Philosophy: Iconic Gameplay

Tue Jul 05, 2005 11:25 pm by Argh

This is a philosophical topic, not a nuts-and-bolts exploration of means. Please bear that in mind. And don't flame me if you disagree- this is a philosophical topic, and I don't claim that my viewpoint is "best". Game design is not about "best"- it's about "best for my audience"

Basically, I've been thinking, for some time, about various people's attraction to issues of scale in a game like FL. After putting some thought into this topic, here's where I sit on this particular fence.

While making star systems "to scale" is a fairly attractive idea, simply because the Freelancer game engine allows designers to make content that's quite large, I am actively exploring the idea that there are lots of worthwhile alternatives that might produce better gameplay. In short... bigger is not better.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but this assertion is based on my experiences with other mods that have deliberately made scalar issues into a much bigger deal than they were previously.

For example, many mods have removed Tradelanes entirely or in large parts, and at the same time increased the scale of the star systems they have players tooling around in.

This definately results in a much larger sense of scale, but is it good game design? My answer, based on my experience doing practical design and playtesting, is a resounding "no".

Why not? After all, it's a game in Outer Space... and Space, as the late great Carl Sagan liked telling us, is "really, really, really big".

The problem is... Freelancer, ultimately, is not really a game in Outer Space. It just looks like one. Really, Freelancer is an updated version of Autoduel (which, if you're curious, can be found here- emulator required).

For those of you too lazy to just go play a game with ancient graphics for awhile... Autoduel was the first "action RPG" that didn't suck. Basically, you built a character, and that character bought and sold cars, which you could attach various weapons and equipment upgrades to. You could take missions or fight in the Dueling Arena to increase your cash, which in turn allowed you to take harder missions, and so forth and so on. Sound familiar? Yup... well before Privateer, Autoduel (designed by Lord British, no less) showed how this kind've "do it yourself" gameplay might be a lot of fun

Autoduel had a very interesting viewpoint on scale, which I really haven't seen done in a game since then. Basically, to do missions (which mainly consisted of FedEx quests and extermination runs) you drove a fairly lengthy "route" through large swaths of terrain (ok, so we're talking really primitive sprites that looked vaguely like cacti, houses and so forth, but still, they were terrain- running into them stopped your car and did damage)... but when you got to a city, it was very iconic. You "drove" your car or walked your little human stick-figure to a building, which opened up a primitive graphical menu and allowed you to do various things, like upgrade your car, buy new cars, visit a bar to get Missions (sounding familiar again?) and so forth.

At any rate... Freelancer has most of these elements. It's really just Autoduel with laser guns and "spacecraft" which only vaguely act like realistic spacecraft.

After awhile, Autoduel's sense of distance got really, really old. Just like flying from System to System does in FL. Having had to play the SP storyline all the way through more than most people (I have to play it over and over again while playtesting the Toolkit Mod, amongst other reasons, and I don't skip any of it, since the mod affects game-balance in all sorts of ways) I have come to the conclusion that an ideal mod for the Freelancer game engine is probably a lot smaller than the FL universe as originally designed. We could still have "solar systems", but they'd be (very deliberately) much smaller, and they'd all technically be in the same System. Hopping from planet to planet would take less time than it now takes with Tradelanes, and the planets would be smaller in scale, along with everything else.

Why do this? In a word: multiplayer. MP Freelancer has always flourished, but let's face the facts: for the most part, it's been difficult to get a lot of genuine player interaction, aside from newbies in NY and the occasional clan war. And many mods have made the isolation of individual players from one another worse, not better, by making huge, sprawling collections of Systems and increasing Cruise Speed to the point where players only meet "by agreement", instead of by design. I think this is bad game design, and I'd like to explore alternatives.

