Jeffool.com

I’m unemployed. I refuse to spend money on games while this is the case. Hearing that, a friend stepped up and bought me a game he was loving, FTL. I can’t thank him enough, because it’s awesome.

Does FTL make you a space-faring bringer of death, or a kamikaze pilot flying a rickety death trap? Yes. Is it worth playing? Absolutely. Dying hasn’t been this fun since Dwarf Fortress. Killing hasn’t been this surgical since Fallout 3’s VATS system, this easy since you first picked up the BFG, or this difficult since you spec’d completely opposite the way you should have for a RPG boss fight. Each play has the potential to serve up a wildly different game due to the game’s elements being so randomly generated, that each play will bring many stories of harrowing success and escape, telling friends how you barely did this, and almost got killed while doing that, and each story will almost certainly punctuated by the full stop of your death. It’s billed as a “a spaceship simulation real-time rogue-like”, but what does that mean? Let’s start with the basics.

The Salad (Before the game.)
In Subset Games’ FTL (yes, it means Faster Than Light,) you fight for the Federation against rebel forces and other nefarious tropes amassing weapons and crew for the big showdown. This is done by plotting your own course through eight sectors full of nodes as a wave of enemies chase you. Each node providing an event. Events range from battle, a social opportunity, an environmental threat, a store, to empty space. Sometimes you’ll even get combination of those things, or they’re made more intricate as the game reacts to your crew, your ship upgrades, or some of the (simple) quest lines you’ve previously opened. As if those combinations didn’t offer enough replay, the nodes of each sector, and the available paths between sectors, are generated freshly with each play through. Each event allows a chance to gain resources along the way.

The Potatoes (The good.)
Ship management shines. It’s what every RPG wishes its management was, simple and robust. It’s so intuitive you can become good at it by accident. You start with one ship available, but more begin to open quickly. You acquire a crew of up to eight from the seven different races, each with special abilities. You choose from six different weapon types, each with strengths/strategies. There are also five different automated drone types you can deploy, not to mention the option to board your enemies’ ships. And on top of it all as you progress you can equip your ship with up to three of twenty-one augmentations that vary wildly in effect.

Upgrading your ship in FTL is micromanagement heaven as you spend scrap (the in-game currency) upgrade your ship. All ships have a reactor. As you spend money to upgrade it, more energy is produced. It’s from this common pool that most of your ship’s systems are powered. Each ship has several systems (weapons, shields, medical bay, life support, etc.) which can be upgraded, and extras that can be purchased. As you upgrade a system, it opens a slot in which you can route an extra cell of energy. It gets frantic when you realize that energy is hot-swappable, meaning you can power and de-power items as needed. So while you’ll likely always want your life support system working, if you don’t plant to run from a fight, you can take energy from your engine and fight your battle with stronger weapons, shields, or what have you!

The Steak (The great.)
Battle is superb for a player like me. FTL offers the perfect amount of control. In most games either the developer has very stupid AI and is too easy, the game cheats to make things interesting, or the player simply can’t match the AI in accuracy/quickness and things are too hard. This is a known problem in nearly any game from Madden to Tetris. This is not the case here. Enemies operate at maximum efficiency (minus a little dumb AI in asphyxiation created by simple logic, not cheating or intentional dumbing down,) because FTL lets the player pause the game at any time with a tap of the space bar.

This makes every meaningful choice available at any time, and you can change strategy instantly on a whim. Pausing time, issuing commands, changing attack patterns, and resuming the battle in a single moment allows you to match the AI move for move. Earlier I mentioned VATS, Fallout 3’s method of giving players a refined control in battle, but it was limited in making the player wait until your endurance was recharged. Captaining your own ship in FTL, giving out orders is expected to come instantly, and pausing time works perfectly to that effect.

