Mechanical Review: You can't go home again.

This post is an addendum to the fantastic blog post here:
       "Don’t remake an old game" by Eamonn McHugh-Roohr

Ask yourself honestly, what is the remake for your Old Favorite Game?

Is it a graphical bump? expanded player abilities? re-balanced item stats?

Regardless of your choice; you are not remaking a game. In fact, you have begun to make a new game. This new game might look like Old Favorite Game but, there is no possible way to actually remake this game.

The passage of time on game technology

The Old Favorite Game was beholden to incredibly contemporaneous things like:

• processor clock speeds.
• GPU clock speeds.
• Memory caps.
• Built-from-scratch movement and physics code.
• Item stats either not refined enough, or balanced to clockspeed-influenced gameplay.

The Old Favorite Game upon final compile and shipment is sealed in stone. A result of decisions and code made for its time. This is an important perspective, because it plays into the next part: game-feel.

You will not be able to actually recreate Old Favorite Game's game-feel. This will happen in both explicit and subtle ways. The explicit comes from simply using a newer engine. The new engine will have different clock speeds, update cycles, memory management. Trying to achieve a straight port of Old Favorite Game to this new engine will. not. work.

The advancement of technology will also play into many design decisions you and/or your team will make; some subtle changes may be required because to do otherwise would be making work harder on yourself.

 

A short exposition on Game-Feel

Obligatory wikipedia entry: Game Feel

"the intangible, tactile sensation experienced when interacting with video games."

Big emphasis on intangible. What you experienced when playing Old Favorite Game is part of this Game-Feel. You can't adequately describe, neither can I, and worse still - you and I could potentially have a sharp divide in what we believe the Game-Feel is for this Old Favorite Game. 

A preliminary diagnosis of The Remakes fatal team dynamics

Already the vision of remaking Old Favorite Game has fractured. We haven't even reached the design decisions! Even if you assemble a team of mostly unpaid game fans to remake the Old Favorite Game, and big if you get them to mostly agree on the Game Feel, we run straight into the design brick wall. It gets a bit meta here, but its important for understanding the overall point I want to make.

The moment you or the team decide to alter Old Favorite Game's stats, game environment, or say move to a new engine - you've fundamentally altered the game.

You will not be able to actually recreate Old Favorite Game's game-feel. This will happen in both explicit and subtle ways. The explicit comes from simply using a newer engine. The new engine will have different clock speeds, update cycles, memory management. Trying to achieve a straight port of Old Favorite Game to this new engine will. not. work.

The subtle changes will come from you or the team. In the energetic frenzy of development, you will say "Why don't we 'fix' this?" or another goes "I always believe that the game should have done that". Whether you are willing to admit this or not; these questions are in fact creating a new game. This new game may look very similar to Old Favorite Game, but it will never be the same. The new game will offer new ideas to implement, new translations of mechanics to gameplay. Further and further you will wander from the narrow vision of remake Old Favorite Game.

This sounds sort of obvious right? It does, and it is, so why mention it? I am looking to help you - given the above likely scenario you should leave behind the notion of remaking the Old Favorite Game. This is a notion similar to an iceberg, small on the surface, but incredibly deep. The phrase itself is an attempt to check that all parties in the conversation merely agree with your idea of the game-feel of Old Favorite Game.

Instead of willingly becoming Sisyphus, the mortal doomed to forever push a single boulder up a hill - only for the boulder to roll back down again. You should start with what are the defining things you like about the game-feel of Old Favorite Game. What moments stand out? what aspects of the play-by-play kindle fond memories for you? Capture those. From these ideas will spring a new game.

Maybe the new game is a sequel in a franchise, maybe a fan game, but for pure pragmatism it should be your own creation. You will own this wonderful project, reaping a bunch of benefits including creative control.

A summary:

It is mostly impossible to simply remake Old Favorite Game. 

The process to do so would either be pointless, ie the amount of effort required to remake is equivalent with just making a new game .
Or
The new game will diverge sharply over development time from Old Favorite Game so much as to basically be a brand new game that may appear similar to the old.

best case: you make a fun, fresh, new game inspired-by the old 

worst case: you've wasted your time fighting heat-death itself to recreate something that never really existed concretely. You will be constantly disappointed as each build of the remake fails to spark your joy of playing Old Favorite Game.

 

Why narrow your game design vision so ruthlessly right at the critical start point! Would you claim that Old Favorite Game is the unassailable example of any game? You know the Old Favorite Game isn't even halfway perfect, you'll admit this readily. Don't use Old Favorite Game's perceived infallibility as a shield against new ideas, or interpretations.