If anybody would like to explore this further or talk about coding challenges this may present, please feel free to add to this thread. I've been thinking about this topic ever since I built Warriors of the Sky, and I'm convinced that I'm onto something here

Wed Jul 06, 2005 12:20 am by Alcander

Actually, you're right on the money Argh. Read any book on good game design and they will share similar conclusions, not as theory but as fact cited in the failure and success of various games. Destroying that sense of isolationism is especially important in multiplayer games and persistent universes. Players need focal points of interaction, such as tradelanes, designed to guide you to a specific destination. They <need> direction and linear guidance. Now they can choose NOT to pursue that path - to travel on cruise and take the scenic route instead say - but the option needs to be available in the first place.

But as you said many mods have removed tradelanes in favor of cruise which can be adjusted, giving players free roam and while this is fun for a while, severely cripples the community in a server.

Simply look at IONCROSS's Total War. Whist it has only four main systems it has a consistent number of active players who thoroughly enjoy it. The four systems intentionally draw players together and that was the point. Player interaction is far more important in a persistent universe than how big or pretty a system is or how many planets it has.

As far as addressing this issue, I think that one of the main problem's is some of the specific limitations in modabiltiy for certain areas of the Freelancer engine, such as how tradelane speed cannot be altered (though it can be and I'm trying to make it easy to do..), so modders simply remove them in favor of what can be altered - like cruise speed. But even beyond that, the main issue is that modders need to find ways to provide focal points of interaction:

-an encounter zone in New York where newbs can group together and take out spawns of X ships to get good with Y faction so they can buy Z weapons.
-make players want to trade. provide more loot, and uber items so players have incentive to meet players - to trade their uber level 8 turret weapon their ship can't even mount, for that uber level 8 missile launcher for your fighter.
-creative marketing. relating to above - make it so X faction makes really good thrusters and Y faction makes really good turret guns and Z faction makes the best missile launchers, so players have to trade and bargain or fight to the death to get something from a faction they aren't very friendly with.

I could go on and on. But it's late and I need to go to bed. I hope this thread provokes some more thoughtful discussion.

Wed Jul 06, 2005 1:05 am by Argh

@Alcander:

There's a limitation that you might be able to address, come to think of it. FL has a hardcoded limit of 255 items in a System. Patrol Paths, Encounter Zones, etc., don't seem to count towards this limit, but Solars of any kind do. I dunno whether that can be fixed without a lot've pain and suffering, though- that's probably a stack or heap size issue and database problem all rolled into one.

At any rate... when Warriors of the Sky, Beta One was on Bobway's Mod Server (Bobway graciously offered to host it because he liked the alphas), players were frank about not liking the huge distances between areas (it was "sort've kind've to scale-ish"

. It wasn't that the mod wasn't fun mind you... it was that players could literally be 20 minutes + away from one another, and hardly anybody interacted, except around the starting cities.

Ever since that playtesting experience, I've decided to look at this a lot more. Players really do seem to want a game universe where they actually (gasp) get to shoot at each other more than "every once in a blue moon", and they also really dig cooperative gameplay- something that I found with WOS, where some of the most awesome, knuckle-biting moments came on escort missions where I was guarding another player's cargo ship from AI bad guys

Wed Jul 06, 2005 6:49 am by w0dk4

you're absolutely right guys, thats why I got the idea of a freelancer deathmatch server with multiple mods (mapchange every hour or so - to prevent boredom) a couple of weeks ago ^^

Wed Jul 06, 2005 7:54 am by Cold_Void

scaling ships down would have some interesting effects....5000 meter scan-range limitations would become 50000 meters,or 50 km,in scale.a gun with a 700 meter range would have 7k range(which sounds realistic for space...but how to hit something that far away with a gun..i don't know).also,speed is relative to size correct?that would make a normal 300 meters per second into 3000 mps(relative to hull size)right?LOD problems with big ships disappearing before they're tiny?should fix that too i think....and I've always wanted much bigger asteroids...this sure would save a lot of rock resizing

