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Game Developers On Game Criticism: Spector & Church
Milktoast writes "Warren Spector and Doug Church, the developers of Deus Ex and Thief hosted a session where they critiqued each other's videogames apart at the game developer's conference. You can see the coverage here."
Those games rank in my top 5 FPSes of all time not necessarily in that order. I have played Deus Ex quite a while back and i was impressed at the number of choices i had but as the article says i had three ways of dealing with a mission. The graphics werent the best i have seen and the system requirements are quite high. On the other hand the other games dont demand the computing power DeuxEx asks of you. You want to test AI? get yourself Halflife and DeusEx. You want to get scared while solving puzzles and using stealth? get yourself System Shock...RTCW well the name is enough. Thief makes me feel live out my fantasies...Im sure Sherlock Holmes would have loved it too. aTaRi2.6K
I'd much rather play a FPS in a stealthy manner. Thief was right up my alley. I know other people like to run through these games with guns pointed at anything that moves. Not me. If a game is well made, then I hate to rush through it.
I remember those early levels of Half-Life, how utterly creepy they were. Remember the sounds of those screams and bones crunching? Hell, that scared the crap out of me.
Or in Jedi Knight, knowing a dozen stormtroopers stood between you and your goal. That buildup, of getting the courage to round those corners really made the game so much fun. Its speaks volumes about a game when you can get so involved in it. That's what made Thief and these other games to much so great. You could really enjoy the game. AND play it the way you wanted.
I just bought Deus Ex this weekend and can't wait to fire it up!
I love it when features like this happen.. A friendly hacksawing apart of 2 applications by friendly rivals helps to give the rest of us more insight into the minds of these programmers. The best type of "picking apart" of this type is in every issue of Game Developers magazine... the Post-Mortem article series is just that but with the game developers themselves admitting to the mistakes and bumbles they made.
it's great to see that Game developers can be hones and open... now to get the Development team for outllok and office to publically admit their mistakes and accept a tearing apart...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The Doug and Warren Show: Thief and Deus Ex Criticism
from the this should be on tech tv department
Posted on
Mon Apr 1st, 2002 07:24:15 AM
At the end of the last day, The Doug Church and Warren Spector show was perhaps my most anticipated session. Deus Ex and Thief are two of my favorite games, and to see their respective creators pick apart each other's game sounded like a great opportunity to learn more about their designs. It turned out to be the best session of the week.
I headed over to the auditorium to find both Doug and Warren sitting down and joking with their microphones off. When the session got started, Warren explained that the purpose of the session was to critique games without jeopardizing their professional or personal relationship. He also quipped that since the audience was all game developers, they could feel safe without a site like fatbabies.com picking it up (sorry guys.)
After they had their introductions, they both stressed how the game developer is only one part of a large and important team. At this point I started taking notes... Usually I write down what I think is important in a session - but the session was so interesting, I started taking their main points down verbatim (more or less). Since I'm not a transcriber, I apologize in advance for not getting this 100% right, but I think I nailed most of the dialogue behind their critique, and if you find their words half as interesting as I did, then I think you'll be pleased with the result.
Overview of each other's game:
Warren: Thief is a mission based, first person game with an emphasis on stealth. The players interaction is with the world. The AI is really a foil for the player, making the player feel powerful. Audio is state of the art. There's a deep fictitious setting and deeply simulated gameplay. It was a new type of game.
Doug: Deus Ex is a mission based first person action game with expansive fiction. There are a large scale of possibilities, with a lot of different contexts and roles. The game blends genre with a mix of action, RPG's and other genre's mixed in. There's a lot of choices that impact who you are and where you're going. The game goes in one direction, but you get a lot of say in how you approach the process.
Narrative and Control of the Narration: Neither game has significant control:
Doug: The narrative of thief was in the cutscenes. Deus Ex combines in into the game, but neither game has significant control, so why did you integrate it?
Warren: A lot of it was my frustration with Thief. I produced it for years and it (the narrative) was so minimal, that I got frustrated with it. Thief was constraining in gameplay. What we wanted to do was bring together a variety of things. We wanted to bring out some action, some stealth and role-play. Inventory management, object manipulation, and conversations. We wanted to include conventional role play conversation into Deus Ex.
Doug: But the player can't impact the narrative..
Warren: The conversations talk to you about the world, and that propels you through the narrative.
Warren Fights Back:
Warren: Why can't I fight my way through a Thief mission?
Doug: Well you can... but you'd be playing your own game.
