Side Quests

Many games have side quests, optional objectives or missions that you don't have to do. However, they're generally rewarding and so can help you complete the main story quests easier. In some cases, it's only by doing optional things that you can get the best items. So, side quests are quite popular among players trying to hunt down the best stuff.

Side quests are also nice for the developer, because they provide a means to pack in more play time, without requiring you to stretch the story too far. It's annoying to the player when the story goes on and on and it's equally annoying to the developer when they have to make up ways for the story to go a little longer. If you include side quests, your story can be shorter, but the player will have more play time still because they will still have things to do. Just don't rely entirely on side quests and cut your story too short.

And there's the real problem right? Over using side quests. Lots of games these days have short stories padded with side quests. Even for the ones that don't have a super short story there's still a problem, losing sight of the real goal. In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I finished the tutorial and spent ten hours of play time before I even returned to the story. The good news is that I was able to enjoy myself for that long without doing anything in the story, but it also meant that I quickly lost interest in the story. The story seemed like a really long side quest. You run into trouble if your player loses sight of the ultimate goal, because they quickly begin to wonder, "Why do I care?" If your player doesn't care anymore, you've lost them.

Real life has side quests too. The main quest is (should be) your job or schooling. Side quests are time with friends, chasing girls, etc. This topic is on my mind because right now I'm trying to ensure that I don't lose sight of my story quest. I got a lot of side quests right now, thus why this post was forgotten last night, and while they're all important, you should never lose sight of the main goal. Think if that's ever happened to you in your life. Remember what happened as a result? Probably didn't go so well. Think about the same effect in games, it's not good to have there either.

You wouldn't want your player to miss now would you?

Dynamic Difficulty

Many games have a difficulty setting. Usually, it's just Easy, Normal, and Hard modes. What the difference between them is exactly, usually just comes down to that the enemies hit harder and have more health. Also, the difficulty is usually something that is set at the beginning of the game and cannot be changed except by starting over. It's when these standards are altered, that things can get very interesting.

One of the first and foremost ways to mix the difficulty up is to have unlockable difficulties. If you beat the game on Hard mode, you unlock Wicked mode. Completing the game on Wicked unlocks another higher difficulty with an increasingly excruciating name. Theoretically, this adds replay value to the game as the players looking for a challenge will play the game again at the progressively higher difficulties. However, many players do not like the idea that you must prove your worth in order to access all the game has to offer. They feel that they should not have to be "at least this good" in order to even attempt the higher difficulties. I think that, if your higher difficulty truly changes things (see below), that it is fair to do this... once.

Next up, what does the higher challenge really mean? As I said, usually the enemies hit harder and have more health. Often, this means that fights just take longer, but the only real added challenge is a new test of patience. If we really want to add challenge, we will have to do more than just power up the enemies. The obvious answer would be to change the AI. The AI would get smarter and faster as the difficulty went up. However, programming one set of AI is difficult enough, but to make multiple sets would take a colossal amount of time and energy. Halo 3 claimed to do just this. I played Halo 3, and found no noticeable difference in the AI between the difficulties. I'm waiting for some developer to do this (and do it right) because it really will be worth the investment.

So, what if we let the player change the difficulty at will during the game? What if we even let them change it during a fight? Also, in RPGs the player tends to start off very weak. So what if we increased the difficulty as the player advanced in levels? There is one game that has tried both of these, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Oblivion has a difficulty slider that can be accessed at any time through the pause menu. Except when experimenting, I've left it in the middle as per the default. The game has its hard parts, but I've found that it is fairly easy to progress through at a steady pace. I once watched one of my friends play the game. He would charge into a room, get surrounded and have the snot kicked out of him. As he was one his last legs, he would pause the game, zero out the difficulty slider, and then trash the remaining enemies. After he was back to full capacity, he would reset the difficulty, and continue into the next room. Mind you, this happened in every single room. So, about every minute or so, the slider would get moved. It would appear that the ability to change the difficulty on the spot is something which is easily abused.

