Top-down, space. You control a vast mothership, bigger than any sun, drifting through a dense system of planets and stars. Hovering your cursor over tiny planets scans them, and after a short delay, reports whether any of your people are captive there or not.

As you pass, the tiny planets launch even tinier capital ships at you, zapping at you with tiny weapons but doing no actual damage. You can destroy these with your giant main laser, but it’ll also obliterate any planet in its path, so you have to be a bit careful.

Once you’ve found a planet with some captives on it, you’ve got to wipe out all the capital ships, then you can right click on it to “Launch Craft”.

A tiny pixel of black leaves the body of your ship and flies towards the planet. When it gets there, cut to:

Top down, globe view. You control a vast black disc of a ship as whole nations drift beneath you, their cities and roads sparkling orange at night. (It’s night because you attacked from the opposite side to the sun.)

The cities launch squadrons of fighter jets against you, which do a little damage to your craft if not destroyed with your main laser. Holding the cursor over a city scans it for captives. When you find some, and you’ve cleared the skies, you can right click on that city to “Launch Craft”.

A tiny pixel of black leaves the body of your ship and flies towards the city. When it gets there, cut to:

Side-on, cityscape view. You control a large black dropship zooming above the rooftops. (The sunset’s orange because that’s the colour of the nearest star.)

Soldiers shoot homing missiles at you from their rooftops, which do significant damage if they hit. You can fry them with your main laser, and burn missiles out of the air, but the beam soon destroys any buildings behind. Hovering the cursor over a building slows your ship for a moment to scan it for captives. If you find some, and the soldiers are all dead, you can right click on it to “Launch Craft”.

A black missile shoots from your ship, slamming into the wall of the building. Cut to:

Side-on, building cross-section. You control a small, flying, baby-squid-like alien, hovering through the building’s floors. (The building is purple. That is random.)

Security personnel fire automatic weapons at you, which kill if they hit. You can fry them with your brain laser, and burn holes through the floors of the building.

On one floor, you see the Captives: others of your species kept in glass jars for military experiments. Once you get to them, you have to destroy their tanks with your laser, then blast your way through the wall to get out.

If you die at any point up to here, we cut back to the previous stage and another craft is launched. If you die after this point, we cut back to the mothership and the captives on this planet are lost.

Assuming you get out, we cut to:

Cityscape. The dropship picks you up from the building, but now the streets are crawling with soldiers. You have to shoot down incoming missiles from all directions while you lift off to the top of the screen. Cut to:

Globe. Fighters have scrambled from all over the planet to intercept you, and their combined fire is lethal if you don’t cut their numbers down with your laser. As long as you survive, the disc of your ship grows larger and larger until it fills the screen and we cut to:

Space. No sound but the quiet hum of the mothership. The planet launches more capital ships if you don’t destroy it, but they can’t scratch you. You drift on, scanning for more captives.

A bunch of people asked if they or someone else could make this – yes! I hereby waive all rights to this thing and chuck it into the public domain, anyone can do anything with it.

The theme is decided by a vote, and ‘Alone’ won. However, ‘Kitten’ was also in the final round. It got more down-votes than any other theme, but I can’t help wanting to combine the two. Here’s my idea:

Top down view of snowy tundra. You are a badly drawn TINY KITTEN that scampers towards the mouse cursor, kicking up snow and leaving messy pawprints. It’s a zero button game: all you do is move the mouse.

If you stray far from where you start, you’ll run into a villager or two. They stop when they see you, and run to the north if you approach. They’re faster than you, so you can never catch up to them.

The further north you go, the more villagers you’ll see. They all run away to a village to the north, but if you get close to the village itself, they’ll flee that too. If you chase them, you’ll reach a cliff edge. The villagers will stop at the threshold, but if you come close enough they’ll throw themselves over to get away from you.

