Exploitable Mechanics

Today we're talking about infinite combos. In a game, you can sometimes find ways to shift your resources around so that you end up with more than you started with. At which point you can keep doing it, and keep doing it, and generate massive amounts of resources. In real life these examples are less common because almost inevitably you encounter negative feedback along the way. Here, let me give you an example.

In the game Morrowind you can practice alchemy. Take ingredients A and B, mix them together, and make a potion. Pretty much the standard fare for modern fantasy games. The trouble comes with the way stores work. If you sell your frost salts to an armorsmith you'll never see them again. If you sell them to an alchemist who already has one in stock, his stock will permanently go up by one. So buy both salts back from him; then close and reopen his window; he'll have two more salts for you to buy. As many times as you like. Or keep selling them back to build up a real proper inventory. It's a real easy way to get otherwise hard to acquire reagents.

If you take two foodstuffs and mix them together, you get a potion of restore fatigue. Not terribly useful, except that it sells for significantly more than the ingredients cost. But if you use the store exploit I mentioned above, you can keep buying reagents, keep selling potions, and get essentially infinite money and stockpiles of powerful potions and rare reagents.

Understandably this does bad things for game balance. On the other hand, Morrowind is a strictly single player game, so that's less important.

I'm going to define some terms quick.

Bug: A bug is anytime when a game does something it wasn't designed to do. This just indicates that the game isn't working properly. For example, in Diablo II if you stood in the bottom corner of Atma's tavern and dropped an item, it would land outside the wall even if you were inside. Usually bugs occur in a computer game, but not always. They've printed Magic cards that play havoc with the rules before. (You used to be able to give judges headaches with Opalescence and Humility. They've since worked it out.)

Exploit: An exploit is anytime you can use a convocation of mechanics or a bug for personal gain. That Atma's tavern bug? I remember it because people could use it to scam people in trades (we each drop an item, then we run around to pick up the other persons. Go stand in the corner so you'll be sure I can't get to yours before you get to mine.) When it's just an oddity in the game, it's a bug. When you can do something with it, like scam other players or make infinite potions, it's an exploit.

Hack: A hack is essentially a way of cheating at the game. Wallhack in counterstrike or loaded dice in back alley craps. What differentiates a hack from an exploit is that in an exploit you're using the rules of the game as they're laid out, with a hack you're changing those rules. To continue the craps example, on your basic come/don't come bet you've got about a 1.4% advantage betting on don't come. If you strictly bet that way you'll do slightly better than otherwise. That's an exploit, not a hack.

There are a couple different phenomena I'd like to discuss concerning exploits, but for now, I'll just talk about the effect on gameplay. For the first consideration, is this a multiplayer game? Ruining the Morrowind economy is one thing; scamming people in Diablo II is another. Generally speaking, if you're screwing over other players it's not a nice thing to do. If you're just making infinite gold that's less troublesome. But that sort of bug tends to get patched relatively quickly.

For example, early on in WoW you could easily script a fishing bot that would sit around in Stormwind and fish. Leave it running, you get stacks and stacks of fish, which you can sell to vendors. That was how the early gold farmers got their stock. They fixed the problem relatively quickly by making the fish you catch almost worthless. Not an ideal solution, but I don't know how you could better solve it. Err; how better it could have been solved.

If you're playing a single player game, do you use the exploit? The question you have to answer is how does that affect your enjoyment of the game? Take the potion example from above. Sure, you feel clever when you discover the exploit, but being able to make completely overpowered potions (yeah, that's another part of it. If you have a higher intelligence you make better potions. You can make potions of intelligence. With infinite potions you can make insanely powerful potions as well) obviates a lot of the exploring old ruins and discovering treasures that makes the game interesting. On the other hand, in Evil Genius there's a short time at the start of the game where you can steal from the world but the world can't fight back. So if you stop completing the objectives at that point and just loot you can get effectively infinite gold (just leave the game running overnight). But since the acquisition of money mechanic in the game is essentially another timesink I don't mind bypassing it. (I've already complained about the timesinks here.)

