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Why Do Games Still Have Levels?
a.d.venturer writes "Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Angband)? Why do games still have levels?"
Since when? HL2 is set up exactly the same as HL1.
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Wait, why not HL2? Its structure was pretty identical to HL1 as I recall.
And that's really good enough for me.
Games that have levels usually have them as way to indicate that the game just got harder. For example, games such as tetris increase speed each time a certain number of blocks are cleared and arkanoid after a screen is cleared. Games that can't be broken down into such simplified logic rarely ever have the notion of levels and instead make it so that you can't get into a certain area, or fail in it, if you haven't got the necessary equipment, XP, etc.
In short the existence, or lack of, all depends on the type of game in play.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Because sometimes, it's nice to do themed, episodic content that's broken apart by firm delineations. If anything, I think that Mario 64 did the best mix of levels and "seamless" play that's been done (haven't tried SM Galaxy yet, it's on my list). Any other silly questions?
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The reason is memory. There's only so much you can load into RAM at once, and levels allow you to more easily control what assets get used and when. You can also do this with streaming and clever tricks, a-la Metroid Prime, but that requires a lot of planning at the initial design phase. It can lead to crash issues if the player gets too far before you've finished loading everything. Again Metroid Prime is a good example of this.
If it works, don't fix it.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Because it's fun to have intermediate progress goals.
Or was this a trick question?
Games have "levels" so gamers can feel a sense of accomplishment at moving up a rung? Kinda' like - you know - life? Work hard, get promoted = meatspace leveling. Same with XP in MMORGs?
What I can't figure out is why everyone in my office gets all weird when I start killing co-workers during my XP grind? Sheesh...
Um...both Half-Life 2 AND Portal never leave the first-person view unless you are loading the game...in Half-Life 2 the next "level" is reached when the small bit semi-transparent text shows up in the center of the screen...in Portal, you ride an elevator (again, entirely in first person, not even a loading screen) and when the doors open...there you are at the next level (or in this case, test) Again, both games NEVER leave the first-person view while playing them...not a load-screen in sight. Come on. Do at least SOME simple research before you start mouthing stupid crap.
Living With a Nerd
Darwina had levels, because it made sense within the games framework and actual story.
As for portals, I'm not sure the HL2 engine can stream a level or load one in the back ground.
I think its more a limitation of the technology/power than actual design. As stuff has gotten more powerful, the games have used more power to make them look pretty as opposed to making them look smoother and load seamlessly.
In some cases, you just can't realistically link 2 separate places.
You mad
Wow, Angband, really brand new game there.
Portal had individual puzzles in individual rooms. Duh.
Next questions: Why do books still have chapters? Why do plays still have acts? Why do movies still have scenes?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Because the writer thought that a clean break in the action, or in the theme between two distinct areas, was important.
Or because "downtime" occurs between levels that the player doesn't need to see, whether they're following corridors or going back to base.
If the basic idea behind a game is a string of essentially separate puzzles, like in portal where each room is a new puzzle, then levels really enhance the gameplay by creating a sense of achievement. I'm thinking of a 2D version, I don't keep up to date on games and I vaguely remember there being several others that might be different.
Levels can be new layers of interest and difficulty. An immersion game is more like a storyline - games with levels play more like a series of puzzles. Some groups of gamers really like puzzles.
Ever read a book without chapters? It's a pain. Likewise, can you imagine playing a Mario game where you were just running form the beginning to the end? that would be nuts. Sure, for some applications, continuous can be really interesting. But that's just not what is most natural to people, whether it's like the real world or not.
I don't give -- what most Western Civilization scholars would term -- a flying fuck about this topic.
(But I cared enough to share it with you, losers.) CHECKMATE.
I have to point out that Half-Life has levels just like HL 2. It just depends on how modern a system you play it on. Since HL has such small levels/textures compared with a modern system the load time is minuscule.
I remember waiting a minute or two to load levels on my old 166 MHz system with a Voodoo 1, and 32mb RAM back in the day.
games have levels for the same reason books have chapters
any substantial storyline has natural breaks and scenery changes contained within it
what's the problem?
Animoog.org
Yeah, a modern computer could load up every single level of Doom or Super Mario Brothers at once and string them together... but strangely enough, game designers have actually scaled up the detail of their games as computing power has improved.
It's a pretty tough tradeoff, I imagine. Take Half-Life 2. They probably could have more-or-less eliminated load times by scaling down level detail a bit and loading on-the-fly like Oblivion... but would that make it a better game? Apparently Valve thinks we'd rather wait 20 seconds every 15 minutes that have a "seamless" but lower-detail gaming experience.
If we're talking about non-technical reasons for levels (like the different "chapters" in HL2, which didn't change every time a "loading" screen came up), well, games are (ideally) 20+ hours long. You don't expect people to actually play them straight through, so it makes sense to have breaks and intermissions in the narrative, the exact same way almost every novel is broken into chapters.
Why isn't everything filmed in one continuous take, like Children of Men or that X-Files episode? There are even some movies that let time pass during cuts. 24 obviously perfected pacing and editing, why isn't everyone doing that?
If I recall correctly from God of War, Grand Theft Auto and Shadow of the Colossus, every now and then you'd have a cutscene, after which your objectives would change, then you'd complete your task and have another cutscene and new objectives. So how do these games not have levels? Is the objection to having a screen displaying the level number before the cutscene? The difference between having levels and not having them seems fairly superficial.
No matter what you do, you have to have some kind of organizational system to a game. Be it "levels" or "zones" or "areas". All of the "non-level" games you mentioned simply use litterary and organizational devices that superficially hide the level structure. Metroid, for instance, has enclosed locals, which usually are accessed via elevators or (herectical) drop points. Shadow of the Colossus has different Colossi which are defeated in order. These are levels, they provide the same super-structure, they are just better hidden. But some games thrive off of much more obvious hierarchical organization. The Mario series, for instance, has always done wonderfully with levels, and (in the 3D era), missions within these levels.
You are basically complaining about superficial differences in game progression. Traditional, levels-based gameplay can be made to be completed in a non-linear fashion, with minimal loading time, and freedom of movement (see Super Mario Galaxy for a recent, and rediculously good example). Where-as less defined organization (like some of the games you mentioned) can be very strictly linear, and have terrible load times. This is more a result of the programming and overall design, not whether a game has levels or not.
There are great usages of level-based design, and terrible ones. It's about as helpful as saying, "why, after all these years, are there still FPSs?" as if one genre of game is inherently inferior.
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I mean, seriously, I can understand that books had chapters back when they had to hand-set every letter in a printing press and had to have some way of designating where to stop printing and bind the pages into a book, but we have things called 'printers' nowadays that can handle collation, printing, etc, much faster and more reliably. Why the heck do books need chapters? Personally, I enjoy books that go n and on and on and don't give me any indication that I've moved on to the next significant chunk of the storyline; it makes saving my progress with a bookmark so much more fun when I don't know if I'm past the good stuff or not yet...
is the new fad.
/s
Welcome to Digg guys, watch your step and make sure you say hi to the mac fanbois on your way in.
Honestly why the fuck are you dissecting a shitty blog piece? As the tag says "why do books still have chapters?" Sometimes chapters are a Good Thing, and this fucking blog is trolling it around.
But hey, since we're on Digg, I guess discussing blogs is A-OK.
Then why are there nine people listed as Level Designers? It's been a few months since I played through, but I'm pretty sure there were loading screens between the levels.
So you can tell people how good you are at the game.
It used to be point total, back in the days of pinball and Pitfall.
Why do books have chapters?
My understanding is that it was a technical challenge (as you mention). Due to hardware advances, it's no longer a problem. When the game was ported to the 360 they developed a way to stream the levels, avoiding that problem. They have not released that as an update to HL2, but I thought they used it somewhere (HL2:E2?). Maybe they didn't. Now that systems have enough RAM to hold both level bits, they can do this. They didn't think they could when HL2 came out.
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Levels give those of us who can't play 24x7 some short term goals. Reaching the next level is a basic goal you can use as a time marker when you have other things to do, but need a little down time.
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Has some "open" play, but also set scenarios which must be completed in order (and reset if/when you fail). Which, to me, is a clear variant of classic level-based play.
Such level-based content is easier to design and implement than completely emergent, open gameplay that is as interesting (the first time through, at least) and detailed.
The level structure is still a perfectly valid mechanism for a game. It provides the player with clear objectives and motivation and allows for variety within the game (e.g. level 1 = streets, level 2 = building, level 3 = chase baddies to the north pole).