..the more i think about it the more I think its the ships not the planets that aren't scaled properly..i wonder what it would do to the AI O_o

i think basically it would work like this,engines would have to be scaled back as well as thrusters,to keep combat balanced between guns and missiles,'cruise' would actually become a warp drive,tradelanes could be bumped up from whatever their new x10 speed is to an absolutely Ludicrous speed,entering atmosphere would actually feel like you were surrounded by it instead of grazing it, capital ships would become menacing planetoids,asteroid fields would be huge expanses of storage-depot size rocks,filled with dangerous dynamic asteroids(did i mention collision damage needs fixing,badly?),gas pockets and perhaps some minefields would become effective only on caps as its quite obvious the only way you can get gas pockets in space is some sort of micro gravity,which ain't happening in a pocket no bigger than 15X15m(my estimate of their current size).
of course we'd need new scaled effects(arrr,where's my ALE editor

)

btw...straight tradelanes are boring(and look ugly on a solar system map),and a lot of time(for players) could be saved by making them curve(in places).yes it works,no it don't lag,and dam its fun building them that way

Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:04 am by Louva-Deus

I thought about this over a year ago but at the time it wasn't feasible. Now we have resources like FLModelTool, new Milkshape plugins, and soon a way to easily modify ALE effects. The only solution to achieve the effect was to make everything else bigger and slow down transit from point to point.

A more recent idea of mine was to have micro systems where only a single planet dominated the system (more realistic scaling) and you had the option of 'docking' with several 'cities' on the planet but it really sent you to a new system that represented the surface of the planet (WOS style) and whatever city you docked with.

An addition to that being that in the city you have buildings that you can dock with that serve only one function, example, you dock with a weapons dealer and the only thing on that base is a weapons seller. You can even have many of each type of building in any particular city and this could also be used as a sort of RPG layer. Players buy a shop and build their own weapons or equipment to sell (the price would match the capabilities of what is being sold so super items cost insane amounts of money).

If you really wanted to go the mile you could allow clans to buy cities and purchase structures to populate them through a credits system similar to Asylum 51, your clan has to haul enough materials in trade, etc.

The more elaborate you go with the idea you have to check even more to see if this is possible without requiring player wipes with every new feature. You would also want to set guidelines for player designed equipment so that original items in the mod stay competitive.

This also gives you a chance to make a fundamental change in how equipment is set up, create formulas for it so each item has 4 or 5 attributes that players can modify (through a script form (php?) perhaps) to make it all easy.

Anyway enough from me for now.

Wed Jul 06, 2005 12:21 pm by Alcander

@Louva-Deus

Yes, specialization like that is exactly what's needed. The more specialization of functions, the more challenging and interesting gameplay becomes. If a player docks at one of 3 ports on a planet he might find a really good deal at one weapons dealer but an even better one at some "black market" ship dealer in hostile territory in the planet, or he could just leave both weapons dealers and go to the different shipdealers and shop around, if hes dissatisifed he can undock from the planet and go to another port and start all over again. The more choices you provide players, the funner it is. But of course, I'm just preaching to the choir.

Wed Jul 06, 2005 12:45 pm by Louva-Deus

Yes well we're all still waiting for you to finish your ALE documentation

Wed Jul 06, 2005 12:52 pm by Cold_Void

I've been trying to spark some interest around here in RSS 2.0 and its media enclosures but i guess nobody around here uses ipods or podcasts.Basically,the software and protocols for doing everything we want are already there,we just need a less cumbersome(ie custom made for FL)aggregator and publishing program.btw many of the podcasting apps are in php already(and it seems all open source,try searching sourceforge...there's a nightmarish amount of these programs,which is a testimony to how easy they are to code i would guess

),this would make it easy to submit new equipments and updated INI entries and even easier(automatic in fact)to download them.now if FLMM had a command line for installing a single INI that's been updated in the mods folder,we would really be somewhere(I for one do not like the idea of a constantly updating mod that swells to 50 meg & takes 5 minutes to update a 2kb file)

even better if it could open your registry and mod your server-passwords after every update so nobody w/o updates could connect and cause crashes.

Wed Jul 06, 2005 1:04 pm by Alcander

@Louva-Deus

Ha-ha.