The other side of the ravine is a sheer wall of ice, in which you see blurry reflections of the villagers you’re chasing into the chasm. But your own reflection is wrong: far too big, dark and spiky. A rough silhouette of that more monstrous shape appears over your usual badly-drawn kitten avatar, and gets stronger the longer you spend in the presence of your reflection. Eventually, the kitten fades away entirely and you see yourself as the monster you are.

After that, there’s a small chance you’ll encounter smaller villagers who can’t run as fast as you. If you get close to one, you automatically pounce on it and rip it to shreds in a spray of blood, and you’re unable to control yourself until you finish devouring its remains. After that, any time your cursor is directly over a villager, you’ll accelerate to chase it down and eat it. The more you eat, the faster your hunting speed.

If you do kill a villager, there’s now a chance that the villagers you meet in future will throw rocks at you before running away. The more you kill, the more will try to fight you. The rocks knock you back very slightly, so if more than a couple are pelting you, you can’t catch up to them and have to run away.

After the first few, rock hits will make you bleed steadily, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. The bleeding stops if you eat a villager. If you don’t stop the bleeding, your monstrous image starts to fade and the kitten returns, still bleeding.

If you leave the villagers alone, or you kill them all, you’ll end up alone in the snow. After a while alone, your beast appearance fades and you start to see yourself as a kitten again. The screen gets darker as night closes in, and the kitten starts to tremble and turn blue. Eventually, its scampering slows to an unsteady crawl, it lies down, goes still, and is lost in the dark blue snow as darkness closes in.

It’s also a useful one for anyone involved with games to ask. It’s one game critics like me should be able to answer reflexively. It’s one developers should answer before they start making something. And it’s one gamers should probably think about before writing a one-star Amazon review saying ‘lol ass’.

I’m sad to say that on the press side of things, we haven’t really got anywhere. Half of us apparently think games meaningfully break down into “Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay, and Lasting Appeal”. And the other half believe they’re unquantifiable pixie dust and anyone who wants even the faintest idea of their merits should have to read 3,000 words of waffle.

The former is confusing a game’s component parts with what the whole achieves. The latter is just giving up. It’s not that games can be captured in a few metrics, it’s that they still can’t in 3,000 words. So instead of abandoning analysis, let’s just be smarter about where analysis stops.

It can’t stop at words like ‘gameplay’, because those aren’t useful: tell me a game has good gameplay, and all I really know is that you like it. Are your actions in it satisfying on some tactile level? If so, great. We don’t really need to know why they’re satisfying, just to say ‘it feels good’ is far more specific and useful than what we had before.

That’s what I mean by being smarter about where analysis stops. Keep asking “Why is that good?” until you hit the primal, instinctive pleasure response you’re having. It’s not impossible to keep going, but it’s more neuroscience than critique past that point.

I’ll try to explain six things that can make a game great, for me. Games don’t need to do all of them well, sometimes one is enough. But the hope is to cover every kind of draw they can have. Every game I like, I like because it does one of these things well.

1. Challenge

How much you enjoy tackling what you’re being asked to do.

Challenge is about what a game asks your brain or fingers to do, and whether it’s something you enjoy struggling with. Personally, I don’t like struggling with anything that requires extreme precision or reactions, like Super Meat Boy. But I love struggling with mental problems, like the time-bending of Braid.

Obviously difficulty is part of it – either extreme makes it hard to engage with the challenge. But just as importantly, difficulty is a way of pacing rewards. It makes games enjoyable by spacing out the dopamine kicks of success, so that you never get bored of getting them, nor of waiting for them.

A game like Tetris has a simple challenge – SORT THESE SHAPES – but a well-paced one. Its mechanics naturally make satisfying successes frequent at first, then rarer and harder the longer you play. There’s never a time in Tetris when clearing a line isn’t satisfying.

