No Guild Wars 2 Expansion for Us!

I've been meaning to write a review for Guild Wars 2 for a very long time.  I even logged in for a solid month a while back to try to get a decent feel for where the game was so that I wouldn't be discussing issues already resolved in the game.  But then with announcements of an expansion and many notable future changes and the talk surrounding all of that, I decided I would talk about why my wife and I unanimously agreed not to buy the upcoming Heart of Thorns Expansion.  To give a really in depth analysis of the good and bad of the game in my eyes would be as extensive as it would be exhausting (both to read and write) and I'm sure that the design issues as I see them will come up in other articles as I decide to write them (which by trying to keep brief will make more likely to happen in the future).  This will however be the closest to a full review I will get.

MMO Thoughts: Guild Wars 1, the MMO that isn't?

Guild Wars 1 might very well be my favorite game of all time.  It's at least my favorite MMO.  Though lately people have been trying to say it isn't an MMO.  These are mostly people who didn't like it but like its sequel, essentially trying to discredit it to explain the conflict.  They call it a CoRPG now (including the creators) which according to Wikipedia is one and the same, but if that isn't enough, there's the fact it won all of these awards for being a great MMO, and is categorized as an MMO on all of these different sites.  So I am going to call it sufficiently duck-like to be considered one.

Not that I don't understand people's confusion on the subject.  It is a very unusual game.  It came out around the same time as WoW, and can be viewed kind of like its antithesis.  Where WoW was this subscription based, persistent world, open PvP (less than previous MMOs) game, GW1 was this one time purchase, instanced, factionless game (unless you count the factions in the Factions campaign, but you shouldn't) with an absolute distinction between the PvE and PvP sides of it.  Since most games tend to follow the WoW model, GW1 sticks out as a bit odd.

But the reason for the oddness in design is because of their rather extreme approach to solving the sorts of issues that MMOs tend to have, with instances being the main solution to those problems.  I will now list the advantages of instances:

• Other players cannot enter your instance and kill you.
• Other players cannot steal your loot.
• Enemies don't need to respawn for other players to kill, giving you a clear path backwards.
• Sharing rewards is fairer when all players are guaranteed to be in a party together.
• Instances can be reconfigured based on the active quests and difficulty, or just for variety.
• Enemies that are vital to quests are guaranteed to be in the instance already. 
• Instances don't need any sort of cooldown timers, they just start anew when entered. 

You may have noticed that much of it has to do solely with interacting with other players, or in this case avoiding it.  I would list the disadvantages of instances, but it basically comes down to not having other players show up while you're in an instance and not being able to stay in an instance when logging in and out of the game.  I think it's safe to say that genre conventions aside, the advantages of the instances far outweigh the disadvantages.  If they didn't, all the other games wouldn't have all their difficult team oriented content in instances as well.  GW1 just took it to its logical conclusion.  

Beyond instances though, was this overall feel I like to call "A Convenient Challenge" which basically means that the game makes it really easy to tackle its challenges.  Many people don't understand how the word easy and challenge can even be used in the same sentence, so I'll try to explain.  When someone fails at a given challenge, it should feel like it is their fault and correctable in the next attempt.  More importantly, failing that attempt should not cause them to waste time completely unrelated to the challenge that was failed.  This last bit is probably the thing which the game does best.  First off, is map travel, which lets you go to any outpost in the game (persistent areas that you can enter instances from) for free, with no restrictions.  If you want to go to another continent even though you're in the middle of a battle, it's perfectly fine.  Earlier campaigns tended to spread outposts out more than later ones, but it never tried to punish you solely for getting closer to your objective.  The previously mentioned zone resets was also helpful, since there was no waiting to retry a quest if you failed it.

The greatest convenience of the game was by far the computer controlled henchman and heroes that you could add to your party in lieu of other human players.  The AI for them was kind of a perpetual work in progress, and were initially far worse than having human players, but better than trying to run solo.  Heroes were essentially full fledged characters, and by the time they came out the AI had improved to the point that they were a viable way to get through the main campaign.  By the time they stopped making regular updates, a full party (your character and seven heroes) could take on the vast majority of the game.  Some players such as EFGJack dug down so much into the mechanics of the game that there was nothing that could not be completed with just heroes, even if it meant a very slow and methodical approach and micromanaging the heroes.

