Puzzle Quest – Preliminary Thoughts

September 19th, 2010

I’ve just tucked a few hours into Puzzle Quest and wanted to lay down a few preliminary thoughts.

Puzzle Quest is quite addictive due to the overlaying of statistical and RPG elements to the already addictive simple match-3 puzzle gameplay of Bejewelled. The statistics send a ripple of randomness through the basic puzzling, while the spells inject a tactical dimension. Tying the matching of colours to respective mana types and attacking further introduce tactical play.

There are seven “colours” of blocks to match, each of which is tied to mana, experience points, health and attack, various spells require different amounts of various colours of mana, weapons and armour alter the player’s stats and have properties in game, companions also have their own automated properties which affect the playing field and enemies have their own list of spells and properties. With all these statistical features, the level of abstraction is far beyond the player’s reach in the minute-to-minute gameplay of deciding which gems to match. It’s better to not even bother trying to keep track of all this.

When you do match gems, the screen splashes with text and colour to signify certain effects coming into play. The animation is too quick to track and the variables are too numerous to comprhend. This is particularly tricky when the AI makes their moves in rapid succession.

The trick to beating Puzzle Quest is to think one to two moves ahead, thereby disallowing your opponent to gain the advantage. Yet, it’s difficult to visualise the formation of blocks when pondering a move (and subsequently any further matches that can be made after that move). Nevermind factoring in the abstract elements. Often times you’ll accidentally give the opposition a free stab at you.

Some enemies are too heavily supported by abstract mechanics, such as automated healing. Just before, I was fighting an orc. It was a slow match and due to his regeneration properties, he gained an insurmountable upper hand. This feels cheap and unfair.

The abstract mechanics are so tricky to follow in-game that they’re effectively random, which, as mentioned, forms the game’s addictive quality.

More as play develops.

Straight-up Interactive Narrative and Quake

September 16th, 2010

I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative aspect of Quake II, in fact, I prefer its narrative language over almost everything else out there. This might sound a little strange given that Quake II is not known for its storytelling prowess, but then again, that’s entirely the point.

Coming at it from a modern perspective where macho space marines populate 5/8ths of all video game narratives, Quake II‘s premise of a one man assault on an alien planet may come off as cliché. Then again id software wrote this cliché in the video game world with an angry American storming a Nazi base (Wolfenstien 3D) and a one man assault of an alien planet (Doom)…wait a minute. This backdrop is all that’s needed though, it’s simple to understand, unobtrusive and doesn’t command a great deal of your time.

The rest of the narrative is, as it should be, interactivity-based, as follows:

individual battles paint the picture of conflict on the Strogg homeworld
interacting with the elevators, switches and other devices define the technological make-up of the alien race
each level constitutes a part of the Strogg’s civil and industrial body, whether it be the mines, sewers, warehouse etc. Therefore, playing Quake II is to take a one-person tour through the interconnected life stream of the Strogg’s homeworld
each objective is a narrative way point
the graphical language of the grunge textures and prison-like architecture tells its own history which the player can discern for themself
enemy movement patterns, their visual character and the grunts they make design the personality of the actors
stealing a tank commander’s head to open a door, calling down an air-strike on a bunker, and defeating Big Gun and Makron act as set pieces
the non-hostile human characters are minor actors

This narrative, one which uses the strengths of the medium, trusts the player enough to let them connect the dots through their own experience. For the most part, the Half-life games tick every box here too which also makes it a pretty good story, but then the director jumps on the scene and ruins the experience in one of two ways. The first by throwing a bunch of talky, “love me! love me!” characters at you which bear little relation to what the player is actually otherwise doing in the gameplay. The second is the use of blatantly scripted scenarios which attempt to be organic, but fail for all their contrivances. The scripted sequences often fail to have an effect because you’re too busy not playing the game the director intended so that you’ll organically trigger an event at the ideal moment or, as is always the case with the original game, the scripting is so glitchy that nothing will trigger and you’ll be forced to restart from your last save. Quake II is almost completely hands-off when it comes to the director, the Half-life games can’t help themselves. Furthermore, the level design in Quake II is meaningfully aids in the combat and movement mechanics, yet Half-life, particularly Half-life 2 is full of so much whitespace its disastrous.

Quake II provides the player with the appropriate context for them to mould their behaviour to and then allows them to engage in the narrative as they see fit. There’s no pretension in trying to be a blockbuster (God of War III), falsehood in limiting the player’s engagement in order to offer choice (Bioware games) or fixed sequences where someone else is trying to do the talking (Metal Gear series), it’s just straight up interactive narrative. That is, a string of encounters punctuated by moments of switch-flipping and button-pushing and for this reason, Quake II has a fantastic, if not unassuming narrative.

Additional Readings

Mapping Stroggos. – Groping the Elephant

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Technology, Mobility and Level Design in Quake II

September 14th, 2010

Quake II, as we’ve established of most genre-defining FPS games, is marked by its relationship to technology. So in order to understand id’s paradigm of technology creating and limiting FPS gameplay, let’s examine influence of technology over gameplay in Quake II.

Unlike FPS games a few years after its release, Quake II could not rapidly track small body parts in fast motion, namely the head, meaning that, without insta-kill head shots, shoot outs were longer and with only a limited number of AI at the one timze. id supported this technical dictation by ramping up the amount of damage which the player and their Strogg foes could sustain, thereby extending the duration of gunplay and making Quake II a game of manoeuvrability within arena designed levels.

(This design also works in well within the technical constraints, in that quicker deaths would require greater supplementation of enemies and therefore an increased likelihood of more enemies on screen at once, that of which the game couldn’t handle in a 3D environment. Furthermore, more hit points gives narrative credence to the Strogg’s being made of metal and other industrial fibre. By limiting the complexity of confrontations, the intelligent AI had a platform to be noticed).

But what do longer shoot outs mean exactly? Well, it means that standing still and firing off rounds of ammo won’t do much good. You’re rival will be acting likewise—and they’re designed so that once they lock-on they shoot liberally, never mind that they won’t run out of ammunition either—and you’ll both be running out of health which you can’t afford to do, so dodging, ducking and hiding become essential devices in overcoming enemies and defeating the game. The systems of shooting and movement support this type of environment and movement-centric play. Movement, for one, is quick, fluid and an advantage that you have over the slow, predictable enemy movement patterns in the game. There is also no reloading required whatsoever in Quake II and ammunition is plentiful which itself practically asserts the unimportance of arms in lieu of tactical use of the level design. Furthermore, there is no real tactical advantage in shooting certain body parts, so there’s little advantage in standing still and being too precise.

Initially, in the early levels of Quake II, which are less like a labyrinth and more open-ended, the player only needs to focus on their proximity to the foes around them. In later levels, where players are drawn into a series of arena-esque levels, the player must keep their distance while also leveraging the environment to exploit the weaknesses in the sophisticated (but decidedly predictable) enemy attack patterns. So, the levels are built to suit this type of play also.

(Backtracking from how technicality affects play behaviour and into how it affects other parts of the game. Similarly to Resident Evil 4, Quake II limits it colour palette to increase technical efficiency elsewhere, namely the fluid movement and steady performance. Also, it is the technical ability (and inability) of Quake II which structures it as a series of connected channels, bound by a level structure).

Conclusion

id established the first person shooter genre under the paradigm that technology creates game design. Quake II is an id first person shooter whose design is dictated by its technical ability and inability. As such, Quake II scales the shooting to only a few combatants at the one time and therefore emphasises the principles of mobility and tactical skills within the well designed levels.

Extended Readings
Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom

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