Single Player Character Progression

Recently, there's been a trend towards single player character progression, and not just in RPGs, but in action games like Dawn of War 2, Brutal Legend, and Assassin's Creed. As single player character progression gets more and more popular, I've started to think about what kind of gameplay single player character progression (hereon CP for the sake of everyone's sanity) creates. What kind of decisions does it give the player?

Why Character Progression is Interesting

Almost all CP decisions have a positive and permanent impact on some stat or your abilities. These are more or less the defining characteristics of a CP decision. For example, in Brutal Legend you can upgrade Eddie Riggs’ axe for an upfront cost and give it snazzy lighting damage, or fire damage. In Devil May Cry 3, you pay blood orbs to give Dante another move or upgrade his weapon damage.

In RPGs, CP decisions are usually very transparent about the exact details of their effects – 10% to spell damage, 20% to all fire spell damage, +100 mana, so on and so forth. For the most part, they give you the raw math that you need to understand which ones are good and which ones aren't so good.

So there’s a skill to deciphering the CP system in RPGs – you know the relative power of your fire spell to your ice spell, so you know that you want your character to take the fire damage increase. Deciphering the system an RPG lays out for you is usually a key part of the core gameplay. You're tinkering with the system; you're trying to find the combination of stats and abilities that the developers didn't quite balance, the math that produces the highest number.

Why Character Progression Doesn't Always Work

However, making CP decisions transparent in action games like Devil May Cry 3 or Brutal Legend is much harder to do, because there is so much more relevant information and that information is so much more obscure. When was the last time you ever saw an enemy’s health as a number in an action game? Or the numbers behind your damage? Typically, action games don’t show you the math behind the system.

So, logically, most action games simply don't tell you the math behind the CP decisions you're making either, because the fundamental system itself is opaque – you wouldn’t know what +10 damage was because you wouldn’t even know how much damage you deal regularly, much less the health of your opponents.

Consequently, CP decisions in action games are much more about luck than your ability to decipher the system. For stat boosts and items, this is definitely true whether the lighting axe does 5% extra damage or 10% extra damage could be the difference between it being worthless and it being completely overpowered, but it doesn’t tell you.  

It's even more luck-based when CP decisions involve learning new abilities in action games. Each ability has a dozen relevant stats – speed of animation, damage, how fast it moves you, whether or not it has invincibility frames, exact range, exactly what effect it has on you, etc etc. It's nearly impossible to tell which moves will end up being useful in these games just by looking at them on the CP decision screen. In some ways, action games are stuck here. Even if these stats were displayed, the player wouldn't understand what they actually represented – because action games have no intuitive way of giving the system to the player without filling the game with clutter.

Fighting games are similar to action games in this sense – they don't give you the math. However, when players get serious about playing, they spend a lot of time testing every single move and giving their results a number, and then comparing it to other moves and deciding whether it’s useful or useless. When serious players do this, they have an understanding of what the numbers mean – they created the number for health, so they know damage in the context of health, and they know how many frames a second the game runs at, so they know what an attack being 120 frames means. Range is less intuitive, but it’s often a reverse-engineered attribute, so they know what the difference between 700 and 600 range is because they made those numbers up to reflect their actual testing in the game. They reverse engineer the system themselves instead of the game giving it to them, so the numbers make sense to them because they created the context.

And it's this raw data that ultimately drives the players' final decisions. Every move in a fighting game is presumably “useful,” in the sense that there was a use intended for it, but only a few are actually worth using. That’s because it doesn’t matter that one attack is “long and slow” and one attack is “short and fast,” what really matter is exactly how long it is and exactly how slow it is.

The Problem of Permanence

Even in single player action games, players are often serious enough to reverse engineer the system in the same way – you'll often see numbers attached to gamefaqs guides on more hardcore action games. So why would reverse engineering the system work for moves in fighting games but not CP decisions in action games? The key difference is that CP decisions are permanent – so the process of figuring out the exact differences between attacks in order to make the right CP decision requires making the CP decision that allows you to test out the attacks in the first place. To contrast, you can really like a character's low kick in a fighting game, but realize that it's worthless against good players once you start getting better. At that point, you stop using it, no harm no foul.

However, that's not inherently bad. In most action games, it's a source of frustration – you're not going to redo 2 hours of a game once you realize that your initial decision to put points into the lighting axe was probably a poor one. But roguelikes have elegantly integrated the trial and error of figuring out the system into the core game itself.  In my experience, the reason why it works for roguelikes but doesn't work for action games is mostly in how they present it. In Brutal Legend, the game is content first, action gameplay second, and the character progression system as a nice little aside. You would never save and load over and over in Brutal Legend to figure out which axe is best because that's not the "point" of the game. But roguelikes make it very clear – the content is the system.

Ben Abraham's Permanent Death

You probably already know that Permanent Death is a iron-man (one death and you delete your save) run of Far Cry 2 done by Ben Abraham. I had heard about it a few months ago, but had only recently decided to read it after being reminded about it by today's Rock Paper Shotgun post on it. In a lot of ways, Permanent Death is incredible – it's incredibly well produced, it's very well written, and it has an absolutely fantastic concept. However, to me, it also misses the point of an iron man run in some ways, instead focusing on being (as it says on the cover) a "novelization" of Far Cry 2.

