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Mass Effect's Aftermath
1up is republishing a short interview with BioWare's Casey Hudson, the Project Director for their sci-fi epic Mass Effect. The piece originally ran in EGM, and covers a few nagging details left behind by the project, things like "What happened to the ability to interrupt people?", or "What's up with the UI?". "Hudson: Well, the item comparison is probably a lot better than KOTOR's because we now show you a graph that compares [the stats] of one weapon to another. As you can imagine, the inventory-management system for a role-playing game is probably one of the biggest and most complicated systems. It's actually one of the drawbacks to giving people so much to do and so many things. We didn't get much negative feedback during development with the inventory screen, although [if stuff doesn't work right], that's definitely something we want to fix in the future." That's a really deft way of handling that question, but I have to say: despite my deep and abiding love for the game, the user interface is an affront to Tufte.
Use a class, man!
I think you're greatly oversimplifying. The complexity isn't in storing the bits of data, it's in designing a system that's intuitive for players. Not to mention that I'd bet that the actual data structures are much more complex than you described above.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Had to play it through twice for it. 2x by the consort on Citadel then once each by Ashley and Liara. Doing the blue chick made me feel cool like Captain Kirk.
Trolling is a art,
From your post it is obvious that you've never written GUI software before. It's a lot more complex than you apparently believe.
In fact, the more I think about this, the sillier it sounds. Excluding artwork and meshes, I could code the entire Mass Effect inventory system in a day (The hardest part about the whole thing is the animation of the avatar, the rest is fresh grad stuff). Throw in the artwork and meshes, and I could produce the entire thing by myself in a week.
There's only 8 buttons, one xy pair of input, and two different screens!
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GAH! I can't! I just can't, it's too easy to slip into the low-brow humor...
Must...resist...joke...
Wow, congratulations! I see you've passed your Intro to Programming class.
Now if only game developers were that smart.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Personally, after only about an hour of play, I kind of liked the way that the inventory and barter system worked...the interface is quite easy to work with. In my opinion, the ONLY two things missing is the ability to filter/sort your stuff, and a raise on the relatively low item cap limit (towards the end of the game, you start seeing the message telling you that you are close to capacity rather frequently) Other than that, I think the inventory system was quite effective and easy to use (yes, even with it's very "made for console" design)
Granted, it isn't the best system out there by any stretch of the imagination, but it was still fairly easy to learn and use.
Living With a Nerd
Yes I'm oversimplifying, but to state it's the hardest part is ridiculous. As for the data, I'm pretty sure that my struct covers all the data you'd actually need for the items. I genuinely ask you, can you think of anything specific that's missing there?
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User feedback? Use cases? The ability to modify or consume equipment?
If you've done any sort of development, you know quite well that anything that gets pushed out the door, even if it's to the guys down the hall, will get beaten, bludgeoned, bullied, and blown up in ways that you never expect.
I just hope they make more sex scenes, and make them more detailed, vivid, and kinky. I'll show a video of the scenes to Kevin McCollough and Jack Thompson, and tell them that I let my 5 yr old son play the game.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Mass Effect's inventory system works pretty conveniently after about a half hour of getting to know what's going on. It is certainly better than KoTOR's . I hope they include party influence in ME2 like Obsidian put into KoTOR2. Mass Effect was probably the coolest and most innovative game I have played since KoTOR, since they both redefined the pinnacle of console gaming. Anybody who gets a chance to play Mass Effect should definitely play it, but be warned, playing Mass Effect will control your life as long as you are playing it.
You're absolutely right that people will insist on changes, however I'm just talking from a strict number of hours to write POV. As for feedback and use cases, the inventory system in mass effect is incredibly simple. [On the assumption you've not played it, theres a handful of slots where you can place items from your inventory, a 150 item limit on the inventory].
For modifications, that's just an item id in something like '(char)character.weapon.mod1'. Consumable, you can press a button (I think it's Y) do remove the item from inventory, and add id to another stat. (Again - really simple).
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A struct is a class in C++, except that members are public by default instead of private.
