How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Casual Games
Despite being a kid of the 90s, (otherwise known as the golden era of video games) I actually haven’t played that many. However, those that I have played, I have *really* gotten into. We never had an NES growing up, so being able to play Mario when I went to friend’s houses was a real treat. The Nintendo 64 was my first gaming system, and that began my ongoing journey of video games. Some might say it’s like a crack addiction. Perhaps, but that’s not the topic of today’s post.
As a kid, one of my dreams was to become a fighter pilot. I’m sure most boys who watched Top Gun shared this sentiment. I bought countless books on the F-14, I went through every single fighter jet book in our small local library, and I could easily point out game and movie errors when it came to my beloved jets.
Some of you may know me as the StarCraft addict, (with the release of SC2 killing Brood War, I am now free from my addiction) but before all that, before I was a teenager, it was all about flight simulators. To be more precise, combat flight simulators. (Microsoft Flight was a nice game, but the best-modeled Learjet had nothing on just blowing stuff out of the sky with unlimited missiles)
To be exact, I sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into a game called “Fighters Anthology”. Now, I spent a fair amount of time playing the game, but in hindsight, I may have actually spent more time *modifying* it. Fighters Anthology was one of the first games that, with the help of an external program, allowed you to modify the game extensively. You could do silly and pointless things like give your plane unlimited missiles, create new paint schemes for your jets, design new cockpits, create your own missions, change the music, and so many other things.
I wasn’t the type to be content with just tweaking a few things here and there, nor was I that big into realism. Each modder tries to achieve different things. To use First Person Shooters as an example, some mods cater to players that want the “80s action hero experience”, and crank up the lethality of player weapons and just have a blast destroying everything in sight, while enemies may as well be shooting BBs at you. Others try to create a different game atmosphere – for example, the Misery Mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat changes the game drastically, from a game that was admittedly already more difficult than the average FPS to something more closely resembling survival horror, where instead of having enough ammunition and stamina to go around hunting everything, you had to make decisions about whether or not to attack something, because you had limited ammo, took damage more easily, and couldn’t run for extended periods of time. You now had the incentive to sneak past enemies if you could do it, because you weren’t sure if it was worth the risk. Other modders just liked changing the looks of things, like changing the knife in CS to a trout. I know, it’s silly, but to each their own.
The “world” of Fighters Anthology is contemporary, i.e. not in space ala Wing Commander or Star Wars. Fighters Anthology (hereafter known as “FA”) was actually a combination of several games all into one. The first game in the series was US Navy Fighters, and you flew the F-14, F/A-18, A-7 and other fighters off a US Carrier Battle Group in Ukraine against the Russians. In the 90s, most designers weren’t particularly interested in realism or balance. In any era, any designer wants to create the ideal player experience (because that sells more games, of course) and what that looks like changes from era to era. Nowadays, you have a wide spectrum of “ideal”. Minigames have grown exponentially over the past few years, cute addictive stuff like Angry Birds or Bejeweled. You can also find games like DCS Black Shark and Falcon 4.0, where simply starting your jet engine, setting your communication to the correct setting, radioing the control tower for takeoff clearance, and getting into the air requires a manual in of itself. You have gamers that love the sense of accomplishment, through kill streaks or being rewarded with new portraits. Some players like playing and beating difficult games, like Fire Emblem, and they don’t care if they have to die many times before they complete it. For the most part though, people play games to be awesome, to be winners, and FA was no exception.
While the names of all the weapons and aircraft were generally accurate, it was blatantly obvious that the Russian weaponry was vastly inferior to U.S. weaponry, and examining the weapon data in the game editor confirmed this. Russian missiles were more likely to be thrown off by flares and other countermeasures, while U.S. missiles were more resistant, could be fired from longer range, and did more damage. This allowed the player to “win” fairly easily. (You could, technically, fly as the Russians, but it wasn’t as encouraged, as the game was ridiculously difficult that way) To be sure, there was a learning curve, but certainly not as steep as it is in a more realistic game like Falcon 4.0 where you can certainly outfly your enemies, but to do so takes hours of learning how well your plane turns at different speeds and altitudes, and understanding what the ideal conditions are for firing missiles (ex: in general, radar guided missiles are better fired at targets above you rather than below, because radar clutter from the ground makes it harder for older missiles to find their targets accurately).
