TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Ten Things I Wish I’d Known About Borderlands

The stuff you can buy at the shop is sometimes too high level for you to use.
There is actually a minimum level bar, and it turns red to warn you of this, but a) it’s tiny and b) the whole weapons shop interface is also red. Any time you’re getting excited about something’s stats, just make sure you check for this before you spend your life savings. Often it’s still worth buying: I bought a level 23 shield at level 21 because it could take 560 points of damage – at level 36, I’d still never seen anything that good again.

The quoted damage for weapons with elemental effects is misleading.
That’s the base, conventional damage – the elemental damage is added to that. Precisely how much it adds varies, but I’ve found a 110 damage revolver with explosive shots significantly more effective than a 150 damage one without.

Repeater Pistols aren’t worth it.
They’re sort of like weaker sub-machineguns with smaller clips, but worse than that, they make the most appallingly puny sounds. Almost every other weapon type sounds and feels good in your virtual hands, repeater pistols really don’t. I suggest avoiding them entirely.

Grenade mods of the same type can do different amounts of damage.
I didn’t notice this for ages – I took ‘explosive sticky’ and never wanted to change types, so never switched for any of the others I found. I’d been selling a bunch of Explosive Stickies that would have quadrupled my damage.

Don’t join a game with a much higher level player than you.
Unless something’s changed since the code I played, you inherit all of their quests automatically, and you can’t get rid fo them. This makes your quest log an unmanagable mess of irrelevant text, and can sometimes cause you to stumble into impossibly difficult enemies.

There are two types of combat rifles.
One fires in three-round bursts, the other puts out a steady stream of bullets. I can’t see an easy way to tell between them on paper, except that three-round burst rifles tend to have small clip sizes that are a multiple of three (some of them actually are three), whereas steady stream ones have larger clips that are multiples of five.

Inventory expansions and elemental artifacts just get dumped in your inventory.
You have to actually click on them there to get the benefit.

It’s really cheap to completely re-spec your character.
At level 25 it cost me about $5,000, which is the kind of chump change you’re making on single trash loot sales by that point. So don’t sweat too much about the path not taken when levelling up. You can get a full refund at any time, try out a different branch, and even switch back for the same price if you don’t like it.

Class mods only boost skills you already have.
If you don’t have any points in Girl Power, +3 Girl Power on a class mod does nothing. If you have 5 points in Girl Power, though, +3 will actually take you past that maximum and up to 8.

Once you kill someone called Flynt, you can pretty much stop playing.
Unless you want to play through the game again with your levelled-up character, which you can do after completion, it’s not worth playing past that point. It becomes a thoughtless corridor shooter leading to a completely irrelevant boss fight with dismal rewards and no plot closure.

This guy. This guy here.

Ten Minutes To Go

We’re all in the office right now, having got up stupidly early, and there’s almost exactly ten minutes to go before the Orange Box attempts to unlock. I think I just about have time to make coffee.

Team Fortress 2: Classless Update Night

The new TF2 update is a bigger deal than expected: today Valve suddenly announced a huge list of balance changes and fun new touches, and also that the update was, like, out. We played around with it tonight, and the highlight by far is the new set of animations for the losing team running around after the match is won. At one point I broke into the enemy supply room and found a Scout, on his knees, just sobbing.

The new mode, King of the Hill, is excellent – exactly what I wanted Arena to turn into. One cap point, quick rounds, normal respawning. More than half the matches I’ve played, both on Nucleus and the snowy new map, Viaduct, have been preposterously close. The control point sometimes changes hands two or three times after both teams’ countdowns are at zero, just because it keeps getting retaken during overtime. This, or some other glitch, is causing the histrionic announcer to declare “Overtime! OVER time! OVERTIME! Oooover time!” frantically for the duration.

Oh, and I got my Shafted achievement for the Sniper – the one for killing someone with the taunt animation for the Huntsman bow. I’d cleverly fooled myself into thinking I already had it, because I have a screenshot of me stabbing a Medic through the neck with an arrow, but of course that was during the humiliation stage so it doesn’t count. Usually my quests for the taunt kills are more epic, but the Spy’s I got while cloaked – killing an Engy while his dispenser kept me invisible – and this one was just a spur of the moment decision. Terrifying nevertheless: sacrificing that gleeful certainty of killing someone who hasn’t seen you for the ridiculous risk of making yourself vulnerable, deep in enemy ranks, to achieve the same result in a more flamboyant way. Sorry VokKz.

