnought
• Dreadnought now has a multimelta upgrade effective vs. vehicles and heavy infantry
• Dreadnought cost increased from 500/90 to 500/140
• Dreadnought HP increased to 1200 from 800
• Dreadnoughts now do splash damage with their melee attacks

Tactical Marines
• Tactical Marines now have the Kraken Bolts ability which increases their weapon damage by 20% against targets with heavy armour
• Plasma gun damage decreased to 65 from 70

Razorback
• Razorback damage increased to 110 from 95

Predator
• Predator now has a dual linked lascannon upgrade which is effective vs. vehicles

Terminators
• Terminator powerfist damage increased from 47 to 68
• Terminator cost reduced to 300 Zeal and 600 Requisition
• Cyclone missile barrage damage reduced to 40 from 80, no longer knocks back retreating units

Assault Terminators
• Assault Terminators now have a lightning claws upgrade
• Assault Terminators HP increased from 1500 to 1800
• Storm Hammer damage decreased from 85 to 75
• Assault Terminators cost reduced to 300 Zeal and 600 Requisition

Tyranids

General
• Tier 2 Carnifex has been reintegrated into the tier 3 Screamer Killer and remains in tier 3
• Added Genestealer unit to tier 2
• Added Tyrant Guard unit to tier 2
• The global ability ‘Mycetic Spores’ now deploys a Ravener Brood and has been moved to the Ravener Alpha
• The global ability ‘Spore Mines’ has been moved to the Lictor Alpha
• Tyranoformation now costs 500 Biomass

Hive Tyrant
• Hive Tyrant Crushing Claw damage increased to 120 from 73

Ravener Alpha
• Corrosive Devourer damage reduced from 180 to 135
• Corrosive Devourer cooldown reduced from 1.8 to 1.4
• The Ravener Alpha can now construct the Hive Node structure

Hormagaunt
• The adrenal glands upgrade has been reduced in cost to 75/15 from 75/20

Warriors
• Warriors with the Adrenal Gland upgrade now provide melee Tyranid units with a boost to melee damage
• Adrenal Gland warriors damage reduced to 27.5 from 55

Zoanthrope
• Zoanthrope windup speed increased to 2s from 1.5s

Venom Brood
• The Venom Brood now provides ranged Tyranid units with a boost to ranged damage
• Venom Brood warrior no longer knockdown units with their leap

Spore Mines
• Fixed an issue where Spore Mines would not damage power nodes and power generators

==============================
/ end of notes for 2.1 Chaos Rising Update
==============================
]]> <![CDATA[So, i got invited to the SC2 beta...]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=477 Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:25:21 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=477
Quite honestly, i probably wouldn't have found out for a few days, but i stopped by TheHiveWorkshop, and noticed the news post which asked members if they had received a key. I quickly popped open my e-mail, and Voila! I was overcome with excitement, seriously, my mom had to yell down the stairs and ask why i was so excited.

I'll have to tell you guys how it is. Tongue]]>
Quite honestly, i probably wouldn't have found out for a few days, but i stopped by TheHiveWorkshop, and noticed the news post which asked members if they had received a key. I quickly popped open my e-mail, and Voila! I was overcome with excitement, seriously, my mom had to yell down the stairs and ask why i was so excited.

I'll have to tell you guys how it is. Tongue]]> <![CDATA[Indie Game Design Do's and Dont's]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=476 Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:10:28 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=476
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/12/o...http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/12/opinion_indie_game_desig

I agree strongly with #4. Take big risks.
During this age of game design, big-name developers seem to be increasingly concerned with how they can make more money rather than provide the player with a new, refreshingly unique gameplay experience ( Modern Warfare 2 is a prime example of this). Sometimes, this is due to the developers publisher not being willing to take the risks, or the publishers investors simply don't like the idea and believe it to be a waste of their company's time and resources, or the devs just want more money. Because of this environment, the burden of creating interesting, new, unique, and challenging games has fallen to us, the Indie devs.

Yes, there are big name developers out there who are championing the cause of renewing creativity among video game developers despite the risks associated with such ventures, and i applaud them, but we can only hope that more and more studios catch on.

Number 4 goes hand in hand with number 5, Don't bite off more than you can chew. Just because indie devs largely carry the burden of creativity within video games, that doesn't mean we should run off and create the next AAA, genre defining blockbuster game we all dream of. Change usually comes to pass with the small, simple things. A new, innovative flash game, taking a classic genre standard and adding a few new, interesting game design concepts, THOSE are the games that slowly but surely redefine the industry, that bring life to the dreary, more stagnant genres. (I'm not suggesting you take StarCraft, change the names and models of the units and rename it , be creative Tongue)

He certainly has some good tips. Sure, they've all been said before, but it's always nice to be brought back down to earth.]]>
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/12/o...http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/12/opinion_indie_game_desig

I agree strongly with #4. Take big risks.
During this age of game design, big-name developers seem to be increasingly concerned with how they can make more money rather than provide the player with a new, refreshingly unique gameplay experience ( Modern Warfare 2 is a prime example of this). Sometimes, this is due to the developers publisher not being willing to take the risks, or the publishers investors simply don't like the idea and believe it to be a waste of their company's time and resources, or the devs just want more money. Because of this environment, the burden of creating interesting, new, unique, and challenging games has fallen to us, the Indie devs.

Yes, there are big name developers out there who are championing the cause of renewing creativity among video game developers despite the risks associated with such ventures, and i applaud them, but we can only hope that more and more studios catch on.

Number 4 goes hand in hand with number 5, Don't bite off more than you can chew. Just because indie devs largely carry the burden of creativity within video games, that doesn't mean we should run off and create the next AAA, genre defining blockbuster game we all dream of. Change usually comes to pass with the small, simple things. A new, innovative flash game, taking a classic genre standard and adding a few new, interesting game design concepts, THOSE are the games that slowly but surely redefine the industry, that bring life to the dreary, more stagnant genres. (I'm not suggesting you take StarCraft, change the names and models of the units and rename it , be creative Tongue)

He certainly has some good tips. Sure, they've all been said before, but it's always nice to be brought back down to earth.]]> <![CDATA[Multi-Player Progression Systems]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=475 Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:01:12 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=475 MP Progression Systems track player "progress" through official/ranked multiplayer matches and award experience, ranks, etc... and typically unlocks as well. This is sometimes referred to as MP Persistence.

The most extreme forms of this come from Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (I've played the beta), and C&C 4 (also the beta). In these games, weapons, perks, etc... are withheld from the player until the player reaches certain ranks/milestones and then these items are "unlocked". Team Fortress 2 could now be said to be such a game as well because players must earn new weapons by amassing class-specific achievements or by playing the game often enough to trigger random unlocks.

Less extreme versions of this include "meaningless" ranks that players earn as they play/win more multiplayer matches (going from Lieutenant to 5 star general in C&C Generals for example).

So, what's the hubbub about these? Really, there isn't much hubbub about the minimal implementations that most RTS games and some FPS games employ to track (effectively) time spent online with the game. These minimal implementations provide little reward and thus rarely are a catalyst for a player to spend more time with the game. As well, they are only of minimal use in gauging player skill (although they are good indicators of experience). Thus, these systems tend to be rather benign and to provide a minimal amount of information as well as a minimal feeling of account persistence. In actuality imo, these systems are largely ineffective for what they are used for. Dawn of War 2 is a game that illustrates this excellently at the moment as it implements both traditional persistence ranking and "TrueSkill". Most players ignore persistence rankings and instead focus on TrueSkill rankings, both for gauging their own and their opponents' effectiveness as well as setting targets for themselves. As well, if the end of the developer is to get the player to play more, then, there is no proper end to a TrueSkill-style ranking system while most persistence ranking systems do end. Also, Blizzard's recent reveals about the new Battle.net for StarCraft 2 are interesting and promising (Left 4 Dead's Survival Mode proved to me that localized scoreboards are effective; granted, arcades should have proved this decades ago, but... but anyway, localized ladders I think will be similarly destined for success).

The bigger hubbub comes from the more extreme end of the scale. These games actually withhold gameplay objects (weaponry, perks, units, etc...) until players play the game enough with sufficient success to reach dedicated ranks. The intent of these systems is quite similar to grinding RPGs and most MMOs- to throw the player a continual stream of bones to keep them "hooked". The problem with this though is that even if all weapons, perks, units, etc... are balanced "perfectly", they are balanced in relation to each other and not in relation to players (specifically, Player X may be amazing with a weapon unlocked at rank 50 but may be pretty bad with everything else), and therefore gameplay balance is affected. Notably, all competitive adaptations of games that use these systems remove ranks and standardize weapon choices (the inability to do this and other modifications for Modern Warfare 2 PC due to lack of LAN and integrated matchmaking spelled the death of competitive PC gaming for it; Bad Company 2 will likely suffer a similar fate as while it leverages dedicated servers, those all come from a centralized source and DICE has revealed no plans for moddability yet). In a very extreme example, C&C 4 links unit type unlocks with player rank, often preventing players from even using a unit that is REQUIRED to effectively counter another unit type until the player has risen sufficiently in rank.

Beyond issues of competitive fairness, developers also should consider that the items they have set to be unlocks are there for a reason. Generally, they are not useless or unappealing, but rather are very useful and quite appealing. My personal experience with the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Beta was that I very much disliked it until I unlocked the Engineer class's SCAR-L and then XM-8C weapons. The game became quite a bit more fun after that. But unilaterally, I *hated* all of the starting weapons. I was really about to stop playing. This is an interesting yet serious dilemma that developers face as such systems can have the reverse intended effect, scaring players away from the game because they do not immediately find what they want rather than hooking them in. And, of course, there are games like C&C 4 where despite that their base design should make them approachable (5v5, very little macro-management, almost completely micro, you are told via tool-tips what units counter what, the game does require some team-work so any more-experienced players on your team will try to help you out to get you to pull your weight, etc...), but really the game is downright unplayable for new players. It forces them into a worse MP hell than even StarCraft as players lose C&C 4 games not because of a lack of skill, but the inability to counter certain tactics because of lack of units, whereas in StarCraft you will likely get massacred in your first week or two of playing online but you can turn the tables by figuring out how you're getting massacred; in C&C 4, you just need to wait until you unlock what you need...

So, having now looked at both sides of the spectrum, what kinda of MP progression systems should game developers consider? Imo, MP progression is not inherently a bad thing. Even the most minimal implementation provides a nice bit of confirmation to the player that their hours of play have some meaning. In fact, a degree of this can be seen by the widespread adoption of Achievements (which generally I, personally, don't give much of a crap about)- and in fact understanding MP persistence can give us insight into the underlying success of Achievements (rather than simply saying, "People seem to like Achievements, so we should just plop some of those in our game").

However, the heavy-handed approach that C&C 4 takes is just horrible. CoD 4, MW2, and Bad Company 2 I also find reprehensible in this respect. CoD 4 and Bad Company 2 mostly overcome it (although for some, Bad Company 2 may not), but lesser games I feel would be slaughtered. That a Call of Duty MMO is being talked of currently doesn't surprise me, since they already have the grind-fest part down...

Anyway, Team Fortress 2 is an interesting beast. The original intent seemed to be to offer secondary, specialist weaponry to replace generalist, primary weaponry. The use of Achievements to regulate this then was supposed to gauge that players using the specialist weaponry had completed milestones for their classes and thus understood the value of those weapons. However, Valve fell prey to Achievements being "Achievements" and while there are many TF2 achievements that promote good/proper class play, there are also many that only Achievement Whores really would concern themselves with otherwise (as well, many of the secondary weapons have actually been attempts to recreate the original vision for certain classes- for example, the Pyro's Backburner, Demoman's Scottish Resistance, Spy's Cloak and Dagger, etc... and thus may be either specific or generalist but in many ways are actually more closely tied to the class than their primary weaponry). This led to the subversion of the system with Achievement Servers. Responding to this, Valve then decided to settle for simply ensuring that players played the game enough, so they implemented random item drops. Well, these were too infrequent and random for most players, and so idle servers and idle programs were created. Thus, despite the inherent awesomeness of the new weapons, the unlock systems for them have resulted in complete failure. Players like myself that do not feel like subverting the systems are stuck considering that yes, Sniper might be an interesting class to play *IF* I had the Huntsman, while other players succumb to some kind of grind (via Achievement Server or Idle Server) to obtain the new items. Either way, Valve may as well just give the items away at this point.

I suppose what can be learned from TF2 though is that if the Achievements and weapons are properly designed to support such a system, it can work. That is, if I want to figure out if a player will understand how to use the Pyro's Backburner before giving it to them, I design an achievement that tasks the player with killing twenty enemies where the player takes no damage from the enemy (thereby inspiring the player to ambush his/her foes). I create another achievement that tasks the player with killing twenty enemies from behind. And etc. When the player completes those or a percentage of those, he/she is determined competent and wanting of this style of weapon and is awarded it.

However, overall, I feel that unlocks should be merely cosmetic. And that is why I think Dawn of War 2 has hit spot-on a great mix of persistent ranking and unlocks. As previously mentioned, Dawn of War 2 has traditional persistence ranking that goes from rank 1 to rank 60 for each race as well as TrueSkill that goes from 0 to 50 (although realistically, between 0 and 40 for DoW 2). What keeps me and most other competitive players hooked is the TrueSkill rank- it's like its own kind of ladder. For the 1-60 persistence rankings, the game awards cosmetic upgrades for units every few ranks. For example, I rank-up to a "Level 1 Shoota Boy" which might be Rank 5 or something. When I get that rank, my Shoota Boyz squads also get a cosmetic upgrade ("'Ard Bitz" or something) that do not impact their performance but which make them look cooler/better, distinguishing my Shoota Boyz from lower-level players' Shoota Boyz. So a player that reaches level 60 has all the cosmetic upgrades and his army looks quite different from a Rank 1 player's army and it's apparent on the field of battle that the Rank 60 is a Rank 60. Imo, this combination of persistent skill ratings and persistent cosmetic upgrades provides a nice balance of maintaining competitive integrity while encouraging players to put more time into the game.

