EVE-Online – Deciding to take Risks part 2

Lets continue exploring risks in EVE-Online and this time look at them in the context of challenge and reward.

EVE-Online is a super-capitalistic game. Skill points mean nothing more than the ability to use different ships and equipment. What makes a man in EVE is his wealth in both fixed assets and capital in currency, called ‘Isk’. Isk is the official currency of Iceland, the game developers and their studio are located in Iceland so they called their in-game currency Isk.

Many ships cost millions of Isk, but some ships cost billions. Some people manage to make 100 millions in a day, others are lucky to make 10 millions in a sitting. There is the saying that it takes money to make money, the same is true in this game. The real power over others in this game is by controlling the market of a region of space. It takes massive capital to do that but once a cartel is set up the money comes pouring back.

I will be looking at the more accessible ways of making money, as a small time trader. People new to the game can engage in this profession fairly soon and for others who just don’t have much time to play this is a viable option to make some money in order to save up for a bigger ship.

One factor in trading is the time it takes to get from point A to point B.

Moving from one space station to another involves a number of steps and costs a certain amount of time. To begin with the player is inside a station. There he conducts his business, upgrades his ship, buys items, takes contracts etc. Once everything is loaded into his ship he undocks and is moved into space. If you are familiar with science fiction movies then the term ‘warp’ or ‘hyperspace’ should mean something to you, it’s a form of faster-than-light travel. The player has to align his ship in a certain direction towards a star gate, go to warp and will remain in warp for a few seconds, traversing the solar system he’s in, and drop out at the star gate of his choice. Each solar system is connected to others by ’star gates’, a sort of giant teleportation devices (no, not the sort of circly thing from the TV series ‘Stargate SG-1).

The star gate turns the ship into light and catapults it across space to the next solar system where the ship will be reassembled.. or something like that. Then the player warps to the next gate en route and so on until he reaches his destination. This is considered making a ‘jump’ and will show up as a measure in following screenshots and each jump takes a certain amount of time, depending on how much effort the player is willing to put into micro-managing the trip or letting the ship go on autopilot.

Challenge

Assuming the player isn’t starting from absolute 0, he already possesses a transport ship and has some spare cash to buy goods for trade. Transport ships have a certain capacity and items have a certain size, depending on pilot skills this capacity can vary a lot. When doing NPC trading, that means buying items that are useless to players from NPC’s and selling to NPC’s, there is a point where one space station can only supply so much and any one space station only requests a certain amount. If the transport’s capacity is greater than those amounts then the pilot will have to calculate in multiple stops along his trade route.

The challenge now is to analyze the market, to find goods that are easy to transport at the lowest price and to find the closest destination with a higher price to make a profit.

This screenshot shows one type of such goods: Electronic Parts. Usually that’s a pretty good commodity for trade.

We can see the cheapest price being 727.71 ISK and the highest buying order paying 821.89 ISK. Additionally it’s also just in the neighbouring solar system, how convenient. Great deal? I don’t think so, look closely at the quantity. 99 pieces up for sale and 3905 on demand at the destination. According to the info box, my transport ship in its most basic configuration can hold 5625m3 of cargo and each electronic parts item is considered to be 1m3 in size. This trip would be a complete waste of my time.
With this type of goods the money will be in the quantity, not in the margin of a few items so I’ll have to look at sellers and buyers that can take as much as i can fit into my ship.
Additionally the seller should be somewhere close to my current location and the buyer not too far away from the seller’s space station, the aim is to minimise travel time. Profit is counted in Isk/hour or Isk/jump.

Currently it’s probably not such a good idea to trade in electronic parts after all since the profit margin will be really small. The market seems to be quite even, suggesting that some heavy trading has been going on in the last few days or weeks.

A further market analysis shows that prices are indeed at a low at this point in time.

Risk

Assuming the player has found a commodity and entered the trade route into his navigation system he’d be set to take off and do his trade run. Only there’s a few risks he has to consider first.

