#they have visual access to any depth that they can explore unlike a broken thing that is forced to bank on

[jrueships]

why is Jare kinda hot lol like even in that video w kyrie i was thinking he sounded so silly but he looked good doing it!

do you forgive him for this because i dont

[rugeon]

The level design of V&A Design/Play/Disrupt

Recently went to the V&A expo on videogames and thought it might be fun to try and think about it’s ‘level design’. I realise its silly to call it that and is more informed by planning an exhibition/ event planning and architecture, but w/e.

[pictured:  how do you Do it?, 2014 - Nina Freeman, Emmett Butler, Decky Coss, and Joni Kittaka]

This is mostly gonna be some simple thoughts on the experience of traversing the space of this exhibition, and how that space is used effectively to create different effects/ experiences, as well as notes on the smarter considerations on how the experience is paced/sequenced.

This warped/truncated/inaccurate/drawn from flawed memory map roughly shows the layout of the V&A expo:

The whole exhibition can be roughly broken up into four fairly distinct parts:

Exhibits of the design of different video games from differently sized studios ~2009 onwards. [blue]

Articles, talking points, video discussions and exhibits of games as part of our broader social context, concerned with violence, gender, sex, sexuality, race, language, protest etc. [orange]

A large video theatre showing some of the communities that form around games. [red]

An arcade showcasing several more experimental games and projects, that is open to free play. [yellow]

DESIGN

When you walk in you are greeted by a huge projector flashing between collages of the various exhibitions and the alternating titles DESIGN, PLAY, DISRUPT.

[pictured slides from Jenny Jiao Hsia’s talk on prototyping to make her game: ‘Consume Me’, 2016]

Seeing this is unavoidable when entering, and it serves as something of a banner to signal the transition into the formal exhibition space. YOU HAVE ENTERED THE WORLD OF THE VIDEO GAMES.

Mapping this first area of the 1. Design section of the exhibit we get something like this:

Note that these numbers are in an arbitrary order of roughly when I encountered them, and are not indicative of density, just general location of possibly several bits of each exhibit. Also this list is not exhaustive, nor is the map strictly accurate, I do not have an eidetic memory, but I do have a notebook and a smartphone.

Design/Play/DIsrupt screen

Large Print Text Binders

‘Journey’ gameplay montage projection

Notebooks, sketches, a headphone + video prototype demo, inspo photos/footage, graph and board of intended player journeys/narrative threads

‘Last of Us’ Dual screen demo showing gameplay and some of the work relevant to make that part of the game happen

Sketches, notebooks, board plotting out story events/setpieces in seasons, film made for atmosphere reference, blue sky concept art, colour scripts

Mocap footage +suit

Matt Lees @jam _sponge describing the anxious, excitable play of ‘Bloodborne’ between 3 screens.

Notebooks, sketches+concept art, level design docs, and SketchUp pics of early levels, headphones to listen to a recording of the soundtrack

Bunch of top designs for ‘Splatoon’

Early Prototype, creature sketches, fashion asset design

Playable prototypes from the making of Consume Me

Notebooks, corkboards, workplace ephemera, unity project demo, headphone + video 40 minute talk on prototypes

Music from ‘Kentucky Route Zero’ / KR0, visual representation of branching dialogue in twine, Margritte’s ‘Spring in the Forest’

Inspirations, typeface considerations, group wiki, twine showcase

Realtime Art Manifesto, Even more notebooks, with sketches and details of designing Tale of Tale’s ‘The Graveyard’

Playable demo of The Graveyard

Bench

Multi-screen montage of generated worlds in ‘No Man’s Sky’

Blueprint tool for spaceships, terrain debug tool, sci-fi inspirations

Visual inspirations

So what are some of the ways we can think about how this expo was laid out? 

For a start it’s fairly linear, there are no branching paths at Design/Play/Disrupt, it’d be a layout ill-suited to somewhere like this where there’s a strong desire for the audience to see all the content and assets (the exhibits) and not miss any pieces that time was spent curating. Thankfully unlike some videogames, this linearity is not gated. There are no attendants fiendishly running up behind you and closing doors as you move from one game to another, people might have missed something, or want to visit an earlier piece while friends are preoccupied with something for a little longer.

Exhibits are visited for the most part in a defined order, with some freedom in the Kentucky Route Zero/Graveyard room as well as the Splatoon/Consume Me room. You are encouraged to experience what is on display for each work and are being guided in a deliberate order, as opposed to set loose in an open hall with no boundaries where some attendees might skip or miss a part of the exhibition.