To think of it another way, if I'm playing through the Starcraft campaign there's not much point if I use the invulnerability cheat. (Power Overwhelming in the original. Don't know about Starcraft II). On the other hand, if I've already tried this stupid battle three times and I'm losing again and I don't like playing the zerg anyway and I just want to see how this story continues already and... and... yeah, then I don't mind using it to get to the next mission already.

The Hotel Full of Bees

This is another post on Evil Genius, covering a couple mechanics that I didn't really last time. And yes, there will be discussions of hotels, possibly full of bees.

Let's start with the tourists. Your base is carved out of a mountain on some remote island. There are no local inhabitants. There's just the mountain and the sea. A dock and a helipad I guess. And yet somehow the tourists show up. They wander around for a while and leave. If in the meantime they saw something that freaked them out, they go back and raise your global heat level. With some effort you can calm them down so they won't raise your heat (keep a certain class of minion trained and available, keep an eye out for panicky Hawaiian shirts) (I should also mention there appears to be a bug that makes this part not work). As far as I can tell, there's no penalty for killing them and hiding the body.

So how do I as a player react to the tourists? Mostly I ignore them. I mean, if they get all scared yeah, I can delegate minions to calm them down, but generally they've got better things to do. If they manage to wander into my base then depending on how I'm feeling I calm them down and lead them out or I torture them to death. Not much room for a middle road there. But the consequences to me as a supervillian are pretty mild either way.

Or, I can build a hotel, as the game suggests. Spend a couple hundred thou of my hard stolen loot, but oh what a hotel! It's got drinks (free drinks, so far as I can tell. I never see a dime for providing them) and dining, a dance floor, a guy at the grand piano in the lobby. It's got an adjoining casino with roulette and craps and baccarat. The game says the varied furniture will entertain the tourists, keeping them from poking their noses in where they don't belong. I've never known the hotel to detain the tourists a quarter as effectively as the minions who staff it.

Tourism, in Evil Genius, is a poorly designed mechanic. Any mechanic which players can largely ignore should draw scrutiny as to whether it deserves to be in the game to begin with. There are more important things to pay attention to. Furthermore, dealing with them doesn't provide you a good, it only allows you to avoid a negative (and a mild one at that; half the things you do increase your world heat anyway). It's the difference between wanting to do something and having to do something. So dealing with the tourists tends to be an annoyance rather than a pleasure. And after that, the mechanic could use some balancing. I went through all this trouble to build you a nice hotel with no bees at all in it and you're not using it? I guess getting gummed up in the impact stress analyzer in my laboratory was more important.

So how could they, at the game design level fixed this? The could have made the hotels make you money. If the tourists are a positive source of income then you've got a reason to pay attention to them, to herd them out of your base rather than strap them to the laser. You'd have a reason to build the hotels. You wouldn't get so annoyed that they keep visiting your island because they represent a viable source of revenue. Which would have also saved the mechanic from irrelevance.

Revenue there would push your existing revenue streams from the world map into being less relevant but that's fine. You do enough on the world map as it is, and even assuming they took out the infinite money bug at the start of the game stealing is never the most important thing you do there.

And speaking of the world map, let's talk notoriety. Whenever you engage in an act of infamy on the world map you gain in notoriety. This has a couple effects:

As your notoriety goes up, you can recruit more henchmen. The world powers send more powerful agents to your island. At predetermined levels the powers send superagents to your island. (Superagents roughly translate to the protagonists you'd find in other, less villain centric stories.) And occasionally you have to reach a certain notoriety to pass an objective.

The problem with the mechanic is it gives you very little to go out of your way to commit those acts of infamy. I mean, if you figure the henchmen you get are about equivalent to the superagents (an arguable point, but take it for the sake of argument for now.), and if the more powerful agents aren't that much of a problem, then at best you're getting a neutral deal by raising your notoriety. A neutral basis doesn't give you the incentive to go out there and neuter that panda.