More scenes from update night:

Also, holy shit, I’ve been nominated for another Games Media Award. I don’t have to nag you to vote for me this time, since it’s not a public vote anymore: this year it’s decided by a ‘panel’ of a hundred odd industry judges. Evidentally one or more of this mysterious cabal nominated me, and Graham, and PC Gamer, so if you’re reading this: holy shit, thanks!

If only I knew someone on this panel so I could show them an unrepresentative selection of my work and beg for their vote. Not whoring myself is weird, I don’t feel seedy enough.

Oh, that was the other thing, I’ve been made a Games Media Award judge. Anyone want to trade votes?

Ah, that’s better.

Team Fortress 2, Episode Two And Portal

The team must have been working on this for a long time, they’ve kept it very secret, and they must have been nervous as hell about whether people would go for a cartoon look to a class-based tactical shooter. They must now be beaming, because virtually everyone seems to love it. The only whispers of dissent I’ve heard are people who love it saying “I don’t know why anyone has a problem with it, TF1 was never realistic.” I was a sceptic before they released this shot, but I see now that it is wonderful. I love their slim chunkiness, their sharp curves, even shading, their characterful but not charicatured expressions. And how cool the Spy:

I still don’t quite understand why they’re giving it to us free with Episode Two, along with Portal – a fantastic-sounding Source-engine successor to indie gem Narbacular Drop (the best game name since Grim Fandango). My best theory so far is that it’s just to generate good will toward episodic gaming and Steam, and partially to ensure a large user-base for TF2. Maybe they were hedging their bets against the cartoon look putting people off, and ensuring that people would end up owning it whether they liked it or not. Of course, they did a similar thing with Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source. We’ll never know exactly how well that did, because they won’t release Steam sales figures, but I have to assume it exceeded what they would have expected for Half-Life 2 alone. Otherwise they wouldn’t be repeating the formula with TF2 and Episode 2.

Forgetting analysis, the ripe bunch of gaming fruit that your slim twenty-dollar bill is going to bag you now looks utterly irresistable. A hefty and exotic chunk of the most finely crafted single-player game ever created; a bold reimagining of one of the all-time greatest multiplayer games using a graphical style never seen in a game before; and a completely fresh and mind-fryingly inventive experimental game, put through the mighty Valve polishing machine. Maybe that’s the point – just to put together something wonderful and profoundly worth the money to everyone. Sometimes if I feel I’ve done something well, I spend an extra half an hour to make it extraordinary, just to see how someone reacts. To hear CEO Gabe Newell talk, the faceless collective grin of an impressed gaming public – expressed through poorly spelt forum posts – is what he lives and breathes for.

Team Fortress 2 Updates In Perspective

There’s only one class left for Valve to update in Team Fortress 2, the Engineer. One by one, Valve have given each of the other eight characters a set of alternative weapons, and with each release there’s been a batch of new maps, game modes and features to play with. The amount of free stuff we’ve had since I wrote up the first details of the unlocks system at the start of 2008 is obscene.

When the inventory system went down briefly before the latest update, we were temporarily stuck with TF2 much as it was in 2007. The feeling was, “Where did the game go?” Compare that to something like Halo 3, released around the same time, which has functionally barely changed and charged a total of £20 ($30) for its new maps.

One thing that hasn’t changed since that article (funny to read in light of how much has) is the spirit of the updates, framed there: “The unlockables aren’t just beefed up versions of the weapons, they balance major advantages and disadvantages to fundamentally alter the role of that class.” While Steam forumites have turned that ethos into an imperative law to be screechingly enforced by the limp fist of internet tantrums, the gist is basically universal: the unlocks are supposed to change the way the class plays in a meaningful way. How successful have they been?

Medic (April 08): decent – the Kritzkrieg is a nice idea but badly needed the large charge-rate boost it later got. The Ubersaw set the standard for awesome new melee weapon ideas with negligible drawbacks that would continue to enrage weird forumites for twenty more months without ever actually making the game less fun.