One thing tying sections you can explore or skip is their loose thematic / tonal linking:

To put it another way, there is a good reason that Bloodborne is next to The Last of Us. Both are triple-A big budget, rated 16+, 18+ action games for blood guts and all the cheery stuff. Consume Me and Splatoon work well next to eachother as the cute aesthetic and playable prototypes hanging from the ceiling work well across from Nintendo’s colourful and playful Splatoon. It would be a bit less natural to have the grotesque and rapacious sounds of Bloodborne echoing within the exact same room as Splatoon. I’m not saying any of these works don’t have some commonality beyond the arbitrary border I’ve drawn, but they fit better together. 

- Plus this open space invites an atmosphere of play after having just been cramped into two games rooms that feature horror elements

[Pictured: Splatoon’s section, as well as Consume Me minigame prototypes open to play, suspended from the ceiling]

This also showcases another thing about this event applicable to level design: the same space can be made appealing to different types of audiences. This is an exhibit about video games. I’ll admit this is just my gut but I’d be willing to bet that this exhibit is more likely to be attended by parents and their children than it would most other exhibits. I don’t know exactly what the V&A’s idea of the ideal attendant is, and that’s probably owed to the fact that this event catered to lots of different levels of assumed knowledge and engagement with videogames. 

Parent’s who might be a little out of touch with mainstream games, are quite likely to have been put off by bringing their kid to something that was entirely wall to wall Bloodborne, Dark Souls and other things as frightening (as much as I personally would have enjoyed that). Standing watching a parent pull their rapt child away from dulcet descriptions of how deadly mistakes are, in the big monster game, the success of the exhibition is apparent; the next room is a bit more targeted towards that kid’s age range (even though they did seem pretty into Bloodborne). 

[The concept art from Bloodborne is such a treat]

It’s no surprise as well that the first game is not The Last of Us, but Journey. More people are playing games now than ever but there remains a fair few people who still don’t really know what’s going on in games. As an exhibition that in part is attempting to show the breadth and depth of games being designed, it makes sense that the first introduction to what games are being made is a game without much in the way of traditional combative interaction. 

To wafflingly reiterate: the sequence of how things were placed matters: The accessibility options: 2. [Large Print Binders] are available at the start. Benches and places to sit are placed later throughout the exhibit (including rather wittily across from The Graveyard; a game where the entire goal is to make an old woman sit on a bench).

Reinforcing this point of how the same space can be made to cater to different people this event was extremely Multimedia. Explanations of parts each games design process written up, sketchbooks, and lots of different drawings, scrawled graphs, charts and plans. Concept art, drawings. Video of prototypes and animation, Sounds of ‘Long Journey Home’ echoing up the hall, and the omnipresent dread of Matt Lees echoing down, as well as headphones to listen to specific parts of the exhibition that might be less suited to how crowded the soundscape is or be for a more narrow audience (I wonder how many of the attendants listened to all ~40 Minutes of Jenny Jiao Hsia’s talk on prototyping. I did. It was good). Just in this section of the exhibit, there were so many different means of engagement, and they all felt very well matched to the story of each games development that they wanted to tell, while still offering different types of engagement. People can be looking at a video display showing how the layers of environmental concept art become important and manifest in The Last of Us, while someone else is poring over sketches of Ellie’s design. 

[Corkboard plotting out events + setpieces across the timeline of The Last of Us]

As an exhibition space, it is made with the fact that multiple people are occupying it at the same time in mind. If something is not available you can engage with something else. And if one type of engagement is not to your tastes there’s a good chance something else will be- not bothered about the wiki used to help the team of KR0 to communicate? Maybe you’ll be more interested in some of Ben Babbit’s sonic improvisations, or the visual inspirations involved in the creation of the game.

There’s more I could talk about wrt this first sections layout of how it winds you around instead of giving you a straightline to the exit, the choice of games playable being fundamentlly simple, an anecdotally sweet image of a child holding the obscenely big original xbox ‘duke controller’  on a pedestal and their dad cradling their hands. But I’ll just leave off this post here for now and maybe continue looking at V&A things and posting about it later.

To be continued..?

[thehallofgame]

Review: Dragon Age 2

Release: 2011

My Rating: 8/10

              Dragon Age is a series that inspires some passionate and very divided opinions. Dragon Age 2 embodies that. Developed in a painfully tight two-year window, Dragon Age 2 aimed to get a sequel to Dragon Age Origins ou as soon as possible and, also, to tell a different, more intimate sort of dark fantasy story. The game was ambitious in what it attempted to accomplish in a minimal development window and it succeeded in some areas, but not in others. Dragon Age 2 managed to be a character-driven, politically intense and truly dark narrative told over the course of a decade but it also took place almost entirely in one city, reused the same maps and assets endlessly, and relied far too heavy on using waves of enemies to make combat encounters difficult.

