hexgrid

The writing in their earlier games is pretty dire too. Take StarCraft, for example. The plot "twists" were telegraphed so loudly and so far in advance that you pretty much knew how the game was going to end before you were half way through. The character writing was *awful* and given little to no thought. As an example, let's take the point where Kerrigan (I think that was her name?) and Raynor first meet. He's apparently a cop from a backwater planet, and she's a powerful psychic and combat veteran who has been hanging around with space marines who aren't exactly portrayed as masters of etiquette or gentlemanly manners. Just about the first thing that happens between Raynor and Kerrigan is the exchange where she reads his mind and declares in a shocked/irritated voice that he's a pig. This is the only time you hear her say something like this, so it's not like she's making an issue of things every time someone mentally undresses her; either Raynor is so over-the-top perverted that his inner thoughts managed to shock someone who should have been beyond shocking (since, really, her skills and position should have been roughly the equivalent of being immersed for years in stileproject.com or whatever today's equivalent is), or... the writers just didn't think about it, and thought it would be funny if the hayseed made the prissy psycher freak out with his mind sex. It's that kind of thing that bugs me with Blizzard's writing, at least what I've seen of it. The characters are all paper-thin context-free archetypes with exactly one twist. Kerrigan is the kidnapped princess BUT she becomes the evil queen. Raynor is the noble prince/hero BUT he will do deals to accomplish goals. Emperor Betrayyou or whatever his name was is the Disney (or Bond) villain who will bring about his own doom eventually and will reflexively betray anyone he can even if it's not in his interests to do so, BUT will be randomly helpful once in a while when it moves the plot along. Fenix (again with the telegraphing) is the noble warrior felled in battle who returns with renewed strength and will fall at the last hurdle to establish the stakes of the climax BUT he wants you to know he wears his baseball cap sideways. Interaction between the characters is the kind of writing I'd expect out of a 14 year old. It reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eISIpBNSA6Q#t=22 (If you've never watched Prisoners of Gravity, by the way, it was an excellent series; it's dated at this point, but it was a really good show covering a lot of speculative fiction subject matter and had a *lot* of good interviews...) It's also Blizzard (in Warcraft 2) that gave us this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Hc_MiZlz6gE#t=24 Aside from being flat-out stupid, it's a classic case of stuff you can't do in the game happening in a cutscene: - human knight sneaks up on orc -- there's no sneaking or line of sight in warcraft 2 - human knight gets one-shot kill by attacking from behind -- again, nope, not in wc2 - human knight captures catapult -- another thing you couldn't do in wc2 - captured catapult shoots down blimp in a single shot -- catapults in wc2 couldn't attack air units, and IIRC didn't do quite enough damage to single-hit kill anything It doesn't seem like the problem is money. I think it's a Dunning-Kruger thing; they don't have the writing chops to realize how awful their stories are.

I'm one of the people Blizzard lost with Warcraft 3; I bought the giant silly box with artbook at midnight on launch day, took it home, and wandered a wonderful path of discovery from initial uncertainty to the gradual realization that I hated it. I only played single-player, which probably didn't help. It was some combination of the awful story (though honestly after StarCraft I don't know what I expected), the paint-by-numbers missions, the "it's an rpg with a level cap of 1" silliness, and the APM-focused game mechanics. Combined with the realization that I was playing off-brand Warhammer written by people who managed to miss both the humor and the deep creepiness of the Warhammer universe (one might well ask what's left with the humor and the creepiness missing, and the answer is "not much of value"), and I was done. I think in retrospect there was also an element of disappointment from the direction of change; I had StarCraft, but it came out in the 90s and was an artifact of its time. I'd played other far more interesting RTS games subsequently, and was looking forward to what Blizzard was going to do to update the formula. The answer seemed to be "split the difference between WarCraft 2 and Diablo", which I reacted to about as well as I'd react if WarCraft 4 came out stacked full of freemium "features". If I wanted a fantasy action RPG, I'd play one with direct control and no level cap, like Record of Lodoss War or the like. So, I'd long forgotten WarCraft 3 by the time DOTA came out, and I largely missed the boat on DOTA and its clones. I've occasionally thought about getting StarCraft 2, but never hard enough to drop the cash on it; the combination of not-on-Steam and what I've heard about the single player campaign has been enough to keep it from getting far up my priority list. There are too many other interesting games out there.