Pyro (June 08): great – the Backburner turns the Pyro into the ambush class he was always meant to be, but they also added the airblast ability to the standard flamethrower to make the trade-off more interesting. To this day there are two distinct breeds of Pyro playing properly different roles. Also, the Axtinguisher is the second best idea Valve ever stole from me (and somehow implimented in 19 days).

Heavy (August 08): weak – the Heavy was one of the least played classes at the time, today he’s dead last. It’s not because he’s underpowered; he’s the second highest scoring class and the most deadly by a head. It’s just a very rocky experience getting those kills, because everyone seems to have an easy way of doing something horrible to you, and you don’t seem to have a way of avoiding any of it. He needed unlocks that would give him some flexibility, some get-outs or workarounds. Instead he got a gun that’s good against Scouts (rarely a problem in my experience), the admittedly neat Sandvich and some fun but impractical gloves. Needs a revisit.

Scout (Feb 09): mixed – the Force-A-Nature and Sandman get changed, patched and bitched about so much that I have to assume they haven’t been totally successful yet, but I can’t get a handle on them myself. People can do things with the Force that I don’t even understand – suck me towards them or one-shot me – and yet it’s utterly useless in my hands. Bonk tackles the main problem with the class, survivability against Sentries, but it’s still not useful enough that I ever want to play the class once turrets crop up.

Sniper (May 09): superb – the Huntsman transformed him from a stay-at-home trouncing twat to a roaming predator, powerful but vulnerable. Its viability at medium and near range leads to so many breathsnatching life-or-death snap shot moments against guys who’d kill him in a second if they didn’t have an arrow in their face. Jarate lets him help friends take care of threats he’s not suited to, or just insult his killer before an inevitable death. I don’t really see the point of the Razorback in a world where Spies can headshot, but whatever.

Spy (May 09): superb – the Dead Ringer creates an Action Spy subclass the likes of which we’ve never seen, and the Cloak and Dagger lets him be the methodical, oppourtunistic infiltrator his abilities always hinted at. Some clever thought about which kind of cloaks should recharge from ammo makes the choice a tough one, and better still, situational. Now that people have cottoned onto it the Dead Ringer noise is a little too loud – it might be fun if he masked it by calling out a random line of the class he’s dressed as: suspicious, but not conclusive. The Ambassador is effective but, if you ask me, too much of an overlap with the Sniper and pretty horrible-sounding.

Soldier (Dec 09): great – the Direct Hit finally makes rocket combat feel like a mindgame rather than a spamgame, and the Equaliser is way better than my idea: it’s the speed increase at low health that really makes it. It’s the one weapon I love to hear people complain about, because having been that Soldier who one-shotted them, I know how terrifyingly close to death he was. Bugle: indifferent.

Demoman (Dec 09): good – the sword and shield don’t make a new subclass of Demoman, they make the tenth class. His massive resilience to explosions demands proper restrategising, and I love the way the Heads mechanic makes him one of the few classes with something to lose. The more lives you take, the faster and tougher you are, so the more you want to preserve your advantage and therefore life. Charging is hilarious. I do think the sound and feel of melee combat in TF2 isn’t quite up to doing a big sword justice, though: it feels wrong for its blows to be met with a quiet crunch, for its swings to connect in much the same way as a bottle’s, and to be able to whack a Pyro three times without killing him. I also think it’s a crime not to have provided a Grenade Launcher alternative: is sucks for all the reasons regular grenades suck.

It’s an excellent track record. The mis-steps haven’t made those classes worse, just failed to improve them – a failure that’s default in other games. The way these unlocks are earned has also changed, but strangely. For the sake of the scrollbar, I’ll save what’s wrong with that and how to fix it for another post.

Team Fortress 2 Update Reactions

This just went live, and makes me happy in several ways.

• Added an option in the Options->Multiplayer dialog to filter custom game files being downloaded from servers

Ahhhh.

• Fixed cases where ragdolls were falling through the world

Ahhhh!

• Graphics optimizations for mid and low end hardware

Ooh.

• Fixed players blocking doors in Well

Heh.