What I liked about Permanent Death

Permanent Death is really good in many ways. On the simplest level, it's always really interesting to see someone take a game and play it a different way than it's intended to be played, especially when the new ruleset dramatically changes the way you play the game, as iron-man rules often do. Also, Permanent Death has very high production values – the strength of the writing and presentation bind the whole thing together into a strong, coherent package.

One of my favorite things about Permanent Death, however, is that it's trying something interesting. Basically, it's saying – what happens if I play this game an entirely different way? How does the way I play it change? What's interesting about the new way I play the game, and how different is it from the way I play the original game, and what does this difference mean?

What I didn't like about Permanent Death

My biggest problem with Permanent Death, however, is that it doesn't really answer any of these questions. Instead of focusing on what's really interesting and different about an iron-man run of Far Cry 2, it focuses on a telling a narrative version of Far Cry 2's story with occasional interjections that remind you that it's an  iron-man run. It foregoes gameplay for characterization.

Let me give some examples. There's a lot of this in Permanent Death:

"Warren Clyde, was my saviour. He charged in, desert eagle and AK-47 blazing. He must have known I was going to pull something stupid, as he was obviously hanging around nearby. I’ll bet he came running as soon as the shooting started. How else can I explain way the almost divine timing that saw him turn up right at that very moment? A second later and it would have been lights out for Qurbani Singh. Talking to him later in the safe house, I barely remembered the rest of the journey. Apparently he picked me up, dragged me out from the middle of Pala by himself and put me back on my feet at the jetty on the north-western side of town. He even covered my retreat as I got in a boat and puttered downstream to collapse on the camp bed of the nearest safe-house. When I asked him about it, he simply gave me a thumbs up and said “Don’t mention it, man”."

And way too little of this:

"I’ve eaten enough lead to make a paperweight by now, but at least the engine’s running so I try and get to the front of the ship to see if I can’t take out the rocketeer. I didn’t even see the next rocket until the last second so I barely had time to duck out of the way. I hurt myself pretty bad in the process.”

As I read, I was hoping he'd explain his gameplay decisions – for example, why permadeath made him want to take an RPG over an IED, or vice-versa, or why he chose the gun he did, or why he approached from the angle he did. Battle descriptions are far too often "I ran into some guys and shot them and didn't die" and far too rarely about the actual moment-to-moment tactics of the battle.  Instead, there's a lot of exposition about how so-and-so made him go on some mission to retrieve such-and-such a thing, and what the guy looked like, and a whole lot of excellent writing about the character of Far Cry 2's protagonist and what he was thinking about.

Now, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Permanent Death is an excellent novelization of Far Cry 2, and maybe that's all it's supposed to be. But it doesn't talk about any of the things that make an iron-man run interesting. It doesn't really capture how the game changes from normal to iron-man, and how his decisions changed. It's a good story, but as someone who's played Far Cry 2 there's just not that much there.

Goals in MW2: Other Thoughts

A column I wrote a week or so ago for GameSetWatch just went up here. I played a lot of MW2 before I wrote it, but I've played some more since and want to use this post to throw out some other ideas I've had and some things I didn't have room to put in the column.

1. I talked about how stat-tracking creates another goal (k/d ratio, mostly) that can conflict with winning each individual round. I still think that's true - however, there's definitely a lot of positive things about the stat-tracking and ultimately I think the game is better off with it in. For me, stat-tracking's main flaw is also the reason why it helps - it creates a new goal that is more individual than team based. The way that you jump on teams in MW2 feels random enough that the game would be a lot more frustrating if everything was focused on teamplay. Instead, having an average k/d is often what makes me want to play more - it's an individual goal that gives a rough measure of how well I'm playing and whether I'm getting better. To this end, it's much better than a win/loss ratio which is all over the place until you look at it averaging out over 100+ games, which means you have to play 100+ games to even start thinking about how good you are, and even then it's impossible to tell, just by looking at win/loss, whether you're getting better.

2. The advantage that higher-level players have over lower-level players in MW2 is much, much larger than the advantage they had in MW1, for several reasons. First, and most obviously, killstreak unlocks put lower levels at a huge disadvantage - chopper gunner and harrier airstrike are two incredibly important killstreaks to have in this game and you really can't get them both until level 20, and even then you don't have pave low or other important killstreaks until later. There was really nothing comparable to this in MW1. Second, the guns you got initially in MW1 were mostly considered to be the best guns in the game, so while your weaponry wasn't as versatile as other players', you weren't at a huge disadvantage. In MW2, however, the FAMAS and other starting guns are definitely strong, but I think they're much less obviously good than the M16 and MW1's starting weapons. Finally, pro perks! Every perk in MW2 has a "pro" form that you can complete challenges to unlock. The pro form of any perk is always better than the original form, sometimes significantly better. These are another high-level advantage that didn't exist in MW1.

As a result of these advantages, the MMO-levelling part of MW2 is a lot more important than it was in MW1 - one of the reasons why I think that the goal-dissonance it creates is a lot stronger than it was in MW1, where most people didn't care about it nearly as much. That, and titles. Probably mostly titles, actually. I want one of those pony ones so bad.