I didn't follow the public sentiment surrounding the game much while releases were still being made, but I hear that the heroes were a great point of contention amongst players.  I can see why, since always having competent party members available made the majority stop looking for or joining other players.  Human players are capable of much more sophisticated strategies, and a well coordinated team can just tear through the highest difficulty areas at seemingly impossible speeds.  But in a game like GW1 that required very tight team builds for maximum effectiveness, Pick Up Groups were generally a waste of time.  Besides, for those who really enjoy coming up with builds, the ability to devise and try out entire team builds is fantastic.

Perhaps more interestingly is how the AI that controls henchman and heroes is essentially the same one that controls enemies and other NPCs in combat.  The vast majority of skills that enemies use are also available to players.  This is part of what makes coming up with the intricate builds viable:  Everything you learn from an enemy's use of skills can be used against them.

Or perhaps the most interesting thing is how minimal the grind tends to be.  Three campaigns and an expansion make for an awful lot of ground to cover, and Hard Mode practically doubles it.  The actual missions that make up the storyline generally have varied win and loss situations.  Enemies can vary greatly between areas.  The daily Zaishen quests that were added last were the sort of time gated thing that normally can get grindy, but with a repeating schedule of at least a month and the ability to store 3 of each kind at a time, it is pretty flexible and immensely rewarding if you can manage it in Hard Mode.  Even the titles managed to avoid the grind by being things like complete all missions or vanquish all areas.  The really long term ones like Treasure Hunter (Open ten thousand chests) generally don't benefit from grinding and are best handled while playing the game normally.  Those ones are also account wide, which also helps.

As far as the monetary grind is concerned, it can certainly be there.  There are groups who spend all of their time repeatedly doing speed runs of the high end areas, which is probably the most efficient way of making money.  That generally isn't viable for most people due to the level of coordination and consistency needed among a group.  It also doesn't sound very fun.  Fortunately, there are very synergistic ways of making money in the game.  For starters, the daily quests provide ample monetary reward, especially in Hardmode.  These quests also tend to fill up pages in books that can be turned in for further money when completed.  Finally, the improved enemy drops in hard mode along with the gathering up materials that can be made into valuable consumable items that can be sold to other players brought in a good amount of money as well.  It may not be as efficient as speed runs, but it is sufficiently varied and doable by most players.  Since most everything can be bought and sold, you don't necessarily have to go to the especially hard areas to get the especially rare items.  This also helps reduce the grind, since it isn't forcing you into a specific area just to get a single item.  You can choose what you are willing to do and just do that.

The game isn't without its issues, of course.  It's just that it probably had less issues 6 months after release (about when I started playing) than most MMOs.  It has typos that have never been fixed, errors on the world map (such as portals being in the wrong place) and weird design decisions like all of the gates around Cantha and all of the mission bonuses there being timer based.  There are a number of really long missions that can be failed right at the end, requiring a complete restart.  There were more personal peeves as well, like how later releases felt more like a collection of maps instead of a coherent whole and how belabored pop culture references started to seem more common than original ideas.  The voice acting steadily improved, but could be painful at points.

Overall though, the complaints are pretty minor.  The game was something that looked really good and performed well (and has held up pretty well for 9 years old).  The skill customization in GW1 is really something to behold, and being a game I can fully play solo or with just another player or two is unique among MMOs.  I am grateful that it wasn't immediately shut down after the launch of its sequel, though I am disappointed by its overall lack of support.  The last releases really felt like they had perfected the gameplay and learned from their previous mistakes.  It's really a pity that they decided to just scrap it all.  There really isn't any reason for it to not get another campaign or expansion, or at least wrap up the things they were planning on doing, such as the Elona epilogue story and releasing hardmode versions of the rest of the quests.
But seriously, It's worth a play. I think I might try to finish up the stuff I missed now.  

MMO Thoughts: The Genre in General

I have weird feelings towards MMOs.  I can and will openly decry the genre as stale on the whole, and repetitive and uninteresting individually.  And yet, I find it hard to avoid wanting to partake in them.  The concept of these massive worlds, with these massive amounts of players waging wars and taking out massive challenges together.  Of course, the reality of the games once you're actually in them tends to be far from that.