The fact that other games have developed alterantive methods of providing structure doesn't mean that existing methods have been surpassed. Linear Movie plots are still being written even after Pulp fiction. heterosexual romance plots are still being written after Brokeback Mountain.
This just isn't a problem. RAM is plentiful, and you can stream from disk as needed. World of Warcraft is a good example of this. You can fly from one end of a continent to another and there's never a pause for a level switch, the game grabs the data as it is needed (it only does a loading thing if you teleport). In a lot of games this is feasible. You just set up your engine so it loads data as it is needed or may be needed, and discard it as it is not. You move away from the idea of having to have every texture, object, etc in a given "level" loaded. Rather only things that are around the player are loaded. If you system is good for making sure that enough is loaded so that wherever the player goes the data is ready, it is quite workable.
If you RTFA, you'll see that it's not whining and asking why we still have levels. Rather, it's a (poorly written) defense on why levels are still a good idea.
N.b. I don't mean to pick on the parent, but it does seem to assume the title was a question, and it answers the question with one already given in TFA.
Sheesh what a douchebag. Games do not have to reflect the structure of the real world to be enjoyable. That's why there's board games, puzzles, sports, etc. If a design is fun then it's fun. It works. End of story. Games might have levels in order to provide the player with a series of challenges that aren't intertwined. If there isn't a reason for seamless transition from one "chunk" of gameplay to another then why expect one? A boatload of games have "levels" and they make perfect sense even if the game mirrors real life. Do you want to go on James Bond missions one after another or do you want to also play through his day-to-day dilly-dallying in Britain when he's off duty in the meantime? For sure the latter is more 'realistic' and may be more 'seamless' but there's no sense in saying it will for sure be more fun.
Basically this guy decided to criticize a gameplay setup without giving any thought to why it's there in the first place. Some games don't need it, sure -- take Oblivion for instance. But to say that games "shouldn't have levels" is to say every game should be like this other game (or games) and to hell with all other designs regardless of how they affect the actual play.
That bit where he claims cutscenes are anathema to gameplay is also rich. They work wonderfully in some games and not in others. To say that in every game ever released from here on out the interaction should be constant with no exposition or story progression told through non-interactive segments is assinine and privileges any pressing of buttons over simply enjoying visual media, which is nonsense. In other words, sometimes it's a better idea to tell something through film than it is through "gameplay." It simply takes a good game designer to know when that time is.
Seriously, all of this cutscene and "levels" criticism is ridiculous. Is Metroid Prime hands-down the best fucking game ever made or something? Is it the design we all want for every game? Hell no! We want it for *some* games.
It would be just as retarded, BUT NO MORE SO, to say that EVERY game should have cutscenes or should have its gameplay divided into "levels."
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I love levels! They make me feel like I've accomplished something. I DON'T play Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, because I feel lost and tragic after playing for so long and sitting on so many couches (Ico) but without any really recognizable progress except mentally. Kung Fu for the NES is still my favorite game ever: once you beat level five, it loops back to level 1. You can progress up those stairs and beat the game infinitely. There are few things more satisfying.
To show progression.
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Why do movies and plays still get written in acts and scenes? Why do television commercials come on just when something interesting is happening?
The answer is that that it is a classic story telling technique. Some (books/movies/plays/tvshows) have successfully done without, and more power to them.
Now that the technology doesn't need so much time to catch up to the player, the game designers and story tellers out there can concentrate on using it purely as a story telling technique, and not as a crutch to support technology.
Cutscenes and levels are just another tool on the utility belt of game designers. Those tools do not need to be ignored, but just as a carpenter is able to smack his thumb with a hammer, the question is how will game devs/designers use them?
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Same as for levels in games, they represent a discrete section of the narrative. For games with a linear narrative, this makes a lot of sense.
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Why shouldn't books be endless blobs of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph?
Are you adequate?
I loved ice world in super mario brothers, it may seem like you can enter a save point on that 'stage' but in my book that is a partition that can be called a level. I'd say it is for game navigation after the fact.
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Levels make a good stopping place to take a whiz and reload the beer! Duh!
Old cartridges effectively had no load times. Look at the N64. Levels are a useful gameplay design construct. Perfect example: Super Mario Galaxy. Level structure, but absolutely zero load times (very cleverly masked).
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
You think you're going to fit all of the level data of STALKER into 2-4 gigs of RAM?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Portal has individual, disconnected levels because its story was specifically designed for it.
When you're done with one test chamber you get on a elevator and go to the next one. I don't see any artificial interruptions in the gameplay.
So, don't implement it that way. To implement an arbitrarily large seamless world, just load the area that the player is at currently, and adjacent areas. As the player moves around, then load the areas adjacent to where they moved.
This technique is useful even if the game is divided into levels, actually; the point is to load only as much game data at any time so as to (a) show the player everything that they can see from where they are, and (b) enable seamless movement away from where they are.
Are you adequate?
... why aren't there mini-games (e.g. a small asteroid type game) while the game is "loading"?
:n
You can distribute a large team of people to work on single levels but it's really hard to have say 20 people work on a single huge level design. Have a couple of designers each contribute a few map files is easy but to coordinate lots of people working on the same files is quite complicated I would guess. Most of the games mentioned in the article (Metroid, HL2) are divided into sections that are connected creatively so the transition is not as rough from one to another but they're still done in sections.
I supposed some games lend themselves to the level-less experience, some don't. Some of it is probably just organizational on the part of the creators. Nevertheless, it is probably true that levels in many modern games are a legacy effect from bygone eras and could be done away with. However, even back in The Day, games like Zork didn't have levels as such, you just played. Ironically, a level-based game may actually be somewhat more realistic. Although we think of life itself as a continuum of moments, our real circumstances actually do break naturally into something approximating "levels": that is, well defined cycles and milestones based on shifting local goals. These milestones are often separate by periods of routine. Perhaps levels in games (like chapters in books or acts in a play) are just a caricature of that real-life organizational effect with the routine periods removed to expedite the entertainment value.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I have played HL2 on the 360, and the game STILL stalls at load points.
You must be playing a different Xbox 360 port of HL2 than I am, as there were plenty of "Loading ..." bars in HL2 from the Orange Box. It's also quite obvious that a new "level" has loaded after a loading bar rather than just streaming in some new data. Though you're still looking at the same place and the same geometry, you'll often notice lighting differences from before and after the load. I haven't played through Ep2 yet, so maybe loading changed there.
Portal did a good job of hiding loads during the elevator rides, but the late-game breaks that convention since data still needs to load but there are no more elevators.
This is one of the lamest posts in quite a while.
Let's say you played a game for 12 hours a day, 3 days solid, and someone asked you where you were in the game. Wouldn't you feel gimpy if you said "I'm in front of the castle" because there was no metric for success? It'd be more like... real life that way.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
There are books without chapters like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and Fighting Fantasy.
But to the original question asked - Its like any medium used for communication - there are many ways of presenting information and different styles make for different experiences. There are many ways to skin a cat.
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for example in mafia you played the biggest "jobs" of tommy's career - and there were years between them
wouldn't it be kinda stupid to play all the uneventful years between those "jobs" in realtime?
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I'm almost tempted to join the tagging beta, just so I can tag this as "becauseyoureanidiot", "thisisastupidquestion", and "whydoesslashdothaveeditors".
But that aside, when it comes to games with levels vs. games without levels, I swing both ways. Fluidity is important, but so are cutscenes and transitions.
If I have to jump through one more Flood-anus to finish Halo 3, I might start changing my opinion.
Actually, come to think of it, Halo 3 sort of employs both mechanisms. 9 missions, separated by cutscenes and load screens, but within those missions the checkpoint system allows it to load data ahead of time and feel as fluid as Half-Life. Minus the quick save option, of course. That ability to load data allows them to have very large missions, with different types of storytelling and game pacing employed within each subsection/subchapter of each mission.
They're not as cleanly split as in Doom, but there are definite levels, and they even have names and different map names.
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If games didn't have any levels anymore how else would I know when to go to bed! I like it when games have levels. It gives us "I need to finish everything in the game" gamers a sense of accomplishment and also provides for a break in the game. I have a hard time saving a game and just leaving it in the middle of the action. Even in games that don't have levels I need to finish the current "quest" or whatever and then find a quiet place in the game to save before I can leave it.
Of course, The Legend of Zelda just had one big world. I don't think I'd count the fade-to-black when entering and exiting dungeons as a loading screen. ;)
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
The fact that they load quickly doesn't matter. In fact they specifically lock you into some areas until you finish a goal.
