Jake

Idle Thumbs 254: Welltris and Wetrix

Recommended Posts

Idle Thumbs 254:

888__header.jpg

Welltris and Wetrix

This week, game developers gather in San Francisco to confer. Chris, Nick, Jake, and Steve swap stories from this year's Game Developers Conference including Super Hypercube and VR as its own medium, a look into the creation of Darkest Dungeon and finding, and adapting to your audience, and Nick Breckon's return to the NBA.

Games Discussed: Super Hypercube, Darkest Dungeon, NBA 2K16, Super Hexagon, Gorillas.bas, Tichu

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I have to take a bit of umbrage with Chris' framing of people's dislike of the corpses in Darkest Dungeon as 'insane' - I get that he was trying to talk about the reaction to the reaction more than the reaction itself, but the way he talked about it  made me feel like a bad person for hating that change.

 

e: it really killed my enjoyment of the game. Instead of fixing their design they inserted this weird garbage stopgap patch that makes no sense whatsoever.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Does Sean still exist? It seems like so long since he was on an episode and I can't remember his absence ever being mentioned. I'm starting to think he was a figment of my imagination.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I have to take a bit of umbrage with Chris' framing of people's dislike of the corpses in Darkest Dungeon as 'insane' - I get that he was trying to talk about the reaction to the reaction more than the reaction itself, but the way he talked about it made me feel like a bad person for hating that change.

e: it really killed my enjoyment of the game. Instead of fixing their design they inserted this weird garbage stopgap patch that makes no sense whatsoever.

Yeah, I agree. It spoiled the symmetry of the game's combat, too, and really felt like an attempt to make it harder for the sake of being harder. It's the same way I feel about some of the uses of Aggressive Expansion in Europa Universalis 4, the devs are just saying, "We don't have a good reason why you shouldn't use this strategy, but we don't want you to use it anyway, so here's a mechanic that specifically punishes you for it!"

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

In-case you guys don't know, your "video-gaaaaaaames" bumper happens twice at the beginning of the show, and then once again in the middle of an ad at 31 minutes.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Does Sean still exist? It seems like so long since he was on an episode and I can't remember his absence ever being mentioned. I'm starting to think he was a figment of my imagination.

 

Seconded. I wrote in about a month or two ago asking about Sean's absence, and then he mysteriously appeared on the following episode. At this point he should be introduced as a special guest rather than a regular host, like Steve Gaynor

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Assuming that this year was Chris' 14th GDC (2003-2016 inclusive), then that would mean in two years' time he'll have been to 16 of them and there will have been 32 in total, meaning he'll have been to half of all of them.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think it's fairly rude to try and demote someone from 'host' to 'guest' as a forum member, tbh. 

 

i miss you Sean. keep up the good Mitten work.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Having an on-screen avatar that looks convincingly like you can definitely be weird. I did the camera-based face-mapping in ​Rainbow Six: Vegas​, which was really effective. The weirdest part was seeing myself eat it.

 

The best part was when I held a laserdisc cover for ​Hard to Kill in front of the camera, and gave myself this face:

 

cSgcnip.jpg

 

It worked well enough that I'd hear people through the Xbox's voice chat saying things like "Holy shit, it's Steven Seagal!"

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I have to take a bit of umbrage with Chris' framing of people's dislike of the corpses in Darkest Dungeon as 'insane' - I get that he was trying to talk about the reaction to the reaction more than the reaction itself, but the way he talked about it  made me feel like a bad person for hating that change.

 

e: it really killed my enjoyment of the game. Instead of fixing their design they inserted this weird garbage stopgap patch that makes no sense whatsoever.

 

As you note, I did mean the reactions themselves were insane; I really don't have an opinion on the substance of the change itself. I can't remember what examples I gave on the podcast so it's possible I didn't contextualize the reaction well enough, but some of the stuff was actually bonkers. Part of the point of the story was also to contextualize that despite what I think we tend to BELIEVE we want out of early access, in reality most people actually simply treat it as "buying a finished game." The developer clearly entered into early access with the idea they would be able to try things and make changes. And there's a difference between finding a change to be poor and giving feedback in the hope the change will be addressed somehow, and acting as though the developer has committed a personal and irrevocable sin against you for doing so. BUT despite that, his takeaway was in fact that you should treat early access as simply a normal product being sold, because there's no way to ensure that the bulk of your audience will ever engage with it as anything else.

