Here is a serious blast from the past with an episode of Electric Playground I and the Naughty Dog team filmed over 25 years ago!
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
If you liked this post, follow me at:
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!
For more articles detailing the making of Crash Bandicoot, click here.
Ars Technica — the awesome technical website — put together an equally awesome video interview with me about the making of Crash Bandicoot as part of their War Stories series detailing how various video games were created.
You can check it out here:
This interview gets into the nitty gritty of various problems we faced and overcame at Naughty Dog in our quest to realize the goal of making one of the first 3D Platform Action Adventure games. When we started, no one had ever made a Character Action game in 3D and we were forging boldly (insanely?) into new territory. We were young. 3D graphics were young. The Playstation was young. Gaming was young (or at least younger than it is now). So Jason, I, and the rest of the team had to figure everything out from scratch and just try to make the best game possible.
Speaking of teams, the one at Ars did an awesome job animating and editing my detailed story so that it actually makes sense!
And on 3/26/20 Ars cut a second episode from my footage for their “Extended Interview” series:
Check out the full Ars article here. or the second one here.
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed The series begins here: Making Crash Bandicoot
If you liked this post, follow me at:
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!
For more articles detailing the making of Crash Bandicoot, click here.
It’s been a while since we heard too much about The Last of Us part II, but rest assured that Naughty Dog has been plugging away full steam on what promises to be a second epic installment. So, today (9/24/19) they announced that the game will be available next year on February 21, 2020 and we got this juicy new cinematic trailer:
Ellie has grown up, and is making choices of her own, plus, after some degree of absence, we’re reminded that that Joel still has her back too. Looks gorgeous, creepy, and hyper violent.
TLOU being hands down the best story based video game of all time and a personal favorite of mine means this is right up there as my most eagerly awaited announced game.
I made this little video for a presentation and it was kinda cute, so I figured I’d post it here. I tried to chronicle both the changing graphics and the consistencies in gameplay across the sweep of 35+ years.
Most of my lifetime and platform game protagonists are still swinging from ropes — not that that’s such a bad thing!
I’m no stranger to Trading Card strategy games, having played Magic: The Gathering way back in 1993 (and fairly heavily through 1995 or 96). In recent years, lacking an enthusiastic series of human opponents, I periodically tried my hand at their latest computer incarnations. Most recently, this was IOS Magic 2013. This game was okay, but the designers felt too beholden to the specifics of the card game and not confident enough to invest in changes that would streamline the digital experience. Also, I’ve long felt that nearly all MTG expansion packs have strayed from their classic D&D flavored roots into that sort of bizarre out-there-and-too-cool-for-school style of western fantasy (all that dimensional and plane waker stuff).
To prove my old school cred, I dug up 20 year old box of magic cards, including beta dual manas, and a 1996 calendar!
Which brings us to Blizzard’s entry into this underdeveloped genre: Hearthstone. Basically, the Irvine powerhouse has taken the MTG formula, reskinned it with Warcraft characters, and streamlined it for online play. And while this may sound merely evolutionary — and it is — in typical Blizzard fashion, when they do something, they do it well.
Hearthstone is great fun and the gameplay itself extremely well balanced (considering its beta state) and fast and furious for a card game.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdXl3QtutQI]For those of you not familiar with this sort of game, it represents a “duel” between two fantasy characters. Each player constructs (or uses an off the shelf) deck of cards out of the pool of cards they own. Hearthstone’s decks are 30 cards, no more than two of any one type. You draw from this (shuffled) deck representing spells, abilities, and creatures to play them against your opponent as best you can. Generally cards require certain resources (mana) be spent to play, limiting the combinations you can cast in a given turn.
The biggest Hearthstone gameplay innovation (and I haven’t played enough Trading Card Duel games to know if it’s even a real innovation) is assigning decks a distinct class. In MTG, your deck design balances the flavor of mana versus the cost needs of various cards. I.e. it’s possible to “dual class” (or even triple class), but the odds of ending up with mismatched land and spell/creature cards becomes greater. In Hearthstone, you select one of the original nine Warcraft classes (Warrior, Rogue, Warlock, Mage, Druid, Shaman, Paladin, Priest, and Hunter — Deathknight and Monk being left for a future patch). Your deck must be constructed from cards specific to that class or the Neutral cards. This is quite clever as by giving each class unique mechanics found only in their specific cards, particular gameplay styles are created. Each class also has a unique 2 mana hero ability which can be used once per turn without consuming a card. This serves to both differential them and prevent the “nothing to do because I don’t have a usable card” problem. In Hearthstone, mana capacity notches up one turn at a time (unless affected by special cards). I.e. first turn you have one mana available, next turn two, and so on. This helps measure out the phase and progression of the game, being like a less frustrating version of playing your MTG lands.
A typical game board
The original World of Warcraft classes transition to this new medium impressively. For flavor, the art is very similar, cards are almost invariably named after WOW spells and creatures, and many are even accompanied by sound effects or voice snippets lifted right out of the MMO (Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!) . To a longtime WOW player like myself (9 years!), this is all pretty effective. I’ve played most WOW classes (all but Hunter and Shaman) and I’ve done enough PVP and raided exhaustively. For me,all the class abilities have a certain iconic quality. Add the fact that Blizzard based the mechanics of the individual classes around similar WOW abilities to color me impressed. For example, mage specific cards include: Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missles, Fireball, Polymorph, Cone of Cold, Flamestrike, Frost Nova, Frostbolt, Ice Lance, Mirror Image, Blizzard, Pyroblast, Mana Wyrm, Water Elemental, and Ice Block — all of which are fairly faithful to their WOW roots. And they world as a cohesive play feel and strategy that makes the transition into the card duel.
Being fully computerized, and not relying on mechanics that work with physical cards, Hearthstone is able to support more complex AOE and card modification. Spells can strike all or groups of cards for certain, random, or variable damage — and work in combination with modifiers like shield, stealth (can’t be attacked), taunt (must attack first), or enrage (extra abilities for damaged minions). Some of these mechanics, while possible on paper, would be tedious and slow to manage (annoying counters anyone?). The game doesn’t exactly push the hardware limits of a modern PC/Mac, but it features the typical slick Blizzard interface. Actions are fast, with satisfying sounds and effects. Plus they queue up nicely in a way that allows for rapid play out of multiple moves. This is in sharp contrast to a game like Magic 2013 which drags out each move with awkward and slow animations. Hearthstone lets you just go bang bang bang in a far more satisfying manner.
$1.50 to $2.00 for just 5 virtual cards!
I suspect Blizzard is also (as usual) going to make a lot of money with Hearthstone. Not only is it fun, and technically free to play, but seamlessly integrated with Battlenet and your attached credit card. Basically, to add anything but the basic cards to your pool of available cards, you have to either be very good, very patient, or spend some money on packs of cards. These cost $1.50-$2 for a pack of 5! And there is no guarantee you’ll get cards you want. Although you can disenchant extra or undesired cards for dust and use them to craft any specific card. Getting substantial dust pretty much only comes from buying packs, so this mostly allows the player who spends $50+ a way to fill in for bad luck (thank God!). Certainly for $50-100 one could get the cards for any ONE deck one wanted (the cost is mostly in getting lucky or enough dust for the 1-3 legendaries many serious decks want).
Warlock class specific cards. You face Jaraxxus, Eredar lord of the Burning Legion!
There are a variety of modes and tricks to keep you coming back. Classes level up (giving you extra cards and bonuses). There are daily quests (you can have up to 3) that earn extra gold (which can be spent on cards or the Arena) and there is practice, normal, and ranked play modes. Possibly most interesting is the creative Arena mode. You have to pay (with dollars or gold) to enter, then you semi-randomly build a new deck, and play until you lose three times. The more wins in this time, the bigger the reward in gold, dust, and cards. The Arena seems currently, even for a sucky player, to be a slightly better value gold/dollars to cards, as it costs $1.50 and you seem to earn at least one pack. However, it does take an hour or two (you don’t have to play all at once). I’ve only done it twice, as I find playing with it’s fairly random decks a little frustrating compared to my carefully crafted normal mode ones.
Finally, you can always play with your Battle net friends, which will be cool once we get out of closed beta and more of mine try out the game. All in all, now that my main in WOW is ilevel 558 and I’d basically have to run Heroic raids for upgrades (almost), and given the fact that Hearthstone can be played in 5-10 minute chunks, I’m having a blast with it. If I feel motivated, I might even write up my experiences with the three late game strategies I’ve been working: Warlock, Mage Ice Control, and Pally Utility Control (sadly, as I’m a Lock in WOW, my Mage deck is doing much better).
| WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria. or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling. Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis! If you liked this post, follow me at: My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us is nearly on us, and the review ban has been released, so I felt I’d round up a couple. Check out these reviews! They average 95, which is pretty unheard of. The most often repeated word is “masterpiece”!
[ NOTE 6/14/13: I started playing and the playable prologue alone is nearly worth the price of admission! ]
First the awesome launch trailer here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpdSVF_k_w]Then the review roundup:
| If you liked this post, follow me at:
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
The Cataclysm Collector’s Edition contents
For the record, like many others, I stopped playing during the last six months of Lich King (who needed to run ICC more than 20-30 times?) and came back for Cataclysm. I discovered what is now my least favorite era of WOW.
I didn’t even like leveling in Cataclysm. The zones were boring. I hated Vashj’ir for it’s annoying 3D travel and vast size. The others were just uninspired. Only Uldum was decent.
I suspect that the designers blew their wad on the giant world revamp. Every zone in Azeroth got an update, some quite dramatic, and all of the quests were redone. But I never saw any of this — except flying overhead. With four toons from 60-80, I wasn’t about to go level a new one. I didn’t even try out the new starting zones (Goblin and Worgen, although I heard they were good). If Worgen had been Horde (like they should), I might have tried them.
The old world got a facelift, or hatchet job…
The talent trees got another huge overhaul, but this time instead of adding 5 new talent points, Blizzard took away 30! Level 85 characters had 41 talents, which wasn’t so bad except it reduced the emotional reward given at each level. Still, I understand how the prospect of 76 points could be overwhelming from a design and user standpoint. More substantially, Blizzard introduced a more formal choice of specialization. Instead of merely investing points in various trees, you had to pick your preferred tree. Along with this came certain mutually exclusive abilities and resources.
On the plus side, this allowed the designers the freedom to work on the specs in more isolation without having to place signature spec abilities deep into the trees. By Pandaria, it allowed even greater differentiation of specs. On the minus, this change continued a trend toward homogenization. There was a feeling under the old system, even if illusionary, that you could create an interesting hybrid between two specs. No more.
The new, post diet, Warlock talent trees
A number of gearing innovations were introduced with Cataclysm. In the BC and LK eras, the number of affixes (different stats and attributes possible on gear) had expanded considerably. The game has a lot of gear specs: plate tanks, plate dps, plate healing, mail spell dps, mail melee, mail ranged, mail healing, leather healing, leather spell dps, leather melee, leather tanking, cloth healing and cloth dps. In the old days, the designers ignored some, like bear tanks, but with making every spec viable came the need to provide them gear.
With Cataclysm, the designers tried to reduce this gear proliferation and consolidate stats. For example, the new “mastery” stat, basically good for every spec, but does something different for each. It might improve healing for a Holy Priest and damage for a Shadow Priest.
To make more gear useful to more players Blizzard introduced the reforging vendor. This allowed players to exchange one secondary stat on an item for another secondary stat. For example, if you had an item with crit and mastery, but want more haste, you could take half the mastery off and turn it into haste. This was reversible and modifiable.
This allowed almost any gear that fit your basic spec to be adjusted to fit your overall itemization. The downside was that it made gear increasingly by the numbers. Individual items used to matter more. You sought out the Azuresong Mageblade or the Core Hound Tooth. After Cataclysm, if the item had a higher ilevel (item level) and fit your spec at all, it was likely better. This meant that you stopped caring so much about the individualitem and its stats and more about its ilevel.
The reforging vendor allows you to play with the stats on your gear
Vanilla, BC, and LK WOW never allowed the modification of gear appearance. Other games had dyes and methods of cosmetic alteration, but in WOW, the gear actually looked good, and because each class had unique tier gear, it was usually possible at a glance to tell how good (or at least dedicated) a player was. In fact, when I first started playing I was really impressed by the way your character slowly improved visually. At first, you dressed in rags, and slowly but surely you got cooler looking (with a few setbacks). I, like most players, chose function over form, and sometimes had a patchwork appearance.
Cataclysmchanged all that by introducing Transmogrification. The transmorg vendor, would for a fee, make any piece of gear look like any other of the same type that you owned (i.e. you couldn’t make a bow look like a sword). Suddenly, your best gear was disconnected from your best-looking gear. The cool part of this was that old gear, which often looked very cool or nostalgic, was useful again as a template for appearance. It also allowed characters to construct unified thematic sets without compromising function. Negatively, the specific new gear you got became even less memorable. It was just ilevel and stats.
You can now make any gear look like pretty much any other gear
Cataclysm about faced the dungeon difficulty trend from LK. Normal mode level 85 dungeons had some challenge, and Heroics had a new key: gear level. You couldn’t enter them (via the Dungeon Finder) without having a certain gear level. This meant you actually had to run the normal ones. Which was good.
They weren’t really that hard and they had some decent gear. Plus, each faction had a tabard you could wear to gather reputation. Two of these dungeons were favorite Vanilladungeons that got a refresh and new level 85 modes: Shadow Fang Keep and Dead Mines.
Uldum featured this cool outside dungeon (shades of ZF and ZG) called The Lost City of the Tol’vir
Heroic difficulty was another matter. While Cataclysm Heroic’s weren’t as brutal as BC Heroics, they were actually kinda difficult. They often required a bit of crowd control (CC) and knowledge of boss strategies. Again, not anywhere near that from the BC and Vanilla era, but a lot harder than in LK.
In guild runs, this was no probably and actually quite fun. But the problem was that most people didn’t run dungeons in guild groups, they used the Dungeon Finder. Heroics with the Dungeon Finder became torture. They were just a bit too hard for most random groups. They required you know the fight. Many good players reacted to this by dropping group as soon as anything went wrong. This happened prior to the Dungeon Finder, but social factors kept it more in check. Now, one wipe and your best player or two fled, leaving you to replace them by random chance.
At the time, I thought my problem was that after facerolling dungeons in LK, it was hard to go back to a challenge, but I think it had as much to do with the interaction of the Dungeon Finder. Pugs with no invested social connection are not well geared to face and learn to overcome challenges.
The badge system reached more or less final form: which wasn’t badges at all, but points. Instead of a constantly expanding collection of currencies, Blizzard converted the badges into two types of points (presumably the badge->point thing was for better granularity) and instituted several policies. With the release of new tiers, any remaining currency in the better currency (Valor) was converted into the lesser (Justice). Old Valor Gear was then made available for Justice Points. New gear went into the Valor Vendor. You earned Justice via dungeons (easy) and Valor by dailies and raiding (harder). Both currencies gained a weekly cap to discourage hardcore players from grinding out too much at once.
Blizzard experimented with different methods of Valor awards for non-raiders: first Heroic completed of the day, then up to 7 Heroics per week. The later was designed to remove the “need” to run one Heroic every day, but somehow turned out to discourage running as many of them.
This latest evolution worked well. Valor gear was very good, and could be purchased approximately one item every two weeks (if you maxed out your weekly cap). There was too little Justice Gear. For single spec classes (like my Warlock) the currency was useless after about two weeks — until a new tier landed a bunch of formerly top gear in the Justice Vendor. For non-raiders, Valor points were too hard to cap.
The elite can slay Deathwing, which is pretty cool
Another successful new system was the expansion of the guild system. With Cataclysm, guilds as an entity gained reputation, levels, achievements, perks and more. Doing “work” (quests, dungeons, profession work, etc) started earning you reputation with your guild and the guild itself experience. The guild could then level up, earning members various guild perks. Certain achievements could open up guild rewards. The perks and rewards were actually pretty sweet although not usually related to performance per-se. Things like: faster running while dead, shorter hearth teleport timer, 10% more reputation, and a mass resurrection spell.
Overall, the system felt rewarding. You definitely wanted to be in a guild, and one that was pretty high level at that. The speed of leveling was reasonable and worked even for my tiny and fairly inactive guild.
The guild reward window: lots of cool stuff
Cataclysm‘s end game reputation grinds kept me occupied for a few weeks. There were some decent epic items and a few cool mounts. Most reputations had some dailies to help them along, or there were always dungeon runs. But they didn’t last forever, after about a month, I pretty much maxed them all out.
Blizzard tried world PVP for a fourth time with Tol Barad. It was a lot like Wintergrasp, including the same kind of loot piñata boss. I felt obligated to run the boss once a week, but couldn’t have cared less about the PVP.