As a kid, I was a huge Lego fan, and my brother and I designed countless fighters and bases. With the FA editor, I could try and turn fantasy into “virtual reality”. After all, we didn’t have enough Lego sets to actually build more than one of each fighter, or to actually have a proper Opposing Force. We could only imagine aircraft carriers, because we couldn’t build one in Lego. But we could do this in FA! Instead of flying the F-22, we could now fly the F-52 Ghost Hawk, complete with our own R-130 ALRAAM and R-76 Agile missiles (fictional). But in our make-believe stories, the enemy had to be formidable. It’s no fun otherwise. And that’s where the issue of game balance comes into play.
For those of you who don’t play video games (or only play minigames), there are two kinds of combat: Player versus Player (PvP), and Player versus Environment (PvE). You could also call PvE “Player versus Computer” in some situations, but Environment is a better fit. In short, PvP means player combat, ala multiplayer games, and PvE means fighting against the computer/AI. In general, PvP games (like StarCraft) tend to be more difficult to design and play, because your opponent has the same resources you do, and can strategize much like you can. In PvE, the computer can be competent, but it’s usually not very flexible. Another major difference is that in a PvP game, with each winner there must be a loser, so the game should be relatively “fair”, otherwise you’d have people ragequitting, because no one likes to lose all the time. But in PvE, there is a much larger incentive for the player to win.
In that sense, enemies (soldiers) in PvE aren’t people per se. They’re more like challenges a player must defeat to reach the finish line, but completely different from an active participant also trying to win and live. The enemy may be difficult to defeat or hard to play against, but not because it’s smarter than the player per se. In many games, a higher-level enemy AI may receive more starting resources than the player, or have better equipment, to make up for its predictability. But the way many games create a challenge for the player is simply by throwing many things at him/her – older shoot-em-ups are a good example of this. The computer has the advantage in numbers, but it is also easy to exploit due to limited tactical proficiency.
The type of player experience the designer wants to create is essentially an issue of perspective. For me, creating/modding a game so my fighter had unlimited missiles, had a ridiculous number of hit points, and could bat away enemies without breaking a sweat was dumb, and took the fun out of it. That’s how many games do it nowadays, of course – in Call of Duty 4, you can take more hits than the enemy, and you can easily achieve kill ratios in the dozens easily (speaking of single player, strictly). Dynasty Warriors is another prime example – your character is made to seem powerful because you are faced with hundreds and thousands of weak enemies and you wipe them out fairly easily. For some people, this is entertainment. For me, it’s utterly unbelievable and it breaks immersion.
Now I know, I was modding the game to have flyable aircraft carriers, and adding lasers to fighter jets, but at the same time, the universe I was creating had to have some rules. Those of you who play RPGs (the kind with pencil and paper) are probably well aware of what I’m talking about here, especially those that have played as the gamemaster or dungeonmaster. You can throw challenges at the players, you are allowed a certain amount of flexibility, but you have to be consistent, or at least follow some form of logic – otherwise, once people call bullshit, the fun’s over. If magic is effective against one type of target, it had better be effective against other targets too unless you have a good explanation for it. “Because I said so” doesn’t really fly, unless if the game is intentionally silly, like Munchkin, in which case, carry on!
So I’m designing a single player game. The game should be enjoyable. To me, that means I can “win” fairly consistently, but that doesn’t mean “wins” should come easily. If a superhero is mowing down enemies easily, that’s not particularly heroic. It can even seem rather cruel, and there really isn’t any sense of accomplishment. To use a real life example, Germany boasted a number of fighter aces with *ridiculous* numbers of kills in World War II, but a lot of those came on the Eastern Front against relatively untrained Soviet pilots. It means almost nothing compared to getting 5 kills in the Vietnam War era, where both sides were fairly competent. A high kill count does not a fun game make.
This isn’t always easy to design in a game, though. In games (and most books, movies, and other forms of media) you follow a primary protagonist, and he/she has to be “blessed”, because if you die, the game ends. But the game has to have continuous action, otherwise it’s boring. (fans of slow-paced, thinking sniper games like Sniper Elite are a dying breed) So the easy solution here is to make enemies extremely weak, but easy to kill, so you can keep facing and defeating enemies without really dying yourself.