• Fixed engineer building in exploit areas on final caps in Well

Oh?

• Increased starting round timer to 10 minutes in Well

Hmm.

But my favourite Steam Update News – and I apologise if you’d hoped I might do something like a ‘Films of the Year’ post instead of this – was actually a little while ago.

• Added effects to players when they earn an achievement, visible to other players nearby

Cool. But isn’t there an achievement for tricking an enemy Medic into healing you while you’re disguised? Would this not give the game away somewhat?

A few days later:

• Fixed cloaked/disguised/disguising spy reporting his achievements to everyone else

Reason Valve should hire me #26: totally saw that one coming.

Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Weapon Ideas

Update: This post was written in May 2008, when only the Medic had new weapons. Since then, some weapons have been added that have similar concepts to these. Valve even gave me a special sparkly Equalizer (similar to the Last Ditch Digger here) and a lovely shoutout in the Solider update.

Obviously we’ve all thought about this a bit at one point or another. I thought the most interesting way of doing it would be to think up just one alternative to every weapon, device and ability in the game. Then I realised there are 29 of them, and did it anyway. I hadn’t originally planned on illustrating them – for reasons I hope will be obvious once you see my illustrations – that just kind of happened. Sorry. Continued

Team Fortress 2 Goes To The Rockies

So the new game mode is a sudden-death single-control point mini-match, suited to fewer players. More like suited to no players! Because of how it might suck! Lol!

Seriously, though, I’m guessing the presence of a single control point negates what does suck about Sudden Death: the tendency for both teams to hole up at their base and wait until stalemate is announced. If you turtle up at the point, you can cap it and win rather than waiting for the enemy to come to you. If you turtle up before the point, the enemy can cap it and win rather than coming to you. I’m optimistic.

A delicious new environment for the chaps and Pyro! It’s quite, quite lovely – in some ways, even more stylised than the canyon motif we’ve been stuck with until now. The backdrop in this shot is just a few colours:

I’m a big fan of game environments that can feel cold without just blanketing the whole place in unconvincing snow. This definitely qualifies – can’t you just smell how brisk and bracing that mountain air is?

That set of tips from the SomethingAwful testers has now been proven so right that it’s had to be deleted from the Steam forums. In Arena’s case, knowing the broad picture wasn’t very helpful: the details that there’s a single control point, and it can have any number of players, completely change the prospect to a rather exciting one.

But if you still doubt that the last Heavy unlock will be a health-restoring munchable named the Sandvich that replaces the Shotgun, you are now officially delusional.

Team Fortress 2 Badlands Exploit Patched

“Fixed Badlands exploits.” Ha! There go all your kills, exploit-o-jerks! “Fixed a case where a spy stabbing from the front of a player would score a backstab.” Aw. There go all my kills.

Teaching Heat Signature’s Ship Generator To Think In Sectors

I haven’t talked about the way I randomly generate spaceships in Heat Signature since this post – before it even had actual art. That’s partly because I’ve barely touched it since then. I showed the game to developer friends and the press in LA and SF a few weeks ago, and got lots of great input and ideas, but the main thing I came away thinking was: the on-board game needs to be more interesting. And I think better ship interiors are the foundation of that. Continued

Talk To Me, Be Talked At By Me, And Play Gunpoint At GDC

I’m giving a talk at GDC! It’s part of the Indie Soapbox Session at 16.30 on Tuesday, in Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Floor. Ten of us will give five minute talks, and mine is called: Continued

Taking The World With Tourism, A Civilization V Story

I just finished my first game of Civilization V with the Brave New World add on, which is focused on culture and stuff. Here’s how it went. Continued

Tactical Breach Wizards Is Out!

Hi! Here’s the game we’ve been working on for 6.8 years!

You can see the launch trailer and all the details on the store page, but for some reason what I feel like sharing here is the very quickly knocked together trailer I made for the developer commentary, which comes with the Special Edition of the game. It just feels like the sort of thing long time blog followers might jibe with.

Oh, and I’m really proud of these quotes, so I’ll put them here for posterity!