It also had a PVE rep and hub with a whole bunch of dailies. This was a pretty extensive 2-3 week grind-a-thon but awarded a couple of worthwhile things at exalted. Then it was done.
The Tol Barad outside world PVP zone. Pretty much just good for its loot filled tasty creme boss.
Instead of adding yet another crafting profession, like BC and LK, Cataclysm added a fourth optional profession all players could train: archeology. This turned out to be a rather boring, albeit, time consuming distraction. Making you travel is a time-proven form of cheap WOW gameplay (lots of holidays feature “tour the world” activities). Theoretically, Archeology could earn you cool items, but at launch it did so in a maddeningly tedious fashion.
Archaeology gets you all too familiar with this little gizmo.
My guild fell apart at the end of LK and my new one consisted of mostly casual players, so I didn’t raid much at all during Cataclysm. I suffered from near burnout and never mustered the energy to try pugging anything or finding a raiding guild.
About a month after the expansion shipped I ran out of any way to progress my character without raiding. So I stopped playing.
A few months in, Blizzard added two new 5 man dungeons with better gear. But I’d seen them both before: the troll raids Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman, just repurposed as 5 man dungeons. I tried a couple of times to run them, but they suffered from the same problem (as the Heroics) of pug wipes.
I stopped playing one more time.
The return of the trolls: Zul’Gurub!
Blizzard tried again with the Molten Front, a new raid (I didn’t try it) and a daily quest hub and reputation. I ground out rep for a week or two and grew bored.
I stopped again, and didn’t return until Pandaria.
Burn your eyes out on the bland looking Molten Front
Without a raiding guild, the majority of endgame progression was unavailable. Sure, I could have continued mindlessly running the same dungeons to gather valor points, but what was the point of getting new better gear if I wasn’t facing any new encounters? I just didn’t feel motivated. This time around, I didn’t bother with alts, the boring 80-85 zones put me off.
Late in the expansion, Blizzard introduced the Raid Finder, an attempt to do for raids what the Dungeon Finder did for dungeons. I never tried it out, but it’s possible, probable even that had this been around at Cataclysm launch, I would have played longer and had more to do.
But as it was, Cataclysm suffered from a diffuse focus spread throughout the world, frustrating Heroic pugs, over homogenization, and a general lack of newness. Had I played too long? Or was it the content itself?
I assumed it was me… until Mists of Pandaria…
| WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria. or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling. Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis! If you liked this post, follow me at: My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
Deathwing lunches on a tasty tower
The original cover
…continued from my coverage of the WOW Vanilla endgame.
In January of 2007, Blizzard launched The Burning Crusade, the first of four expansions to World of Warcraft and completely overhauled the endgame. In the race from level 60 to 70, any advantage gained by level 60 raiders was quickly swamped out.
Vanilla introduced the core World of Warcraft gameplay: questing, dungeons, pvp, and raids, but The Burning Crusade (BC) began a long process of inventing and refining new mechanics that doled out rewards for these activities. Most innovations were introduced during the BC and Lich King periods, and the newest two expansions (Cataclysm and Pandaria) have mostly tuned those mechanics. BC represented a lot of innovation, beginning one way (closer to Vanilla) and ending another.
BC saw radical changes with regard to party size. Ignoring UBRS, Vanilla finished up with a 5, 20, 40 scheme. This meant that dungeons were 5 man, smaller raids 20 man, and big raids 40. BC dropped the odd “big dungeons” (like UBRS) and moved to 5, 10, 25. Dungeons didn’t change, but the small raids moved to 10 man and the big raids to 25. Unlike today, each raid was designed for one size. At launch, there a single “intro raid”: Karazhan and four “big” raids. Two were 1-2 boss raids (Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon) and two were bigger progression instances (Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep). 40 man groups persisted vestigially for ad hoc and battleground PVP.
The intent of the shrinking group was to make it easier for guilds to get a raid together. With 10 man, this was successful. 10 man raids had enough people for two tank mechanics and specialized roles, but were easy to recruit and coordinate. I’m not sure the 40 to 25 shift was as productive. 25 man raids were only moderately easier to organize than 40 and certainly felt less epic. On the other hand, Vanilla 40 mans allowed single players to screw up and slip through the cracks. In BC 25 mans, everyone counted.
BC shipped with 7 big new zones, a new capital city, two new races, and a ton of quests. By the time I hit level 70, I still had two full zones left. However, like Vanilla, the motivation to finish wasn’t extremely high. You got gold and a few decent blues, but it was a lot of work, and there were numerous annoying 5 man quests. The main reason to finish was to open up the complex network of key chains required to raid (more on this later).
Questing in general was a lot better organized. The basic principle of smaller quest hubs located near their objectives was established. There were few long postal quests like in Vanilla. Dungeon quests remained interwoven with long zone based quest chains. This usually meant, like Vanilla, that during leveling you had not opened up the proper chains for many dungeons. Often these lengthy chains that wound in and out of the many dungeons had to be completed at 70.
The gateway between Outland and Azeroth
Reputation in BC moved from the sidelines to front and center. Each dungeon group had one (or two) associated new reps and each rep gained a more meaningful vendor. The rewards, pathetic in Vanilla, became merely okay, and in the case of a few later reps actually good. Several of the reps gated the acquisition of vital items and buffs. The specifics varied by class and spec, but generally it was necessary to run most reputations to revered, particularly since entry into the new heroic difficulty dungeons also required revered reputation with each dungeon’s specific rep (more on that later). Reputation was earned in two ways: by running dungeons specific to the reputation or by grinding annoying drops.
Important to all classes were two new city reputations (Scryer and Aldor). Blizzard experimented with providing the player with a choice between two similar reps. Both gated important buffs and resistance gear. Any serious raider needed to reach exalted and that required killing thousands of specific mobs to collect rep drops (or you could buy them on the auction house). Since this was the last time the designers tried this “choice of rep”, I can assume it was a failure. It added color, but ultimately was a lot of developer work for what didn’t amount to much variety.
Dungeons remained a major source of loot and were necessary to armor yourself in dungeon blues for entry raiding. Blizzard shortened up the dungeons — slightly. Nothing in BC was as big and as long as the gigantic Blackrock dungeons. Still, some of them were still quite long, like Shadow Labs. Normal dungeons were difficult in questing gear and some dungeons like Shattered Halls, Shadow Labs, and Black Morass had high wipe rates. They required careful crowd control and care. There was more need for players to understand the boss mechanics than in Vanilla. A few dungeons proved unpopular and were infrequently run.
But they were, for the most part, challenging and fun.
When BC shipped, instance attunement was famously complex. Every raid, heroic dungeon, and the more difficult normal dungeons all had separate and involved key requirements that wound their way through previous content. Some of this content was quite difficult and unpopular and basically made it so that only players in well organized guilds could easily complete the chains. In these guilds, players were willing to run otherwise pointless dungeons and raids merely to help others finish their keys. Without this, gathering a pickup group for difficult content could be extremely frustrating.
Later in BC, the designers removed the key requirements. Most people seemed to feel this was an entirely good thing and Blizzard never again gated instances with much in the way of achievement based requirements (although the current ilevel gating could be considered a dumbed down form of key). However, I miss the key quests. True, the ones in BC were often too long and too difficult, particularly the Naruu and A’dal chains, but they gave you long term goals and filtered out less capable players.
I my opinion, the Karazhan (intro raid) key chain was perfect. It required running several normal dungeons but could easily be accomplished in a day or two. The Naruu chain, where you had to defeat Mag (an unpopular 25 man boss) and several brutal heroic dungeons was another matter entirely.
Vanilla and BC key requirements
It was never clear if Blizzard intended players geared from normal dungeons to move straight to heroic dungeons or the intro 10 man raid, Karazhan. In practice, Kara was much more appealing. It offered vastly better rewards and was much less frustrating.
Karazhan is also my favorite instance in all WOW — and I reached exalted with the Violet Eye (Kara’s rep) on three characters.
Kara was a big place. It had 12 bosses (some optional) and a post corn roast buttload of trash. It was also incredibly cool with a fantastic score and ghostly gothic atmosphere. The bosses each had distinct and memorable mechanics. The complex encounter design that had been born in Vanilla‘s Naxx was repurposed in a more approachable manner. There were actually even more than 12 bosses because the opera event was really 3, one chosen at random each week, same in the Servant’s Quarters (even if it’s rewards were so lame that no one ran it).
For loot, Kara contained something for everyone. Its gear was a step up from the dungeon blues and better than the early heroic and badge epics (see below). It held the tokens for the tier gloves and helm and dropped matched gear for every slot and every spec in the game. At two epics per boss, it dropped upwards of 20 items per run for 10 players. A lot of loot. By late autumn of 2007 Kara was a juicy plumb of a loot piñata for new 70s.
But in the beginning, it was too hard, and the loot a little too weak. Early groups moving into Kara soon after launch experienced a serious shock. Kara wasn’t exactly a gear check. You could do it in blues, but beyond the first boss, it required that you understand the mechanics. For raiders forced in the hellfires of Blackwing Lair, AQ40, and Naxx, it was a cakewalk. For normal players, used to tank and spank, it was a serious challenge. Over several months, Blizzard nerfed the bosses, trimmed back the exhausting trash, buffed the loot, and players learned the encounters.
The 10 man “entry raid” concept was so successful that mid expansion Blizzard added a second one, the troll themed Zul’Aman.
The wizard Medivh’s spooky abode
BC introduced the concept of the tier token (actually AQ40 and Naxx had experimented in this direction, but that was only for the 1%). In Vanilla, bosses dropped a particular tier item, like Ony and the Tier 2 helm, and they dropped them for a specific class. This barely worked with 40 players, but in 10 man raids it would have been a total failure. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a bunch of druid helms when there isn’t even a druid in the party!
So we got the token, which could be exchanged for a specific piece of gear, say the Tier 4 helm. Usually three classes shared a token, so say priests, warlocks, and paladins. This meant it was likely someone could use it. The token could be converted to any spec’s gear, say holy, prot, or ret for paladins.
Far less successful, were the heroics. The idea itself was brilliant. Since leveling dungeons don’t get a lot of mileage, provide two tunings of each BC dungeon: normal and heroic. The heroic was intended to be level 70 exclusive and quite difficult. In practice, the heroics were VERY hard, required revered reputation, and provided sub-par rewards. However, it’s worth noting that their badge system was to evolve into one of the cornerstones of WOW endgame progression.
Heroics dropped mostly blue gear. Only the final boss would drop an epic, and there were very few of these, covering only a fraction of the gear slots and specs. The epics were also lame, barely (and sometimes not) better than the blues. The bosses also dropped “badges” that could be redeemed for epic gear. Again, brilliant idea, poor tuning. Heroic runs earned 3-6 badges. Gear cost 40-80. The gear was the same lame ilevel as the end boss heroic gear, and there weren’t very many items.
Heroics were also very hard. Some, like Shadow Labs or Shattered Halls were REALLY long or really hard. They were hard to recruit for and even harder to run. In the early days, before the badge gear was expanded, they weren’t worth it.
I’m a PVE player. I never cared that much about PVP itself. But during the first year of BC the easiest way to gear your PVE character was to PVP. Before the removal of the Tier 6 key requirements, you could get post Kara gear only from the 25 man Tier 5 raids. These were pretty hard and even in a raiding guild it was several weeks between items. The summer 2007 PVP set was competitive with T5 and the fall one better. Half of it could be bought for honor, the other half for arena points.
And honor came from battlegrounds. So you played them. And played them. And played them some more. This was easy, predictable, and boring. I used to PVP on the laptop while watching TV. You wanted to grind for 5-10 hours a week. Basically, I consider this a design failure. It got me into battlegrounds, and for a while I cared, but eventually I’d just run AV endlessly, barely paying attention.
During the 2007 seasons, arena was the secret sauce and 3 vs 3 the sweet spot. A casual 3 vs 3 team could spend an hour a week, lose half its matches, and still earn enough arena points to buy amazing gear every other week. This was the best time investment to gear ratio in the entire game by an order of magnitude. Eventually, Blizzard caught on and required fairly high ratings to buy the best pieces. Still, it paid to arena to get the others. With Lich King, they changed the gear balance to make PVP gear fairly useless in PVE, but for a while, it was a solid progression option.
During the course of the expansion, Blizzard introduced a number of ideas to add endgame content and mitigate the varied time investment of the player base. As I discussed in my Vanilla article, difficulty and time investment were used as the gateway to many rewards. It turned out, you could do the same thing for quests that you did for raid gear: limit them by real time as opposed to time investment.
And so the daily was born: A quest that you can do once per day. Dailies allow grinds to be limited by real time instead of time invested. If you can only earn reputation by completing 5 daily quests worth a total of 1000 points, you can only earn 1000 a day. One of the first uses of the daily concept was the “daily dungeon.” Here, one random dungeon was chosen each day. Running it rewarded extra badges. This actually solved two problems. Besides gating badge earning, it concentrated player energy on that specific instance for the day and made it easier to find a group.
The spring of 2007 brought a trio of reputation based daily quest hubs. These player time sink centers allowed you to pick up 5-8 quests per day and turn them in for reputation. Things were calibrated so that a 1-2 hour a day investment for 2-3 weeks would bring you to exalted in any one of the hubs. Blizzard didn’t trust the new mechanic and these first hubs were mostly cosmetic. I did the Netherwing chain where you earned a cool flying dragon. The grind was significant but fair. You could do it but it was enough work that you felt you achieved something. The evolving mix of quests was also pretty cool (the bootarang quest is one of WOW’s greatest).
Like the badges, this idea was initially underutilized but destined to become a cornerstone.
During early BC, my guild endlessly ran Kara and Gruul. Entry into the T5 raids required that the entire guild earn the “Champion of the Naruu” title by killing Magtheridon and running a bunch of heroics. No one liked Mag and our guild was too disorganized to get everyone through the heroics. This effectively kept us artificially “stuck” in T4 gear and unable to progress into T5.
Eventually, Blizzard just dropped the key requirement to Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep (and later to Black Temple and Hyjal). This was a drastic solution, although effective enough. However, in my opinion, the real mistake was the nature and difficulty of the keys, not their existence. Key quests added flavor and excitement to the endgame, but they needed to be doable without a great deal of punishing runs. Merely requiring 10 of 25 in the raid to have killed Gruul for entry into SSC/TK would have been fine.
A similar problem existed with the T6 raids (Black Temple and Hyjal). Their key quest was truly epic. Besides some heroics, you had to collect something from both Vashj and Kael. These bosses, the final ones in both SSC and TK, were serious raid checks. Both encounters were multi-staged and required that everyone in the raid know and execute on their role. While cool encounters, it was very rare that guilds wanted to take down these bosses after getting into T5, as the burden of training new people on them was too high.
Still, earning “Hand of A’dal” (killing both Vashj & Kael), was one of the proudest moments of my WOW career.
I used to tank Ilidan on my warlock
In Vanilla, Blizzard introduced plenty of additional content as the endgame progressed, however very little of this helped the more casual player progress their gear level and make any additional progress in the difficult raids. These remained the providence of exclusive raiding guilds. In BC this changed.
First, they introduced ZA, a new 10 man “easier” raid along the Kara model. This offered gear somewhere between the T4 and T5 level. It was easier than T5 and only required 10 people so it helped players and guilds gear to make better progression in T5 and T6. Also, ZA introduced a number of interesting new concepts designed at rewarding better players. The faster you ran it, the more loot dropped. But more importantly, if you ran it really fast, you got a single “Amani War Bear” mount for someone in the group. This became a major status symbol, particularly as Blizzard removed the ability to win the mount when Lich King shipped.
In my opinion, some of the features of ZA paved the way for both the achievements and raiding heroic modes that were to become the hallmark of endgame experimentation in Lich King.
With the final major content push of BC, Blizzard introduced not only a new major raid (Sunwell, the last crazy hard normal raid in WOW history) but a whole island of content. There was a great new 5 man dungeon at both a higher level of difficulty, better design, and with better epic loot. Plus there was a new reputation centered around a quest hub of daily quests. This took the daily concept begun with the more casual hubs and brought it to the next level. The dungeon tied into the same rep and keyed from it, plus the rep vendor actually offered valuable epic upgrades both as normal gear and as profession recipes.
The model of the Isle of Quel’Danas was to set the mould for what was to come. Plus, unlike in Vanilla, this patch offered less hard core raiders a shot at “easier” gear equivalent to T5 and T6. One of the effects of this was to enable progression of guilds (like mine) that didn’t really have the skill to handle Black Temple and Hyjal in pure T5 gear. This ties into one of the most important trends discussed below.
The Isle of Quel’danas
The initial badge system sucked. As I said before, the badges were only earned in annoying heroics and the rewards bit. With the launch of Qel’Danas, this all changed.