And so I ran into this problem after awhile – early versions of my game modification were heavily skewed towards the “good guys”, where your aircraft could carry 10 lethal missiles, backed up by a lot of machine gun ammo, and enemy countermeasures were ineffective, allowing your missiles to destroy them consistently. I had mission scenarios where 2 of my F-37 jets could defeat 30 MiG-21s 70-80% of the time. This gets boring quickly. And so I started creating stronger opponents, increased enemy accuracy, and started finding myself shot down more often. And then I decided to switch combat from being missile-based to gun-based, because with modern missiles, the player doesn’t really have any better chance than the computer, because they’re simply too hard to avoid. But in a guns dogfight, at least you have a chance.
Why’d I do this? Because you can only put the player in “heroic” situations so many times – defending their country against overwhelming odds, against huge bomber fleets that shot a lot at you but had bad aim – before you start to feel a lack of tension, because despite great odds, the enemy was utterly incompetent if it wasn’t actually winning most of the time, and all of a sudden the tension’s gone.
It’s like if you watched War of the Worlds and they tell you right at the beginning of the film that the invaders are going to spontaneously combust because they can’t handle Earth’s atmosphere. Sure, if you already read the books you know that already, but you still watch the movie because you want to see how it builds up there. It’s like in superhero movies – you know Spiderman’s gonna end up defeating the enemy, but the journey itself can still be interesting if it’s not too obvious how it occurs. Of course, superhero movies are an interesting case to examine, because if you looked at some older stuff, you’d notice that it was pretty much “feel-good” kicking ass and taking names, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that Superman’s invincible. But if you look at the new Batman movies, you sense vulnerability. Batman’s going to defeat the Joker eventually. But there might be a heavy cost involved, or the Joker may force Batman to sacrifice part of himself. It’s a huge difference in storytelling style.
Modern games like Call of Duty are very different from old-school shooters like Counter Strike. In the former, it’s relatively easy to “get lucky” and relatively new players can still do somewhat decently, especially if the action gets hectic enough (improved computer graphics allowing for more destruction effects affects this), but in the latter, a more skilled Counter Strike player will defeat a new player almost every single time, simply because the game requires you to understand your weapons, and rewards experienced players more heavily, not through power-ups or kill streaks or anything like that, but just because the game has a heavy focus on accuracy, positioning, and teamwork.
In another example, StarCraft 2 is arguably a lot easier for new players to get into than Brood War. I shy from calling the game itself “easier”, but the difference between great players and good players isn’t nearly as stark as it was in Brood War. To put things into perspective, I was able to achieve a “C” rank on the Brood War ladder, which meant that I could easily trash most of my friends I played with in real life, and breeze through the D and D+ ranks. Yet those D-ranked players would win most of the time against players that had only played single player, or only played in map modes with unlimited resources and money. However, I would lose to other C players 50-60% of the time, and rarely ever took a game off of a C+ player. Still, I could count myself in the top 90-95% percentile of all StarCraft players. And yet, I had absolutely no chance against B-ranked players. B-ranked players will be lucky if they can win a single game in a Bo7 series against an A-ranked player. Practice partners on professional Korean StarCraft teams rarely ever lost to A-ranked players, and these players weren’t even good enough to break the starting lineups of most pro teams. Among the elite StarCraft players, you could even divide them even further – the “A” class elite that were the cornerstone of a strong team lineup, the “S” class players that had that something extra that put them ahead of the “A” class (most obvious in extended BoX series), and anomalies like Lee Young Ho/Flash (known as “God”) who was regarded as nearly invincible at his peak. In StarCraft 2, you have players still in school taking games off of professionals. Granted, these part-time players are incredibly talented and gifted, and would do probably do even better playing full-time, but this would have been absolutely impossible in Brood War. No one had a chance against the Korean pros, that’s how good the game allowed them to be. The skill ceiling was extremely high, allowing for a wide range of skill disparity.