Crate & Crowbar's theory of why Blizzard All-Stars was renamed was that it was inevitably going to be abbreviated to "BALLS".

That seems to be an Idle Thumbs thing.

I did find I liked the earlier games in the lineage better; it seems like the player mental energy freed up by the improved controls has been spent on making the scale of the game increasingly insane. That's fair, and I can respect it as a sport that I can't be bothered to get good at but that other people might be very focused on. I might watch it the way I might watch sumo wrestling; fascinating in its own way, and a highly specialized skill that requires one's full devotion to master. I'm not getting in the dohyou, though. I've actually found that if anything in Sins my units get less effective if I start giving them orders in battle; I usually only interfere if they've picked targets particularly stupidly. I guess my point is that a reliance on APM is a design decision rather than a fundamental aspect of the RTS. There's no reason you couldn't make an RTS that focuses on mental acuity rather than reflexes. As an example, though I never played it, I had the sense that Achron has moments where tight timing pays off, but is mostly a game about out-thinking your opponent rather than out-clicking them. For a *really* simple example relevant to the other part of the podcast, consider the market in MULE. It was four players in a timed event, where buyers started at the bottom of the screen and sellers started at the top. Sellers moved down to lower the price, buyers moved up to up their offer, and when a seller and a buyer were at the same height on the screen, goods and money were exchanged. It's active, compelling, and quite strategic, and it doesn't rely on reflexes at all despite being real-time. It was a simple little thing, but it was the core of the game.

This is a design choice, not something fundamental to the RTS genre. It's partly a question of pacing, but it's also very much a question of the tools provided to the player. The Dune 2/C&C/Warcraft model has concentrated on actions per minute, but many other RTS games have not. It all comes down to the tools the player is given. Westwood/Blizzard gives you a very restricted set of tools in order to force the focus to APM, locking the camera down low, limiting the amount of preparation you can do (ie: little to no queueing of actions), limiting the selection tools, and so forth. Consider Total Annihilation and its descendants; the unit groups have unlimited size, there are hotkeys like "select all combat units", "select all units of this type" and "select all units onscreen". If you assign a vehicle factory to a group, everything that it builds is assigned to that group. If you hold down shift when giving orders, you can queue up orders, so a single construction unit can be ordered to build an entire base, or a combat group can be given complex patrol orders. In the later games (Kingdoms and onwards) you could zoom out far enough to see the whole map. Or consider Dark Reign, where you could set AI behavior in units; you could build something and tell it "go do harassment raids randomly, return for repair when you're 50% damaged" and it would do that without you ever having to pay attention to it again. You could lay down waypoints *independently* of units, so you could lay down a left pincer attack path, a right pincer attack path, and then tell group 1 to take path A, group 2 take path B, and you've got a coordinated attack without having to hand-manage it. You mention the pacing of Sins of a Solar Empire, but that's only part of the reason it's easier to play. It's also easier to play because once a fight starts, the units take care of business. There's little advantage to getting in and interfering; the game is more about logistics than tactics. Once the battle starts, the winner is going to be the one who got the right quantity and mix of forces to the battlefield, not the one who can group select and choose targets the fastest. Sins also makes many of the upgrades single click actions, and will even auto-place structures for you if you ask it to. I've long-since grown cold on the Westwood/Blizzard style RTSs because of this. After playing games that gave me higher-level command tools, it feels clumsy and idiotic to go back to a formula that's basically a gambit metagame combined with "how many marbles can you hold at a time?". The Westwood/Blizzard model is all about burying you in busywork so the fastest APM wins the day. There are far more interesting design models to follow for RTS games which concentrate more on strategy and less on reflexes and single gambit victories.

