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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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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.
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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...
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?
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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 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?
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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.
Except that while you are riding in this elevator, in first person, the game locks your ability to move, and a box in the middle of the screen shows up that says "LOADING..." but you know, maybe that's not a load screen, maybe it's just part of the plot, and GLaDOS temporarily poisoned you with neurotoxin or something...
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
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?
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...
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.
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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Portal has levels because the Enrichment Center's testing environment has levels. If anything, Portal is a satire of this phenomenon, presenting the absurdity of slicing up an adventure into neat chunks by putting the player in the position of a real person progressing through such a system.
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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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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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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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.
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.
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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.
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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?"
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.
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
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.
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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.
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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....