If you just did a spit take, well, let me explain. Inasmuch as the game provides many, many openings for making fun of the mechanics, they really did fine with the writing. These acts of infamy you engage in as an Evil Genius are, well, cartoonish supervillainry. They include stuffing fish with radio beacons to overtax a sonar system, blowing up a Russian vodka distillery, very publicly executing a boy band mid performance, stealing a solid gold Buddha statue and replacing it with a solid brass one, replacing an ivory supply with elephant squeaky toys just before the forces of justice descend on it and so forth. My favorite is, of course, neutering the worlds only panda that's interested in breeding.

But the point is that engaging in these diabolic acts form a large part of the reason you want to be an Evil Genius. They're the draw for the market. That and the whole conquering the world thing, which doesn't enter into this discussion. Doing them isn't easy; you have to mold your minion base into the appropriate form and then keep them alive on the map long enough to finish the objective. I wish the game gave you more reward for them than a high notoriety, or at least more reward for a high notoriety.

Some of the acts of infamy also get you a loot item; those I'm fine with. At least you get the Ark of the Covenant to use as a coffee table. That doesn't mean the other type works. The game should do more to encourage people to go after giant pandas with a hedge clipper.

One final mechanic: traps.

Again the game hits this one out of the park in terms of the creative aspect. You get to build pirahna tanks, trapdoors into furnaces, tesla coils and all manner of fiendish devices with which to baffle your foe. Which is great. The trouble is that the traps tend to have a number of annoying downsides.

First off, you'll catch plenty of minions in them. While this cultivates a properly evil sense of outrage (I spent a lot of time teaching that mook quantum mechanics and he goes and gets himself stuck on the sawblades. Why am I surrounded by idiots?), a sense of outrage isn't the feeling I expect to get when I'm playing my videogames, however evil. And however remote you make the trap, your minions will go poking around it, potentially setting it off or being near it when an agent sets it off. Somebody has to clean up the bodies, after all. And you'd better hope the agents get killed by it, if they somehow manage to survive (blast them!), they'll find the motion detector and blow it up, making traps expensive to maintain.

The traps themselves are fun, and in a rare case of getting the incentives right the game awards you small amounts of cash which get bigger the more traps an agent sets off at once. You're not in it for the money, but it's nice to know someone appreciates your art. My favorite trap is, of course, the beehive. Stepping in the wrong place and getting chased by swarms of malevolent, genetically engineered superbees? Awesome.

Which brings me to the title. The Hotel Full of Bees. This latest time playing through the game (for all I complain, I do seem to play it) I built a lavish base with all the amenities, including two sets of backup generators. I built two hotels with all the amenities even though they're largely useless. I then built a third, decoy hotel. Full of Bees. Which is, as they say, pretty much what it says on the tin. Rather than constructing the usual bar and rooms and all the hotel contains nothing but motion detectors, pressure sensitive tiles, laser trip beams and roughly fifty beehives.

Literally dozens and dozens of agents and tourists have wandered in only to come running out pursued by swarms of bees.

I still haven't stopped laughing about it.

It's a Hotel. Full of Bees.

Now that's the kind of supervillainry I signed up for.

Realism, and why not to

To start off, "Realism" means that you're conforming your game mechanics to how you think reality works. Usually realism is good and necessary, but sometimes it'll get in the way of making an Awesome Game. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to try to explore that distinction.

To start with, is realism necessary? Yes. yes it is. Moving on... oh right, the reasons. To start with, realism allows your players to grasp on to something, which helps them understand the game. If I told you I was making a game where, all else being equal, the side with the fewest soldiers won a battle you'd be rightfully skeptical. Our experience with wars and the way the world works tells us that it doesn't happen that way, so I'd better have a darned good reason for running it that way in the game.

