"This isn't D&D!"

While paging through the interesting but overpriced "30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons and Dragons," I came across a passage written by Ed Stark regarding the adaptation of the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition ruleset to a computer game.  An early draft of the rules was sent to Bioware, and Bioware was to develop a game to roughly coincide with the official release of the rules by the new owners of the property, Wizards of the Coast.  
 
When Bioware finished their design and sent it to Wizards for approval, the game had changed so much in the hands of Bioware that Ed Stark said, "This isn't D&D!" 
Wizards rejected much of Bioware's design and sent a couple of guys up to Bioware headquarters, where they rewrote Bioware's interpretation of the rules right in front of them.
 
What's missing is Bioware's perspective on this.  I doubt they'd likely go public with their feelings about this late-stage rewrite of the development they'd worked hard to adapt to the computer screen, but I have my suspicions. 
 

License to Sit Still

 
Given the development of Dragon Age Origins, where they specifically set out to create their OWN RPG engine rather than cater to an outside license, to me it's fairly clear that the hassle with dealing with a licensee was hindering their ability to make the game they wanted. Not to mention having to pay others for the privelege of working within their system and riding upon the fame of the license.
 
Not only that, but as someone who's both played pen-and-paper RPGs and the computer variety, I know that those two forms are entirely different beasts when it comes to how a game plays out.  Expecting a pen-and-paper ruleset to be mirrored by the computer game is a tall order.  Of course there were changes every time Bioware, Black Isle, SSI, whomever, put out a licensed game.  Things changed slightly or drastically, many were dropped, some were expanded.  Things that were math-intensive or required the player to be unaware of what was going on was easy to do for a computer RPG, while the pen-and-paper game's strengths, improvisation, peeking behind an unexpected door, and creative use of resources, were huge development obstacles that would take a pen-and-paper group a few seconds to resolve. 
 

I Was Once but the Learner...

 
With that strange relationship between Bioware and Wizards in the back of my mind, I stumble upon this article:
 
Designing the Dragon Age Tabletop RPG
 
and I can't help but grin.  What sparked this blog entry was this passage:
 
It appears Bioware isn't doing what Wizards did, trying to dictate the system to them in the final hour; they worked with Green Ronin from the get-go, making it a tandem project, and stating explicitly that the video game and the pen-and-paper version should probably NOT be the same.  I'm not a big Bioware fan and I don't abjectly hate Wizards of the Coast, but to me this mirror-image event is really cool.  D&D, the game that started the entire hobby, helped build Bioware's success-- and now that Bioware is a huge name in RPGs, they're getting people to do versions of THEIR games. 

 

A Postscript for Those Interested in the Pen-and-Paper Side of Things

It looks to me as if Green Ronin's approach to their design for their game is a fun one, in that it's a bit of a hearkening back to the old designs of early RPGs, with less complicated rules and more flexibility, while getting rid of the anachronistic approaches which don't fit into the hobby anymore.  Pramas says later in the interview how he looked to the original D&D boxed sets as direct inspiration for how to tackle it, a sort of game in a box rather than stringing out consumers through a chain of supplements all necessary for the basic game.  (Their version of hooking consumers is that each boxed set has a level cap, where you buy each set when your characters are ready to get upgraded.  I think that's reasonable; if you like the game, you'll buy more.  If you don't, it was pretty cheap, especially considering what most SINGLE pen and paper books go for).
 
The current edition of Dungeons and Dragons, the 4th, is considered by some to be fairly unrecognizable when compared to the older Dungeons and Dragons rules, although I'd argue there are some lines of similarity.  What's remarkable is that during the concept phase, Wizards of the Coast designers talked about taking a cue from video games, like MMORPGs, for some of their mechanics.  Players of World of Warcraft will recognize some of the mechanics of D&D 4E, as will players of tactical battle games (as it's moved pretty much inexorably to miniatures on a battle map now).   As to whether or not this was the right choice is up to the individual, but computer games were an influence nonetheless. 
 
Again, a circle.
 