• Is his corporation / alliance at war? Meaning, could he get shot in secure space, lose the ship and cargo?
• Will someone else fulfill the buy order before he can? Sometimes it’s a real head to head race to get the last shipment in before selling the lot.
• Does the chosen trade route cross unsafe solar systems? If so, what would be the trade off in number of jumps if he chose a secure route?

The red dots on the star map are unsecured systems, there is nothing to protect travellers in those systems, yellow and green dots mean that the game has police NPC’s guarding the gates and they will shoot anyone who attacks another without having the right to do so. Shooting rights are only granted for corps that are at war with each other or for someone who’s been robbed, he’s allowed to shoot the thief. If someone pulled it off to kill someone without having those rights before the police arrived the right for revenge is reserved.

The two routes lead to the same destination but one goes trough unsecure space and the other avoids those areas. It is up to the player to determine if he’s willing to take the risk, knowing that other players are preying on traders like him in those unsafe systems. They will shoot on sight and collect what’s left of the cargo and ship or make the player pay ‘protection’ money.. and usually shoot him afterwards anyway.

Reward

The rewards of a successful, large quantity trade can be several millions. With many ships costing under 150 million, a series of successful trade runs can put the player into a new and powerful ship quite quickly. Once he owns the new ship he still has to run a few trades to pay for the equipment such as weapons, repair modules and ammo but after that he can drop the trading routine and go shoot people or NPC’s to make money, or go into the mining business which is also quite a lucrative upgrade from NPC trading.

EVE-Online – Deciding to take Risks part 1

I have introduced EVE-Online in a previous post and will continue on, discussing decisions to take risks of different natures.

Whenever the player does something besides chatting to fellow players he has to make decisions that could have uncertain outcomes.

Lets identify one of the potentially most devastating outcomes of a risk taken within the game: player death in the worst case scenario.

Player Death

Death in the game is semi-permanent. If the player’s space ship gets blown up he loses it for good, including most if not all equipment and cargo that was held within. Depending on the type and size of ship this could mean that days, weeks or even months of play time have been wiped out. The second stage of death is the destruction of the ‘Pod’ which contains the actual avatar of the player. This can be extremely costly as well and can potentially set the player back months in play time by wiping out skill points to a certain degree and ‘implants’ that help the player gain skill points (experience points in other games). A quasi level-down if you compare it to mechanics of normal MMORPG’s.

The story of the ‘Pod’s is that a player is floating inside an egg-shaped vessel, hooked up to neural interfaces which allow him to control the space ships into which the pod is installed. The movie ‘The Matrix’ illustrates this very accurately when ‘Neo’ gets disconnected from the matrix for the first time and wakes up floating in that goo filled pod, hooked up to all sorts of cables and tubes.
So if a ship in the game is destroyed, the pod is whats left and can be destroyed as well if it doesn’t/can’t escape.

Taking Risks

It is up to the player to decide the amount of risk he is prepared to take when he plans to perform any action within the game. There are certain rules and safeguards that protect him from the worst case in some parts of the game world, but it is not always guaranteed that he will be protected by the system. Certain conditions such as being at war with another corporation can mean that going from one space station to another in otherwise safe, policed space can be as unsafe as in the outer, lawless (in the real sense of the word, least amount of rules imposed on players) regions of the galaxy.

Assuming the player wants to attempt a PVE mission (player versus environment quest in MMORPG’s), he requests a mission from an NPC agent, sees the requirements to complete the mission and the rewards promised by the agent. Based on the reward the player can usually get an idea on how difficult, or risky that mission will be. Additionally the mission text will give hints to the type of enemy that will be encountered.

It is now up to the player to decide on whether to take the risk or not before he accepts the mission. If he accepts it and finds himself in a position that is too risky then it is sometimes too late to abort if he didn’t come prepared to be able to run away from an engagement in combat (a practice which will decrease his firepower, thus lengthen the duration of the mission – another decision of risk acceptance), in which case death is a likely outcome. Failing the mission, he will also lose the ‘respect’ of the agent who issued the mission, resulting in crappier future missions with less payment.