2. Feel

Making individual interactions convincing and pleasurable

When you fire a virtual gun, feel is the sound of the shot, the muzzle flash, the recoil of the weapon model, whether it offsets my aim, the reaction of the target, and what all that suggests about the unseen parts of the interaction: the weight of the bullet, its hardness, where it hit, how that felt, what damage has been done.

But feel is just as important in non-violent games. Bejeweled is incredible at it: I know exactly how hard a topaz is despite the fact that it never touches anything, just from its sound and motion. The sound of four gems forming a super-gem, and the glow that gives it, makes the thing feel dense, pregnant – all reinforced by the cathartic boom when it goes off.

If you’re ever wondering why a PopCap game succeeded despite being suspiciously similar to an existing game that was only moderately popular, it’s because the first game got the challenge right and PopCap added the feel.

3. Freedom

The extent to which a game reacts to your choices with interesting results

A game that put you in an infinite empty field would have a lot of freedom in the ordinary sense of the word, but it’s not just about maximising options. Freedom is about how many different options the game has an interesting response to.

If the result is just “Your character moves a bit in that infinite field”, that’s not interesting. In Deus Ex, though, your choices about how to approach a wide-open level all lead to meaningfully different situations. The front door gets you into a dangerous dance with a patrolling bot, the side entrance exposes you to a lot of guards, the rear gets you a key to the building. Shooting attracts guards and results in a big gunfight, stealth keeps things under control but gives you more threats to think about in the long run.

There are more complex reasons why those choices are particularly compelling, and more complex ways that the sub-options within them interact. But basically, a big reason Deus Ex is great is that it gives you a lot of options, and has something different to offer you whichever one you pick.

4. Place

A world you want to be in

It’s funny how many people can’t see the point of games, but see traveling as one of the most enriching and exciting pleasures of life. I love both, often for the same reason and in the same way. Stepping off a zeppelin in Durotar is as clear and fond a memory getting off a plane in Zimbabwe.

Mirror’s Edge is a good case study, because place is the only thing it does perfectly. It shows how an urban environment can be as visually exciting and artistically inventive as a different planet. It had an incredible vision for its setting, and the tech was bent and boosted to show it dazzlingly. The place glows, and my desire to be there outweighs every problem with the game’s mechanics.

5. Promise

The temptation of further possibilities

You could claim this doesn’t count, that the mere promise of something interesting or better is not a pleasure in itself, just the anticipation of one. Nope!

On its most basic level, the promise of ever-better items and stats keeps RPGs interesting way beyond the sell-by date of their challenge and feel. But promise can also be the anticipation of story developments, new puzzle mechanics or unknown abilities.

Most of my time actually playing Dawn of War 2: Retribution was before I unlocked the particular abilities for my heroes that turned them into a perfectly co-ordinated killing machine. But long before I had them, they were making the game exciting just by sitting there, greyed out on the character sheet, promising.

6. Fantasy

The appeal of playing this role

This is different to story – I think Mass Effect 2′s story is outright bad, but I love being a badass lady space captain zooming around the galaxy punching robots and telling people to fuck themselves.

For some reason ‘fantasy’ has become a slightly shameful word, while ‘escapism’ – trying to get away from your life – is accepted as normal. I think discovering new places and ideas is healthier than vegetating in front of some glossy people making out on TV. I don’t play games to escape my life, I play them to explore new ones.

Why isn’t Story on there?

It’s a little personal, of course. But for me, the pleasure of a good story is in making this alternate life interesting (Fantasy), suggesting a rich world (Place), and keeping me wondering about what’s coming next (Promise). If it doesn’t do any of those things – even if it’s Of Mice and Men – it doesn’t make a good game. So it’s not a pleasure in itself.

How does this help?

An early version of Gunpoint’s plot was an attempt at a good story, rather than a good Fantasy. The player was involved, but his role wasn’t a very exciting one, and there was no hint of a world beyond this plot.

Deciding on this list made it dramatically easier to see and solve those problems in a total rewrite. I started with the Fantasy – being a spy for hire – and built everything around that. I’ll get a bunch of other stuff wrong, but that’s one less.

