TOM FRANCIS
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How Fast Should Stuff Unlock?

The game Magicka unlocks eight different elements in its ten minute playable intro, giving you access to 16,384 spell combinations.

And later, an M60.

Half-Life 1 and 2 don’t give you any abilities in the first ten minutes, and in general only grant you about one new weapon type every hour or two.

Obviously it depends partly on genre, but there’s more than that going on. I think developers fundamentally disagree on the question of “How far through the game should I get access to the main abilities that make it great?”

Every hour before that point, you lose some players who might have liked it if they’d got that far. I’m probably never going to get through Dead Space 2 because I’ve been playing for hours and still only have two weapons, one unexciting and the other impractical.

But every hour after that point, the player has a less exciting sense of progression, and risks getting bored with the same formula. FEAR probably fell victim to that – if you didn’t love the basic combat as much as I did, the fact that it never changed after the first few levels probably killed it.

Personally, I like to get things one at a time, but quickly early on. I will play almost anything if my toolset is changing every ten minutes.

The games that pace their unlocks slower tend to frontload the experience with a lot of scripted or story content, unique stuff that’s hard to make.

I think that’s rarely as compelling and inviting to the player as getting new abilities. I’d rather they saved the unique, story-driven stuff for after I’ve got all my tools, to stop that phase from getting repetitive. By that point I’m probably invested enough to pay more attention to it, whereas early on it’s usually unwanted noise.

What’s your sweet spot? What games do it well, and which ones don’t? I’m asking partly because this is one of the big things I haven’t decided about Gunpoint yet.

Better Spelling In Magicka

Magicka is great. You’re a wizard who casts spells by summoning any combination of eight different magical elements into your staff, then releasing them either as a quick blast, a charged shot, an area of effect around you, an enchantment for your weapon, or directly onto yourself. Accordingly, there’s a crazy level of player freedom, very few limits to your power, and a great, great many ways to instantly kill yourself by applying the wrong powers to the wrong thing.

Because you need to combine those eight elements so frequently, they’re on the WASD keys where movement controls would normally be. More specifically, they’re assigned like this:

Remembering what’s what is crucial and takes some time to pick up. So I can’t help thinking that, for the English version of the game at least, it might have made more sense to assign them like this:

Q and D aren’t perfect, but there’s enough consonance to make the association memorable, I think. You can reassign all of these manually, but because the game still displays them in the old order on-screen at all times, you’d have to relearn it while trying to ignore ever-present misinformation of their relative positions, so it isn’t worth it.

The fun thing about Magicka is, ironically, that there’s no concept of magicka or mana in it – however mighty a spell you cook up, you can cast it as quickly and as often as you can press the right buttons. It changes the concept of magic from what it is in most RPGs – fantasy guns, with fantasy ammo. Here it’s just palette of abilities, with curious but reliable rules about how they interact and combine. It feels like what magic should be.

I mentioned there’s lots of ways to kill yourself – using lightning when you’re wet, firing an arcane beam at a shield, forgetting to heal before you use fire to dry yourself. In multiplayer, they’re increased exponentially. Even trying to heal one of your friends when they’re using the wrong spell can cause them to explode. There’s merciless friendly fire, so area of effect stuff frequently shreds everyone on your team, boulders smash them out of the level, and lightning leaps from enemies to friends indifferently.

But the good stuff also gets more interesting: the most satisfying spells involve the Arcane element, which gives the attack the form of a beam that ultimately explodes whatever it kills. In co-op, you can intentionally cross these beams so that they combine into a more powerful one, shooting off in a direction that’s democratically controlled by where each of you are trying to point it. It’s like a weaponised version of moving your hands on a Ouija board. Again: magic like it ought to be.

The bit I most enjoy about playing a new game is after I’ve discovered enough possibilities to be excited, but before I’ve discovered them all. Magicka seems to exist entirely in that period – you grasp what’s cool about it in seconds, but days later I’m still not sure of the best way to execute my most common attack.

Right now I summon water, summon fire to turn it to steam, combine steam with arcane to turn it into a burning beam, then electrify that beam so that as the superheated steam soaks my target, the lightning does double damage as it electrocutes them.

But now I hear you can summon a rock, douse it in water, and use that as a super-soaker to get all your enemies wet. And once they are, an arcane beam that’s imbued with both lightning and cold does even more damage – freezing a wet target triples the damage it takes while electrocution also doubles it, and has the added bonus of slowing them to a crawl.

