Time limits, for the most part, serve only to frustrate the player by forcing them to play the game at a pace uncomfortable to them, which is usually, also annoyingly difficult for them. In fact, because timed challenges operate in a different style of difficulty to untimed challenges (as the skills required to do a certain action don’t necessarily correlate to the set of skills required to do that action quickly, for example a player could be excellent at a strategy game when given time to think, but unable to effectively strategize when the game is played at a fast pace i.e. chess vs lightning chess) a player who doesn’t immediately translate their skills into speed, often can’t improve in a noticeable way, regardless of time spent trying.  The only obvious way around this is to rebalance the difficulty so that the section is easy enough for anyone to progress through, however that has the side effect of making the section feel out of place in the level (as it’s so much easier than other levels) or it defeats the purpose of having a timed mission (as it’s so easy there’s little pressure on the player).

In this case, the timed mission effectively becomes a brick wall that can be near impossible (or completely impossible) for that player to surpass, completely ruining their experience if you’re lucky, or making it completely unplayable if you’re not. Additionally, the implementation of time limits in-game provides a huge design problem, and I am struggling to recall a timed mission that was implemented in an effective and natural way (though I’m sure there would have to be some, so feel free to let me know). The major problem in implementing a time limit in-game is how to provide the information to the player as, given the nature of a timer, it doesn’t integrate very well into a game environment.

Firstly, a timer needs to be easily noticeable to a player (so they can constantly check their progress) without distracting too much from the actual gameplay; a balance which can be surprisingly difficult to achieve, though far from impossible for a good interface designer, especially when accompanied by the standard ticking noises of a timer to constantly reinforce a player’s attention to the fact their time is running out. Furthermore, even assuming a good balance between distraction and visibility can be achieved; having numbers floating on the screen isn’t exactly a boon to player immersion and a timed mission could erode an otherwise well crafted, immersive experience. In fact, unless your game’s HUD is intended to be inside the character’s helmet/suit (for example, Halo), a HUD itself is a huge hindrance to effective immersion, regardless of the game – though that’s a topic which is for another day.

So, why do people persist in designing missions with a time limit? Well, there are three main reasons and assuming you can come up with a relatively elegant solution to the aforementioned problems, they do present some compelling reasons for a timed mission.

First and foremost, the story/narrative of the game can demand that a mission have a time limit; it would be incredibly strange to have your protagonist eluding guards in a cut scene, and then suddenly have plenty of time to slowly stroll along and do what you want. However, for the most part this alone shouldn’t be reason enough to attempt a timed mission given its difficulty – as its easy enough to either write the timed section out of the story, or to present it some other way (such as completely within a cut scene, which has its own list of issues).

Secondly, a timed mission can be used to artificially increase the difficulty of a level. As I mentioned earlier, the skills required to perform some activity don’t always translate into the skills to do that activity at speed, which is why this method is a purely artificial way of increasing the difficulty; it doesn’t make the game harder, it makes the player worse at playing it which as a player, serves to make a game frustrating rather than actually difficult.

Finally, a timed mission can also be used to artificially increase tension. However, using a timed mission purely to increase tension is not uncommon, though it’s a flawed argument as it makes more sense to give the illusion of a time limit, as Ill discuss below.

My Solution

So, to me at least, it isn’t worth the effort of trying to implement a true timed mission. Assuming you can come up with an effective way of implementing the graphical timer interface, you still have the monumental task of finding a way to overcome the difficulty issues I discussed in the beginning of the article.

Therefore, the solution is to do away with the timed mission. But what if our game has a legitimate reason for a timed mission? After all, as I briefly discussed earlier, there are a number of fairly valid reasons you would want to include a timed mission in your game, and it can be useful as a change of pace to break up monotony.