I'm working on it ;P.

Edited by - Alcander on 7/6/2005 2:04:41 PM

Wed Jul 06, 2005 3:54 pm by Sandman12

as i am a newbie to the mod world this thread is fascinating. some of the best games i have played have been small in scope yet they were great in multiplayer. i like the idea of being able to do more than just blow up ships and run freight. i also am a fan of einstien and always felt that rather than tradelanes you should have "worm holes" instead. this would increase the speed of travel and lend more to the realism of the event. I believe this is more critical to a game than the vastness of the world you play in. If you have ever played battleship millinium you now what i mean. i think you folks do good work and enhance the game. keep up the good work!

Wed Jul 06, 2005 3:56 pm by Mace_166

I agree with what you have said mostly. I'm not a big multiplayer fan, mostly because vanilla FL is so damn easy it only takes me an evening to get to "the point", where i have nowhere to go and nothing else to buy.
I think there room for two styles of freelancer, either a game that is compact and is based on a smaller area with the focus in it being multiplayer based and aiming to keep everybody closer together. Or, like the mod i'm working on, make the game very large and have it based more towards SP exploration. One of my favourite games ever is Frontier (an open ended do whatcha like game made by David Braben), in it there is more systems and possibilities than you couls ever go to. Quite literally, there is the entire galaxy several thousand systems each with planets, asteroids.. etc.
The way that the game was created relied upon a generic structure, where there are set planet types, random pirates (with some density type values) and the whole game is actuallly very tiny programming wise.
The point i'm eventually going to make is that there is room for a generic version of freelancer with many possibities. As long as the time is taken to make the system look and feel as unique as possible and to give the player a reason to want to explore in the first place.

I like the idea about the plant-micro system, could they be done generic too? So you could have say 5 typical populated worlds, 5 manufacture worlds, 5 terraforming worlds..

Wed Jul 06, 2005 9:11 pm by Louva-Deus

You can do anything if you know how.

One problem with Freelancer and it's mods is that for the most part there isn't a real reason to go to most places. Even though there is the issue of people rarely seeing each other there is also an issue of everyone hanging out in a few places. To make things interesting there must be something unique to every location.

There is also the issue of alignment. Few mods really play into faction alignments to any degree that matters. Each faction must be unique to a certain area and also have unique properties that make them different from all others. It's a simple principle found in RPG games.

Ultimately pretty much everyone gets bored of any mod after a few weeks. That is the reason why the RP communities have been dominating the field so to speak. Now the question is how much innovation do we have to take this game to the next level?

Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:58 pm by falcon 2

Thanks for starting this thread Argh.

Catalyst for some good ideas.

I now have a mini-system with one planet that has two 'cities' (bases) on it!

I'll probably add a few more.

The system is 49k across horizontally and 64k diagonally.

The planet takes up one whole square!

I can make it smaller but.....

Anyway, thanks again for helping to "make my day".

Wed Jul 06, 2005 11:48 pm by Argh

Actually, I'm thinking something even smaller in scale. Maybe have whole "systems" that are 10-15K across. I had a similar scale for the "island groups" in WOS B2, and that worked quite well- I just seperated the "island groups" by enough distance to make traveling from one to another a bit of a trip, but not overly onerous. You can make Encounter zones that are quite small- this isn't a problem.

The only benefits to long trip times is that then you can make trade more of an economic factor. But even there you can play around with things. It's easy enough to change the values of traded items and the percentage of greater value recieved if you take Item X from Point A to Point B, so that people won't get rich trading for an hour or less.

In the end, the objective is to have players encounter one another often, and to have common areas where they'll end up being a lot more of the time. Then things like Roleplay are actually meaningful because they're tied to shared human experiences, instead of being saga-like heroic retellings of one's battle with the computer. Stock FL's MP is not well designed in this regard- players only interact by choice, which doesn't leave a lot've room for genuine spontanious happenings.

When I get done releasing the "pretty planets" materials, I'll take a look at building a tech demo of these concepts.

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