 

For what it's worth, at one point he asked the audience for a show of hands illustrating how many people were even aware of the corpse controversy, and only maybe two people raised their hands, which utterly blew him away. He was expecting it to be common knowledge amongst a large roomful of relatively well-informed people who were familiar with the game. (I would imagine most people in the room had played the game, anyway, because they chose to go to a talk about its development.) That further suggests to me that incidents like this are not necessarily representative of most people's experience. At a GDC event last night I was talking with a couple people about this and they both said "Yeah I played the game before and after the corpse thing and it seemed like a pretty good game in both cases, just different." That's not to suggest that anyone who didn't like the change is incorrect, or that it is definitely a good change, or anything--just that the INTENSITY and virulence of people's reactions was clearly way out of line. But, again, that's just the reality of the audience, so as a developer you have to either learn to live with it, or learn to avoid it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've never been to GDC so maybe my perception is way off base, but aren't the majority of atendees game developers? I wouldn't think that game developers would be up on the controversies of other games (they are too busy managing the communities for their own games). I imagine a more general audience you would feature more people familiar with the corpse problem.

 

I think dismissing the vocal minority is potentially a mistake too. They might be a minority, and they might be complaining about things in a stupid and over-the-top way, but they are also probably the segment of that community that is most engaged with that game. I see developers talk about this all the time, always listen to feedback because even if people can't articulate a criticism sensibly it does probably mean there's something wrong with your design.

 

Certainly my own personal experience playing Darkest Dungeon in EA was I put a couple of hours into the game, they made the changes with the corpses, and then the combat felt a lot more tedious to get through. I understand wanting to combat a degenerative strategy, but their solution was heavy handed and, for me at least, eliminated the basic enjoyable loop of the game. I don't have an issue with difficult or challenging or even slightly unfair games, but if the game feels boring I'm going to drop out and that's certainly what happened to me with Darkest Dungeon.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Duke Nukem 3D was one of the coolest games to "hack". Part of the game logic was in C like script which was compiled on start up. So besides being able to make the game easier you could also mod the game with complete new stuff. It was awesome.

 

I've also hacked various games. Not really to make it easier, but just to figure out how to mess with various files. Made savegame editors for various games, or unpackers. The fun was in figuring out how things ticked, and to extract the music which I could can play while doing other things.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've never been to GDC so maybe my perception is way off base, but aren't the majority of atendees game developers? I wouldn't think that game developers would be up on the controversies of other games (they are too busy managing the communities for their own games). I imagine a more general audience you would feature more people familiar with the corpse problem.

 

I think dismissing the vocal minority is potentially a mistake too. They might be a minority, and they might be complaining about things in a stupid and over-the-top way, but they are also probably the segment of that community that is most engaged with that game. I see developers talk about this all the time, always listen to feedback because even if people can't articulate a criticism sensibly it does probably mean there's something wrong with your design.

 

Certainly my own personal experience playing Darkest Dungeon in EA was I put a couple of hours into the game, they made the changes with the corpses, and then the combat felt a lot more tedious to get through. I understand wanting to combat a degenerative strategy, but their solution was heavy handed and, for me at least, eliminated the basic enjoyable loop of the game. I don't have an issue with difficult or challenging or even slightly unfair games, but if the game feels boring I'm going to drop out and that's certainly what happened to me with Darkest Dungeon.

 

So, again, I'm not really making any argument about the quality of corpses as a gameplay element.