Suddenly, you could get badges not just in heroics, and bonuses for daily heroics, but every raid boss dropped a pair, including the ones in ZA and Kara. The already popular Kara became a total badge fest at 23 a week! Even the hardest core raiders pounded it out making it easier for the rest of us. Why? Because the new badge vendor on the Isle sold T6 quality gear. Sure, some at steep prices like 250 badges, but the gear was fantastic. This meant that if you raided, and ran a Kara/ZA, and some heroics, like a daily or the ever popular Heroic Mechanar (because it was the easiest and shortest heroic), you could bank 50-70 badges a week.
New best in slot items every two weeks or so. One way or another, the badge system (now the point system) has been a major part of WOW ever since. I’ll discuss later how it evolved over the course of Lich King, where it was to see a lot of experimentation, but Blizzard had hit on something. The badge system meant that running instances where you needed no loot, or were unlucky and got no loot, wasn’t a total waste of time. When you accumulated enough badges, you could buy something you really did need. Regulating the rate of badge acquisition would be a major design challenge, but the concept was brilliant. Vanilla and early BC were filled with a lot of play sessions that left you feeling cheated, hours invested and nothing gained. Badges changed (or at least mitigated) that.
It’s worth noting that the final raid, Sunwell Plateau, retained the traditional Vanilla/BC elitist only model. Some regard this as the best raid Blizzard ever produced, but few saw it. Our guild only downed the first two bosses, and we considered ourselves pretty elite to be killing anything in there. It was hard, really f**cking brutally hard, and nothing about the new gearing systems changed that. Meeting the final boss of the expansion, Kil’Jaeden, was something only the most dedicated and skilled could be expected to do.
It took us 6 weeks to vanquish Archimonde
BC began and extended a trend which was to continue through Lich King and Cataclysm: Normalization.
In Vanilla, a lot of differences existed between classes and faction. The Alliance had Paladins and the Horde Shamans. BC took this away and gave both factions the same classes. Because of both PVE balance and largely because of arena, Blizzard worked very hard to normalize the classes and specs. There was a significant effort to make every spec viable. In Vanilla, raiding Druids and Shamans healed. Tanks were all Warriors. BC saw the rise of the Pally and Bear tank. Not only that, it became part of the design to make even healing specs viable in arena and for solo (i.e. daily) play.
In Vanilla/early BC, healing gear was healing only and healing specs couldn’t dps worth a damn. Healers were forced to spec back and forth in order to grind materials or run dailies. Blizzard made a number of incremental moves to change this, first making “plus healing” provide partial damage and then merging “plus spell” and “plus healing” into one stat. The amount of gear was reduced, with a lot of healing and dps gear merged. There was some effort to provide specialized bear tanking gear and other rare specs.
Another aspect of normalization was a decreased emphasis on quests and content that could only be experienced by a few. Blizzard built less and less specific class quests in BC and onward. Still, BC had a few great ones like the Druid flying form quest chain.
Making most specs viable changed the relative value of the hybrid. In the Vanilla design, hybrids (druids, shamans, paladins) were supposed to be more versatile but a little worse than the dedicated classes. As each spec was brought into parity, the “option” of being healer/dps or healer/tank/dps became more and more valuable. My main has always been a Warlock and we dedicated damage classes became less popular and less likely to be picked for raid.
In many ways, BC was my favorite endgame. It had some problems, particularly at the beginning. The difficult key quests and high degree of raid difficult meant that it “seemed” like there was too little raid content for mediocre guilds like mine (because T5 and beyond wasn’t accessible). The tuning on new systems like heroics and badges wasn’t right at the beginning.
Still, there was a lot to do, and the game felt more epic than ever. Compared to Vanilla, there was vastly more accessible content for the non-raider and the softcore raider alike. Things were generally much more balanced and mature than in Vanilla, if not quite as varied. There was a lot less wasted development effort (some of Vanilla‘s vast dungeons were barely ever played). It was possible for different levels of raiders (and even non-raiders) to make significant progress across the course of the expansion. PVP got some skill based development (at top arena levels) and only remained “mostly” (as opposed to entirely) a grind.
Burning Crusade introduced, new and untuned, many of the systems that were to lead to the modern endgame. Lich King would more or less finish the job.
This saga continues as we head to the frozen north…
| WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria. or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling. Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis! If you liked this post, follow me at: My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
The original boxes
In this detailed post series, I discuss the evolution of the five World of Warcraft endgames from both a player and game design perspective.
For the most part, leveling a character in Vanilla World of Warcraft wasn’t too different than in most single player RPGs. Sure, helpful or hurtful players sped up or slowed down your leveling rate, but you rarely required others. Dungeons were an exception, as these always required five players, but you didn’t need dungeons to keep leveling. In fact, while the dungeon blue gear was much better than the typical leveling gear, dungeons slowed you down. The XP was split among players and the two hours it took to assemble a party and the frequent wipes made them inefficient. In those early days, experience came from only two sources: killing monsters and quests. Everything was slow compared to where it is now. Quests were far apart. Mounts came at level 40. Flight points were rare.
It took me approximately 400 hours to level my Warlock from 1 to 60. It felt epic. I never looked at a guide, or searched the web, but took the game as it came. Aside from the occasional frustration, progress was slow but steady. Things were tuned much harder back then and catching a second (or, God forbid, a third) add (additional monster) could mean certain death. Graveyards were spread far apart. Sometimes it was even easy to get lost on the corpse run back to a dungeon (like Black Rock Depths).
But at 60, this steady rate of progress took a huge downshift. Why?
Even at launch, WOW was a big game. So big, that as a game creator my jaw dropped at the sheer number of zones, quests, mobs, items, dungeons, etc. Still, it took years to make. There is no possible way, no matter how much money Blizzard spent, that they could create leveling content at even close to the rate at which players could consume it.
So they had to slow you down and design “endgame” content that was slower to consume.
Back in 2005, questing at 60 was a waste of time unless you merely loved the lore. Quests didn’t even award (meaningful) gold on turn in. They rarely earned reputation. They were pretty useless except for the obsessive. Without achievements, it was hard to judge how many you had even done.
One exception to this, and short lived, were class specific quest chains. Warlocks had class specific quests every 10 levels and at 60 could quest for a special demonic pet called the Doomguard and to earn a special epic (i..e. fast) mount. Both of these chains were fairly difficult and required help from others but occupied me for a few days as a new level 60. Too bad the Doomguard was — at that time — utterly useless (except for torturing newby Aliance) and the Dreadsteed cost a fortune in gold. Still, these were cool chains.
You needed 4 friends to help you get the “epic” Warlock mount!
In vanilla, most of the level 60 dungeons and the three early 40 man raids (Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Onyxia’s Lair) all required keys. As a brand new 60, I didn’t even understand what raiding was, so I’ll come back to that, but it took a bit of work to grind out all the quests needed to get the keys for Scholomance, Stratholme, UBRS, and Dire Maul. These often involved normal questing mixed with dungeon runs and had quest chains that strategically bounced back and forth between continents (adding 30 minutes of travel time to each leg). The UBRS chain was hard enough that despite the instance’s popularity owners of the key were few and far between (each group only needed one key holder).
For a short while, the five man dungeons represented a decent source of level 60 blue gear, which was much better than quest greens. Unfortunately, the return on investment was often very poor. Guild runs were great, but my guild was a tiny group of real life friends and rarely went. PUGs (Pick Up Groups of random players) were another matter entirely. In general, it took perhaps an hour or two to recruit a tank and healer and get them all to the desired dungeon. Then one of two things happened: 1) you spent about 2-3 hours making really solid process through the dungeon or 2) you spent 3-5 hours wiping constantly and eventually one or more people left and the monsters respawned.
In the first case, you had a great time and might even earn some needed loot or clear out a few difficult dungeon quests. In the second, you almost certainly wasted the time completely and spent a bunch of gold on repairs and materials. As you got more and more blue gear the odds of winning something you wanted declined. Combining this with the high odds of “option 2” in random PUGs meant that few players wanted to run level 60 dungeons with strangers.
Those of you who never played Vanilla or Burning Crusade may not really understand what the old five man dungeons were like for people in blue and green gear. They were all gigantic, with 5+ bosses and obscene amounts of trash. It was easy to get lost. The tuning was such that each individual pull required crowd control to have any hope of success. Accidentally dragging in a PAT or second group was almost always suicide. Monsters respawned fairly quickly which meant that dying could involve clearing a second (or third) time. Only a Warlock Soul Stone or Shaman Ankh could prevent a long corpse run after a wipe. Druids healers didn’t even have a resurrection spell! Replacements had to travel across the world to enter the dungeon (could take 30 minutes). Summoning could not be done inside the dungeon and required carefully exiting the whole party so the Warlock could summon.
On the plus side, the dungeons were really cool and involved all sorts of special setups.
New 60s could expect to spend a lot of time “raiding” undead Stratholme
The early honor system rewarded extreme investments of time spent grinding battlegrounds. PVE and PVP gear wasn’t very different in those days, so there were some decent blues that could be earned by reaching high levels of reputation with one of the three battleground factions. In practice, only Alterac Valley made this reasonable, involving a grind of “only” several weeks. The other two, could take months. If you focused your PVP time intensely into a short couple of weeks you could get your honor rank up and earn a few mid range blues. The epic (and quite awesome) sets were reserved only for the top ranks. The rank of High Warlord (he who PVPed the most on the server for the Horde) required an investment of approximately 16-18 hours a day for 6-9 months. Hardly casual.
Some players, me not included, seemed to enjoy grinding out various materials for trade skills, sale, or their guilds. This usually involved mindlessly killing a particular class of mob for extreme lengths of time (hours was just the beginning). An alternative variant was traveling around on your mount in a set route collecting either herb or mining nodes.
One variant of this, which I did occasionally do, was grinding for rare vanity pets. For example, the little colored whelplings which dropped 1 in a 1000 from various dragonkin. It took several hours to get lucky and collect one of these rare pets.
WOW professions have never been much of a minigame and instead just a straightforward grind. In Vanilla, the designers did add some interesting choices and splits into a couple of them. Like the goblin/gnome engineering divide. My main took Alchemy/Herbology, which while very useful, has always been one of the most boring combinations in the game. Across five expansions they almost never added anything interesting to either profession, Burning Crusade being a minor exception.
Most crafting skills involved some rare/epic component useful/necessary for high end raiding. This usually involved an obscene grind. Getting the Thorium Brotherhood reputation up for Blacksmithing, for example. With Alchemy, the original flask system made another brutal illustration. The recipes came only from raid bosses. The ingredients were very rare and worst of all, flasks, which are after all a consumable, could only be made at the two special Alchemy Labs: one deep in Scholomance, the other, even more cruelly, several bosses into Blackwing Lair (a difficult second tier 40 man raid)!
At least the scenery was nice while grinding for materials!
Prior to winter/spring 2006, it was possible to “raid” Scholo, Strat, LBRS, and UBRS with 10-15 players. The dungeons weren’t tuned any differently in these modes, so were MUCH easier than normal 5 man runs (UBRS was never possible 5 man, but required a minimum of ten). You couldn’t complete most quests this way, but you could get a shot at the blue loot. This was by far the easiest and most efficient way to get blue dungeon gear as 10 man raids rarely wiped (except in UBRS). They usually involved an easy mindless zerg with low odds of getting gear. Loot dropped infrequently, and only one blue per boss.
UBRS was a special exception, as it was harder, even with 15 people, and had slightly better loot. It was also very popular, vital for the Ony Key Chain, and so groups were readily available. Occasionally — very occasionally — it even dropped some mediocre epics.
The designers created specialized quest chains that allowed many classes to get one or two epics, often head gear. In addition, there were a few weapons like the priest staff, the hunter bow, or the warrior sword (as usual, DPS casters got nothing). This gear was better than dungeon blues, but not nearly as good as the raiding epics. The grinds were also pretty obscene. In Vanilla, when they said epic, they meant it! The helmets all required the “pristine hide of the beast” an exceedingly rare drop from The Beast in UBRS (available only to max level skinners with a special rare tool) plus a whole bunch of rare materials from other dungeons. Several weeks of dungeon grinding were required to make one item.
The weapon quests, which were all tied into raiding, were difficult, but regarded by many as super cool and rewarding (after you finished).
Reputations have come a long way in WOW. The early reps combined both obscene grinds (like kill several thousand Furblogs or run Strat and Scholo at least 150 times) with an extreme paucity of rewards. Getting exalted with the Argent Dawn was a tedious weeks (or months) long process of endless dungeon runs, yet in the end, you merely got a shoulder enchant that added +5 chromatic resist. At revered, you could pick a single school of resist.
Other factions offered even less reward. Timbermaw took weaks for one (more or less) vanity item! However, by the later days of Vanilla, the AQ and ZG factions did offer some real gear — but were tied to raiding and retained the brutal grind.
A few weeks after turning 60, there was only one way to make any real progress on your character: get into a real raiding guild. This made for a clear and sharp divide between raiders and non-raiders. A quick glance at a character told the tale. Raiders were sprinkled (or covered) in purple.
But raiding involved 40 (or occasionally 20) player groups with a particular class composition. The raids themselves were exceedingly difficult even with everyone present. Reading strategies and installing and using an external voice chat program were mandatory. Guilds at this time usually had web pages and formal applications. The armory wasn’t yet available, so you had to list all your gear and progress, and even fill out a couple of essays.
Acceptance, if it happened, was provisional. Guilds had rules and policies and as a new member you had to tread lightly or get kicked out. “Dragon Kill Point” systems ensured that newbies had a very low chance of getting gear.
One of the most loved and reviled things about Vanilla was the Onyxia Key Chain. In order to enter this single boss 40 man raid, you had to atune your character and doing that meant finishing one of the most arduous quest chains in the game. Having completed it was often a requirement for entry into raiding guilds.
The Horde version of the chain began with my most hated quest of all time: Warlord’s Command. This required you to run LBRS 5 man several times. Without guild help, this was brutal. LBRS could easily be 4-5 hours and offered subpar rewards. No one ever wanted to run it except for the Ony or UBRS keys. I spent a good ten days continually recruiting groups. Several times I even got into the place only to wipe and fall apart 3-4 hours later. One of the drops was even a single scroll hidden in one of four random locations which only one party member could get. Only the mercy of two of my real life friends helped me finish this rite of passage.
And after that, the quest chain bounced you back and fourth between a remote spot on the eastern continent and Rexxar, an elusive quest giver who wandered two whole zones on the western. In between, you ran UBRS again and again for various stages of the chain. Other than Warlord’s Command (and an equivalently brutal Alliance version in BRD), it wasn’t really hard, but it was a test of will power and perseverance.
The lower “half” of Blackrock spire. So big, so hard, no one wanted to run it!
An important thing to understand about all raids in WOW (particularly Vanilla) is that each player could enter each one only a single time each week. This was called the lockout. Once you became “bound” to a raid ID for the week that was your instance until next Tuesday. This meant that one of the worst things that could happen was to be accidentally bound to a raid with a group that was incapable of making significant progress. If you did, you blew your shot at those bosses for the week. Also bad was to join an existing raid that had already killed the easy bosses, as you would become bound and miss those bosses for the week.
While I was leveling, Blizzard released the first of Vanilla‘s two 20 man raids, ZG. In January of 2006, they added AQ20. These raids were easier than their 40 man brethren and certainly getting a group organized was simpler. The gear was mixed blue and epic and in both cases tied in a complex faction to the dungeon reputation. Most serious raid guilds ran them as “off night” content when a big raid wasn’t going. Getting into the group was easier. Killing the bosses sometimes easier. But the rewards weren’t great. The gear was odd and you often had to run the place again and again for weeks to have enough rep to turn in the better rewards. Some of the fights were pretty hard too and interesting gear was often offered by optional bosses that were very difficult to summon — meaning groups rarely bothered.
Molten Core, or MC, was the bread and butter of Vanilla raiding. It had LOTS of bosses. It dropped the whole Tier 1 set, three epics per boss without constraint. It was fairly easy with 40 people who knew the place. The atunement was easy. Our guild sometimes had trouble filling all 40 spots and so that was a bit of a problem. The instance was also VERY long if you weren’t efficient. There were a lot of bosses and immense swaths of trash, so sometimes it took two nights, which meant clearing the trash twice! The final boss, Ragnaros, was hard. He required high fire resist and was a serious DPS check, but he did drop the T2 pants.
MC was the key to getting seriously geared in Vanilla. If your guild ran it every week and actually cleared to Domo (the boss before Rag) then your odds of getting some serious T1 loot were high. It was a serious time commitment, scheduled (for example, 6 to 10pm on tues and wed) but in the early days, before it devolved into a six hour slog through solid orange, it was damn fun and felt seriously epic.