I think pen and paper games are stronger when they do their own thing, so I'm hoping Green Ronin's Dragon Age delivers on those design promises and gets the attention it deserves.  Heck, I hope the hobby itself gets more in the bargain too, but that's me :) 

A Post-postscript for Anyone Interested in the Actual Mechanics of the Dragon Age Pen-and-Paper RPG

 
Chris Pramas talked with co-workers on the Green Ronin website about the project, including hints about the actual mechanics the game is using.  As a bit of a RPG vet, at least relatively speaking, it sounded neat, so I thought I'd share for any fellow RPG geeks out there.
 
All tests of ability are resolved by rolling three six-sided dice, two of a neutral color and one of a different color (red, I imagine).  You have a difficulty level that you have to meet or beat by totaling up the roll and adding the appropriate attribute rating (say it's a contest of strength.  You roll 3d6 and add whatever your strength happens to be, and then compare that result to the difficulty the game master has set). The reason the dice are different colors is that the off-color die tells you how successful you were, if you met the difficulty level of the roll.  6 means you did really well, 1 means you just barely scraped by.  
 
In addition, if you roll doubles in any combination of the three dice, the off-color die acts as a sort of customizable critical success.  The off-color die counts as points you must immediately spend to add an effect to the thing you just did.  In a twist, you are the one who chooses what the result will be, by purchasing it from a list using the die's point value.  So you get to make something grand happen fitting the context of the situation (the different tables for each class further differentiate rogues and warriors, which some have said are rather similar in the computer version of the game).   Mages also have access to their own tables, which allow for special effects when casting a spell.
 
Given that most games dictate what a critical successes does for you, I think that sounds pretty fun :)

 

What a Difference 10 Gigs Make.

I've finished Machinarium.  Past the demo hints I mentioned, I actually never used the hint system even once, which I'm pretty proud of.  I'll have my reflections about the game up eventually, and maybe log a review of it just for fun.
 
When finished with that, I wondered where my gaming eyes would fall next.  We managed to clear like, 10 GB (gigabytes, not Game Banshee or Giant Bomb) of hard drive space after a long overdue purge of old files and defragmentation, and it was sorta like getting a bunch of money.  The first words out of my mouth then were pretty much "I wanna re-install Diablo."  All this talk of Diablo III and Torchlight (the name keeps making me think of Doctor Who spinoffs) had me wanting to kill things, take their stuff, and possibly repair it.
 
Since the purge I had to make sure I had the latest Diablo II patch just in case they'd updated, and apparently they nearly had.  In that, they were still actively working on patch 1.13, something that has yet to be released.  First it was an issue with Warcraft III that forced the "legacy" team at Blizzard to reorient and stop whatever madness that exploit was allowing; then when they got back on the Diablo patch they realized that adding more space to the cache threatened game performance!!  I still can't quite wrap my mind around that one, but I guess keeping track of all these extra items would be brutal on the already optimized multiplayer servers and ladder tracking thing.  I doubt it would have much impact on single-player--  regardless, they said that they had to hammer that down to see if it was even possible to implement it NOW, rather than put out 1.13 as-is and then try to add the cache upgrade later, since that would likely be even harder to implement.
 
All this had my eyes bugging a bit.  It also had me hesitating to install Diablo II, since I have a completist mindset when it comes to game versions.  I know that a better version of Diablo II is out there, so I'm going to wait for it!
 
So, I get up this mornin' and see that my go-to GOG (Good Old Games, not Gog from the land of Magog) is selling a game I regretted not getting when I passed by in the bargain bin.  After watching Greg Kasavin's love letter* on Gamespot (for like the third time, I think) I decided it was time to go for it.  More than a gig of game in that purchase, and it's taking a while to download, but I think I found something to do with my spare time (and something to occupy all this spare space). 
 
Download 44% complete.  It's going to be a long day :)
 
*Note: Thankfully, a Greg Kasavin-style love letter is not the same as a Frank Booth-style love letter.  At least as far as I know.
 
P.S. Download 100%, but apparently this machine is outpaced by [the game I downloaded], which I didn't think was possible considering how old it is.  Looks like yet another game is going to get exported to the laptop.  Too bad I didn't think to download the demo first! :P

The Progress of Adventure Games

Adventure games have, for a long time, been in the process of streamlining.  I think this comes from the old parser days, where people found it frustrating to have to guess what the designers were thinking.  They tried to make things more accessible through point-and-click interfaces, allowing you various verbs to interact with the environment.
 