No the don't call them levels, but What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.
An interesting insight is the new half-life two mission they put on steam. You can run it in a mode where you click on a bubble and the devs. talk about the scene, or area. It was very interesting.
My primary concern is that the game is fun. These days that seems a radical view point, not taking some 'side' in a made up issue like this one.
Yes, Halflife 2 kicked ass... except for the ending.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They have levels to allow someone to measure how far they have progressed in the game. When your friends ask how far you've gotten, you can say "Level 42" or whatever and they can tell where you are relative to them in the game as a whole, not "well I got to the big black tower after the underground dungeon..." "What underground dungeon?" "Oh, it comes after you get in the airship and..."
Yeah, just think about how this conversation goes for a game like Super Mario Bros, verses an RPG like Final Fantasy and the reason for levels becomes obvious.
You can fly from one end of the continent to the other. But you need to load when ever you visit another continent, outland or enter a dungeon.
========
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Because it's easy to divide the game design tasks among several designers by level. It's harder to show "emergent behavior" on a Gantt chart.
I imagine it is much easier to ask your QA department to "test this level" than it is to ask them to "test this entire game". In fact, I'm willing to bet that games broken up into levels get shipped a lot quicker than monolithic games. (Does Duke Nukem Forever have levels?)
It's been too long since I played it on PC, but HL2 on Xbox 360 definitely stalls at "checkpoints" (or whatever Valve calls them.) Moreso than, say, Halo 2 does.
In fact, Halo's a pretty good example of a game where the content *is* pretty much streamed to a large extent, and the "levels" are just artificially created as chapters in a story. It's not that it was technically impossible for Bungie to stream content, it's just that the story needed broken up and that was the best way to do it. (I mean, the chapters in Halo games usually represent hours of "time passes" anyway... would be really, really boring to do them in real-time.)
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When the summary asks a (rhetorical) question and a bunch of people answer it insightfully, doesn't that mean it was a bad question?
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First, I thought it was funny that you seemed to insinuate that Angband is new. I played both ancestors (most notably Moria, my first and favorite roguelike) and derivatives of it 15-20 years ago.
Second, levels aren't annoying - loading screens are. I haven't seen a lot of newer games that have "levels" for their own sake; much more common are loading screens resulting from map-based design. Most 3D games, following the legacy of Wolfenstein3D/Doom/Quake/Half-Life, sew together a collection of finite-sized maps to make the game, and transitioning from one map to the other usually requires a significant loading time.
I think many more immersive games, especially RPGs, have moved past this concept where possible. Good examples include WoW (where the only level loading happens when you transition to an instanced map where only people in your group can join you) and Morrowind/Oblivion (which dynamically loads in chunks of map data in the background to simulate a seamless game world). Even old RPGs like the last Wizardry trilogy (6, 7, 8) were not bound by levels or loading screens.
As others have mentioned, the level concept itself has also separated from the loading screen necessity in newer action games, instead taking on a character of progression checkpointing.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
I always thought that Operation Flashpoint was an innovative game for its time for its non linear game play and its map size. Basically, you were on a 1 mile squared island and the boundary was the ocean. You could go anywhere on the island to complete your mission and complete your mission in a number of ways. Admittedly, it did have mission loads between them, but once you were in a mission there was no loading and you could go anywhere. This made for wonderful game play and the game didn't get boring because I could complete a mission in various ways.
Why do people who are old enough to read Slashdot still play computer games?
With the advent of digital storage, a seemingly endless supply of recycled "paper" for printing, and "e-books", why do many books today still have chapters?
Chapters are anathema to book reading, and only serve to break up the story and ruin the flow.
Games need levels because:
They serve to break up the story into meaningful sections.
They serve to break up the game play into manageable chunks - not everyone can play for hours on end before taking a break. Having a level break, much like having a chapter break, serves as a meaningful stopping point. Picking up in the middle of a level, or in the middle of a non-descript section of gameplay is like picking up a book in the middle of a chapter, or an article in the middle of a paragraph. You don't remember what happened, and you're damned if you know where you're going.
They serve to ease resource constraints. Yes, we have more RAM and processing power. But the games still eat it all up.
They allow developers to partition out work (development, testing, and debugging) amongst the team in a more efficient manner.
They simply "fit" for many game types. An RTS or Tactical game will obviously have various missions for the player to complete, interspersed with story elements.
But hey, why do sports have quarters/halves/periods?
Why aren't pencils three feet long?
Why does my checkbook have perforations?
... books have chapters?
The idea of a smaller unit(s) making up a larger whole is a very, very powerful organizational motif... it goes deep.
peace
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Ya know, I've been kicking this idea around for a while, and this discussion is as good a place as any to bring it up...
Why on earth do we still have a screen that says "Press start"?!?!? If you ask yourself, why don't any games say "press start 6 times to begin", the answer is obvious. But why do I even have to press it once?
Why do games still have unskippable cut scenes? I can understand an "are you sure?" prompt, or requiring two simultaneous buttons, but c'mon! People either want to skip them, or they don't. If you offer a choice, you've managed to please everybody all of the time- a rare thing to do! Seize the opportunity!
And, heck, on a semi-related tangent- why do TV shows start with a musical number? What does that DO? It's cool once, but from then on, it's just a marker for people who want to press the "record now" button on their VCRs instead of scheduling it. Some shows like Scrubs have taken to making shorter and shorter songs.... Can nobody leap to the obvious conclusion, that if shorter is better, none is best? Okay, show me music over the end credits. But the crappy music video at the beginning is an anachronism that somebody needs to reexamine.
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
Ok aside from its really really crap game play in other respects, one of the things that really impressed me about 'Ultima IX: Ascension' was the way that the world was totally seamless.
You walked around the world with no load screens at all, through tunnels under the sea to the island on the other side and swim back again. Walk into buildings, cave systems, castles all in one huge seamless world.
The graphics were incredible. Did I mention no load screens?
1999 or so. And there was not much hardware available at the time to play it with all the graphics turned right up to 11.
Pity about the crap game play tho, it became so boring after a while that the only way I could bring myself to finish it was to use hacks.
So no, lack of load screens does not a great game make.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"Amateur" my ass, I'd love to see the Angband developers come run Slashdot while you go build a text mode RPG. We'll find out who's the fucking amateur.
Take a look at this neat paper The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege.
It explains a great detail of the issues surrounding a system like this. The more interesting issues are as others have mentioned are memory and disk i/o management, but also there's another lovely curiosity in there... floating point numbers begin to quantize more and more the further you get away from the origin. It means it's impossible to have a global coordinate system.
Enjoy.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Radarsoft's Breaker is "Arkanoid without levels": when the ball would leave the top of the screen, the entire playing field scrolls up.
Surprisingly, it doesn't really change the game all that much. The second paddle, which can be moved up and down in addition to left and right, makes a bigger difference in game play than the scrolling playing field.
(Those looking closely at the screenshots will notice a level indicator: indeed the game has levels, but each level is many screens in height.)
Why do games still have levels? Which brings us to this question, why do games still even have a story? You would have thought that by now games would have done like porn and done away with the non-fun part of them. I mean come on, we care as much about JC Denton's back story as we care about why the hot nurse with the big breasts is so devoted to her patients.
EDIT : Please don't reply to tell me how stories in games are important for immersion or whatever.
EDIT #2 : And stop asking me how to edit comments after posting them, it's right next the Parent link..
You just got troll'd!
A lot of people seem to have read the summary and then go on to argue against it. It raises a good question, but there are good answers. Which is what the article is about - it's not saying levels are a bad thing. It's saying they're good, and "here's all the reasons why". Of course in certain styles of games they shouldn't be there - and aren't - which is what makes them that style. However in the majority of cases, there's lots of reasons TO have levels, and this article points out what they are.
/agree 's.