This is pretty much what Rag did to the unprepared!
If MC was the bread and butter, Ony was the creme. As a single boss behind only four trash mobs, she dropped at least four T2 epics including two T2 helms. This was the best gear that was moderately accessible. Ony wasn’t even that hard, but she was random. Her second of three phases made or broke the whole event. She flew around above periodically sweeping half her chamber with “deep breath.” Sometimes it didn’t happen, sometimes once, sometimes three or four times. One hit you could survive, particularly if you swigged a fire protection potion in advance. Two or three? Forget it. If most of the raid lived to phase three, you’d probably kill her. If someone didn’t pull agro or get themselves knocked into the whelp caves, therefore bringing out a fatal brood of her spawn.
The RNG (Random Number Generator) was killer. My guild vanquished Ony every week in 2006. She only dropped the Warlock helmet twice. Once on my birthday when I wasn’t there and once in October (while I was sneaking the raid in at work). I wanted that hat (the Nemesis Skullcap) for 9 months. Getting it was perhaps the biggest high of my WOW career (tied with achieving Hand of A’dal).
Ony had quite the capricious nature.
Raids prior to BWL were hard, but didn’t require all that much coordination. Yeah, there was stuff to avoid, and tanks had different jobs, but for the most part DPS had to stay alive and do as much damage as possible. BWL was something else entirely. The first boss had no trash, but about 50 adds at a time. Different groups had to run around in a 100+ mob free-for-all kiting and managing this unwieldy and dangerous host while some designated “controllers” mind controlled a dragon and broke a bunch of eggs with special abilities. If somehow you had the coordination to survive this, it switched into a more or less normal boss fight after 10 minutes.
This opening, plus MC’s Rag and the later BWL bosses, separated the hardcore from the merely competent guilds. We worked on Razorgore (the first boss) for about two months before downing him. Nothing released in later patches geared you up to overcome the level of coordination needed for BWL. Guilds had to be disciplined to progress. You needed to raid 4-5 nights a week. To show up on time and have forty people of the right mix there. They needed to be the same people and they needed the patience to wipe again and again and again and again. They needed to watch videos and prepare, to pop flasks and pull out all the stops. Special mechanics gated certain bosses. Nefarion (the final boss) required that everyone in the raid have Ony cloaks, which could only be made from scales earned from the earlier dragon. It took half a year to make enough for everyone in the guild one, and only if people didn’t leave!
Blackwing layer didn’t “look” too hard from the entrance.
In early 2006 Blizzard changed a bunch of stuff in the endgame, most, but not all for the best. They added some epic quests. They discontinued the “raiding” of the normal dungeons, and they opened AQ20 and AQ40, two new raids. The dungeon changes actually made the end game harder by removing the easiest route to blue gear. The 5 mans got a hair easier, but still remained huge time sinks.
AQ20 gave midlevel guilds like ours something else to do and a way to get more approximately T1 gear. We dabbled in AQ40 but it wasn’t manageable by guilds that hadn’t farmed BWL.
In May, Naxx launched. This monstrous 40 man raid was probably the most difficult ever made (the only other contender being Sunwell). Only the elitist guilds that had farmed through BWL and AQ40 could possibly make progress there. Its groundbreaking encounter design required extreme cooperation. Many of you probably saw it years later in its much easier 10 and 25 man Lich King incarnations.
I’ve always had a weakness for undead sorcerers and their homes!
You might wonder why I keep using the worlds hard, brutal, tedious etc. How come 10-15 million people played this game? Now, it was a little less during Vanilla (perhaps 7-9 million) but WOW was incredibly fun. Yes, often hard and frustrating, but immensely addictive. And honestly, it was much less frustrating than prior MMOs, which had been designed with the punitive model Let’s speculate on WHY the designers did what they did with the endgame.
MMOs have a decent number of hardcore players. Some are willing to spend crazy amounts of time and energy on things and some have a very high level of skill. Yet, this isn’t most people, and so the designers wanted an endgame that could keep people playing for months or years regardless of their skill level.
The raid content served the hardcore. It required skill, coordination, practice and all that. It was/is also some of the most difficult content to make from a development standpoint so the sheer amount was very limited. Therefore, to make it last for the elite, it had to be very hard. Progression was further “slowed down” (or more gameplay created, depending on your perspective) by regulating the amount of boss kills and per boss loot. If the current tier has 9 bosses that means that approximately 30 epics drop for each guild of 40 players each week. This means one per player every week or two at best (there is a random factor and as you get better geared it gets harder to get that last specific item). It then takes a couple months for a raid to fully gear from a tier. Hopefully, by then, the dev team has time to build a new raid. In practice, for guilds who weren’t as good as the difficulty standard, it was far far slower (and more frustrating).
The non-raid content was designed for the more “casual” but because of the existence of those willing to spend 100+ hours a week on grinding, each individual route to progression needed to be incredibly slow so they couldn’t power through it. Blizzard had not yet transferred the raid lockout concept to this arena as it would in Burning Crusades (i.e. dailies, but I’ll discuss that when I post about the expansion). So, their solution was gating by sheer time investment, and a steep one at that. Some crazy people (High Warlords I’m looking at you!) rose to the occasion!
While the Vanilla endgame did have its share of problems: a lack of content for non-raiders, frustration factors, tank shortage, class imbalances, broken specs, extremely steep grind curves, and very high difficulty levels, it was overall pretty damn successful. The designers built a truly stupendous amount of content and invested heavily in unusual and “one-off” quests and details. Compared to later expansions, items were highly individualized, classes varied, factions different, and the game was filled with all sorts of unique quests and features. This, combined with the high difficulty, lent things an extremely epic and deep feel.
The long saga continues with thoughts on The Burning Crusade…
| WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria. or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling. Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis! If you liked this post, follow me at: My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
First a bit of background on me and WOW (World of Warcraft):
I bought the game at launch but didn’t start playing until 2005. Once I did, I was instantly addicted — truly I’ve never been so addicted to a game in my life — and I’ve played at all stages of the game’s evolution. In Vanilla, my main (Undead Warlock) raided everything except for Naxx. Even my Night Elf Rogue wore Bloodfang. In Burning Crusade, my Warlock tanked Illidan and cleared all but the last bosses of Sunwell. My Paladin and Druid healed and tanked Karazan. In Wrath of the Lich King, I raided through to and including Icecrown with both my Warlock and Holy Paladin. But at the end of LK my guild fell apart and I didn’t have the willpower to apply to another, so with Cataclysm I merely leveled my Warlock, geared him for raiding, then gave up.
After almost two years hiatus, I swore I wouldn’t bother with Mists of Pandaria. Of course, this didn’t stop me from buying the collector’s edition. I have all the others except for Vanilla. I didn’t even log in for a few days.
When I finally zoned in, I was daunted by the effort needed to revamp my interface before I could play. All the spells had changed. I had to pick new talents from the completely redesigned (non) talent trees. I had to update all my addons, glyph, and layout my action bars nearly from scratch. I’ve long preferred Destruction on my Warlock, with a minor in Demonology, only having briefly played Affliction during LK.
I found the new Destruction spells make for a much tidier toolbar. A lot of abilities are gone or moved to other specs and so all the main combat spells actually fit on convenient keys for the first time since vanilla. I’ll eventually have to see if this is true on my Paladin. Historically, the Pally’s obscene collection of roles and buffs has meant the default action bars don’t even have enough slots for all the abilities.
Anyway, the new Destruction rotation didn’t take long to learn — although it’s really weird not to have Lifetap and Corruption which were such longtime Warlock staples. The new Destro Lock is more Mage-like than ever with only a single DOT. But the burst is pretty awesome and thanks to a bunch of defensive cooldowns and heals, survivability is excellent. I didn’t choose either Howl of Terror or Shadowfury so my only problem is if I get mobbed by 5+ tough enemies.
I’m not sure how I feel about this new talent system. Broken as they were, I liked the talent trees back in the old days of Vanilla and BC. But the compressed Cata trees felt a bit lame. And most importantly, what seems to be missing now-a-days is the feeling of upgrading while leveling. Between 85 and 89 nothing happened. No talents. No new abilities of note (one minor passive change to Backdraft). All rather anticlimactic. I liked slowly depositing points into those trees and eventually gaining new abilities.
Pandaria looks gorgeous. From the trailers, I was initially skeptical of the whole Kung-fu Panda thing, but it actually works. The Asian look, and the shear dramatic verticality of many zones can be breathtaking. They are easily the best looking yet. I liked the look of BC and LK, but Cata never did it for me. Most of those zones were flat, and far too dislocated.
Jade Forest is a great place to begin and it’s really lovely. Valley of the Four Winds is tongue in cheek, but reminds me (in a good way) of Nagrand which was my favorite BC zone. Kun-Lai Summit is another favorite. This has a high Tibetan feel that is really cool. Being on foot/mount is great, as the scale when you crest some of these mountains wouldn’t work if one was flying. Krasarang Wilds and Townlong Steppes are a little less exciting, but certainly fine. I haven’t played the Dread Wastes yet.
The music is top notch.
I played Jade Forest, Valley of the Four Winds, Krasarang Wilds, and Kun-Lai Summit in that order, completing 100% of the quests in each before moving on (I’ve had Loremaster since two weeks after LK shipped, so this is no surprise). I turned 90 just as I finished up Kun-Lai. I’ve always wondered why Blizzard paces the XP so that you usually have two zones left over when you hit max level. In LK it was three! The Pandarian zones are the biggest yet. Jade Forest and Kun-Lai are almost heroically big. Too big perhaps, as I was starting to feel a little weary moving into the final sub zones of Kun-Lai.
The whole process took me less than a week and I wasn’t playing that hard.
Overall difficulty was very easy. Similar to Cata, but much easier than BC and Vanilla. In those old days you used to die while leveling. Sometimes a lot. I probably died 2-3 times from 85-90.
This was the best leveling experience in a long time, but I can’t help but think it would have been even better with 10 levels, and with the pacing spread out so you hit 90 right at the end of Dread Wastes and with more spell and talent rewards per level.
The quests seem hugely improved. There are still plenty of kill and gather quests, but they are doled out in a really efficient way. You almost always get about five quests at a time all concentrating on a single area. They usually mix collection and kill quests. You head back and pick up a new crop. There is no sense that you might miss some. It’s extremely easy to do them all and feel that you got 100% of the quests. This is in marked contrast to the haphazard nature of old vanilla quests. There is a total absence of postal (long distance delivery) quests and long back and forth quest chains. They also seem to have toned down those giant story chains that took a lot of time in Cata. I’m talking about the Bronzebeard one and that weird vision quest thing in the tedious and way-too-big Vashj’ir. I don’t miss these. Replacing it are some fun chains like the odd but funny monkey/sniper adventure and the highly amusing kung-fu training. It’s all pretty light hearted but enjoyable.
For perhaps the first time ever, the quest rewards were actually useful. I pretty rapidly replaced my blues and purples with green (and the occasional blue) quest rewards. The huge thing is that the rewards are ALL for your class! In the old days, particularly as a DPS only caster, 90% of the rewards couldn’t even be equipped, or were useless healing gear. Plus the rapid step up of base stats (dare we say runaway inflation – my level 90 Lock has 400,000 HP, at 60, in raid gear, I had 6k) means that in MOP, a level 87 green is probably better than your level 85 raid gear, at least for leveling.
Interestingly, there are almost NO socketed items until the endgame. Blizzard doesn’t seem to want you to have to deal with it. There is no need for enchants. The game is easy anyway, and the same scaling means that old cheaper enchants are a waste of time and new endgame MOP enchants too expensive to bother with on leveling gear. You grab and go.
Bag space, at least for a hoarder like me, is still a problem. I need to move some more crap into void storage. The asian look of some of the armor is cool, although I’ve been stuck at 90 with a dumbass looking green hat and need to transmorg it.
My Warlock is, and always has, been Herbology/Alchemy. I’m going to write up a separate post later on the level 90 endgame where I will discuss the bigger changes in the skills, and confine myself here to the experience while leveling. It’s clear that Blizzard is currently thinking that you should concentrate on crafting skills at 90.
Gathering nodes are, however, available in almost obscene quantity. This is in stark contrast to LK where there was barely an herb to be found. I hit 600 with Herbology about half way thru. At first I thought there was a crazy overabundance of Green Tea Leaf, but then I realized this holds for every Pandarian herb except for Golden Lotus. It’s nice that you get XP from the nodes as this rewards you for the 30 seconds spent chasing them down.
Alchemy right now is also very straightforward and doesn’t even require ANY return visits to the trainer or grinding of reputations. This is perhaps boring, but more on this in the next post.
Cooking and Fishing are clearly intended to level at the end as they are both tied to level 90 daily quests. First Aid is, as usual, trivial, and I find Archeology too tedious and am stuck at about 250.
There are only four leveling dungeons: Stormstout Brewery, Temple of the Jade Serpent and at level 87: Mogu’shan Palace and Shado-Pan Monastery. These are all really great leveling dungeons. The quest givers are inside and there are exactly two quests for each. They take about 15-20 minutes and are easy but fun. They feel different enough. They don’t require any sort of crowd control or marking. You just pull a pack and whack away at it and then pull another. Even adds won’t wipe you.
The XP and gear rewards are very good. The gear for sure is better than from quests. The overall balance and length of these instances is very consistent. All four are fun and there is no frustration factor.
If I had a major criticism I think that all the MOP dungeons should have been leveling dungeons and the heroics reserved for 90. I hopped right into heroics without ever playing the level 90 normals (and had no problem) so these are wasted. The designers would have been better off making the Palace and Monastery available at level 86 and the two bug dungeons available at 88 in normal mode.
Overall, the instances serve as nice breaks from the tedium of questing. Now-a-days, with the dungeon finder, you can just queue and keep questing, hop into one, and then back out to questing. It’s all very efficient. You don’t even have to walk in once like in Cata. At some level, I miss the cool interweaving of the world and dungeon quests that Vanilla and BC had, but in practice, back when I leveled vanilla, the time it took to gather a group and run the ludicrously large dungeons was not adequately compensated by the rewards. It was much faster to quest on past them.
I’m also of two minds about the dumbing down. It began with Lich King, saw a frustrating reversion in Cata, and is back in full force. I guess for leveling dungeons, where one is in a hurry, this is a good thing.
Despite the fact that I collect vanity pets (I had over 175 even before this expansion), I haven’t dealt with the whole battle pet mini-game yet. It doesn’t turn up XP or gear, so I figured I’d save it for when I run out of normal stuff to do.
I keep meaning to play a Pandarian (Monk) through the turtle zone, but I haven’t yet.
While there is nothing radically new about MOP, it feels a hell of a lot better than Cata. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. It was fun to level again and Blizzard has cleaned up a lot of stuff that after four expansions had become a little messy. This “new” game is still very much World of Warcraft. They have not reinvented the wheel, but they continual the usual iterative improvements. I suspect that Cataclysm suffered from the redoing of the old zones, which was a lot of content that continuing players like myself never saw.
Anyway, the real meat of the matter is in the end game, and I’ll discuss that in a second post.
| If you liked this post, follow me at:
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo) has bought us an extensive new gameplay coverage video for Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic survival game, The Last of Us. Aside from the recently released Diablo III, this is my most anticipated upcoming game, and I suspect I’m not alone.
[ NOTE: this is my beta preview. I also have a release post on playing the Barbarian 1-60 and a separate one on the Barbarian in Inferno Mode. ]
Finally, the Diablo 3 beta invite showed up in my mailbox. Unfortunately, by the time I got it downloaded and installed I was headed to Vegas for the weekend (which wasn’t so bad, really). But as soon as I returned, I fired it up, rolled a toon, and cranked through the 1.5-2 hours it took to defeat the Skeleton King and “finish” the beta. Then I rolled another class. Then another and another until I’d played them all.
Not surprisingly, for a Blizzard game, and one that is only a month from launch, the game looks “finished” and is seemingly bug free. I didn’t have any problems. I didn’t try any multiplayer but I’m looking forward to it in the release.
Graphics wise, D3 is kinda dark, which wasn’t a problem playing at night, but during the sunny hours it was hard to see a lot of detail. I play on a Mac Pro with an Apple 30″ monitor. At full 2500×1600 resolution the game ran fine (I have a ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB). There was occasional slight slowdown as new textures paged in (I think that’s what it was because it wasn’t during big fights but moving into new areas).
The art is fantastic and everything is modeled in detailed 3D, yet the classic three-quarters pulled back viewpoint limits the options for dynamic camerawork or even the simple ability to show enemies at any real scale. Overall, this substantially reduces the visual drama in favor of more approachable gameplay.