As previously mentioned as well, localized ladders and other methods of evaluating skill/ranking that make it feasible for any player to get to the top are interesting and useful as well. Team Fortress 2's hats, for all intents and purposes, work nicely as well on the other end of the spectrum. Team Fortress 2's tracking of time played as each class and highest scores for each rank and a variety of categories also is pretty interesting. Like with ranking systems, these set targets for the player to beat, be they the player's own, a friend's, etc... Personally, I would also like to see average scores for these categories as well as most of the time the highest scores tend to be one-off deals that come about because of a particular situation and are tough to beat despite that they are your own, but an average of these will constantly shift so the player can constantly look to improve that or at least maintain it while high scores may remain stagnant for quite some time.]]> MP Progression Systems track player "progress" through official/ranked multiplayer matches and award experience, ranks, etc... and typically unlocks as well. This is sometimes referred to as MP Persistence.

The most extreme forms of this come from Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (I've played the beta), and C&C 4 (also the beta). In these games, weapons, perks, etc... are withheld from the player until the player reaches certain ranks/milestones and then these items are "unlocked". Team Fortress 2 could now be said to be such a game as well because players must earn new weapons by amassing class-specific achievements or by playing the game often enough to trigger random unlocks.

Less extreme versions of this include "meaningless" ranks that players earn as they play/win more multiplayer matches (going from Lieutenant to 5 star general in C&C Generals for example).

So, what's the hubbub about these? Really, there isn't much hubbub about the minimal implementations that most RTS games and some FPS games employ to track (effectively) time spent online with the game. These minimal implementations provide little reward and thus rarely are a catalyst for a player to spend more time with the game. As well, they are only of minimal use in gauging player skill (although they are good indicators of experience). Thus, these systems tend to be rather benign and to provide a minimal amount of information as well as a minimal feeling of account persistence. In actuality imo, these systems are largely ineffective for what they are used for. Dawn of War 2 is a game that illustrates this excellently at the moment as it implements both traditional persistence ranking and "TrueSkill". Most players ignore persistence rankings and instead focus on TrueSkill rankings, both for gauging their own and their opponents' effectiveness as well as setting targets for themselves. As well, if the end of the developer is to get the player to play more, then, there is no proper end to a TrueSkill-style ranking system while most persistence ranking systems do end. Also, Blizzard's recent reveals about the new Battle.net for StarCraft 2 are interesting and promising (Left 4 Dead's Survival Mode proved to me that localized scoreboards are effective; granted, arcades should have proved this decades ago, but... but anyway, localized ladders I think will be similarly destined for success).

The bigger hubbub comes from the more extreme end of the scale. These games actually withhold gameplay objects (weaponry, perks, units, etc...) until players play the game enough with sufficient success to reach dedicated ranks. The intent of these systems is quite similar to grinding RPGs and most MMOs- to throw the player a continual stream of bones to keep them "hooked". The problem with this though is that even if all weapons, perks, units, etc... are balanced "perfectly", they are balanced in relation to each other and not in relation to players (specifically, Player X may be amazing with a weapon unlocked at rank 50 but may be pretty bad with everything else), and therefore gameplay balance is affected. Notably, all competitive adaptations of games that use these systems remove ranks and standardize weapon choices (the inability to do this and other modifications for Modern Warfare 2 PC due to lack of LAN and integrated matchmaking spelled the death of competitive PC gaming for it; Bad Company 2 will likely suffer a similar fate as while it leverages dedicated servers, those all come from a centralized source and DICE has revealed no plans for moddability yet). In a very extreme example, C&C 4 links unit type unlocks with player rank, often preventing players from even using a unit that is REQUIRED to effectively counter another unit type until the player has risen sufficiently in rank.

Beyond issues of competitive fairness, developers also should consider that the items they have set to be unlocks are there for a reason. Generally, they are not useless or unappealing, but rather are very useful and quite appealing. My personal experience with the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Beta was that I very much disliked it until I unlocked the Engineer class's SCAR-L and then XM-8C weapons. The game became quite a bit more fun after that. But unilaterally, I *hated* all of the starting weapons. I was really about to stop playing. This is an interesting yet serious dilemma that developers face as such systems can have the reverse intended effect, scaring players away from the game because they do not immediately find what they want rather than hooking them in. And, of course, there are games like C&C 4 where despite that their base design should make them approachable (5v5, very little macro-management, almost completely micro, you are told via tool-tips what units counter what, the game does require some team-work so any more-experienced players on your team will try to help you out to get you to pull your weight, etc...), but really the game is downright unplayable for new players. It forces them into a worse MP hell than even StarCraft as players lose C&C 4 games not because of a lack of skill, but the inability to counter certain tactics because of lack of units, whereas in StarCraft you will likely get massacred in your first week or two of playing online but you can turn the tables by figuring out how you're getting massacred; in C&C 4, you just need to wait until you unlock what you need...

So, having now looked at both sides of the spectrum, what kinda of MP progression systems should game developers consider? Imo, MP progression is not inherently a bad thing. Even the most minimal implementation provides a nice bit of confirmation to the player that their hours of play have some meaning. In fact, a degree of this can be seen by the widespread adoption of Achievements (which generally I, personally, don't give much of a crap about)- and in fact understanding MP persistence can give us insight into the underlying success of Achievements (rather than simply saying, "People seem to like Achievements, so we should just plop some of those in our game").

However, the heavy-handed approach that C&C 4 takes is just horrible. CoD 4, MW2, and Bad Company 2 I also find reprehensible in this respect. CoD 4 and Bad Company 2 mostly overcome it (although for some, Bad Company 2 may not), but lesser games I feel would be slaughtered. That a Call of Duty MMO is being talked of currently doesn't surprise me, since they already have the grind-fest part down...

Anyway, Team Fortress 2 is an interesting beast. The original intent seemed to be to offer secondary, specialist weaponry to replace generalist, primary weaponry. The use of Achievements to regulate this then was supposed to gauge that players using the specialist weaponry had completed milestones for their classes and thus understood the value of those weapons. However, Valve fell prey to Achievements being "Achievements" and while there are many TF2 achievements that promote good/proper class play, there are also many that only Achievement Whores really would concern themselves with otherwise (as well, many of the secondary weapons have actually been attempts to recreate the original vision for certain classes- for example, the Pyro's Backburner, Demoman's Scottish Resistance, Spy's Cloak and Dagger, etc... and thus may be either specific or generalist but in many ways are actually more closely tied to the class than their primary weaponry). This led to the subversion of the system with Achievement Servers. Responding to this, Valve then decided to settle for simply ensuring that players played the game enough, so they implemented random item drops. Well, these were too infrequent and random for most players, and so idle servers and idle programs were created. Thus, despite the inherent awesomeness of the new weapons, the unlock systems for them have resulted in complete failure. Players like myself that do not feel like subverting the systems are stuck considering that yes, Sniper might be an interesting class to play *IF* I had the Huntsman, while other players succumb to some kind of grind (via Achievement Server or Idle Server) to obtain the new items. Either way, Valve may as well just give the items away at this point.

I suppose what can be learned from TF2 though is that if the Achievements and weapons are properly designed to support such a system, it can work. That is, if I want to figure out if a player will understand how to use the Pyro's Backburner before giving it to them, I design an achievement that tasks the player with killing twenty enemies where the player takes no damage from the enemy (thereby inspiring the player to ambush his/her foes). I create another achievement that tasks the player with killing twenty enemies from behind. And etc. When the player completes those or a percentage of those, he/she is determined competent and wanting of this style of weapon and is awarded it.

However, overall, I feel that unlocks should be merely cosmetic. And that is why I think Dawn of War 2 has hit spot-on a great mix of persistent ranking and unlocks. As previously mentioned, Dawn of War 2 has traditional persistence ranking that goes from rank 1 to rank 60 for each race as well as TrueSkill that goes from 0 to 50 (although realistically, between 0 and 40 for DoW 2). What keeps me and most other competitive players hooked is the TrueSkill rank- it's like its own kind of ladder. For the 1-60 persistence rankings, the game awards cosmetic upgrades for units every few ranks. For example, I rank-up to a "Level 1 Shoota Boy" which might be Rank 5 or something. When I get that rank, my Shoota Boyz squads also get a cosmetic upgrade ("'Ard Bitz" or something) that do not impact their performance but which make them look cooler/better, distinguishing my Shoota Boyz from lower-level players' Shoota Boyz. So a player that reaches level 60 has all the cosmetic upgrades and his army looks quite different from a Rank 1 player's army and it's apparent on the field of battle that the Rank 60 is a Rank 60. Imo, this combination of persistent skill ratings and persistent cosmetic upgrades provides a nice balance of maintaining competitive integrity while encouraging players to put more time into the game.

As previously mentioned as well, localized ladders and other methods of evaluating skill/ranking that make it feasible for any player to get to the top are interesting and useful as well. Team Fortress 2's hats, for all intents and purposes, work nicely as well on the other end of the spectrum. Team Fortress 2's tracking of time played as each class and highest scores for each rank and a variety of categories also is pretty interesting. Like with ranking systems, these set targets for the player to beat, be they the player's own, a friend's, etc... Personally, I would also like to see average scores for these categories as well as most of the time the highest scores tend to be one-off deals that come about because of a particular situation and are tough to beat despite that they are your own, but an average of these will constantly shift so the player can constantly look to improve that or at least maintain it while high scores may remain stagnant for quite some time.]]> <![CDATA[Support of Control Methods]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=474 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:28:47 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=474 brief article that summarizes the event). I think the media is taking the whole "protest" deal out of proportion and I do agree that 2K provided plenty of warning so those complaining don't have much ground to stand on. Furthermore, it really is not that hard to remap controls to work on your gamepad and if even that is too much for you there are companies like Switchblade Pro that make software to do exactly that for you (they've done demos of this working quite well in CounterStrike: Source and Call of Duty 4 and such, neither of which have inherent gamepad support; btw, by "working quite well", I mean that the gamepads work like you'd expect gamepads to- they don't work well in the context of facing mouse and keyboard, lol; Switchblade actually decided to do a CoD 4 PC tournament with mouse/keyboard teams and gamepad teams... all of the gamepad teams got annihilated in the first round; I was on an m/k team ofc Wink).

Anyway, looking beyond the furor, there is a pretty valid question here about what forms of control developers should look to support in their titles. For Bioshock 2, as I recall both Bioshock 1 and 2 are GFW titles (Games for Windows). Last I knew, all GFW titles need to support the X360 gamepad (this was one of the reasons why Activision did not bother with GFW certification for CoD 4 PC since they actually developed a different SKU for that unlike Modern Failfare 2), so I am somewhat perplexed there. Either way, the original Bioshock supported gamepads so in general I'd say that it's bad fan service to drop support for a technology your formerly endorsed and supported unless that technology is just absolutely dead.

But now, moving to a broader area of this issue, what I find odd here is that 2K already has done all of the requisite UI design (and likely coding as well; in particular, note that they stated that they removed components of the UI to swap in new ones which suggests that the gamepad-friendly UI was at one point in the PC version) to support gamepads. They state that they opted to provide a superior mouse/keyboard controls, but obviously for the X360/PS3 versions they were working on providing superior gamepad controls. It thus seems a rather simple solution here that striving for better m/k controls does not necessarily need to come at the expense of gamepad controls. That is, the game simply could have been coded so that if a gamepad was utilized, the gamepad-favoring UI would be swapped-in and used instead of the m/k UI. In general, this should be easily doable for all cross-platform games and thus there is little reason not to- yes, the m/k provide superior control for first person games (that point is rather unassailable- if you pit two people of equal skill against each other and equal familiarity with their chosen controller, gamepad or m/k, m/k is going to win in a first person game because its upper bound for what it can do there is just significantly higher), but if the player is more familiar and comfortable with the gamepad then that's going to be their preferred route.

In the case of the PC, I think it's worthwhile remembering that one of the appeals of the PC platform is its open-ness. M/k is the default control-scheme, but joysticks, gamepads, etc... are rather common peripherals nowadays. To drive that point home, m/k controls typically suck for flight sims, combat flight sims, air combat games, etc... and the typical gamepad is better-suited to them than m/k yet that was a genre that thrived massively on the PC for quite some time because it was flat-out easier, cheaper, and simpler to hook-up a joystick to your PC than to get one on your console. As well, reasons for getting the PC version of a game often go far beyond the method of control, ensconcing superior graphics, moddability, online, digital distribution, and even portability (courtesy of laptops). When developing for the PC, you really need to consider that even if you are developing console versions of your game, controls are just one of many factors that contribute to a customer's decision to purchase one version over another. And for those developers that are releasing games on PC that do not work best with m/k (fighters, racers, platformers, sports games, etc...), they need to consider that they can support the method of control that works best for their game. Also, as with all platforms, a PC may be the only thing your customer has to play your game with.

In general, when it comes to supporting various methods of control, we get into a discussion that actually goes well beyond gamepads and m/k. We can get into joysticks, guitar peripherals, racing wheels, the Novint Falcon and other such "unique" control methods, voice control, touch control, motion control, etc... So how do you pick out what to support and what not to support?

The first consideration here, and I agree with 2K on this, is that you have to prioritize supporting the platform's native controls. Even if they don't mesh well at all with your game. Here, something is better than nothing. And, in general, it's usually possible to do a halfway decent job. Be it a gamepad or m/k, these are user interfaces of their own and thus they are designed to translate human actions into on-screen actions in some manner. And nicely, the default controls for a platform typically are designed to be generalized greatly, so that gives you plenty of wiggle room to work with.

The second consideration is what control method works best with your game. If this method aligns with the platform's default controls, then you know what to focus most of your efforts on. If not, then this is the real star of your show. As previously mentioned, flight games are going to work best with joysticks, so while you're still going to want to provide a m/k option, you want to spend the majority of time making sure your joystick controls are top-notch (and you'll also probably want to invest in supporting force-feedback and other joystick-specific features).