 

A parting note: enjoy your memories of your old game and replay this old game if possible! 

it was a lot fun to play, after all!

But disabuse yourself of the notion that remaking this Old Favorite Game will ever bring those feelings back. They were special and unique for you, and functionally impossible to adequately recreate or experience. Instead, look to the future, bring forward what you loved about those games into your efforts.

Mechancial Review: Leg-destruction in Mechwarrior-style video games.

(a  BL-6-KNT Black Knight engages a EXC-B2 Excalibur in desperate melee, circa 2780...)


This post was started off a conversation I participated in on one of the mechwarrior discords, when the subject turned to balancing the Mechwarrior experience to that of the Battletech tabletop game, and to 'legging' an opponent (that is; destroying one or both of a target's legs in the Mechwarrior games).

I asked:
should legging matter?  
Is legging in a PvP game fun? is it fun to win via legging?
Is it ok to lose because of legging?
I don't think it is. Try applying legging to most other FPS action games, and it gets annoying, quick.
If a player is accurate enough to target someone's legs, then making the target even slower is just feeding a run-away-winner scenario.

and one of the responses really stood out:

You’re comparing quite different genres there. Those are FPS games, this is a vehicular combat simulation game.
Stop thinking like an MLG and start thinking like a hardcore simmer :wink:
Also, using that logic, maybe we should remove arm destruction and weapon critical hits since if things like that were put in most action FPS games, it’s get annoying Quick
So would the heat mechanic,
But, I think you get the point
You can’t use those kinds of games as a comparison to MechWarrior as a basis against mechanics such as leg destruction
They play very differently, and therefore the mechanic might work great in one genre, but bad in the other
Could you imagine having section-based damage on TitanFall?
Or an FPS-style, aggressive cone-of-fire mechanic in MechWarrior?
It just wouldn’t work
But section-based damage readings work well in MechWarrior
And the cone of fire system, if done right, works quite nicely in games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.

Which then led me to write up this response:

It's not exactly 'MLG or not', this (Mechwarrior)being a game it's all about players and the decisions they can make , or incentivized to make.

Also, Mechwarrior is not as sim-like as we want to believe.

Mechwarrior exists in a game genre like any other game does, open to criticism as well as evolution and experimentation.

re: Titanfall section-based damage, why not try it?

re: Cone of fire, this is actually more sim-like than Mechwarrior's pin-point accuracy. no targeting computer based on hard-scifi could compensate for the the source gun changing shooting position every split second of a mech's walk-cycle. The positional height difference would be insane, not to mention the pilot being shaken like paint in a can.

Originally I had a longer post about genre conventions and simulations, wanting to say that yes mecha-sims are a 'sim' but they handwave away of massive amounts of realism to make sure the experience is fun.

take it this way: you ever play World of Tanks? it's a great example of unfun simulation. It gets all rivet-counter on shot penetration and deflection mechanics, but somehow your invisible crew can jump out to repair a blown track while under fire...but wait there's more!

if you are hit again in the tracks, your repair meter is reset allowing opponents to functionally immobilize you after a single hit to your tracks. Sim-like? a little, but is it fun? god no. Player experience becomes sitting there, waiting to be eliminated.

re: "make legging more like tabletop" , that has some interesting stuff - like your speed and stability degrading over time as your legs are damaged, but do you really want to sit there in a hex, on your mechs stomach, immobilized for the next 20min? Players do not like it when game scenarios escape their control, and this effect needs to be managed (note: I didn't say removed).

End of the day, I'm saying that certain mechanics should be gamed out to their logical conclusion, assessed, and then adjusted to make sure the player has fun, or that most of the players have fun.

Limping along a giant map for even 5min with a busted leg isn't fun. If the player is playing a campaign, they will probably save-scum at that point, merely restarting the mission.

In multiplayer? might as well just slap the respawn button because functionally their vehicle is dead-in-the-water.

As it exists today: legging is a shallow mechanic that feeds into the run away winner problem. You either leg someone, then control the rest of the fight completely from there - to wit, you've already 'won' by this point. or you don't leg someone, and they don't leg you, and both of
yous are playing as if legging doesn't exist.

so what's the answer? honestly I don't know. I think we'll need a bunch of new mech games to take up the challenge to explore these trickier aspects of Mechwarrior style gameplay, and I look forward to playing them!