Well, the answer is simple – give the player the illusion of a timed mission, while doing away with the actual time limit. By this, I mean keep things such as flashing warning lights, musical cues and frantic enemy pacing that accompanies timed missions (as though it is a timed mission), just remove the timer and the time limit (i.e. the player can’t run out of time). This solves a number of problems;

-          No Integration into the UI needed

-          Less player frustration as they can’t actually run out of time

-          No extra skills needed for the player (or the developer…)

Furthermore, while it doesn’t actually make the mission any more difficult (unless you want to add in some other form of increased difficulty), it does give the illusion of increased difficulty as you’ve kept all the non-timer cues.

While this implementation poses another issue; breaking immersion if the player actually stops and realizes they can’t run out of time after it being implied they’re running out of time via cues and story development, there are plenty of ways to manage this, and even without those, it’s a much better solution to timed missions.

Bioware’s latest RPG masterpiece is finally upon us, and it’s obvious that they’ve made the most of the 6 years they’ve spent developing it (that’s right, for those unaware, Dragon Age was announced well before Mass Effect yet has only beaten Mass Effect’s sequel to stores by a couple of months).

Obviously a game with such a long development time has some huge expectations… expectations I stayed away from by distancing myself from as much of the previews and trailers as possible so that I could stay out of the hype and just enjoy the game, rather than being concerned with whether it met my expectations. But you know what; I don’t think it would have mattered as the game is, in a word, “brilliant”, though far from perfect. In fact, perhaps “difficult” is more appropriate as it seems to be the first thing that pops into mind when I talk to people about Dragon Age.

More after the jump.

Killing is a bloody, but jovial business

Of course, I  haven’t finished the game yet (In fact, with around 20 hours played I’m only 22% complete according to the in-game meter) and there’s still plenty of time for my opinion on some of these things to change so don’t take these thoughts to be the final word on the game. That being said, so far I’m really enjoying the game in a where-did-the-past-6-hours-go kind of way.

The difficulty seems like a great place to start actually as it seems to be, by far, the least polished aspect of the game. First and foremost, there are four difficulty levels; Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare… but I don’t see any reason for them to include either Hard or Nightmare as even Normal seems nigh impossible at times, and I’ve dropped it back to Easy difficulty more times than I dare to mention on a gaming website. Maybe I’m just terrible at the game, but it doesn’t seem to be a matter of not making the right moves, but just sheer weight of numbers/incoming damage that, unless you get lucky, is just insurmountable.

Pictured: Slightly less blood than your average Dragon Age rat

This isn’t the only problem with the game’s difficulty though and while some fights seems insurmountable, there are just as many that you barely notice the enemy before they’re eliminated. While every fight shouldn’t leave the player on the edge of their seat, they should at least provide some amount of challenge, and such inconsistency in the difficulty of combats makes it really feel like the game’s difficulty was rushed together at the last minute and as such really lacks the polish present in most other aspects of the game.

Another poor design choice that helps compound the difficulty problems is the way they display the party’s health and mana/stamina on the screen; small circular icons in the top left corner of the screen. This in itself isn’t the problem though, the issue is that in the heat of combat, there’s no way to actually see the physical amount, or even the percentage of, the character’s health/mana/stamina without pausing the game and completely breaking immersion by going into their stats page. If you’re constantly pausing and micro-managing all of your characters move-by-move then it’s not as large of a concern, but for a player like me who tries to play it in real-time and enjoys the sense of immersion Bioware have accomplished, it’s rather annoying and disappointing, especially when there is a large empty space in the bottom right of the interface where larger, more detailed info could of been placed.

Now the time is here, for Iron Man to spread fear

Despite this however, the actual gameplay is still really enjoyable and the combat system in particular strikes me as an unusual mix of traditional Baldur’s Gate/KOTOR gameplay spliced with aspects of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XII, which is hard to explain and sounds really odd in theory, but works really well when put together in the game.  In fact, some aspects such as the system of assigning key strategies to your allies is ripped almost word for word from Final Fantasy XII and works just as well in Dragon Age as it did for Square Enix a few years ago, though is no less intimidating to those unfamiliar with the system (you have a number of slots per character that you can assign certain abilities, attacks or items for them to use depending on certain situations, such as how much health you have or how many enemies are nearby).