Doug- The game isn't about defeating the AI, they're foils like you said... not the enemy. The AI could defeat you if we wanted it to. "I think I hear something
Doug: Thief is a game about territory. In each game the player and the AI have their safe zones, but to get to the player's goal they need to adjust that territory by changing the environment.
Warren: How is standing and waiting fun?
Doug: Make the player about to do something. Those moments are loosing someone and waiting for the AI to calm down, or waiting to bonk someone on the head when they turn around. We have to provoke those feelings in the player to make the game fun.
Is there really player choice in Deus Ex?:
Warren: Almost everyone on the Deus Ex team argues that player control is much more powerful, but here's the secret, much of that choice was fake. We did some simulation, much more than a lot of games, but much of the gameplay, much of what people thought was the depth of the solution was hardcoded like Ultima... Some of the most memorable parts were the most scripted. look at mission 6, Hong Kong. On the PS2 version we were 5 months late just because we tinkered with it and broke that fragile mission. Preplanning everything makes things fragile and takes too much time. Mission 6 felt much more like a traditional game mission.
Back to Thief:
Warren: Is there a difficulty curve in Thief? How is it implemented, and how did you test it?
Doug: There is a difficulty curve. The environments get more difficult. For example, the drunk guards at mission one are easy vs. the alert guards at the end. In Deus Ex you (the player) get more powerful, but in Thief, we decided not to do that. We wanted the environment and the player to be the two factors. To balance the game we just tested it a lot.
Warren: Deus Ex is a different game - we forced them to play through the game in radical ways to test it. One tester never drew a weapon and could beat the game. We had other testers run through it never increasing their skill level or not using augmentations. It may not be as much fun, but they can do it.
Doug: Someone played through Thief in 42 minutes. It shows you how skill can be an impact. Let the player play their own game with their own "scores" and you will end up with a new game.
Give me Direction!
Warren: Why in Thief am I given so little information about the mission and what I'm getting into?
Doug: We did it deliberately, not that it wasn't discussed endlessly. There was lots of team chaos and discussion. We wanted Thief to be a game that forces the user to dynamically react to what occurs. We didn't want a lot of planning, we wanted it to be played on the fly. Give the player enough information for an initial plan of attack.
Warren: (shakes his head) I want more direction on how big the mission is. You never know how close you are to your goals or some general difficulty information.
Warren: The other thing is that I'd be less upset if you'd replenished my inventory. It's so inconsistently replenished that I don't know if this is a time to use my fire arrows.
Doug: But that's not strategy... the player shouldn't know.
Warren: I just want informed choices..
Doug: We didn't want our players to hoard inventory... we wanted them to run out and use them. In games like first person shooters, inventory and powerups are very short term (like quake). That's true of most games of that style. You don't get a large stream of powerups and the play is determined by skill. This isn't final fantasy with 3000 healing potions.
Warren: (emphatically) But I have no way of knowing that the barracks is full of guards!
Doug: SCOUT THE BARRACKS!
Doug gets the final blow
Doug: Thief has a strong focus, with approachability and clarity. What do you lose by not having that focus?
Warren: Part of the Deus Ex game is that it gives players a large number of ways to approach it. Clearly the game is important, but we wanted to appeal to fans of sneakers, RPG's, and FPS. I was so nervous when we signed off on the game, because I had no idea how it would be received. What if people compared it to the best of each genre? What if they said you couldn't sneak as well as Thief? Our success was that people were excited about choosing how they played.
Doug: Attempts to do things out of Thief's focus results in failure. You can't change the narrative because we wanted that focus.
They wrapped up by reiterating that game development was a team effort. They are just the most visible of the team, but that doesn't make the team less valuable. They also expressed their hope that other game developers could have the same type of dialogue about similar games like Halo and Half Life. Personally I think this is a great idea.. I think we could all learn something about game criticism by hearing the developers deconstruct each other's games.
What people fail to recognize are all of the people who read the articles without reading the posts. Back from the open chat that
Umm Deus Ex is a fairly popular game, and Thief once was. Deus Ex is supposed to have a sequel on the way and Thief already had one ( maybe 2) sequel. Deus Ex does still matter, if you've seen some recent betas - there's a game called neocron, that's massively multiplayer, that resembles Deus Ex a lot.
Derek Greene
Anybody got a mirror?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Saving. A real problem in both Thief and Deus Ex. I can't believe anyone can finish them off without saving every 10 seconds or so. In both games, being detected can have huge consequences for which there is litterally no escape. Or if you do escape, you will be so near death only a miracle can save you.