Rather than arguing against non-existent points, go read the article, THEN come back and post your
This AskSlashdot sure doesn't warranty the front page, or even BEING ASKED. Seriously, I wish I was older so I could say slashdot's gone downhill. The question asker has obviously not thought out his question, or have any point on it. His criteria aren't accurate or consistant - he asks why games still have levels, and states seamless play as being the apparent end all (when its pretty damn clear that its not). The Metroid Prime series (which I'm a big fan of) ALL HAVE LEVELS - even the ones on a continuous world like Prime and Echoes have levels. you just walk between them. Nor is it seamless - there are frequent cutscenes where I am outside of my control - but does it bug me that I lose control of myself, in order to have a cool looking sequence where Samus has a western style stand-off with Dark Samus in a sci-fi reactor room? No, that sequence looked rad. Could they have had that sequence if it didn't break the seam and have a cutscene? No. Half life similarly, while seamless, has pretty obvious levels, just once again, you walk between them - in HL2 there is the antlion cave level, leading to the outdoor antlion guard showdown, leading to the fetching the car stage, driving around getting ambushed, Fight the Helicopter in the Crate Yard (or whatever you want to call it). Continous, yes, levels, yes. So why aren't some games seamless, and why do games still have levels? Because seamless and level-less aren't the end all of game design - they are an option, that like all other things you can put in a game, are awesome where appropriate, and are just suckful when they get put where they don't belong. Zonk, your standards seem to be pretty low, how about the next front page question be "Why Doesn't Every Author Write Books Like Phillip Pullman?"
Certainly the argument that games have levels like books have chapters is compelling. The difference is, I don't have to wait 5 minutes between chapters staring at a blank page that says "Loading Chapter 5: Aliens Attack". I just turn the page. A movie can change the the pace, or the current sub-plot, but it doesn't have to wait 5 minutes to do it. And also, certain games require levels, because they are games, e.g. tetris, breakout, feeding frenzy, or tennis. Games like BioShock, Mass Effect, Halo etc could all have no loading times and still have different sub-plots, "periods of calm", foreboding, etc.
So the real reason that games still have load screens is because people still buy games with load screens. Which tells you that either people are morons, or that loading screens aren't really all that much of a show stopper.
Bottom line, getting rid of loading screens is "hard". Its not technically hard. Its organizationally hard. It requires designers, programmers, audio, art, all communicating and being on top of their shit, trusting each other, and knowing enough about each other's disciplines to be able to make good compromises in the right areas for everyone to win. This is extremely rare.
Another question (with the same answer) is "Why don't games run at 60Hz?"
The only people who would ask such a question do not have a background in either programming or in game design. So, here are just SOME of the reasons for having "levels"...
First, you need to look at what goes on behind the scenes.
In some cases where there do not seem to be "levels", there is one, but the transition is done without a pause. The new area is pre-loaded during game play. This assumes that the game areas are contiguous, where the entire game is played in the same area, and there is no "boring travel" that would bore the player between areas. For these contiguous areas, the plant and animal life may not be all the different, so loading new textures and unloading the old textures may not be needed, while for some, this would be a case of needing to predict which textures need to be removed from memory while loading the appropriate textures and objects on the fly.
When one fairly small area is enough to strain the average computer, the small size makes it even harder to predict and properly pre-load what is needed for a smooth transition between areas as well.
There are some very good reasons for having these breaks, including modularity, and allowing for custom content, in addition to saving memory. Back in the ancient days of computers, if you had 16KB of RAM, that was a good amount, but it also meant that you had to really work to reduce how much memory your program would take. Even into the days where 8 megabytes of memory, a programmer had to look at how much memory code would take, and spend a good amount of time trying to cut back on memory usage. So, what do you do to cut back on memory used? One method is to take code that is not needed and clear it out of memory so that more memory is available. By having "levels", it allows a game to clearly define what will be available at one time so that the old junk can be cleared out. If a "new area" will make a huge change to what is going on in the game, that would also be a good reason for a "transition", because the old "rules of gameplay" need to be swapped out for the new.
There is less of a reason for LONG load times these days, but if a game has a lot of options for which areas the player can enter, being able to pre-load the next area may not be a good option. What if the current area takes a gig of memory by itself? Pre-loading the next area may cause the game to go over the 2 gig mark, and may cause an application crash. There is an increasing number of people who are aware that if a game takes up more than 2048 megabytes of memory at once under 32 bit Windows, it can cause the application to crash due to the limits of 32 bit processors, and the design of Windows(blame Microsoft). You can adjust this number, but it risks the stability of the OS if you do.
So, if all you play are games that have ONE path, where you enter on one side, and leave on the other, it is easy to pre-load the next level when you get to a certain point. If there is any complexity to the path the player can take, it may not make sense to pre-load all the available areas that the player may choose to enter.
Isn't it obvious why some games have levels? Tetris is a good example, as you progress through each level, the difficulty is also increased. And once you have played it on higher difficulties, your skills at playing the game would (in theory) also increase.
Games that follow a narrative style need levels or something that performs the function of a level to help pace the story I mean what if a narrative game had no concept of levels then there would potentially be no pause in the game and you would have something like this post which is a never ending sequence of words with no pacing but i think you get the idea.
Why do books still have chapters?
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
And yeah, I am a game developer.
1) Development purposes.
When you design a game with a set of discreet levels or areas, it is easier to cut out a level than it is to do something like cut out 30% of a contiguous game world.
2) Narrative expedience
If you have a game where the narrative jumps from London to Tokyo to Moscow, do you really want the developers to try to tack on a bunch of filler for parts of the world that have no importance to the story? In Knights of the Old Republic, you only ever visit 5 or 6 worlds. Is that game better served by providing you with a hundreds or thousands of habitable worlds when only those 5 or 6 are relevant to the game?
3) Not all games are about exploration.
Wario ware would not be a reasonable type of game to set in a contiguous world. Trauma center is also not a game that really needs that kind of structure.
In any event, not all of your examples are good ones of continuous worlds. Metroid in particular has two types of loading screens. One shows up when your on a long elevator ride, say between an ice level and between a fire level. You may notice the cut scene that does a close up on Samus during that time. The other loading screen is when you shoot a door to open it, and then get to wait 20 to 30 seconds for the next chamber to load.
END COMMUNICATION
There are games where levels make sense and others where a seamless progress lends itself more to the game.
Take the average RTS game. Usually, as you increase in "levels", you get access to more equipment, thus the game gradually introduces you to its more complicated parts. You start out with simple barracks where you train cheap cannon fodder, progress with upgrade buildings that allow you to upgrade something, which leads to other units, and so on. Dump the whole game onto the player right away and he'll get frustrated, because he simply won't understand the complicated implications today's RTS games have.
Breaking this up into levels makes sense. Supreme Commander kinda tried to break up that concept a bit by "expanding" the battle field with every step you complete in the mission, often also resulting in more units being at your disposal. But this already showed a key flaw in this approach in RTS games.
What's the core problem in RTS? Resource management. Now, if you know right after the step completion you'll be swarmed, but right now you can hold your ground easily, what do you do? You start cranking out units, no matter how inferior they may be, thus overcoming that obstacle easily. Which is not really the plan of the game (or if it is, it's quite a bad idea), since when you play the game the first time, you should not know that this is what you should do. You should be able to beat it despite the odds. So the game has to give you ample enemies to compete when you start building your army right after the information, which means you'll simply drown them in the units you prepared if you know what's coming.
With levels, that's easy to avoid. Simply give the player what he should have at the beginning and then let the battle begin.
Of course, in a FPS that's not broken up in missions (like IGI, STEF or similar mission based FPS games), but rather an ongoing quest like Jedi Knight or HL, it makes sense to avoid breaking up the game explicitly into levels and have the player gradually go further down into the dungeon. Still, even in those games you notice that you're about to enter a new "level", because the mood and theme changes. When you step from some market town into the sewers, you cannot help but feel that you've just entered a different "level". Good, bad, depends on how you look at it.
Generally, though, I can't see the problem. Yes, in some games the experience and immersion would be better if there was no level gap. When playing a story about getting out alive, I don't really care for mission debriefings, statistics and kill records. Who cares, my job is to get out! In some games, though, it would be devastating to get rid of the level based design. It would simply destroy the game.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To ask why games have levels when all games have levels would be a good question. To ask why an easily conceivable aspect of gaming hasn't been explored is a good question. But to use examples of continous games (ehem, zelda, ehem) to ask why all games aren't the same, is just, well, retarded in the true sense of the word. So I'll answer, in a manner slow enough to suit the question. Because not all games are the same. Not all games are 3D. Not all games are multi-player. Not all games are Internet playable. Not all games are Q-Bert (thankfully). Not all games are continuous because not all game developers have any desire for their game to be continous. Or, as my mother would have answered this question, and many other questions, when I was eight years old: Why Do Games Still Have Levels? "Because if they didn't, you'd be asking: 'Why don't games have levels anymore?'"
Cursed wet behind the ears pup!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
'nuff said
One of the article's examples is wrong too as Half-Life (the first one) definitely had loading screens (although when you run it on today's hardware it's barely noticeable).
