Control Freak

“Been playing HL2 as I fancy going through it again. I’m enjoying it, but still find it weird on the XBOX controller. Things which are piss easy on the mouse can be a real bugger on the controller” – Navan Daughn

Valve need to get their heads screwed on for console conversions

When does a controller become part of the game? Pretty much always! However the degree to which it affects the game experience really varies wildly from case to case. I think Navan now understands some of my complaints with regards to The Orange Box much better, having tried it on a twin stick pad. And having played through Half Life 1 myself on a mouse, I already wish I’d got The Orange Box on the PC rather than for the 360. I’m having the same problem with Left 4 Dead as well. Apart from the small concession of a quick-turn button the game is completely designed for mouse & keyboard control rather than for twin stick on a gamepad, and I felt the game really suffered. Now with the Left 4 Dead 2 demo out, I’ve been able to directly compare it on the 360 vs the PC; and there was no contest at all, the game handled far more easily on a mouse, and due to the design of the game this made it actually much more fun to play in many ways. It leaves me frustrated with both versions because many more of my friends are on 360, and I’d much rather play over XBox Live, in the comfort of my front room, with my preferred twin sticks; yet the game feels so much nicer to control on the PC with a mouse and keyboard. So basically I won’t be 100% satisfied with either version. I realised what I really want is a proper “Left 4 Dead 360″ version that changes the game control mechanics enough so that control on a twin stick pad becomes viable & fun and doesn’t feel like you’re stuggling to replicate a mouse. Halo, Gears and many other titles all do this fine, so it can be done.

Some people may say it’s a simple case of “always play a game on it’s default intended controller”, which held more weight with arcade conversions, but it’s still not exactly clear cut. Should Street Fighter 2 HD Remix be played on an 360 or PS3 pad since those are the systems it was released for? Ok, it’s clearly a update of an original joystick game though – so fine, use a joystick. But what about the differences between different joysticks? Isn’t it a bit of an unfair advantage in the game to be using a high quality controller vs someone that isn’t? For Street Fighter IV, shouldn’t I always be using button bindings and turbo auto fire? These things are built into the game options and the official controller! On the PC it gets even more murky, with WoW Macro keyboards, gaming mice with extra button bindings and on and on. Where do you draw the line between cheating and ‘playing to win’ when it comes to your choice of controller? Should you even be allowed to reconfigure your button layout on Halo on the 360? That sounds ridiculous I know, but it shows how difficult it is to draw the line without some kind of organisation of the metagame rules around the video game itself. For Street Fighter, I play to the standard I’ll be held to at whatever offline tournament I want to enter, but if I wasn’t competing in organised offline events, what then?

Auto-fire is probably the biggest controller issue on competitive 360 games, and it affects everything from Street Fighter to FPS titles. There are some quite simple solutions to either designing the game so it won’t be an issue, or detecting it as cheating online. But sadly games developers don’t appear to care, putting in pistols that ‘fire as fast as you can press the button’ which is foolishly naive in an online competitive game, and making the aforementioned official controllers with auto-fire built in. It’s there so you can test combos out in training mode? Yeh right. And the line just gets blurrier all the time – it is already possible to use a keyboard and mouse on a 360 if you are willing to go to enough trouble with things like this XPFS 4.0 Speed.

Another game I love, Virtual On was recently re-released in an upgraded version on the 360 on XBLA, and I was initally overjoyed. But it requires such a specialised controller to play properly I’ve completely avoided it until one comes available. My friend Ollie Barder covered the history of Virtua Ron (as I affectionately refer to it sometimes) and it’s controller issues on the 360 here. However, luckily, fan pressure has meant that a twin-stick controller for the 360 was eventually announced. It’s still not out at the time of writing, but is imminent, and can be previewed at Hori’s site. Of course the problem is whether I’ll ever be able to get hold of one in the UK, and at what price, and then will the game’s netcode make it worthwhile to even play, let alone shell out for another controller.

I don’t really have any answers here, with the current state of play, other than to raise this point as yet another murky area of gaming that developers of competitive games, and conversions of games, really ought to pay much more attention to. However especially on platforms like the PC, it might be a case that there’s very little they can do to control the issue however. All this, and I haven’t even touched on WiiMotes or Natal yet!