My first experience with MMOs was Tibia, a game that is very old school, and still available if you want to see what pre-WoW MMOs were like.  I did not enjoy the experience much.  I spent most of my time killing rats and spiders, and scavenging loot that higher level players deemed not worth their time and left on the corpses.  All this while hoping that the random passersby wouldn't kill me just because I was there, and hoping that there would be some level appropriate monsters in the otherwise picked over areas.  Any time you died for any reason, you lost 10% of your experience totals.  That plural is intentional, as not only did you have character levels, you also had skill levels for the different weapon types and magic. At low levels this was a minor inconvenience but at higher levels you would be set back several levels each time you died.  And you lost your entire inventory.  And a 10% chance for each item equipped on you.  And enemies were not organized in nice, curving scales.  It was pretty common to be wandering around an area that I had a decent handle on, and then get one shot by something way more powerful that just happened to be there.  So after this happens to you and on your way back to gather your belongings from your own corpse you get attacked in town by a guy walking around with a pet fire demon (true story by the way) that tends to make you pretty reluctant to log back in.  Especially since the combat and all that are pretty bland.  Nonetheless, it wasn't a terrible thing to keep your hands busy while watching something on TV or split screen on your computer.  

The only reason I bring up Tibia is because MMOs have improved greatly, and that is important to note.  The reason that people complain about MMOs not being like Tibia anymore is more because they are secretly the people who like to crap on other people's good time, and said crapping is the only reason they were playing them in the first place.  The only reason people put up with being crapped on is the hopes that some day they will find other people to crap on.  They obviously aren't going to be able to return the crapping to the right person, because that person will always be above them in level or equal because of a level cap.  I suppose in this sense MMOs are a microcosm of the world and why groups of people will kill each other if they think they can get away with it, no matter how much they have been on the other side of that situation.  

Beyond that, the gameplay is generally grindy in the best of them, with long term goals being built around the repetition of mundane or trivial tasks, sometimes with these tasks acting as prerequisite to anything more interesting, but more often than not it was just prerequisite to something just as mundane and trivial, but handing out bigger numbers for doing them.  And it's not entirely the designer's fault either.  But it's not the player's expectations that are causing it, like so many people like to blame it on.  It's more to do with the impossible logistics of a game that is meant to go on forever.  If games are like delicious meals, then MMOs are kinda like a really watery soup.  The soup is plentiful; where most games can be 100% complete in 40 hours (less being more typical), MMOs are designed to encourage players to play for THOUSANDS of hours.  And MMOs actually do have more unique content than most games, possibly hundreds of hours. So it's a plentiful soup, but it's still a magnitude away from what is intended, so then it starts to get watered down.  Larger goals like killing ten thousand of an enemy occur, and higher gear that is incredibly rare but provides the necessary stat boost to survive the most difficult areas get added.  Time gates are added to rewards to prevent people from progressing to quickly.  More water gets added to the soup because it's easier to do than to create something new and interesting.

So then why do they remain popular?  The social aspect of it is a big part of it.  I wouldn't call the card game Uno deep or interesting, or anything but a bunch of random luck, but it can be a fun time if played with your friends.  But then you're not playing Uno because you especially like the game, but because it is something you can do with your friends.  And at that point it doesn't really matter how good the game is, it's just something to do with people.  My best moments in the MMOs I have played have lied with playing them either with a close friend, or with friendly guildmates.  At the end of the day however, I don't play videogames for the social interaction, but because they provide something inherently fun and/or challenging.  And while people normally argue that I'm missing the point of an MMO, my counterpoint is that you could have that fun with ANY game that allows a sufficient player count (a number that really doesn't need come near the definition of massive), and there is absolutely nothing in the conventions of the genre that makes it superior in that respect.

If there is another aspect to the genre that is actually interesting in its own right, it is the character building (and by extension combat to a point).  Nearly all of the games break characters down into a series of roles that need to be fulfilled for a group to overcome a challenge.  The more interesting systems are more open ended, allowing for balancing and tradeoffs on a single character in order to find the ideal mix that can overcome the challenges of a game.  As someone who came from playing JRPGs of the 16-bit and following generation before trying any MMOs, I was used to a much more straightforward approach, where if you were sufficiently high leveled you could power your way through the end of the game.  Maybe some bonus dungeons or bosses would require some particular strategy, but in general you could brute force your way without much more though than making sure you bought the latest gear and fully healed before leaving town. There isn't really any other genre of games that have quite that sort of depth.  If other games imitate something from MMOs, it more often tends to be the less savory grind and questing mechanics.