If without level many will simply forget to go eating or take bath. And how confusing it is to talk to other one like I got 23145235134 experience points, how about you?!
Asking Slashdot a rhetorical question...
... aren't a silver bullet to apply to all games. There are trade offs to having seamless worlds, like having to lower all the chunks of the world into a small enough size to be loaded on the fly. Same with graphics, where you go from having to render an appropriate sized area, to now several city blocks. Buildings get reduced to cubes with small textures smeared across them.
How does a game where you are a spy doing missions all over the world benefit from a seamless world? Are you going to walk to china?
Because the player needs a break too.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
24 perfected pacing in the same way that windows perfected crashing.
The reasons that games have levels are many.
...) ...)
Basically, in rank order, they are:
1. So we don't have to electroshock you and drag you to the bathroom to take a leak.
2. So you will listen to your mom/dad and eat your already cold dinner.
3. So you will finally go to bed instead of waiting until dawn.
4. So you can brag about how far you got (Level 30) instead of some other method (I went down that corridor
5. So we can rank how far you got for our online or in game rank listings (You are Mr. Purple!)
6. So we can sell you extra content at each level.
7. So we can tell how far you got and where people get hung up (remember when WoW plateaued around level 20 for most players?)
8. So when you do a bug report it is faster to fix (I was in this room and it was like red and
9. Because people like numbers.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Games without levels have their place, namely RPGs where the landscape is continuous and the objectives are practically infinite. But is this really practical in anything else? I myself can't imagine playing a shoot 'em up game that has no levels and just goes on for ever. I just don't see a continuous landscape fitting in with much other then RPG games.... But perhaps that's because there haven't been many (any?) games besides RPG's with continuous landscapes, should some good non RPG games come out with continuous landscapes perhaps my view will change (it's a new idea deal, can't imagine it until it is actually applied and seen to be practical).
Simply put, levels are not some mere archaism, no mere relic of some time when people "settled" for "inferior" games because the ZOMGGRAFIXXXX weren't up to this day's misguided standards. They are a valid method of game design, and do not need to die out just because some GTA fanboy with narrow tastes doesn't like the idea.
For example games where action takes place in different zones or times, for example, any of the WWII games, it would be really weird if you opened a door of a bunker in europe and then bam!, you are at the north african fighting against the afrika korps, that wouldn't make sense at all.
I think that's exactly how they saw it -- occupying or liberating one town was an accomplishment, and only after that (and hopefully a brief respite) would they be ready for the next objective. Dividing the war into smaller objectives ("battles") was not just for the benefit of generals, but for the psychological well-being of the troops.
In games, you have to give the player the sense of accomplishing something, and levels is one way to do that. Unless the player feels he's achieved something, and has a new goal in sight, a game quickly becomes boring.
If you're talking about an arena game, that hardly makes sense without a level, although the "level" could be larger than what fits into RAM -- which is, I think, what the article complains about.
But if you're talking about an MMO, sure, the server needs to keep the whole thing in RAM, and maybe it needs to be segmented into a few different servers. That doesn't excuse making the player wait, though.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
levels or no levels? So what?
If you don't like it, make your own damn game.
You don't like that car? Make your own.
IF you think you know BETTER, then prove it.
Its a computer game. NOT real. It doesn't affect the "real" world.
Real : physical reality as interpreted by the Five senses of the human body which are processed by the human brain as
electrical impulses. This is scientific fact. Not some religious bullshit.
Levels? No levels?
Boring. IMO THis article should have been completely ignored.
Next useless article : All games should only have 4 colours. Oh boy. Lets play a game with only 4 colours.
Or even better : ONE colour. Lets all go back to monochromatic games. Remember those? I do. zzzzzzzzz.
Computer game. Grow the fuck up.
Take your levels and cram them up your ass.
Levels are still used because in MANY cases, they make sense. There's several reasons for using levels.
#1 - You simply shouldn't be in the same place.
Examples:
Say you're a covert agent. Levels make perfect sense - you have a mission - or maybe a short series of missions - in a set area. You complete your assignment, return to HQ, and get shipped elsewhere. There's no reason to do away with levels in that, because it doesn't make SENSE for seamlessness.
Ditto on an RTS. Sure, you might be fighting over a whole country, or continent, or solar system, or whatever, but you're still being deployed to major mission areas where they need a skilled commander - again, levels make sense.
If it's a fighting game, you fight your opponent and move on - 1 fight = 1 level.
If it's a sports game, you play one game, then head to the next stadium.
Even in an RPG, where it's one connected world, you still have levels in a way - the ancient temple you need the artifact from, the volcano you have to scale - whatever.
Reason #2: Difficulty Control
A tetris-style puzzle game is a bit different, as nothing really changes, but the levels get used for their other purpose - increased difficulty over time. Tetris on level 0 is pretty much impossible to lose - you either have to get ABSURDLY unlucky with the RNG, or you have to majorly screw up, multiple times. On level 15 (or whatever, there's a gazillion versions of the game) on the other hand, most players will fail within a minute or two. Since the game has no end, it's a matter of how long you can last, with player skill measured primarily by how high you can get the level counter, and secondarily how much of a score you can rack up.
#3: Crowd Control
This one only really exists in online games, but it's important. When you don't want 1000 people all crammed into a tiny battlefield, or dungeon, or whatever, you're going to need some kind of instancing system, which means a piece of your world needs to be cut off from the main and run as a separate level.
#4: Mechanics control
In some games, the rules simply aren't constant. Many online RPGs don't allow players to attack each other... except in certain areas where they can kill each other at will. In some cases, there's also a place where being pvped costs you equipment, designed for people looking for a majorly dangerous area. These are usually segmented off from the rest of the world by some clear boundaries.
#6. Splitting the game up
While sometimes this is a bad thing, sometimes it's good too. Can you imagine playing something like Mario Galaxy if it were one giant level. Navigating that would be an absolute nightmare.
If you really look at it, levels DO make sense in almost every game they exist. Sure, sometimes it's a cop-out to split up would should otherwise be a seamless world for the sake of easier programming, but usually, if the game has levels, it DOES have them for good reaosn.
My sons and I used to play games like Mario Brothers (pick a number), X-man and so on. The level breaks were a time for hugs and snacks. We particularly liked games such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms that had natural turn play so we could play the same session for weeks yet the boys could go to school and I could have bath once in a while. **eew* Life sucking games with no breaks were the reason we quit gaming altogether.
Lets break it down even further. Why do we still use punctuation in sentences. Really, on the internet there is no need for someone to stop and breath while reading a sentence. Unless there very weird and read aloud to themselves. Of course, some idiots posting do actually just write entire paragraphs without any punctuation... educated people immediately disregard thier posts. The concept of levels, missions, chapters, objectives, sentences and paragraphs are all part of basic syntax. Its parsable information. If you've ever watched the classic Alfred Hitchcock film "Rope" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040746/ )It essentially filmed without any camera cuts. They only stopped filming to change film 10 times due to the ammount of film a camera could have. Even still though, it has very distinct acts etc.
Why does /. still have karma, btw?
Are you a scoremonkey?
*shrug*
It bothers different people differently.
I find the load times in Half Life 2 unacceptable. I haven't finished the game, and I find the load points way too slow, even on my Core 2 Duo system with fast SATA drives, and 4 gb of ram.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
... you need a good place to pause, come up out of your parents basement, order another pizza to be delivered and grab a 6-pack of cola before resuming the game.
Have gnu, will travel.
Thank you. I always find it funny/frustrating when people tell me how easy my job is. ;)
BTW: Do you know that cancer is easy to cure? You just remove all the cancer cells and leave the healthy ones. Should take like two days (three if it is *really* bad)...
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Shadow of the Colossus has levels. Each Colossi is a level. The main area with the temple can be viewed as a sort of hub world connecting all the levels.
God of War pretty clearly has levels. You start out on that ship, take down the Hydra boss at the end, then go to Athens, then the desert, then pandora's temple, and so on. God of War II is the same.
Seems to me that the question you're asking isn't 'why are there still levels?', rather, 'why are there still breaks / loading screens between levels?'. With modern processing power, you should really only see one loading screen and then everything subsequent to that should be seamlessly integrated.
If there were no levels people like myself would never stop playing -the old "When I've finished this level" tactic just wouldn't work.