Has it also helped you understand why you love, hate or only like certain games?

It’s also helped me understand why I love, hate, or only like certain games.

Why isn’t Just Cause 2 my favourite game ever? Great Feel, amazing Place, but it doesn’t have Promise like the others do. There’s no sense that anything interestingly different will happen if I keep playing.

Why do I never stick with World of Warcraft? Amazing sense of Place, no Feel. Why don’t I like the Witcher games as much as people tell me I will? I hate the Fantasy, I don’t want to be this guy, in this world, doing this.

And why is Minecraft so popular? Under a traditional notion of challenge, it has none. But it does rarefy its rewards well, and that’s what Challenge is really about. Minecraft is great at Challenge, Feel, Place, Freedom and Promise, so it’s not surprising it appeals to a pretty broad audience.

This list is a first stab at something I’ll keep working on as I write about and try making games. I hate the feeble attitude that games are too complex, too new, or too arty to quantify their appeal in specific or useful ways. Because it’s hurting our ability to understand them, to explain them to people who don’t get them, and to make them better.

The upside of all the scalebacks is primarily speed. It doesn’t really matter whether you pay for the stuff you build gradually (SupCom) or upfront (SupCom2). SupCom2 cuts out the interminable upgrading process to spectacularly accelerate how quickly you can build something vast, gleaming and capable of a war crime. It’s a less remarkable game, but a much more playable one. And even though its matches unfold eight times faster, I’ve already sunk more hours into it than the first.

A few things stop it from completely replacing the first game, most prominently the scale. A few things stop it from being the perfect evolution of the real-time strategy; a few signs of timidity in the Research options. And a few things stop me from really wanting to play it online with strangers – it appeals more than any other RTS in that way, but I still have to customise it a little to be happy with the playing field. So I wrote a few posts about how to fix all these things.

Some of the basic stuff probably isn’t controversial: it needs more eight player maps, two or three ten player ones, more sea maps, and more sea in the sea maps. AI that doesn’t build more transports than it can fill, and a ‘Very Hard’ AI that builds Experimentals with near-perfect efficiency. And a visible build queue, so that things don’t have to be paid for until they start construction, you can see what’s going to drain your resources, tasks can be reordered, and repeat-building factories can start churning out units again when nothing else is sapping your resources.

The Research tree of upgrades you can unlock is a wonderful improvement over the usual nonsense, but they’ve needlessly lost that concept of truly elite units. Experimentals are a different kind of “Fuck you” to the classic “Fuck you, one of my tanks can kill ten of yours.”

Upgrades should be more specific, more significant and more visible. The five incremental ‘Training’ upgrades should be cut to two very expensive ones that each double the units’ effectiveness, and make them physically bigger. It has to be immediately obvious “Shit, that’s an upgraded tank” or “Holy shit, that’s a maxed-out tank”. It should also be different for each race: UEF’s should upgrade health more than damage, Cybran damage more than health, Illuminate damage, health and range.

And scrap all generic ‘damage’, ‘health’ or ‘rate of fire’ upgrades – that’s what Training’s for. They should be replaced by unit-specific upgrades that change their form, size and function more dramatically. So instead of “+30% damage to all turrets” you’d have “Anti-air turrets upgraded to surface-to-air missile launchers, increasing their range and damage and letting them lock on to fast aircraft.”

Every upgrade needs to make a visual difference that’s obvious from any zoom level where you can see the model. Training increases size, a new weapon type changes the shape of the unit and adds an effect, regen causes them to spark colourfully when healing, etc.

This has been a huge problem for me in both games. Because it’s nuclear war, but it’s boring. Either side can build a nuclear missile, but either side can also build an anti-nuclear missile for half the price. The only reason not to is that half the price of a nuke is still significant. So an actual nuclear war is just a contest of who can be bothered to click their button the most, and since the defender has an economic advantage, it’s almost always him. The only time nukes actually get used is when your opponent is too new, stupid or artificial to know to build anti-nukes. Top marks for matching reality, zero marks for fun.