Managing risk

Since loss of ship or avatar life are some of the biggest risks a player faces and can have a serious impact on his game play and game enjoyment there are ways to manage this risk.
The system provides ways in form of insurance policies covering the partial value of the ship for a limited amount of time and insurance for skill points of the avatar in form of ‘clones’ that retain the knowledge. Basically that means that the player will respawn at a certain space station with as many skill points left as he insured himself for.
The community provides ways to manage risks as well. If a corporation or alliance is at war and players lose ships in battle everyone chips in to help those players get new ships in a short amount of time. This can be voluntary or defined as corporation policy and enforced by the system in form of tax imposed on any transfer of property within the game, player to player, player to system market and rewards gained from killing NPC’s with a bounty on their heads (such as in kill missions). The tax goes into the corporation wallet and can there be allotted to different projects, such as ship funds by the CEO and Directors (yes, corporations in EVE work just as in the real world).
The community also helps players manage risk by people helping each other, protecting a convoy or asteroid mining operation for instance or patrolling alliance ‘owned’ space.

This risk management helps the player to take on tasks that would otherwise be too risky for him, but still, the outcome is never certain.

Choices lead to complexity

Choices offered by the game create complexity and require the player to make decisions which will have effects on him and in the case of EVE-Online, will very often also have a direct or indirect impact on other players. Conflicts, economics, politics and relationships make this game so complex, dynamic and enjoyable that players keep coming back to it. It is built in a way that even if a player decides to stop playing for a while – months or even years – he can return and integrate himself back into the community without feeling left behind in the grind for equipment or fortune unlike many other MMO’s.

EVE-Online, Community and Metagaming

I have introduced EVE-Online in a previous post and will continue on, discussing elements of the community and metagaming.

Community

The nature of MMO’s is that the player community is an integral part of the game experience. Many aspects of this sort of games are even impossible for single players to accomplish. The community consists of all players but usually players like to group up. Lines are drawn around groups of players, sometimes they’re called a guild, a clan, a fellowship and in EVE’s case, a corporation.

The player’s identify with the name of their group, the values on which the group is based and create friendships with the members of their group. Within the group there are sub-groups consisting of players with special roles within the corporation or depending on the time of membership or contribution to the corporation.

This is all nice and well but where EVE-O separates itself from the other MMO’s is that corporations can combine into alliances within the formal system and rules of the game. They can act as one, control territory and the market within a region of the game. They can erect their own space stations within the borders of their territory. They can declare war on other alliances and fight to acquire new territory or defend their own turf.

Social Contract

The formal rules of the game in relation to corporations and alliances create a sort of social contract. It specifies the type of game play the players should or shouldn’t partake in as a code of conduct and the general objectives and values of the corporation and the alliance. It builds trust and provides safety. Whoever accepts this contract will be respected within the community and will receive help if in need. However, if the player betrays those within the group he will be expelled and most likely hunted down and killed, in-game of course.

Metagaming

It is impossible to keep communication and organization of such large groups of players contained within the game itself. It is common for a corporation to create a website with a forum to help players to keep in touch and remain up to date on current affairs related to the game. Discussion of game politics, coordination and organization of events, role playing and trade of in-game items can all take place on these forums.

Players adept at programming usually attempt to combine the in-game and out of game channels of communication with varying success. The game allows for certain information to be exported and downloaded. Web applications that help with manufacturing, market research, book keeping, mining, banking and event planning are popular and the game provides an internet browser (with limited functionality) to interact with these applications. Players in the game deal with the same real-time data as the ones who aren’t playing because they’re at work or otherwise unable/willing to play but like to browse the web and play around without actually playing the game.

In the next major expansion of the game, the developers plan to integrate several of these applications directly into the game. While some parts might make sense to be integrated, such as fleet coordination, attack / defense planning and so forth, others won’t be used as much. The reason is that for some tasks which are important for running the community and corporation/alliance, it is simply more convenient to just perform them in a browser than having to load up the game and go trough the game interface.