I think we're loosing the point of discussion here. One thing is the end of a stage/mission/objective/etc and levels/load times are an other. F.ex : GTA has load times every time you enter a building. GodFather the game doesnt. It is indeed a "free roam" game. As about rpg games and leveling there it's totaly another thing. It is a way the human brain works..When it sees somethg incomplete, it tends automatically to complete it. That's why such games are so addictive. Off-topic tip: So when you write a text that you want ppl to read it align it to the left. If you choose to "justify" it will look good but is no good to read.
I think this raises an even more important question .. . In this era of steroid-fueled athleticism, why do our professional sports have quarters, halftimes, or breaks of any kind? They just stop the action. And a 40 second clock to snap a football . . . This is ludicrous, we should get rid of any breaks in the action. If someone scores, we shouldn't have to stop and let the defense back on the field. Half the fun would be watching today's super-athletes over-exert themselves until they break down.
Phil
Tetris is SUCH an unrealistic game!
In WoW, as you fly, you see monsters/characters popping into existence below you. In Second Life, you can run into objects before you see them. "Seamless" loading doesn't make sense for many first person shooters because of the need for correctness. In WoW you cannot interact with your environment, so it doesn't matter overly much.
Also, WoW's graphics are not of highest quality. LOD pops, limited numbers of models at one time, etc.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Zing.
Apparently, it's part of the Boss Union contract. The concept of levels helps assure that member bosses are kept fully employed. The union boss, King Koopa, makes sure everyone in the union holds the line.
Just like a book is divided in chapters, a ga... 'book', yes. A BOOK. Like comics but then for people that can't read pictures.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
What's wrong with levels? This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard.
Half-Life 2 doesn't have levels. It's paced exactly like Half-Life 1, the only difference is it lets you load different sections of the game at any time. Also, games that don't have levels still have loading times between areas.
Games that don't have levels are usually built completely different from games that do. Most shooters that have dramatic pauses between levels don't have seemless continuity between loading times, or they just have different pacing altogether. Being modern also doesn't make games more level-free. The Legend of Zelda games were all about roaming about the land, and though they contained dungeons, they never contained levels.
They are just cleverly disguised as elevator animations and other transition scenes.
People keep replying that levels are for some technological reason, or else that a story or some other external element requires them. But neither of those are correct. It's HUMANS that require them.
We need payoff. We need to feel like we've accomplished something bigger than defeating one enemy, but smaller than finishing the game. We need to expunge all the cruft from one section of the game from our minds to make way for new information.
LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM FOLLOWS:
On one level, we're getting reinforced all the time when we play games. We see an enemy (antecedent), we shoot the enemy (behavior), the enemy dies and the path is cleared (consequence). A couple of levels up, we have the whole game as one contingency, where playing the game is the behavior and having the game finished is the consequence. (I was having a hard time coming up with the exact antecedent on that one.)
But other than with very short games, we need something in between those two. Eventually most people will get satiated on the enemy-shooting contingency; without a higher contingency than that, but a lower contingency than the far-away end of the game, there's no strong enough, near enough reinforcement to be worth continuing to play. (At least for a while.)
END LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM
Game designers know all of this, so they space out the payoff so that there's always something near enough (end of a level) to be worth fighting toward. Eventually, most people will get satiated even with intermittent big payoff, but it takes a lot longer than if the game was just one big level. And in the end, the main goal of game designers is to keep you playing as long as possible.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
There is an early hitchcock movie that was shot in real-time in one take, starting James Stewart. I forget the title, but the gist of it was a bachelor killing someone in his apartment just before a party and hiding the body on scene. The point was to depict the stress of having committed a murder and having the evidence in a place anybody could potentially find it, and somehow remain cool hosting a crowd around the hiding spot.
At the time it was filmed, they had to load the camera with a replacement reel. During that moment everyone had to sort of freeze in position until filming resumed to ensure a seemless cut from the first reel to the next. No other cuts were made to the movie whatsoever.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Reading these posts, it makes me wonder why they just don't put mini-games in during loading times. I remember a friend installing a linux distro which let you play tetris while it was installing. He loved it. Then again, I wonder why they don't let you make config settings while the packages install--yeah, I imagine it would be difficult to parallelize that...
completing levels give the player a sense of accomplishment and an easy basis of comparison against competing players ("I passed level 3").
So that there is time for cake.
It probes the stagnation of design philosophy :Level-based games are discrete chunks of gameplay,and level-less games redistribute content into one big meta-level which is more homogeneous in detail(and much rarer in games).Like experience points,these levels indicate how "far" you advanced inside the gameworld.
When the story is non-linear(do whatever) there is no need for such content levels,they could be better quantized as skill level or material advantage ingame.
The real question is:Why most games remain linear? Why do we need the hierarchy of gameplay experience based on invested gametime(i.e. time/strategy vs immediate skill/tactics)?
Did not have levels, but you soon knew about it if you tried to enter an anarchist system in a basic ship!! Elite allowed you to select which systems you went to guided by the information on how lawful the system appeared to be.It was a sort of personal level selection.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Duke Nukem used the toilet. Look what happened to him.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There were a couple of games that required tape loading _after_ the 'main' section had been loaded. The only one that I can bring to mind is Outrun (on the Spectrum). Someone else mentioned Gauntlet, which did a similar trick.
In addition to the game engine, each stage was separate, with the first stage being loaded with the game engine. At the end of each stage there was a fork in the road with the player given the option to go left or right.
IIRC you had four stages to complete to win the game, so there were nine additional code sections as well as the main loader. The continual loading got old very fast.
I was lucky enough to have a Spectrum+ 128, which could cache a handful of levels. The first run through the game was painful because you had to preload the additional stages, then you could have an almost continuous run through.
Ah, the memories...
F_T
games still have levels for the same reason music still has albums. it's a decent presentation for ideas/stories, and you can easily adapt it in a linear fashion (i.e. beginning, middle, end)
Some games benefit from levels as a kind of marker for your achievements and progression through the game. Portal is a good example of this, with the levels you have conquered representing the skills and techniques you have mastered.
It's the same thing with RPGs. I've heard the level system criticized as outdated and unnecessary, but looking at someone and being able to say "he's level 20" is a concise way of communicating with other people exactly what kind of player you're talking about.
Game... blouses.
So when you talk to fellow players, or read on a forum, etc. you can say "I'm stuck at level 33!", "I've beaten level 69 doing it upside down" and so on.
Not to mention that after escaping and killing some thousands of enemies, and 1% health left, reaching the room with the switch and seeing "loading next level" is very satisfying, is the confirmation of success of your efforts.
Third, players have less chances of getting lost. In a large world it's easier to remember locations if it's divided in sections in some way. I don't have problems finding the cave above lake Hylia, quite some and finding that strange tomb near some city it might have been Balmora - or was it Caldera ? - on the east - or was it west ?...
This is the same reason why most non-online RPGs still have levels (same name, different concept, see http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html) one way or the other.. it's easier to say "13th level vampire" than "some guy who takes pain in the sunlight with 100% magery and 79% swords and.. and.. and.. and.
One element that is so frustrating with modern games, is that once something becomes technically possible, everyone feels compelled to implement it in their games, whether or not it improves the game itself.
We can discard levels now. Should we? Well, if your game is essentially a sandbox that you can run around in and do whatever, that's fine. If your game runs on a rail, or if you have any narrative story in it whatsoever, then the word level often just means chapter. It is a good thing to have because it breaks the story up into digestible chunks and gives a pause in the action where the user can feel comfortable saving his game and taking a break.
Also, from a technical standpoint levels break the game into a number of subgames that can be tested independently, without worrying about something that happens later in the game effecting something earlier. They also help to prevent the user from introducing unintended nonlinearity in the plot, and essentially breaking the story line. I've seen a lot of so called sandbox games with very fragile plots.
Call it what you will, call them "areas" if you prefer; but every game has levels. Metroid (mentioned in the summary) has levels, they make it look like its seamless but all they are doing is hiding it by delaying the door opening, the elevator taking longer or having to use your ship. Other games might hide their level load screens behind cutscenes, examples being Gears of War and Heavenly Sword. GTA has different areas that you can move between fairly seamlessly; that doesn't change the fact that every area was created at a different time (possibly by a different person or persons)and has a different level of difficulty to do things. MMORPGs are the only games that don't load the new level, instead connecting you to the server for the new area which already has the level loaded; but the world is still subdivided. What the author is really asking is why do games still have loading screens? The answer is simply because not everyone can hide them or they want the levels to act like chapters in a book, giving some dividing lines to either skip to the interesting parts or subdivide the story.
Well, that doesn't necessarily scale.
I guess the best way to say it is: it boils down to how long your loading times are. If they're fast enough, sure, you can put them in a background thread. If not, not.