              The game begins during one of the most important events of its predecessor, the dacking of Lothering. The main character of Dragon Age 2, Hawke, and his family, are refugees fleeing the blight. With a little bit of help from new friends, and draconic intervention, what remains of the family survives to begin a new life in the city-state of Kirkwall. Kirkwall, part of a collection of city-states known as the Free Marches, is a former center of the slave trade. It’s grim, dark, crowded, violent, and the Hawkes have to build a home there. What follows is the intertwined story of a city in social collapse, a refugee’s rise to fame and their relationship with all the most powerful players on the local political scene.

              Framed as a retelling by Hawke’s close friend Varric, the story of the Champion of Kirkwall is designed to be taken with a grain of salt. As one of the companions Hawke gains earliest in the game, it is established right away that Varric Tethras is a dwarf with a heart of gold and a penchant for grossly exaggerated story-telling. That can excuse a lot of nonsense that takes place in the game but not all. The narrative structure of Dragon Age 2 is vastly different than its predecessor. Instead of a tale of a hero overcoming a singular, huge threat, Dragon Age 2 is broken into a prologue and three arcs, each of which chronicles Hawke’s journey through a major life event or political shift in the city.

              Hawke’s companions are a ragtag group of warriors, rogues, and mages each representing different political and social backgrounds. Their relationship to Hawke swings wildly on a bar from friend to rival in response to actions and dialogue choices the player makes with each party member in the party. All the companions have a great deal of interest and depth to explore, and with one companion quest for each of the three acts of the game, the player gets to see a lot of that depth. It’s a shame, then, that the relationship building is boiled down to what is essentially a point-based system. The player has to be constantly mindful of what threshold they’re at (but of course, there’s only a visually represented bar and no numbers, so the player can only eyeball where they stand) because not exceeding certain percentages of friendship or rivalry can result in party members abandoning the party, or a romance the player was interested in pursuing not beginning despite the player’s best efforts. It doesn’t help that the game is slightly glitch-prone and sometimes certain events just don’t occur for no discernable reason.

              Meanwhile, customization opinions for the player character are markedly decreased since the first game. The player is still free to play as a male or female hero, but they now must be human. There are also pre-built faces for Garret and Marian Hawke that can’t be re-created in the actual character customization engine, so if you were interested in tweaking anything about Garret or Marian’s face without changing it entirely… you can’t. The player can also choose one of the three standard classes for Hawke: Warrior, rogue or mage. However, as both the game and the Hawke family history are heavily invested in the conflict between brutal church led segregation of mages and what happens when people are desperate to be free, it makes a great deal of sense to play Hawke as a mage. There’s no reason not to play as the other classes, but the mage route adds the most personal stake in the narrative to Hawke.

              Each of the three classes begins the game with access to several branching skill trees. Many of the skills have come over directly from the first game, but the new presentation makes them easier to identify and use. Each of the trees is composed of complementary techniques that form a magic or fighting style. As they level up, each of Hawke’s companions will unlock a tree unique to them and their story which contains their most powerful techniques and strongest abilities. Hawke will eventually be able to choose two of three possible specialization trees, though theirs are more generic and most are specializations ported directly from the first game.

              As abilities are gained the player will probably want to map them to the tactics system, because while the player can switch between characters during combat, nobody has time to manage four characters during real-time RPG combat. Based again on a tiered, priority based system, new options and more specific toggles make the tactics system better. It is still inherently limited by being a simple if-then statement based system that relies on the player to organize actions correctly so that they’ll trigger in order of priority (i.e. you probably want to have healing moves be command 1, rather than below any sort of attack move). It’s not a very adaptive system, but unlike in Dragon Age Origins, I didn’t experience any instances of abilities activating incorrectly. More abilities, such as area of effect techniques, can now be used without worry through the tactics system.

              Before getting into combat, a quick word on the inventory and equipment system. Once again, the player is gonna get a lot of backtracking in. traveling back and forth to the store to sell the literal junk (seriously, junk is now an item category) that clogs the small inventory space. Every character has a slot for two rings, one necklace and one belt that all provide stat bonuses and other conditional effects. They all, except Varric who has a special weapon, can have their weapons switched out and customized with runes to deal extra or elemental damage. However, Hawke has the only armor in the game that can changed out, and as every class can only equip certain item types, most of the armor Hawke finds in the field is useless and has to be sold. Meanwhile, each party member ‘dresses themselves’ in a signature outfit/armor that Hawke can find upgrades for in the field as well as enchant with runes to increase its effectiveness. Every single character has the same body type as every other member of their race and gender. This isn’t so egregious for elves, dwarves or quanari, but for humans it’s downright obnoxious. All the men in the game have tiny hips, broad shoulders, and six-pack abs. All the woman have comically large breasts and walk with an exaggerated hip-sway. The worst example of this is a party member named Isabela. She’s well beloved, and for good reason, but her design is ridiculous. She wears thigh high boots, a thong, and an under-bust corset with just enough excess fabric to cover the bottom half of her breasts, her crotch and her bottom. As a curvy, female, martial artist I have it on good authority any warrior worth their salt would not fight in this. I don’t care that Isabela’s character “justifies it”, video game characters don’t get to dress themselves. She’s a pirate captain and expert duelist before she’s a sex object, even in her own in-game descriptions of herself. I frankly find the way she’s dressed, and the way some fans defend that choice, insulting. Please forgive the outburst, but I believe it’s relevant and worth discussing.