Betrayal often happens by one player trading sensitive information to a alliance or corporation that is at war with his own corp/alliance. Espionage is an interesting manifestation of metagaming. Some players will stay with a corporation, gaining their trust but have their own hidden agenda. They will gain access to important information which is stored out of game and use it to their own advantage just a the right time. It doesn’t just have to be text, sometimes it is even a case of interception and relaying of voice communication which is often used to coordinate in-game battles (using Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Skype, etc).

EVE-Online – Roles in a space MMO

EVE-Online is a massive multiplayer online space game.

The background story is that humans from earth found a natural wormhole leading to a different galaxy filled with planets that support life or could be terraformed (transformed to sustain life). They started colonizing those solar systems but then a catastrophe happened, destroying the wormhole and therefore the way back to earth. Stranded on those new worlds civilization and a new order of worlds had to be established. After centuries of war the remaining coalitions managed to hold peace and that’s where the game starts.

Roles

Before the player can participate in the game he has to create an avatar. In the process of creation he has to choose a general direction which his character will follow in the game. This can be a soldier, scientist, leader, mining and logistics expert amongst others. This choice will affect the time it takes for a player to learn a skill. If the skill falls within the skill set required by his chosen path then it will take much less time to learn than if it wasn’t.

It is the player’s personality and likes or dislikes of actions within the game that will ultimately decide the role of the player within the game.

Attack, Capture and Rescue

If he likes to play on his own most of the time and make money by hunting down NPC’s (non player characters) then a big warship with a balanced loadout of defenses and weapons systems will be his choice. In this case the player takes over the role of agressor, having to overpower the enemy while holding his own against large numbers of powerful enemies. His counter actors are the enemies spawned by the system, their role is to defend their fleet, position in space or their space stations. Sometimes a mission requires the player to capture items, recover kidnapped personnel or save a damsel in distress, however the role of the counter acting forces doesn’t change since the outcome of nearly every combat mission is that there won’t be anything left but bits and pieces of enemy ships floating in space.
If the player enjoys sharing his play time with other people he is free to include them in his battle against NPC’s.

Search and Capture

If the player likes to spend time chatting with others while running a mining and logistics operation in one of the many asteroid belts which are filled with valuable ore he would choose a mining vessel without any defensive or offensive capabilities. The motives of play here are to seek and capture the most valuable resources. Everything in EVE-Online is based on these resources. Since the player is interacting mainly with the system in this mode of play, the system also provides a counter actor in the form of attacking NPC groups that spawn at random intervals.
This is where another player comes in to protect the mining operation by drawing the enemy fire on him and destroying the attacking ships. He is counter acting the system.

EVE-Online is a game with a very strong and dynamic economy. The game development/management company even hired a full time economist to monitor it and make subtle changes if it steers off course (usually as a result of a game in-balance which usually gets fixed fairly quickly) or to introduce changes based on the progression of the game’s background story. Every usable (different from trade able) item is based on the basic resources gathered from mining. The rarest, most expensive ores and minerals can only be found on the fringes of the galaxy where there is no police, law and order. Everyone is on their own. After long mining operations there are convoys of transport ships heading towards the center of the galaxy to sell their ore. This is the perfect time for ambushes by other players which want to take that ore and sell it themselves.

The Chase

These kinds of ambushes can quickly become all-out fleet battles if the convoy is protected by a large enough escorting fleet. But in some cases it can turn into an exciting chase where the mineral transporter has to try to mislead the ones chasing him. He can choose odd routes, use cloaking technology or fit powerful booster rockets to his ship to be faster than the ones chasing him.
If he choses to hide in obscure places or in plain sight but remaining cloaked, the one that’s been doing the chasing will have to start searching. The game provides devices to perform this action and success of finding the hiding player is based on skill and chance.

Once the raw ore has reached the safe and policed solar systems it will be turned into minerals in one of the refineries. There are many refineries, but only a handful will have the highest output yield because of the player’s reputation with the corporations that own the refineries. Once turned into minerals they are sold on the market.