:-)
Basically, these two games are so life-like and high in quality that you cannot beat them without saving all the time. The only other real option is the really be a hero, and have no life (no thanks). Personally, I think that destroys the fun out of it and makes completing the game more of an obsession than real fun.
Why should you be able to save the game so often? Why can't they balance it for the need to stay alive for longer periods? This way, hoarding may get less of a problem since a gamer won't do a longer "hell" again for just a few extra health-kits.
Oh and btw, the inventory strategy for Thief is completely necessary to balance each level. Otherwise it would be entirely a different game. (Hmm, no rope-arrows. What to do???!
I don't believe that /. is responsible for making sure that each item they link to is mirrored somewhere else. If nothing else, some of the ISP's that host these sites may finally decided to increase server capability/bandwidth.
The Geocities sites on the other had are just a pain, no matter what.
Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 are both due to come out just before Christmas this year.
In 1996 I worked with Warren Spector at the Austin office of Looking Glass Technologies on an online game project. That project got cancelled, but it was interesting to watch Warren gradually evolve (without, I'm ashamed to admit, any constructive input from me) the ideas that later led to DEUS EX:
1. Warren's holy grail is immersion in the game world. The simulation must be rich enough that the world's response to your actions reasonably matches your expectations, so that you can make a coherent plan. Toward this end, for a time Warren had the hope of making game levels laid out like actual real-world structures. But in playtesting early in the development of DX, the designers found that this led to boring gameplay, so they jettisoned that idea. (Warren is no ideologue. If an idea doesn't work, he tosses it.)
2. For Warren, your choices as player must affect your experience of the game. Here Warren differs somewhat from Doug Church, who says the player's choices should literally affect the world or the narrative. In DEUS EX your choices don't really affect much of the actual narrative, until the endgame, but those choices pivotally determine how you experience the game -- as a stealthy thief, or a gadgeteer, or a combat monster.
3. I don't know if Warren regards player individuality as always to be desired, but for DEUS EX one of his guiding principles was that by the end, every player's version of the main character, J.C. Denton, should be different from every other version. That's where DX really shines, in the skill and augmentation systems that force you to make hard choices about your play style. The great response to DX indicates that he was right to pursue this. Although in some kinds of games individualized player characters are probably unnecessary or even gratuitous, this goal is very appropriate to an immersive first-person simulation of the kind Warren cherishes.
Warren has a film degree from the University of Texas, and he talks often about the parallels between computer games today and the very earliest days of cinema. He strongly believes this is a new artform a-borning, and I know he'd like to play his part in birthing it.
Warren Spector doesn't like Thief's cutscenes, and prefers to use in-game conversations to convey information.
Why not use both? The ability to have conversations in Deus Ex was very nice, but Deus Ex's mission briefings, compared to Thief's, were pretty dull and monotone. It would seem a simple enough matter to have some sort of mission briefing before entering a new map, but still have conversations that occur within the map itself.
For one, the advancement system didn't make much sense. Cybernetic implants needed to fire a gun? Gun breaking down after firing a few rounds? This was quite frustrating, and took away from the gameplay for me.
I didn't like the randomly spawned enemies, either. Maybe I'm too used to the Doom/Quake paradign of clearing out a room then moving to the next one. It was quite annoying to clear a room, move to the next one, then turn around a see an enemy coming at you. It completely ruined my suspension of disbelief - where was that zombie supposed to come from?
Again, maybe I missed something - maybe I needed to play Thief, SS1, Deus Ex, etc. to get into the "sneaking around" paradigm. I still have my copy of System Shock 2 - any advice on how to enjoy it? Can it be enjoyed on a laptop? Should I play SS1 first?
As an extra way of increasing difficulty, I play Thief on Expert with "No Save". Technically this is a bit of a lie-- I save the game a few times per level. The real key is never using the reload button. If you get in an altercation with the guards, tough. You better run your ass off! The game has a lot more depth of gameplay if you can't just charge in for scouting and then reload the game.
In practice, I reload once or twice per mission, and only when I die. It can be done, but it's much harder. Try it sometime.
-Ted
There is some excellent coverage at gamasutra, free registration is required but it is worth it. Here's a fair use excerpt:
Hey folks, why not post some of these comments over at joystick101.org instead of here? That site, like slashdot is (potentially) made better and more interesting by user input. If you have a relevent comment to make and are tired of your comments never getting read over here why not post them over there?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
The line;
"This isn't final fantasy with 3000 healing potions. "
States EXACTLY what my problem with current RPGs is.