The only good moments we’ve had with them have been when, in co-op, a stupid AI has built their only nuke defense on the fringe of their base. One player readies a nuke, the others send in a combined strike team to take out the defense silo, and the moment they’re successful, you launch. Awesome. But in normal play, a strike force capable of taking down a massively tough nuke defense silo in the middle of the enemy base is also a strike force capable of taking down the base itself. Here’s my proposal:

All factions should be able to build a basic Nuke Defense silo without having to research or unlock it. It has unlimited anti-nukes, but it can only fire one at a time, and they don’t neutralise the nuke: they detonate it. So to avoid just blowing yourself up in a slightly different way, you have to build it well outside your base, and defend it with stuff you can afford to lose or move. The silo itself is nuke-proof – it’s basically a bunker – so you don’t have to rebuild it each time.

The idea is to turn nuclear war into a fight, rather than who can be bothered to click more times. It’s easy to defend against nukes, but only if you can defend a forward position in regular combat. Accordingly, it’s harder to nuke someone if all you do is sit back and nuke, but it’s easier to take out nuke defense if you build a good strike force and use it well.

It also gets you thinking about which directions nukes can come from, and which directions you could launch yours from.

Not strictly necessary, but it’d also be nice if each race had a unique second way of delivering a nuke. Each would bypass nuke defense, but be counterable by conventional units: again, more of a fight than a discrete “I clicked more times” system.

UEF build a Nuclear Bomber that must get close to its target intact to drop its payload. Anti-air can take it out quickly, and the nuke won’t detonate, so advance forces need to take out most AA defenses.

Cybran have a Walking Nuke experimental: a huge, tough block on legs with no weaponry, but which explodes with nuclear force on death. You’ll want to escort it in to give it enough protection to survive, then abandon it so your own units aren’t caught in the blast.

The Illuminate can unlock an upgrade for the Space Temple that lets them fire a nuke into it to hit the teleport destination. But the marker has to be in place for thirty seconds, and the enemy can destroy it in that time if they have the firepower. It’s a test of their base’s defenses, so if you strike while their army’s on their way to you, you’ve got a better chance of delivery.

This has always been a personal crusade of mine – I hate fog of war. It doesn’t meaningfully represent any real element of war, since regular line of sight would cover the whole battlefield on almost any map, and in any game set in modern times or later, dozens of other intel methods would give a clear picture of the scenario. But more importantly, it hurts the game in so many ways. Its crimes:

• Making the whole game look dingy and claustrophobic
• Wasting years of work on beautiful unit models by replacing them with grey squares
• Mandating endless, arduous scouting with air units – all the less welcome in a game where Air is supposed to be one of many options rather than a mandatory tool
• Robbing you of the satisfation of seeing artillery smash an enemy base. It doesn’t even compensate you with the luxury of an icon vanishing if you don’t have realtime radar coverage.

The argument in favour, as I understand it, is to let you surprise the enemy by building something he doesn’t know is coming. If that works, it reduces the game to scissor/paper/stone – complete luck. If you can see what’s being built, you have time to adapt your strategy to include a counter, and so does the enemy. To me, that’s where strategy gets interesting.

I think the tricky element can be achieved in a more explicit and localised way: each faction should have their own method of deception.

UEF can unlock a decoy engineer: everything he builds is a cheap fake that looks real to the enemy. It fits their defensive nature by making them look bigger than they are, and leads to feints like building masses of real point defense, then letting the enemy catch you building a fake one to tempt him into a doomed rush.

Cybrans have a very high-tier Land upgrade to turn the Adaptor mobile shield opaque to the enemy, so they can cluster these to conceal land units. Stealth is broken when it takes just a few hits, though, and doesn’t regenerate when the shield does.

