Who would have expected this? Complains about the levelling speed in Shadowbane?

Haemish:
I’m not even sure it was the lack of people. It was that PVE is a flat-out grind, with no trappings, or gravy or anything. It’s GODAWFUL. It always was, but it was bearable because I was coming off of EQ and DAoC. Having playing CoH and WoW and EQ2 now, it’s SO FUCKING SLOW. It isn’t even about how fast you gain experience, but how boring is the actions which must be done in order to gain exp.

Spoiled by the little improvements of the genre.

As I always repeated, a problem of quality, not quantity.

Shadowbane and DAoC have now probably the faster treadmills out there. And they both still feel as painful grinds.

This is what I complain about when I say that these games are observed and then designed superficially. The problems are always seconded or dodged instead of solved directly.

Oblivions “should” be out in the shops. “Should” because it seems the majority of the people didn’t get it, while I’m reading mixed feedback from the few who have it.

In the past weeks along with the good hype we also read some complaints criticizing exactly that part that this game should do at best: the graphic.

The perplexity seems somewhat confirmed, we already knew that Oblivion relies heavily on dynamic Level Of Detail. The clipping range in the game is HUGE, but this also means that the detail is always dynamically adjusted and that there’s a whole lot of pop-up going on. I never liked games with dynamic LOD, I prefer less detail overall, so that what I see on screen is consistent and so that if I see something on the horizon the place will look exactly the same when I’ll be there. This consistency is a fundamental part of the immersion, which is the strongest element you expect from a RPG.

Oblivion uses the same crap engine on which Morrowind was based (and DAoC, and Civ 4). The same that is now hyped at the GDC. New version, of course, but in my experience there are some flaws that have always been a constant and that I fear I’ll find again in Oblivion. In particular a very bad memory management (and memory fragmentation that makes the game slow down the more you play) and input/mouse lag when there are lot of trees and grass on screen (this due to the SpeedTree technology, also used in DAoC, the unreleased Wish and the upcoming Vanguard), along with an overall bad rendering performance of the render itself. That’s the negative side of using middleware to develop games, you spare a lot of time and resources to focus directly on the production, but at the same time there are tradeoffs and the results aren’t as good as proprietary engines.

This past week Bethesda released a set of six videos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and you can figure out already some of the quirks of the engine, also considering that the game will never be as smooth and polished as 30 sec videos carefully put together:

As the video shows the geography and buildings are all there and do not “pop-up”, but at the same time it’s obvious that they rely on the dynamic level of detail heavily. The camera is always tilted up but if you pay attention you can see how all the grass is drawn at a relatively close range (as in every other game, it really kills the performance with all the transparent and animated textures it has to move) and on the distance you can see how the ground textures are rescaled and appear more like a smoothed “blob”. The LOD transitions and colors on the trees seem much, much better than DAoC but it’s hard to see through the resolution of the video.

My comments go in two directions. The first is that the game looks simply amazing despite these compromises (and the light rendering is spectacular). The second is that there seem to be an incredibly huge amount of “generic wilderness” that may dilute a lot the actual game. Have you seen the clip range? You could fit five full games within it. It remains to be seen if all that ground has actually some life or if it’s just terrain you have to cross to go from point 1 to point 2.

That video gave me a sort of “desolated” look, even if it looks so great.

I also wonder at which range living beings and creatures are drawn.

Now we know that even the rocks that you see around, the fallen trees and all the details that aren’t buildings have to go through the LOD. Outside the relatively narrow distance at which the area is fully populated with grass, rocks, detailed trees and wildlife, everything else is reduced to a “blob” texture terrain and tree placeholders.

There are a couple of official screenshots showing these “glitches”. This one, for example, shows how the detail is reduced in the distance. The terrain textures are smoothed and lose specific details like the roads only to reflect basic transitions, from grass, to bare soil and the rock of the mountain, and the trees are reduced to basic placeholders with little to no detail, like stains of color (and it’s possible that they are simple bitmaps drawn at the distance). From this other screenshot you can actually see the distinction between, roughly, three different areas. The first area is the close range at which the grass, rocks, trees in full detail and characters are being drawn, then there’s a second area that you see on the left, where the texture resolution goes down and we have only an approximation of the terrain, with the trees reduced to basic placeholders. On this second level all the specific details are lost and we have just the geography, basic terrain transitions and trees. Then there’s a third area, on the horizon, where even the trees stop being drawn and we just have the bare terrain on display.

This can give you a rather precise idea about how the engine behaves. The heavy LOD is there and I’m sure it can be truly annoying if you come from games with consistent geography where you don’t see the scene slowly “fading in” as you move. This along the fact that there will be rather frequent loading pauses as you move (same as in Morrowind) and that the main city that you see on the screenshots should be a closed “zone” on its own, so there won’t be a smooth transition when you enter it but you’ll have to go through a loading screen.