Balancing Match

Earlier I looked at the concept I attempted to coin ‘Versus Flow‘ in video games. Here’s my continued thoughts on that & how to improve things.

Don’t Give Up, Challenge Again

So what can you do to try to fix the matchmaking? Well, much like getting good at anything; the first step is to at least try! Flawed as they are, at least SF4 and Halolz are starting along the right track, it’s just that overall it’s taking videogames a ridiculously long time to get anywhere, given that this is something that’s been needed since the dawn of competitive gaming, and has been ripe for any game to utilise for as long as we’ve had internet enabled games.

I’ll use a primary example of Vs Fighting games, as those are my favourite. You need to start with a decent skill rating system like those in VF5 or HDR, ie: one based on results and not experience (although experience might be used to count for a very small portion of your rating), but use it based on the character you select, not an average overall score. Just because I’m pretty decent with DeeJay, it doesn’t mean I’m anywhere near that good with Ryu. However your ‘best character rating’ could be used to give a default ‘base’ rating with a character you hadn’t played before eg. you’d start at half your best character’s rating until you actually played a more games with different characters to assist the game in ‘finding’ your skill level based on results. You could potentially go even further than a character based rating, and use a character matchup based rating. eg. I’m pretty familiar with the Dee Jay vs Ryu match, but I’m really not good or familiar with playing Dee Jay vs Dictator.

Then, here’s how a network battle options menu ought to look:

Online Game Type: Single Vs Match, Repeated Vs Match, Best of Three Vs Match, Group/Lobby Match etc. Whatever relevant modes that game allowed. Maybe even allow a player to try and play all types depending on what is available with a priority setting for whatever the player prefers.

Priority: Skill Match, Connection Match, Equal, possibly even a Zone/Attitude Match (more on this below).

Ping Limit: Set the highest ping time you want to play from Any, down to 10ms or something ridiculous (good luck!). Turn this into a number of stars of connection or whatever for simplicity. Or Best/Good/Average/Any banding.

Skill Upper Limit: Set how much higher ranked than you your opponents can be, this could be banded rather than actual points for simplicity.

Skill Lower Limit: Set how much lower ranked than you your opponents can be.  Again this could be banded, and might not even be needed at all. Certainly if it was, it could be limited to not very much easier, or tied to your upper limit, so you can just choose how far varied rankings you play against.

All of this could be further simplified for players who didn’t want to worry about ‘under the hood’ mechanics, just let them pick “I only want to play Good/Average/Any net connections” and “I want online Vs matches to be Easy/Normal/Hard/Any”. Oh and you’d probably need to put in warning messages like “you may not find matches for a long time” if people set it on certain silly options – like a low rated player only wanting easier opponents, if you even chose to allow this (perhaps not).

Then I’d pick the character I want to play as.. and we’re off. No, not staring at a ‘waiting for opponent’ screen – I’m playing vs the CPU, or training mode, or ideally, whatever the heck you wanted to do in that game, or even a different game if the gaming platform could allow it. But my ‘Request to Fight’ would be out there, on the network, looking for another request to match with, and when they find each other via XBL dedicated matching  servers etc, bam – “Here Comes a New Challenger”. You could still quit at this point if necessary (your Mum just called!), but the game wouldn’t even show you your opponents name, character, connection or actual ranking until the match began. And once the fight begins, if you quit or disconnect – you’d lose and your opponent would win. After the match your ratings would be recalculated appropriately – perhaps given lesser weighting to the result, the further the match was from your preferred settings.

Hopefully the online code would also have some method for dealing with other forms of ‘cheating’ other than the simple to deal with quitting – including things like auto-fire, lag switches – whatever the actual known exploits are in the game. Almost all of these would be detectable over time.

All of this would totally change the idea of “Ranked Match”; which arguably emulates entering a tournament against all comers and figuring out ‘who’s the best’ instead to a “Balanced Match”; attempting to match equally skilled players. Online versus shouldn’t be about the ‘n00b pwnage’! I’d even rename it Balanced Match if I could do, and hopefully at least put a hinderance on the ’rank-whoring’ obsession with Leaderboards & how to cheat them. To me a leaderboard for the vast majority of players should be the byproduct of play, not the goal of play.