And thus why I keep having an interest in MMOs despite so many negative aspects to the genre.  Ultimately there is this deep strategic concept that is so rare elsewhere, and this huge amount of stuff to conquer with it (in theory at least).  So those are my thoughts on MMOs as a genre.  Next time I will talk about some noteworthy examples.  

Genre from Beyond

So the last two real posts I made (not counting the disclaimer) were both written as a lead in to an eventual article on leveling systems.  This is not that article, as it's still pretty important to understand where exactly leveling systems come from, which is the Role Playing Game genre.

RPGs have been one of the most popular genres of computer games for the majority of computer gaming's brief history.  Of course, it did not originate there, but in tabletop form, which itself was an offshoot of the strategy games (Warhammer and the like) genre that was originally started way back by H.G. Wells.  Anyone who's seen or played these knows that players assume control of a side, and decides when and where units will move and attack.  Since these are meant to be simulations of combat, they tend to be fairly complex affairs with a great deal of math and dice rolls. 

Tabletop RPGs are essentially the same thing, except scaled down to controlling a single person with pretty much all the complexities of that whole army compressed down into one character.  So instead of simulating armies in combat, now the game is simulating characters fighting, but more importantly expanding that control beyond into the myriad number of things a person might do, so a character who is handy with a sword and a bow may also speak 3 languages and have a hobby of woodworking.  This expansion beyond combat and focus on a single character is why it's called a Role Playing Game.   Just like the term used in acting, you're assuming a specific role (your character) for the sake of the experience.  But ultimately, the heart of the game is numbers and simulating things with those numbers.  The "acting" part of it is actually pretty ancillary to the numbers. 

Also worth noting here is a change of emphasis on competitive play (two opposing armies) to a cooperative one (multiple people on a quest together).  Since this sort of gameplay still required someone to act as opposition, there is always a Game Master of some sort running the show and trying to provide a memorable experience.  And with this, can be seen some of the unfortunate necessities that tends to come with the game:  lots of numbers to track, lots of dice to roll, lots of rules to remember, an odd man out GM, and it can be really hard to enjoy by yourself.  Of course, a computer is great with numbers and probability.  It can even provide a scenario and let someone enjoy the game itself.  So needless to say, it wasn't much of a jump for people to start making computerized version. 

Of course, one might note that many RPGs both tabletop and electronic don't seem to follow this form as much anymore.  Things change after several decades, and even the originals like Dungeons and Dragons have changed since then.  But what the genre has become isn't as important as the conventions that it has managed to retain.  In this case, we're talking specifically about leveling. 

Leveling was this system put in place to help quantify the improved capabilities someone gets from life experience.  New abilities are granted once a character reaches specific levels, stats are improved, and most abilities are directly affected by the level.  Two characters at the same level are probably equally capable of taking on a monster of a given level.  This makes it pretty easy for a human being to come up with appropriate scenarios, instead of looking at all the individual stats for a character and trying to guess.  Progression to the next level usually required significantly larger amounts of experience (generally an exponential curve), and typically had a relatively low maximum level.  The reason for these two things comes down mostly to the limitations of humans and books. 

While a human being is very much capable of doing complex calculations, it is time consuming, and isn't very enjoyable to have to do for every little thing.  So the math has to be kept to a minimum: addition and subtraction can be done easy enough, to a lesser extent multiplication, and an even lesser extent division, assuming that the numbers stay fairly low and only require one operator at a time.  For anything more complicated, it's easier for someone to just look up a value in a table and use that.  And since these tables were all physically printed out, the higher the range of numbers, the bigger the tables would get and the more expensive it would be to print the books.  So the simplest solution was to make a given enemy give a perfectly consistent amount of experience, and just increase the amount needed to reach the next level.  This means a once intimidating enemy that could contribute a significant percentage to reaching the next level would only contribute a tiny percentage when at a high level it was nothing more than cannon fodder. 

When RPGs started showing up in the electronic realm, most of the conventions set up by the early tabletop games came over with it, straight down to simulating the dice rolls and the tables.  Of course, since computers can quickly do complex calculations and cheaply store information, changes have been made to better take advantage of that.  However, they all still carry these systems with them at the heart, and much of the praise and complaints leveraged at an RPG is how it handles it.  But more on this and leveling next time. 

Theoretical Disclaimer

The most valuable thing I learned during my time in Music Theory was that theory comes after the fact.  The entirety of the subject comes from observation of music that has already been written.  This little rule became a bit of a mantra of mine that I would repeat often when doing analysis for class and trying to figure out whether I was looking at secondary functions, borrowed chords, or some elaborate combination of the two when the truth is it could be all of the above depending on how you want to look at it.  