Furthermore, people expect a certain level of realism. They'll suspend disbelief on the points you tell them to, but otherwise they expect the world to act like, well, like they'd expect. My Grandpa watches reruns of Bonanza. One day we were watching one and he says to me "why does that Indian have Little Joe's horse?" Now he knows and I know and you know that it's just a TV show, that they've got constrained budgets and that when they need a bunch of mounted Indians they have to borrow some mounts from regular cast members who aren't on screen at the moment. But seeing the horse where it oughtn't be breaks the illusion and makes us unhappy.

Suspension of disbelief isn't a bad thing mind you. Far from it! But you've got to manage it well. People are going to accept all sorts of things that they know can't happen in real life, but you can't abuse that trust. You've always gotta make it sound plausible, and you've gotta be careful about contraditions in your internal logic. (Like that horse. No plot reason for it to be under that Indian.) Suspending disbelief doesn't hurt your realism, but breaking that suspension does.

Take Super Mario Bros. as an example. We understand that jumping on things heads is generally bad for the thing being jumped on. We understand that falling in pits of lava is generally fatal. We know that jumping on things with spikes or upwards facing jaws are probably going to hurt us more. And, while we might be a little fuzzy on why a hundred coins equal an extra life, we know that collecting coins is good, because we want to do so in the rest of our lives. All of these mechanics make sense from a realism perspective, even if they're expressed in a very unrealistic game.

Except for that 100 coins bit. Why does it give you an extra life? Well, this one is harder to justify based on our expectations of reality. I can tell you why it's in there, it makes for good gameplay. We want to collect the coins anyway, so they give us a bonus for collecting the coins. Collecting coins is fun, getting a bonus is fun, doing both is more fun and so the mechanic is added. Realism will be ignored when the result makes the game a better game to play. Come to think of it, who ever told you that you'd get 3+ tries at life, depending on how many mushrooms and coins you collected?

Thus you have two forces pulling in different directions when you're designing your game. Realism makes your game easier to understand, and furthermore people expect it. But fun often constrains you to make mechanics that aren't very realistic, for the sake of making the game playable. Take Evil Genius, for example. I was arguing in my previous post that the research system might be more realistic, but it was less fun. In that case it seems to me that they went too far towards the realism side of things. I, on the other hand, tend to err towards the other side of things; less realism, more action, which doesn't necessarily make it more fun.

Let's talk about the Terrible Secret of Space for a moment. I spent a while figuring out how to run all the orbital mechanics. I think I'm going to ignore almost entirely liftoff from planetary surface. Why the distinction? Because having planets and distances change dynamically over the course of the game gives an interesting battlefield, which changes from turn to turn. But dealing with liftoff from a planetary surface just adds complication to the game without much in the way of interesting mechanics, strategic decisions or so forth. So I spend time dealing with the one and nearly none dealing with the other.

But what does Realism have to do with all of that? I court realism with the movement mechanics (Remember, they're all based off of physics) because it gets me what I want; an interesting game. I couldn't make a variable board like that without realism because I wouldn't have a mental hook to hang it's movements on. But I'm avoiding realism with the liftoff questions because as far as I can tell it adds complications without adding anything of value.

Evil Genius; or; they finally made a video game out of my life.

Today I'm going to go into (at length!) everything that's wrong with the game Evil Genius.

If you've never played it, Evil Genius sets you up as a James Bond supervillian trying to take over the world. Ten out of ten gold stars for concept. They also do a number of other things really well; the music is excellent, and the animation looks good. Real good. They're problems come mostly from gameplay. And the interface.

So, as a mastermind with less than unimpeachable morals, you get two kinds of underlings, hereafter referred to as Henchmen and Minions. Henchmen are the named bad guys with a shtick of some sort. Think Oddjob from Goldfinger; Short, Korean, almost entirely mute and kills his enemies by throwing a fedora with a metal brim. Or Jaws with his sharp metal teeth. Basically this covers any subvillain who actually has a name.

