LVL Headed

So No More Heroes 2 is coming out. Personally, I’m elated.  That’s because I’m a fanboy.  However, in order to become a competent blogger, one must be able to sell one’s own opinion as hardline fact.  So let me just wax a few sentences of why grape is the best candy flavor.

I’ve played No More Heroes.  And I liked it.  The graphics were a little shoddy, the hit-boxes on the cars were way too large, the open-world style hub was completely unecessary, and some of the bad guys were a bit too predictable.  But I still like the game because of the attitude.

No More Heroes is a game that takes our culture of cool violence and strange chivalry, exagerates it, and turns it into a serious parody of itself.  It’s ultra-cool while pointing out how absurd everything cool is.  I mean, you play an assassin who has to do odd jobs like mowing lawns in order to afford your hobby of killing people.  The most mundane parts of our real lives are mixed with our game lives in which we spend most of our time mowing through baddies, not grass.  It’s fun to see that contrast inside the game world.

Suda 51 is said to be an auteur.  I think that’s kinda true.  In this young medium you don’t often see too much experimentation.  Most designers seem to be looking for formulas, for a “science” of game design, while it seems that Suda 51 wanted to play around with expression and experience a bit more than fun.  And so he succeeds with the two former but comes up a bit short with the latter.  Suda 51 is important because he’s making games more personal, giving them something to say, but he (like every other game maker) hasn’t quite gotten everything right yet.  The medium is young, but games like No More Heroes help to bring on adolescence.

I’m excited about No More Heroes 2.  I’m hoping that it won’t just be a retread of No More Heroes, as I want to see more new ideas coming from Grasshopper Manufacture.  At the same time, I’m also hoping that they pin down some of the problems of the earlier game.  In some areas they can definitely do better, but everything behind the game is strong.

At least, that’s what I can come up with to hold up my opinions.

The other day, just sitting around at work like I normally do (I’m employed now, didn’t you know?), I had a sudden vision of something so obvious that I couldn’t believe Nintendo hadn’t cashed in on it yet (like they have everything else).  It had come to me as my coworkers were discussing whether they should stick it out with World of Warcraft or hop the fence to Warhammer Online, where the grass is greener.  I have personally had a fairly dissapointing history with MMORPGs.  Warcraft had interested me just enough during it’s free trial period that I thought I could spend a few bucks a month just to keep at it, but then I learned that I had to buy the $50 game disc as well… even though I already had the entire game loaded on my hard disc and already had my credit card out for the monthly fee.  A little bit of money a month would have pulled me in, but that fifty dollar deposit was a big brick wall.

Anyways, back to the post as I originally had intended it.  Nintendo.  They’ve played around with the quasi-social gaming experience, bringing us casual games like Wii Sports and interesting experiments like Animal Crossing, but they haven’t really dove into the lucrative world of reaching into gamers’ pockets every month via a subscription model.  But it somewhat makes sense, as Nintendo doesn’t do a lot of “War,” and that seems to be a necessity for modern MMOs.

But wait!  There’s one property that would make perfect sense in a massive online environment!  One that Nintendo is already squeezing the life out of, and has enough popularity that it would immediately grab a demographic here-to untapped in the world of MMORPGs.  One with dueling and fights with wild beasts, and even ranking system.

My god… Pokemon would make a perfect MMO.

Think about it.  An entire world of free-roaming Pokemon to catch, train, battle, and trade.  A server-wide ranking system of wins and losses, creating a giant never-ending tournament.  Raids on dungeons not to collect epic loot, but rather epic Pokemon.  The RPG elements are there, they’d just have to be tweaked a bit.  And obviously there are a few off bits, but the game fits well in the mold.

Just like in the old Gameboy game, a player would start by picking out his or her first Pokemon.  This decision would choose their hometown, much like choosing your race sets your starting point in World of Warcraft.  Players could style their characters however they liked, not worrying about having to wear rediculous-looking armor later.  There’d be no armor, no weapons.  All of these things would be built into the Pokemon themselves.

Ah, and the classes!  No more rogues or paladins, just different types of Pokemon.  Not only that, but players could switch out their Pokemon at will, meaning one player can hold a multitude of classes all at once, able to use just a fraction of their abilities at a time by carefully tossing a Pokemon to the battlefield.