This is giving me new ideas for my defense spells: right now I use an area-effect shield to create a bubble around myself, then stand at the edge of it and mix water and shields to create an arc of rainclouds just outside the bubble. Once the enemies are wet, I mix lightning and shields to create stormclouds that electrocute them all. But perhaps I could be creating a frost arc with that same method, hurting them more and slowing the rate they break down my shield?

Everything you can concoct in Magicka can be cast in five different ways – a quick blast, a charged blast, an area effect around you, directly onto yourself (often a bad idea), or into your weapon, making its next hit deliver the magical damage the spell normally would. Casting a shield on your sword causes it to shoot out a long barrier, dividing groups of enemies in two. It’s that mix of logic and nonsense that makes experimenting with this system exciting.

Unfortunately, right now, getting it working is as dark and erratic an art as playing it. Hilariously, some machines crash whenever beams are crossed in multiplayer. Others behave as if they have an ancient videocard, multiplayer is hard to get into. The single player is also hurt by some really stupid use of checkpoints over proper savegames. But it is only £8, and the devs are keeping to their promise of daily patches.

How I Feel About Team Fortress 2 In Graph Form

Lately, I’ve been playing and enjoying TF2 a bit. There was a time when I wrote about that game so often this site was virtually a fan blog, but it petered out a bit. It’s a combination of the natural drop off in interest in a competitive online game, and a drop off in the interesting differences the new content adds.

The latest update has bucked the trend a bit, but before I get into why, I want to explain what I’m talking about. I often wonder why my play time with TF2 dropped off even as the stuff in it got much better, so I have expressed the relationship in the only way I know how to articulate any feelings: through the medium of graph.

Basically, I wouldn’t normally like a team-based shooter at all by this point in its life cycle, and that can’t help but have an influence. I don’t like competition because I’m too competitive, and I don’t like team games because I don’t like organising people. It’s a miracle I like TF2 at all.

The chunks of new content flying into the game have kept it fresher than it had any right to be, often because it genuinely made the game better, and the rest of the time just because it was new. That appeal ended with the money update: once they added a way to buy new stuff for cash, they no longer provided an easy route to get it for free. It ceased to be “Ooh, new stuff!” and became “Hmm, purchasing options.”

But the last update does have that kick of novelty: it’s a medieval mode where most classes are useless, since their high tech weapons are gone.

Only the sword-and-shield Demoman and the bow-firing Sniper are great, and a few other classes can work if they happen to unlock certain new items, like gloves that make the Heavy tougher against ranged attacks, or a healing crossbow for the Medic. What I like about it is this:

1. It’s very, very different.
2. It’s so new no-one really cares about winning yet.
3. No-one can bitch at me for going Sniper when we already have five Snipers.
4. The only map for it is small, focused, and channels people into a beautifully designed chokepoint for the finale.
5. No sentries.
6. No stickies.

I’m fine with getting skewered by an arrow, fine with having my head cut off, fine with being battered to death by a Heavy’s metal fists. Almost every other way to die in TF2, particularly by automated sentry fire, is just irritating to me. Nothing to do with the skill involved or lack thereof, it just feels annoying.

This mode pares back all of the ways to die instantly to a distant opponent, and so for the first time, my cause of death isn’t always “Walked round a corner, met three enemies”.

How long it’ll stay fun I don’t know, but variety like this is what I want from this game now. I think there’s as much value in taking things out as putting them in.

Old Year Resolutions

Christmas is over, I’m home, and I have a bit of time before I go back to work. My resolution last year was to be more prolific – take on lots of different stuff, do it all, stop whining. In that spirit, I’m going to try to get a bunch of stuff done. I doubt I’ll manage it all, but here’s the plan.

Work on Gunpoint for two days straight
Making Scanno Domini in 48 hours was exciting and eye opening. The deadline not only sped progress, but forced brutal and useful decisions about the design. I want to do the same for my longer-term game Gunpoint, aiming to get it to the point where you can meaningfully complete a level using the game’s central mechanic by the end of the year.

Every hour of work you put in before that point might be a complete waste of time, so you have to get there as rapidly as possible. I’ll probably work on it on the 29th and 30th.

Redesign Pentadact.com
The intentionally misleading title of this place is starting to cause actual harm in world increasingly reliant on search ranking. I have to call it by my own name. I also want to make the design slightly cleaner and less busy, and implement infinite-scroll rather than those archaic ‘Older posts’ links. Might tweak the colours and add an archive if I have time.