Edit: I understand the importance of listening to an early access audience. I also never advised anyone to ignore actual substantial criticism. But you simply can't listen to people who act as though a gameplay change is the actual end of the world. People who make arguments in that kind of manner MAY be responding to something real, but those are ALSO the kinds of ways that people respond to things that are completely not real. Those extreme reactions can certainly have overlap with reasonable reactions, but you have to react to the ones that are actually reasonable, otherwise you're going to wildly swing the pendulum of your game design back and forth trying to please extremists. The game ended up shipping with the corpse system, even though it changed from its original design, and has been extremely well received since then. So obviously the problem isn't "UYGHGHHHHH CORPSES ARE AWFUL AND YOU ARE AWFUL AND YOU RUINED EVERYTHING," the problem was, as is often the case in game design, with the details of implementation. Obviously ideally, an early access audience would understand the realities of an early access game, but realistically, that is probably not the case, which means by the time you put your game on early access, you better be pretty happy with the state of your systems. The developer made the point that new CONTENT was pretty much always received well, but new or changed SYSTEMS were not. That's a bummer, because being able to experiment with systems with a real audience, instead of within the insular world of your own development team and trusted friends, would be a great asset, but for many games (and most especially games whose art LOOKS basically "finished", as Darkest Dungeon's did), it is probably not realistic. The expectation for an early access game seems to be that it will change ADDITIVELY, but not QUALITATIVELY, and that was the lesson I took from the postmortem. I'm really not interested in discussing whether one mechanic was good or bad, or done well or not, because I don't have a horse in that race; the larger issue of how these things are received in GENERAL, using this as an example, was what I intended to pass on.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The Saints Row games have had some pretty detailed character creators, and in SR1 I was able to recreate myself accurately enough to cause confused double-takes when friends would glance at the TV as I was playing. I eventually ended up dressing myself in a dumb purple pimp outfit and rolled around the city in a tricked-out hearse firing an SMG out the window.

 

If you want to play around with (cheat at) games, you should take a look at Cheat Engine. It's a memory modification tool that lets you search and modify/lock values in RAM and even set up scripts to run in the background as you play.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think it's fairly rude to try and demote someone from 'host' to 'guest' as a forum member, tbh. 

 

i miss you Sean. keep up the good Mitten work.

 

   :getmecoat Sorry

Just miss Sean and want either an update on when he'll be back or an acknowledgement that he's gone. Didn't mean to insult.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think dismissing the vocal minority is potentially a mistake too. They might be a minority, and they might be complaining about things in a stupid and over-the-top way, but they are also probably the segment of that community that is most engaged with that game. I see developers talk about this all the time, always listen to feedback because even if people can't articulate a criticism sensibly it does probably mean there's something wrong with your design.

Certainly my own personal experience playing Darkest Dungeon in EA was I put a couple of hours into the game, they made the changes with the corpses, and then the combat felt a lot more tedious to get through. I understand wanting to combat a degenerative strategy, but their solution was heavy handed and, for me at least, eliminated the basic enjoyable loop of the game. I don't have an issue with difficult or challenging or even slightly unfair games, but if the game feels boring I'm going to drop out and that's certainly what happened to me with Darkest Dungeon.

I actually see this quite frequently with Paradox. Often, as opposed to the vocal minority being a bunch of people who don't know how to control their tone, the vocal minority are people who have invested enough time in the game and its systems to understand them better than the developers themselves, at least in terms of unintended consequences. The number of times that the EU4 devs patched a new feature into the game or overhauled the values in a core system; dismissd a line-by-line criticism of the changes by TheMeInTeam or someone else with stature on the official forums by saying, "Detractors represent a vocal minority, overall our numbers on Steam are up"; and then quietly patched in watered-down versions of the fan's suggestions three or four months later, because it ends up that adding a generic "Western Europe" trade node does in fact make the New World only profitable for Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and maybe France to colonize, was enough to give me deja vu. I know that Chris isn't saying this, but it does seems like some developers fall into the trap of thinking that all negative reactions are coming from the same place, regardless of content, and not actually parsing the critiques from the complaints.

EDIT: With Paradox specifically, this situation is not helped by the status of their community managers as "patch apologists" who seem to have been put into place expressly to prevent fan reactions from ever reaching the devs' ears, if the latter aren't seeking them out.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

 

So, again, I'm not really making any argument about the quality of corpses as a gameplay element.