All these elements could be disappointing in a game that was so hyped. The engine is going to be heavy and while there were nearly no options in Morrowind, making it look really good on every computer (the only advanced effect was the water when most of the video cards didn’t support the pixel shaders), in Oblivion you can customize nearly everything. Which also mean that you can easily turn the game to look like crap.

These are the four screens with the graphic options that you can set: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4

As you can see you can basically turn off everything, buildings included. On the official forums you can read mixed impressions, people loving how it looks like and people feeling quite disappointed about the heavy LOD. The truth is that the game can look superb as it can look shabby. This is one comment from Q23 on the positive side:

True to form, I’ve turned off HDR. Can’t stand the lack of AA in the game and bloom does a decent job. Playing on a standard clocked 1800 XT at 1920×1200 with 4x AA, 8x HQ AF, bloom, and every single in-game graphics option (except for grass shadow, which is off) maxed out. Perfectly playable for me. And the game is gorgeous, absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous (except for the terrain LOD, which can paint distant hills with very low res textures). The game also has incredibly immersive aural feedback; donned a pair of iron boots and suddenly felt like an encumbered tank moving through a dungeon, with the heavy clocking of my boots clanking on the stone floor. A nice contrast to the wispy quietness of the leather shoes I was wearing before discovering the iron boots. Combat is also far more visceral than Morrowind’s, and definitely more involving. The ability to block with weapon or shield and the options to perform special attacks if timed correctly add more depth to the hand-to-hand combat than Morrowind’s whack-a-mole fighting.

That comment about the sound is particularly interesting. In Morrowind the footstep would change depending on what you had on, but they didn’t change depending on where you were walking, and the jumping sound was just one in total (and extremely annoying). In Oblivion not only the sounds will change depending on both conditions, what you have on and the surface you are walking on.

And this one on the negative side:

Oh my god! My Eyes! On the xbox 360, the distant textures are hideous. There’s no way any of the screenshots or videos were 360 footage. Essentially, Bethesda replaced fog with really, really low res textures. Ugh. I can’t believe how disappointed I am with these “next gen” graphics.

The distance texture issues is what I always think of, rightly or wrongly, as excessive mip-mapping, e.g. swapping in lower for higher-res textures as you get closer or vice versa as you get farther away. Of course the distant textures are supposed to look better, not blander, and the latter is certainly the case to some extent here. Maybe it was a memory issue, or just another unfortunate relic of 360 development perhaps being front and center. But you’ll also notice the game grids out areas and periodically pops up a message stating “loading area” wherein trees, grass textures, etc. suddenly pop-in a few hundred yards down the way.

In heavily forested areas, you rarely notice the loads. In huge, empty space, like quite a lot of the foothills area NE of the capital, it’s really obvious.

I’ve ordered the collectors edition from play.com, myself. The shop is in the UK and the games are usually out in Friday over there, so I’ll have to wait about a week and a half before I can see it with my eyes. I really wish I could be here giving first-hand impressions and screenshots instead of deducing from what I read around.

As for Morrowind I expect it to be a great game, but also deluding under some aspects. I can already imagine the community splitting in two, between those who love it and those who hate it.

Amber writes the best “review” of DDO I’ve read till this point.

I like the way she looks at things and I possibly agree on every point she explains. It’s the first time that I hear about something interesting about the game. Solid points, some of which we were already and anticipating from quite a while and that I’m glad to see (like the resources and the different behaviours for the mobs).

The point is if that’s what people expect from this genre. If it is what the myth of Dungeon & Dragons truly evocates. I know it didn’t work for me.

– I don’t like the game.
– It is not what I search in a mmorpg.
– I would have used the potential of the setting in a different way.

I still continue to see it as the bastard child of the genre, which doesn’t mean that it has no qualities. But we still have to see if those are the qualities we expect and search in this particular genre.

Someone else doesn’t have the same kind words as Amber.

Yay, again about the “accessibility barriers”, a theme I brought up a million of times and that I still consider the main reason of the success of WoW. This time from Ubiq.

What he writes is indeed true and precious, but it’s still something that should have been evident years ago. It’s not a topic of today, it’s a topic of yesterday.

It’s something we do extremely poorly.

No, it’s something YOU do extremely poorly.

I’m recently toying with Shadowbane thanks to the free thing. Well, this is the WORSE game out there when it comes to the accessibility barriers. There isn’t any other game, between those in the same genre, that could be compared. And definitely not because of the full PvP ruleset. To arrive at the PvP you need to go through the first 10 levels and get ported on the main land. If you arrive there you are already past *the majority* of those barriers.