Just Desserts (The self-indulgent run-through.)
I load up on offensive slots, going light on reactor energy, and rerouting power from my meager engine and medical bay and give that extra bump to weaponry. Toss a few Zoltan crew members (who add energy to the ship systems they’re assigned to) and you’re boxing above your weight class. My starting ship is the Red-Tail (Kestral B), which comes with one Zoltan (who add one energy to your reactor), one Mantis (excellent fighters), and two humans. It also starts with four single shot lasers.

The first thing I do is invest in blast doors to asphyxiate boarding enemies, expand my crew with as many Zoltans as possible, and invest heavily in laser weapons. Soon I’ve got an opening volley of lasers that rips through enemy shields and begins taking apart a system of my choice. Worst case scenario, I use the lasers to tear at an enemy’s shield and then use a beam weapon to do my damage in a line drawn across the enemy ship with my mouse. Either way, I have a good chance of jetting straight to the final sector in no time as long as things go decently well for me, but I only really get a chance of beating the final boss if I’m lucky and a certain few augments and the right weaponry come my way. To ensure that, I take my time, scouring as many nodes as I can in each sector. I’m a man on a mission, people!

But before I leave the second sector, I die. That happens often. You’ll have bad luck, you’ll not get awesome items by the time you expect to. You’ll need to spend your scrap repairing your ship, instead of buying upgrades. You will die very often in this game. Here, let me go back and underline that for silly comedic effect. And you’ll quit the game, and you’ll start something else, and you’ll instantly want to start it back up and play again. I actually wrote all of this in a relatively short time, I just kept starting the damn game back up and playing again… In fact, I think I’ll go play it now!

In these days of Minecraft, IndieGoGo/Kickstarter, Steam, and online markeplaces on console, it would be easy to say that small/indie developers are where the innovation lies. That the AAA games are just refinement, over revolution. Well, I can think of one idea, relatively easy to implement, that would let any game (AAA or indie) greatly benefit from emergent gameplay. It’s easily demonstrated in FPS’, but really any game with shooting mechanics could do it, and it especially could benefit the open world games that AAA developers love to make.

Calling your shot – Let players tag their target. Just, let them point, hit a button, and have that target marked in some fashion. From there, the possibilities expand exponentially.

1. Skill: If they hit it, dependent upon size, speed, view, power of shot, maybe even weather and penalty of missing given other nearby targets? Give them some kind of recognition or bonus. Hell, give players skill points for using that skill.

I never really used a bow in Oblivion, instead preferring to cleave enemies with an axe. But there was one time I did… When I saw deer. It was natural. It was primal. When I saw a deer, I pulled out my bow, snuck as close as possible, and shot. Invariably my sucky skill meant the deer lived, which meant I had to chase the deg through the first, completely forgetting whatever I was in the middle of. It was like they were purposely meddling with my fun with their… Fun!

2. Challenge: It was just like taking to a rooftop in GTA, pulling out your sniper rifle, and plugging interesting looking civilians. It was a shooting gallery, and I had tools to shoot with. How could you NOT save your game and occasionally do it?

Of course eventually police would come, increasing in number and strength, and eventually take you out. (Usually.) But man what fun it was, plugging a citizen going about their way, and seeing the chaos that ensued.

3. Self-defined Narrative: The key to emergent gameplay is that the player brings it with them. And that’s never more evident than when done with intent. But if you pick out the target, and tell the player why it needs to be done, then there’s no wiggle room. Instead, Let players mark people/places things, and let them tag them as important for themselves, for whatever reason.

Emergent gameplay gave us “zombie” in Halo 3, when it emerged from Halo 2 players consciously creating the rules from thin air. Oblivion gave extra damage if you shot a target while unseen, making initiative on a target worthwhile. GTA had instant kills with headshots.

These are just a few evident ideas that come with letting the player point at things. That’s all I’m suggesting, really. And anyone, AAA or indie, can do it.