It may sound like merely stating the obvious tautology, but there are some actual game design implications there.
If we decide that all games must be seamless and loading screens are sooo last century, then that puts an upper limit on how complex your game can be. Complete changes of scenery (e.g., from jungle woods to high-tech research bunker) are right out, because there you get to pretty much replace the whole set of textures. Extremely high polycounts and texture detail are out too, because obviously loading another 16 MB for the next zone is much faster than loading 256 MB for the next zone. And extremely complex scripts and dialogues are out too, because one way or another you do end up loading them.
You can't really have both. Morrowind tried, and it became just a case of annoying breaks more often, instead of them being at points where you're warned and expect a load time. Instead of having one load screen every zone change, it just ended up having one a hickup every 30 ft. It just became a constant annoyance.
Second, keeping in memory the data to decide exactly what you want to load means more memory needed too, so it comes at the expense of something else. Sure, you don't need much RAM to decide it when you load just terrain for a FPS, but in a complex RPG it can be subtly more complex. The more that could have changed in the world as a result of the player's actions -- or of player mods -- the more you might have to process an area before it's ready to render.
Pre-optimizations are also right out. You can't pre-compute too many NPC's paths and schedules, if you have to be ready in milliseconds. So that again will have to come at the expense of something else. Either then you need more CPU power during the game, or you load the pre-computed data to a file... but that again brings you back to the problem that now you're waiting for IO, so you have to reduce some other data being loaded. It also throws a spanner into modding, since now changing a cell -- Morrowind or Oblivion style -- essentially invalidates anything you might have pre-computed when developing the game.
Basically what works for a flight sim, may not necessarily be the best way for a complex RPG like NWN2.
That's not to say that you'll end up with a bad game. WoW can be seamless and a good game. But if you re-read the above paragraphs and have played WoW, you might recognize some of the tradeoffs they had to do, to keep it seamless.
It's not applicable to all games, that's what I'm saying.
Elevators too, are nice but aren't for all games. You'd be hard pressed to justify an elevator in a medieval setting, for example. Heck, even in a modern setting, if you have elevators between bits of outdoor scenery, it looks just bloody stupid.
So basically, yeah, it would work in an old-style FPS consisting of small mazes of small rooms. But I'd rather that not all games became clones of Quake 2 and its engine's limitations.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Because books have chapters and movies have scenes.
If you do a hyperjump between galaxies that surely counts as a "level" to me. You cannot simply go back to the previous planet, if you do that you will have to fight all the pirates all over again since that level is loaded again....
Comments are all over the place, but then so is the summary. It would have been better to ask something like "why do games have zones that have to load?" Sometimes, the loading phenomenon is a matter of moving up a level in a game, and sometimes cut scenes are useful for a storyline or some such thing, but the actual issue is why we have wait and drum our fingers, when we want to keeping pwning orcs or zombies or whatever, and are merely moving between areas. If you are talking about genuine level transitions, like the acts in Diablo 2, it really isn't an issue - it's a part of the game that makes sense and a necessity technically. In other circumstances, you might eat your mouse in frustration, because you can run from OG to Tanaris without loading, but you can't go from Freeport to Neriak without loading twice, which is just annoying. So...I'd say the relevant comments below are the ones that discuss memory issues.
Bad cut scenes come from one thing: bad games. Cut scenes can add to the depth and layers of a game, ala Warcraft II. The only thing I see wrong with cut scenes is when they are superfluously added as "filler" or are done as an afterthought to "fill up to CD-ROM".
One of the captivating properties of games is that they give you a sense of achievement for your efforts. Levels are one (traditional) way to implement that. They also serve to give you a sense of how far from the end you are (if there is one) and a way to communicate your progress to others efficiently.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Modern printing system can print billions of pages in a row and yet, damn authors still write chapters !
If games didn't have levels, you couldn't catch the first rays of the morning sun glinting through the window and tell yourself "Just one more level!".
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I think we saw a ground change with DOOM -- no points, no score, just survive and kill everything in sight. I don't pay a lick of attention to scores nowadays unless they're really obviously pointed out, such as on a transition between levels.
Zuma, currently one of my favorite games, does have scores and levels, although the levels are much more important, as it changes the map the balls roll through. The score is less relevant, but it's there. Most of PopCap's games seem to have both scores and levels. (Dave, any comment on that?)
-- haaz.
This is like asking why books have chapters. Or websites have sections? Or why your house has rooms?
I am not sure if this has been mentioned yet (no time to read all 330+ comments). But how about progress. People want to feel they have progressed in the game. Levels is one way to achieve this feeling.
The same way in a sense, that RPG characters, level up and get stronger, you progress.
So without any levels, you might have an unsatisfied feeling after you finish the entire game.
Also 'Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver' for playstation which worked quite fantastically without load screens. Sometimes going thru portals takes a few seconds (literally, 2 or 3), but you can walk thru the whole game without teleporting and without any pausing or freezing, ever.
This shows that it is not a real issue of hardware limitations like some people have written above as this was on the (underpowered by todays console or PC standards) PS1 and the graphics/sounds aren't particularly crap for that game. Oh, it's because graphics have got a lot better on games since then? This is all you need to know about the games industry - chasing more and more advanced 'realism' instead of making architectural changes to games engines which really improve gameplay.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
You reminded me of the time my friends and I tried to "beat" Gauntlet on the C64.
//should have sprung for a fastload cart.
I think we made it to something like level 54, playing two people at a time, in shifts.
It took hours, and several dozen sodas. It felt like we spent as much time watching levels load as we spent playing them. It kind of made those "bonus" levels a penalty of sorts: 2 minutes loading, 20 seconds playing, another 2 minutes loading, etc.
Gauntlet most certainly falls in the "game data loaded from disk" category. The old SSI AD&D games were another good example of that, with dungeons, towns and the overworld each being requiring data from disk.
Life is levelling up, right? You were abandoned by your working parents, so you levelled up from pre-school to kindergarten. You levelled up every year, except (in your case) fifth grade, all the way through high school. You probably got diplomas and certificates along the way. Assuming you graduate from college, you might even get to hear Dick Cheney spewing wisdom down your ear canal like Hamlet's uncle. If you achieve the lofty heights of grad school, you'll get to wear a fancier costume and command a fancier salary in your chosen profession (possibly the arcane field of pre-Raphaelite influences on iPod design).
... uh ... simpler. It's show biz, and ya gotta shift the scenery. Don't notice the ninjas, ok? They work backstage.
Eventually you'll even achieve a Ph.D., or Fudd, as we call it here in Realworld, and if your grip on actual quantum mechanics has been (heh) level enough, you might get a call from Dull-sounding Dynamics, which is constructing the world's first wavebent camouflage for Japanese Gundam suits. You'll have meetings. You'll climb the corporate ladder. You'll level up.
The simple answer is
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
It seems pretty obvious, anyway, although maybe that's because I've seen tons of games use similar techniques.
But the point is, you don't need FMVs, period, and you certainly don't want to force them on your users everywhere your engine forces a level break.
My comment about the "cinematic" HL2 sequence was to point out that you don't need a technological limitation and an actual "Loading, please wait..." screen to make a break in story continuity.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes
By the time we were playing games at home on machines such as these, the video game industry -- and game design -- were already well established on arcade platforms. Arcade games at the time were burned into ROMs, and given the expense of hardware and memory, the more reasonable factors for "level based" game design are 1) it was hideously difficult to design a complex game with such constraints, 2) the economics of the arcade industry relied on short entertainment bursts, hoping to "hook" the player into using another quarter to play again (or the utterly genius notion of "continue"), 3) the first arcade game players couldn't understand complex games (e.g. the failure of Computer Space vs. the success of Pong).
Both of these factors led to simple "one level" showy games (e.g. using memory to maximize graphic and sound effects) that would simply progressively get harder. Each level was in many ways just a sped up version of the previous level. Once this routine was in place and proven (via weekly receipts of Pong, Space Invaders, Pac Man, etc.) it was hard to break out of this mold. Games such as Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac Man were groundbreaking in the sense that instead of one true "level" of play, multiple levels were rotated to increase the playability of the game (and deal with their customers' ever-increasing sophistication at undesratnding how video games worked). The next modification came in games such as Phoenix and Xevious, where a "boss level" was introduced as a goal for players to reach. But nearly of the biggest revenue generating video games were level based.
As to why: perhaps the human brain is simply wired to prefer short-term goal attainment?
Why do men still have nipples?