I am not aware if structs violate any public decency laws, however. I prefer only letting friends see private members.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the engine evolves for the next game. Any improvement is going to seem really significant if most of the engine is the same.
I should learn to keep quiet about these things, but I'm not trying to be arrogant. I work in C++ OpenGL interfaces every day, and based on my experience of the complexity of the inventory system, this is my genuine opinion about the length time it would take to implement. I'm not talking about the rest of the game - that would take a long time, but the inventory system along - Given the design spec and drawings, really isn't that complex imo.
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Mass Effect's effect?
Yes, the dialog system does look interesting... it is lacking an important feature, though.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't think Mass Effect was overhyped...in fact, in every review that I read of it (which was many, I assure you) they DRILLED into the things that it does wrong...the texture pop-in, some funky animations, etc. Nearly every review universally praised the game, and nearly every review universally blasted the same negative parts of the game.
That's just it though. If a game has mistakes in it that would normally be a deal-breaker for other games, Mass Effect is amazing in many people's eyes DESPITE it's shortcomings. That is a sign of a truely great game.
Living With a Nerd
Ironically, I just started playing Mass Effect last night (yeah, I put off purchasing a 360 for a long time. Finally broke down and picked up the Arcade package + ME on the way home from work yesterday).
:). I loved KOTOR (1 & 2) and Jade Empire though, so I'm sure I'll slip into Mass Effect eventually.
I've put about 45 minutes to an hour into the game so far, but I can agree that to someone new to the game, it's a bit of a confusing interface. Then again the *only* game I've played in the last year and a half is WoW (which I'm taking a break from now), so just about anything different feels odd at this point
Only thing I can't stand at all, and this may be changeable, but I had being zoomed so close the the char. Makes me feel almost claustrophobic or something.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Yes: an understanding of what you're doing, and what you're dealing with.
For a start, you're going to need to have an extensible object system to handle the sorts of things which can be stored in the inventory; a bottle has different properties than a sword. For a second thing, the limits to what can go in an inventory is not a fixed number of items; it depends on the size and on the weight of the items. When adding an item to the list, you have to determine whether there's physical room for it in the player's bag(s), and whether the player can carry the weight. You may also have to consider whether the object added contaminates, or is contaminated by, anything currently in the inventory. And then you've got to provide the user with a user interface which allows him to add to, search through, and select from the inventory.
I've written such systems (a long time ago, and in LISP); as Casey Hudson says, it's not trivial.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I'm not talking about inventory systems in general. I'm talking about the Mass Effect inventory system. ALL items of any type have 3 stats, there is a hard limit of 150 items (of any type). There is no weight or size. There are no bags, you can just have 0-150 items in your inventory. That's it.
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I've played mass effect, I've coded games, and I can promise you that such a structure would be at least three times as large.
.. and thats just to display the damn thing. Internally, there'd be a lot more simply because items would be a specialized form of a larger abstraction of game assets. Not many games these days are written out of pure C and no abstraction of game asset data structures.
.. what the hell does any of this have to do with an inventory screen? The complaints were about usability. It doesn't matter how complicated/simple the data is, the issue is that the UI to equip/unequip and manage your items was too simplistic given that as a player, you're switching your inventory items in and out relatively often.
Description, cost, icon, colour (since items with the same skin are colour shaded differently)
However
I think they missed out big time on not allowing you to build preset load outs you could switch between, and the button mapping for the control of the inventory screen was unintuitive at best. That has nothing to do with coding; thats an interface design (or possibly just a feature scope) issue.
BTW, you'd be shot on sight for using a character buffer to represent any form of id outside of a debug name for debug builds around here. Why use ("character.weapon.mod1"), a 20 byte string in presumably a 32 byte string buffer for an id?!? It's easy to hand wave, but the devil is in the details, and the same goes for interface design.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I'm actually in the process of writing my review for Mass Effect right now, I've found it's one of the hardest reviews to write in a long time. The game does a lot of things really, really well: story, universe, history, characters, dialogue, graphics. But in pretty much every category I review I can pick out some really big blemishes.