Mine (and other more legitimate discussers of the subject) analyses and theorizing on games is no different than the work of music theorists:  Theory (in this sense at least) is just an attempt to understand what makes something good. However, music and games are much a matter of personal preference, and so the interpretation of the elements of a game can also be a matter of perspective.

Music Theory can be taken with a grain of salt, because the ultimate rule with music is Do What Sounds Good.  If the musical experience is ultimately improved by disregarding a rule of theory (which are really more aptly called guidelines) then it is the right choice.  20th century music threw out all pre existing rules more often than not, and being the last thing in our course curriculum left many of us to wonder what was the point of the rest of the 4 semesters worth of study if at the end all we did was throw it all away.  The truth is that we probably would not even be able to properly describe what was being thrown away without studying all of that other stuff in the first place. 

In this way Theory provides a common language for describing things.  If I wrote I bVI IV VI on the board of a music theory class, people would understand it.  They could probably even go over to the piano and play it in some form.  They could probably even write out full 4 part harmony from it.  Without theory, that would require something restrictively specific like writing out the frequencies each pitch sounds at.  Game Design is generally described in terms that are common to games themselves, as well as borrowing from related fields like Human Computer Interaction.  I feel that there needs to be terminology created that can describe games with the same range of granularity that music theory has. 

The point isn't to codify some set of standard for engineers to follow to make an excellent game, but to look inside and see what all the pieces are and how they fit together, and with that new knowledge be able to more solidly build our own work, and maybe put together those elements in a way that we would not have considered otherwise.

And thus is my disclaimer:  While at times influenced by the work of many insightful theorists, this is ultimately me coming up with terms, and applying them to games as makes sense to me.  Within this little sphere of influence I will treat them as fact.  To everyone else, consider it to be advice that if not good, is at least well thought out. 

Power Sources

Previously, I went through a bit about what a Power Up is.  This time, I will discuss ways in which Power Ups in all their success promoting, gameplay modifying forms are actually seen in the game.  Here are some categories that I have come up with, keeping in mind that some Power Ups can fit  into multiple categories:

Utility

These are the type that do not modify the gameplay directly, but still help the player towards success in the game.  These do things like replenish health and ammo, permanently improving capacity, unlocking new passageways, money, experience, etc.  It isn't that these power ups can't change the gameplay, it's more that the change it has on gameplay per individual item is insignificant and the change in gameplay is psychological on the player's part.  Someone with higher health capacity and ammo is more likely to take more risks and be more liberal with their ammo, but the gameplay itself hasn't changed, just the way the player feels about it.  And even though these items don't effect the gameplay inherently, the mere inclusion of a power up will always effect gameplay (typically lowering the difficulty as well).  Things like coins in Mario have long been used to draw players towards the correct path, even though their collection does not modify gameplay, and even their individual utility to the player is fairly insignificant.  Healing items in RPGs are another interesting one, because proper management of them can be a fairly integral part of the gameplay.  These types of power ups are nearly ubiquitous in gaming, and it is generally harder to create a game without implementing these in some way.  The regenerating health that has become a staple in modern FPS games is actually a really good example of this.  Whether a design like this is an improvement over health lying scattered around is something that varies greatly.  The value of these Power Ups is mostly dependent on their rarity.  Extra lives can be a great reward to skilled risk takers in a game, but if they are common enough that the player easily hits the maximum, there might as well not be lives at all. 

Temporary

These are Power Ups whose effect is temporary.  Whether a time limit, damage, death, running out of ammo, or being single use, these will run out.  These are the primary type of Power Up found in platformers, and to a lesser extent includes the weapons found in many FPS games and classic shoot em ups (death and a new stage generally resetting the weapons and abilities the player has accumulated).  Essentially anything that does not persist can be seen as part of this category.  These are most commonly seen in linear games (meaning the game is broken down into stages, and the goal is to get from point A to B, however circuitous that path may be) though they do show up elsewhere.  This type actually rewards player skill, since these power ups can be easy to find but can only be fully utilized by proper skill from the player (getting extra lives from an invincibility star, maintaining a fire flower the entire game, saving the rocket launcher for a later tank instead of wasting it immediately on infantry).  Their temporal nature is also valuable because they can add variety without changing the baseline experience, but the game has to be designed to be completable without these temporary Power Ups, with only a few exceptions.  A rare example of this is the Hypermode ability in Metroid Prime 3 (you may choose when you enter it, but it's still temporary) turns on for the remainder of the game once the final area has been entered, which causes a permanent shift in gameplay.  This sort of design is definitely more the exception than the rule, both in its forced use at the end of the game, and in its ability to be chosen to be entered at any time.

