Arcade Berg aka. "Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg"

1. 

   gutek
   July 9th, 2009 - 12:55

   this analysis is what brought me to your blog. i must admit, i haven’t played terminator: salvation, still i find your argumentation to be cohesive and comprehensible.

   the only thing that stands out as rather conflicting is that you described the risk vs. reward mechanic as working, but later admitted that – in effect – there is no risk when in cover. to my understanding, a risk vs. reward mechanic should not eliminate all risk when it is still possible to be rewarded.
2. 

   Arcade
   July 9th, 2009 - 13:18

   @gutek
   Ah, as you say there’s most often no risk when in cover, but nor is there a gain. Both factors are pulled to their extreme.

   “”to my understanding, a risk vs. reward mechanic should not eliminate all risk when it is still possible to be rewarded.”"

   Now, yes, since the NPC’s can finish the fight for you you can still “gain” by taking cover, but that’s a problem with the NPC-design, not the cover mechanics in itself.

   If I’ve missunderstood you, please let me know.

   I appreciate you reading it and overall finding it allright, if I understand you correctly.
3. 

   gutek
   July 9th, 2009 - 13:31

   i not only found your analysis to be alright, but downright great – if only because of its sincerity.

   i might be wrong since i haven’t played the game – but (assuming you employ the same blindfire mechanic gears of war does) you still can hit enemies while in cover, without exposing yourself, right? then we might have a problem within the risk vs. reward mechanic itself. i’ve read several reviews that mentioned the AI won’t try to flank you and you yourself stated that there’s basically no risk when in cover.

   that would mean you could blindfire (and thus be rewarded by hitting enemies) while perfectly hidden and not be in any danger.

   again, i haven’t played the game, so i could be off.
4. 

   Arcade
   July 9th, 2009 - 16:08

   @gutek
   “i not only found your analysis to be alright, but downright great”

   Wahey! Thanks.

   “that would mean you could blindfire (and thus be rewarded by hitting enemies) while perfectly hidden and not be in any danger.”

   Not quite. I see your point and it’s valid BUT there is a risk/loss. Using blindfire it’s really, really hard to hit something (Harder than in for example Gears). By doing this you’re wasting ammo.

   Losing your valuable M249 (or RPG/grenade) ammo isn’t something you’d want to do, so is it worth the risk of losing a lot of ammo for the reward of perhaps destroying the enemy?
5. 

   gutek
   July 9th, 2009 - 16:43

   i see your point, and it is valid.

   “you hit guteks argument with a critical strike – guteks argument dies.”

   although i still feel that your assertion “the risk vs. reward mechanic works” is conflicted. simply because of the fact that the AI interferes with it. i know it’s not a fault in the mechanic itself but on a dynamic level it really does gimp the mechanic. the way i try to look at games, i do not allow myself to look at them from an isolated standpoint – and i pretty much stick to the MDA framework when checking in on mechanics.
6. 

   gutek
   July 9th, 2009 - 16:48

   *the way i try to look at games, i do not allow myself to look at them from an isolated standpoint – mechanically speaking of course.
7. 

   Arcade
   July 9th, 2009 - 17:09

   @gutek
   I totally agree with you on that. But what I do in the text is to isolate each aspect. In my conclusion I do admit that there’s unfortunately colliding designs.

   But yeah, it might be unwise to class it as “working”, since other parts affect it very much. But what I mean with the statement is that it, by itself, is working.

   That might very well be something to reformulate if I update the text later on.

   I really like you explaining your view of things. It helps me a lot!
8. 

   gutek
   July 9th, 2009 - 17:16

   so we are on the same page essentially – arguing over semantics
9. 

   Arcade
   July 9th, 2009 - 17:20

   @gutek
   I win.
10. 

    Joshua Lindberg
    July 18th, 2009 - 10:34

    I came to your blog through your analysis as well. I got annoyed with the part (PC) where you had to use pipe bombs for the first time against T-600′s. I’ve been playing the game on hard for the first time and found that part impossible to complete.

    I managed to destroy one terminator, but that victory, along with the immense sacrifices in health and ammo, was nullified immediately (over and over, I tried 7-10 times) when another terminator would barge through the door to take it’s place. I ended up finishing that part on easy as I deemed it impossible to finish on Hard. Maybe I’m simply not good enough but the rest of the game was (Is, I’m not done yet) a cakewalk on ‘hard’ so I say it’s inherently broken.

    I am not a game analyzer nor am I involved in the game development process but I disagree with where you say “The player is not required to achieve anything in particular to be rewarded with the weapon making it possible to win the fight”

    I think that in some games, it is O.K to simply make a weapon available as a tactical choice. If it lies in front of you; so be it. The player can then choose if he wants to use the weapon or not.

    In Terminator Salvation, the weapon pool is often delivered to you by pretending a fight took place before you arrived (dead resistance fighters) or by simply stumbling onto some weapon cache. It keeps the game fluid. At no point did I have to worry about not having the right weapon available (Apart from the stupid pipe bomb sequence!)

    Anyhow, I think this game could have benefitted from having you in charge. Your analysis is spot on and it’s a shame because the level design is magnificent. Movie titles… Sigh.
11. 

    Arcade
    July 18th, 2009 - 11:49

    @Joshua Lindberg
    Haha, I totally agree with you about that exact section of the game. Even I find it crazy difficult on the Hard-setting. Much, much harder than the rest of the game.