A game like this couldn’t have a weapon or armor marketplace, but players could teach their Pokemon different skills.  Though the amount of skills available would be great, each Pokemon would only be able to remember about four, meaning players would have to be very careful of how they trained their Pokemon.

Well, this is just what popped in my head at the office.  I haven’t played Pokemon since Blue and Red, but I’ve always appreciated the catchy idea behind it.  I just thought it was interesting enough to share (and also I haven’t posted in a while, so I needed to put up some content).

I was thinking about trading card games today, and as I just want to chronicle this idea, this won’t be a long post.

I’ve played with the idea of time as a resource before.  As part of my Independent Project at Centenary College, I created a card game in which player’s cards had a limited amount of turns in play which could be manipulated a few ways in order to create a winning strategy.

But today I saw a card from the Street Fighter collectible card game, and it got me thinking about other ways to use time.  I’ve heard of other trading card games that go without turns in “real time,” meaning players are just laying down cards as quickly as they can.  I don’t think I would be into that, I’d like to give my games a little more thinking time.

Then I thought about timers.  Perhaps a special timer.  Each player would have a certain amount of seconds for their turn, and each card would cost time.  The timer would count down from, oh, lets say 30 seconds, but there would be buttons to subtract time from the timer for each card.  That way, the longer players thought about their turn, the less they would be able to do with it.  That just might make it like a real fight!

I’m going to keep this here so I can remember it.  If you stumble upon this, let me know what you think.

I’ve made a game using Game Maker and I’ve entered it into the new competition there.  So far, it’s doing okay.  I don’t really care if it wins, I’d just like to see how people are liking it.

No Extra Lives
Added: 25 June 2008
By: AerodynamicHair

Apparently, at least one guy likes it.  That guy is a cool guy.

I was stuck in one place for too long, and I started to think about what the systems in computer Role Playing Games have to say about us as humans. In games like Fallout, you’re given points that you can distribute between intelligence, charisma, strength, and other such qualities. After you’ve created your character, there isn’t much you can do to heighten these statistics. Fallout makes sure to separate inherent characteristics from gained skills. You can become better with handguns, but you can’t become stronger.

Compare that with the Final Fantasy series (and most other jRPGs). A player’s intelligence, strength, speed, and so on goes up for every level they gain. A system like Fallout’s uses a mixed nature and nurture system, in which there are unchangeable traits, but skills that can be mastered. jRPGs like Final Fantasy go the pure nurture angle, wherein as the player goes on, they become stronger, more intellegent, get more charisma, and so on.

This is kind of interesting, but obvious enough. But this lead me to think about the level system in RPGs themselves. Is it really necessary anymore?

Levels to me seem to be a kind of shorthand, an easy way to calculate how strong the player should be after enough battles. But a system of levels usually just rewards “grinding,” or going out to fight random things in order to raise levels. Players see the best way to get through a game like Final Fantasy is to go outside a town, run around in circles and participate in random battles until they’ve leveled up to the point where the next boss is an easy target.

I’d like to see a little more thought go into these systems. I’d like to see a game which gets rid of levels on whole. My suggestion is to take each action the player can do (such as “Fight,” “Magic,” “Run”) and give these experience points. Each time a player uses that action, that action gains experience. And instead of adding up that experience to get to a new level, just use the amount of experience to calculate the strength of that skill.

You see what I’m saying?

Give experience to each action instead of the player, and you set up a new system of player growth. Instead of the player choosing new skill sets every level, the skill sets are chosen by what the player uses. If the player wants to be a magic user, they’ll have to exercise their skills with that magic. If they don’t use those skills after a long enough time, maybe they should start to deteriorate.  Deterioration of skills prevents grinding because it prevents a player from trying to level up that skill.  Too much work would be put into “leveling up” a skill that won’t stay leveled up for that long.

With the way computers can take over calculations for us, there’s no reason to use something like a level.  A game could make it so that the player sees the rewards for each action they take, and interesting gameplay could occur around a system that asks players to constantly exercise all of their skills.

Just a thought.