Granted

These are permanent Power Ups that are given to the player during the course of gameplay.  Unlike the previous category, these usually come after some sort of accomplishment in the game like finishing a stage, defeating a boss, or finding some obscure and difficult to reach corner of the game world.  Because these are permanent, they effectively change the baseline experience for the game, which might make one wonder why this would be superior to something temporary or having all of the capabilities immediately.  Besides the obvious at this point (variety) there is also the difficulty curve of the game.  Granting abilities after the player has overcome a challenge that proves their proficiency with the current gameplay mechanics allows them to learn incrementally.  This is a much more effective system than a tutorial info dump of everything at the beginning of the game.  At the same time, there are some serious balance complications with this, as granting a large amount of Power Ups over the course of a game can cause many of them to be used once and forgotten about.  Also if granted to close to the end of the game, it ends up having very little actual application, which can mean a great deal of time implementing a Power Up with little benefit to the whole experience.  Portal 1 is an excellent example of its use, as there are only 2 Power Ups:  Creating a portal, and Creating a second one.  You don't get each one until you've managed a number of different situations first that proves your mastery, but the majority of the game is spent utilizing those two Power Ups effectively. 

Chosen

These are also permanent (with few exceptions) but instead of being received at given points in the game are chosen by the player, typically by means of some list on a menu and spending some form of points.  This gives the player gives some options in terms of strategy and play style that is not available otherwise.  However, non-determinism of any sort can be very hard to design around.  Whether intentional or not, there is often an optimal order, and some other combinations could be severely worse.  Designing the game difficulty to follow the least optimal order could leave it completely unchallenging to better set ups, and designing for the most optimal could make it downright impossible to worse set ups.  Which means the best solution is to plan for something in the middle, which may still be a far from either extreme.  The ideal solution would be to balance the possibilities well enough that there is no optimal order (or at least very subtle differences) but that is difficult without greatly removing the actual variety of it.  These sorts of Power Ups are common in the form of research upgrades in Real Time Strategy games.  In this case the player starts from scratch at the beginning of each level, so an optimal order for acquiring them can simply be seen as part of the overall strategy, and a poor decision will only effect the immediate level.  In a hack and slash (another place these have become common), the cumulative choices since the beginning of the game could have consequences much further out.

Slotted

These are Power Ups that are selected from a pool of possibilities, with a finite number being usable at any one time.  This has become popular in many multiplayer games lately due to the larger meta game strategy that it allows.  This of course has many balance issues, as some combinations can be overpowered to the exclusion of all other strategies.  If the number of slots and size of the pool can be increased, balance gets that much harder, and individual Power Ups can't be very significant due to the differing quantity.  This type rarely stands alone, as slots and Power Ups have to be acquired somehow. 

Chained

These are Power Ups that have others as a prerequisite.  This type can not really stand on its own, but is a combination with others (Mushrooms before Flowers, Skill Trees, etc).  This allows for connecting different types of Power Ups into very complex formations. The prerequisite is in the actual possession of the Power Up, not in the gameplay side effects.  This is most often used with Slotted, allowing certain Power Up effects to get progressively more complex, but Chosen is often included as well.  This can keep player choices from completely unbalancing the game. 

Compound

These are Power Ups that are useless individually, taking effect after a group have been collected.  This is another type that does not really stand alone, with Utility being the most common combination.  There is absolutely nothing preventing other combinations though. 

In Practice

Naturally, there isn't a game that uses any of these exclusively, even if you only consider Chained and Compound an extension of these other types.  But this helps shows some of the concerns that different implementations of Power Ups can have.  Some of the issues come from choosing one type where another type would be better, others come from just not considering thoroughly the complexities of a certain implementation.  And of course, the more complex the implementation gets, the more to consider.  Leveling systems are a specific combination of these more basic types of Power Ups, and I'll get into more the issues with those later. 