Now you have all your remaining considerations. You're going to want to prioritize these and, in my opinion, support as many as you feasibly can, in order of priority. For example, for a PC RTS game your primary method of control is going to be m/k. However, you may also want to look into supporting touch, voice, motion/pointer (ala Wiimote), etc... To cover everything you do not support, you'll want to implement your controls as modularly as possible so that you can allow the player or an external entity (such as a peripheral manufacturer) to tweak them to support whatever their control preference is even if you, the game developer, do not specifically support that control set-up.]]> brief article that summarizes the event). I think the media is taking the whole "protest" deal out of proportion and I do agree that 2K provided plenty of warning so those complaining don't have much ground to stand on. Furthermore, it really is not that hard to remap controls to work on your gamepad and if even that is too much for you there are companies like Switchblade Pro that make software to do exactly that for you (they've done demos of this working quite well in CounterStrike: Source and Call of Duty 4 and such, neither of which have inherent gamepad support; btw, by "working quite well", I mean that the gamepads work like you'd expect gamepads to- they don't work well in the context of facing mouse and keyboard, lol; Switchblade actually decided to do a CoD 4 PC tournament with mouse/keyboard teams and gamepad teams... all of the gamepad teams got annihilated in the first round; I was on an m/k team ofc Wink).

Anyway, looking beyond the furor, there is a pretty valid question here about what forms of control developers should look to support in their titles. For Bioshock 2, as I recall both Bioshock 1 and 2 are GFW titles (Games for Windows). Last I knew, all GFW titles need to support the X360 gamepad (this was one of the reasons why Activision did not bother with GFW certification for CoD 4 PC since they actually developed a different SKU for that unlike Modern Failfare 2), so I am somewhat perplexed there. Either way, the original Bioshock supported gamepads so in general I'd say that it's bad fan service to drop support for a technology your formerly endorsed and supported unless that technology is just absolutely dead.

But now, moving to a broader area of this issue, what I find odd here is that 2K already has done all of the requisite UI design (and likely coding as well; in particular, note that they stated that they removed components of the UI to swap in new ones which suggests that the gamepad-friendly UI was at one point in the PC version) to support gamepads. They state that they opted to provide a superior mouse/keyboard controls, but obviously for the X360/PS3 versions they were working on providing superior gamepad controls. It thus seems a rather simple solution here that striving for better m/k controls does not necessarily need to come at the expense of gamepad controls. That is, the game simply could have been coded so that if a gamepad was utilized, the gamepad-favoring UI would be swapped-in and used instead of the m/k UI. In general, this should be easily doable for all cross-platform games and thus there is little reason not to- yes, the m/k provide superior control for first person games (that point is rather unassailable- if you pit two people of equal skill against each other and equal familiarity with their chosen controller, gamepad or m/k, m/k is going to win in a first person game because its upper bound for what it can do there is just significantly higher), but if the player is more familiar and comfortable with the gamepad then that's going to be their preferred route.

In the case of the PC, I think it's worthwhile remembering that one of the appeals of the PC platform is its open-ness. M/k is the default control-scheme, but joysticks, gamepads, etc... are rather common peripherals nowadays. To drive that point home, m/k controls typically suck for flight sims, combat flight sims, air combat games, etc... and the typical gamepad is better-suited to them than m/k yet that was a genre that thrived massively on the PC for quite some time because it was flat-out easier, cheaper, and simpler to hook-up a joystick to your PC than to get one on your console. As well, reasons for getting the PC version of a game often go far beyond the method of control, ensconcing superior graphics, moddability, online, digital distribution, and even portability (courtesy of laptops). When developing for the PC, you really need to consider that even if you are developing console versions of your game, controls are just one of many factors that contribute to a customer's decision to purchase one version over another. And for those developers that are releasing games on PC that do not work best with m/k (fighters, racers, platformers, sports games, etc...), they need to consider that they can support the method of control that works best for their game. Also, as with all platforms, a PC may be the only thing your customer has to play your game with.

In general, when it comes to supporting various methods of control, we get into a discussion that actually goes well beyond gamepads and m/k. We can get into joysticks, guitar peripherals, racing wheels, the Novint Falcon and other such "unique" control methods, voice control, touch control, motion control, etc... So how do you pick out what to support and what not to support?

The first consideration here, and I agree with 2K on this, is that you have to prioritize supporting the platform's native controls. Even if they don't mesh well at all with your game. Here, something is better than nothing. And, in general, it's usually possible to do a halfway decent job. Be it a gamepad or m/k, these are user interfaces of their own and thus they are designed to translate human actions into on-screen actions in some manner. And nicely, the default controls for a platform typically are designed to be generalized greatly, so that gives you plenty of wiggle room to work with.

The second consideration is what control method works best with your game. If this method aligns with the platform's default controls, then you know what to focus most of your efforts on. If not, then this is the real star of your show. As previously mentioned, flight games are going to work best with joysticks, so while you're still going to want to provide a m/k option, you want to spend the majority of time making sure your joystick controls are top-notch (and you'll also probably want to invest in supporting force-feedback and other joystick-specific features).

Now you have all your remaining considerations. You're going to want to prioritize these and, in my opinion, support as many as you feasibly can, in order of priority. For example, for a PC RTS game your primary method of control is going to be m/k. However, you may also want to look into supporting touch, voice, motion/pointer (ala Wiimote), etc... To cover everything you do not support, you'll want to implement your controls as modularly as possible so that you can allow the player or an external entity (such as a peripheral manufacturer) to tweak them to support whatever their control preference is even if you, the game developer, do not specifically support that control set-up.]]> <![CDATA[Save Systems]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=473 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:33:10 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=473
And all of the above begs the question of what save systems should games provide to the player? In the above case, BIA (Brothers in Arms) provides a checkpoint save system, which for the most part works pretty well as the game requires the player to execute sequences of tactical decisions to clear-out enemy positions and accomplish objectives. Forcing the player to complete these in sections and to not just try and brute-force through them as quicksave would allow works quite nicely. It provides a proper feel of accomplishment at having made not just a single good decision each time, but rather a series of good decisions.

Usually, the checkpoints divide the series of decisions nicely, preventing the player from being overly penalized for making a single mistake and then needing to go back and replay 15+ minutes of the game. However, I have occasionally noted, as with almost all checkpoint-based games, there are some checkpoints that become grating because the areas they cover are tough and either long or draining to repeat. Still, the checkpoint system does impose a sizable level of difficulty on the game and the sections encapsulated in each checkpoint.

So now let's take a look at the broader scope of save systems here, because BIA is just one game. Let's start by listing the types of save systems that games can have:
  • None: This broad category ensconces the concept of no saves at all, lives, and continues. A select few games intend to make themselves so hardcore that if the player dies at all ever for any reason, he/she needs to restart from the very beginning of the game. Mostly though, this was leveraged in the early years of video games with the concept of continues. Lives are mostly overlooked here as they usually factored into checkpoints, but some games do not have continues and instead only have lives and in those, lives are a form of no saving. But, continues generally existed in a finite amount and allowed the player to restart from the beginning of a level until the player ran out of continues, at which point it was game over.
  • Level: This can be thought of as scene selection more or less. Except you have to unlock the scenes usually. But basically, this form of save system keeps track of what level the player has made it to and allows the player to start from the beginning of any completed level. This system is rarely used alone but rather is often used in tandem with other save systems.
  • Checkpoint: This is the broadest save system and it encapsulates traditional, progress-based checkpoint saves as well as event-based saves (for example, typewriters in Resident Evil) and most "lives" systems. Checkpoints are popular because they allow for a level to be split-up into sections that the developer controls (although games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space give some control back to the player with their event-based systems as the player can trigger the same checkpoint multiple times). The way that lives are implemented for checkpoints is usually that when a player loses a life, his/her character is transported back to the nearest checkpoint (for example, in Sonic the Hedgehog, recall the rotating sign sticks).
  • Save Anytime: This system of saving is popular in PC games (and not so popular in console games; popular on PC thanks to its similarity to application-style saving) and allows the user to save his/her game at pretty much any time by navigating through a menu ad giving the saved game a name that can then be used to load it later. This is very popular in RTS games and is often combined with Level save systems for PC games.
  • Quicksave: Not yet the most common save system, but perhaps the most popular among players, Quicksave is much like Save Anytime in that the user is allowed to save at any time, but rather than having to cumbersomely traverse a menu, Quicksave generally maps to a keystroke and either maintains a single save file which is overwritten with each press of it or creates a new file each time it is pressed. Besides the mechanical differences between Quicksave and Save Anytime, Quicksave comes with the connotative difference that it is meant to be used to save often (the "save before going around every corner" mentality). Quicksave is usually combined with Save Anytime and Level saving systems.

So, those five types are what I'd consider to be the primary types of save systems. Now, I think that we can actually make a few determinations on when some of these save systems should be used.

Quicksave and Save Anytime are by far the nicest save systems in respect to the player. In that respect, they are the ultimate save systems, and the combination of them is the best. However, they both have an issue, and that issue is that they can make games that use them quite easy and overall less challenging and even less fun (some frustration in a game is actually good- it makes for challenge).

Is this a problem though? Remember as well that both Quicksave and Save Anytime are elective procedures- the player chooses when to use them. So if the player wants more of the challenge, the player can choose not to use them, unlike checkpoints (well, unlike *most* checkpoints). But, consider that this provides no developer direction of save-based difficulty for such players outside of levels (if the game even uses levels)- for players that haven't played the game yet, figuring out when to Quicksave to emulate checkpoints can be rather tough if not impossible. But what level of developer direction is required really is based on the game itself.

My personal solution to this problem is to always make Quicksave and Save Anytime available to the player. Why? The player is the one who has chosen to purchase and play your game. Therefore, the player should have as much control over that experience as he/she wants, even if it breaks developer control to an extent. Consider how frustrating it is to be most of the way through a level or mission but you need to go to bed or something pops up.

Now, as mentioned, Quicksave and Save Anytime do impact difficulty. Therefore, imo, much as the player should be able to leverage them, the player should also be able to turn Quicksave and/or Save Anytime off- INDEPENDENTLY of the difficulty level the player has set the game to. Preferably though, this should be indicated in some manner that the player has turned these features off. That is, much like a player can currently claim that they beat the game on "Hard" or "Medium" difficulty, the player should be able to claim for example that they beat the game on "Hard" difficulty with Quicksave and Save Anytime turned-off.

I also feel though that games need to go beyond just Quicksave and Save Anytime. There are a few reasons for this.

First, the inherent potential for technical difficulties in games. In my opinion, by default, games should autosave right before any significant loading sequence (for example, at the end of a level before the next level loads, right before a player uses rapid transportation to get to another area in an open world, etc...). I had a very bad experience with Universe at War where it would crash while loading the second level. However, it did not save anything before loading the second level, and therefore did not remember that I beat the first level (and there were no checkpoints either) and thus I had to replay the first level multiple times. That was even more frustrating than the BIA incident that provoked this.

Second, at a bare minimum progress needs to be saved at major checkpoints. By these, I mean that if the player reaches level/mission 3, the game should remember that. If there are no levels, then other significant milestones should be considered. This basically just ensures that if the player forgets to Quicksave for awhile and then unexpectedly dies or there is a technical issue (crash, power outage, etc...), the player will not be pushed too far back.

Third, a proper checkpoint system should still be considered. For most gamers, checkpoint save systems work perfectly fine and allow the developer to control the level of challenge. However, as Brothers in Arms, Far Cry, etc... demonstrate, developers sometimes screw-up their placement of checkpoint saves, so Quicksave and Save Anytime can step-in to fix this. However, this is where most of the frustration with checkpoints comes in, and they often are otherwise viewed positively.

The key, when you go beyond saving between levels and such, is to figure out what is going to work for your game. If you feel that Quicksave is what you want your primary save system to be, then design around that but provide the requisite Level and Save Anytime features to back that up (and allow all of those to be turned-off individually). If you feel your game will be best-served by Checkpoints, then go for that while still providing Quicksave, Save Anytime, and Level saving systems for player convenience (again, be sure to provide options to turn these systems off- including turning the checkpoints off). Finally, if you think your game would be best-served by not having a save system at all, put one in anyway but disable it by default and allow the player to activate Quicksave, Save Anytime, and Level saving (feel free to penalize the player for doing this by indicating in some way that the player beat the game by making use of these features).

Basically, design what you feel you need to, but leave the final choice up to the player for how draconian or not they want the save system to be.




Now, the above only applies to Singleplayer, right? But what about Multiplayer? MP (Multiplayer) is often overlooked for save systems. Almost the only MP games that even bother are those that have matches that average 2+ hours or more (games like Sins of a Solar Empire, almost any TBS, etc...). But consider that there is utility in being able to save a MP game and boot it up again later.

This utility is not necessarily the same as it is in SP (Singleplayer) unless we are talking co-op (speaking of which, yes, the tenets I listed above for SP save systems I would apply to Left 4 Dead Campaign mode as well- in fact, even Survival mode). The utility for saving in most MP games (including dedicated-server-based MP games) will come at the competitive level, to guard against technical or connection issues. Left 4 Dead Versus mode is a very good example here as each match is usually five levels (and each level gets played twice so that each team has a turn as Survivors and Infected). If anything crops-up between level 1 and level 5, the game is essentially screwed. If there is a technical issue, screwed. If someone has to leave, screwed. If everyone has to leave because the LAN is over, screwed. Sure, you can create a new game and start from level 3 if that is where you left off, but your scores are eradicated. Being able to save the game status and to then load that at a later time would combat these issues.