Oblivion also increased the difficulty has your character advanced in levels. Every couple of levels you advanced, the enemies would receive upgrades. Weaker enemies would be outright replaced by stronger foes. Bandits would start wearing better armor and wield better weapons. So, the game would get harder. On the flip side though, the loot dropped would be better and those better weapons and armor used by the bandits could become your if you killed them. For me, the increased difficulty/loot meant I blasted myself to level 20 as fast as possible. Level 20 was when the upgrades stopped, so if I leveled to it then I would be grabbing the best equipment possible. However, for most people, this upgrade system had the opposite effect. Your character will continue to grow in power, even if you never cash in a level up. This means that most players remain level one throughout the entire game. I've seen numerous people complain that the game is effectively unplayable if you level up ever. This is odd to me, considering I try to make characters with obvious handicaps to try and increase the challenge a little. My main character is a very powerful caster, but takes 175% more damage from all magic cast at him. This means that I'm fine, until I come up against an enemy caster, at which point every move is a matter of life and death. All the while, my difficulty slider remains in the middle.

Here is where I mention what game I think has done this difficulty thing the best. After thinking about it I've decided I give the award to Neverwinter Nights. While it has the same problem Oblivion did of having a difficulty slider that can be moved in mid battle, it does enough other things right to outweigh that problem. The main part it does right is that the difficulty affects more than just changing the enemy's health. Certain spells will not affect the player at lower difficulties, namely those that would allow an enemy to take control of them. At hard mode, your spells that affect an area rather than a single enemy will begin to hit your allies if they are caught in it. Of course, the standard changes to enemies are still there but the game goes beyond just the basic changes and that's what puts it above the rest.

What do you think of variable difficulty?

A boss from Demon's Souls who, like all bosses in that difficult game, will eat you up.

The Power of Dreams

Dreams take two main forms, life goals and the ones you have at night. The life goals type are when you dream of making it big and having a good life. These are powerful in that they provide direction as you go and you often shape your life in a way to make your dreams come true. The dreams you have at night can also be very powerful, but are a little more... um... hard to use.

As I said, life dreams give you a goal to work towards. Everyone has some sort of dream, and everyone has a slightly different approach toward achieving them. Some dream small, allowing them to realize it easily. They then pick a new dream and move on, working incrementally. Personally, I dream very big, very big. It will take a lot of work and luck to make it happen, but I'm more than happy to settle for less if it doesn't happen, and if it does happen then I've done something amazing. Dream big, but be content with what you have.

Most video game characters would seem to tend toward my side. Many characters in games have huge aspirations. Prime example is Pokemon. A ten year old kid from a town of about six people wants to become the greatest Pokemon trainer in the world. Somehow, this kid in about a week runs all over creation thumping seventy year old guys who have been training their whole life. Not sure how they "train" exactly, but ten year old rarely become world champions of anything across all age groups. In order for a single person to make a major accomplishment like that, they have to be truly driven. They have their (unrealistic) dreams, and they will do anything to make them happen. This is what video game characters do. They have this drive built into their character, a pure will to succeed. Might sound stupid, but this is frequently the basis for protagonists.

Then there's sleep dreams. There's lots of different explanations for why we dream at night and what they mean. They might be cool, embarrassing, or stupid, and you might not really remember them the next morning, but these too have power. Some people try to focus on a problem as they fall asleep and tell themselves that they will dream a solution. I saw a documentary in one of my psychology classes where a NASA scientist did just this for how to build a base on the moon. The next morning he began working on a design where robots would it. Dreams can also be a source of inspiration on accident too. Two of my games I'm currently working on are based on dreams I had. They are both still in the early design phase, because I got very little from the dreams to go on, but they are fun to work on.