I used to complain about this all the time. Games are getting too easy. We’re rewarding mediocrity to allow people to “feel good”, and games are no longer as good as they used to be. Then I slowly came to realize that it’s really an issue of taste. I personally prefer games that give the enemy some credit. Say you’re in a shooter game holding a chokepoint. Enemies come pouring in, and you machine gun them down by the dozens. They keep charging, and you keep shooting, and it ends with a bunch of dead bodies piled up in front of you. Hey, you just defeated an entire enemy army. But who can believe that? In real life, the enemy might call in indirect fire (artillery), or air support, rather than keep suiciding into your defenses. And yet, if the goal of the game is to make the player feel powerful and invincible, the computer isn’t designed to *think*, it’s designed to die. And so they keep charging. The enemy isn’t “human”, in that sense. It doesn’t have a desire to live, it doesn’t think of better ways to do things, because its goal isn’t to survive or actually defeat you, its goal is to ultimately provide you with some eye candy before dying.
That’s why I enjoyed playing Brood War, despite losing more games than I won (it’s inevitable, given how good players are). That’s also why I tend to play more difficult single player games, like Resident Evil (before 4 changed everything, of course. Don’t get me wrong – 4 is actually wonderfully entertaining as well, but in a totally different way), Fire Emblem, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and flight simulators. A harder game is more rewarding to me. I like the feeling of improving, and breezing through areas that were once difficult not purely because my character has better stats and equipment, but because I’m a better player than I was before.
But after working full-time for the past half a year or so, I’ve come to see the appeal of “casual” games a bit more. My definition of “casual” may be a bit broad, as I include stuff like Call of Duty and Halo (I know Halo has a competitive scene, but you can’t argue that it’s as hardcore as Counter Strike). It’s why, despite the Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) flight sim looking absolutely amazing… it’s not going to be something I purchase anytime soon, because I don’t have time to go through hundreds of pages of a manual, learning how to adjust flap trim and memorize radio frequencies and the proper missile firing procedure. Sometimes I just want to enjoy the feeling of flying and blowing stuff up. It’s why I spend more time playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. than Operation Flashpoint. I just don’t have the time to really get into video games like I used to. I’m sure when and if I start my own family, I’ll have even less time to burn playing video games. And now understand why people can look at me in astonishment when I described my passion for Brood War. I don’t necessarily regret the time I spent there, but I now get where they’re coming from. And maybe that’s just a part of life. People enjoy different things at different times, and the choice is not always yours to make. You just have to make the most of what you can.
Perhaps that’s growing up.
So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play some Angry Birds.
(I don’t actually have Angry Birds)
As a kid, one of my dreams was to become a fighter pilot. I’m sure most boys who watched Top Gun shared this sentiment. I bought countless books on the F-14, I went through every single fighter jet book in our small local library, and I could easily point out game and movie errors when it came to my beloved jets.
Some of you may know me as the StarCraft addict, (with the release of SC2 killing Brood War, I am now free from my addiction) but before all that, before I was a teenager, it was all about flight simulators. To be more precise, combat flight simulators. (Microsoft Flight was a nice game, but the best-modeled Learjet had nothing on just blowing stuff out of the sky with unlimited missiles)
To be exact, I sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into a game called “Fighters Anthology”. Now, I spent a fair amount of time playing the game, but in hindsight, I may have actually spent more time *modifying* it. Fighters Anthology was one of the first games that, with the help of an external program, allowed you to modify the game extensively. You could do silly and pointless things like give your plane unlimited missiles, create new paint schemes for your jets, design new cockpits, create your own missions, change the music, and so many other things.
I wasn’t the type to be content with just tweaking a few things here and there, nor was I that big into realism. Each modder tries to achieve different things. To use First Person Shooters as an example, some mods cater to players that want the “80s action hero experience”, and crank up the lethality of player weapons and just have a blast destroying everything in sight, while enemies may as well be shooting BBs at you. Others try to create a different game atmosphere – for example, the Misery Mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat changes the game drastically, from a game that was admittedly already more difficult than the average FPS to something more closely resembling survival horror, where instead of having enough ammunition and stamina to go around hunting everything, you had to make decisions about whether or not to attack something, because you had limited ammo, took damage more easily, and couldn’t run for extended periods of time. You now had the incentive to sneak past enemies if you could do it, because you weren’t sure if it was worth the risk. Other modders just liked changing the looks of things, like changing the knife in CS to a trout. I know, it’s silly, but to each their own.