Besides people needing to leave or connection problems, consider that MP is generally competitive. Saving has practical applications to practicing MP. Say for example that I am trying to get good at a particular RTS. I have a friend who is trying to do the same. We partner up so that we can train together. Now consider that we may want to take a single game and replay it from a certain point in the game state. That is, perhaps I made a stupid decision and my partner and I both want to see how the game would have turned-out if I didn't do that, so we load-up a quicksave from that point in the game and we play through it again. And again, and again, and etc...



My main point, for both SP and MP, is that the first concern with any save system should be player freedom. The game should allow the player to save whenever he/she wants. Save system design can then be layered on top of that to satisfy difficulty and other design goals.]]>
And all of the above begs the question of what save systems should games provide to the player? In the above case, BIA (Brothers in Arms) provides a checkpoint save system, which for the most part works pretty well as the game requires the player to execute sequences of tactical decisions to clear-out enemy positions and accomplish objectives. Forcing the player to complete these in sections and to not just try and brute-force through them as quicksave would allow works quite nicely. It provides a proper feel of accomplishment at having made not just a single good decision each time, but rather a series of good decisions.

Usually, the checkpoints divide the series of decisions nicely, preventing the player from being overly penalized for making a single mistake and then needing to go back and replay 15+ minutes of the game. However, I have occasionally noted, as with almost all checkpoint-based games, there are some checkpoints that become grating because the areas they cover are tough and either long or draining to repeat. Still, the checkpoint system does impose a sizable level of difficulty on the game and the sections encapsulated in each checkpoint.

So now let's take a look at the broader scope of save systems here, because BIA is just one game. Let's start by listing the types of save systems that games can have:
  • None: This broad category ensconces the concept of no saves at all, lives, and continues. A select few games intend to make themselves so hardcore that if the player dies at all ever for any reason, he/she needs to restart from the very beginning of the game. Mostly though, this was leveraged in the early years of video games with the concept of continues. Lives are mostly overlooked here as they usually factored into checkpoints, but some games do not have continues and instead only have lives and in those, lives are a form of no saving. But, continues generally existed in a finite amount and allowed the player to restart from the beginning of a level until the player ran out of continues, at which point it was game over.
  • Level: This can be thought of as scene selection more or less. Except you have to unlock the scenes usually. But basically, this form of save system keeps track of what level the player has made it to and allows the player to start from the beginning of any completed level. This system is rarely used alone but rather is often used in tandem with other save systems.
  • Checkpoint: This is the broadest save system and it encapsulates traditional, progress-based checkpoint saves as well as event-based saves (for example, typewriters in Resident Evil) and most "lives" systems. Checkpoints are popular because they allow for a level to be split-up into sections that the developer controls (although games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space give some control back to the player with their event-based systems as the player can trigger the same checkpoint multiple times). The way that lives are implemented for checkpoints is usually that when a player loses a life, his/her character is transported back to the nearest checkpoint (for example, in Sonic the Hedgehog, recall the rotating sign sticks).
  • Save Anytime: This system of saving is popular in PC games (and not so popular in console games; popular on PC thanks to its similarity to application-style saving) and allows the user to save his/her game at pretty much any time by navigating through a menu ad giving the saved game a name that can then be used to load it later. This is very popular in RTS games and is often combined with Level save systems for PC games.
  • Quicksave: Not yet the most common save system, but perhaps the most popular among players, Quicksave is much like Save Anytime in that the user is allowed to save at any time, but rather than having to cumbersomely traverse a menu, Quicksave generally maps to a keystroke and either maintains a single save file which is overwritten with each press of it or creates a new file each time it is pressed. Besides the mechanical differences between Quicksave and Save Anytime, Quicksave comes with the connotative difference that it is meant to be used to save often (the "save before going around every corner" mentality). Quicksave is usually combined with Save Anytime and Level saving systems.

So, those five types are what I'd consider to be the primary types of save systems. Now, I think that we can actually make a few determinations on when some of these save systems should be used.

Quicksave and Save Anytime are by far the nicest save systems in respect to the player. In that respect, they are the ultimate save systems, and the combination of them is the best. However, they both have an issue, and that issue is that they can make games that use them quite easy and overall less challenging and even less fun (some frustration in a game is actually good- it makes for challenge).

Is this a problem though? Remember as well that both Quicksave and Save Anytime are elective procedures- the player chooses when to use them. So if the player wants more of the challenge, the player can choose not to use them, unlike checkpoints (well, unlike *most* checkpoints). But, consider that this provides no developer direction of save-based difficulty for such players outside of levels (if the game even uses levels)- for players that haven't played the game yet, figuring out when to Quicksave to emulate checkpoints can be rather tough if not impossible. But what level of developer direction is required really is based on the game itself.

My personal solution to this problem is to always make Quicksave and Save Anytime available to the player. Why? The player is the one who has chosen to purchase and play your game. Therefore, the player should have as much control over that experience as he/she wants, even if it breaks developer control to an extent. Consider how frustrating it is to be most of the way through a level or mission but you need to go to bed or something pops up.

Now, as mentioned, Quicksave and Save Anytime do impact difficulty. Therefore, imo, much as the player should be able to leverage them, the player should also be able to turn Quicksave and/or Save Anytime off- INDEPENDENTLY of the difficulty level the player has set the game to. Preferably though, this should be indicated in some manner that the player has turned these features off. That is, much like a player can currently claim that they beat the game on "Hard" or "Medium" difficulty, the player should be able to claim for example that they beat the game on "Hard" difficulty with Quicksave and Save Anytime turned-off.

I also feel though that games need to go beyond just Quicksave and Save Anytime. There are a few reasons for this.

First, the inherent potential for technical difficulties in games. In my opinion, by default, games should autosave right before any significant loading sequence (for example, at the end of a level before the next level loads, right before a player uses rapid transportation to get to another area in an open world, etc...). I had a very bad experience with Universe at War where it would crash while loading the second level. However, it did not save anything before loading the second level, and therefore did not remember that I beat the first level (and there were no checkpoints either) and thus I had to replay the first level multiple times. That was even more frustrating than the BIA incident that provoked this.

Second, at a bare minimum progress needs to be saved at major checkpoints. By these, I mean that if the player reaches level/mission 3, the game should remember that. If there are no levels, then other significant milestones should be considered. This basically just ensures that if the player forgets to Quicksave for awhile and then unexpectedly dies or there is a technical issue (crash, power outage, etc...), the player will not be pushed too far back.

Third, a proper checkpoint system should still be considered. For most gamers, checkpoint save systems work perfectly fine and allow the developer to control the level of challenge. However, as Brothers in Arms, Far Cry, etc... demonstrate, developers sometimes screw-up their placement of checkpoint saves, so Quicksave and Save Anytime can step-in to fix this. However, this is where most of the frustration with checkpoints comes in, and they often are otherwise viewed positively.

The key, when you go beyond saving between levels and such, is to figure out what is going to work for your game. If you feel that Quicksave is what you want your primary save system to be, then design around that but provide the requisite Level and Save Anytime features to back that up (and allow all of those to be turned-off individually). If you feel your game will be best-served by Checkpoints, then go for that while still providing Quicksave, Save Anytime, and Level saving systems for player convenience (again, be sure to provide options to turn these systems off- including turning the checkpoints off). Finally, if you think your game would be best-served by not having a save system at all, put one in anyway but disable it by default and allow the player to activate Quicksave, Save Anytime, and Level saving (feel free to penalize the player for doing this by indicating in some way that the player beat the game by making use of these features).

Basically, design what you feel you need to, but leave the final choice up to the player for how draconian or not they want the save system to be.




Now, the above only applies to Singleplayer, right? But what about Multiplayer? MP (Multiplayer) is often overlooked for save systems. Almost the only MP games that even bother are those that have matches that average 2+ hours or more (games like Sins of a Solar Empire, almost any TBS, etc...). But consider that there is utility in being able to save a MP game and boot it up again later.

This utility is not necessarily the same as it is in SP (Singleplayer) unless we are talking co-op (speaking of which, yes, the tenets I listed above for SP save systems I would apply to Left 4 Dead Campaign mode as well- in fact, even Survival mode). The utility for saving in most MP games (including dedicated-server-based MP games) will come at the competitive level, to guard against technical or connection issues. Left 4 Dead Versus mode is a very good example here as each match is usually five levels (and each level gets played twice so that each team has a turn as Survivors and Infected). If anything crops-up between level 1 and level 5, the game is essentially screwed. If there is a technical issue, screwed. If someone has to leave, screwed. If everyone has to leave because the LAN is over, screwed. Sure, you can create a new game and start from level 3 if that is where you left off, but your scores are eradicated. Being able to save the game status and to then load that at a later time would combat these issues.

Besides people needing to leave or connection problems, consider that MP is generally competitive. Saving has practical applications to practicing MP. Say for example that I am trying to get good at a particular RTS. I have a friend who is trying to do the same. We partner up so that we can train together. Now consider that we may want to take a single game and replay it from a certain point in the game state. That is, perhaps I made a stupid decision and my partner and I both want to see how the game would have turned-out if I didn't do that, so we load-up a quicksave from that point in the game and we play through it again. And again, and again, and etc...



My main point, for both SP and MP, is that the first concern with any save system should be player freedom. The game should allow the player to save whenever he/she wants. Save system design can then be layered on top of that to satisfy difficulty and other design goals.]]> <![CDATA[What is Rational Discussion?]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=472 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:22:14 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=472
The general goal of Rational Discussion is to enlighten all involved. A discussion may not necessarily lead to one, specific result, but rather may reveal many results to be equally valid in varying situations. Hopefully, this will provide Unearthly and other game developers that participate with better information on the topics discussed. As well, hopefully gamers will gain greater insight into the choices that developers make and therefore make more educated decisions about games to purchase or support as well as to provide superior responses to developers about the specific quality of their titles.]]>
The general goal of Rational Discussion is to enlighten all involved. A discussion may not necessarily lead to one, specific result, but rather may reveal many results to be equally valid in varying situations. Hopefully, this will provide Unearthly and other game developers that participate with better information on the topics discussed. As well, hopefully gamers will gain greater insight into the choices that developers make and therefore make more educated decisions about games to purchase or support as well as to provide superior responses to developers about the specific quality of their titles.]]> <![CDATA[Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=468 Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:54:46 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=468

Known to be coming for a fair bit now, Chaos Rising will be adding the following to Dawn of War 2:
Quote:
  • New Single Player Missions – Continue your fight against the enemies of the Emperor and use your squads’ wargear, abilities, and experience to battle Chaos in 15 new missions
  • New environment and Multiplayer Maps – New ice planet graphics set will increase the visual diversity and adds 7 new PVP maps
  • Aspire to Glory – Build your existing squads up to level 30 and unlock even more devastating abilities
  • Chaos Corruption Mechanic – New single player mechanic allows you to equip incredibly powerful equipment that corrupts your squad and will guide the story towards or away from the corrupting influence of Chaos
  • New Multiplayer Race – Swear loyalty to the Chaos Gods and play as the bloodthirsty Chaos Space Marines in multiplayer battles against both Chaos Rising and Dawn of War II owners
  • New Units – New units for the Space Marines, Ork, Eldar, and Tyranid armies in multiplayer.
  • 2 New Last Stand Heroes – Face off against the relentless horde as either the Chaos Sorceror or Tyranid Hive Tyrant

Impressive, but one of the biggest questions has been what the new units will be for the existing races. No more is that a question. Today Relic posted the final new unit on their blog:
Discuss away!

Until today, as an Ork player, I was rather worried. Properly kitted Space Marine Force Commander players can already give Orks a very tough time, and the Librarian seemed like it would shift that match-up even farther in the Space Marines' direction. However, the Weirdboy seems the perfect counter to the Librarian and even "Speed Force Commander". The Weirdboy's Zzap ability should allow Orks to neutralize much of the effectiveness of the Librarian as well as to mix things up against Scout squads and Force Commanders as well. Over Dere! seems like it will allow Orks to get past ranged blockades by tossing powerful Ork melee units right up to their foes (I'm already envisioning combining this ability with Shoota Boyz' "Aiming? Wutz Dat?", Kommando Nob's Stun Bomb, and/or Tankbustas' Barrage).

Pretty much, while I had been worried all-around about the additions to each side, seeing them as a whole now, they all seem to be balanced pretty well and whereas before I was wary of Chaos Rising tossing DoW 2's MP into disarray, I am now excited for the new strategies it will bring (and, of course, Chaos should be interesting).]]>

Known to be coming for a fair bit now, Chaos Rising will be adding the following to Dawn of War 2:
Quote:
  • New Single Player Missions – Continue your fight against the enemies of the Emperor and use your squads’ wargear, abilities, and experience to battle Chaos in 15 new missions
  • New environment and Multiplayer Maps – New ice planet graphics set will increase the visual diversity and adds 7 new PVP maps
  • Aspire to Glory – Build your existing squads up to level 30 and unlock even more devastating abilities
  • Chaos Corruption Mechanic – New single player mechanic allows you to equip incredibly powerful equipment that corrupts your squad and will guide the story towards or away from the corrupting influence of Chaos
  • New Multiplayer Race – Swear loyalty to the Chaos Gods and play as the bloodthirsty Chaos Space Marines in multiplayer battles against both Chaos Rising and Dawn of War II owners
  • New Units – New units for the Space Marines, Ork, Eldar, and Tyranid armies in multiplayer.
  • 2 New Last Stand Heroes – Face off against the relentless horde as either the Chaos Sorceror or Tyranid Hive Tyrant

Impressive, but one of the biggest questions has been what the new units will be for the existing races. No more is that a question. Today Relic posted the final new unit on their blog:
Discuss away!

Until today, as an Ork player, I was rather worried. Properly kitted Space Marine Force Commander players can already give Orks a very tough time, and the Librarian seemed like it would shift that match-up even farther in the Space Marines' direction. However, the Weirdboy seems the perfect counter to the Librarian and even "Speed Force Commander". The Weirdboy's Zzap ability should allow Orks to neutralize much of the effectiveness of the Librarian as well as to mix things up against Scout squads and Force Commanders as well. Over Dere! seems like it will allow Orks to get past ranged blockades by tossing powerful Ork melee units right up to their foes (I'm already envisioning combining this ability with Shoota Boyz' "Aiming? Wutz Dat?", Kommando Nob's Stun Bomb, and/or Tankbustas' Barrage).