Sleep dreams are also used in games a lot. Usually, they are ways for the game to give you hints of some sort. Many times a character will jump up and exclaim they had a dream where the Goddess spoke to them and so they know we must go to the western mountains. This usually seems like a convenient cover for a plot hole the writers couldn't think of a better way to solve. Other times, NPCs will contact the player through the protagonists dreams. In Fallout 2, the village mystic would speak to you while your character slept to tell you that time is running out.

Yeah, wouldn't really want this guy showing up in my dreams. He also freaked me out real bad the first time, because I hadn't met him so I had no idea who he was.

There's one more way for dreams to be used in games. In high school I took a class about the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, writer of the Lord of the Rings. In one of his essays on fantasy, Tolkien spoke about "Dreams as an Excuse". He said that one of the worst things a fantasy story can do is to write it off as a dream at the end. The truth of this isn't fully apparent until one considers what the Lord of the Rings would be like if the last sentence of the book had been, "And then Frodo woke up." Maybe he gets a cup of coffee and picks up his briefcase to catch the bus to work, I don't know. But I think the books would be much less popular if that had happened, it would ruin everything previously written.

Games do this sometimes, and it usually has that very effect. A game can always be trashed by a terrible ending, but using the dream excuse is one of the worst. There is one game that did this, and for once did it well. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. It's hinted at in the title, and the goal of the game is to wake the sleeping Wind Fish. Waking him is the only way to leave the island everyone says, but the bosses (appropriately called Nightmares) claim that doing this will destroy the island. In the end, Link defeats the Nightmares and meets the Wind Fish. Mr. Fish ends his monologue with, "Come Link, let us awaken... together!" After the island fades, we see Link sleeping clinging to a piece of his ship destroyed by lightning at the beginning of the game. Link then wakes up and sits on the wood. The entire game was a dream. But, what makes it work for me, is that right after that the Wind Fish flies overhead. So maybe it wasn't a dream, or if it was, it had real world consequences. That makes it work for me. Personally, I don't plan on ever trying to pull of a dream excuse ending.

Link's Awakening Ending


So, what do you think of dreams and how do you use them?

I almost feel bad for killing that last boss in Awakening. On one level, he's actually trying to save everyone on the island, but mostly just himself.

I'm Going to Kill You... After I'm Done Telling You That I'm About to.

Shortened edition this week. I'm on my way to Grad School and time is short.

I recently, and finally, picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 for my PC. I decided that I'd enjoy it, despite it's flaws and this proved true. I just like the screwing around aspect of the GTA games, and this is still quite intact. It's a bit hindered by the cars all being built out of lead, a criticism I had heard of. Having to take people out on the town is annoying, another criticism I was aware of. But there's one thing that really bugs me that no one had yet pointed out, every time I'm sent to kill someone I walk right up to them and tell them so.

I like avoiding messy fights. A nice clean head shot can settle an assassination mission quickly and quietly. I certainly don't like finding myself in the middle of a room full of people who I just told I'm going to kill. But no, I always have to watch a cut scene and get planted in the middle of the room with everyone shooting at me. Arresting control from the player is something that should always be done sparingly. But to consistently put the player in danger? Maybe sometimes, but it is happening quite frequently. Kill the player? Rarely, and only as part of the story. Players get tired of getting automatically killed very fast. But punish the player for dying when you threw them in the middle of danger? Now that's just not nice.

Letting the player strategize and plan their attack is an important factor in games. It gives the player more control, something they often like. Forcing them around makes the game more linear, and robs them of control. As I said, doing this sometimes can be great as a sudden switch in circumstances can really throw the player for a loop and add challenge to the game. You don't want things to get predictable. But when the player predicts they will need full health and armor before a mission because they're going to lose half of it before they can move, it's getting bad.

Always be careful about stealing control from the player. When done right and rarely, it is amazing. When done wrong and too often, it can cloud an otherwise great game.

This is the last guy I killed. And, despite starting this close to him, it took me ten minutes to chase him down. All because Niko opened his mouth.