The “world” of Fighters Anthology is contemporary, i.e. not in space ala Wing Commander or Star Wars. Fighters Anthology (hereafter known as “FA”) was actually a combination of several games all into one. The first game in the series was US Navy Fighters, and you flew the F-14, F/A-18, A-7 and other fighters off a US Carrier Battle Group in Ukraine against the Russians. In the 90s, most designers weren’t particularly interested in realism or balance. In any era, any designer wants to create the ideal player experience (because that sells more games, of course) and what that looks like changes from era to era. Nowadays, you have a wide spectrum of “ideal”. Minigames have grown exponentially over the past few years, cute addictive stuff like Angry Birds or Bejeweled. You can also find games like DCS Black Shark and Falcon 4.0, where simply starting your jet engine, setting your communication to the correct setting, radioing the control tower for takeoff clearance, and getting into the air requires a manual in of itself. You have gamers that love the sense of accomplishment, through kill streaks or being rewarded with new portraits. Some players like playing and beating difficult games, like Fire Emblem, and they don’t care if they have to die many times before they complete it. For the most part though, people play games to be awesome, to be winners, and FA was no exception.
While the names of all the weapons and aircraft were generally accurate, it was blatantly obvious that the Russian weaponry was vastly inferior to U.S. weaponry, and examining the weapon data in the game editor confirmed this. Russian missiles were more likely to be thrown off by flares and other countermeasures, while U.S. missiles were more resistant, could be fired from longer range, and did more damage. This allowed the player to “win” fairly easily. (You could, technically, fly as the Russians, but it wasn’t as encouraged, as the game was ridiculously difficult that way) To be sure, there was a learning curve, but certainly not as steep as it is in a more realistic game like Falcon 4.0 where you can certainly outfly your enemies, but to do so takes hours of learning how well your plane turns at different speeds and altitudes, and understanding what the ideal conditions are for firing missiles (ex: in general, radar guided missiles are better fired at targets above you rather than below, because radar clutter from the ground makes it harder for older missiles to find their targets accurately).
As a kid, I was a huge Lego fan, and my brother and I designed countless fighters and bases. With the FA editor, I could try and turn fantasy into “virtual reality”. After all, we didn’t have enough Lego sets to actually build more than one of each fighter, or to actually have a proper Opposing Force. We could only imagine aircraft carriers, because we couldn’t build one in Lego. But we could do this in FA! Instead of flying the F-22, we could now fly the F-52 Ghost Hawk, complete with our own R-130 ALRAAM and R-76 Agile missiles (fictional). But in our make-believe stories, the enemy had to be formidable. It’s no fun otherwise. And that’s where the issue of game balance comes into play.
For those of you who don’t play video games (or only play minigames), there are two kinds of combat: Player versus Player (PvP), and Player versus Environment (PvE). You could also call PvE “Player versus Computer” in some situations, but Environment is a better fit. In short, PvP means player combat, ala multiplayer games, and PvE means fighting against the computer/AI. In general, PvP games (like StarCraft) tend to be more difficult to design and play, because your opponent has the same resources you do, and can strategize much like you can. In PvE, the computer can be competent, but it’s usually not very flexible. Another major difference is that in a PvP game, with each winner there must be a loser, so the game should be relatively “fair”, otherwise you’d have people ragequitting, because no one likes to lose all the time. But in PvE, there is a much larger incentive for the player to win.
In that sense, enemies (soldiers) in PvE aren’t people per se. They’re more like challenges a player must defeat to reach the finish line, but completely different from an active participant also trying to win and live. The enemy may be difficult to defeat or hard to play against, but not because it’s smarter than the player per se. In many games, a higher-level enemy AI may receive more starting resources than the player, or have better equipment, to make up for its predictability. But the way many games create a challenge for the player is simply by throwing many things at him/her – older shoot-em-ups are a good example of this. The computer has the advantage in numbers, but it is also easy to exploit due to limited tactical proficiency.
The type of player experience the designer wants to create is essentially an issue of perspective. For me, creating/modding a game so my fighter had unlimited missiles, had a ridiculous number of hit points, and could bat away enemies without breaking a sweat was dumb, and took the fun out of it. That’s how many games do it nowadays, of course – in Call of Duty 4, you can take more hits than the enemy, and you can easily achieve kill ratios in the dozens easily (speaking of single player, strictly). Dynasty Warriors is another prime example – your character is made to seem powerful because you are faced with hundreds and thousands of weak enemies and you wipe them out fairly easily. For some people, this is entertainment. For me, it’s utterly unbelievable and it breaks immersion.