Take the graphics for instance, the game is beautiful and the characters look relatively real, their facial structure is complicated enough to basically do any kind of movement realistically. The environments are large and well textured... when all the textures are there. The game (maybe more Unreal Engine 3) suffers from some really nasty texture draw-in as it layers the textures. Some cutscenes will start and the characters will look nothing like their actual appearance because all the textures and bump/normal mapping hasn't been performed yet. A few seconds in and finally everything will look "right," but that's after some obtrusive pop up was performed that can be quite distracting. I would rather have had a few longer loading screens than that, honestly.
A lot of people complained about the elevators serving as load screens in the game, I never really had a problem with them. In most, your fellow party members will talk amongst themselves or you'll hear a radio report. The problem I had was they put an elevator on your ship that was a mandatory ride! This elevator must only travel about 15 feet but it takes at least a minute to ride. And if you want to buy anything on your ship or talk to most of your crew members, you must ride the elevator (and then of course ride it back up). Annoying, and I really only think it was necessary because of all the particle and graphical effects they were doing in the engine room.
Another complaint I have is with the inventory system. It's not that bad when you're equipping people, usually you only have a few shotguns or sniper rifles to pick from. The problems start when you have a lot of a certain type of item. Like upgrades. You'll usually carry a lot of different upgrades around because you never know if you'll need them. The item are arranged in basically a non-sorted order (I think sorted by when you obtained them...) so you'll find yourself scrolling through scores of items to find the one you need. Scrolling is NOT fast, either. This issue is multiplied when you go to a shop. If you want to buy or sell something, the items are not organized in a way that you can easily buy only pistols or only armor. No, they're ordered in ascending order according to price if you're selling and descending order if you're buying. There's no other way to sort them. It's incredibly obnoxious and makes item management the single worst thing about this game.
My final complaint is about the Mako ground transport vehicle and the subsequent side missions. Well, really my complaint is more about planet/level design than anything. Every planet is riddled with high mountains and usually the items of interest are stuck in these mountains. The Mako vehicle is surprisingly capable of climbing peaks, etc. but it is still really annoying to go from point A to point B. This is a little harder to describe if you haven't played the game but imagine playing Halo and driving the Warthog (a much looser version at that) over all the mountains in your way to get to your next checkpoint.
Okay, even though that was a lot of complaining, Mass Effect was still awesome. Those are my stand out issues with the game and I have some confidence they will fix most of them with its impending sequels. Mass Effect is still a must play game, especially for science fiction fans.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
It's not about how the data is stored, it's about how the data is presented and manipulated. Writing, say, the spec for HTML tables is very simple compared to implemented a fully compliant table renderer.
Here's the real aftermath, I'm very pissed at Bioware because they've all but abandoned the PC. They make watered down games for the consoles, then if we're lucky a year or so later it gets ported to the PC....
Mass Effect, like Final Fantasy XII, has the behind-the-character camera in way the wrong place.
All you can see of Cmdr. Shepard or Vaan is their butt. The rest of the world might be the most wonderfully realised piece of CG art you'll ever see, but if you can't detach the camera from the hero's backside, it's all for naught.
I'd been on the Citadel for three hours before I realised I'd never looked up. Do you have any sense of how tall the the room leading towards the council panel in the Citadel Tower is? C-Sec seems to be infinitely tall, but you can't tilt the camera up high enough to see.
Honestly, I couldn't see a damn thing.
I agree that they really dropped the ball when it came to the inventory system. I liked the game a lot, but that was despite great annoyance with the inventory. Why can't I find out the number of items I have before you start complaining that I'm running out of room? Why is there a pause at each item so I can't quickly scroll through a list?
I think the bigger problem though, is that the whole system of money and items is just broken. The only things I ever bought were the Specter guns and the MediGel/Grenade capacity upgrades. Anything else you might want you'll find dozens of in the crates you come across, and all the while there is a large number of quests that only serve to dump more money in your lap. You found a rock? Here's 16 000 credits. Look inside a "Malfunctioning Object" and you'll find 50 000 worth of weapons.