    Once I got the retail version of the game, I got home and started playing it. I wanted to play the actual game y’Know and I died more than 10 times there and got very frustrated. I might have died over 20 times.

    The way I do it is to blindfire a lot with the M249 untill I run out of ammo.

    I’m grateful for your friendly words about me and my analysis. Thank you.
12. 

    Joshua Lindberg
    July 18th, 2009 - 12:12

    I just finished the game! Last night I quit at Chapter 9 thinking I’d have some heavy fighting ahead of me.. Turned out to be a fun 10 minutes.

    Compared to the other maps, even though they’re all short, the last map seems rushed. Even the movies stopped making sense. (Why are they all firing downwards? The terminators are upstairs!)

    I also got the idea that at some point, GRIN intended for one of the survivors to be an infiltrator terminator and that John Connor was to be trapped inside the base.

    The ending didn’t seem to make sense given the ‘vibe’ I got from the radio conversation between John and the survivor. I also thought the conversation/movie where John finally meets up with the survivors was laden with a strange atmosphere. One guy questioning the other about the lack of a red sash and the strange looks that were exchanged ..

    John also speaks of terminators with real flesh at some point in the game. Idle chit-chat or an attempt at slowly unveiling what was supposed to come?

    Tried the blind firing as well, wasn’t accurate enough for me. Thinking back of it, I think I could have destroyed the Terminator furthest away by hiding in the corner with the two desks … I just didn’t know, at that point, that guns were effective because, like you said, they don’t let you damage terminators before that.
13. 

    Arcade
    July 18th, 2009 - 12:27

    @Joshua Lindberg
    Congrats.

    Of course, as you understand, I can’t comment on anything related to the production. But it’s still great to hear your thoughts, as the experience of the player is the key value of a game.

    On what difficulty did you finish it?
14. 

    Joshua Lindberg
    July 18th, 2009 - 13:16

    No problem, when I first typed the comment about level design I hadn’t realized you were actually part of GRIN until I read your CV. I already thought it odd that you would have ‘played the game for over a 100 hours’ but now I understand why you wrote that.

    I finished it on ‘hard’ with the only exception being the pipe bomb creation part up to the end of that level (Where the pipe bomb creator dies.) which I played on easy.

    I did die quite a few times. (not counting the pipebomb part, about 10-15 times, I think) Most of the time because I couldn’t regenerate health during a fight or because I couldn’t find something to take cover behind something due to the lack of a ‘crouch’ button …

    I died twice during the school bus rails section (Although I found a bug where the bus would be blown up right at the end of the first map, I pressed ‘retry’ and was suddenly transported to the second part of the map.. Apparently it blew up right after I made it), died once in the big robot part because I couldn’t make out the targets with all the infrared vision going on (Everything starts to look 2D to me and it’s not always obvious where you can move the turret to because it changes per ‘scene’ ) and I died once or twice in the tram section because once the flyers started appearing (Which I did hit with an RPG blast) I figured I wanted to shoot down the HK most of all but apparently, you can’t …. My rocket went through it, I think.

    Oh, and I died near the end of the game because John set up the trap and I didn’t know what to do from there until the terminators walked up to my party and prevented me from getting the rocket launchers and pipe bombs… The second time I got it right.

    By the way, what did you think of the movie? I thought it was horrible. If I was in charge of the writing, I would have created a Saving Private Ryan-like war movie set in the Terminator universe with a T-1000 hunting them to recapture that T1/T2 feeling of urgency. No man/machine love either.

    The whole ‘best friend’ vibe in T2 was way more emotional than the ‘I don’t meet so many good guys nowadays’

    That and I would have wanted the full Dirty Dozen cast but none of those things will ever happen for various reasons.
15. 

    Arcade
    July 18th, 2009 - 13:29

    @Joshua Lindberg
    Hehe, yeah, I know about that bug.

    Well, the thing about the movie is that I think the movie would be a lot better of it was just the way it is, but didn’t use the Terminator-franchise. The movie in itself is an okay popcorn-flick, but I’m a HUGE T2-fan and it’s nowhere near that.

    This new entry is a new type of film for the franchise and I don’t get the “Terminator-feeling”. I like the one machine-theme in the previous movies.

    [Spoilers ahead!]

    I don’t care much for the relationship with Marcus and hate the fact that Skynet use video and audio to communicate with him. He’s a machine, just send over the information with BlueTooth or something!

    But if the movie had only been named “Robots pwning Humans” and they would’ve replaced John Connor, Skynet and all that with some identical substitutes, I would have liked it a whole lot more.
16. 

    Joshua Lindberg
    July 18th, 2009 - 14:47

    ‘But if the movie had only been named “Robots pwning Humans” and they would’ve replaced John Connor, Skynet and all that with some identical substitutes, I would have liked it a whole lot more.’

    hah, you should compare Screamers (1997) and Screamers: The hunting (2009)

    I agree that some movies would be better if they just sought out a new audience by simply changing the title and a few names.

    ‘This new entry is a new type of film for the franchise and I don’t get the “Terminator-feeling”. I like the one machine-theme in the previous movies.’

    Marcus didn’t make a very convincing cyborg to me. He screamed a lot. Using Arnold’s face kind of showed what they wanted to live up to but no matter how fancy the technology, without a decent storyline, you just can’t. Ironic.

    In that respect, the videogame had a much better storyline even though it borrowed heavily from the movie. I’m wondering if perhaps they should have turned things around. Use the script for the movie to create a game and vice versa …

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