Because people like to have a sense of accomplishment, as well as being able to compare with friends.
... they have items and character levels instead.
Why do books have chapters for that matter?
Why do roads have names?
Why do we name the stars or planets?
Order helps us keep things straight. Levels are a form of order. Worlds are another (like Super Mario) and so on.
Sure, MMORPGs don't need "levels"
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Relax, I know how it works (I do this for a living). I can give you a dozen examples of games that have done it right and reasons why some games don't do it at all. I was just commenting on "Slashdot Experts".
By your posts, I'm guessing you're not a programmer (or at least not one with experience). All of the programmers I know don't give up on something because they find it hard. Learning to program is hard, getting a job in the game industry is hard, working 80-90 hours a week for months on end is hard. Programmers who give up when something is hard don't last.
That said, there is a big difference between something being possible and being practical. HL2 doesn't do load-waits because their core engine isn't set up for it. Other game engines are. Could Valve rewrite the engine to handle streaming data? Sure (in fact, I'm guessing the next Source engine will do this). But is it practical? I'm guessing no or they would have done it (Valve programmers don't give up because something is hard).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-- Auden
Some people might be referring to HL1 from memory, but having replayed HL1 somewhat recently, it has levels, or at least 'acts', where the screen cuts out and then fades in from black, displaying a 'level name' in white. Planet HalfLife's walkthrough refers to them as Episodes: Anomalous Materials, Unforeseen Consequences, Office Complex, We've got Hostiles, Blast Pit, Power Up, On A Rail, Apprehension, Residue Processing, Questionable Ethics, Surface Tension, Forget About Freeman, Lambda Core, Xen, Gonarch's Lair, Interloper, Nihilanth.
~nog_lorp
The idea of levels isn't just for loading screens. Can you imagine a Perfect Dark or MegaMan (with the exception of the *ahem* MegaMan Legends/64) without levels? And the Metroid series does have a type of level, as each part is independent of each other. Levels are simply there to divide the game, to make it seem not so overwhelming, to give respite, and to categorize missions/objectives!
Technically, in HL2, what are considered levels are not -- they are called chapters, because a game such as that plays out like a novel (or interactive movie, in this case). It also gives the player a feeling of accomplishment in moving on between chapters. But it's an interesting discussion. :)
Becuase you can't kill some commies as a British soldier, and run all the way to the middle east, change your uniform to the US Marines and waste terrorists there...
Well... You can't without taking a break, or a hell of an in-game flight.
Oh.. The flashbacks suck in real-time too.
Because players need a reward system and a sense of achievement.
C'mon guys, string a couple brain cells together, it's not hard.
Games have levels because humans like a measurment. So, we measure how far we have completed a game by the level that we are either playing, or have reached. It's like money. We measure how well we are doing in 'worth' by how much money/assets we have/make. Everything has it's measurement, and levels is just what most humans can understand in game terms. Might as well ask "Why do we use money?" when there's no real use for it beyond it being a measurement. Just propose to someone a utopia where there is no money, they'll look shocked, and most likely the first question/statement they'll have would be something like "How would you know if you were sucessfull or not?"
There ya go.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
As a former game developer, I find it hilarious that the very people criticizing game design are those who couldn't produce a play-worthy title even if they drank Warren Spector's urine every day for seven years.
I hate load times as much as the next guy, probably even more because I have a beefy machine that should negate them, but today's games have levels because, well, they do. You don't go whining to Peter Jackson when he cuts from scene to scene, and a one-shot movie is neat when you're a pretentious film student, but pretty boring anywhere else.
Levels break up the story into discrete chunks. They offer a convenient pivot to introduce plot twists, new challenges/tools, new landscapes; it's analogous to a fade-to-black. Those who complain about realism and immersion, well tell me this: why do you play games ? Is it because reality is kinda boring and you want an escape ? Then why would you want the escape to be identical to the boring thing you're running away from ?
I'll take a recent example: Crysis. You walk, drive and fly from the beginning to the end. There are maybe 3-4 loading sequences where you stare at a progress bar for a few seconds, then reappear in the same area but differently framed (e.g. fly over a naval fleet, and after loading you findself on foot on the ship, a few hours later in plot time. I can live with this, as the action radius shifts from a 20-mile canyon to a 400-foot naval carrier; it gives the player confirmation that the tedious flying and shooting is over, you've (temporarily) beat the bad guys, and get a chance to snap back into the run-and-gun mindset. Even when there are dramatic plot transitions, you're still pushing those movement keys and shooting down the bad guys. The few "cutscenes" in the game are actually rendered by the game engine so there's no pause, no transition, and when the speech is over you still have your finger on the trigger.
You could change the names, and that last paragraph would apply to Half-Life. If the game designers didn't want a loading pause, they wouldn't be one. Technical limitations aren't such a huge obstacle anymore, with plentiful Ram and fast storage you can buffer hours worth of content long before the player ever reaches that area.
There are some folks that just don't put any effort, and still approach game design like people did 30 years ago. Sometimes that's a good thing like arcade games, which will always have a market in those who don't want to sit down for a 2-hour adventure.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Just want to vent my frustration with a very good game. Load screens (the freezing in gameplay) every fifteen seconds in Mass Effect are extremely annoying. It doesn't tend to happen in battle, but the frame rate often drops during battle. Strange. Back to loading, it's annoying. Especially when you take into consideration that the DVD drive never spins down. With games like Halo3 and Assassin's creed constantly loading vast and intricate landscapes... you'd think that Mass Effect would have no issues with loading a all the confined spaces rather quickly.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Real life, in fact, has chapters. You can tell the breakpoints because they are separated by what we call 'sleep'. There is your meatform load screen. People who want continous flow forget this usually imposes further technical challenges (as someone who has written dynamic cell loading code for a massive multi-user platform, I can say that with some confidence). If you're going to do dynamic cell loading and you want to do it efficiently, you need to decide how you're going to load the cells intelligently. You also need to find a way to do this in the background, without disrupting currently active cells. Portaling/Teleporting around seemlessly could be an even bigger challenge. Of course, all these and other challenges can be handled, but they'll eat some CPU, some memory, and add some code complexity. Is that where you want your game dev $$$ expended? Is that really the best use of those $$$? And besides, I don't know about anyone else, but the logical breakpoints of level loads often let you shake out the tension in arms and wrists, unkink your neck, and refocus your eyes a few times somewhere else. Probably good to have these sorts of minor breaks in game flow.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
LGPLv2 would probably work.
BSD only requires attribution, if that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Levels can allow to setup with similar-level of skills opponents. This is really great to ensure you have the most fun in online gaming.
Here are two Kartrider examples:
If you are a newbee, you only get to play with newbees (others cant join your games).
If you are a pro, you get to play with pro-level players without newbees wasting your time and fun
If you take the article's logic and apply it to novels, you might conclude that books still have chapters because:
1) Printing constraints - to let the printing press cool down.
2) A Pacing mechanism to give your eyes a one-page rest.
3) Escalation of reader level - Earlier chapters easier words.
4) Unity of chapters - So you can have "the flashback chapter" or "the monologue chapter"
5) Design Constraints - So that multiple authors can work on the same book.
we humans- most of us anyway- tend towards conservatism. familiarity has its advantages.
levels exist. levels will continue to exist as long as people enjoy levels. reasons abound.
but by all means, play whatever sort of games you choose.
(arkanoid especially would be a COMPLETELY different game with some kind of continual level)
What a COOL IDEA! Continual Arkanoid! You could just have the blocks move down slowly, and provide voids to get some nice multiple bounces! The blocks could be lethal to run into. The permanent blocks would dissolve for some reason when you got to them, of course.
Just a theory:
Ignoring the obvious programming shortcuts that they afford, levels can offer the same literary features that a chapter break offers to a printed work. It gives the opportunity to build tension, change scenes, or shift the focus from one character to another.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
So that I can go to bed. Open ended games rob me of sleep - at least with levelled games I can aim to finish that level, then go to bed. Of course you could argue that I have no discipline over my gaming... and you'd be absolutely right.
I think a better system than levels is to make them floating-point (sorta), so the transaction between levels would be seamless, unless you are a person who looks at the 5th number behind the decimal point (Or maybe 16 for C++ minus 3 digits). However, the current level-based system is a staple of most RPGs, and gamers are just accustomed to them, just like graphics designers are accustomed to parallel projection in 3D, and layers in Gimp/PS (me at least). So speaking in a commercial sense, it would be unwise to remove the level based system, as it would mean that gamers would have to learn many concept from scratch.