Pretty much, while I had been worried all-around about the additions to each side, seeing them as a whole now, they all seem to be balanced pretty well and whereas before I was wary of Chaos Rising tossing DoW 2's MP into disarray, I am now excited for the new strategies it will bring (and, of course, Chaos should be interesting).]]> <![CDATA[StarCraft Nate MSL Finals Tonight!]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=467 Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:13:44 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=467 [Image: mslfinalban2.jpg]

Basically, the best Terran player in the world currently and the best Zerg player in the world currently are facing off in a best of five for the Nate MSL championship. This should make for some really, really entertaining matches of StarCraft, and of course this is the championship, so there's that too.

[Image: msl234.jpg]]]> [Image: mslfinalban2.jpg]

Basically, the best Terran player in the world currently and the best Zerg player in the world currently are facing off in a best of five for the Nate MSL championship. This should make for some really, really entertaining matches of StarCraft, and of course this is the championship, so there's that too.

[Image: msl234.jpg]]]> <![CDATA[Please guide me]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=466 Sun, 10 Jan 2010 04:32:09 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=466
Do any of my friends here can guide me to recognise this difference??
"What's the difference between the Ultra HD Flip Cam and the Mino HD Flip Cam"
Thank you in advance..]]>
Do any of my friends here can guide me to recognise this difference??
"What's the difference between the Ultra HD Flip Cam and the Mino HD Flip Cam"
Thank you in advance..]]> <![CDATA[Interesting facts]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=465 Sun, 10 Jan 2010 04:30:16 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=465

Without Sleep
The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.

Poisonous birds
The only poisonous birds known are the three species of Pitohui from Papua new Guinea - the Hooded Pitohui Pitohui dichrous the Rusty Pitohui P. ferrugineus and the Variable Pitohui P. kirhocephalus. The Hooded Pitohui is the deadliest. The skin and feathers contain almost the same homobatrachotoxin as the Poison Arrow Frogs.

Color of Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it.

Pure gold
Twenty-Four-Karat Gold is not pure gold; there is a small amount of copper in it. Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.

Smallest & Largest Books
The smallest book in the world is called Chemin de la Cruix. It has 119 pages. It is 2 inches high and 1 1/3 inches wide. The largest book in the world is an atlas which is in the British Museum. It is 5 feet 10 inches high and 3 feet by 6 inches wide.

Rome
There is a city called Rome on every continent.]]>

Without Sleep
The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.

Poisonous birds
The only poisonous birds known are the three species of Pitohui from Papua new Guinea - the Hooded Pitohui Pitohui dichrous the Rusty Pitohui P. ferrugineus and the Variable Pitohui P. kirhocephalus. The Hooded Pitohui is the deadliest. The skin and feathers contain almost the same homobatrachotoxin as the Poison Arrow Frogs.

Color of Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it.

Pure gold
Twenty-Four-Karat Gold is not pure gold; there is a small amount of copper in it. Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.

Smallest & Largest Books
The smallest book in the world is called Chemin de la Cruix. It has 119 pages. It is 2 inches high and 1 1/3 inches wide. The largest book in the world is an atlas which is in the British Museum. It is 5 feet 10 inches high and 3 feet by 6 inches wide.

Rome
There is a city called Rome on every continent.]]> <![CDATA[Glad to be here]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=464 Sun, 10 Jan 2010 04:28:47 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=464
I am new to the Forum so thought I should say hello!This forums looks like its full of good info, I'll be visiting here often.I must say I am really pleased to see such site which sharing good knowledge.
Keep the site as it is because it is simply the best. Color combination of background and font I like most. Speed of response also the best.]]>
I am new to the Forum so thought I should say hello!This forums looks like its full of good info, I'll be visiting here often.I must say I am really pleased to see such site which sharing good knowledge.
Keep the site as it is because it is simply the best. Color combination of background and font I like most. Speed of response also the best.]]> <![CDATA[2009 Top Five PC Games]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=461 Sun, 27 Dec 2009 15:58:02 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=461
  1. Dawn of War 2
  2. Empire: Total War
  3. Killing Floor
  4. Borderlands
  5. Demigod


Yes, that list is 3/5s "strategy games" (Demigod isn't quite a strategy game, but to FPS addicts that doesn't seem to matter much), and the simple reason is that most FPS games this year disappointed or set sail for 2010 to avoid the "juggernaut" of MW2 (despite it being the biggest disappointment of all by far). But also, the strategy games listed have easily earned their spots, particularly by this late point in the year, despite early stumbles for all three of them.

[Image: Demigod_PC_US_ESRBboxart_160w.jpg]
Demigod
My #5 pick and one that 90% of you at least probably shook your heads at, already queuing up arguments for Heroes of Newerth. My primary arguments against HoN are dualfold- first, it's still in beta and thus technically has not released in 2009 (if we're going by beta games, we'd need to include Battlefield Bad Company 2 and RUSE, among others, but obviously we're not going to do that), and second it's pretty much stand-alone DotA. The latter is certainly admirable of S2 for that is something of great desire, but at the same time much of the praise that gives HoN even a chance of being on this list really should be directed at DotA instead.

Now, for Demigod itself. It had a rocky start, with Stardock running into some early teething problems with Impulse Reactor and Demigod's implementation of it. Interestingly, while the starting issues were egregious even for a P2P game, Stardock took the solution many steps farther. Not only did they bring the P2P functionality up to par with other strategy games, but they also added the proxy server system which rectifies many inherent flaws in P2P networking, and arguably Demigod's online backend is now the best among all strategy games- the only current strategy game that challenges this is HoN which bypasses most typical strategy online issues by almost exclusively leveraging black-boxed dedicated servers.

After Stardock worked-out the online issues with Demigod, its position on this list quickly became apparent. It took DotA's base (like many other WC3 maps have as well btw) and then molded that into a different, distinct, and full game. Unlike LoL and HoN, Demigod does not try to replace DotA. Rather, it offers a very different experience that promotes more high-level strategy. It achieves this through its smaller, but incredibly fine-tuned hero selection as well as flags and Citadel Upgrades. While Demigod does support high-level play well as is expected of any game to descend from DotA, Demigod goes a step farther by catering to new players as well. It offers relatively competent bots that allow players to get the basics down and Demigod encapsulates much of its depth- rather than bombarding players with 50+ heroes to choose from right off the bat, Demigod only provides 10 diverse heroes that each have sizable skill-trees and which can be played in a variety of manners. This approach makes the whole game much more tractable and allows players to start having fun sooner and for longer.

Also of note to Demigod owners is the recent release of modding tools; on the user side, implementing and using mods is really easy and convenient, and thus far there have been quite a few UI mods (which can be installed and used without affecting competitive play; that is, I can have UI mod x installed and my friend can have UI mod y installed while my other friend has no UI mods installed and we can all still play ranked matches together) that have done an excellent job of providing solutions to some of Demigod's subtle interface pains (Demigod still has the best interface of DotA descendants I have played yet, partially thanks to its zoom functionality, but also because of its minimalist nature; it is overly minimalist in some areas though and UI mods can fix this quickly).

[Image: Borderlands_PC-DVD_FoB_FINALboxart_160w.jpg]
Borderlands
As a game designer, Borderlands is an odd beast. You see, it's actually a rather stupid game in some respects. Most boss battles are piles of unused potential as they just have the player pumping bullets into a giant target, and a majority of the game is just mindless killing (really, mindless- even playing as Lilith, the assassin class character, I was able to tank through most enemies with no real need to use my brain). On top of this is a predictable storyline that doesn't really go anywhere. And sure, there are a crapton of guns, but they're victim to the Yu-Gi-Oh! card syndrome- most of them are terrible and completely useless. And the characters... there may be four classes, but they're ALL overpowered.

But somewhere, Borderlands does a lot of things right. Specifically, despite its lack of push-to-talk, it gets four players into an open-world session pretty seamlessly. It again opts for the "stupid" option of just scaling enemy health as opposed to more creative solutions, but much like the above issues, in Borderlands it just becomes another situation of that it's just good enough to work. I think, to some degree, Borderlands taps into a market that has just be unfulfilled and that's why it can have so many serious flaws and miscues and just overall instances where it doesn't fully capitalize on its potential, yet it's still *my* #4 pick. It's kinda like EDF 2017 in that respect.

Borderlands' strength lies in its ability to seamlessly get four players into a cooperative, open-world environment where the enemies become tough enough that some degree of cooperation is required and players can just have fun. Not to mention, the tongue-in-cheek nature of the setting (Nine Toes [and three balls]!) complements the gameplay well. Add in good sound effects and overall a strong FPS feel to make all of that mass murdering easily bearable, complement it with loot that can make a tangible difference in the player's combat experience (corrosive sniper shot-gun? Wha!?) so that the shameless looting and grinding mechanics have a proper pay-off, add-in four characters to inspire interesting cooperation, and throw down some of the most entertaining vehicular combat since the last Twisted Metal (I am waiting on a Borderlands Twisted Metal mod) and for one and a half playthroughs the game is just plain fun.

[Image: Killing-Floor_PC_US_RETAILboxart_160w.jpg]
Killing Floor
Killing Floor ahead of L4D 2? Wtf? Before everyone starts chomping down on a perceived bias that I have against L4D 2, note that I bought L4D 2 for $30 from Dell because it hit expansion pricing which is what I was willing to pay for it, and I own it now. I have a bias towards games I own, so L4D 2 is having other issues with me right now (as well, I need to play it more; but as of now, I am very disappointed in the new campaigns and the glitz that were the new weapons and special infected that I found interesting in the demo along with the increased gore are quickly wearing away on me as I grind- literally grind, it's not even fun anymore- through all five campaigns). Killing Floor properly stakes its ground at #3 on this list on its own merits.

When Killing Floor first released, it provided an enjoyable alternative to Left 4 Dead, leveraging a different breed of zombies and gameplay. Pitting six players against wave after wave with the only goal being to survive, it was comparably simplistic as well. Like Borderlands though, Killing Floor rises above its simplicity. Tripwire's continued excellence in audio and "weapon feel" really finds a home in Killing Floor as every single shot the player fires is exhilarating. Scoring head shots on Clots and other foes is ecstasy. But all of this killing is not mindless. To succeed, players need to to have a plan. These plans don't necessarily need to be complex, but the shit hits the fan in under half a second in Killing Floor so a fair bit of thought tends to help.

Since Killing Floor's release, it has received three waves of additional maps. These have addressed the issue of the original five not being enough. The latest of these waves as well has seriously amped up the difficulty. On top of additional maps, new weapons, items, and even a new class perk and foe type have been introduced. These have all worked towards correcting previous imbalances (the AK-47 and SCAR now offer the Commando a proper three-tiered weapon progression), ultimately making the game a lot more fun from Wave 1 through Wave 10. This support is working almost as well for Killing Floor as Valve's TF2 updates have for it, and without these it's safe to say that Killing Floor would not be on this list.

Killing Floor scores mixed points for its unlock mechanics. Perks, as classes, work really nicely. However, the grinding element that Tripwire has inserted along with them is not as desirable. As is usual with grinding, some people like it and some do not, but the perk grinding was a rather transparent attempt to ape CoD 4's grinding mechanics that helped to sustain its playerbase over time. On the other hand, equipment/weapon progression via cash works rather well. It's not particularly well-balanced because it is based purely on kills (and once someone gets ahead, they're likely going to stay ahead because they have the better weapons; nicely though, this is possibly one of the only known instances where the concept of trickle-down actually works as such players can get "too much money" and can share their extra cash with allies), but it does properly establish a relatively logical progression that keeps the gameplay changing from Wave 1 through Wave 10.

Also of interest in Killing Floor is its sheer scalability. Insane 32-player matches (particularly on some of the custom maps built for it) can be extremely fun, while Solo provides a completely different experience. Solo is actually quite interesting because whereas a games like L4D and L4D 2 are built purely for four players in Campaign, no more and no less (despite tons of effort having been put into the bots), Killing Floor's mechanics scale very well as Solo mode doesn't bother the player with having to deal with stupid bots but rather puts the player on the map, alone. This second part is key as it tends to force the player to run through the level, relying on wits and quick skills to chip away at the massive horde chomping at his/her heels. It's a brutal, even scary experience, but one that I appreciate. Its flaw, per se, and the reason why it is not the primary mode of Killing Floor is that its pacing is actually too frantic for the most part, draining the player very quickly. In co-op, this is offset by having other humans around to talk to and play with.

[Image: EMP_PC_Front_RPboxart_160w.jpg]
Empire: Total War
The latest Total War game is also quite possibly the best (which definitely cannot be said for all sequels this year). E: TW offers a rather different experience from its predecessors as it treks closer to modern times. The star here is the massive RTT land battles (Real-Time Tactical; genre of strategy game that has no macro resource collection) which boil down to a variety of minutiae to determine the victor. The game really does an excellent job of implementing and making available tactics and strategies of the period (my only complaint is the lack of support for Swamp Fox-style combat, but that is not so much a flaw as much as a matter of scope) and it is genuinely fun and challenging to micromanage a few inferior battalions to victory over a well-diversified and larger force. In short, the land battles do a great job of making the player feel like a general of the period and that's exactly what the game needed to do to be successful.

The turn-based component is relatively pleasant as well. The game provides sufficient automation and tooltips that even for those interested purely in combat, the turn-based over-world is fine. For those interested more in the TBS (Turn-Based Strategy) part of the game, there's plenty of depth to be had. Whether it could stand as purely a TBS is debatable, but when leveraged in tandem with the real-time components it's excellent and the additions to it since Rome: Total War and Medieval 2: Total War are great as well.