I never got into the Age of Empires series specifically because of that; there were a couple of people playing it at the office over lunch, I joined a game and got wiped out by a huge second-era army just as my guys were finally building a market. I hadn't realized the fruit trees were a resource rather than just decorative sprites, so I'd had my guys haring all over the map chasing deer, and when I did figure out about the fruit trees my guys barely managed to harvest anything because they all got stuck in the middle of an empty field, unable to pathfind around each other. And then this massive blue army with priests and catapults and things showed up and murdered them and burnt down my half-built market. At that point I was "eff this, back to total annihilation", and I never did try any of the series after that. There was a point in the early 2000s where StarCraft was getting really big, Dark Reign was doing pretty well, Total Annihilation had a decent following, and pretty much every publisher decided that THE FUTURE IS RTS AND SHOOTERS. I don't have documentary evidence for this, but it seems in retrospect like that's about the time when things like flight sims and adventure games and the like started to move off the eye-level shelves and into the reduced bin. When that happened, there was a flood of also-ran RTS games, and in a lot of cases the game design process was essentially "StarCraft except with this one broken thing fixed", or "StarCraft except underwater" or what have you. After a little of that, the publishers seem to have started saying "So, what makes your game different from the other five RTS pitches I've seen in the past hour?", at which point the shovels come out and you started to see the baroque, gnarly design philosophy 4X games have been suffering from. Throw everything in! You'll be leveling up your peons, and choosing their specializations and equipment! Formations! Multi-part structures with branching upgrade paths! 30 resource types, with complex conversion paths between them involving structures! Stealth! Shields! Multi-level maps! Strategic metagames! Any of which are potentially fine, of course, the problem is that when they're all in the same game what you have is a complex mess that would be difficult for the player to learn even if the developer had been given the time and budget to give each subsystem the treatment it deserved. And you can be pretty sure that didn't happen.

My main "what about X" moments mostly centered around Homeworld and Battlezone, neither of which completely fit the discussed standard, but which at the same time can't exactly be said to have spawned subgenres of any significance. Somebody is trying to resurrect Homeworld, and there's at least one project attempting to remake Battlezone (Bionite Origins, which still seems to be staggering on, but is looking increasingly like a failed project despite raising some kickstarter money). A couple of "let's bring back X" projects isn't exactly evidence of thriving genre diversity, however.

There were a couple of points in this episode where I had "wait, what about X?" moments, but for the most part I was nodding. As an indie developer, I think Soren's position on mobile is wise; it's a hostile market. It's hard to maintain any visibility in the app stores, and if nobody knows you're there you just aren't making any money. Between that and potential customers being conditioned to think of $1.99 as "overpriced", it's very difficult to make a game actually pay for its development costs. The DSiWare market has been routinely panned by pretty much everyone (for fairly good reason), and the games we shipped on DSiWare haven't come within an order of magnitude of recouping their costs, but we shipped our DSiWare titles years ago now, and we're *still* making more on them per month than our iOS titles have earned in their entire lifetimes. At the recent Apple event, they announced that there were a million (give or take) apps in the app store, and they'd paid out (presumably slightly more than) ten billion dollars to developers. So, on average, each app makes $10,000. That wouldn't be enough to recoup the investment necessary for most games, but when you remove some outliers like Rovio ($195M profit last year, probably mostly from Angry Birds on iOS), the story gets very sour, very fast.

I'm more inclined to think the right answer to ship customization in 4X games is "don't". Or rather, if you want to make a game with ship customization, make a game about that. Like, say, Gratuitous Space Battles, though such a game could also potentially give you control in battle and offer more of a campaign. Ship customization in 4X games adds complexity to no good end. Having the ship building minigame is one more subsystem for the developer to focus on, and one more subsystem for the player to master. Neither are likely to happen; the ship building minigame will be shipped "good enough" (or some other subsystem will suffer for the focus diverted to making shipbuilding good), and most players will do as much ship building as the game forces them to and no more. Besides, surely someone in the imperial retinue can handle the job of keeping the fleet up to date. That said, your major point stands; a ship building/fleet combat game built around deck construction could potentially work quite well.