Minions, on the other hand, are nameless, faceless drones in suits. Think the members of the axe gang. Or the jumpsuited figures defending Blofeld's crater base in You Only Live Twice. Or the blue suited Koreans taking out Ft. Knox in Goldfinger. The game rightfully sees and exploits this relationship, giving you few henchmen with powerful and useful abilities and many less important minions it does give the minions names, but in hours and hours of playing the game the names have never been relevant in the slightest, so I ignore them. Therefore I'm crediting them with proper application of the trope, in a subtle manner.

The trouble is though, you can't actually order your minions around. All you can do is suggest. So if you want someone to build you a detention cell, you don't find a construction worker and ask. You specify an order that the detention cell be built, and a minion will proceed to do that. If you want an enemy agent killed, all you have to do is say "Who will rid me of this troublesome fool?" and someone will rush to the job.

Which has it's problems. Your foes with kill tags, and anyone who sees it will go running to do the deed. Now, your union thug with a spanner might think he's pretty tough, but when he's facing down half a dozen warriors with their rifles, well, he don't look so good. And thanks to the fact that you can't order the minions around singly or in groups, each individual person sees that tag in order, and goes rushing in like he's Bruce Lee and gets drilled full of holes.

It's true that they get guns. You have to convince them to use them, though. Y'see, even your big bad mercenaries don't wander the base carrying. You have to set up a yellow alert and then they'll go and pick up guns from your gun racks. If they're not otherwise too busy. And even if they have the guns, unless they see the enemy at a distance they'll still run in and try to tap dance on faces with their fists. And even if you get them shooting at a distance then they're still going their lonesome against a squad of computerized opponents who are working together. Which is more than you can manage by merely offering your minions suggestions.

My favorite in this regard are the marksman type minions. After you spend oh so much time training them up, they wander your base carrying their huge rifles. And then they find someone that needs killing, and they run up and poke 'em in the jaw because they haven't figured out what it means to be a sniper. Idiots.

Which brings me to another point. Training. You want a marksman? You gotta train a mercenary, which you gotta train from a guard, which you gotta train from a construction worker. You get one construction worker every sixty seconds (more if you pay), and they upgrade on the same "whenever they get it in their minds to do so" way. So you wait and wait and wait until that marksman get to the third tier and then he gets it in his head that he's reincarnated Cassius Clay and, well, frustrating would be a light way to describe it.

Come to think of it, waiting is pretty much the order of the day in this game. You send people onto the world map and you wait for them to steal. They get a certain amount every sixty seconds, but you don't get it immediately, you have to wait for a minion to run to the helicopter pad on the far side of the islands and pick it up for you. Which lets them get killed along the way and surrender their precious precious gold to the forces of justice who are just going to spend it on carbon credits anyway.

But the waiting, yeah I'm getting to that. So, you recruit minions on a time basis. you train up better minions on a time basis. You earn your cash from the world on a time basis. When the world gets angry at you (and they do, often), then if you just wait a little while the heat will die down and they'll stop sending their better agents to your island. If you just wait a little longer maybe your scientists will research some better stuff for you. I'm not saying that limiting actions by time is a terrible thing in general, but if you trend all of your incentives that way then you end up with the player sitting at his computer and waiting. And not having fun, because doing any of the interesting stuff requires him to wait oh so much longer.

Oh yeah, research. In most games you tell your minions what you want discovered, and they proceed to discover it. After giving you perfect estimates as to cost and time. not really realistic. In this game you have your scientist minions wandering your base and looking at stuff. Eventually, one of them gets some inspiration, and you can have him research that object. It's more realistic admittedly, but there are two problems; one is that you're never sure that the scientists have researched everything, they might have just overlooked something. The other is, if you're going for a specific object then you're completely at the mercy of the clock. You gotta wait. There are a number of objects that I'd really like to research before I build a second base, and so again I delay blowing up my first one as long as possible for that to happen.