The Race

This is where the race for the transport professionals in the safe regions begins. They grab as many minerals as they can and race towards the space stations housing factories which will buy and use the minerals (both NPC’s and real players buy and produce). There is a system of supply and demand. If one factory station is low on minerals they will pay a higher price than the general market value, so the race is on to be the first to fulfill those extra orders and close the sale. Once that has happened, the demand is gone and prices fall, sometimes below the price at which the minerals have been originally bought. The transport players that lost the race will now have to spend much time moving their load to often very distant factories that pay the right price.

World in Conflict – Interface

I have introduced World in Conflict in a previous article, examined the conflict part of the game, now we will have a look at the user interface.

At the beginning of a round, after you have selected your general role in the team, you get to pick a place where your reinforcements will be dropped onto the map. Planes will deliver all units, dropping them in crates with attached parachutes.

This is the user interface which holds all the functions a player will need to play the game.
At the bottom left corner we can see the mini-map and associated control buttons to quickly move the camera around the map.
Following the bottom edge there are small icons representing the player’s units which is a handy way to quickly select them without having to move the camera around the map to track them down just to select them and then having to move back to where he intended to send them.

The bottom right corner holds the unit command interface. Each type of units have two special abilities, one offensive and one defensive. They are represented by the big buttons to make them easy to reach. Next to those buttons are general commands such as formation, stop, fire on the ground, drive backwards etc.

The top right corner holds the buy menu where the different types of units are grouped up into tabs. You can see the available points and the units which can be bought using those points. The player spends his points, buying a set of units which are queued up until he presses the parachute button at the bottom of that menu. Once the order has gone trough the player has to wait for a plane to drop the batch of units.

The top middle holds the round’s status display, in the case of the screenshot, the number of command points under my control and the round timer.

Finally the top left corner menu provides support options, air strikes or artillery support to barrage an area as measure for defending an area where there are no friendly units nearby or to provide a preemptive strike against a target area. Options range from artillery barrages of different density and area effects to carpet bombing, napalm bombs, anti air or tank missile strikes and nuclear strikes. A similar points & buy system applies as to the unit buying system.

The player is always informed of the status of his currently deployed units, his points and the status of his orders. Whenever something happens which requires the player’s attention the appropriate controls start to blink red which is great for usability.

All buttons are icon based which presents a bit of a learning curve, but each button has a rollover label and a box in the corner of the screen displaying the specific stats of a unit or action.
No matter which role or faction a player chooses, the icons will always look the same, just the unit price, stats and models will differ.

The interface is very clean and easily accessible even in the heat of battle. It doesn’t take up too much screen real estate and the buy menus retract once the player has finished interacting with them.

World in Conflict

World in Conflict is a strategy game where the player defends the USA against invading Soviet forces in World War 3. It is set in the 80’s when the Berlin Wall should have fallen but it didn’t and after Europe was taken over the Soviets moved on to the US.

The player leverages every weapons technology available at that time and up till today (not very much has changed in that regard), from foot soldiers over vehicles and aircraft to air strikes and the ultimate weapon, nuclear missiles.

Typical for a real time strategy game it has both, single player and multi player modes but it is aimed at player versus player conflict.

The goal of the game is for a team of players to cooperatively dominate the opposing team by performing certain tasks related to specified areas of the battlefield, called ‘Command Points’, depending on game mode chosen before the start of the match.

Victory conditions:

• Domination: Capture all command points or hold the majority over a period of time
• Assault: One team starts out holding all command points and the attacking team has to capture them
• Tug of War: A front line keeps getting pushed back and forth, the team which ends up controlling most of the battle field wins

The main type of conflict is physical, achieving goals by shooting or blowing things up but also economical as all players have to manage their resources. Players can pick a role at the start of the game, such as troops, vehicles, air units or artillery support.

The game developers took a new approach to the handling of resources. Instead of having to gather resources and build a base to support the war effort which usually results in a slow game start, each player is given an equal number of points that he can spend to buy units right at the start of the round. That pool of points is fairly small, restricting him to a handful of units at a time. Over time and as own units are destroyed, the pool will refill and the player can order new units. If a team has a good balance of roles and good teamwork they can effectively ‘bleed’ their enemies dry of resources by eliminating their units with appropriate offensive/defensive units while not sustaining heavy losses. The enemy will have to sit there and wait until their timers are up so they can order new units.