E: TW also treads relatively new ground for the Total War franchise. The inclusion of three campaigns to help introduce new players to the game and the series scores huge points for accessibility. Like other RTS games though that have opted for more open-ended campaigns such as Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, the campaign does suffer from the issue that without truly significant imagination you do not feel like George Washington and the story is weak despite strong source material, for a series that previously had just about none of this, the existence of this even as a tutorial cannot be understated- E: TW scores accessibility points just like Demigod did and for largely the same reasons.

E: TW also introduces naval battles to the Total War franchise. This is where E: TW stumbles a bit. The realistic depth of these battles is quite nice, but the controls for it are extremely awkward and the battles still, despite their depth, tend towards self-resolution anyway. Personally, I actively avoid naval combat as much as possible. Nicely though, this is doable because of the nature of E: TW, and thus while for most games this would be absolutely killer, for E: TW, it's not much of a problem at all. Hopefully Creative Assembly can improve this significantly in future iterations, as the core mechanics have the seeds of greatness and may hold the keys to a veritable renaissance of naval combat in RTS games.

But still, the land battles more than compensate for the naval issues. With an MP version of the campaign currently in beta and with MP skirmishes already being fun, E: TW still has plenty of life left in it (like it wouldn't anyway- it's practically the definition of infinite replayability). The game just offers so much and delivers on so many fronts that for anyone remotely interested in the concept of building your colonial empire it's too good to pass up or turn a blind eye to, and the great execution of all of this easily earns E: TW the #2 slot on this list, particularly as patches have solved nearly all of the game's early issues.

[Image: WH40k_DOW2-BX-RGB-Mboxart_160w.jpg]
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2
There is no game on this list or this year even that has benefited from post-release support more than Dawn of War 2. Empire: Total War may have been a broken mess on release, but when it worked it was still fun and still easily a candidate for the #2 slot. Killing Floor may have gotten boring because of its small map selection, but its core mechanics were still damn fun. Demigod's online situation may have been horrible on release, but 77% of Demigod players didn't care because even with bots the game was fun even if it wasn't reaching its full potential. Sure, Killing Floor and Demigod may not have made this list, but unlike Dawn of War 2 they would have at least been viewed positively still. Dawn of War 2, without the updates it has received, would have been a blight on Relic's stellar record only a tad smaller than The Outfit. Relic has stepped in to fill the strategy void that Blizzard has left since releasing WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne, and Relic have stepped up to nigh indisputably claim the title of *the* RTS developer of this decade. The original Dawn of War legitimized the introduction of capture points as viable macro resources in RTS games and proved that squads were viable. Company of Heroes then took those innovations and transported them into an environment with an almost FPS level of detail and polished them to no end, creating the greatest RTS game of this century. With Dawn of War 2 coming from such a grand pedigree, it had little margin for error. On launch, it had errors.

It's still not without error either. The singleplayer campaign, in my honest opinion, failed to live up to expectations. It is a massive improvement over Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Soulstorm's campaigns. However, while it avoids the complete doldrums that those devolve into, it does drag on a bit. It does not live up to Company of Heroes. Narratively, it's better than Company of Heroes, but still not great. However, the last mission temporarily brushes with greatness, tapping into the core of the WH40K license, but it pulls some deus ex machina and backs off (this isn't much of a spoiler because they've already made it well-known that your squads transfer into Chaos Rising). Still, for an RTS, the SP campaign is not bad and for fans of DotA and isometric RPGs, it may well be extremely enjoyable. I do prefer it to the standard RTS campaign structure of skirmish battles with cut-scenes before and after.

During beta and at launch, DoW 2's multiplayer was supremely disappointing. Relic had regressed to Dawn of War 1 combat depth while, at the time, having removed a fair amount of macro depth as well. They had scored points with heroes, particularly the Tyranid Ravener Alpha and Eldar Warp Spider Exarch, but DoW 2 was not supposed to be competing with DotA and Demigod and etc- it needed to compete at least with WC3 (excluding WC3's custom maps, although Relic really needs to consider the kind of success Blizzard has had with such functionality). Between meh battles and slow macro, DoW 2 looked to be a failure. Worse, what it brought to the table over Company of Heroes was melee combat, and at launch the game was not taking advantage of this distinction much at all.

But somehow, Dawn of War 2 rose to #1 on this list. Not only that, but I rate it as the third-best strategy game of all-time, behind CoH and StarCraft. So something significant happened at some point to elevate it to that great height. That significant occurrence was patch 1.5, aka "There Is Only War". The patch infused the game with a flood of new maps, including the superb Calderis Refinery which continues to be one of the best maps for all modes (1v1, 2v2, and 3v3). More importantly though, the patch completely reworked Dawn of War 2's balance. Relic freely admitted to having originally screwed-up, and in 1.5 they effectively fixed it.

What, exactly, did 1.5 do? It established the proper relationship between ranged and melee units, massively increasing the effectiveness of melee units and also increasing the overall lethality of combat. Dozens of units were also tweaked in significant ways, but I won't go into the details of that. The effect was massively deeper combat and finally Dawn of War 2's macro genius began to shine because of the more lethal combat. Do not let the lack of "base building" fool you- Dawn of War 2 has every bit of macro depth that Company of Heroes and other RTS games with "base building. Only when we get to the very elite macro titles in the genre such as StarCraft and Total Annihilation does DoW 2 begin to falter.

Dawn of War 2 consolidates the base building macro into four things- the HQ structure, the units, the hero, and the power. The HQ structure is the traditional base, like a Zerg Hatchery it has three tiers and each opens new units, upgrades, etc... There are two functions of this structure- to produce units, and to advance your tier. This is the only structure that can do these functions, so you need to plan its usage very carefully. What order you train units in is huge, as is the timing of your decision to research Tier 2 and Tier 3 (during those times, you cannot produce units and thus you potentially leave yourself vulnerable). This isn't, by far, where most of DoW 2's macro depth stems from, and Relic recognized that and that's the reason for the consolidation and it works.

Units and heroes are the bigger macro factors. In DoW 2, every unit in your possession represents a serious investment. In DoW 2, combat is almost unavoidable. It's nearly constant. The battle lines in DoW 2 are far more fluid than they are in Company of Heroes despite the smaller, tighter levels. It's a constant war to win the little battles, and it's here where the macro kicks in- it's embedded right in the combat. The main goal is to inflict more casualties on your foe than you take and to attempt to wipe out enemy squads without allowing any of your own to be wiped-out. Losing units in a squad is generally ok to an extent as they can be replaced relatively cheaply (it still takes a toll on your macro to replace them and it will delay acquisition of new squads and tier advancement, but you don't need to invest in completely new squads to replace dead existing ones), but losing an entire squad is often devastating. This used to be a rarity until 1.5. Now it's much more common. The other side of unit macro is investment in units. The only global upgrades in DoW 2 are Tier 2 and Tier 3. Otherwise, everything is local, and most units have upgrade options. These all tend to require power and requisition and purchasing them will delay your acquisition of other units- and, potentially worse, your upgrade to a higher tier. For example, Ork Shoota Boyz are pretty weak by default. However, for 75 requisition and 25 power you can upgrade them with a Nob Leader that turns them into a respectable ranged squad. You can also, for 80 requisition and 20 power, upgrade them with a Bigga Shoota which further increases their damage and grants them an ability, "Aiming? Wotz Dat?" which allows them to suppress a target enemy squad (very useful for keeping enemy melee units away and/or suppressing enemy ranged units while your melee units move in for the kill). Both of these upgrades massively improve the Shoota squad, but together they cost 145 requisition and 45 power. The second of these two stats is the big one because that is ~a third of the power you need to go to Tier 2, thus by upgrading even one of your Shoota squads you significantly delay your advancement to Tier 2. Now consider doing this for multiple squads. You'll get a short-term boost, but long-term you may have issues.

Heroes are similar. When killed, they require at least 250 requisition to resurrect. If you don't resurrect them, you're going to be working with less because the hero is a "free unit" per se (it doesn't factor into the pop cap) and heroes tend to provide the kinds of special functionality you need to make inroads against your opponent. For living heroes, you have the option of purchasing wargear. There are three types of wargear and usually at least three pieces of wargear for each type. These all cost requisition and power and thus pose the same issue as unit upgrades. Furthermore, many of these items are tier-dependent. As well, these items tend to open up abilities and functionality for your hero that can alter his/her role. For example, the Ork Kommando starts with a double-barrel bolter, marking him as a ranged unit. His damage is ok, but not extraordinarily, although he can prove very effective against light enemy ranged units and enemy melee units if he is microed to keep them out of range (a bit easier with good use of his stun bomb ability). In Tier 1, he can be upgraded with the Assassin Knife. This gives him a melee attack, allowing him to be effective in melee combat. It also makes him much more damaging against enemy heroes. This is further complemented by the Assassinate ability he gains, which allows him to deal a very large amount of damage in a single attack (this is analogous to gank/snipe abilities in DotA/HoN/Demigod/etc). Early on, this can prove very effective at countering enemy heroes (in particular, it's very useful against Space Marines because the Kommando can combine his Infiltrate ability with the Assassin Knife to engage Tactical Space Marine squads in melee combat without taking fire from them on the way there and then opening them to safe attack from your melee units; also, the Assassinate ability will kill a Tactical Space Marine and there are only three of them in a squad by default and they are expensive, so that is huge as well to gain a macro advantage). Later, the Tier 3 Rokkit Launcher often proves the more effective piece of wargear. This requires replacing the Assassin's Knife. In total, that's 80 power spent on the hero that can't be spent on advancing your tier or acquiring new units.

And power. I danced around that above for quite a bit, but power is big in DoW 2 because unlike in DoW 1, it's not in your base anymore. Relic took the fledgling concept of making power nodes capturable points (recall the super power nodes in DoW 1 that you could place your special beefy power structure on) and fleshed it out. Granted, this comes on the heels of Company of Heroes with its three types of capturable points (Manpower, Fuel, and Munitions). Power in DoW 2 is analogous to fuel in CoH or Vespene in StarCraft. It is the secondary resource that controls your ability to advance your tech tree and to acquire more valuable units and upgrades. It is, in the early stages, a very scarce resource whose usage has massive repercussions. For example, investing power in upgrading tier 1 units will help you dominate in tier 1, but if your opponent uses his/her power to instead tech to tier 2 and then invests in a vehicle, you could find yourself in a heap of trouble. Because power is forced to be on the field of battle now and no longer tucked deep away in your base, it is open to harass. Power harassing in DoW 2 is important and hearkens back to StarCraft in a very positive way. The system works as follows- when you capture a power node you start gaining a small amount of power per a second. Next, you can fortify the node (this costs 125 requisition) and increase the power gain rate while forcing your opponent to destroy the fortification before being able to capture the node. After a power node is fortified, you an add generators to it (100 each) which further increase the node's output. If you don't protect your power nodes, your opponent can destroy your generators and node and devastate your power economy. That's power harass. Your opponent can also just destroy the fortification and keep the generators intact and capture the node and they will then control the generators as well and thus they will use your investment against you (this is not as common as you'd think, as while it's a favorite of newer players to try this, in general players don't invest so much into power nodes that they do not have very good control over, so such fully decked-out power nodes tend to be close to the enemy's base and tough to hold and thus the enemy tends to recapture them quickly; slash and burn tends to be a more crippling tactic).

So all of the above combine to give DoW 2 a very, very pertinent macro element that is ever-present and which can often be match-deciding. I have taken such time exploring all of this because it was one of the biggest criticisms of DoW 2 initially because it was not implemented properly, but since 1.5 that has changed. Now, the game is much deeper and a ton more fun. The full capability of DoW 2's micro depth has now come to the fore and it's a very fun, eventful game to play. There is tons of combat constantly, often on multiple fronts, and you're kept very busy- rarely are there lulls. This makes DoW 2 a fair bit different from CoH and offers the different take on that formula that I think everyone wanted when DoW 2 was initially announced.

Beyond the above, it's also worthy of mention that DoW 2 plays extremely well in 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3. 1v1 retains the typical RTS showdown appeal. 2v2 hybridizes the intense competition of 1v1 with a bit of cooperation. Finally, 3v3 offers full cooperative play and the combination of heroes and races available in this allows for some real cooperation. Thus, the game has very wide appeal.

Despite the huge advancement that 1.5, There Is Only War brought, that was not DoW 2's only major post-release patch. Patch 1.8, Last Stand, was also massive in a completely different way. Besides further refining 1.5 (Last Stand made some additional, bold tweaks) and adding even more maps, Last Stand added... Last Stand. A brand new co-op survival mode. At first glance, this seemed to be the latest in a long bandwagon trend. But this is Relic, and this is a game that was not what it should have been at launch and they've been making up for that ever since. Simple pandering would do them no good. Last Stand isn't a bandwagon mode and it's not pandering. It's something that hasn't been seen much outside of the WC3 custom mapping community. Last Stand is rather highly-polished and quite fun. There are only three heroes available, but they're all diverse and fun to use. Unlike other games, the leveling system in Last Stand makes sense and is not pure grinding- it works nicely for the most part. Last Stand, on its own I have spent tons of hours with at 2am in the morning and a couple of friends. It's just damn good fun, and Relic did a great job rejecting what most developers do, which is using their core gameplay for every mode whether it fits or not. Campaign, Multiplayer, and Last Stand all use roughly different mechanics and all play very differently. They're like three different games based on the same engine instead of just three different modes. And Relic scores high points for this- there is almost assuredly something for everyone in DoW 2.

So, despite a slow start that saw lackluster MP and a horrifically small MP map selection, Relic have more than turned Dawn of War 2 around with a series of intelligent patches. For free, they have almost recreated MP from the ground-up and they have added what, on consoles would be a $15 piece of DLC with Last Stand. These improvements have made DoW 2 what it is today- the best game of 2009 and one of the best RTS games of all-time. I simply cannot wait for the Chaos Rising expansion now as it will be adding a new campaign that seems like it will fix some of the issues with DoW 2's campaign, it will add a new race (Chaos), and it will add two new heroes and a new map to Last Stand. And if all that doesn't work, Relic has established that they will do whatever is necessary to bring their game up to snuff.