Now I know, I was modding the game to have flyable aircraft carriers, and adding lasers to fighter jets, but at the same time, the universe I was creating had to have some rules. Those of you who play RPGs (the kind with pencil and paper) are probably well aware of what I’m talking about here, especially those that have played as the gamemaster or dungeonmaster. You can throw challenges at the players, you are allowed a certain amount of flexibility, but you have to be consistent, or at least follow some form of logic – otherwise, once people call bullshit, the fun’s over. If magic is effective against one type of target, it had better be effective against other targets too unless you have a good explanation for it. “Because I said so” doesn’t really fly, unless if the game is intentionally silly, like Munchkin, in which case, carry on!
So I’m designing a single player game. The game should be enjoyable. To me, that means I can “win” fairly consistently, but that doesn’t mean “wins” should come easily. If a superhero is mowing down enemies easily, that’s not particularly heroic. It can even seem rather cruel, and there really isn’t any sense of accomplishment. To use a real life example, Germany boasted a number of fighter aces with *ridiculous* numbers of kills in World War II, but a lot of those came on the Eastern Front against relatively untrained Soviet pilots. It means almost nothing compared to getting 5 kills in the Vietnam War era, where both sides were fairly competent. A high kill count does not a fun game make.
This isn’t always easy to design in a game, though. In games (and most books, movies, and other forms of media) you follow a primary protagonist, and he/she has to be “blessed”, because if you die, the game ends. But the game has to have continuous action, otherwise it’s boring. (fans of slow-paced, thinking sniper games like Sniper Elite are a dying breed) So the easy solution here is to make enemies extremely weak, but easy to kill, so you can keep facing and defeating enemies without really dying yourself.
And so I ran into this problem after awhile – early versions of my game modification were heavily skewed towards the “good guys”, where your aircraft could carry 10 lethal missiles, backed up by a lot of machine gun ammo, and enemy countermeasures were ineffective, allowing your missiles to destroy them consistently. I had mission scenarios where 2 of my F-37 jets could defeat 30 MiG-21s 70-80% of the time. This gets boring quickly. And so I started creating stronger opponents, increased enemy accuracy, and started finding myself shot down more often. And then I decided to switch combat from being missile-based to gun-based, because with modern missiles, the player doesn’t really have any better chance than the computer, because they’re simply too hard to avoid. But in a guns dogfight, at least you have a chance.
Why’d I do this? Because you can only put the player in “heroic” situations so many times – defending their country against overwhelming odds, against huge bomber fleets that shot a lot at you but had bad aim – before you start to feel a lack of tension, because despite great odds, the enemy was utterly incompetent if it wasn’t actually winning most of the time, and all of a sudden the tension’s gone.
It’s like if you watched War of the Worlds and they tell you right at the beginning of the film that the invaders are going to spontaneously combust because they can’t handle Earth’s atmosphere. Sure, if you already read the books you know that already, but you still watch the movie because you want to see how it builds up there. It’s like in superhero movies – you know Spiderman’s gonna end up defeating the enemy, but the journey itself can still be interesting if it’s not too obvious how it occurs. Of course, superhero movies are an interesting case to examine, because if you looked at some older stuff, you’d notice that it was pretty much “feel-good” kicking ass and taking names, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that Superman’s invincible. But if you look at the new Batman movies, you sense vulnerability. Batman’s going to defeat the Joker eventually. But there might be a heavy cost involved, or the Joker may force Batman to sacrifice part of himself. It’s a huge difference in storytelling style.
Modern games like Call of Duty are very different from old-school shooters like Counter Strike. In the former, it’s relatively easy to “get lucky” and relatively new players can still do somewhat decently, especially if the action gets hectic enough (improved computer graphics allowing for more destruction effects affects this), but in the latter, a more skilled Counter Strike player will defeat a new player almost every single time, simply because the game requires you to understand your weapons, and rewards experienced players more heavily, not through power-ups or kill streaks or anything like that, but just because the game has a heavy focus on accuracy, positioning, and teamwork.