It was a stupid, simplistic way of dealing with the loot. Luckily the story was good enough to overlook it. But then why even bother having the loot system if it adds nothing to the game?
Sorry, wasn't quite clear there; I meant "character.weapon.mod1" to represent inheritance, not as an identifier; which as you quite correctly point out does not take into consideration asset abstraction, which I suppose complicates things, taking my estimates out of context.
Having played mass effect and coded games, would you agree with me that it really doesn't constitue a significant portion of dev?
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You can't see the forest for the trees. Yes, you are being extremely arrogant.
You're talking strictly about engineering. They were talking about exposed design, user interaction, and user interface. How the data is stored in memory and manipulated is completely irrelevant to the point at hand. From an engineering perspective, the amount of work required for that part IS trivial. From an interface implementation perspective, its not that difficult, just time consuming. But when it comes down to actual screen real-estate planning, interaction with the user who is using aj oypad, it becomes a much more difficult system to plan and design. Keep in mind it is a console game which must be able to function at less than 640x480 - and on top of that there is a dedicated safe region around the edges, so take off 5% of your screen space on each edge! Additionally, a joypad is a very different control paradigm than a mouse - you can't just click around the screen. Don't judge how long it would take to create the screen they used. They're talking about how long it took them to come up with the screen they did, which includes prototyping other ideas which they felt did not work as well.
You seem to like to use background to backup your claim, so here is mine. I am currently and have been an engineer in the games industry for almost a decade, having worked on big budget titles for every platform of the current and previous generation systems, as well as PC (with the exception of the Wii). Along the way, I've worked directly UI engineers on implementation of UI screens and back end interfaces on both PC and console games.
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When I began playing Mass Effect, I knew it was mostly very well reviewed, but I hadn't read any specifics (on purpose, to avoid spoilers). And I agreed with the numerical values in said reviews at first glance; the game is definitely a lot of fun, and well done overall. However, after having watched my brother play his "good" character most of the way through the game then playing my evil character through on my own, I was certain the thing it'd be losing points for every time was the dialogue system. How confused I was to discover it touted as a major selling point!
For those unfamiliar with the game, you're given up to six responses in any dialogue, represented by a short sentence (usually 5-6 words) indicating the gist of your response. The problem arises when, quite often, this tiny summary bares little or no resemblance to the several paragraph response your character actually chooses. It became a running joke between my brother and me: he'd take a guess at what he wanted the character to say, pick the option, and we'd laugh as Shepherd just randomly shot off in some totally unrelated direction.
The only real control you have is in the good/evil dialogue choices. When you're presented with the response wheel, the upper left choice is always the good ("Paragon") choice, the middle left is always the neutral choice, and the lower left is always the evil ("Renegade") choice. The three on the right side are a crapshoot. So given that your character will say whatever the hell he wants to regardless of what you think the summary implies, after about an hour into the game the player realizes he just needs to pick either Paragon or Renegade and always select that option. It's not long before you stop reading the response text on the wheel altogether.
As for the aforementioned neutral option, that's a suckers bet, and might as well have been left out. You can play a neutral or balanced guy, sure, but doing so nerfs your character. Basically, if you're an asshole you get Renegade points and you can threaten people better, and if you're a pansy you get Paragon points and can cajole like a pro. Almost without fail, any time you're allowed to talk your way through a situation, you'll be able to do so with either threatening or cajoling at a certain level. The point being that if, rather than getting either one or the other to "10" you got them both to "5" (Renegade/Paragon are opposites, but it's possible to build up both point pools; it's not a scale), at some point you'll start seeing all dialogues as being solvable by either threatening at level 6 or cajoling at level 6, meaning you're screwed; that'll teach you not to be an archetype!