The image above shows an example of an efficient tactic. These ground troops and the vehicle are not capable of dealing with airborne targets, so the helicopters will win this engagement. The ground is still burning and there is a lot of smoke which suggests that this area has been carpet bombed, so these ground units might be whats left of a bigger army which was holding a command point and the heli’s are cleaning up before their ground troops move in to secure the command point. The conflict between the affected players here has been resolved.

The conflict can be fairly intense when the player joins the battle at the front line but it comes in stages. As the player loses units he has to track back to the drop points in his team’s safety zone where reinforcements are inserted and command them to drive/walk/fly to the front. Once engaged in a fight the player has to concentrate on issuing the right orders with the right units on the correct opposing units and using their special abilities to counter incoming attacks or to launch an offensive move.

As part of the interface, there is a bar on the top of the screen which indicates progress towards victory or defeat by displaying markers for command points held, the round timer and the team score points gathered. On the ground, each command point held by friendly units is marked green, both on the ground and on the mini-map. That makes it easy to see where to focus the next attacks.

Escape! (continued)

Continued development has finally brought the game to a state where many sections are fully playable, interconnected and interacting.

The screenshots show the 4 levels of the game, the top down views and two of the challenges in the first person mode.

The game’s purpose is not to win any awards for it’s visual design but to build skill in using the authoring tool Director MX 2004.
Right now the development is focused on play testing and balancing.

Some challenges are harder than others within the same level, some have a random element and others are static and repeatable. To avoid getting the player stuck the player often has a choice of which path to take. One path will be easier than the other but it will also be longer. If the player hasn’t picked up an item he will need to complete a challenge he receives a hint that should point him into the right direction so he won’t be stuck somewhere without knowing that the necessary item is in another part of the map.

As the player progresses towards the end of the game the challenges become more difficult but whenever he dies he is respawned close to the point where he died so he’s not punished by having to repeat lengthy parts of the game.

The game has gone trough an iterative process from drawings on paper to prototypes on screen and the final combination of all game assets. For instance the prototype of a game I discussed previously, the jump and run side scrolling game, provided some of the core mechanics that were implemented in this game.
The drawings on paper were detailed enough to be used as a storyboard for all parts of the game, the digital prototypes were evaluated, the layout often adjusted and then passed on to each person responsible for the visual design of a particular area.
During play testing several problems have been identified and parts of the game have already been refined and retested. As all the parts of the game are combined new, unpredictable problems arise and have to be solved.

Although the game is simple it is fun to play and would best be targeted at hand held devices that have an arrow pad (or similarly arranged buttons) and a touch screen.

Emotions other than ;-P in games

Emotions and first person shooters, that sounds funny at first since they are always portrayed as being very simplistic but look at it a bit longer and you’ll find all sorts of reactions to the games.

Few FPS games are designed to evoke a certain emotional reaction, other than quick scares by sudden actions towards the player.
Counter-Strike for instance is not designed to create any particular emotion but it’s competitive nature creates envy, unhappiness when you die and potentially happiness at the end of the game when the final scores are shown. It’s technical implementation can create extreme aggression due to design flaws and bugs that are never going to be fixed even though it was promised to the players.

But there are some FPS that target specific emotions by design. The easiest emotion to induce is fear. It is one of human’s basic instincts and therefore the triggers aren’t difficult to reach.

The game  DOOM 3 does this by playing on player’s religious fear towards evil and especially satan by drawing satanic symbols all over the place and the -in your face- scare attacks of this type:
You are in a dark corridor with a broken light that flashes every now and then, at the end of the corridor is a door thats slightly opened and you see light. As you walk up to the door and want to open it just like any other door, the middle of the door’s surface suddenly morphs into the shape of a scary monster’s face and jumps out at you, and then fades away.

Thats when the player who hasn’t played this part before and is somewhat immersed in the game  will feel his heart pump and will very cautiously attempt to open the door again, hold his gun loaded and direct all concentration to the game as he’s ready to shoot anything that moves.