When this process gained the pixel-hunt reputation for, if you're stumped, having to mouse over every little area to try to guess what, again, the designers were thinking, the mouse-over icon was born.  You can see an example of this in the Axel and Pixel Quicklook on this site, where the cursor will sort of tell you what's background and foreground.  The verbs, in a sense, are melded with mousing over a location, to where you no longer need to pick the right verb for solving a puzzle.  There are still inventory systems with these, so the verbs and items are still in a sense present, but nowhere near the amount that there used to be in games like those using the SCUMM interface, or the old point-and-click Sierra games.
 
This next step in simplification has been somewhat of a godsend for players who don't have the time and patience to solve puzzles through trial and error if the solution doesn't come naturally.  You still get a thrill from solving the puzzle using your own ingenuity, but you can at least progress if you happen not catch what's necessary to do.  The problem comes when the process of solving a puzzle now leads to a diminshed puzzle depth, reducing that rush of happy juice in the brain when you figure things out.  You run about, knocking things over, until it all falls into place, scanning the cursor over everything to find out what's pushable and what's just in the background.
 
I'm of a mind that this is one step too far, or at least a half a step.  We can still go about figuring out the puzzle methodically, but the reduction in variables is so much that you can, if you want, do little more than wave your magic cursor over the screen to find the points that really matter.
 

But, Czech This Out:

What I discovered while playing the demo for the new game Machinarium, made by the group who brought is the Samarost series, is that they had through clever design found a solution to this problem, while keeping the interactions simple enough not to be too frustrating.  With mouse-over contextual icons, adventure games allow the cursor to almost be another character, a semi-sentient puzzle solving creature that automatically knows what a thing is for.  It might be too much to ask of us to be able to figure out what an object does and how it should be wielded in order to help solve a puzzle, but sometimes this allows us to be a bit too lazy in actually figuring out how everything fits together.  Machinarium solves this dilemma elegantly:
 Your character cannot interact with an object or the environment unless he is standing closely to it.  This isn't new in and of itself; there are plenty of games that tell you "you're not close enough yet".  What Machinarium does is it doesn't tell you these objects are worth interacting until you get close to them.  You still can mouse over things, but because you have to be close to them, the world instantly becomes less static.  You need to look for interesting areas, and experiment more than a quick-mouse over of the whole screen allows.  
 
On top of this, your character has the ability to stretch in height, or shorten himself, in order to access areas that are otherwise unreachable at his normal height.  Again, experimentation is encouraged, because you have to look at an object and ask yourself if the object is low or high enough to warrant changing the character's shape.  
 
The variables aren't increased substantially, but when you add these layers to the traditional mouse-over, you're forced to do some thinking about where you're going to go next and what you're going to do there.   The experimentation must be more intelligent in order to be successful, and that's why I think it's such a breakthrough.
 

Lessons Learned

 
Playing the demo made me realize just how lazy the latest iterations of adventure games have made me.  I beat a King's Quest or two in my day, as well as the lethal Space Quests and the clever Day of the Tentacle and Fate of Atlantis, so I know how cheap or obscure game designers could be. When I found myself doing the mouse-over thing in Machinarium, and usually not getting anywhere, it became clear what I needed to do was really start observing my environment again, instead of pretending the game was just an interactive painting.
 
I still didn't solve some of the puzzles, but I found the reason I hadn't was often because I was forgetting to think in the terms the game was telling me to think in.  I sometimes forgot that I had to actually be next to an object, rather than be some disembodied cursor spirit.  I also found that I often assumed the contextual cursor I saw in a given place was the ONLY possible interaction; again, this was an artifact of this increasing laziness that the self-solving style of puzzles have encouraged.  I managed to get past these problems by using the clever two level hint system, but once I figured out what I needed to do, I felt a bit ashamed for using the hints.  That's a good sign.
 

