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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?"
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.
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?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
You are correct... Both have 'levels' but they are seamless (when you go from level-to-level all you see is a white semi-transparent text saying the title of the 'level' you are on.)
Although there are 'loading' screens, but that is just because the game is programed that way.
Portal is similar, but much more distinct in the way of 'levels.' But that works into the gameplay quite a bit because each 'level' is a new test. Once you get into the behind-the-scenes area there is no real 'level' change. Just loading screens, which you have with all Valve single player games.
-nick
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."
I like basketball!!1!
Well putting aside the fact that the game DESIGN is around the idea of a level (arkanoid especially would be a COMPLETELY different game with some kind of continual level), let's give a modern example: The Halo series. In more than one case you get on/off a ship, a planet, or wherever. Teleported, or any other method of "fast travel" then gets you "between levels" of the game. But as the "quip" in the tag for this article said, why do books have chapters? The answer is the same as for games: to segment the story. Either for something as simple as a new art look, or for story reasons, breaking up the game isn't necessarily a bad thing. Go back to one of the earliest methods of storytelling, theatre, and you see acts in the play that are NOT there just to change the set on-stage, but also help segment the story.
Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium. Sometimes seamless works (HL2 is nearly-seamless, though there is the "slow teleport" which definitely qualifies as a break in the continuity), and sometimes you need the break-up to move around the story (Halo). And some games just work better with discrete campaigns, such as RTS games. And even the FPS example you gave, any WWII game. Well as veterans can tell you, the fighting DOES stop at some points. You make discrete attacks, push forward, and hold. It's not anything like the games of course, but it's not 24/7/365 from the start to the end of any war.
Levels work as both a story tool, and a gameplay tool. If they're eliminated, you need a reason for that too, which is OK, but they shouldn't be eliminated "just because."
As a game programmer who is currently having to deal with the complexity of memory management in a streaming open-world environment, I'd like to say shut up, I hate you. Or to put it a little more politely, once you take away the known-memory state checkpoints that you reach between levels, you start having to worry about fragmentation of memory, so you start instituting fixed-size memory "slots" for assets, which deals with the fragmentation problem, but then you sometimes aren't optimally using memory, and then the designers start wanting things to follow you through the world, or allowing you to carry things back and forth through the world, so you have to manage memory outside of the slot system as well as within it, so you have the fragmentation problem again, and then you have to sneak into the designer's house late at night and stab him to death with an icicle.
step 3: god dammit, it doesn't work
I just played hl2 recently, There was only one fade to black moment in all of hl2 when you teleport out out of the prison back to the lab, and you find out that it actually took you a week to get there.
If you count halflife, hl2, ep1 and ep2 as one game, there are 6, one at the end of each game, where you get take out of time and space, or knocked unconscious, the teleport in hl2, and the when you get knocked unconscious in halflife and put in the trash compactor.
Even including these, from the time you get on the train at the start the game is a complete presentation of Gordon Freeman's life, with no gaps where he goes off and does something without you.
and then the designers start wanting things to follow you through the world, or allowing you to carry things back and forth through the world, so you have to manage memory outside of the slot system as well as within it, so you have the fragmentation problem again, and then you have to sneak into the designer's house late at night and stab him to death with an icicle.
Did you have to get the icicle from your house, or his?
No, the loading mechanisms in HL1 and HL2 are identical. The game consists of a series of levels. In the cross-over point between levels, you have a couple of identical-looking corridors, and you stay in the same relative position.
Now, on a modern PC, the load times in Half Life are so short that you won't notice them - you'll get a really fast blip of text saying "now loading", and that's about it. But when Half Life was new, there was a good 20 seconds of wait time between levels.
Also, Portal's elevators are rarely actual loading screens. The first 18 test chambers take place on something like 6 separate levels, but there's still an elevator ride between each one. You're confusing a pause in the game with a loading screen.
While we're at it, it was rare for a C64 game to have in-game loading. The vast majority of C64 games ran on tapes, so didn't have access to the tape after it had finished loading. The entire game had to fit in that 64Kb of RAM (possibly less, depending on how the game set up the RAM).
The game just has to be smart about what parts to keep in memory. If you won't be getting to a certain point for hours, there's no point in having it in memory. The game knows you can't go from the place you are now to a place 100 rooms away in 10 seconds. Same with flight simulator games. You could technically fly around the whole world, but it only loads stuff in the vicinity of where you are. Games like Metroid although they don't have distinct levels still do little tricks to avoid loading. Between some areas where the entire scenery changes, and they have to load a lot of content, they put an elevator. What you're riding in the elevator it's loading the content. It looks likes it's not loading so the user isn't bothered. Personally I find it much more acceptable to wait 15 seconds in an elevator, than to wait 3 seconds while the game pauses with some big loading message on the screen.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Actually, you have to get the icicle from an ice gnome. But the gnome doesn't want to give to you, so you have to get the sleeping herb to put him to sleep to get it. But the apothecary that sells the herb only takes Borgrovians Drikkits for payment. So you have to travel to Borgrovia and..
Chris Mattern
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