The other aspect of DOOM is the enjoyment of violence. You can use a shot gun, rocket launcher or chain saw amongst others to transform mountains of enemies into gibs.

Then there is F.E.A.R, you’d expect that it’s scary just from it’s name. This game uses the effect that makes weird looking little girls really scary, lots of disturbing pictures of mutilations and the resulting mess of blood and bones and a newly available graphics technology for it’s fear attacks on the player.
This is more advanced than the DOOM type of fear because it is implemented in a more movie like style.

Japanese movies and their remakes of little scary girls are somewhat popular and have part of the player base predisposed to scares in this game due to it’s use of the same type of imagery. The rest of the player base is slowly made to fear this too by use of atmosphere building game elements and then scaring the player with her appearance in unexpected situations.

Then there is the experimentation with newly available graphics techniques, transparent enemies that refract light like glass. Think of how different everything look when seen through a glass of water or trough uneven glass like bathroom windows. The difference to previous technology is that it was either visible or not and usually flat. This technique of scaring the player, making him fear the game is using the  awareness-suspense-surprise! style. They are cloaked enemies, people, that can climb walls like spiders, jump you and see in the dark. You are alerted by the sound of their cloak and informed of their position by means of 5.1 directional sound effects or the dim night vision goggle light.

High quality surround sound is used to create much of the atmosphere and lead up to events like in movies.

There is one game I’ve played that could potentially make you cry, depending on whether you are more likely to cry, to turn to self-punishment or become angry and violent against others or things.
It is EVE-Online, a space MMO with minimal RPG but much PVP. You build your fortune and ship (which is incidentially your character, compared to other MMO’s) over weeks and months, you go and have fun playing with others or against others but there will be a time when you just expended all your resources to get that one new big space ship and someone else blows it up. Death in this game is permanent, for your ship-character at least, your avatar with the skill/experience points is a bit less permanently mortal but can under certain circumstances be just as destructible as your ships.

Compare it to building the biggest sand castle on the beach, it took you all day to create it. Then you have to go to the toilet and by the time you come back, someone else is kicking it apart, taunting and mocking you just because they can. The same emotions apply to the game in those circumstances.

The game is a sandbox type game with an unusually lose rule set that allows for unconsential PVP combat and gives little to no advantage to the inferior party in uneven matches.

Sharp Knives, Rewards and Penalties

One of the latest games in my collection is Assassins Creed. Aside from fantastic graphics it also has an intriguing story and main character.

You start out as a high ranking, officer status member of a secret society, the assassins guild sometimes during the crusades in medieval times. You are bound to the creed: don’t harm innocents, keep the guild a secret by being stealthy in appearance and action and don’t harm your fellow assassins, or something to that effect.

On your first mission you have all your powers and items even though you probably wont ever use most of them at that stage because you don’t know you have them. But the game leads you to use the most impressive ones by ways of on-screen hints.

Let’s look at the system of penalty and rewards implemented in this game:

So you break all the guild’s rules in that first mission and get demoted to novice upon return. The demotion also cost you all the coolest moves and weapons.

You are then sent on a mission and it is then that you realize how much you have been penalized, or what is yet to come in form of rewards.

Once you finish that mission and return, some of your abilities are returned and one of the extra weapons is given to you.

This cycle repeats until the (I assume, I haven’t finished the game) end of the game. All these rewards make stabbing people easier and allow you to get to places you couldn’t get to before. This is a consistent reward schedule.

Completing various sub-missions gains you rewards in form of making the completion of the main mission potentially easier and gaining experience for health level-up’s.

Your vision gets impaired if you take damage which is a penalty you want to reverse by not getting hit for a period of time. This obviously requires you to either run away or apply the more advanced techniques of stabbing or sword fighting which you have received as rewards to get the slaughter done quickly.

End-game, World of Warcraft and challenges

Many people enjoy a bit of MMO gaming these days with the perpetual PVE challenge-reward-level_up cycle drawing them in (and keeping them paying) month after month.