But in that regard, Blizzard does it’s usual slick job of babying you into the game. This is in complete contrast to a hardcore RPG like Dark Souls, which does no coddling. Here, you start each class with just one skill, gaining them incrementally as you level. The early quests are easy and straightforward. By the time you get into the depths of the cathedral and to level six or so, the real flavor of the class starts to emerge.
The overall gameplay is, as one of my friends said, like the Diablo II you remember, not as it actually was. If you boot up the aforementioned classic you’ll find a 2D game that runs in 800×600 (and that only with the expansion pack installed!). Sure the gameplay is slick, but the late 90s graphics are very dated. The new Diablo brings the same basic experience but updated to perhaps 2007 level technology. And really, it’s that great gameplay that matters.
I’m normally drawn toward dark wizards, and so in D2 I mostly played a Necromancer. In D3, that niche is filled by the Witchdoctor, but neither the pet based nature or the class style really appealed. I decided to try out the Barbarian. Big and plate wearing, this is a very straightforward class. The few skill choices available in the first nine or so levels basically seemed to oscillate between heavy hitting on a single target and non-quite-so heavy hitting on multiple targets. I haven’t studied the skill system in detail but it seems to have been simplified, moving away from the elaborate talent trees. Each skill can be powered up or tweaked with runes, and there are several completely distinct skill slots (primary, secondary, defensive, etc) that you can swap in and out skills that belong exclusively in their particular category. For the Barbarian, the primary is a fury generating basic attack and the secondary a harder hitting fury sink.
Progression with the Barbarian was a piece of cake. In the limited scope of the beta I barely even had to chug a health potion, perhaps once. I didn’t die at all. Even the Skeleton King was pretty easy. The attacks definitely got more satisfying as they leveled up, but some felt lackluster like the bleed-causing whirlwind. Maybe it gets cooler later. Maybe they aren’t done with it.
Still, all and all a very fun class to play.
For my discussion of leveling 1-60 in the final version, see here.
Taking on the Skeleton King
Next I tried out the wizard. This is the ranged magical damage dealer. Overall, this class is much squishier than the Barbarian and I died in one spot (right on returning to the Cathedral where there are three big sub-bosses). You have to watch your health and make sure to kite, mostly using the freeze ray or the frost nova to slow down the badies. I liked the feel of the freeze ray, it’s pretty fun. If you tune the skills toward the electrical discharges and the spark-like exploding fireball the wizard can do some serious AOE damage. On one middling outside area I collected a rather large collection of undead and then obliterated them in a big firefight (earning a 60 enemies killed at once achievement). I think there is more pure DPS output here than with the melee classes — in exchange for being fragile.
You have to pay more attention to your resources than the Barbarian. The defensive skill (on the 1 key) is crucial. With the Barbarian it was a sweetener, here, it’s key to getting out of the middle of a big cluster of foes (or blasting them down quick if you are using Crystal Armor). Although harder, it was a fun class to play and I’ll be torn what to try first in the release version.
Third up I tried the Monk. Squishier than the Barbarian for sure, but fairly similar in that you get right in the thick of thinks and wallop. At the earlier levels the different skills didn’t seem as differentiated. Theoretically the Barbarian would be slower and the Monk more nimble, but the Barb is plenty fast, so I’m not sure I yet see a compelling advantage. The teleport TO an enemy rune is kinda cool though.
At about level 7 or 8 things power up a bit and the excitement level rises. The spinning circle of fire and triple punch are real nice. Overall this was an easy class too. I didn’t die and pretty much never needed a health pot.
A few days after finishing the monk I felt it was my duty as a Necromancer player and diehard WOW Warlock to try the Witch Doctor. It was immediately obvious that this was a seriously squishy class, even more so than the Wizard. It’s harder to kite with too. A lot of the early skills are pets of one sort or another and you have to toss them out there and run. This is true of the spiders and bats. I really didn’t like trading the snaring hands for the bats and quickly went back to it. The spiders were okay though. Like the other classes, by the time I got to level 8 or so he was getting fairly powerful. The dogs were fun. The runed version of the grasping hands was a really solid snare and the machine gun blow gun too. Fun to play, but despite the cool theme, I think the Wizard was more straightforward as a ranged caster.
This is the last class I played and thematically the least interesting. The Hunter in WOW never held any interest whatsoever for me and it’s the only class I’ve never rolled. But the D3 Demon Hunter turned out to be pretty fun. Its long range and rapid fire is satisfying and I put an epic? (yellow) bow I got from another tune to good use right from the beginning. The problem with this class, like the Witch Doctor and Wizard, is that it’s very squishy. But even more than those other two it becomes problematic when you get mobbed by mobs. The Demon Hunter can go down fast. Now, even given that, I only died on the Skeleton King, but it was the only class where the boss gave me some trouble. Once I learned to kite and stun him and run back and forth for the health balls it was okay, but still harder and slower than the other classes. Up until that point I often felt I was really kicking ass with the DH, but the problem seemed to stem from the classes’ lack of AOE. I ended up having to use the “trap” as my slowing and AOE device, laying them down (up to five) in advance. I didn’t like the invisible skill very much. The Wizard, while also a ranged squishy, has much better AOE (at least at these early levels).
I enjoy the gearing up minigame in Diablo, always have. My only complaint is the still present need to manage your inventory. It’s not as bad as in D2 where one spent a ridiculous amount of time combing the trash from your inventory and leaving it on the dungeon floor, but you still have to do this. The more readily available town portal(s) makes flipping back to sell your crap much easier.
I also don’t exactly get what gear you really want for each class. Classes can use a large percentage of the items, which I guess is a good thing, but it’s hard to know if a 15.5 dagger is better for a Wizard than a 12.0 wand.
I spent about an hour playing the last two dungeons and the Skeleton King with a pickup group of one other person. This does not represent any exhaustive survey of D3’s four player coop mode. Overall, it was fun, and slightly easier. It was also slower as one often had to wait on the other person. That player clearly hadn’t run through the whole beta four times already and didn’t know exactly where to go like I did :-). I’m assuming multiplayer is the most fun with a good or pre-made four man group. I was playing my monk (repeating the dungeons and she was level 9-11) and they were playing a Demon Hunter about two levels lower. There is no increased loot or particular advantage to playing multiplayer, either. There should be. It’s also not very competitive anymore because everyone has their own loot and there is no PVP (that’s in a separate non PVE mode like the WOW arenas).
The consistent naming and art elements in Blizzard style are an amusing note. While Diablo is darker and more gothic than WOW there are quite a number of common enemy archetypes. The grotesques (abominations in WOW) are one example. These are a distinctly Blizzard baddie. Many of the spell names (and even the class archetypes) are overlapping. The Demon Hunter fires arrows and drops traps and bombs like the Hunter. The Wizard is like a WOW Mage, even down to having a Frost Nova with nearly identical effect. There was even a skeletal sub-boss with the same name as a Scholo boss.
I can’t wait for May 15. In the meantime, watch the Wrath animated short.
Or read my discussion of the Barbarian class, levels 1-60 here.
Find more video game posts here.
www.vg247.com has written a very nice piece on Naughty Dog’s 25th anniversary.
There’s been a few anniversaries in the gaming world this past year: Ubisoft’s 25th, Blizzard’s 20th. But it seems there may have been one that slipped under the radar, which is a big surprise considering this studio is now perhaps one of the most widely-recognised on the triple-A scene.
Naughty Dog is 25 years old this year.
But all things have an origin.
Jamming, man
In 1986, high school students Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin joined forces to found what was then known as Jam Software. The pair had been experimenting with computer programming, tooling around with C++, before combining their talents.
But it was in 1989 that the first seeds of the company as we know it today were sown. Making a new beginning, Jam Software was renamed Naughty Dog, with EA-published RPG Keel The Thief for Apple IIGS, Amiga and PC the first release under the new moniker. Its next effort, Rings of Power for the Genesis or Mega Drive, arrived in 1991 – another RPG published by EA.
And in 1994, Naughty Dog developed a 3DO fighting title for the now defunct Universal Interactive Studios (better known in recent years as Vivendi Games) called Way of the Warrior, with both single-play and multiplayer.
Based on Way of the Warrior’s success, Mark Cerny, then head of Universal Interactive Studios, agreed to back the company’s next games. What came afterwards signaled the beginning of Naughty Dog’s true success.
“Whoa!”
In 1996, with a distribution deal secured, Naughty Dog released a unique platformer called Crash Bandicoot. It was published by the fresh-faced Sony Computer Entertainment, which had released its debut console, the PlayStation, over 1994 and 1995.
Despite a few errors (our first game was actually published in 1985) this is a nice article with lots of good stuff and some fun videos from the different eras. Check out the full text here.
I was once a very hardcore WOW (World of Warcraft) player. And although I burned out and haven’t been playing this year (after reaching 85 with my main, I just lost interest), but I still follow the news. Blizzard just released a trailer for the upcoming fourth expansion, the Mists of Pandaria. Below is a series of cinematics, from the original 2004 release to this newest (sometime 2012). It’s an interesting exercise in progression.
Above is the classic WOW launch cinematic.
Burning Crusade, where the demon infested Illidan Stormrage is confronted.
Then, above, the corrupted Lich King and his army of Scourge, in Wrath of the Lich King.
Then the gigantic Deathwing shatters the world in Cataclysm.
And finally, above, the arrival of… talking pandas. Hmmm. Seems a little like an April Fools joke. But not.
Now Blizzard also just released the cinematic for the upcoming Diablo 3.
That’s more like it! Even if the demon lecture is slightly cheesy. Also note how awesome the rendered girl looks, particularly the lighting and skin textures.
For more info on my video game career, click here.
For what I’m up to now, click here.
Title: Ready Player One
Author: Ernest Cline
Genre: Pop Science-Fiction
Length: 384 pages
Read: September 13-18, 2011
Summary: 10: buy book 20: read book 30: goto 10
I read this after two different friends recommended it in the same week. Wow! If you’re one of my (presumably) many readers who love video games. Go buy and read it. This is pretty much the ultimate classic video games novel! And I should know, having been born in 1970, the perfect time to experience the full rise of video games and modern pop culture (inaugurated May 25, 1977). I was so enamored of computers in general and these little beasties in particular that I went and made (and sold) thirteen of them professionally.
But back to Ready Player One. It’s a first person narrative set in a roughly 2040 dystopia where the world has basically gone to shit and most people live inside a gigantic virtual reality video game. It’s creator has died and left his vast fortune to the winner of an elaborate easter egg hunt (think Atari Adventure Easter Egg crossed with the Great Stork Derby). This whole world and contest centers around an obsessive love of all things pop-culture and 80s, particularly films, comics, and most importantly, video games.
In practice the novel is an old school adventure set mostly in virtual reality. But it contains an astounding number of well placed and deeply woven 80s pop-culture references. For me, they were continual fun. I got 99% of them, including some damn obscure ones. I’ve played every game described in the book (except for Dungeons of Daggorath — never had a TRS-80 — but it looks like Wizardry), seen every movie, heard nearly every song, etc. I don’t know how this book will read for someone a lot younger who isn’t up on all this old school geekery, but I sure enjoyed it.
The story is great fun too. The protagonist is likable and all that. It’s not a long book but races along. There are a few second act jitters (the “romantic” period between the first and second keys), but I blew through them fast enough. The prose is workmanlike but unglamorous and there are some cheesy or cringeworthy moments. They don’t distract from the fun. The last third in particular was awesomely rad with numerous 1337 epic moments. When the protagonist faces off against an unstoppable Mechagodzilla avatar and invokes a two-minute Ultraman powerup I felt tears coming to my eyes.
As Science-Fiction the book is a bit mixed. Mr. Cline manages to deftly describe what must to the novice be a bewildering array of virtual reality technologies and concepts. He’s fairly unusual in actually specifying some of the interface elements in his world and he does a credible job with all of this. Nothing stood out as particularly bogus, but was based on decent extrapolation. There are some elements, however, which still exist in his 30-years-from-now future that are already on the way out. Hard drives in “bulky laptops” for example. One only has to look at the iPad and the Macbook Air to see that writing on the wall. Again, I must point out that these minor quibbles do not detract from the book’s extreme fun factor.
Cline is uncannily knowledgable about his video games (and again, I should know), but there is a curious oddity in the biography of the central Bill Gates crossed with Richard Garriot character. He is described as releasing his first hit game (for the TRS-80) in 1987 in plastic baggies. Besides wondering if any TRS-80 game had much cultural impact (Read my own Apple II guy origin story here!), the date is totally off. If he was talking about 1982 that would have been fine. But by 1987 the TRS-80 had gone the way of Allosaurus and plastic baggies hadn’t been seen in years. My first game, Math Jam, was released in baggies in 1984 and that was way late for them. 1987 featured games like Zelda II, Contra, Maniac Mansion, Mega Man, and Leisure Suit Larry. All of these are well after the era venerated in the book. This small, but important, error is odd in a book so otherwise accurate. I can only assume that the author (and his character), living in the middle of the country, existed in some kind of five-year offset time-warp 🙂
On a deeper level, the novel toys with one of my favorite futurist topics: Will we all get sucked into the computer? I actually think the answer is yes, but that it’s unlikely to happen via 90s envisioned visors and immersion suits (like in Ready Player One). I think we probably will have retina-painting laser visors/glasses at some point. Then neural implants. But the real big deal is when our brains are digitized and uploaded into the Matrix. Muhaha. I’m actually serious, if flip. Eventually it will happen. If not this century then the next. I just hope I make it to the cutoff so I can evade bony old Mr. Grim and upgrade.
In conclusion, I have to agree with the back cover quotes of some other authors I like:
John Scalzi: “A nerdgasm… imagine that Dungeons & Dragons & an ’80s video arcade made hot, sweet love, and their child was raised in Azeroth.”
Patrick Rothfuss: “This book pleased every geeky bone in my geeky body. I felt like it was written just for me.”
So if you have even the least enthusiasm for video games, virtual reality, 80s pop culture, or just plain fun. Go read this book!
For more book reviews, click here.
PS. If you are 5-10 (or more) years younger than me (born 1970) and have (or do) read this book. Tell me in the comments what you think of it. I’m really curious how those who didn’t live it see it.
I couldn’t resist.
This is the twelfth of a now lengthy series of posts on the making of Crash Bandicoot. Click here for the PREVIOUS or for the BEGINNING of the whole mess.
The text below is another journal article I wrote on making Crash in 1999. This is the third part, the FIRST can be found here.
The Crash Bandicoot Trilogy: A Practical Example
The three Crash Bandicoot games represent a clear example of the process of technology and gameplay refinement on a single platform. Crash Bandicoot was Naughty Dog’s first game on the Sony Playstation game console, and its first fully 3D game. With Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back and Crash Bandicoot: Warped, we were able to improve the technology, and offer a slicker more detailed game experience in successively less development time. With the exception of added support for the Analog Joystick, Dual Shock Controller, and Sony Pocketstation the hardware platforms for the three titles are identical.
Timely and reasonably orderly development of a video game title is about risk management. Given that you have a certain amount of time to develop the title, you can only allow for a certain quantity of gameplay and technology risks during the course of development. One of the principle ways in which successive games improve is by the reuse of these risks. Most solutions which worked for the earlier game will work again, if desired, in the new game. In addition, many techniques can be gleaned from other games on the same machine that have been released during the elapsed time.
In the case of sequels such as the later Crash games there is even more reduction of risk. Most gameplay risks, as well as significant art, code, and sound can be reused. This allows the development team to concentrate on adding new features, while at the same time retaining all the good things about the old game. The result is that sequels are empirically better games.
Development: September 1994 – September 1996
Staff: 9 people: 3 programmers, 4 artists, 1 designer, 1 support
Premise: Do for the ultra popular platform action game genre what Virtua Fighter had done for fighting games: bring it into 3D. Design a very likeable broad market character and place him in a fun, and fast paced action game. Attempt to occupy the “official character” niche on the then empty Playstation market. Remember, that by the fall of 1994 no one had yet produced an effective 3D platform action game.
Gameplay risk: how do you design and control an action character in 3D such that the feel is as natural and intuitive as in 2D?
When we first asked ourselves, “what do you get if you put Sonic the Hedgehog (or any other character action game for that matter) in 3D,” the answer that came to mind was: “a game where you always see Sonic’s Ass.” The entire question of how to make a platform game in 3D was the single largest design risk on the project. We spent 9 months struggling with this before there was a single fun level. However, by the time this happened we had formulated many of the basic concepts of the Crash gameplay.
We were trying to preserve all of the good elements of classic platform games. To us this meant really good control, faced paced action, and progressively ramping challenges. In order to maintain a very solid control feel we opted to keep the camera relatively stable, and to orient the control axis with respect to the camera. Basically this means that Crash moves into the screen when you push up on the joypad. This may seem obvious, but it was not at the time, and there are many 3D games which use different (and usually inferior) schemes.