Unwashed cad; Limburger Industries, clearly.

I'm not sure; it's somewhat outside where I usually wander. Likewise, I haven't darkened the door of Meeplemart yet, nor been to the SIlver Snail since it moved (though I'd heard they were barely doing games any more...). Comic Warehouse up in Brampton is surprisingly well stocked; I know they've been operating since the 90s, and possibly earlier. It does seem, though, that the internet has largely put the boots to hobby/game shops.

The million dollars for models thing raises a question about what happens to the companies that sell these models once 3D printing is ubiquitous; you can get a 3D printer and the PC to hang it off of for under $5K now, and I'm assuming $995,000 worth of electricity and printer feed stock would let you print more soldiers than Napoleon actually had, with money left over for Rob's paint crew.

On the question of models (or more the question of stores) in Toronto, does anyone have any recommendations? It seems like a lot of the old standby places have gone.

It was interesting to listen to this and the latest game design roundtable back to back, since gdr was talking about the same thing.

I don't really see how that future works unless Apple does something drastic about the app store. You might see GTAV as a $4.99 title but GTAVI will be "free to play" with a paid-for premium currency, because it's the only way to reliably make money on games in the app store. All the incentives in the app store are to drive the up-front cost of games to $0. If you want to move any copies of your game at all, you need to be on the top 50 list, and if you want to make a profit you really need to be on the top 10 list. If you want to get on the top 50 list, unless you've got massive sales clout behind you, you need to be free because that's the only hope of getting enough people to download your game to get you in the rankings. More to the point, the mobile hardware out there now is roughly equivalent to the Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube generation of consoles; heck, the Dreamcast was even PowerVR graphics, same as the iOS machines. You could relatively trivially port nearly everything from that generation to phones. The DS and DSi are ARM CPUs with *simple* graphics systems and low-res screens; you could port pretty much anything from DS and DSi to iOS or Android easily, with plenty of CPU and graphical horsepower to spare. If that's such a compelling thing for GTAV, why isn't it compelling for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? Or Okami? Where's Puzzle Fighter? Panzer Dragoon Zwei? It's not like the publishers of any of those titles have a horse in the console race; Konami, Capcom and Sega are all pure software houses now. You can get Madden, but guess what? Free. Except for the in-app purchases... Beyond that, I don't think it's going to happen, mostly because the economics of it are stupid. For at least the next decade the cost of a mobile device is going to be dominated by the cost of the screen, the backlight, the case, the battery and its charging circuitry, the cameras, the cellular modem, the touchscreen, the SIM reader and logic, the GPS and sensors, and jamming everything into a tiny package. A console with equivalent power to a phone is going to cost a small fraction of what the phone costs, because of all the components it doesn't need and all of the tolerances and space requirements it doesn't have to conform to. The console has a fraction of the parts, and will be considered tiny if it's ten times the size of the phone. It can also burn an order of magnitude more electricity without anyone batting an eye, which means it's much easier to make it go fast without making it expensive. So, I think what you're going to see, rather than phones dominate everything and consoles dying out, is that consoles will get dirt cheap. We'll probably see the PS4/XBone generation reach the point where they're almost cheap enough to be pack-ins in cereal boxes. And yes, if Apple allows it, they may do AirPlay or whatever if you want to play games with your phone on the big screen. But I think instead you'll be playing Steam, PS4 or XBone games, because the consoles don't have the race-to-the-bottom app store and can compete effectively on hardware price. Jake, have you found anything remotely as compelling as the new Luigi game on iOS or Android?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