Illuminate can Research an upgrade that makes all their experimentals appear to the enemy as regular units of a similar type, only revealing their true form and power when attacked. They already have a deceptive edge in that their Experimental factory is the same for all types of Experimental, so you can’t tell what they’re planning to build.

I also had some ideas for how a high-level campaign map could work for the single-player, and a redesign of the Illuminate to make them feel less toothless. But those are probably separate posts.

I had to pick a specific open world to talk about to prevent this from becoming hopelessly vague, so these are all ideas for how a game like Just Cause 2 could work. I chose that not because of any qualms with it, but because the first one was a classic example of a wonderful open world, gorgeous and fun to move around in, without much going on in it. The sequel’s even more inviting and even more fun to traverse, so it’s a great chassis to plug some cool ideas into.

This got long, so first I’ll summarise:

Give the player the option to set up camp in his favourite place, upgrade it with the features he wants, and liberate other areas he likes through a simple but high-level strategy game played out on the world map.

Split the main story into separate series of missions with a common theme – Sabotage, Assassination and Heroics. They have the appeal of categorised side-missions because you get to choose what kind of challenge you feel like taking on, but they’re unique and story-driven so they don’t wear thin.

Litter the world with obvious opportunities: a network of drug dealers with hugely varying prices that invite you to embark on your own travel missions, convoys carrying precious cargo that invite you to attack them, and rare assassination targets whose deaths will help you on the strategy map.

Thoughtfully place sets of collectibles that tell the story of long-dead agents like you as you collect them, encouraging you to explore, making the world feel like it has a history, and improving your character with the upgrades and unique weapons they left behind.

The first thing you do, after base-jumping into the island, meeting your handler and a short introductory mission, is choose where to set up camp. You pinpoint the precise location in-game – a secluded bay, a mountain top, a waterfall, the roof of a skyscraper – and a package is airdropped that unfolds itself into a tent. You can fast-travel there, lose your alert level, make a permanent save, or rest until a set time.

For every twenty or so locations you find – towns, islands, bases, villas, mountains, etc – you’re given the option of calling in another base of operations somewhere else.

When you get your first Revolutionary (explained next), you have to pick somewhere within a certain radius of a camp to place a comm antenna and laptop. You have to use this to issue orders on the strategic map.

You can also add other bits of equipment to any of your bases by stealing them from military bases and government facilities. These are marked with a special logo, and you can just tether one to a vehicle and drive off to rip it out. If you make it out of the area with the item intact and in tow, the agency airlifts it out and you can choose where to put it near one of your camps.

Camp bits:

Tent – pass time, save game (earned by exploring)
Laptop – strategise (unlocked by campaign)
Weapons locker – restock (stealable)
Camo net – store vehicle (stealable)
Anti-air - defense against pursuers (stealable)
Workbench – for upgrading kit (stealable)

The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give him a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.

The extra features give an ongoing way to improve and customise your camps as you start to engage with more of the world, keeping them relevant, personal and distinct as you progress through the game.

After about five missions, you’ve stuck it to the man enough to inspire some of the locals to rebel – including a Revolutionary leader. On the map, you can send this guy to any region and he’ll Liberate it: he and his band of rebels battle any present military forces and will keep them out indefinitely, making the area a bustling and vibrant safe zone.

A few missions later, the country’s President sends an Officer to lock down the region next to his residence, putting it under Martial Law. Constant military presence, very low tolerance for misbehavior, shops, services and base camp fast-travel disabled. Each time you send out a Revolutionary, he’ll lock down more of the island in response.

If you’ve Liberated a region next to one under Martial Law, you can use your next Revolutionary to attack it. Your guy and his rebels invade, and the resident Officer emerges with his own troops. Chances of success are even, but you can join in the fight to make the odds much better. If you win and your Revolutionary survives, the region is Liberated. If both the Revolutionary and the Officer die, the region reverts to normal.