Technical risk: how do you get the Playstation CPU and GPU to draw complex organic scenes with a high degree of texture and color complexity, good sorting, and a solid high resolution look?
It took quite a while, a few clever tricks, and not a little bit of assembly writing and rewriting of the polygon engines. One of our major realizations was that on a CD based game system with a 33mhz processor, it is favorable to pre-compute many kinds of data in non real-time on the faster workstations, and then use a lean fast game engine to deliver high performance.
Technical risk: how do the artists build and maintain roughly 1 million polygon levels with per poly and per vertex texture and color assignment?
The challenge of constructing large detailed levels turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of the whole project. We didn’t want to duplicate the huge amount of work that has gone into making the commercial 3D modeling packages, so we chose to integrate with one of them. We tried Softimage at first, but a number of factors caused us to switch to AliasPower Animator. When we began the project it was not possible to load and view a one million polygon level on a 200mhz R4400 Indigo II Extreme. We spent several months creating a system and tools by which smaller chunks of the level could be hierarchically assembled into a larger whole.
In addition, the commercial packages were not aware that anyone would desire per polygon and per vertex control over texture, color, and shading information. They used a projective texture model preferred by the film and effects industry. In order to maximize the limited amount of memory on the Playstation we knew we would need to have very detailed control. So we created a suite of custom tools to aid in the assignment of surface details to Power Animator models. Many of these features have since folded into the commercial programs, but at the time we were among the first to make use of this style of model construction.
Technical risk: how do you get a 200mhz R4400 Indigo II to process a 1 million polygon level?
For the first time in our experience, it became necessary to put some real thought into the design of the offline data processing pipeline. When we first wrote the level processing tool it took 20 hours to run a small test case. A crisis ensued and we were forced to both seriously optimize the performance of the tool and multithread it so that the process could be distributed across a number of workstations.
Conventional wisdom says that game tools are child’s play. Historically speaking, this is a fair judgment — 2D games almost never involve either sophisticated preprocessing or huge data sets. But now that game consoles house dedicated polygon rendering hardware, the kid gloves are off.
In Crash Bandicoot players explore levels composed of over a million polygons. Quick and dirty techniques that work for smaller data sets (e.g., repeated linear searches instead of binary searches or hash table lookups) no longer suffice. Data structures now matter — choosing one that doesn’t scale well as the problem size increases leads to level processing tasks that take hours instead of seconds.
The problems have gotten correspondingly harder, too. Building an optimal BSP tree, finding ideal polygon strips, determining the best way to pack data into fixed-size pages for CD streaming — these are all tough problems by any metric, academic or practical.
To make matters worse, game tools undergo constant revision as the run-time engine evolves towards the bleeding edge of available technology. Unlike many jobs, where programmers write functional units according to a rigid a priori specification, games begin with a vague “what-if” technical spec — one that inevitably changes as the team learns how to best exploit the target machine for graphics and gameplay.
The Crash tools became a test bed for developing techniques for large database management, parallel execution, data flexibility, and complicated compression and bin packing techniques.
Art / Technical risk: how do you make low poly 3D characters that don’t look like the “Money for Nothing” video?
From the beginning, the Crash art design was very cartoon in style. We wanted to back up our organic stylized environments with highly animated cartoon characters that looked 3D, but not polygonal. By using a single skinned polygonal mesh model similar to the kind used in cutting edge special effects shots (except with a lot less polygons), we were able to create a three dimensional cartoon look. Unlike the traditional “chain of sausages” style of modeling, the single skin allows interesting “squash and stretch” style animation like that in traditional cartoons.
By very careful hand modeling, and judicious use of both textured and shaded polygons, we were able to keep these models within reasonable polygon limits. In addition, it was our belief that because Crash was the most important thing in the game, he deserved a substantial percentage of the game’s resources. Our animation system allows Crash to have unique facial expressions for each animation, helping to convey his personality.
Technical risk: how do you fit a million polygons, tons of textures, thousands of frames of animation, and lots of creatures into a couple megs of memory?
Perhaps the single largest technical risk of the entire project was the memory issue. Although there was a plan from the beginning, this issue was not tackled until February of 1996. At this point we had over 20 levels in various stages of completion, all of which consumed between 2 and 5 megabytes of memory. They had to fit into about 1.2 megabytes of active area.
At the beginning of the project we had decided that the CD was the system resource least likely to be fully utilized, and that system memory (of various sorts) was going to be one of the greatest constraints. We planned to trade CD bandwidth and space for increased level size.
The Crash series employs an extremely complicated virtual memory scheme which dynamically swaps into memory any kind of game component: geometry, animation, texture, code, sound, collision data, camera data, etc. A workstation based tool called NPT implements an expert system for laying out the disk. This tool belongs to the class of formal Artificially Intelligence programs. Its job is to figure out how the 500 to 1000 resources that make up a Crash level can be arranged so as to never have more than 1.2 megabytes needed in memory at any time. A multithreaded virtual memory implementation follows the instructions produced by the tool in order to achieve this effect at run time. Together they manage and optimize the essential resources of main, texture, and sound RAM based on a larger CD based database.
Technical/Design risk: what to do with the camera?
With the 32 bit generation of games, cameras have become a first class character in any 3D game. However, we did not realize this until considerably into the project. Crash represents our first tentative stab at how to do an aesthetic job of controlling the camera without detracting from gameplay. Although it was rewritten perhaps five times during the project, the final camera is fairly straightforward from the perspective of the user. None of the crop of 1995 and 1996 3D action games played very well until Mario 64 and Crash. These two games, while very different, were released within two months of each other, and we were essentially finished with Crash when we first saw Mario. Earlier games had featured some inducement of motion sickness and a difficulty for the players in quickly judging the layout of the scene. In order to enhance the tight, high impact feel of Crash’s gameplay, we were fairly conservative with the camera. As a result Crash retains the quick action feel of the traditional 2D platform game more faithfully than other 3D games.
Technical risk: how do you make a character collide in a reasonable fashion with an arbitrary 3D world… at 30 frames a second?
Another of the games more difficult challenges was in the area of collision detection. From the beginning we believed this would be difficult, and indeed it was. For action games, collision is a critical part of the overall feel of the game. Since the player is looking down on a character in the 3rd person he is intimately aware when the collision does not react reasonably.
Crash can often be within a meter or two of several hundred polygons. This means that the game has to store and process a great deal of data in order to calculate the collision reactions. We had to comb through the computer science literature for innovative new ways of compressing and storing this database. One of our programmers spent better than six months on the collision detection part of the game, writing and rewriting the entire system half a dozen times. Finally, with some very clever ideas, and a lot of hacks, it ended up working reasonably well.
Technical risk: how do you program, coordinate, and maintain the code for several hundred different game objects?
Object control code, which the gaming world euphemistically calls AI, typically runs only a couple of times per frame. For this kind of code, speed of implementation, flexibility, and ease of later modification are the most important requirements. This is because games are all about gameplay, and good gameplay only comes from constant experimentation with and extensive reworking of the code that controls the game’s objects.
The constructs and abstractions of standard programming languages are not well suited to object authoring, particularly when it comes to flow of control and state. For Crash Bandicoot we implemented GOOL (Game Oriented Object LISP), a compiled language designed specifically for object control code that addresses the limitations of traditional languages.
Having a custom language whose primitives and constructs both lend them selves to the general task (object programming), and are customizable to the specific task (a particular object) makes it much easier to write clean descriptive code very quickly. GOOL makes it possible to prototype a new creature or object in as little as 10 minutes. New things can be tried and quickly elaborated or discarded. If the object doesn’t work out it can be pulled from the game in seconds without leaving any hard to find and wasteful traces behind in the source. In addition, since GOOL is a compiled language produced by an advanced register coloring compiler with reductions, flow analysis, and simple continuations it is at least as efficient as C, more so in many cases because of its more specific knowledge of the task at hand. The use of a custom compiler allowed us to escape many of the classic problems of C.
Development: October 1996 – November 1997
Staff: 14 people: 4 programmers, 6 artists, 1 designer, 3 support
Premise: Make a sequel to the best selling Crash Bandicoot that delivered on all the good elements of the first game, as well as correcting many of our mistakes. Increasing the technical muscle of the game, and improving upon the gameplay, all without looking “been there done that…” in one year.
For Crash 2 we rewrote approximately 80% of the game engine and tool code. We did so module by module in order to allow continuous development of game levels. Having learned during Crash 1 about what we really needed out of each module we proceeded to rewrite them rapidly so that they offered greater speed and flexibility.
Technical risk: A fancy new tools pipeline designed to deal with a constantly changing game engine?
The workstation based tools pipeline was a crucial part of Crash 1. However, at the time of its original conception, it was not clear that this was going to be the case. The new Crash 2 tools pipe was built around a consistent database structure designed to allow the evolution of level databases, automatic I/O for complex data types, data browsing and searching, and a number of other features. The pipe was modularized and various built-in restrictions were removed. The new pipe was able to support the easy addition of arbitrary new types of data and information to various objects without outdating old information.
We could never have designed such a clean tool program that would be able to handle the changes and additions of Crash 2 and Warped at the beginning of the first game. Being aware of what was needed at the start of the rewrite allowed us to design a general infrastructure that could support all of the features we had in mind. This infrastructure was then flexible enough to support the new features added to both sequels.
Technical/process risk: The process of making and refining levels took too long during the first game. Can we improve it?
The most significant bottleneck in making Crash 1 was the overall time it took to build and tune a level. So for Crash 2 we took a serious look at this process and attempted to improve it.
For the artists, the task of surfacing polygons (applying texture and color) was very time consuming. Therefore, we made improvements to our surfacing tools.
For both the artists and designers, the specification of different resources in the level was exceedingly tedious. So we added a number of modules to the tools pipeline designed to automatically balance and distribute many of these resources, as well as to auto calculate the active ranges of objects and other resources that had to be controlled manually in the first game. In addition, we moved the specification of camera, camera info, game objects, and game object info into new text based configuration files. These files allowed programmers and designers to edit and add information more easily, and it also allowed the programmers to add new kinds of information quickly and easily.
The result of this process was not really that levels took any less time to make, but that the complexity allowed was several times that of the first game. Crash 2 levels are about twice as large, have integrated bonus levels, multiple branches, “hard paths,” and three or four times as many creatures, each with an order of magnitude more settable parameters. The overall turn around time for changing tunable level information was brought down significantly.
Technical/Design risk: can we make a better more flexible camera?
The camera was one of the things in Crash 1 with which we were least satisfied. So in order to open up the game and make it feel more lifelike, we allowed the camera to look around much more, and supported a much wider set of branching and transition cameras. In addition, arbitrary parameterized information was added to the camera system so that at any location the camera had more than 100 possible settable options.
If the two games are compared side by side, it can be seen that the overall layouts of Crash 2 levels are much larger and more complicated. The camera is more natural and fluid, and there are numerous dynamic camera transitions and effects which were not present in the first game. Even though the Crash 2 camera was written entirely from scratch, the lessons learned during the course of Crash 1 allowed it to be more sophisticated and aggressive, and it executed faster than its predecessor.
Optimization risk: can we put more on screen?
Crash 1 was one of the fastest games of its generation, delivering high detail images at 30 frames per second. Nevertheless, for Crash 2 we wanted to put twice as much on screen, yet still maintain that frame-rate. In order to achieve this goal we had one programmer doing nothing but re-coding areas of the engine into better assembly for the entire length of the project. Dramatically increasing performance does not just mean moving instructions around; it is a complex and involved process. First we study the performance of all relevant areas of the hardware in a scientific and systematic fashion. Profiles are made of cache latencies, coprocessor parallel processing constraints, etc. Game data structures are then carefully rearranged to aid the engine in loading and processing them in the most efficient way. Complicated compression and caching schemes are explored to both reduce storage size (often linked to performance due to bus bandwidth) and to speed up the code.
Simultaneously we modularized the game engine to add more flexibility and features. Crash 2 has more effects, such as Z-buffer-like water effects, weather, reflections, particles, talking hologram heads, etc. Many annoying limitations of the Crash 1 drawing pipeline were removed, and most importantly, the overall speed was increased by more than two-fold.
In order to further improve performance and allow more simultaneous creatures on screen, we re-coded the GOOL interpreter into assembly, and also modified the compiler to produce native MIPS assembly for even better performance.
Technical risk: if we can put more on screen, can we fit it in memory?
We firmly believe that all three Crash games make use of the CD in a more aggressive fashion than most Playstation games. So in order to fit the even larger Crash 2 levels into memory (often up to 12 megabytes a level) we had to increase the efficiency of the virtual memory scheme even more. To do so we rewrote the AI that lays out the CD, employing several new algorithms. Since different levels need different solutions we created a system by which the program could automatically try different approaches with different parameters, and then pick the best one.
In addition, since Crash 2 has about 8 times the animation of the first game, we needed to really reduce the size of the data without sacrificing the quality of the animation. After numerous rewrites the animation was stored as a special bitstream compressed in all 4 dimensions.
Design risk: can we deliver a gameplay experience that is more than just “additional levels of Crash?”
We believe that game sequels are more than an opportunity to just go “back to the bank.” For both of the Crash sequels we tried to give the player a new game, that while very much in the same style, was empirically a bigger, better game. So with the increased capacity of the new Crash 2 engine we attempted to build larger more interesting levels with a greater variety of gameplay, and a more even and carefully constructed level of difficulty progression. Crash 2 has about twice as many creatures as Crash 1, and their behaviors are significantly more sophisticated. For example, instead of just putting the original “turtle” back into the game, we added two new and improved turtles, which had all the attributes of the Crash 1 turtle, but also had some additional differences and features. In this manner we tried to build on the work from the first game.
Crash himself remains the best example. In the second game Crash retains all of the moves from the first, but gains a number of interesting additional moves: crawling, ducking, sliding, belly flopping, plus dozens of custom coded animated death sequences. Additionally, Crash has a number of new control specs: ice, surfboard, jet-pack, baby bear riding, underground digging, and hanging. These mechanics provide entirely new game machines to help increase the variety and fun factor of the game. It would be very difficult to include all of these in a first generation game because so much time is spent refining the basic mechanic.
Technically, these additions and enhancements were aided by the new more flexible information specification of the new tools pipeline, and by additions to the GOOL programming language based on lessons learned from the first game.
Development: January 1998 – November 1998
Staff: 15 people: 3 programmers, 7 artists, 3 designers, 2 support
Premise: With only 9 months in which to finish by Christmas, we gave ourselves the challenge of making a third Crash game which would be even cooler and more fun than the previous one. We chose a new time travel theme and wanted to differentiate the graphic look and really increase the amount and variety of gameplay. This included power-ups, better bosses, lots of new control mechanics, an open look, and multiple playable characters.
Technical/Process risk: the tight deadline and a smaller programming staff required us to explore options for even greater efficiency.
The Crash Warped production schedule required that we complete a level every week. This was nearly twice the rate typical of Crash levels. In addition, many of the new levels for Warped required new engines or sub-engines designed to give them a more free-roaming 3D style. In order to facilitate this process we wrote an interactive listener which allowed GOOL based game objects to be dynamically examined, debugged, and tuned. We were then able to set the parameters and features of objects in real-time, greatly improving our ability to tune and debug levels. Various other visual debugging and diagnostic techniques were also introduced as well.
Knowledge from the previous game allowed us to further pipeline various processes. The Crash series is heavily localized for different territories. The European version supports five languages, text and speech, including lip sync. In addition, it was entirely re-timed, and the animation was resampled for 25hz. The Japanese version has Pocketstation support, a complete language translation, and a number of additional country specific features. We were able to build in the features needed to make this happen as we wrote the US version of the game. The GOOL language was expanded to allow near automatic conversion of character control timing for PAL.
Technical/Art risk: could the trademark look of the Crash series be opened up to offer long distance views and to deliver levels with free-roaming style gameplay?
In order to further differentiate the third Crash game, we modified the engine to support long distance views and Level of Detail (LOD) features. Crash Warped has a much more open look than the previous games, with views up to ten times as far. The background polygon resource manager needed some serious reworking in order to handle this kind of increased polygon load, as did the AI memory manager. We developed the new LOD system to help manage these distance views. These kinds of system complexities would not have been feasible in a first generation game, since when we started Crash 1, the concept of LOD in games was almost completely undeveloped, and just getting a general engine working was enough of a technical hurdle.
Similarly, the stability of the main engine allowed us to concentrate more programmer time on creating and polishing the new sub-engines: jet-ski, motorcycle, and biplane.
Gameplay risk: could we make the gameplay in the new Crash significantly different from the previous ones and yet maintain the good elements of the first two games?