Powering Up

I (and at least half a million other people in the world) had the opportunity to play the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event this last weekend.  Having Played Guild Wars 1 since before its first birthday and logging more hours than I really care to admit to, I was looking forward to this quite a bit and thoroughly enjoyed it.  And I think it's important to clarify that first and foremost:  I liked the game, I am looking forward to the next weekend event, and I do not regret preordering the Collector's Edition in all its costly glory.  Giving my wife a spin on it made her start shopping for a new computer so that she could play it with me when it comes out. 

This isn't a review of GW2 or an analysis or anything.  I expressed many of my thoughts and concerns already on their forum, so I won't get too specific about that.  I'll give my detailed thoughts once it's not a beta anymore and I have an opportunity to get to an area that isn't effectively right outside the city gates.  Nonetheless, It has caused me to think rather extensively about the actual value of a game mechanic that features so heavily in it and its ilk:  Leveling. 

I don't think that leveling is bad, really.  I've been a fan of RPGs for a very long time, and it is generally the main commonality between eastern and western RPGs that actually allows them to even be identified together.  It also gives a nice quick look at the relative power of your characters or your enemies without having to get into a whole lot of nitty gritty.  I just think that it is a mechanic that can be vastly misused.  But that's getting ahead of myself.  After all, it's important to understand the purpose of a leveling mechanic, which is to Power Up the respective player avatar(s) in a game. 

The earliest example of a power up that I can think of is the power pellets in Pac-Man.  I think this is also a very good example of a power up, because while it was in effect it actually changed the gameplay mechanics.  There are two very simple goals in Pac-Man, collect all the pellets and avoid the ghosts.  The power pellet actually turns that goal on its head, and all the sudden you're the one chasing the ghosts down.  By either eating them or merely putting distance between yourself and them you are also improving your odds of success, which is possibly the more important effect as a player, if not the only one that they are truly conscious of.  So you could say that a power up is anything in a game, whether it be an on screen item that you collect or something you select from a menu at some point in the game or whatever, that allows a player to progress further in the game and optionally changes the way the game is played in some way.  I posit that the power ups that accomplish the first goal THROUGH the second one are the ones that will be more memorable and fun for the player. 

Another fairly early example would be the original Mario Bros.  In this game, you had the capability of running around and jumping on enemies and platforms, and hitting blocks from below to attack enemies and gain power ups.  The Super Mushroom is probably the most iconic power up in all of gamedom.  Certainly, this item was valued for the extra hit it granted you, but it also changed the gameplay significantly in ways that actually were both good and bad.  Being now 2 tiles tall, you could no longer fit through paths 1 tile high, forcing you to take certain paths.  You could also now destroy many blocks by jumping underneath them (allowing access to new paths), which could actually become a liability if you needed those to traverse the level.  It also allowed you to find the Fire Flower, which did not actually grant you an extra hit, but the ability to attack enemies from long range, which is a far less subtle change to the gameplay style.  This ability improves the player's chance of success far more than the super mushroom, and it did it solely through the change in gameplay mechanics. 

Less linear the design gets, the more important power ups become, as the power ups generally act as the means to which further exploration is enabled (and therefore improving the player's chances of winning).  And these usually vary greatly.  In the Metroid series, they ranged from jumping higher to being able to walk safely through lava, to allowing you to run through obstacles at a high enough speed.  Each one of these changed the gameplay (jumping to new paths, running into lava instead of avoiding it, searching for open stretches of land to run through) as the game continued.  Compare this to something like Doom, where the key cards merely allowed you to go through the matching colored door.  Of course, Doom's weapons are also powerups, and the different way each one behaved changed the gameplay when using that weapon, as well as the overarching weapon choice for a given situation. 

These are important to multiplayer games as well, as they can change player tactics quite a bit.  One player having Invisibility in a First Person Shooter (assuming the other players know about it) will cause opposing players to be less conservative with ammo, while the one with the ability will be less likely to give away their position by firing.  Having a damage multiplier will generally cause the player to fire continuously in the hopes to maximize its effect, while other players will usually run directly away from them.  Something like the Jump Boots from Unreal Tournament will make players choose their location differently to either use it as an evasion or to reach a tactically superior position that is otherwise unaccessible. 

So powerups in general are pretty great.  Players like them because it helps them beat the game, and also because it makes for a more varied and interesting experience.  If you took the power pellets out of Pac-Man, it would probably still be playable, but more difficult and much more repetitive.  But there are many ways to implement them, and some are more well suited to certain things than others.  More on that next time.