Diablo 3 & Game Motivation

With the release of Diablo 3 earlier this year Blizzard/Activision answered the dreams of gamers for the past 12 years. Unfortunately it seems that dream is slowly spiraling down into a nightmare. When Diablo 3 was released gamers surged through the content at a pace that was at best unexpected. Through the increasing difficulties and gear drops the world first Inferno mode Diablo kill came just over a month after the game's release, despite complaints among players about hitting a wall and having to farm for hours to find gear needed to progress.

While recently there have been patches and additions to the game there has been a lot of public backlash against Blizzard with the way that not only the game has been handled but from public statements made by some of Blizzard's employees and a mess with overzealous forum suspensions. While these things don't directly affect game play they reflect badly upon the way that Blizzard has handled the fallout of poor game motivations and bad game balance.

When designing a game there are specific motivators that keep gamers playing. Content, challenge, rewards and story, each of these come together to create and experience for players that should be engaging and rewarding, Diablo 3 is an example of how when one or any of these aspects is missing the game feels incomplete or at best broken.

Let's start by taking a look at how Diablo 3 addressed content within the game. I played through Diablo 3 on the beginning normal mode, through all four acts and finished it at sometime under 19 hours. Including the time it took to farm the items needed to unlock the hidden area "Whimsyshire", and I thoroughly enjoyed the time it took me to run through the game the first time through. However Diablo 3 is setup so that once the game has been completed on normal mode the next tier difficulty unlocks and the player is asked to play the game again, their only rewards for doing so being better gear and harder creatures to fight. This harder tier adds absolutely no new content for the player to experience and for those people, like myself, who play games to see the content that was created have no motivation to continue playing.

Diablo 3's challenge aspect is something that worked early on in the game, normal and nightmare modes were fair, the challenge ramp up through the acts felt even and smooth and there were times that when I died it felt frustrating at points but never did it feel like it was an unfair death. I always felt that if I approached a situation or particular fight differently that I was able to overcome it and move on and 90% of the time that was absolutely correct. Never was there a point where I felt like I had hit a brick wall and could not progress. As the later difficulty ranks of Diablo 3 were unlocked, hell and inferno, that no longer became the case. Players now need to spend hours and hours collecting drops in hopes that something that would increase their stats enough for them to move forward would drop so that they could progress.

Loot drops have become the reason to continue playing Diablo 3 for many gamers. The reward of finally being able to move to act two or three of Inferno mode so that they can continue to grind for different items and collect new rewards is the biggest motivator of continued play from people that I know still playing the game. While there are several reward systems in Diablo 3 including gear, gold, and with the addition of the Real Money Auction House, income it seems that this was the focus of the development team over many of the other aspects of the game. The primary and main motivator of Diablo 3 has become the reward system which when looking for that "perfect" item in and of itself is a poor motivator. The chances of a item dropping that has perfect stats for a player is an abysmal 0.0000343%, and while there are hundreds if not thousands of pieces of gear that drop through a play through of all four acts you still end up with an extremely low probability that the piece the player is looking for will drop. I'm certain that this is an intentional move on Blizzard's to push players to spend money at the Real Auction House, which Blizzard takes a cut of.

Lastly people play games for the story; this is something unfortunately where I believe Blizzard has failed completely at. The story behind Diablo 3 is, to use and overused phrase, cookie-cutter at best. The location types used in Diablo 3 are almost exactly the same location types used in Diablo 2 in almost exactly the same order. The characters are flat; lacking any real traits they are almost impossible for the player to be empathetic to. Even the big "twist" towards the end of the game seemed predictable and the final confrontation feels anti-climatic.

Personally I think that Diablo 3 had the capability of being an excellent game if it had taken a more traditional approach to content progression by making the player grind throughout the game content for gear that they needed and an overall progression of difficulty through the story instead of asking the player to run through the same content four times with increased difficulty while playing through the same content.

Scope & Lovecraft

Today would have been H.P. Lovecraft's birthday and it seems a fitting time to mention my current design project. There are several things that have called to me from game design that I absolutely love, world building and story telling. Creating a world and story go hand-in-hand to me, you're creating the overall experience for the player something that they can get lost in and immerse themselves in for hours and hours at a time. Lovecraft's prose is an example of something that pulls together both storytelling and creating a world unlike any other beautifully.

With that in mind my current project is setting up my rendition of Miskatonic University. I've been pulling from some pictures found around online to get a good sense of building designs from the 1920s and 1930s for my floor plan and layout of the university. At the moment it is texture-less and just some basics in place, the walls for the classrooms/offices, some windows and doors and the stairs. I figured I should get the basics blocked out before working on all of the frills and details.

I know I want to put a clock tower on the roof, not sure if that's because of the time period of the building or because there just seems to be something ominous about this giant clock watching over a campus, deep loud bells tolling away every hour. There are some more unconventional rooms I want to add to the structure as well, a hidden chained door in a supply closet, a trapdoor leading to an occult archive below the school, as for now just the basics though.