Those ought to be no worse than console wireless controllers; probably a frame of lag at worst, unless Apple or Logitech does something spectacularly stupid. That said, is anyone going to buy them? The value prospect is dubious. Some background here; I'm an indie developer, I've worked on PC, console and mobile. I'm looking at this both from the point of view of a technically savvy customer and a developer who wants to make money on his games. I have preferences (if I had a magic wand, Sega would still be a force in console hardware and I'd be making games on their systems), but ultimately I have to go where the money is. I'd rather make money with a game I like on a platform I'm not thrilled with than starve shipping on a platform I like. iOS devices are pretty impressive for mobile systems, and they're as powerful as desktop machines from a decade ago, but as the basis for a game system they have... flaws: - the app store's pricing model and disastrous discoverability problems mean that free to play is going to remain dominant; some people are getting lucky or have savvy marketing, but for every good non-freemium game that is doing well on iOS there are a thousand equally good non-freemium games making too little money to ever cover their development costs - at best, freemium means... well, I hope you like MMORPGs a lot - more likely, freemium means I hope you like farmville mechanics paired with licensed nostalgia or cutesy critters, and games where skill matters only until the game convinces you to spend money to make up for the carefully-tweaked impossible difficulty ramp - freemium mainly means if it can't be made on a 3 to 9 month development cycle with a team of less than 8 people it probably isn't going to happen - the number of people who are going to carry around an MFI controller so they can twitch game on the bus is too small to consider -- if you were going to do that, why not carry a 3DS or a Vita instead? -- so we're only really talking about the home gaming market - Apple is requiring that games with MFI controls have touch-based fallback controls (ie: you have to be able to play the game fully without the MFI controller), which means most games will wind up either having really shitty touch controls or will restrict their use of MFI controls to what they can reproduce well on the screen -- this also means it's harder to do things like declutter the GUI - for the cost of an iThing capable of decent gaming (ie: not the older models, and with at least 32G of storage) plus the AppleTV and the MFI controller you could have the PS4 *and* the XBone with money to spare The last point is going to be exacerbated by the speed with which the mobile market is developing. The PS3 is six months older than the original iPhone. You can still get a PS3 and PS3 games, and the generation shift is just coming now. We're on the 7th generation of iPhone hardware in essentially the same amount of time, and half of the models of iPhone released in that time are no longer supported (iPhone, iPhone3, iPhone3GS, iPhone 4). The original iPad has pretty much dropped off the map as a target for game development due to its general lack of speed and memory, and the iPad3 is going to follow it very soon (the iPad3 is the first retina model; it quadrupled the number of pixels of the iPad2 without a corresponding increase in memory and graphical horsepower). I wouldn't be surprised if the Apple event on the 22nd shakes up the iPad line and gets rid of the non-retina iPads entirely, which would put the iPad2 on the endangered list for game support as well. The next iPad is about to come out, and it's almost certainly going to be a 64bit model, which means we're creating another point of obsolescence; you can be damned sure that two models later Apple is going to declare that iOS9 won't support "legacy" devices with 32bit CPUs. That'll be everything from the iPad4 and the iPhone5 and iPhone5c and back obsoleted, plus all current models of iPod. So, if you were planning on using an iPad and an AppleTV instead of a PS4 or an XBone, you're probably looking at replacing the setup at least once over the life of the PS4. Probably twice. You'll be paying a premium each time for features like compactness, lightness, battery life and portability that, while important in a mobile device, are entirely unimportant in a game machine displaying on a TV. You're going to get some decent games if you can find them in the sea of crap, but nothing of the scope or depth routinely seen in PC and console titles. And to get that, you're going to be paying a major premium. The games will be cheaper, sure, but the "good enough" iPad is currently $600, the "good enough" iPad mini is $430, and those have a ~2 year service life before the new games will start treating them as legacy devices and iOS upgrades start to seem like they're making things worse rather than better. I'm sure some people will go for it, probably based on the "I have an iThing anyways, so all I need is $150 worth of additional hardware to turn it into a half-assed PS2/Dreamcast/GameCube era console", but if you actually want a game machine I don't see why you wouldn't get a steam box or one of the new consoles. The quality of the games is much higher, with significantly more variety. If you want a *cheap* game machine that still has way more variety of games and much higher quality games than iOS, get a PS3 or even a PS2, and raid bargain bins and (in the case of the PS3) the online store. Or buy a bottom of the line PC, hook it up to your TV, and buy a bunch of stuff from gog.com.