Other Features

 
The two levels of hints I mentioned let the player get the basic goal of the level, and if that's not enough, a Game & Watch-inspired minigame pops up.  If you manage to beat it, you get a generous, step-by-step solution to solving every puzzle in the level.   The minigame increases in difficulty every time you try to use it, so it's best to only pull it out when you have to.
 
You get the usual inventory list of acquired items, some of which you can combine (and they're relatively painless to combine, too, with a minimum of actions needed to do this, unlike some of the older games that would pause to tell you how stupid you were for trying to combine x and y together).
 
The artwork itself manages to be colorful and bleak at the same time.  I like bleak stuff myself, but I tend to like even that to have a sense of color and artistry to it, and Machinarium has that.  Just check out their screenshots to see kind of what I mean.  The music, by Tomas Dvorak (not sure if he's related to the other guy) has enough quirk to lend the right sense of quiet, mystery, and humor that the robotic main character and the other mechanical inhabitants show with their animations.  There are also other touches, like the daydreaming the main character does in addition to his other idle animations, which provide some foreshadowing to things that will be revealed later.  
 
Note that the Steam version doesn't quite give you the soundtrack mp3s as a free bonus, like buying directly from the company does.
 

I Hope this Is a Sign of Things to Come

What looks like a standard puzzle game, in my opinion at least, is a revolutionary in how it goes about combining the expected adventure elements into something pleasantly challenging and beautiful to see and hear.  I hope more developers take this route in the future, rather than trying to simply make things easier or add more distractions to a genre which already has tons of untapped potential.  Kudos to Amanita Design!

I MAY have a chance to play the XBox version of Psychonauts in the near future.  I'm looking forward to the chance.  Ever since I learned that a lot of the games I liked from Lucasarts were all masterminded by the same dude, I've begun to understand the whole Psychonauts obsession people have.
 
I played the demo for the PC a month or two ago...  I think...  and barring control difficulties I enjoyed the style of it.  The only thing that bugged me was that it seemed like money endlessly generated around the little camp where you start, which to me seems like an odd design choice since that means you can basically obsessively collect money and buy everything.  Maybe the stuff you buy isn't that big a deal though, so collecting a bunch just helps the game from stalling when you need recuperative items or whatever.
 
Whatever you may think of Brutal Legend, the guy's got a good list of games behind him-- The short but sweet Full Throttle and the excellent Grim Fandango spring to mind.  So I'm pretty sure I'm in for a treat...  assuming I get it :)
 
If not there's always buying it straight from the company store, but that will cost me...  nearly a hundred dollars, all told.  Not too keen on that if I can avoid it.  Should I get the game, if anyone's interested in hearing what I have to say (in the same way that I'm interested in hearing what people who saw Star Wars for the first time think of it), let me know.

Like many I held out hopes for Scribblenauts being revolutionary, but I think the big problem is it didn't learn the lessons of its predecessors, the text adventures of old.  Put succinctly: Scribblenauts got the nouns down.  What it forgets is the verbs.
 
Parser commands in those old games were difficult because they not only had you worry about nouns (that were, granted, already in the game world in some fashion, not summoned by the player), but also about how you could interact with the environment, other things, things with other things, and things with the environment.  Lots of combinations to work out, and eventually you just had to hope people wouldn't be so lacking in creativity, or too creative, to get themselves stuck.  Some of the puzzles were deliberately diabolical ( Douglas Adams' games spring to mind), but other times it was a function of the game makers and the game players sometimes being in a different mindset.
 
That different mindset is dangerous if you expect players to play a game fluidly.  While you can expect some stumbling blocks in a game so ambitious, it seems like Scribblenauts wound up letting the actions that objects and you can have with the environment go by the wayside, and it apparently suffers for this huge oversight.
 
Others aren't so rash as to ignore the power of the verb.  Veteran game creator Chris Crawford is working on a system that seems more like a build-your-own-dialogue box rather than set choices.  It's sort of like a hybrid between the old, unmanageable parsers and the staid dialogue options we often get in RPGs now.  Take a look, I'm hoping more people will capitalize on the power of this idea, as it may finally help bridge the gap between immense player creativity, and a designer's limited means to harness it.
 
The openly licensed system is available on the project's main page:  

http://www.storytron.com/