Now, it might sound overly complicated or difficult to code the features in my online battle menu, but all of these features already exist in one form or another in various games, they just haven’t ever been put together in any game that also has good netcode and a good rating system.

There’s certainly hope of all of this being put together at some point. The most progress seems to be coming on the ‘Attitude Match’ mentioned above. Impulse (a PC digital download service from Stardock similar to Valve’s Steam) will attempt to match players based on game ownership and their self-defined gaming priorities, which is a bit like a far more advanced version of XBox Live’s “Zones” for a player – which I’ve only ever seen a single game (Marble Blast Ultra) even make use of – probably because they are just too limited to be of much use. Social gaming applications like Raptr might also eventually become an aid to matchmaking – even Facebook itself (& its games) could use all of this – you can see the early signs that they are starting to look into it’s relationship with gaming when you read interviews like this one, and see the start of it’s integration with XBox Live (even though it’s really basic at this time).

 

With regards to actual skill matching, it appears Blizzard have some fantastic ideas for Starcraft II:

“The old experience of playing through single-player, getting online, getting your ass handed to you,and then saying “I don’t want to play anymore” is not something we’re after. We want to have more friendly experiences for new players.”

It seems like they really want to make Starcraft II multiplayer far more accessible:

“Sigaty talks about how long it took him to feel like he could win at Warcraft III. “It took 10 games… I knew it would get to that point, but I think, 10 games, that’s ridiculous. If you play three, get your ass handed to you, then you walk away, you say yeah, I think the online thing’s not for me.”

Pardo, and Battle.net, have the answer. Over and above improved matchmaking algorithms, searches, and the persistent player profiles that should prevent “smurfing” (experienced players creating new accounts to take noobs unawares), there’s an ambitious and clever new ladder and tournament system that aims to give players of all skill levels the kind of thrill experienced at the top end of competition – “the competitive arena for everyone”, Pardo calls it. “Ladder play doesn’t have to be for hardcore gamers only.”

There will be seven levels of competition in StarCraft II – five regular bands from Copper to Platinum, book-ended by the e-sports Pro League at the top, and the Practice League at the bottom. Practice League will feature a slowed game speed and maps custom-designed to prevent the rush tactics that can be panic-inducing and off-putting to a new player.”

It sounds like exactly the same things I’m talking about, just translated to the RTS genre, doesn’t it? But all competitive games should be doing this. Even if Starcraft II actually ends up more like this:

Even Capcom appears to have some decent ideas for Super Street Fighter IV, as they are talking about having rating points based per-character, and also matchmaking in team vs team battles to try to create equal teams. Now they just need to put these features in a better fighting game with better netcode (like, say HDR ).

Overall, once again, it’s down to ‘e-sports’ to take their cues from real sports. There’s usually multiple paths available to a sportsman to get a varied skill level of competition. But video games don’t have much available between “casual games with your mates” to “take on the best in the world”; but they easily could, and should do. In many ways this is recovering another lost part of local arcade culture; where you vied to be the ‘best in your arcade’, as that was all you really knew about. Your local arcade catchment area was the equivalent to an amateur sunday league at a sport in some ways, but the options that are available with online matchmaking could actually be signigicantly better than this.

Coming next in this series – my thoughts on how to improve measuring actual skill at games to get good ratings, and also training modes in games and how to allow players to improve their skills better.

Saving Anywhere costs you Half a Life

It’s taken me almost a year, but I’ve finally completed Half Life on the PC. The reason it took me so long to play was that I only played it in my ’spare moments’, usually late at night, far apart from my more dedicated gaming time. That wasn’t something intentional, it was because the game wholly failed to grab me at all. It was really only the non-game factors that ever piqued my interest – mainly a desire to discover the story, and to see what all the fuss was about with this old game (1998). Now this review does a good job of placing the game in its historical context, but my problem is despite all the innovations to the FPS genre, that doesn’t mean this was a fun game to actually play through then, and it certainly isn’t now.