Start ‘Notebook’
A new category or subsite on here for what I used to call philosophy, but which has evolved into increasingly practical advice given by myself to myself. I need to write the shit I figure out down so I don’t forget what little I’ve learned, and doing it publicly helps get it straight in your head.

Post: What Makes Games Good
One I’ve been tinkering with for too long. It’s about giving names to the different metrics on which great games succeed – the ones that really matter. Because they’re not ‘graphics’, ‘gameplay’ and ‘multiplayer’.

Post: What Games Are Bad At
Less of a priority, but I’ve often wanted to do a series on the things I think the industry is repeatedly fucking up. Most of my obsessions about games relate to what they normally get wrong, so explaining why and how might turn that into useful advice for making them better.

Tweak Scanno Domini
So much I could do to this from here, but to avoid letting it distract me from more important stuff, I’ll stick to the quality-of-life essentials. Snow and single-barreled weapons fire both need to be darker – they’re invisibly bright on some people’s screens. Bots still sometimes get stuck camping you, forcing a restart. I really should let you use the keyboard for movement if you want to. And I might either make the game a little easier, add an easy mode, or do something clever with the difficulty so that it ramps up more smoothly. Watching my dad play it was informative.

A Minecraft Diary And My Black Ops Review

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on. Continued

Halloween 2010

Roughly from left to right: Craig as Dexter Morgan, Kim as The Scout, me as The Spy as Graham Smith, Jim as a witch, Anna as a witch, Graham as Minecraft Guy, Lisa as a dinosaur, Tim as a Murloc, Laura as Red Riding Hood, and Amanda as Sully.

I’m actually grinning.

John made these amazing pumpkin desserts in little ramekin dishes, so he’s forgiven for coming as John Walker.

The wrap-around made this even scarier than I’d intended.

I eventually discovered for myself how disturbing it is to see someone else wearing your face.

Kim’s custom-made dog tags – “BONK!” and “I broke your stupid crap moron!”

I did not spend a lot of the evening with my mask correctly aligned.

Graham forgot not to sit down.

Why Graham, Rich And Jaz Should Get Forged Alliance

I was about to send an e-mail to Graham, Rich and Jaz explaining why they should get Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and play against the AI with me sometime, then I started digging out screenshots for supporting evidence, then I realised I’d put way too much effort into this and that the shots were kinda cool.

SupCom 2 is now truly brilliant, but it’s still a different game. Here’s what’s still cool about the last one.

This is what it looks like when you launch fighter/bombers from an aircraft carrier.

This is what it looks like when you launch torpedo bombers from an aircraft-carrying flying saucer.

This is what a lot of Monkeylords look like.

In SupCom 1, heavy shit just walks on the sea bed.

And Monkeylords don’t really care about transport fire.

Face lasers were longer range.

You sure could set a lot of shit to assist a thing.

The fourth race has a bomber the size of a stadium. Those explosions? Those were battleships. That was one bomb.

The fourth race has kind of awesome cities.

Tech 3 units are utterly badass. Here’s me discovering that Tech 3 Cybran assault bots can turn tactical missiles around mid-air.

You can play on custom maps, such as the fucking moon.

And Seton’s Clutch was actually big.

It’s £10 on Impulse.

StarCraft 2: Single-Player

For about four years, everyone’s been scrambling to reinvent the RTS. Blizzard seemed like the only company sticking with the traditional mine-resources, build-buildings, mass-units structure – presumably because they didn’t dare undermine the professional scene that sprung up around the first StarCraft.

So they siphoned all their thick, sticky innovation into the single-player for StarCraft 2, where they can stick with the old high-level rules but make more interesting missions out of them.

In fact, they got a bit carried away. I’m used to high-budget strategy games giving me a lot of special-case missions, but StarCraft 2 never stops. I spent half the game waiting for a “Make a base, go kill theirs” mission that never came. Literally every single one is a custom showcase for one particular unit, an unusual objective, a pre-built base, no base at all, or revolves around a new rule they have to teach you on the fly.

At the risk of sounding like a tiny child, I don’t like it. I like to make my own bases. I like to choose the units I like, rather than have a whole mission structured to force me to appreciate one the game wants me to use. And I don’t like new rules.

Scripting a mission around a unique scenario always involves a degree of Bullshit: Bullshit you couldn’t have seen coming, Bullshit you’re forced to do, Bullshit to stop you taking shortcuts or being clever. Blizzard are so good, so big, rich and talented, that they’re able to avoid almost all the Bullshit that scripting causes on one, maybe two missions. The rest of the time, I’m punished for doing my own thing so much that I eventually learn to just play the way the mission designer wants me to. Use the unit he tells me to. Click what he tells me to click. It works, but it’s basically a waste of my time.