Edit: I understand the importance of listening to an early access audience. I also never advised anyone to ignore actual substantial criticism. But you simply can't listen to people who act as though a gameplay change is the actual end of the world. People who make arguments in that kind of manner MAY be responding to something real, but those are ALSO the kinds of ways that people respond to things that are completely not real. Those extreme reactions can certainly have overlap with reasonable reactions, but you have to react to the ones that are actually reasonable, otherwise you're going to wildly swing the pendulum of your game design back and forth trying to please extremists. The game ended up shipping with the corpse system, even though it changed from its original design, and has been extremely well received since then. So obviously the problem isn't "UYGHGHHHHH CORPSES ARE AWFUL AND YOU ARE AWFUL AND YOU RUINED EVERYTHING," the problem was, as is often the case in game design, with the details of implementation. Obviously ideally, an early access audience would understand the realities of an early access game, but realistically, that is probably not the case, which means by the time you put your game on early access, you better be pretty happy with the state of your systems. The developer made the point that new CONTENT was pretty much always received well, but new or changed SYSTEMS were not. That's a bummer, because being able to experiment with systems with a real audience, instead of within the insular world of your own development team and trusted friends, would be a great asset, but for many games (and most especially games whose art LOOKS basically "finished", as Darkest Dungeon's did), it is probably not realistic. The expectation for an early access game seems to be that it will change ADDITIVELY, but not QUALITATIVELY, and that was the lesson I took from the postmortem. I'm really not interested in discussing whether one mechanic was good or bad, or done well or not, because I don't have a horse in that race; the larger issue of how these things are received in GENERAL, using this as an example, was what I intended to pass on.

 

Yeah, point taken. I was not at the GDC Talk, and I haven't looked at the Steam forums, so I don't have any knowledge of how ugly it got, but I'm certainly familiar with how much gamers can act like a bunch of entitled babies.

 

One thing that is clear is that developers just can't have the same relationship with people playing their game in EA that they would have with traditional play testers. And that should be fairly obvious since there is a difference between someone paying money to play a game in an early state vs someone that is paid or volunteering to play the game in an early state.

 

It does seem that with each passing year the expectations surrounding EA games are going to become increasingly clear. I'm now thinking back to a conversation Jon Shafer and Soren Johnson had awhile back about EA games (possibly on 3MA?), and Jon was very cautious about early access for his game, and he hasn't made it available on Steam, and he has been radically reworking systems as he goes on. And at the time Soren thought this was crazy and his attitude was that early access was essentially a form of arbitrage for game designers -- it was just free money on the table. In light of how Darkest Dungeons played out though I think Jon was probably wise to hold off from putting his game up on Steam.

 

Finally, I just want to post a picture of a slide from the Rocket League talk that Soren just posted on twitter because it is kind of hilarious.

 

Cd2PBE-UMAAK1hp.jpg

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I actually see this quite frequently with Paradox. Often, as opposed to the vocal minority being a bunch of people who don't know how to control their tone, the vocal minority are people who have invested enough time in the game and its systems to understand them better than the developers themselves, at least in terms of unintended consequences. The number of times that the EU4 devs patched a new feature into the game or overhauled the values in a core system; dismissd a line-by-line criticism of the changes by TheMeInTeam or someone else with stature on the official forums by saying, "Detractors represent a vocal minority, overall our numbers on Steam are up"; and then quietly patched in watered-down versions of the fan's suggestions three or four months later, because it ends up that adding a generic "Western Europe" trade node does in fact make the New World only profitable for Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and maybe France to colonize, was enough to give me deja vu. I know that Chris isn't saying this, but it does seems like some developers fall into the trap of thinking that all negative reactions are coming from the same place, regardless of content, and not actually parsing the critiques from the complaints.

EDIT: With Paradox specifically, this situation is not helped by the status of their community managers as "patch apologists" who seem to have been put into place expressly to prevent fan reactions from ever reaching the devs' ears, if the latter aren't seeking them out.

 

Yeah, this is probably especially relevant when it comes to strategy games (in the broadest sense of the term) where there are so many complex systems at work it is really hard for developers to even understand their own game. When Civ 5 came out there was this kind of infamous piece of criticism about the design decisions of the game from a former Civ 4 playtester by the name Sullla (link here: http://www.sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html ). There was a lot of push back at the time from defenders of the game, but by the time Jon did a post-mortem of Civ 5 his criticisms ended up being about the same.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now