For that matter, what does "Paragon" and "Renegade" mean? You can't be super-evil; there's no option to just go nuts on your own and start murdering people like traditional games of this type (Fallout + evil char + sledge hammer = kill every NPC in the game was fun as hell). It seems like your choices are more between the D&D "lawful" versus "chaotic," but it really doesn't fit this definition, either. And it varies from scene to scene; sometimes the "bad" option is you being a jerk, sometimes it's following your own rules, sometimes it's following the letter of the law to an insane and hurtful extent, sometimes it's being selfish, etc etc etc. At first glance, you might think this is nice, since you can sort of role play your character: as long as the "evil" option keeps changing what it means by "evil," you can just pick it when it fits your vision of Shepherd. But that's the thing: regardless of what they actually say, the bottom left option results in Renegade points, and the top left option results in Paragon points. So even playing a narrow, "always good" or "always evil" character, you'll find yourself totally in the dark as to what your ethics actually are!
Oh, and while we're at it, whomever decided to make the "skip spoken dialogue" button also automatically select the middle option needs to be fired. Basically, it means that
The hard part isn't coding it. As you say, that's pretty trivial, especially for one as simple as Mass Effect. The hard part is designing it - complex enough to have impact on tactics/strategy, simple enough to be usable on a console, usability testing it to ensure it doesn't confuse people, etc.
Generally, I thought the Mass Effect inventory system is pretty good, but it's really let down by the apparent rush job they made of the items themselves. There aren't any items you can get that aren't weapons, basically, so the accumulation of money feels pointless. All you can do with the items once you have 12 of them is sell them, to get money, that you can use to buy ..... worse weapons? I also seemed to be acquiring weapons with no obvious method by the time I was done on Virmire. I'd kill some bad guys and get a ton of upgrades or weapons, but didn't feel like interrupting the action to compare them. So I just mostly ignored that aspect of the game until I was back on the Normandy.
Balancing a game is usually way harder than coding it, and coding it is already difficult enough :)
(insert obligatory "mass effect is awesome" message here)
Having Played Mass Effect, and worked in game Dev, I would agree that you are absolutely the source of the problem, in that you can't even figure out what the problem was to begin with! You just take something the dev director said out of context, misinterpret it, then argue it.
Storing item data? Yeah, that's just a few bits of data in a database, or whatever, but making a functional UI to handle 100's of items across multiple characters in dozens of configurations? Adding, subtracting, comparing items quickly and powerfully between characters, characters and inventory, inventory and stores, stores and characters, etc. etc. That's the actual 'work' of making a game playable. Your obtuseness knows no ends.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
"Mass Effect is amazing in many people's eyes DESPITE it's shortcomings. That is a sign of a truely great game."
Actually no, it's a sign of a game that was released before it was time to release it and a rushed development.
God of War and God of War 2 had little anyone could complain about because the team actually took the time and busted their asses to make it the best it could be. The same cannot be said for mass effect.
There's no need to be rude, I was just stating my opinion. Ad hominem arguments are fallacious.
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Software that is rushed to release before it is ready can almost 100% of the time be blamed on the person or company financing the project. Or do you honestly think that programmers and game designers want people to think negatively of them?
Living With a Nerd
...ORDER BY ItemName ASC
:)
That's ALL I wanted! 4 simple words. They couldn't even be bothered to deliver that! "I thought we had a very good inventory system." No wonder it was such garbage they're living in denial!
Rest of the game was brilliant.
all your chars should be enumerations.
One of the more frustrating things I've found on my 2nd/3rd playthrough, is that there's many instances where you choose the paragon/renegade option, and it makes zero difference on what is actually said. Ditto when you've got a left/right choice (if you know what I mean). I do like the way it's done, when it's done, but I hate that it appears as though you can change what Shepard says at all times.
I did just the same. I'd prepare my equipment before the big missions and then sort out the stuff I wanted to keep afterwards. And then sell just about everything else so I had space for the deluge of items I would receive on the next big mission (or doing all the secondary missions available).
In fact I never actually bought any weapons or upgrades, with one exception - to buy the Spectre gear, once that was available. And since I had plenty of cash, the only limit seemed to be the one on each type that they had. (And didn't the biotic powers seem almost *too* effective? Singularity and lift immediately incapacitated the enemy AND reduced they damage protection.)
Is this a rhetorical question?
Comparing God of War to Mass Effect? That's a stretch. Hey Orange, why can't you be more like Apple?