              To return to the subject at hand: combat. Faster paced than Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2 uses snappy auto-attack animations and flashy lighting effects to achieve dramatic combat encounters. Left clicking an enemy will cause a character to auto-attack them until one of their abilities is activated. Whoever the player is controlling will not use their tactics system, and instead, the player will have to trigger their abilities by mapping them to the number buttons or by selecting them manually. Once used, each will be unusable for a short period while it cools down. Luckily, the player will soon have plenty to choose from, and it will be the extent of their stamina/mana pool that limits them. It costs either stamina or mana to use any ability, and in long battles, the reserves will quickly run down. HP, mana, and stamina all have consumables that can restore them, but they too have cooldowns, which incentivizes resolving combats quickly.

              Combat becomes the core gameplay mechanism, as due to the small map sizes, both exploration and puzzle solving aspects become minimal. Each chapter has a strong core story, and most of the companion quests are also strong and add plenty of depth to the off-time. Unfortunately, most of the game’s other side quests don’t hold up. Many of them are simple fetch and/or slay quests in the same repetitive environments, fighting the same enemy types. It’s really obvious padding, and the game didn’t need it. Maybe without it, the game would’ve been significantly shorter, but that may well have been a good thing for those exasperated with Dragon Age 2.

              This game is deeply flawed but not inherently bad. Where it really stumbled was not meeting fan’s high expectations of a follow up to Dragon Age Origins. Bioware shot themselves in the foot three times over on this one with the short development time, changing the scope, and changing the core feel of this game. While set in the same world, with the same gameplay, and the same core themes, Dragon Age 2 doesn’t feel like Dragon Age Origins and that disappointed a lot of people. I think the story and the characters, my favorite grouping in any Bioware game, is more than worth those changes. Not everyone does. I wholeheartedly insist that Dragon Age 2 is worth at least one play. Trust me. Though the game itself doesn’t always play like a triple A title, there’s something so alive and so endearing about these characters that they’re not worth missing over some clunky mechanics.

 The Exiled Prince (🆗): I really want to like this DLC, or more accurately, this new party member. Sebastian Vael is an archer, priest and former prince of a nearby city-state that has recently suffered a coup that eliminated his whole family, save him. His character, focusing on both the politics of the Free Marches and the point of view of a devotee to the dominant religion, feels like it fills a niche in the party. Likewise, it’s nice that he also adds a new romance option for a female Hawke. Yet, despite these things, Sebastian doesn’t feel as fully realized as the other characters. He’ll often refuse to go on story-missions, presumably because he wasn’t written into them, and also seems to have fewer or less interesting party-banter than other companions. The idea for the Exiled Prince was good but, unlike the DLC character Shale from Dragon Age Origins, Sebastian doesn’t slide into the story and instead remains something of an outsider.

Legacy (👍🏻): This is the best DLC that came out for Dragon Age 2 by a long shot. Its story actually contributes to the world-building and advances the overall plot of the Dragon Age world. Perhaps too much, some have said, because the villain introduced solely in this DLC becomes the main antagonist of Dragon Age Inquisition. That aside, however, the Legacy DLC provides much-wanted expansion on the story of Hawke’s dead father and a chance to reconnect with any surviving Hawke siblings after they’ve parted ways. It’s also long, has some decent but not punishing puzzles, and a solid, twisting and turning story.

Mark of The Assassin (🆗): Considering the most major selling point for this DLC was the fact that nerd-show-staple actress Felicia Day lent her voice and likeness to it, I wasn’t expecting much from Mark of the Assassin. To its credit, it’s more fun and meatier than expected. The basic premise is that Hawke gets talked into going on a jewel heist at a high society party in the French-themed empire of Orlais. The only thing of consequence that occurs is some expansion of the Qunari belief system, which makes this DLC entirely skippable. Especially because an eye-roll inducing stealth system and a story that encourages you to miss the best rewards for the mission all conspire to make the DLC occasionally irritating despite fun combats and some truly funny gags and side quests.