System Failure

Preface: I need to get this one out of my Drafts folder before I resume the positivity. I wrote it a while ago, at my parents’ place, in such a fury that I barely remember typing a word of it. To break up its somewhat critical tone, I have inserted some of my Eve Online screenshots. Here goes:

My Gran knows a lot about wood-working. She likes wood, she likes working with wood, and she likes things made of wood. My friend Steve knows a lot about bikes. He likes riding bikes, he likes tinkering with them, and he even seems to like trying to explain to an idiot like me which one I should buy.

I know a lot about computers. I hate computers.

I’m part of one of the first generations to grow up with them – we’ve had at least one in the house as far back as I have memories, and I’ve had my own from secondary school onwards. So I’ve sort of hacked away at the most maddening idiocies that would normally get in the way of the things I use them for, but I still don’t think a forty-eight hour period has gone by without one of them making me swear, and I’m extremely difficult to anger.

The problem is that they don’t occur naturally, they have to be built. And they have to be built by people who are very intelligent in precisely the way that typically only people who are hopeless at understanding people are. Then they have to be used by people.

It’s incredible that there’s even such a topic as ‘usability’, laughable that it’s a relatively new one, and embarrassing that we haven’t actually done anything in it yet. Things like iPods are still seen as examples of it, which makes this era a lot like the one when fire was considered technology.

Linked computers are the single most important non-medical advancement mankind has made since the wheel, which I’m increasingly of the opinion was a mistake (except perhaps for bikes, which have broadly seen a net benefit), and we haven’t got round to figuring out how to make them usable yet? Usable. As in, so peope can use them. What have we been doing?

\i tend to notice what’s most heinousy wrong with computers when \i have to use someone ese’s to show them how to do something. \the pacement, for exampe, of the forwards sash key on a \toshiba \sateite \pro\; precisey where the shift key is on every other computer in the word. \or the fact that the ” key barey works on this particuar machine.

I was trying to make BBC website’s radio work on my mum’s, this, laptop. I fixed the first problem in three seconds – the volume was set to zero – but it’s four hours later now and I still haven’t actually managed the broader task.

And it’s worth saying that no-one ever tells you those concentric ellipses next to the clock represent a speaker rather than the Death Star (which they much more closely resemble) and that they summon no, not the speaker volume (that would almost make sense (spit!)) but the Windows volume, which is a range of meta-volume sliders that govern and multiply with all other volume settings, of which there can be up to five nested levels at any given time, sometimes in geometric and other times exponential proportion, and that they produce two different interfaces for these meta-volume sliders depending on whether they were single- or double-clicked, meaning that attempting to activate the double (which appears in a conventional window format) frequently creates an instance of the mini-interface triggered by the single (which manifests itself in a narrow, windowless overlay that steals focus but is not recognised by the operating system or Start Bar as an application, and presents the user with no obvious way of dismissing it, and which frequently encounters an unhandled exception that means it can’t be dismissed), sometimes followed by a second instance, sometimes moving to follow the cursor as it clicks again, sometimes actually blocking the second click, and jumping the volume to zero in doing so – quite often (and in this case) the very misconfiguration you are attempting to reverse.

When I said that was worth saying, of course, I had imagined I would be able to do so in fewer than a thousand words and four-hundred overlapping nested clauses.

Clicking the Listen Now link from the homepage of a BBC programme launches a new window which immediately notes that you do not have the RealPlayer plugin installed, which I took to be a compliment – the Windows equivalent of saying “Oh, you’ve lost weight!” or “So you finally realised puffer jackets weren’t even cool seventeen years ago?”

Mostly, I admit, out of disbelief. RealPlayer went out of fashion on websites to the extent that fascism did in Germany, some time before puffer jackets outlived their fad. Five years before their invention.

But this was not my own computer, and I thought there would be no harm in installing a small plugin which I happen to hate. I committed the very fallacy that is responsible for the ridiculous state of all computer software today – I thought something would be ‘good enough for normal people’.

If I were King God of Earthtopia, supporting RealPlayer would be a criminal offense. The punishment for requiring it would be watching your children die. So discovering that my technical savvy wasn’t actually up to the task of installing it, I couldn’t entirely suppress a noise that cause my mum to immediately ask what was wrong.

“There’s a picture of the download link.”