When it comes to write impressions about this game there’s a side that is justifiable. The client, for example, feels really ancient, at release they had major bugs and instability, lots of crashes. That’s what the great majority of the players remember of this game. All these problems are technical and it’s not something you can solve just because you want to. There’s a degree of complexity, you need resources, things can go wrong. You can try your best but there’s always a limit about what you can possibly do.

But the design? The glaring design mistakes and shortcomings cannot be easily justified like that. It’s a part of the game that doesn’t need particular resources, it just requires common sense, observation. The very basic skills that should be mandatory for every designer. It’s unacceptable how the new players are introduced to the game and how the default UI is set. It’s three years that the game is out and nothing at all has been done to streamline it and organize the UI so that it can be usable right out of the box and without spending two hours to figure out everything.

Damion Schubert has been there from the start and I just cannot digest what he writes when his game represents the worst case out there. It’s just not believable. Working on better default options and reorganize the UI to make it more usable aren’t daunting duties that require insane technical skills. This is just the bare minimum you can do and the bare minimum that hasn’t been done for the three full years that the game has been out, plus all the years that it was in development and beta. Come on.

From the comments:

Interesting point. What seems obvious to the designer is not always obvious to the gamer.

No, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s what is absolutely obvious to the player that doesn’t seem to be obvious to the designer. You don’t need focus groups to discover why, if you cannot figure that out by yourself it means that your observation skills are extremely lacking.

It’s not a matter of founding, it’s not a matter of resources. This is pure conceptual work that should have been obvious BEFORE even writing the first line of code. Before the first proof of concept of the UI was ready, before the ruleset was being designed. Shadowbane isn’t an incredibly complex game, but it becomes overly complicated because it is badly planned and because it didn’t improve an inch along these years. Shadowbane failed not only because of the technical complexity that is required to run a mmorpg, but also because it was poorly designed.

You just cannot say what you said with a straight face. Really. Yes, we all agree with what you say. But *I* can complain about that. You cannot. We aren’t on the same side of the fence and I’n not letting you jump here.

It seems that Grimwell is back home.

Good because I never migrated to Gamergod, so he never “sold” that idea to me. What he says about the gaming media is far from surprising, one wonder what else he expected to find.

A couple of years ago I was also writing news and some comments for an italian site and left without an inch of drama as they told me to just report the news as they arrived without commenting them or dig the truth behind. I think I did a good service for the site for the time I was there (about a year) and simply left when it wasn’t anymore a possibility.

Anyone can post a press release and regurgiate PR material, but very few people in gaming can tell it like it is.

It’s not a news that game journalism is not possible. The game companies have the full control over what is released. It’s not public domain, it’s their private property and they can even menace you if you happen to find unauthorized screenshots as it happened to me with WoW’s exp. If you want to be able to write previews and join betas you are forced to be their tool. Or have friends and infiltrates in the company. Everything else is useless, there’s nothing to report if not what is already under everyone’s eyes. You are the game journalist of your socks.

(and so what matters is not anymore the “news” itself, but an opinion. The subjectivity. That particular point of view of who writes.)

Even here I believe who is losing more are the game companies themselves, not the players. It’s the games that are going to suffer because the quality always stands out. You can hide the dirt under the carpet but you are going to have it come out somewhere else and hurting you even more. The problems are better discovered as soon as possible and promptly addressed instead of hidden. This is why if I was at the head of a big project I would push to go fully open and honest. I would go HUNT the beta testers I need between those who know the genre and I believe will give me honest, unbiased opinions and ideas, and beg them to join. The community and the feedback are a precious resource for the game itself, to narrow down, discuss those problems before it’s too late to solve them. Hyping things and repeating “it’s beta” doesn’t work, it’s not useful. Those are the people who should be left out. The criticism can help to move forward. The more direct and honest is the relationship, the best is for the whole project.

My point is that the companies themselves should go hunt that type of relationship instead of favoring the asslickers. If they don’t want, their loss.

Lum:
I think a lot of why community dialogue in these games suck is actually because there isn’t a mature media that holds game companies to account. That’s what helps keep governments honest in the real world, and it’s a balance that doesn’t exist in the virtual one. So you see the effects instead of community relations subverted by public relations efforts.

Grimwell lists various types of “game journalists”. Between those I’m the one who writes to have a taste of that part of game development that is inaccessible to me. “The ladder to see the stars”. Even if I cannot understand why one couldn’t desire to develop games without being interested in celebrity. For sure I don’t consider myself a journalist, nor I’m interested in becoming one.

The total, unrestrained freedom I have is a strength, because I’m not influenced in any way. The point of view is subjective and completely honest. There are no filters and I naturally escape every form of control because I’m always on my own personal search.