Here's a followup: http://appglimpse.com/blog/touchmarks-ii-touchscreen-latencies-in-flagship-tablets/ Here's the relevant image: http://appglimpse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/touchmark_graph_ftablets_rev2.png So, the best tablet on the market has (handwaving around the range) 5 frames of lag (sure, I've rounded up from 4.5, but so does the game you're playing in all likelihood, unless it's running its world simulation faster than the device frame rate), and the worst measured is over a sixth of a second. That's fine for turn-based games and the like, but for anything the least bit twitchy it's hideous.

The "who are you?" problem of strategy games is ubiquitous, even in tactical games. Even in games where the narrative strongly implies who you are, it rarely bares close analysis well. You're almost invariably too powerful, too well connected, and too well informed to be any actual player in the conflict.

One of the reasons Nintendo doesn't use capacitive touchscreens is that the lag on them is terrible. Apple folks were crowing recently that Apple's got the iphone 5S screen's input lag down to an average of 55ms(!), which is over 3 frames of lag at 60fps. It's an outlier; the 4S is more like 5 frames of lag, and android tablets are anywhere up to double that.

It seems to have showed up in my feed.

I think that's part of it, but there's also the history book aspect. The transgressions of your own country generally tend to get swept under the rug in school texts unless they're so egregious and recent they can't be avoided. As an example, there's apparently reasonably good evidence that here in Canada the Haida (a west coast aboriginal tribe) were nearly wiped out by a smallpox epidemic caused by intentionally infected blankets in the mid to late 1800s. It's not something I've ever seen mentioned in a school history text (though admittedly that may have changed; it has been a while since I've looked). I think there's also a lot of "the past is a foreign land inhabited by murderers and fools" to it. We're past all that stuff now. Except when we aren't.

My understanding is he was talking about a game in which you are specifically playing Hitler, leading the Nazi party to political power. IIRC it was a hypothetical offered as "here's a game I wouldn't be comfortable making".

I don't think there's a contradiction there. In the case of a game where you were playing the Nazi party attempting to take political control in interwar Germany, you'd be very directly put in the role of a character whose path to victory involves racist demagoguery that eventually leads to the deaths of millions. The choices you'd need to make in playing pre-war Hitler are directly related to bringing about some very ugly bits of history. The game designer would have to choose between making a historical game with a lot of ugly decisions and an ahistoric game where you have the option to play Nice Hitler. I haven't played Twilight Struggle, but unless I misunderstand the game you may well be playing Stalin (at least at the beginning), but the focus of your game isn't the gulag and the purges, it's foreign policy and diplomacy. You may well be cast in the role of a man responsible for millions of deaths, but your decisions aren't focused on bringing those deaths about. By the same principle, most (though not all, it must be said) wargamers are relatively comfortable playing Nazi Germany at most levels of scope, but that comfort would evaporate for most people if the game mechanics included pogroms. That said, it's a strange time now; Hitler is about to pass into history. Anybody who was 16 at the end of WW2 is now 84; the number of people who saw the war first hand is dwindling. We're probably less than two generations away from Hitler (and Stalin, for that matter) being like Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Alexander; some great leader from the past who did some stuff and there was a big war, but it's not really relevant because we're modern and people were primitive and foolish back then. Even the historians who care to read and understand the stories are going to experience them at a distance; time takes the edge off of even truly massive atrocities. Even then, though, I don't think people will be comfortable simulating racial extermination programs; events fade, but the morality that gave them weight sticks around. So even a hundred years from now I don't think we're likely to see people playing a game based on bringing the Nazis to power; the game may well be made, but I doubt most people would be comfortable playing it simply because of the policy decisions they would be making.