A picture. The BBC whisk you to their Help page, which is really a FAQ, rather than pointing you to the plugin, and then when you finally find the question that relates to the problem they already know you’re having, it has no link to the piece of software you need. Instead, it offers you an installation guide, the first step of which is to install the software. To illustrate how you do this, they show you a picture of the download button that you will find four pages later, just after step – and please excuse the large font you have by now already seen coming – FOURTEEN.

The picture is not a link. It is a picture of a link. It is a picture of a link you must click to complete step one, but which you cannot click until you have skipped steps 1-13, at which point it takes you away from the guide entirely. Nevermind why, how, in all conscience, there can be a FOURTEEN step process to install what PC World Magazine rated number two in their worst 25 technology products in the history of human civilization, in order to listen to the fucking RADIO; something people have been doing since before the FIRST WORLD WAR.

No! Actually, do mind that. Mind exactly that. Mind it furiously, because putting up with this shit is exactly the reason we have to put up with this shit.

Here’s the reason this matters: if you’re responsible for a feature of a site which, over your site’s lifetime, causes five million visitors five minutes of frustration, you are responsible for a lifetime of pain. That’s not a figure of speech, I actually worked it out – that’s seventy years of torment. If I were in charge of a team making a website, I’d have the designers watch the user tests with their hands splayed out on a table, and every time someone so much as frowned, I’d smash one of their fingers with a claw hammer six times. There’s no maths behind that figure, that one just feels right.

I didn’t read it, I skipped to the download link for the thing I didn’t want, it downloaded, I ran it over Internet Explorer 7’s apoplectic objection to me running a file I deliberately downloaded (to be fair, on this occasion it had a point), and it ran the RealPlayer downloader. This is an application consisting of a single blank horizontal progress bar that never progresses, a pause button that doesn’t do anything, and a mysterious ‘down’ button that depresses slightly when clicked. By flatly and categorically not working even a little bit, without explanation, it proves itself far superior to the program it’s trying to download. A Real program that doesn’t do anything is a relief on the scale of a cancer that doesn’t do anything – the word is not ‘malfunctioning’, it’s ‘benign’.

It’s not good enough for ordinary people, because ordinary people is everyone. Developers assume, when so few people seem able to intuitively understand their products, that people are stupid. In response, they hide the advanced features in future versions, insert big, colourful images, constant pop-up windows that try to explain what’s happening, and extensive help files. And of course, even fewer people understand this newer version, because hiding complexity adds a whole new layer of complexity.

Since DOS, computers have been getting harder to use. If you use XP, the easiest way to work with it is to also install Google Desktop, and use its quicksearch function to just type in the name of the thing you want to open or run, and press enter. Even if you’re an ordinary person. My gran can type ‘calculator’ more quickly than she could locate and click on it in the Start Menu. I can type Firefox faster than I can click on its quicklaunch icon.

Writing the name of the thing you want is dramatically quicker, more logical and easier to do than stroking the narrow slats of a clickless location-sensitive nested lateral hierarchy of hundreds of wildly diverse items that are categorised not by function, not by type, not even by name, but alphabetically by the name of the company that published them – not even the one that made them.

A search box is the low-water mark against which all interfaces should be judged, because it’s a complete lack of interface. And yet so far, we’ve yet to come up with anything more efficient or self-explanatory. It’s actually quicker for me to find something on the internet by typing it into the Firefox address bar (which Googles it) than it is to get back to it again via my bookmarks.

Windows Vista makes an almost sane gesture by adding a search box, but again it’s a step back: slower, harder to get to, harder to select a result from and limited to certain folders. Right now the only people even breaking even on an interface front are Google, who don’t even make operating systems, just by adding in the crudest and most basic possible interface concept into the OS they know we all have to put up with. It’s only by comparison to the excruciating insanity of modern interface design that it seems like an actual achievement, and it’s virtually the only thing we’ve got that just about qualifies as usable. Everything else is a fucking disgrace.

SWAT 4: The Movie Script

OFFICER DOWN, OFFICER ANDAGENTLEMAN, OFFICER DIBBLE and HANK stand in a rain washed street, weapons at the ready. HANK plants a breaching charge on the back door to a building. OFFICER DOWN takes out a gun-shaped camera device. Continued