The zombie-frying mission is the one I’m thinking of as an example of pretty much Bullshit-free scripting. It does dictate certain aspects of the way you play, but the New Rule is easy to grasp and has a certain intuitive logic to it. And you can build whatever works for you: any effective army is effective here. Accordingly, it’s fun.

The other one I liked was the optional mission where you play as a female Ghost, separated from but supporting a larger army. Plenty of Bullshit, but the way it turned existing RTS mechanics into puzzle logic was interesting, and the mind-control ability has so many great applications. I’ve heard the alternative mission, with Utter Tosh, is good too, but his abilities seemed less exciting to me and I didn’t get anywhere with it.

I’m also a fan of the research system between missions, and the ability to postpone some missions for ages. But both are pretty minor bonuses. Two good missions, among thirty, isn’t enough to make me want to sit through the embarrassing cutscenes.

Valve Steal Sixth James Weapon Idea, Sell It

You can now buy stuff for real money in Team Fortress 2. First thoughts:

• The world has ended. No further world can be built.
• Oh wait, you can still get everything for free.
• This is fine, so long as they don’t make the free route slower.
• Hey, they made the free route slower!
• Man, now they won’t even want to make a drop system that doesn’t suck – one that lets me work towards what I want, or ever gives me a hat.
• I’m glad crafting the new stuff is pretty easy, though.
• Wait a minute: finding a load of stuff I don’t want, plus easy crafting and trading, wavy-equals working towards what I want?
• Yes – very, very slowly, and with no hope of getting a hat.

So it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been. But I think it’s been mishandled: if the point really is to channel money to community contributors, only sell community items. Add your own when players demand it. And if you don’t want to make non-purchasers feel left out, launch with a few Valve-made weapons unlockable with achievements, and make them the focus.

Because that’s how I feel, as someone who doesn’t want to burn through a lot of cash on this. TF2 isn’t a game for me anymore – the only people who get to play it all are the ones prepared to pay. It’s nice that there’s a lot to unlock, but in practise, even the much lower crafting requirements are way too high for someone like me. It takes seven items I don’t want to make one that I do, and that’s more than I find in a month.

Even after months of play, I won’t have the +25 health that Scouts who pay do. The chances of finding all the items required for a set bonus, particularly the hat, are negligible.

I do really like the Black Box, though – a vampiric rocket launcher with a smaller clip. It limits your aggressive capacity, but suits the calculating way I play Soldier: safe distance, medkit near, Equaliser ready, Buff Banner steadily charging.

The item that’s closest to one of my suggestions, the knife that rapidly steals your victim’s identity, is a total bust. The ability itself is a satisfyingly stylish flourish, but they’ve paired it with a wildly disproportionate drawback: the inability to disguise at will.

That’s such a massive, constant pain in the arse for an advantage that’s really only useful when facing exactly two people, both of whom are looking the wrong way, and even then only if the second of them looks round less than a second but more than half a second after your kill. And doesn’t spy check.

They should have actually stolen my idea, rather than independently coming up with their own that has just enough in common for me to make false accusations about it on my blog. My knife had some trivial drawback that would rarely hinder anyone – it’d sell even better.

Postcards From A Weekend Of Premeditated Murder

A slightly tense week inspired me to go back to Hitman: Blood Money last weekend. It is cathartic.

Well, yes, now it’s obvious where the killer was standing.

This is the climax of a spectacularly machiavellian plot to replace an actor’s prop pistol with a real one to trick him into performing your hit for you at the crescendo of a wartime opera.

I’ll save you the trouble – yes, there’s a bomb in that.

I don’t know why, but as I trash-compacted this sanitation worker, it really bothered me that I was depriving society of the valuable service he provides.

If you’re in witness protection, don’t let them put you in a house with a wall like this.

In case someone hides there and throws a kitchen knife into your head like this.

In retrospect, yes, it was always going to be difficult to get away with killing that bird in front of this cop.

I still don’t know how they did this goddamn crowd scene. How- polygons- what?

This is as tragicomic as it is hilarisad.

I am especially unclear on where I keep my pistols in this outfit.

Still feels good.

What? Too slutty?

Yes, I have done this more than once.

What’s the matter asshole, never seen a poisoncake before?

NO POISON FOR YOU.