Another interesting aspect to the gameplay is how the design team has dealt with the death of characters; they’re not permanently dead and will revive at the end of a battle, but with major debuffs such as “Broken Arm”, which greatly reduces their damage, or “Cracked Skull” which does the same to their Cunning, with these penalties lasting until you return to camp or use an uncommon/expensive “Injury Kit” item. Given how unbalanced the difficulty can seem at times, I think they’ve done a great job with these penalties, making them damaging enough that death is still a major concern, but without making it impossible to continue onwards; a balance that given the difficulty of the game, I’m

glad they got right.

Robocop, is that you?

I find it interesting how much Dragon Age has the feel of an MMORPG to it, despite being a completely singleplayer experience, and it seems odd to me that Bioware haven’t tried to implement at least a 4-player Co-op mode akin to Baldurs Gate as the game would be phenomenal with a whole party of human characters. Truth be told, after playing Dragon Age I’m already psyched up for The Old Republic; Bioware’s Star Wars MMO, because if they can capture the blend of Storytelling and Gameplay from here, I could see myself investing far more time than I’d care to admit into TOR.

Which brings me to what has always been Bioware’s greatest strength; their storytelling, world design and characters. Fereldan really feels like a living, breathing world and I’ve yet to find a named NPC who hasn’t been a well-rounded, fleshed out character; even when I kill them after 2 lines of dialogue. While many of the traditional fantasy tropes are present, Bioware has still done a great job making them interesting and seemingly unique to the world presented in Dragon Age, and as always, the writing in the game is brilliant; especially the little one-liners and background discussion your party members will casually toss around during idle moments. Even outside of the main storyline and sidequests, there is a wealth of background information in the codexes I’ve stumbled across in librarys, or even by examining landmarks such as statues and ruined guard posts. Not only this, but the game itself is incredibly long; I’ve spent nearly 20 hours in the world of Dragon Age and have completed just 16% of the game according to the stat tracker in-game, and with the multiple branching archs, it’s obvious theres a huge amount of replayability aside from the 100+ hours of main gameplay.

Uh.. Yeh... No idea whats going on here...

The camera style is, by default, a 3^rd person over-the-shoulder style akin to Gears of War, but can be zoomed out into a more traditional Isometric view in the style of Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights which, combined with the ability to pause the game on the fly, means that it can be played in the same style as it’s progenitor though, even as a huge BG/NWN fan, I actually find myself playing the game more in over-the-shoulder style. It should also be noted that orientation seems to be a bit funky in the fully-zoomed Isometric view, rendering the WASD movement controls almost useless and essentially forcing you to use the annoying click-to-move controls

Speaking of polish; the game runs incredibly well even with graphic settings cranked up to full. While my PC isn’t top of the range, it is fairly powerful still (2.4ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM, 260GTX) and I wasn’t expecting to have the game run so well while looking so good, major props to the codemonkeys at Bioware for such great engine work.

More thoughts to come later…

Quick satire of major announcements and my thoughts on some games from E3 after the jump.

Here’s a quick wrap of each console’s major announcements (warning: snarky cynicism ahead)

Microsoft’s press conference gave us some unexpected sequels,  Old men cashing in on new media, Yet another Halo game…. oh and a device that makes people lose control and flail their bodies around madly*.

Sony followed this up by announcing another handheld to get murdered by the DS juggernaut, A mysterious new non-GTA Rockstar game, another Final Fantasy MMO (that will probably come out before FF XIII) and unveiled their response to the Wii: A motion sensing magic wand.

Nintendo finished the major conferences off by copy and pasting Mario Galaxy, unveiled a (presumably) sexier and bloodier Metroid game, a new Golden Sun game for DS (finally)…. and a new peripheral that checks your pulse (and presumably warns you if you’re dead).