I leave the political battles to someone else. I’m just one who believes that honesty and unbiased journalism are a need of the industry first and the community after.

For reference, give a look at this as well.

I take an occasion to write down some notes about what I believe should be the role of a “lead designer” in a mmorpg. I know that things don’t work this way, but take this as another critics to the industry.

A lead designer for a game is the one directly responsible of the whole project, the one more exposed and that risks more. The one accountable for it. At the same time it’s one of the most exciting position but this should come at a price. His main duty is to observe, take the game as a whole, in all its part, even the most peripheral. Observe it as if it was on the palm of his hand. All the work he does should be at an high level only. He should never write a line of code, a script, a quest line or a character skill. His duties are elsewhere and not directly involved in the implementation. He supervises the implementation and the “flow”, but then the duty to make things work as expected is a responsibility exclusively of the team leads.

The second most important duty is about the communication. The communication happens in two moments, both equally important and part one of the other as two faces of the same medal:
– Communicate, and make communicate, toward the inside: between the developers and different departments, between the team leads.
– Communicate, and make communicate, toward the outside: to the community. Gather feedback, encourage discussions, contribute. With an active role.

Know, understand and dialogue with both these sides is essential and a direct duty of the lead designer without third parties working as filters.

The first part is also divided into two moments. There’s a first moment where every developer or designer should participate in regular meetings. No group of devs should work isolated and everyone should be involved when it comes to lay down plans and set a strategy. During these meetings there aren’t roles or distinctions between the devs. The situation about the whole project is presented and ideas are gathered from everyone. Things are organized and planned roughly. Everyone can participate and comment on all levels without restirctions. Every dev in the company should be made aware about how things are going and what the goals and the priorities are so that everyone can feel part of the project and can follow the progress. Here the lead designer can work as a moderator.

Then there’s a second moment. The main group without distinction is broken into “departments” with one “team lead” responsible of each. Once the overall goals are set, the different activities are assigned to the teams and on this second level everything is planned in detail. The schedules are set and the workflow organized. Each team is supposed to know exactly what are the goals to reach and the deadlines. Past this level the implementation becomes a complete responsibility of the team leads and the lead designer isn’t anymore involved.

The lead designer continues to dialogue constantly with every team to follow directly the work, but without directing that work. He is supposed to supervise the activities, monitor if the goals are reached, but the details of the design and practical implementation are a responsibility of specialized designers that are assigned to the specific teams. The lead designer is responsible for the design only at the high level, working in coordination with everyone else, as a communal effort. For example the identity of the classes are set, the skills and their effects are set. Precise descriptions are written down of the intended result. But the lead designer will NEVER decide if a fireball will do 50 damage instead of 80. He sets the goal, how the skills are supposed to behave and interact in the game and the idea of the intended balance. But the implementation of those goals is a duty of the different teams and responsibility of the team leads. During the tests the lead designer will monitor if the work of the team reached the intended goals or not. If the balance doesn’t feel right or if the implementation produces unintended results the lead designer forces a reiteration, underlining what didn’t work. But he is never responsible of that reiteration. He just sets goals and supervises the work, reiterating it till the result isn’t satisfying.

Then there’s the communication toward the outside, to the community. The duty of the lead designer doesn’t overlap with the duty of the community managers, but he still needs to maintain an active role, without third parties working as filters. Without passively gathering feedback. The lead designer should promote directly the discussions, participate to them, ask for feedback. Even comment and analyze other games. The players are made part of the development, made aware of the strategies of the development, the intended goals. Before these goals go in production. The first feedback comes directly from the community and things are discussed BEFORE they are set in stone.

The first reiterations happen here.

I always believed that it is a duty of the lead designer to dialogue directly with the community. Not a possibility. A duty. I don’t think that it’s possible to do a good work without doing it or doing it through third parties. I believe it’s an essential part of that role that cannot be opted out. If you don’t value this, if you don’t want to bother or if you cannot sustain the exposition and the harsh attacks you simply aren’t suited for this position.

These games don’t belong anymore just to the developers. It is important that the community is made aware of the development, integrated with it. Dialogue directly with it. This not for the benefit of the community itself, but for the benefit of the development. This is a crucial part of the development that till now has always been dismissed and underestimated. It’s important that it gets back its relevance and value. Developers and community are part of the same unit.

That “unit” that goes under the direct responsibility of the lead designer: observe and communicate with the system, where the system represents the unit of the two parts (developers + community).

A mmorpg is a “system” made by those two parts. Both essential. Both object of the work of a lead designer.

The lead designer is the creative director of the project. He is committed to it for ALL its life cycle. As a sacrifice.