The new free-roaming style levels presented a great gameplay challenge. We felt it necessary to maintain the fast-paced, forward driven Crash style of gameplay even in this new context. The jet-ski in particular represented a new kind of level that was not present in the first two games. It is part race game, part vehicle game, and part regular Crash level. By combining familiar elements like the boxes and creatures with the new mechanics, we could add to the gameplay variety without sacrificing the consistency of the game.
In addition to jet-ski, biplane, and motorcycle levels, we also added a number of other new mechanics (swimming, bazooka, baby T-rex, etc.) and brought back most of Crash 2’s extensive control set. We tried to give each level one or more special hooks by adding gameplay and effect features. Warped has nearly twice as many different creatures and gameplay modes as Crash 2. The third game clocked in at 122,000 lines of GOOL object control code, as compared to 68,000 for the second game and 49,000 for the first! The stability of the basic system and the proven technical structure allowed the programmers to concentrate on gameplay features, packing more fun into the game. This was only possible because on a fixed hardware like the Playstation, we were fairly confident that the Warped engine was reasonably optimal for the Crash style of game. Had we been making the game for a moving target such as the PC, we would have been forced to spend significant time updating to match the new target, and would have not been able to focus on gameplay.
Furthermore, we had time, even with such a tight schedule, to add more game longevity features. The Japanese version of Warped has Pocketstation support. We improved the quality of the boss characters significantly, improved the tuning of the game, added power-ups that can be taken back to previously played levels, and added a cool new time trial mode. Crash games have always had two modes of play for each level: completion (represented by crystals) and box completion (represented by gems). In Warped we added the time trial mode (represented by relics). This innovative new gameplay mode allows players to compete against themselves, each other, and preset goals in the area of timed level completion. Because of this each level has much more replay value and it takes more than twice as long to complete Warped with 100% as it does Crash 2.
Technical risk: more more more!
As usual, we felt the need to add lots more to the new game. Since most of Crash 2’s animations were still appropriate, we concentrated on adding new ones. Warped has a unique animated death for nearly every way in which Crash can loose a life. It has several times again the animation of the second game. In addition, we added new effects like the arbitrary water surface, and large scale water effects. Every character, including Crash got a fancy new shadow that mirrors the animated shape of the character.
All these additions forced us to squeeze even harder to get the levels into memory. Additional code overlays, redundant code mergers, and the sacrifice of thirteen polka dotted goats to the level compression AI were necessary.
In conclusion, the consistency of the console hardware platform over its lifetime allows the developer an opportunity to successively improve his or her code, taking advantage of techniques and knowledge learned by themselves and others. With each additional game the amount of basic infrastructure programming that must be done is reduced, and so more energy can be put into other pursuits, such as graphical and gameplay refinements.
| If you liked this post, follow me at:
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
This is loosely part of a now lengthy series of posts on the making of Crash Bandicoot. Click here for the PREVIOUS or for the FIRST POST .
Below is another journal article I wrote on making Crash in 1999. This was co-written with Naughty Dog uber-programmer Stephen White, who was my co-lead on Crash 2, Crash 3, Jak & Daxter, and Jak 2. It’s long, so I’m breaking it into three parts.
Teaching an Old Dog New Bits
How Console Developers are Able to Improve Performance When the Hardware Hasn’t Changed
by
Andrew S. Gavin
and
Stephen White
Copyright © 1994-99 Andrew Gavin, Stephen White, and Naughty Dog, Inc. All rights reserved.
Personal computers and video game consoles have both made tremendous strides in graphics and audio performance; however, despite these similarities there is a tremendous benefit in understanding some important differences between these two platforms.
The ability to evolve is the cornerstone behind the long-term success of the IBM PC. Tremendous effort has been taken on the PC so that individual components of the hardware could be replaced as they become inefficient or obsolete, while still maintaining compatibility with existing software. This modularity of the various PC components allows the user to custom build a PC to fit specific needs. While this is a big advantage in general, this flexibility can be a tremendous disadvantage for developing video games. It is the lack of evolution; the virtual immutability of the console hardware that is the greatest advantage to developing high quality, easy to use video game software.
The price of the PC’s evolutionary ability comes at the cost of dealing with incompatibility issues through customized drivers and standardization. In the past, it was up to the video game developer to try to write custom code to support as many of the PC configurations as possible. This was a time consuming and expensive process, and regardless of how thorough the developer tried to be, there were always some PC configurations that still had compatibility problems. With the popularity of Microsoft’s window based operating systems, video game developers have been given the more palatable option of allowing other companies to develop the drivers and deal with the bulk of the incompatibility issues; however, this is hardly a panacea, since this necessitates a reliance on “unknown” and difficult to benchmark code, as well as API’s that are designed more for compatibility than optimal performance. The inherit cost of compatibility is compromise. The API code must compromise to support the largest amount of hardware configurations, and likewise, hardware manufacturers make compromises in their hardware design in order to adapt well to the current standards of the API. Also, both the API and the hardware manufacturers have to compromise because of the physical limitations of the PC’s hardware itself, such as bus speed issues.
The operating system of a PC is quite large and complicated, and is designed to be a powerful and extensively featured multi-tasking environment. In order to support a wide variety of software applications over a wide range of computer configurations, the operating system is designed as a series of layers that distance the software application from the hardware. These layers of abstraction are useful for allowing a software application to function without concerning itself with the specifics of the hardware. This is an exceptionally useful way of maintaining compatibility between hardware and software, but is unfortunately not very efficient with respect to performance. The hardware of a computer is simply a set of interconnected electronic devices. To theoretically maximize the performance of a computer’s hardware, the software application should write directly to the computer’s hardware, and should not share the resources of the hardware, including the CPU, with any other applications. This would maximize the performance of a video game, but would be in direct conflict with the implementations of today’s modern PC operating systems. Even if the operating system could be circumvented, it would then fall upon the video game to be able to support the enormous variety of hardware devices and possible configurations, and would therefore be impractical.
Another problem with having a large variety of hardware is that the video game developer cannot reliably predict a user’s personal set-up. This lack of information means that a game can not be easily tailored to exploit the strengths and circumvent the weaknesses of a particular system. For example, if all PC’s had hard-drives that were all equally very fast, then a game could be created that relied on having a fast hard-drive. Similarly, if all PC’s had equally slow hard-drives, but had a lot of memory, then a game could compensate for the lack of hard-drive speed through various techniques, such as caching data in RAM or pre-loading data into RAM. Likewise, if all PC’s had fast hard-drives, and not much memory, then the hard-drive could compensate for the lack of much memory by keeping most of the game on the hard-drive, and only spooling in data as needed.
Another good example is the difference between polygon rendering capabilities. There is an enormous variation in both performance and effects between hardware assisted polygonal rendering, such that both the look of rendered polygons and the amount of polygons that can be rendered in a given amount of time can vary greatly between different machines. The look of polygons could be made consistent by rendering the polygons purely through software, however, the rendering of polygons is very CPU intensive, so may be impractical since less polygons can be drawn, and the CPU has less bandwidth to perform other functions, such as game logic and collision detection.
Other bottlenecks include CD drives, CPU speeds, co-processors, memory access speeds, CPU caches, sound effect capabilities, music capabilities, game controllers, and modem speeds to name a few.
Although many PC video game programmers have made valiant attempts to make their games adapt at run-time to the computers that they are run on, it is difficult for a developer to offer much more than simple cosmetic enhancements, audio additions, or speed improvements. Even if the developer had the game perform various benchmark tests before entering the actual game code, it would be very difficult, and not to mention limiting to the design of a game, for the developer to write code that could efficiently structurally adapt itself to the results of the benchmark.
A subtle, yet important problem is the large variety of video game controllers that have to be supported by the PC. Having a wide variety of game controllers to choose from may seem at first to be a positive feature since having more seems like it should be better than having less, yet this variety actually has several negative and pervasive repercussions on game design. One problem is that the game designer can not be certain that the user will have a controller with more than a couple of buttons. Keys on the keyboard can be used as additional “buttons”, but this can be impractical or awkward for the user, and also may require that the user configure which operations are mapped to the buttons and keys. Another problem is that the placement of the buttons with respect to each other is not known, so the designer doesn’t know what button arrangement is going to give the user the best gameplay experience. This problem can be somewhat circumvented by allowing the user to remap the actions of the buttons, but this isn’t a perfect solution since the user doesn’t start out with an inherent knowledge of the best way to configure the buttons, so may choose and remain using an awkward button configuration. Also, similar to the button layout, the designer doesn’t know the shape of the controller, so can’t be certain what types of button or controller actions might be uncomfortable to the user.
An additional problem associated with game controllers on the PC is that most PC’s that are sold are not bundled with a game controller. This lack of having a standard, bundled controller means that a video game on the PC should either be designed to be controlled exclusively by the keyboard, or at the very least should allow the user to optionally use a keyboard rather than a game controller. Not allowing the use of the keyboard reduces the base of users that may be interested in buying your game, but allowing the game to be played fully using the keyboard will potentially limit the game’s controls, and therefore limit the game’s overall design.
Of course, even if every PC did come bundled with a standard game controller, there would still be users who would want to use their own non-standard game controllers. The difference, however, is that the non-standard game controllers would either be specific types of controllers, such as a steering wheel controller, or would be variations of the standard game controller, and would therefore include all of the functionality of the original controller. The decision to use the non-standard controller over the standard controller would be a conscious decision made by the user, rather than an arbitrary decision made because there is no standard.
Another problem associated with the PC’s evolutionary ability is that it is difficult to predict the performance of the final target platform. The development of video games has become an expensive and time consuming endeavor, with budgets in the millions, and multi year schedules that are often unpredictable. The PC video game developer has to predict the performance of the target machine far in advance of the release of the game, which is difficult indeed considering the volatility of schedules, and the rapid advancements in technology. Underestimating the target can cause the game to seem dated or under-powered, and overestimating the target could limit the installed base of potential consumers. Both could be costly mistakes.
While PC’s have become more powerful through continual evolution, video game consoles advance suddenly with the appearance of an entirely new console onto the market. As new consoles flourish, older consoles eventually lose popularity and fade away. The life cycle of a console has a clearly defined beginning: the launch of the console into the market. The predicted date of the launch is normally announced well in advance of the launch, and video game development is begun early enough before the launch so that at least a handful of video game titles will be available when the console reaches the market. The end of a console’s life cycle is far less clearly defined, and is sometimes defined to be the time when the hardware developer of the console announces that there will no longer be any internal support for that console. A more practical definition is that the end of a console’s life cycle is when the public quits buying much software for that console. Of course, the hardware developer would want to extend the life cycle of a console for as long as possible, but stiff competition in the market has caused hardware developers to often follow up the launch of a console by immediately working on the design of the next console.
Unlike PC’s which can vary wildly from computer to computer, consoles of a particular model are designed to be exactly the same. Okay, so not exactly the same, but close enough that different revisions between the hardware generally only vary in minor ways that are usually pretty minor from the perspective of the video game developer, and are normally transparent to the user. Also, the console comes with at least one standard game controller, and has standardized peripheral connections.
The general premise is that game software can be written with an understanding that the base hardware will remain consistent throughout the life-span of the console; therefore, a game can be tailored to both exploit the strengths of the hardware, and to circumvent the weaknesses.
The consistency of the hardware components allows a console to have a very small, low level operating system, and the video game developer is often given the ability to either talk to the hardware components directly, or to an extremely low hardware abstraction layer.
The performance of the components of the hardware is virtually identical for all consoles of a given model, such that the game will look the same and play the same on any console. This allows the video game developer to design, implement, and test a video game on a small number of consoles, and be assured that the game will play virtually the same for all consoles.
| If you liked this post, follow me at:
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
This is part of a now lengthy series of posts on the making of Crash Bandicoot. Click here for the PREVIOUS or for the FIRST POST .
Dave Baggett, Naughty Dog employee #1 (after Jason and I) throws his own thoughts on Crash Bandicoot into the ring:
This is a great telling of the Crash story, and brings back a lot of memories. Andy and Jason only touch on what is to me the most interesting aspect of this story, which was their own relationship. When I met them, they had been making games together — and selling them — literally since middle school. I remember meeting Andy for the first time in April 1992, at an MIT AI Lab orientation. He knew as much as I did about games and programming, was as passionate about it as I was, and was equally commercially-minded. I just assumed meeting someone like this was a consequence of the selectivity of MIT generally and the AI Lab in particular, which accepts about 25 students each year from a zillion applicants.
In the long run I found that assumption was wrong: Andy and Jason were ultimately unique in my experience. None of us on the Crash 1 team realized it, but as a team we were very much outliers. At 23, Andy and Jason had commercial, strategic-thinking, and negotiating skills that far exceeded those of most senior executives with decades of experience. These, combined with their own prodigious technical talents and skillful but at times happenstance hiring, produced a team that not only could compete with Miyamoto, but in some ways outdo him. (More on this in a moment.)
I still remember the moment I decided to bail on my Ph.D. and work for Andy and Jason as “employee #1”. I don’t think they saw themselves this way, but my archetype for them was John and Paul. (The Beatles, not the saints!) They were this crazy six-sigma-outlier yin/yang pair that had been grinding it out for literally years — even though they were still barely in their 20s. I knew these guys would change the world, and I wanted to be the George Harrison. One problem with this idea, however, was that they had been gigging together for so long that the idea of involving someone else in a really deep way — not just as an employee,but as a partner — was extremely challenging for them emotionally, and, I think, hard for them to conceptualize rationally from a business standpoint. This ultimately led to my leaving after Crash 2 — very sadly, but mostly for dispassionate “opportunity cost” reasons — though I continued to work with Josh Mancell on the music for Crash 3 and CrashTeam Racing, and remained close friends with all the ‘Dogs.
Andy and Jason had evolved a peculiar working relationship that the rest of the team found highly amusing. Jason would stomp around raging about this or that being terrible and Andy would play the role of Star Trek’s Scotty — everything was totally impossible and Jason couldn’t possibly appreciate the immense challenges imposed by what he was really asking for. (As a programmer myself, I generally took Andy’s side in these debates, though I usually hid in my office when the yelling got above a certain decibel level.) Eventually when matters were settled Andy usually pounded out the result in a 1/10th of the advertised time (also like Scotty). The rest of us couldn’t help but laugh at these confrontations — at times, Andy and Jason behaved like an old married couple. The very long work hours — literally 100-hour weeks — and the stress level definitely amplified everyone’s emotions, especially theirs.
Andy and Japanese Crash in the NDI offices
On the subject of Mario 64, I agree more with Andy than with Jason, and think that Jason’s view highlights something very interesting and powerful about his personality. At the time I thought — and in retrospect, I still think — that Mario 64 was clumsy and ugly. It was the work of a great genius very much making a transition into a new medium — like a painter’s first work in clay. Going from 2D to 3D made all the technical challenges of games harder — for both conceptual and algorithmic reasons — and Miyamoto had just as hard a time as us adapting traditional gameplay to this new framework. The difference was that Miyamoto was an artist, and refused to compromise. He was willing and able to make a game that was less “fun” but more aggressively novel. As a result, he gave gamers their first taste of glorious 3D open vistas — and that was intoxicating. But the truth is that Mario 64 just wasn’t that fun; Miyamoto’s 2D efforts at the time — Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi’s Island — were far more fun (and, in fact, some of my personal favorite games of all time, though I never would have admitted that out loud at the time). As Andy said, the camera algorithms were awful; we had an incredibly hard time with camera control in our more constrained rails environment, and the problem wasn’t really technically solved for open environments like Mario 64’s until many years later. Mario 64’s collision detection algorithms were crap as well — collision detection suffers from a “curse of dimensionality” that makes it much harder in 3D than in 2D, as we also found. At Naughty Dog, we combined my ridiculously ambitious octree approach — essentially, dividing the entire world up into variable-sized cubes — with Mark’s godlike assembly coding to produce something *barely* fast enough to work — and it took 9 months. This was the one the one area on Crash when I thought we might actually just fail — and without Mark and I turning it into a back-and-forth coding throw-down, we probably would have. (As an aside, some coders have a savant-like ability to map algorithms onto the weird opportunities and constraints imposed by a CPU; only Greg Omi — who worked with us on Crash 2 — was in the same league as Mark when it came to this, of the hundreds of programmers I’ve worked with.)
But Jason was tormented by Mario 64, and by the towering figure of Miyamoto generally. Like Andy Grove, Jason was constantly paranoid and worked up about the competition. He consistently underrated his — and our — own efforts, and almost neurotically overrated those of his competitors. I saw this trait later in several other great business people I worked with, and it is one I’ve found that, while maddening, correlates with success.