The Games That Aren't on This List
Well, the most obvious is Modern Warfare 2. And the reasons, from a PC perspective, are obvious. But even beyond that, Modern Warfare 2 is a disappointment. Its singleplayer campaign has more plot holes than anyone can shake a stick at and "isn't balanced for lean" despite level design to the contrary, and overall is disappointing compared to CoD 4's. MP fares little better, with the smaller battles, rampant hacking, and poor balance. In short, MW2 just is not as good a game as CoD 4 was and it really is just a mediocre entry overall, despite its sales and hype. And since this is best PC games of 2009... IWNet says it all.


I also left L4D 2 off this list. Personally, I am thus far disappointed with the game for the short time I've had it in my hands. However, I need to play more Vs and Scavenge. Nevertheless, this is still effectively an update to last year's entry and I'm not inclined to put the same game on my list twice, despite its changes. If I were to do that, I'd have to list Dawn of War 2 twice (ok, not really because it wasn't worthy of inclusion until it was patched). Also not on this list are Dragon Age: Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum. These titles I leave out due to relative ignorance. While I have played the Arkham Asylum demo, I do not feel confident in fully judging it. However, from what I have played, heard, and seen I believe it would barely miss my top five. Dragon Age: Origins I simply have not played. I was interested until $15+ worth of DLC dropped for it on launch day. Then I instantly became disinterested. It may be a great game, but without playing it I cannot consider putting it on my list. Shattered Horizon and Torchlight, again I claim ignorance on. Shattered Horizon I am very interested in buying though, but again it seems as if it would just miss the list. Torchlight I'm not very interested in and thus cannot judge it, but that does seem like it could have had a shot at being in the list otherwise, so that and L4D 2 are my two recognizable points of contention. Red Faction: Guerrilla is probably the final notable title I have left off. Again, this stems from relative ignorance, but like Arkahm Asylum I do not feel this would have made the list regardless.

So, there's my list and my reasoning. If you made it this far, gj and help yourself to a virtual cookie.]]>
  1. Dawn of War 2
  2. Empire: Total War
  3. Killing Floor
  4. Borderlands
  5. Demigod


Yes, that list is 3/5s "strategy games" (Demigod isn't quite a strategy game, but to FPS addicts that doesn't seem to matter much), and the simple reason is that most FPS games this year disappointed or set sail for 2010 to avoid the "juggernaut" of MW2 (despite it being the biggest disappointment of all by far). But also, the strategy games listed have easily earned their spots, particularly by this late point in the year, despite early stumbles for all three of them.

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Demigod
My #5 pick and one that 90% of you at least probably shook your heads at, already queuing up arguments for Heroes of Newerth. My primary arguments against HoN are dualfold- first, it's still in beta and thus technically has not released in 2009 (if we're going by beta games, we'd need to include Battlefield Bad Company 2 and RUSE, among others, but obviously we're not going to do that), and second it's pretty much stand-alone DotA. The latter is certainly admirable of S2 for that is something of great desire, but at the same time much of the praise that gives HoN even a chance of being on this list really should be directed at DotA instead.

Now, for Demigod itself. It had a rocky start, with Stardock running into some early teething problems with Impulse Reactor and Demigod's implementation of it. Interestingly, while the starting issues were egregious even for a P2P game, Stardock took the solution many steps farther. Not only did they bring the P2P functionality up to par with other strategy games, but they also added the proxy server system which rectifies many inherent flaws in P2P networking, and arguably Demigod's online backend is now the best among all strategy games- the only current strategy game that challenges this is HoN which bypasses most typical strategy online issues by almost exclusively leveraging black-boxed dedicated servers.

After Stardock worked-out the online issues with Demigod, its position on this list quickly became apparent. It took DotA's base (like many other WC3 maps have as well btw) and then molded that into a different, distinct, and full game. Unlike LoL and HoN, Demigod does not try to replace DotA. Rather, it offers a very different experience that promotes more high-level strategy. It achieves this through its smaller, but incredibly fine-tuned hero selection as well as flags and Citadel Upgrades. While Demigod does support high-level play well as is expected of any game to descend from DotA, Demigod goes a step farther by catering to new players as well. It offers relatively competent bots that allow players to get the basics down and Demigod encapsulates much of its depth- rather than bombarding players with 50+ heroes to choose from right off the bat, Demigod only provides 10 diverse heroes that each have sizable skill-trees and which can be played in a variety of manners. This approach makes the whole game much more tractable and allows players to start having fun sooner and for longer.

Also of note to Demigod owners is the recent release of modding tools; on the user side, implementing and using mods is really easy and convenient, and thus far there have been quite a few UI mods (which can be installed and used without affecting competitive play; that is, I can have UI mod x installed and my friend can have UI mod y installed while my other friend has no UI mods installed and we can all still play ranked matches together) that have done an excellent job of providing solutions to some of Demigod's subtle interface pains (Demigod still has the best interface of DotA descendants I have played yet, partially thanks to its zoom functionality, but also because of its minimalist nature; it is overly minimalist in some areas though and UI mods can fix this quickly).

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Borderlands
As a game designer, Borderlands is an odd beast. You see, it's actually a rather stupid game in some respects. Most boss battles are piles of unused potential as they just have the player pumping bullets into a giant target, and a majority of the game is just mindless killing (really, mindless- even playing as Lilith, the assassin class character, I was able to tank through most enemies with no real need to use my brain). On top of this is a predictable storyline that doesn't really go anywhere. And sure, there are a crapton of guns, but they're victim to the Yu-Gi-Oh! card syndrome- most of them are terrible and completely useless. And the characters... there may be four classes, but they're ALL overpowered.

But somewhere, Borderlands does a lot of things right. Specifically, despite its lack of push-to-talk, it gets four players into an open-world session pretty seamlessly. It again opts for the "stupid" option of just scaling enemy health as opposed to more creative solutions, but much like the above issues, in Borderlands it just becomes another situation of that it's just good enough to work. I think, to some degree, Borderlands taps into a market that has just be unfulfilled and that's why it can have so many serious flaws and miscues and just overall instances where it doesn't fully capitalize on its potential, yet it's still *my* #4 pick. It's kinda like EDF 2017 in that respect.

Borderlands' strength lies in its ability to seamlessly get four players into a cooperative, open-world environment where the enemies become tough enough that some degree of cooperation is required and players can just have fun. Not to mention, the tongue-in-cheek nature of the setting (Nine Toes [and three balls]!) complements the gameplay well. Add in good sound effects and overall a strong FPS feel to make all of that mass murdering easily bearable, complement it with loot that can make a tangible difference in the player's combat experience (corrosive sniper shot-gun? Wha!?) so that the shameless looting and grinding mechanics have a proper pay-off, add-in four characters to inspire interesting cooperation, and throw down some of the most entertaining vehicular combat since the last Twisted Metal (I am waiting on a Borderlands Twisted Metal mod) and for one and a half playthroughs the game is just plain fun.

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Killing Floor
Killing Floor ahead of L4D 2? Wtf? Before everyone starts chomping down on a perceived bias that I have against L4D 2, note that I bought L4D 2 for $30 from Dell because it hit expansion pricing which is what I was willing to pay for it, and I own it now. I have a bias towards games I own, so L4D 2 is having other issues with me right now (as well, I need to play it more; but as of now, I am very disappointed in the new campaigns and the glitz that were the new weapons and special infected that I found interesting in the demo along with the increased gore are quickly wearing away on me as I grind- literally grind, it's not even fun anymore- through all five campaigns). Killing Floor properly stakes its ground at #3 on this list on its own merits.

When Killing Floor first released, it provided an enjoyable alternative to Left 4 Dead, leveraging a different breed of zombies and gameplay. Pitting six players against wave after wave with the only goal being to survive, it was comparably simplistic as well. Like Borderlands though, Killing Floor rises above its simplicity. Tripwire's continued excellence in audio and "weapon feel" really finds a home in Killing Floor as every single shot the player fires is exhilarating. Scoring head shots on Clots and other foes is ecstasy. But all of this killing is not mindless. To succeed, players need to to have a plan. These plans don't necessarily need to be complex, but the shit hits the fan in under half a second in Killing Floor so a fair bit of thought tends to help.

Since Killing Floor's release, it has received three waves of additional maps. These have addressed the issue of the original five not being enough. The latest of these waves as well has seriously amped up the difficulty. On top of additional maps, new weapons, items, and even a new class perk and foe type have been introduced. These have all worked towards correcting previous imbalances (the AK-47 and SCAR now offer the Commando a proper three-tiered weapon progression), ultimately making the game a lot more fun from Wave 1 through Wave 10. This support is working almost as well for Killing Floor as Valve's TF2 updates have for it, and without these it's safe to say that Killing Floor would not be on this list.

Killing Floor scores mixed points for its unlock mechanics. Perks, as classes, work really nicely. However, the grinding element that Tripwire has inserted along with them is not as desirable. As is usual with grinding, some people like it and some do not, but the perk grinding was a rather transparent attempt to ape CoD 4's grinding mechanics that helped to sustain its playerbase over time. On the other hand, equipment/weapon progression via cash works rather well. It's not particularly well-balanced because it is based purely on kills (and once someone gets ahead, they're likely going to stay ahead because they have the better weapons; nicely though, this is possibly one of the only known instances where the concept of trickle-down actually works as such players can get "too much money" and can share their extra cash with allies), but it does properly establish a relatively logical progression that keeps the gameplay changing from Wave 1 through Wave 10.

Also of interest in Killing Floor is its sheer scalability. Insane 32-player matches (particularly on some of the custom maps built for it) can be extremely fun, while Solo provides a completely different experience. Solo is actually quite interesting because whereas a games like L4D and L4D 2 are built purely for four players in Campaign, no more and no less (despite tons of effort having been put into the bots), Killing Floor's mechanics scale very well as Solo mode doesn't bother the player with having to deal with stupid bots but rather puts the player on the map, alone. This second part is key as it tends to force the player to run through the level, relying on wits and quick skills to chip away at the massive horde chomping at his/her heels. It's a brutal, even scary experience, but one that I appreciate. Its flaw, per se, and the reason why it is not the primary mode of Killing Floor is that its pacing is actually too frantic for the most part, draining the player very quickly. In co-op, this is offset by having other humans around to talk to and play with.

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Empire: Total War
The latest Total War game is also quite possibly the best (which definitely cannot be said for all sequels this year). E: TW offers a rather different experience from its predecessors as it treks closer to modern times. The star here is the massive RTT land battles (Real-Time Tactical; genre of strategy game that has no macro resource collection) which boil down to a variety of minutiae to determine the victor. The game really does an excellent job of implementing and making available tactics and strategies of the period (my only complaint is the lack of support for Swamp Fox-style combat, but that is not so much a flaw as much as a matter of scope) and it is genuinely fun and challenging to micromanage a few inferior battalions to victory over a well-diversified and larger force. In short, the land battles do a great job of making the player feel like a general of the period and that's exactly what the game needed to do to be successful.

The turn-based component is relatively pleasant as well. The game provides sufficient automation and tooltips that even for those interested purely in combat, the turn-based over-world is fine. For those interested more in the TBS (Turn-Based Strategy) part of the game, there's plenty of depth to be had. Whether it could stand as purely a TBS is debatable, but when leveraged in tandem with the real-time components it's excellent and the additions to it since Rome: Total War and Medieval 2: Total War are great as well.

E: TW also treads relatively new ground for the Total War franchise. The inclusion of three campaigns to help introduce new players to the game and the series scores huge points for accessibility. Like other RTS games though that have opted for more open-ended campaigns such as Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, the campaign does suffer from the issue that without truly significant imagination you do not feel like George Washington and the story is weak despite strong source material, for a series that previously had just about none of this, the existence of this even as a tutorial cannot be understated- E: TW scores accessibility points just like Demigod did and for largely the same reasons.

E: TW also introduces naval battles to the Total War franchise. This is where E: TW stumbles a bit. The realistic depth of these battles is quite nice, but the controls for it are extremely awkward and the battles still, despite their depth, tend towards self-resolution anyway. Personally, I actively avoid naval combat as much as possible. Nicely though, this is doable because of the nature of E: TW, and thus while for most games this would be absolutely killer, for E: TW, it's not much of a problem at all. Hopefully Creative Assembly can improve this significantly in future iterations, as the core mechanics have the seeds of greatness and may hold the keys to a veritable renaissance of naval combat in RTS games.

But still, the land battles more than compensate for the naval issues. With an MP version of the campaign currently in beta and with MP skirmishes already being fun, E: TW still has plenty of life left in it (like it wouldn't anyway- it's practically the definition of infinite replayability). The game just offers so much and delivers on so many fronts that for anyone remotely interested in the concept of building your colonial empire it's too good to pass up or turn a blind eye to, and the great execution of all of this easily earns E: TW the #2 slot on this list, particularly as patches have solved nearly all of the game's early issues.

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2
There is no game on this list or this year even that has benefited from post-release support more than Dawn of War 2. Empire: Total War may have been a broken mess on release, but when it worked it was still fun and still easily a candidate for the #2 slot. Killing Floor may have gotten boring because of its small map selection, but its core mechanics were still damn fun. Demigod's online situation may have been horrible on release, but 77% of Demigod players didn't care because even with bots the game was fun even if it wasn't reaching its full potential. Sure, Killing Floor and Demigod may not have made this list, but unlike Dawn of War 2 they would have at least been viewed positively still. Dawn of War 2, without the updates it has received, would have been a blight on Relic's stellar record only a tad smaller than The Outfit. Relic has stepped in to fill the strategy void that Blizzard has left since releasing WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne, and Relic have stepped up to nigh indisputably claim the title of *the* RTS developer of this decade. The original Dawn of War legitimized the introduction of capture points as viable macro resources in RTS games and proved that squads were viable. Company of Heroes then took those innovations and transported them into an environment with an almost FPS level of detail and polished them to no end, creating the greatest RTS game of this century. With Dawn of War 2 coming from such a grand pedigree, it had little margin for error. On launch, it had errors.