I remember in the older RPGs HAVING to Hoard my healing potions.
Ability to raise from dead? LOL!!! Yah right! If you were LUCKY it was included in the game SOMEPLACE. I remember in DragonWars (Interplay RPG, most none linear RPG that I have ever played, man I love that game!) there was this ONE healing well down a gazzilion levels underground that more often then not you ended up losing two or three more guys just escaping from it after reaching it to raise one party member from the dead.
Not an easy experance.
Now days RPGs have healing spells and raise dead items and such around every corner. Hell they HEAL you before the boss fight! Isn't the TRUE beauty of fighting that Red Dragon (not like any games actualy use Dragons as bosses anymore, they are typicaly commons now. . . . and that is just plain wrong) that you finaly limp through level 10 of the dungion (anybody else remember Ultima4's dungion system? Oh man those were EVIL) on your last few HPs with all of your healing potions expended and your magic spells all but gone, only to find this HUGE ass dragon ready to kick your ass halfway to hell.
Now THAT was an epic fight. You felt damn PROUD when your sorry ass CRAWLED out of that brawl alive. It wasn't a matter of equiping your 4x spell ring and casting meteo for 4000000 gazzilion damage. Hell no. It was spending four or five minutes MINIMUM thinking over EVERY last damn little move that you made. You EARNED your victory, you literaly had sweat pouring from your veins.
RPGs were HARD damnit. If a character died he was DEAD. Or at least a LOOOONG ways off from revival. Yah it SUCKED when a character died, but hey, guess what, death sucks, deal.
And above all else, it felt damn good to have your white mage crawl up from out of a dungion with everybody else in the party dead. Wooden Hammer to the rescue!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Nothing wrong with nightmares, it's a personal preference thing. But that's not really what you're looking for.
:)
The three games are successful for different reasons, and were also targeted at different people. Sims was a broad range audience with practical life learning lessons. Sims also was cross-genre, aimed at pleasing more audiences. More importantly, the Sims continues the "Sim" brand name (quite successfuly). These are larger reasons as two why Sims sold more.
Deus Ex was given missions with story lines IN the mission - the cut scenes weren't between but at the beginning. Theif was a more tradional FPS, except that instead of killing (frag count) like Quake and Doom, the importance was being given to being quiet. Both were firmly scripted that the character you play was a guy. Deus Ex and Theif were marketed directly to the guy (16 to 34) crowd, which is the staple of computer games.
The problems you have fold out into the following:
Strategy and Goals. In Sims, once I decide I want my two girl roommates to kiss, then I've decided my goal. If I want a baby, then I decide to have a baby. On the other two games, the Goals are chosen, but you can still choose your strategy. Some would argue that your strategy is chosen for you by Theif.
Game time is also a difficulty. FPS games are Real time. Sims is not. Sims falling in love over time took weeks if not months to get them to bear fruit in game time. Part of the game was giving the right back rub at the right time (of many many backrubs).
Scripted games allow control of characters and characterizations - all of the Sims peed their pants if you forgot to build a bathroom. They all jumped up at down at the same time, same body motions. You'd think some of them would be smart enough just to walk out side and not pee in their pants, right? (especially the guys).
So, what you're asking for, in my opinion is a method (algorithm) for the creation of a plot by the choices made by a user. I've got one or two, but I still need to get my games out the door or assist someone else.
Qualifications: I've written two post-mortems for Game Developer magazine: for Age of Empires, and Age of Empires2: Age of Kings.
First off, know that the editors *strongly* encourage the writers of the Post-Mortems to follow a 5/5 format: 5 positive things followed by 5 negative things, wrapped by an introduction and a conclusion.
Not all off the post-mortems in game developer magazine tell the full story, especially in the "what went wrong" section. As someone on the inside, I've known about some of the problems/wierdness during the development of other companies games. Then when I've read the post-mortem in Game Developer magazine, I've seen some of the following:
1) Serious development problem not mentioned at all- all 5 "what went wrong" items being less serious than the problem I knew about. A general desire not to make the game or company look too bad.
2) The "what went wrong" items being turned into false positives... like the job interview coach telling you to answer the question about your weakness with something the company would see as a positive (i.e. "well, I have a tendancy to work too much and not ever leave until late...")
3) The author only concentrating on his department or speciality, giving a less balanced picture of the development process. i.e. The Art director is writing the post mortem and all he talks about are the issues the art department faced, while ignoring the programming, etc.
-Matt P