Oh, and Miyamoto also announced that he isnt announing a new Zelda for Wii at E3 this year.

Ok, with that snarky cynicism out of the way.. here’s some actual thoughts about what we saw at E3 this year:

Motion Controllers

First up, what was probably the biggest surprise announcement of E3: Microsoft’s “Natal” prototype. It was pretty obvious that both Microsoft and Sony were developing their own take on the new Motion-Control craze the Wii is thriving on (and don’t get me wrong, I’m not dismissing it as a fad, its a definite step towards the future of gaming), but I, like many people, were surprised to see Microsoft’s approach to motion control, wasn’t a controller at all but rather, an upgraded version of the PlayStation Eye(toy). While the technology behind it is fascinating and its clearly quite powerful (and the tech demos they had at the show looked fun and showed off it’s power very effectively), I dont see it really being more than an upgraded version of what the Playstation Eye was/is; a fun little attachment with interesting mini-games to enjoy, but completely ignored by main stream games.

Now, that may sound harsh, but theres a good reason for this; tactile feedback (or lack thereof). The reason the Wii controller suceeds so well as a motion controller, is that the user is physically holding the controller and imitating the action you’d actually make with whatever object  it’s meant to be (your imagination can easily fill in the blank slate that is the controller with whatever object it actually is, or if you lack imagination, there are thousands of Wii accessories in the shape of bats, guns, axes, racquets etc), and just as importantly, it applies feedback to the user through rumbling.  This combination gives the user the sensation of actually feeling like they’re doing the action in question, a feat which can’t be simulated through non-physical motion capture devices such as the Playstation Eye or the “Natal”.

Strangely, for a company that this generation seems so out of touch with developers (architecture unnecesarily complicated) and players alike (new PSP that still lacks dual analogs, and priced to rip off consumers), Sony’s option, while looking like a Wii Remote bred with a Magic Wand, apears to be similar in function to the Wii Remote and should please consumers and developers alike. While not revolutionary, as long as they fix the look of it (i.e. make it not look like a magic wand) it should actually suceed (which is more than I can say about the “Natal”), mainly for the reasons I outlined earlier about motion control and feedback.

Games, Games and more Games

Plenty of games were announced and/or showed off over the conference, heres some thoughts on games that impressed me (as a lounge chair enthusiast who wasnt actually at the conference). Bare in mind that I talk more about PC, Xbox360 and Nintendo DS games as theyre the three platforms I currently own.

Modern Warfare 2 (PC/360/PS3): When Infinity Ward announced they were making MW2, I wasn’t sure how to react; while COD4 was an amazing game, I was worried they’d play it safe and just retread the same ground as MW1. Thankfully, they’ve sent a precedent as COD2 much more than a re-tread of COD1 and their showing of the game at E3 removed any doubt from my mind. The snow level they demoed looked phenomenal, especially the whole rock climbing sequence (which looks like a lot of vertigo-inducing fun), and I loved the blizzard-battered Air Base where you couldn’t see more than a few meters in front of you, making it easy to sneak around (or get snuck up on yourself). Now I cant wait for this game… thankfully its coming out this year.

Splinter Cell: Conviction (PC/360): I haven’t played a Splinter Cell game since the early games of the series, and Conviction wasn’t really on my radar coming into E3, but it came from nowhere and sucked me in. Very much story-driven, Sam Fisher is out for revenge after the death of his daugher, cutting all ties to his organsitation and laws in his pursuit of those responsible. While the game appears very action driven, stealth is still the key in the game, and a lot of little additions to the gameplay make it a lot smoother and enjoyable, most notably the addition of a shilloute to indicate where enemies last saw you. Hopefully they’ll show more of this game off over the next couple of months, as it’s another game I’m already way too excited about (and again, thankfully it comes out this year).