It's still not without error either. The singleplayer campaign, in my honest opinion, failed to live up to expectations. It is a massive improvement over Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Soulstorm's campaigns. However, while it avoids the complete doldrums that those devolve into, it does drag on a bit. It does not live up to Company of Heroes. Narratively, it's better than Company of Heroes, but still not great. However, the last mission temporarily brushes with greatness, tapping into the core of the WH40K license, but it pulls some deus ex machina and backs off (this isn't much of a spoiler because they've already made it well-known that your squads transfer into Chaos Rising). Still, for an RTS, the SP campaign is not bad and for fans of DotA and isometric RPGs, it may well be extremely enjoyable. I do prefer it to the standard RTS campaign structure of skirmish battles with cut-scenes before and after.

During beta and at launch, DoW 2's multiplayer was supremely disappointing. Relic had regressed to Dawn of War 1 combat depth while, at the time, having removed a fair amount of macro depth as well. They had scored points with heroes, particularly the Tyranid Ravener Alpha and Eldar Warp Spider Exarch, but DoW 2 was not supposed to be competing with DotA and Demigod and etc- it needed to compete at least with WC3 (excluding WC3's custom maps, although Relic really needs to consider the kind of success Blizzard has had with such functionality). Between meh battles and slow macro, DoW 2 looked to be a failure. Worse, what it brought to the table over Company of Heroes was melee combat, and at launch the game was not taking advantage of this distinction much at all.

But somehow, Dawn of War 2 rose to #1 on this list. Not only that, but I rate it as the third-best strategy game of all-time, behind CoH and StarCraft. So something significant happened at some point to elevate it to that great height. That significant occurrence was patch 1.5, aka "There Is Only War". The patch infused the game with a flood of new maps, including the superb Calderis Refinery which continues to be one of the best maps for all modes (1v1, 2v2, and 3v3). More importantly though, the patch completely reworked Dawn of War 2's balance. Relic freely admitted to having originally screwed-up, and in 1.5 they effectively fixed it.

What, exactly, did 1.5 do? It established the proper relationship between ranged and melee units, massively increasing the effectiveness of melee units and also increasing the overall lethality of combat. Dozens of units were also tweaked in significant ways, but I won't go into the details of that. The effect was massively deeper combat and finally Dawn of War 2's macro genius began to shine because of the more lethal combat. Do not let the lack of "base building" fool you- Dawn of War 2 has every bit of macro depth that Company of Heroes and other RTS games with "base building. Only when we get to the very elite macro titles in the genre such as StarCraft and Total Annihilation does DoW 2 begin to falter.

Dawn of War 2 consolidates the base building macro into four things- the HQ structure, the units, the hero, and the power. The HQ structure is the traditional base, like a Zerg Hatchery it has three tiers and each opens new units, upgrades, etc... There are two functions of this structure- to produce units, and to advance your tier. This is the only structure that can do these functions, so you need to plan its usage very carefully. What order you train units in is huge, as is the timing of your decision to research Tier 2 and Tier 3 (during those times, you cannot produce units and thus you potentially leave yourself vulnerable). This isn't, by far, where most of DoW 2's macro depth stems from, and Relic recognized that and that's the reason for the consolidation and it works.

Units and heroes are the bigger macro factors. In DoW 2, every unit in your possession represents a serious investment. In DoW 2, combat is almost unavoidable. It's nearly constant. The battle lines in DoW 2 are far more fluid than they are in Company of Heroes despite the smaller, tighter levels. It's a constant war to win the little battles, and it's here where the macro kicks in- it's embedded right in the combat. The main goal is to inflict more casualties on your foe than you take and to attempt to wipe out enemy squads without allowing any of your own to be wiped-out. Losing units in a squad is generally ok to an extent as they can be replaced relatively cheaply (it still takes a toll on your macro to replace them and it will delay acquisition of new squads and tier advancement, but you don't need to invest in completely new squads to replace dead existing ones), but losing an entire squad is often devastating. This used to be a rarity until 1.5. Now it's much more common. The other side of unit macro is investment in units. The only global upgrades in DoW 2 are Tier 2 and Tier 3. Otherwise, everything is local, and most units have upgrade options. These all tend to require power and requisition and purchasing them will delay your acquisition of other units- and, potentially worse, your upgrade to a higher tier. For example, Ork Shoota Boyz are pretty weak by default. However, for 75 requisition and 25 power you can upgrade them with a Nob Leader that turns them into a respectable ranged squad. You can also, for 80 requisition and 20 power, upgrade them with a Bigga Shoota which further increases their damage and grants them an ability, "Aiming? Wotz Dat?" which allows them to suppress a target enemy squad (very useful for keeping enemy melee units away and/or suppressing enemy ranged units while your melee units move in for the kill). Both of these upgrades massively improve the Shoota squad, but together they cost 145 requisition and 45 power. The second of these two stats is the big one because that is ~a third of the power you need to go to Tier 2, thus by upgrading even one of your Shoota squads you significantly delay your advancement to Tier 2. Now consider doing this for multiple squads. You'll get a short-term boost, but long-term you may have issues.

Heroes are similar. When killed, they require at least 250 requisition to resurrect. If you don't resurrect them, you're going to be working with less because the hero is a "free unit" per se (it doesn't factor into the pop cap) and heroes tend to provide the kinds of special functionality you need to make inroads against your opponent. For living heroes, you have the option of purchasing wargear. There are three types of wargear and usually at least three pieces of wargear for each type. These all cost requisition and power and thus pose the same issue as unit upgrades. Furthermore, many of these items are tier-dependent. As well, these items tend to open up abilities and functionality for your hero that can alter his/her role. For example, the Ork Kommando starts with a double-barrel bolter, marking him as a ranged unit. His damage is ok, but not extraordinarily, although he can prove very effective against light enemy ranged units and enemy melee units if he is microed to keep them out of range (a bit easier with good use of his stun bomb ability). In Tier 1, he can be upgraded with the Assassin Knife. This gives him a melee attack, allowing him to be effective in melee combat. It also makes him much more damaging against enemy heroes. This is further complemented by the Assassinate ability he gains, which allows him to deal a very large amount of damage in a single attack (this is analogous to gank/snipe abilities in DotA/HoN/Demigod/etc). Early on, this can prove very effective at countering enemy heroes (in particular, it's very useful against Space Marines because the Kommando can combine his Infiltrate ability with the Assassin Knife to engage Tactical Space Marine squads in melee combat without taking fire from them on the way there and then opening them to safe attack from your melee units; also, the Assassinate ability will kill a Tactical Space Marine and there are only three of them in a squad by default and they are expensive, so that is huge as well to gain a macro advantage). Later, the Tier 3 Rokkit Launcher often proves the more effective piece of wargear. This requires replacing the Assassin's Knife. In total, that's 80 power spent on the hero that can't be spent on advancing your tier or acquiring new units.

And power. I danced around that above for quite a bit, but power is big in DoW 2 because unlike in DoW 1, it's not in your base anymore. Relic took the fledgling concept of making power nodes capturable points (recall the super power nodes in DoW 1 that you could place your special beefy power structure on) and fleshed it out. Granted, this comes on the heels of Company of Heroes with its three types of capturable points (Manpower, Fuel, and Munitions). Power in DoW 2 is analogous to fuel in CoH or Vespene in StarCraft. It is the secondary resource that controls your ability to advance your tech tree and to acquire more valuable units and upgrades. It is, in the early stages, a very scarce resource whose usage has massive repercussions. For example, investing power in upgrading tier 1 units will help you dominate in tier 1, but if your opponent uses his/her power to instead tech to tier 2 and then invests in a vehicle, you could find yourself in a heap of trouble. Because power is forced to be on the field of battle now and no longer tucked deep away in your base, it is open to harass. Power harassing in DoW 2 is important and hearkens back to StarCraft in a very positive way. The system works as follows- when you capture a power node you start gaining a small amount of power per a second. Next, you can fortify the node (this costs 125 requisition) and increase the power gain rate while forcing your opponent to destroy the fortification before being able to capture the node. After a power node is fortified, you an add generators to it (100 each) which further increase the node's output. If you don't protect your power nodes, your opponent can destroy your generators and node and devastate your power economy. That's power harass. Your opponent can also just destroy the fortification and keep the generators intact and capture the node and they will then control the generators as well and thus they will use your investment against you (this is not as common as you'd think, as while it's a favorite of newer players to try this, in general players don't invest so much into power nodes that they do not have very good control over, so such fully decked-out power nodes tend to be close to the enemy's base and tough to hold and thus the enemy tends to recapture them quickly; slash and burn tends to be a more crippling tactic).

So all of the above combine to give DoW 2 a very, very pertinent macro element that is ever-present and which can often be match-deciding. I have taken such time exploring all of this because it was one of the biggest criticisms of DoW 2 initially because it was not implemented properly, but since 1.5 that has changed. Now, the game is much deeper and a ton more fun. The full capability of DoW 2's micro depth has now come to the fore and it's a very fun, eventful game to play. There is tons of combat constantly, often on multiple fronts, and you're kept very busy- rarely are there lulls. This makes DoW 2 a fair bit different from CoH and offers the different take on that formula that I think everyone wanted when DoW 2 was initially announced.

Beyond the above, it's also worthy of mention that DoW 2 plays extremely well in 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3. 1v1 retains the typical RTS showdown appeal. 2v2 hybridizes the intense competition of 1v1 with a bit of cooperation. Finally, 3v3 offers full cooperative play and the combination of heroes and races available in this allows for some real cooperation. Thus, the game has very wide appeal.

Despite the huge advancement that 1.5, There Is Only War brought, that was not DoW 2's only major post-release patch. Patch 1.8, Last Stand, was also massive in a completely different way. Besides further refining 1.5 (Last Stand made some additional, bold tweaks) and adding even more maps, Last Stand added... Last Stand. A brand new co-op survival mode. At first glance, this seemed to be the latest in a long bandwagon trend. But this is Relic, and this is a game that was not what it should have been at launch and they've been making up for that ever since. Simple pandering would do them no good. Last Stand isn't a bandwagon mode and it's not pandering. It's something that hasn't been seen much outside of the WC3 custom mapping community. Last Stand is rather highly-polished and quite fun. There are only three heroes available, but they're all diverse and fun to use. Unlike other games, the leveling system in Last Stand makes sense and is not pure grinding- it works nicely for the most part. Last Stand, on its own I have spent tons of hours with at 2am in the morning and a couple of friends. It's just damn good fun, and Relic did a great job rejecting what most developers do, which is using their core gameplay for every mode whether it fits or not. Campaign, Multiplayer, and Last Stand all use roughly different mechanics and all play very differently. They're like three different games based on the same engine instead of just three different modes. And Relic scores high points for this- there is almost assuredly something for everyone in DoW 2.

So, despite a slow start that saw lackluster MP and a horrifically small MP map selection, Relic have more than turned Dawn of War 2 around with a series of intelligent patches. For free, they have almost recreated MP from the ground-up and they have added what, on consoles would be a $15 piece of DLC with Last Stand. These improvements have made DoW 2 what it is today- the best game of 2009 and one of the best RTS games of all-time. I simply cannot wait for the Chaos Rising expansion now as it will be adding a new campaign that seems like it will fix some of the issues with DoW 2's campaign, it will add a new race (Chaos), and it will add two new heroes and a new map to Last Stand. And if all that doesn't work, Relic has established that they will do whatever is necessary to bring their game up to snuff.

The Games That Aren't on This List
Well, the most obvious is Modern Warfare 2. And the reasons, from a PC perspective, are obvious. But even beyond that, Modern Warfare 2 is a disappointment. Its singleplayer campaign has more plot holes than anyone can shake a stick at and "isn't balanced for lean" despite level design to the contrary, and overall is disappointing compared to CoD 4's. MP fares little better, with the smaller battles, rampant hacking, and poor balance. In short, MW2 just is not as good a game as CoD 4 was and it really is just a mediocre entry overall, despite its sales and hype. And since this is best PC games of 2009... IWNet says it all.


I also left L4D 2 off this list. Personally, I am thus far disappointed with the game for the short time I've had it in my hands. However, I need to play more Vs and Scavenge. Nevertheless, this is still effectively an update to last year's entry and I'm not inclined to put the same game on my list twice, despite its changes. If I were to do that, I'd have to list Dawn of War 2 twice (ok, not really because it wasn't worthy of inclusion until it was patched). Also not on this list are Dragon Age: Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum. These titles I leave out due to relative ignorance. While I have played the Arkham Asylum demo, I do not feel confident in fully judging it. However, from what I have played, heard, and seen I believe it would barely miss my top five. Dragon Age: Origins I simply have not played. I was interested until $15+ worth of DLC dropped for it on launch day. Then I instantly became disinterested. It may be a great game, but without playing it I cannot consider putting it on my list. Shattered Horizon and Torchlight, again I claim ignorance on. Shattered Horizon I am very interested in buying though, but again it seems as if it would just miss the list. Torchlight I'm not very interested in and thus cannot judge it, but that does seem like it could have had a shot at being in the list otherwise, so that and L4D 2 are my two recognizable points of contention. Red Faction: Guerrilla is probably the final notable title I have left off. Again, this stems from relative ignorance, but like Arkahm Asylum I do not feel this would have made the list regardless.

So, there's my list and my reasoning. If you made it this far, gj and help yourself to a virtual cookie.]]> <![CDATA[Merry Christmas]]> http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=460 Fri, 25 Dec 2009 06:51:13 -0500 http://forums.unearthlygames.com/showthread.php?tid=460 .]]> .]]>