Lines edited out of this post:
-Fact: I would’ve been trying to balance apples on the heads of Cyrodiil’s guards.
-Many games check for regional shots/damage. A game could even go so far as to let players highlight not only targets, but regions of targets.
-Imagine an action game that lets you press select/back, pauses the gameplay, and gives you a freeform camera to zoom around and pick your own target, then you get to try for it.
-Maybe a game with one player as the spotter, and the other as the shooter/sniper. Or a game where both players “mark” the other’s target, and they have to chase it down. (Instead of killing each other.)

Today at Joystiq Justin McElroy wrote what I’ll dramatically describe as an unsurprising slap in the face of the latest Spider-Man game, Spider-Man: Edge of Time. Go read it. He gets it. He wore Spidey pajamas as a kid. (Note: I dig his writing, and always have. Even during the huge fiasco when he made threats against U2’s Bono.)

Games are their gameplay mechanics, the choices and actions of the player. For all the crap we give them, licensed games actually often have a rare opportunity: unique mechanics. Any other game that mimics webswinging is going to be seen as a knock-off, or at least compared to Spider-Man.

To be fair, Justin notes that they try to do something with his “Spider Sense”, but that’s certainly not what I think of first when I think “Spider-Man”. What he rates a 2.5/5 game sounds like a thoroughly mediocre beat’em-up, which is a disappointment, given my love of older Spider-Man games.

Spider-Man 2 (Xbox, PS2) is actually one of my favorite games. I was one of the people blown away by the webswinging. It was a perfect example of both “appropriate difficulty” (being slightly difficult, but very fulfilling to pull off well) and the “ludic displacement” that occurs when a game makes you feel like you really are doing what’s happening in the game.

Despite Spider-Man 2 being third person, and despite how bad the blur looks in this pixelated video, you really got that feeling you imagined as a kid, of being Spider-Man, dipping from the rooftops into the streets of New York city, swinging back up, flying forward as fast as a normal person would fall. (Ultimate Spider-Man was still great, less so Spider-Man 3… Both the victim of over-refinement, imo, but still.)

Super heroes are typically defined by having unique abilities. In that very nature, they’re begging to be put into games, giving players unique actions and choices. Older Spidey games got him right. The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction game did a decent job of making you feel like you were wrecking shit, though it could’ve been better aside from that. From what I hear both Wolverine and Batman games had great combat, making you feel like the characters were “right”. Marvel Ultimate Alliance was a fun beat’em-up, not because it was particularly deep, but because it rallied together almost 30 loved characters. Why do a game featuring a singular beloved character, or even two, without trying to do well what that character is known for?

Here’s a few free suggestions for Activision’s next Spider-Man game.

• New York City – I’m serious. Forget corridor fighters. Don’t be silly.
• Make swinging a matter of skill – Anyone player should be able to do it, but being good at the mechanics should pay off well.
• Spider-Man has a history – Not saying you shouldn’t do “origin stories” or work them in, but, Spidey has a very deep gallery of well-known, well-defined, fun, friends and enemies. Utilize them.
• Peter Parker exists – Spider-Man has a personal life. Don’t be afraid to use that in more than a reference.
• Peter Parker is a photographer – Some games did it recently, but then cameras have only become MORE popular in society, as well as other games. Some even do it well. You could, too.
• A random encounter should blow my mind – Sure, Spidey fights generic thugs all the time. That happens. But sometimes? Sometimes? Sometimes that bank robbery you stumble across should be Rhino.
• Subscriptions – Learn from comics. Everyone who owns the game gets a free few missions each week. They culminate each month in an arc. Do this for a month, free. Then charge a fee, $1 a week, $3 for a month, or sell subscriptions $10 for three months.

C’mon. Activision can’t say no to that last one. And face it, you’d buy them. I would, and I don’t even have a job.

Also, hi Activision. So, maybe you need someone to help with your next Spider-Man game? I mean, I don’t know if you heard, but I’m on the market. I’ve even got five years experience in producing. (Another medium…)