I understand that you need something to stretch the game out. I mean, if I dropped $40 for the game even at the discounted price I'm expecting hours of entertainment out of that box. But if all you can manage is three hours, there's no need to put me through all that waiting to stretch it out to eight ten twelve hours. I can think of several novels that do this; For Whom the Bell Tolls comes to mind first.

There are a couple of interface problems, of varying seriousness. The first time I played through the game I never found out how to save the game manually; Saving games is under "Load Save" which I assumed was only for loading saved games. And the annoying announcer lady is almost entirely superfluous. I dunno about that though; maybe I'm a skilled enough gamer that I don't need her reminding me that a security door has been breached, or that I don't have minions available to start building that right away. It might be for the ten year olds who may or may not be playing the game.

There's also an annoying one on the minion screen. When you order minions you have to specify the number of minions you're ordering in that type. So I might have on the one tree fifteen guards, ten mercenaries and five marksmen. If I don't have any mercenaries or marksmen, then it won't let me order more marksmen, the box where I specify the number is blanked out. Let's say I had that tree filled, and then in an intense bit of combat I lost all of it. On my minion report I'd have listed 00/15 guards, and the other two would be blacked out. But the number of minions ordered in those slots wouldn't zero out, I'd still have fifteen minions ordered that I couldn't possibly get rid of until I found a way to get more guards. So I'm stuck with an annoyingly low cap on the number of construction workers. Yeah, it's happened to me before. A couple of times.

And speaking of which, let's get to the AI glitches that allow you to lose your entire minion force in just one assault. I mean beyond their reluctance to use guns and go it alone attitude. If you've got a squad of soldiers assaulting your base, only your soldiers and construction workers will attempt to attack them. The social and scientific minions will generally ignore them. Theoretically this helps you by not having those guys rush off to get themselves killed. In practice it tends to mean they wander by the soldiers and get killed anyway.

Suppose they set a part of your base on fire. Not an uncommon occurrence. Your valet minions see "the base is on fire!" and run for the fire extinguisher. They then run to the trouble spot and valiantly try to put out the fire, and get gunned down mercilessly. Maybe they even put the fire out first. Then your next valet sees "oh no, there's a fire extinguisher just laying there. How unclean!" and goes to tidy up. And gets gunned down like an Indian at Wounded Knee. Or maybe you managed to kill one of the soldiers. You've got a body bag that needs moving. And you've got the minions who want to move it for you. So your higher ranking scientific and social staff will calmly walk into a battle, attempt to pick up a body bag and walk on out. Naturally, they also get gunned down mercilessly. It wouldn't be so bad if you could JUST TELL THEM NOT TO GO THERE but you CAN'T because you're not allowed to give direct orders to your minions. No, I'm not frustrated, why do you ask?

As a lesser criticism, the game doesn't really have that many options for player actions. You can: capture and interrogate someone, commit an act of infamy on the world map, defend your island against intruders, and research something. None of them are really strong enough to make a game out of themselves, like 'Kill all the orcs" is for Warcraft. (err, the RTS Warcraft games; not WoW). They do ok with it, the storyline has you do each a couple times. It's good enough for one playthrough, but it doesn't exactly help the replayability. And it stretches my suspension of disbelief when people just randomly show up at your island. (A Russian Cosmonaut, a handful of diplomats, a crime boss, that sort of thing).

Bottom line I've got two main criticisms of the game. First; it doesn't allow you control over a major determinant as to whether you win or lose. By not allowing you to control minions directly the game forces you to watch in frustration as they do things that just aren't optimal. That's not fun. Secondly, it overly incentivises wasting time. Since the major limitation on your resources since you can shore up your defenses by adding time, you end up taking much longer to complete portions of the game than you would had you been playing at your own speed. Like drinking watered down wine, this makes the game less fun.