Fifteen years later, I’m now on my third startup; ITA Software followed Naughty Dog, and now I’m doing a raw startup again. The Naughty Dog model set the mold for all my future thinking about startups, and so far each one has followed a similar pattern: you must have a very cohesive, hard-working, creative team early on. This team of 6-12 sets the pattern for the company’s entire future — whether it grows to 50, 500, or — I can only assume — 5000 employees. The Crash 1 team was one of those improbable assemblages of talent that can never quite be reproduced. And unlike our contemporaries, our team got lucky: as Andy said, we were able to “slot in” to a very low-probability opportunity. Yes, Andy and Jason, with Mark, had identified the slot, and that was prescient. But many things had to go our way for the slot to still be genuinely available. The Crash team was an improbably talented team that exploited an improbable opportunity. As a life-long entrepreneur, I’ve lived to participate in — and, now, try to create — teams like that. There’s nothing more gratifying in business.
Part 8 CONTINUES here with another guest post.
| If you liked this post, follow me at:
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
PREVIOUS installment, or the FIRST POST.
A Bandicoot, his beach, and his crates
But even once the core gameplay worked, these cool levels were missing something. We’d spent so many polygons on our detailed backgrounds and “realistic” cartoon characters that the enemies weren’t that dense, so everything felt a bit empty.
We’d created the wumpa fruit pickup (carefully rendered in 3D into a series of textures — burning a big chunk of our vram — but allowing us to have lots of them on screen), and they were okay, but not super exciting.
Enter the crates. One Saturday, January 1996, while Jason and I were driving to work (we worked 7 days a week, from approximately 10am to 4am – no one said video game making was easy). We knew we needed something else, and we knew it had to be low polygon, and ideally, multiple types of them could be combined to interesting effect. We’d been thinking about the objects in various puzzle games.
So crates. How much lower poly could you get? Crates could hold stuff. They could explode, they could bounce or drop, they could stack, they could be used as switches to trigger other things. Perfect.
So that Saturday we scrapped whatever else we had planned to do and I coded the crates while Jason modeled a few, an explosion, and drew some quick textures.
About six hours later we had the basic palate of Crash 1 crates going. Normal, life crate, random crate, continue crate, bouncy crate, TNT crate, invisible crate, switch crate. The stacking logic that let them fall down on each other, or even bounce on each other. They were awesome. And smashing them was so much fun.
Over the next few days we threw crates into the levels with abandon, and formally dull spots with nothing to do became great fun. Plus, in typical game fashion tempting crates could be combined with in game menaces for added gameplay advantage. We even used them as the basis for our bonus levels (see above video). We also kept working on the feel and effects of crate smashing and pickup collection. I coded them again and again, going for a pinball machine like ringing up of the score. One of the best things about the crates is that you could smash a bunch, slurp up the contents, and 5-10 seconds later the wumpa and one-ups would still be ringing out.
This was all sold by the sound effects, executed by Mike Gollom for Crash 1-3. He managed to dig up the zaniest and best sounds. The wumpa slurp and the cha-ching of the one up are priceless. As one of our Crash 2 programmers used to say, “the sounds make the game look better.”
For some reason, years later, when we got around to Jak & Daxter we dropped the crate concept as “childish,” while our friends and amiable competitors at Insomniac Games borrowed them over into Ratchet & Clank. They remained a great source of cheap fun, and I scratch my head at the decision to move on.
Now, winter 95-96 the game was looking very cool, albeit very much a work-in-progress. The combination of our pre-calculation, high resolution, high poly-count, and 30 fps animation gave it a completely unique look on the machine. So much so that many viewers thought it a trick. But we had kept the whole project pretty under wraps. One of the dirty secrets of the Sony “developer contract” was that unlike its more common “publisher” cousin, it didn’t require presentation to Sony during development, as they assumed we’d eventually have to get a publisher. Around Thanksgiving 1995, I and one of our artists, Taylor Kurosaki, who had a TV editing background, took footage from the game and spent two days editing it into a 2 minute “preview tape.” We deliberately leaked this to a friend at Sony so that the brass would see it.
They liked what they saw.
Management shakeups at Sony slowed the process, but by March of 1996 Sony and Universal had struck a deal for Sony to do the publishing. While Sony never officially declared us their mascot, in all practical senses we became one. Heading into the 1996 E3 (May/June) we at Naughty Dog were working ourselves into oblivion to get the whole game presentable. Rumors going into E3 spoke of Nintendo’s new machine, the misleadingly named N64 (it’s really 32 bit) and Miyamoto’s terrifying competitive shadow, Mario 64.
Crash and his girl make a getaway
For two years we had been carefully studying every 3D character game. Hell, we’d been pouring over even the slightest rumor – hotly debated at the 3am deli takeout diners. Fortunately for us, they’d all sucked. Really sucked. Does anyone remember Floating Runner? But Mario, that wasn’t going to suck. However, before E3 1996 all we saw were a couple of screen shots – and that only a few weeks before. Crash was pretty much done. Well, at least we thought so.
Now, we had seen some juicy magazine articles on Tomb Raider, but we really didn’t worry much about that because it was such a different kind of game: a Raiders of the Lost Ark type adventure game starring a chick with guns. Cool, but different. We’d made a cartoon action CAG aimed at the huge “everybody including kids” market.
Mario was our competition.
Jason says:
The empty space had plagued us for a long time. We couldn’t have too many enemies on screen at the same time. Even though the skunks or turtles were only 50-100 polygons each, we could show two or three at most. The rest was spent on Crash and the Background. Two or three skunks was fine for a challenge, but it meant the next challenge either had to be part of the background, like a pit, or far away. If two skunk challenges came back to back there was a huge amount of boring ground to cover between them.
Enter the crates. The Crates weren’t put in to Crash until just before Alpha, or the first “fully playable” version of the game.
Andy must have programmed the “Dynamite Crate/Crate/Dynamite Crate” puzzle 1000 times to get it right. It is just hard enough to spin the middle crate out without blowing up the other two, but not hard enough not to make it worth trying for a few wumpa fruit. Getting someone to risk a Life for 1/20th of a Life is a fine balancing act!
Eventually the Crates led to Crash’s name. In less than a month after we put them in everyone realized that they were the heart of the game. Crash’s crash through them not only filled up the empty spots, the challenges ended up filling time between Crate challenges!
This isn’t the place for an in depth retelling of the intrigue behind the Sony/Crash relationship, but two stories must be told.
The first is Sony’s first viewing of Crash in person. Kelly Flock was the first Sony employee to see Crash live [ Andy NOTE: running, not on videotape ]. He was sent, I think, to see if our videotape was faked!
Kelly is a smart guy, and a good game critic, but he had a lot more to worry about than just gameplay. For example, whether Crash was physically good for the hardware!
Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”
Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash.
The second story that can’t be glossed over was our first meeting with the Sony executives from Japan. Up until this point, we had only dealt with Sony America, who got Crash’s “vibe”. But the Japanese were not so sure.
We had been handed a document that compared Crash with Mario and Nights, or at least what was known of the games at the time. Though Crash was rated favorably in “graphics” and some other categories, two things stood out as weaknesses. The first was that Sony Japan didn’t like the character much, and the second was a column titled “heritage” that listed Mario and Sonic as “Japanese” and Crash as “other.” The two negatives were related.
Let us remember that in 1995 there was Japan, and then there was the rest of the world in video games. Japan dominated the development of the best games and all the hardware. It is fair to say that absent any other information, the Japanese game WAS probably the better one.
Mark presided over the meeting with the executives. He not only spoke Japanese, but also was very well respected for his work on Sonic 2 and for his years at Sega in Japan. I could see from the look in Mark’s eyes that our renderings of Crash, made specifically for the meeting, did not impress them.
We took a break, during which it was clear that Sony was interested in Crash for the US alone, hardly a “mascot” crowning. I stared at the images we had done. Primitive by today’s standards, but back then they were reasonably sexy renderings that had been hand retouched by Charlotte for most of the previous 48 hours. She was fried.
I walked over to her. I think she could barely hold her eyes open. I had spent the previous month spending all of my free time (4am-10am) studying Anime and Manga. I read all the books available at that time in English on the subject. All three! I also watched dozens of movies. I looked at competitive characters in the video game space. I obsessed, but I obsessed from America. I had never been to Japan.
I asked Charlotte if she could close Crash’s huge smiling mouth making him seem less aggressive. I asked her to change Crash’s eyes from green to two small black “pac-man” shapes. And I asked her to make Crash’s spike smaller. And I told her she had less than 15 minutes. With what must have been her last energy she banged it out.
I held up the resulting printout 15 minutes later.
Sony Japan bought off on Crash for the international market.
I don’t want to make the decision on their part seem arbitrary. Naughty Dog would do a huge amount of work after this on the game for Japan, and even then we would always release a Japanese specific build. Whether it was giving Aku Aku pop up text instructions, or replace a Crash smashing “death” that reminded them of the severed head and shoes left by a serial killer that was loose in Japan during Crash 2’s release, we focused on Japan and fought hard for acceptance and success.
We relied on our Japanese producers, including Shuhei Yoshida, who was assigned shortly after this meeting, to help us overcome our understandable ignorance of what would work in Japan. And Sony Japan’s marketing department basically built their own Crash from the ground up for the marketing push.
Maybe Charlotte’s changes showed Sony that there was a glimmer of hope for Crash in Japan. Maybe they just saw how desperate we were to please and couldn’t say no. Maybe Universal put something in the coffee they had during the break.
Who knows, but Crash was now a big part of the international PlayStation push. So there were more important things for us to worry about then Sony and the deal:
The fear of Miyamoto was thick at Naughty Dog during the entire Crash development period. We knew eventually he would come out with another Mario, but we were hoping, praying even, that it would be a year after we launched.
Unfortunately that was not to be. We started seeing leaks of video of the game.
It was immediately obvious that it was a different type of game: truly open. That scared us. But when we saw the graphics we couldn’t believe it. I know there will be some that take this as heresy, but when we saw the blocky, simple, open world we breathed a sign of relief. I think I called it I Robot Mario, evoking the first 3D game.
Of course we hadn’t played it, so we knew we couldn’t pass judgment until we did. That would happen at E3.
| If you liked this post, follow me at:
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
The Big Fight!
PREVIOUS installment, or the FIRST POST.
[ NOTE, Jason Rubin added his thoughts to all the parts now, so if you missed that, back up and read the second half of each. ]
But this brings us to the gameplay. We were forging new ground here, causing a lot of growing pains. I started fairly programming the control of the main character early. This is the single most important thing in a CAG, and while intellectually I knew this from Way of the Warrior, it was really Mark who drove the message home. I did all the programming, but Mark helped a lot with the complaining. For example, “he doesn’t stop fast enough,” or “he needs to be able to jump for a frame or two AFTER he’s run off a cliff or it will be frustrating.” Jason’s also really good flaw detection. Which is a good thing. Internal criticism is essential, and as a programmer who wrote dozens of world class control schemes in the years between 1994 and 2004, I rewrote every one at least five or six times. Iteration is king.
Even after the control was decent, we still had no idea how to build good 3D gameplay with it. Our first two test levels “the jungle, level1” and “lava cave, level2” were abysmal, and neither shipped in the final game. First of all, they were too open with way too many polygons. Level1 had over 10 million, whereas a shipping level tended to have around a million (a lot back then). Level2 was better, but not much.
So during the summer of 1995 we retrenched and tried to figure out how to make a level that was actually fun. The F word is the most important concept in making games. Too many forget this.
But Mark – who served the practical function of producer – never let us.
By this time most of the art design for the game was complete, including the vast layout of possible looks and levels, but we skipped to about 2/3 through and used Cortex’s factory levels to really focus on fun. Our first successful level was essentially 2D (“Heavy Machinery”). It was all rendered in 3D, but the camera watched from the side like a traditional platformer. Here we combined some classic devices like steam vents, drop platforms, bouncy pads, hot pipes, and monsters that tracked back and forth in simple patterns. This was in essence a retreat to success, as it employed the basic kind of techniques that Donkey Kong Country had used so successfully. This palate of objects would be arranged in increasingly more difficult combination.
It worked. Thank God.
Simultaneously, we were working on a more ambitious level where the camera sat above and “Willie” walked both into/out and side to side (“Generator Room”). This factory level included drop platforms, moving platforms, dangerous pipes, and various robots. By using a more mechanical setting, and briefly forgoing the complex organic forest designs we were able to distill this two axis gameplay and make it fun. In both areas we had to refine “Willie’s” jumping, spinning, and bonking mechanics.
We then got our third type of level working (“Cortex Power”). This involved having the camera behind the character, over his shoulder, in the original “Sonic’s ass” POV that had faired miserably with level1 and level2. By taking some of the new creatures and mechanics, and combining them with hot pipes and slime pits we were able to make it work in this more factory-like setting.
Having learned these lessons, we turned back to the jungle design with a new jungle level, known as “levelc” (“Jungle Rollers”). This used some of the pieces from the failed level1, but arranged as a corridor between the trees, much like the over-the-shoulder factory level. Here we utilized pits, skunks on paths, stationary plants, and rollers to create the palate of obstacles. With this level the into-the-screen gameplay really came into its own, and it remains one of my favorite levels. Each element served its purpose.
Rollers (big stone wheels that could crush the player, and rolled from side to side) provided timing gates. They could be doubled or tripled up for more challenge.
Skunks traveled down the path tracking back and forth toward the player, requiring him to attack them or jump over them.
Fallen logs, tikis, and pits needed to be jumped over.
Stationary plants could strike at the player, requiring one to tease them into a strike, then jump on their heads.
Once we had these three level types going things really begun to get on a roll. For each level art design, like jungle, we would typically do 2-3 levels, the first with the introductory set of challenges, and then the later ones adding in a few new twists combined at much harder difficulty. For example in the sequel to the jungle level we added drop platforms and moving platforms. The elements combined with the characters mechanics to form the fun.
It’s also worth noting that we stumbled onto a few of our weirder (and most popular) level designs as variants of the over-the-shoulder. First “Boulders,” aping that moment from Raiders of the Lost Ark when the giant stone ball starts rolling toward Indy. For this we reversed the action and had the character run into the screen. This proved so successful that we riffed on it again in Crash 2 and 3. Same with “Hog Wild,” in which the character jumps on the bag of a wild “hog ride” and is dragged at high speed through a frenetic series of obstacles.
Jason says:
Making games is no game. So many aspiring designers think that all you do is come up with a great idea and the sit around and play. That may be true if you are aping something that exists, like making just another first person shooter (this time in ancient Sumeria and with Demon Aliens!), or making something small and easy to iterate, but it is certainly NOT true when you are trying something new in the AAA space.
And to make matters worse, the LAST person who can attest to a good game design is the game designer. Not only do they know what to do when they test it, but they are also predisposed to like it.
Oh no, the proper test is to hand it to a complete noob, in Crash’s case the ever rotating list of secretaries and clerical staff that worked at Universal. For many of them it was their first time touching a controller, and they succeeded immediately in failing, miserably, to get a single challenge passed. As they smiled and tried to be positive they were saying “this sucks” with their hands. Thus a good designer has to both dread and seeks out other people’s advice, especially those most likely to hate the work he has done. And the designer has to accept the third party opinion over theirs. Every time. Only when the noobs start completing challenges and smile WHILE PLAYING do you know you are getting somewhere.
I don’t know why, but I have always had an innate ability to see the flaws in my own projects, even after they are “final” in everyone else’s eyes. Naughty Dog graphic engine coder Greg Omi, who joined for Crash 2, once said I could spot a single pixel flicker on his monitor at 30 yards while holding a conversation with someone else and facing the opposite direction. Whatever it is, I get a weird frustrated sweat when I see something wrong. Mark Cerny has the same “talent.”
The two of us were always unhappy with the gameplay. I don’t mean just the early gameplay, I mean always unhappy with the gameplay, period. I know in retrospect that I was to hard on the team quite often because of this, and that perhaps more often than not I was too poignant when voicing my frustration (letting myself off easy here!), but I think a certain amount of frustration and pain is inherent in making gameplay success.
Stripping the game down to familiar 2D, and then building from there to levels that contained only platforms floating in space was the crutch we used to get to the jungle levels that made Crash such a success. In the end, these levels aren’t that different in gameplay design. But starting with the Jungle was too big a leap. We needed simple. Upon simple we built complex.
Andy has done a good job of compressing a year of design hell into a blog-sized chunk. With all our technical and art successes, the game could not have succeeded without good gameplay. This was by far the hardest part of making Crash Bandicoot.
Dave and Andy’s code, Justin’s IT and coloring, Charlotte Francis’s textures, And Bob, Taylor and my backgrounds and characters would have been worth nothing if Crash hadn’t played well.
Jason, Andy, Dave, Bob, Taylor, Justin, Charlotte
| If you liked this post, follow me at:
My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