What absolutely kills this game is the save game mechanic. You can save at absolutely any point, anywhere, with an infinite amount of save slots, and you can even ‘quick save’ and ‘quick load’ almost instantaneously. Such a mechanic will kill any action orientated game, as all elements of suspense and worse, challenge, are ruined. Half Life basically devolves into a trial-and-error slog throughout. Any battle, no matter how ‘hard’, can easily be overcome not by any improvement in the player’s skill (although it will require a basic minimum), but by simply increasing the use of saving & restarts. The issue of checkpoints or setting the right challenge and difficultly level for the player has been sidestepped – it’s effectively set on an infinitely potentially easy challenge at all times, as determined by the player. But the player has very little idea of how hard or easy they are making it a lot of the time. How on earth is the player even supposed to guess what a “Normal” difficulty should be for this game?

Could anything be further from the ideal of an arcade challenge and hard-fun? In fact I recall when I started to play Half Life 2 in The Orange Box, I was shocked to discover such a mechanic, as I’d played through a good chunk of the game assuming only the in-game checkpoints that I was used to. But given ’save anywhere, anytime’ any action game becomes an interactive movie more than a game; albeit one with potential frustration & repetition to progress through. Now perhaps there is some hidden ‘ideal’ in the game to only rely on the game’s built-in auto saves, and to attempt to never use the save states (in much the same way “one credit” play is often assumed in an arcade title for the real challenge level). But if this is so, why did the designers not build this into the actual game mechanics? At the very least score a player on the least use of save states or something of that ilk. But the trouble is that many parts of the game seem so obtuse in their design that without the assumed use of heavy repetition, the player really has little chance of passing them, and the game is so long, it is hardly reasonable to require the player to re-start the whole game like a true arcade title. For an example of this type of design, I did enjoy the high level of variety of the weapons in the game – in terms of feel and effectiveness in different conditions & vs different enemies, but the trouble was the game would give me little or no idea as to what the effectiveness conditions of the various weapons actually was. Couple this with random and unknown restocks of future ammunition for said weapons, and the player is clearly being guided by this design to use (& abuse) the trial and error method of play on offer by the save game mechanics.

Now of course the game offers more than shooting based challenges – there are also heavy platforming & manoeuvre sections. Platforming in a first person perspective is one of the most irritating and silly game mechanics I’ve ever come across. I have never been a huge fan of platform games anyway, but I’m aware of a few that managed to effectively translate this play mechanic in 3D environments (such as Mario 64, or even Gun Valkyrie), and they all did it by using a third-person perspective.

Lastly we come to the puzzle element in Half Life. Which mostly comes down to “where the **** do I go now?” or it’s close cousin “how do I get through this bit without X killing/damaging me?”. Now these are the only areas of the game where I actually became stuck a few times and found any real challenge in completing. However most of the time I was simply lost because I hadn’t played the game in a long time (usually due to being bored by it), and the game often gave very little indication of even the direction of progress (although some levels are indeed expertly arranged). However the solution to all of the times I got stuck was either trial and error on movement timing or a jump, or more often had a totally illogical solution which almost always involved moving your ‘disembodied hand & weapon floating camera’ along a 1 pixel wide ledge or pipe. These manoeuvres would be totally impossible in any game where you actually played a character that had any sense of scale and size, or even vaguely realistic physics to the placement of your character within the game environment. The trouble is that, given the save mechanic, these puzzle elements were pretty much the only challenging part of the game left to actually play. It did make me think that if you must design a game within the limiting restraints of a save mechanic like this, making something like Portal -where the action elements have been mostly stripped out in return for far more puzzle elements – is actually the logical way to go to improve it.

The story to Half Life was, by game standards, rather good – albeit very short and simple. And it is told in a fantastic method without recourse to dull non-interactive cut scenes, so I did enjoy that aspect of it. For me the two best things that came out of this experience was that I was introduced to Steam & I actually slowly found my FPS playing skills with keyboard and mouse control vastly improving as I went along. By the time I got through some of the latter action & platform heavy sections I was starting to actually enjoy playing with a mouse & keyboard, as for the first time I didn’t feel like I was battling the control scheme.

Half Life has of course won many awards, but none as coveted or as well deserved as the Agoner’s single turd.