The thought for this is to keep it something within my one man scope but to still make it impressive. I have this tendency to dream and think well beyond my doable scope, in fact scope was one of the huge things that we ran into during Final Project for my last three months of school. Need to realize what is doable in a reasonable time frame. I don't mind spending hours and hours on something that is going to turn out well, in fact I love it, but I need to be able to produce a result as well.

Just some things to keep in mind, I'll update later with some images I'm using as inspiration.

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Extra Life

I'll be taking part in this year's "Extra Life" fundraising campaign, the money raised will be going to Doernbecher Children's Hospital here in Portland. Some of you may not be aware that Liam (my son) has had to have some physical therapy appointments in the past and this is a chance for me to give back to the hospital groups that have helped him out! If you've got an extra few bucks that you can spare for it I know I would really appreciate the support!

My Extra Life Page

Cyberpunk - Editorial

The video game industry has had a love affair with cyberpunk cultures even as far back as the 1988 release of the Neuromancer video game that was loosely based on William Gibson's book by the same name. While the cyberpunk genre is one of my absolute favorite genres for media, to me there seems to be something missing from the video game incarnations of the genre.

The latest cyberpunk blockbuster to come out, Deus Ex, was a great game and I loved every moment I spent in it. The game's aesthetics and the augmentations that translated into game mechanics worked beautifully. However, like most other cyberpunk games, one issue prevented me from feeling immersed in the environment; everything was just too neat and tidy.

One of the most important aspects of the cyberpunk genre and even subculture is taking risks and making things messy. In Deus Ex you were surrounded by these beautiful gleaming cities, and there was a bit of political unrest in the story, but you never saw the uglier, dirtier, or grittier side of the city first hand. Even the back alleys and sewers were open and tidy. Cyberpunk touches not only on the beauty of what humans can become when given the ability to be anything but also what reaches man would go to to unlock that freedom, the failed experiments, the drug use and the wires running to a hacked together prosthetic.

So many "heroes" in cyberpunk fiction are really anti-heroes, they're terrible role models. They smoke and drink and use narcotics but we embrace them because they are flawed, and the same goes for the settings. Chiba City from Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't a clean and glimmering tower of progress; it was a drenched and rainy slum where those who'd lost everything tried to scrape something back together.

I feel that if we as an industry are going to embrace this genre, we need to realize all of the facets of it and not just put a glossy paint on a modern setting. There are some fantastic stories to be told in a world where almost anything is possible and screw-ups can affect humanity as a whole. The shine and sparkle have their place, but so do the grit and the moral gray areas. The self-serving protagonist may be a hard pill to swallow at first, but the story of his/her change makes them more human, and we are able to better connect with them as they develop over the course of their tale.

Extreme Environments

Last week a challenge came up over at /r/WorldBuilding which was to create a story of a world or culture that exists in more extreme environments. I felt like it would be a good time to stretch some creative muscles and see what I could come up with. So below you'll find my answer for the Extreme Environment challenge.

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The teeth of the venomous steel jaws of the cave surrounding the dwelling are always one of the trickiest parts of checking in on the people of Old Los Angeles. The people who choose to still dwell here generations after the planet was evacuated and the sun burst spewing the planet with radiation somehow continue to thrive. The Dead Angels are a people of short tempers and almost shorter life spans. If their rebreaters aren't attached directly after birth a lung full of the radioactive dust in the air would make their lungs burn and their skin melt. There are those here and there that had their rebreather attached a little too slow, the effects are like seeing a still flag made of skin attached to a skeleton, their features sag and wave with each step they take.

The Dead Angels have found a language of their own through grunts and hisses that are audible through the rebreather they have developed their communication. Even the puffs of exhaust from the rebreathers are used to convey the message. It seems to be some combination of ancient communication methods of smoke signals and even more primitive grunts and guttural noises. However just because they are unable to communicate with the higher crust members of society, that now live off planet, it doesn't mean that the Dead Angels are primitive at all. There are volumes of information scratched into old shards of broken glass and written on steel with old oil. The ingenuity of these people to make what was left behind work for them and serve their purposes is a testament to their determination to survive in these less than inviting remains of what was left behind to burn.

Every night as the acid rain storms against the rotting remaining structures of Old Los Angeles the Dead Angels drag closed the mouth of their cave and flip the switch on the generator they have salvaged and pieced back together, powering the discarded screens that line the floor of their cave creating a shimmering and shining landscape buried here below the remains of the city. The light plays off of the corners and edges of the steel. Each night as the younger Dead Angels settle in for bed the parents take turns twisting and moving scrap metal, casting shadows on the ceilings and grunting, telling stories to their children as they slip off to sleep to the sounds of the toxic weather outside.

The shadow plays may be the closest the children ever get to a normal existence. Each day for them is spent crawling through holes and dragging back salvage that the rest of the residents of Old Los Angeles have grown too large to retrieve. This salvage retrieval isn’t without its own dangers, loss of digits and limbs are normal, burns and acid damage scar each of the Dead Angels, crude prosthetics are created for those that have lost a limb, and maybe it is because of the harsh existence and the frequent amputation of limbs that the Dead Angels have been able to recreate such functional replacements even from the scraps of a past civilization.