One particularly interesting aspect of World of Warcraft (and most likely in Ever Quest before that) is what is known as ‘End-Game’. It is a mode of play for the hardcore players, a small fraction of the total player base, with large groups of these players combining their efforts to get the highest end gear such as armor and weapons. These players will often devote more than 40 hours per week to this task. The resulting rewards, those weapons, armor, spells and other items are just slightly superior to the items regular players get from playing but are incidentally required to beat ever greater challenges and have a certain ‘bling’ effect for that envy effect in the town square.

The time / reward ratio is extremely out of balance in favor of time but that is what keeps people playing for years.

Let’s have a look at one of the former end-game dungeons, a game map designed to be completed by 40 people within a time frame of 6 to 10 hours. High-end groups have done it with less people and considerably quicker.

The map is a set of inter-connected caves with rivers of lava. It is not entirely linear, some areas have to be traversed twice within a limited time frame before monsters respawn and make completing the dungeon either unfeasible or a lengthy and painful experience.

There are 10 bosses (pictured below), each requiring a completely different strategy to be beaten.

Let’s use the second last boss encounter as an example for a challenge hierarchy diagram. It’s the fight against that gray snake in the middle of the picture.

This is the boss encounter, broken down into the sequence of stages, simultaneous challenges within each stage and atomic challenges of key players. This is disregarding intrinsic skills, the most basic action sequences of the players that should be their general skill of handling their character, challenges which they have to overcome and master long before this encounter. The rest do their general group/monster interactions of dealing damage and healing at the points where it sais ‘raid/healers do x’.

The winning strategies are not revealed to the players. The first few raid groups to ever attempt this fight have the hardest time, applying and combining all their previously used strategies until they find what works in the different situations during the encounter. They often communicate this knowledge to the community which will try it and come out with their own strategies based on the first known strategies and sometimes keep those strats as guild internal knowledge. This gives them an edge on other guilds competing at their level of game progression. The first few guild’s strategies that were published give those guilds a record of their achievement in which the community sees value.

So there is an implicit challenge within the game and the community turns it into an explicit challenge. This strengthens the community around the game.

Stress is applied to players in the form of an implicit time limit as they cannot keep an equilibrium of forces with the monsters forever, it is a sprint effort, not endurance.

This is the second last boss encounter of what was the first end-game dungeon in the game so there is a relatively high absolute difficulty as this sort of simultaneous player interaction is difficult to achieve between 40 people.

The encounter is a timing and rhythm challenge for the magical and melee classes, a math problem for healers (they deal with accurate numbers of player health and their own mana (healing power transformed to health on their targets) and a logical puzzle for the entire raid group in finding a strategy that works for them using pattern recognition.

Escape!

Escape! is a relatively simple 2D game which is being implemented in Macromedia Director by a group which I’m a member of, as a multi media project for ITN257.

The story is that the player is a prisoner of war which is being held in a jail, high up in the mountains, somewhere in the North Indian area. The player has to escape that prison, make it down the mountains, traverse a jungle and reach the beach where an extraction team is waiting but along the way the player has to overcome several deadly challenges.

The game is played in a similar way to games such as Zelda on the Game Boy. When traveling the player has a top-down view of the area and uses the arrow keys to move around. When he arrives at certain areas the game switches to a first person view and the player has to overcome the challenge using the mouse.

The following chart details the challenges of the first level inside the jail.

It breaks each challenge down to its atomic parts and the outcomes for the player for choosing one action over the other.

The next step in the development of the game was to draw a storyboard on paper for each part of the game.

This storyboard shows the actions the player has to take to overcome the challenge or the outcome of it if he fails.

We found this approach the easiest way to coordinate efforts and produce a somewhat consistent look across similar parts of the game. Some have to feature mainly hand drawn graphical content while other parts could be easier done using manipulated fotos or computer generated images.

This CGI image is used as background for a menu to let the player see that he is entering a vast and dense jungle (ok, only palm trees which isn’t so realistic but I didn’t have 4 gig’s of ram to include other vegetation). Even though he will traverse the jungle in a 2D top down view, not in this 3D environment, this image should get his imagination going and give him a sense of location.