Forza 3 (360): Forza 2 was probably my favourite serious racing game of all time (yes, better than all the Gran Turismo games to date) and I’ve sunk countless hours into the game, so I’m understandably excited for a sequel. While the trailer they showed looked amazing, they haven’t really showed off the gameplay itself, instead focusing on the car painting and video editing features (which are cool, but don’t necessarily appeal to me that much). However, they did discuss a couple of things that got me interested again; a track editor (which I’ll reserve judgement on until I see it) and a rewind button (which could be interesting if implemented well). Mixed anticpation for this one, but it interests me far more than any other racing game at the show .

Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (DS): Nintendo announced a follow up to what is quietly one of the best RPG’s on handheld; Pokemon… err Mario & Luigi Partners in Time. No, I’m not kidding either, PiT (love that abbreviation) was a well designed JRPG that also introduced some real time elements to the turn based combat which sound gimmiky but, when combined with the Mario universe and an ample dosing of humour, made the game extremely enjoyable. As long as Nintendo stick to that formula, this game should be another great RPG on DS.

Golden Sun DS (DS): While the Mario & Luigi RPG series is a quiet achiever, the two previous Golden Sun games are regarded by many (including myself) as the best RPG’s on the Gameboy Advance. While not a lot of the game was shown, practically everyone who played the first two have been waiting years for the next game in the series, and this is definetly one to keep an eye on if you have a DS and enjoy RPG’s.

God of War 3 (PS3): God of War 3 finally had some gameplay shown during E3 and it looked like… more God of War. As a designer, I know I should feel disappointed that (so far) they haven’t really shown much that’s pushed the design of the game forward, but I just can’t. I loved the first two games, and even if the game doesn’t do much different and just looked better and pushed the story forward, it would still be one of the few games (among the likes of MGS4 and Uncharted) that really make me wish I had a PS3.

Assassin’s Creed 2 (PC/360/PS3): The first Assassin’s Creed game, to me, was a tech demo more than anything else. The gameplay fundamentals were there and the engine powering it all was clearly well developed and powerful, it just wasn’t polished and quickly degenerated into doing the exact same things over and over again. The whole time I played the game, I was thinking of how cool the sequel would be, since they had the mechanics in the game, but hadn’t developed them into a fun experience; and here that sequel is. The gameplay demo showed that they were trying to address most of the concerns with the first game, although obviously a demo won’t show if they’ve fixed the endless repetition of the first game, as well introduced the cool new renaissance era setting (and Leonardi da Vinci making devices such as the flying machine for the hero is a cool way of introducing some wacky looking, but interesting designs). Another game that I can’t wait to see more of as the year goes on.

The Last Guardian (PS3): The latest game from the masterful Ico team really let me down ths year. Don’t get me wrong, the trailer was great and all, but it was just an extended version of a trailer that was leaked a week before the show and they had absolutely nothing else to show of the game. I was really hoping we’d see some gameplay (at least video of gameplay if not a demo), but it wasn’t to be this year. This could be the game that finally convinces me to buy a PS3 and I really want to see something more substantial.

Brutal Legend (360/PS3): I think this was a game made almost specifically for me as I love Tim Schafer and I love heavy metal. Aside from the lack of a jump button (Shafer’s reasoning being “No jump because that’s what ruined Van Halen.”), I’ve seen nothing but positive feedback from the game and although I havent had the chance to check out videos of the gameplay, from what I’ve heard it’s incredibly fun. Based on his past works alone, I’d be excited about this game, but given it’s setting and a positive showing, I want this game as soon as possible.

* No offense to Felica Day, I love her work (and I only found that video through her own twitter updates)

I’d encourage you all to check out the About page if you haven’t, just to give you an idea of what my blog is about.

I’ll be populating this with some new posts over the course of the next week and will be (hopefully) updating 2-3 times a week, depending on my free time.

Hope you have fun here and enjoy my blog.