In another example, StarCraft 2 is arguably a lot easier for new players to get into than Brood War. I shy from calling the game itself “easier”, but the difference between great players and good players isn’t nearly as stark as it was in Brood War. To put things into perspective, I was able to achieve a “C” rank on the Brood War ladder, which meant that I could easily trash most of my friends I played with in real life, and breeze through the D and D+ ranks. Yet those D-ranked players would win most of the time against players that had only played single player, or only played in map modes with unlimited resources and money. However, I would lose to other C players 50-60% of the time, and rarely ever took a game off of a C+ player. Still, I could count myself in the top 90-95% percentile of all StarCraft players. And yet, I had absolutely no chance against B-ranked players. B-ranked players will be lucky if they can win a single game in a Bo7 series against an A-ranked player. Practice partners on professional Korean StarCraft teams rarely ever lost to A-ranked players, and these players weren’t even good enough to break the starting lineups of most pro teams. Among the elite StarCraft players, you could even divide them even further – the “A” class elite that were the cornerstone of a strong team lineup, the “S” class players that had that something extra that put them ahead of the “A” class (most obvious in extended BoX series), and anomalies like Lee Young Ho/Flash (known as “God”) who was regarded as nearly invincible at his peak. In StarCraft 2, you have players still in school taking games off of professionals. Granted, these part-time players are incredibly talented and gifted, and would do probably do even better playing full-time, but this would have been absolutely impossible in Brood War. No one had a chance against the Korean pros, that’s how good the game allowed them to be. The skill ceiling was extremely high, allowing for a wide range of skill disparity.
I used to complain about this all the time. Games are getting too easy. We’re rewarding mediocrity to allow people to “feel good”, and games are no longer as good as they used to be. Then I slowly came to realize that it’s really an issue of taste. I personally prefer games that give the enemy some credit. Say you’re in a shooter game holding a chokepoint. Enemies come pouring in, and you machine gun them down by the dozens. They keep charging, and you keep shooting, and it ends with a bunch of dead bodies piled up in front of you. Hey, you just defeated an entire enemy army. But who can believe that? In real life, the enemy might call in indirect fire (artillery), or air support, rather than keep suiciding into your defenses. And yet, if the goal of the game is to make the player feel powerful and invincible, the computer isn’t designed to *think*, it’s designed to die. And so they keep charging. The enemy isn’t “human”, in that sense. It doesn’t have a desire to live, it doesn’t think of better ways to do things, because its goal isn’t to survive or actually defeat you, its goal is to ultimately provide you with some eye candy before dying.
That’s why I enjoyed playing Brood War, despite losing more games than I won (it’s inevitable, given how good players are). That’s also why I tend to play more difficult single player games, like Resident Evil (before 4 changed everything, of course. Don’t get me wrong – 4 is actually wonderfully entertaining as well, but in a totally different way), Fire Emblem, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and flight simulators. A harder game is more rewarding to me. I like the feeling of improving, and breezing through areas that were once difficult not purely because my character has better stats and equipment, but because I’m a better player than I was before.
But after working full-time for the past half a year or so, I’ve come to see the appeal of “casual” games a bit more. My definition of “casual” may be a bit broad, as I include stuff like Call of Duty and Halo (I know Halo has a competitive scene, but you can’t argue that it’s as hardcore as Counter Strike). It’s why, despite the Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) flight sim looking absolutely amazing… it’s not going to be something I purchase anytime soon, because I don’t have time to go through hundreds of pages of a manual, learning how to adjust flap trim and memorize radio frequencies and the proper missile firing procedure. Sometimes I just want to enjoy the feeling of flying and blowing stuff up. It’s why I spend more time playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. than Operation Flashpoint. I just don’t have the time to really get into video games like I used to. I’m sure when and if I start my own family, I’ll have even less time to burn playing video games. And now understand why people can look at me in astonishment when I described my passion for Brood War. I don’t necessarily regret the time I spent there, but I now get where they’re coming from. And maybe that’s just a part of life. People enjoy different things at different times, and the choice is not always yours to make. You just have to make the most of what you can.
Perhaps that’s growing up.
So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play some Angry Birds.
(I don’t actually have Angry Birds)
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