Each time you make a move on the strategic map – and the government makes one in response – you both get one new leader for every two neighbouring regions you control. So you want to keep your territories joined, and break up the enemy’s. You can pile more Revolutionaries into an already Liberated region and send them all to attack a neighbouring government territory at once, to ensure victory without having to show up in person.

The idea is to let you fight for areas you like with visible effect, to give regions strategic significance, to create a world that changes in response to your actions, and to give you something to think about while messing around. It gives a visual sense of what you’ve achieved, what you’re up against, and how each mission is getting you closer to your objective. And by linking in with Convoy and Target Opportunities, it gives those context and significance beyond fun things to do.

The actual rules of the game, particularly the reinforcement mechanic, work magnificently in the super-simple Flash game Dice Wars.

Your mission is to overthrow the President of this island state, which you go about in three different ways. These mission threads are separate, so you can alternate between them or just burn through one type that suits you.

Sabotage: A series of missions offered by your handler to cripple the local military by destroying their hardware and facilities, either strategically or with brute force. Missions typically have you taking on a large but not limitless force and culminate in the destruction of one vital asset. Eg. Fighting your way through fighter jets and boats to scuttle a battleship at sea.

Assassination: A series of missions given through dead drops by an Agency operative you never meet, to eliminate well-protected key personnel in the local military. Missions usually pit you against a vastly superior force but with a suggested way to avoid them. Eg. Hopping on top of a civilian passenger jet to fly over an island base with heavy anti-air, to drop in on a target there from above.

Heroics: A series of missions given by coded messages broadcast on the local radio, by an operative pretending to be a rebel to convince the locals there’s already an insurgency for them to join. Missions are about using carefully setting up then pulling off spectacular victories, and always have some optional bonus objective that’ll make your actions all the more inspiring to the populace. Eg. Stealing a government Death Squad’s ammo reserves the night before an attack, with the option to sneak in convincing blanks so they don’t realise until they open fire.

The idea is to give the player a clear choice of what kind of challenge he wants to take on, but without resorting to boilerplate template missions or fairground challenges. These are still story-driven campaigns of unique missions, you just get to pick what type you’re in the mood for – and even avoid some of your least favourites entirely.

Each mission series ties its jobs together into an overarching story about the atrocities the regime has committed, the corruption of its officials, and the few local heroes trying to undermine or expose it. You know your Agency wants to overthrow him partly to get their own preferred candidate in power, but since that entails overthrowing a true despot, you’re happy to oblige.

Near the end of each series, though, your work gets harder to rationalise. Destruction missions start to include facilities with hundreds of people inside, Assassinations shift from military to political targets, and the new leader your Heroics missions are promoting starts to show a darker side. The last mission in each firmly crosses the line, and you can both voice your concerns and refuse to do them without necessarily giving up the cause.

You’re after the President, and he’ll only leave the bunker beneath his mansion when he’s lost control of the island – when there are no regions left under Martial Law. That’s extremely hard to achieve: halfway through your missions the government starts locking down regions much faster than you can earn Revolutionaries. But completing any of the three mission threads gives you a major advantage.

Finishing the Sabotage missions deprives all Martial Law regions of hardware, meaning they can no longer invade your territories.

Completing all Assassinations means the government runs out of Officers, so the ones already on the map are all they’ll ever get.

And doing all the Heroics missions inspires the populace so much that you gain double the number of Revolutionaries each time you move.

With a good strategy and skillful fighting on the ground, it’s possible to win the game without completing any of the mission threads – though you’ll have to come close in at least two of them to earn enough Revolutionaries.

Finishing the game this way means you’ve avoided compromising yourself with any of the dubious final missions, so it unlocks a special Epilogue mission in which you can expose the new leader for the asshole he is, and instate one the local heroes you’ve encountered in the course of the missions – against your Agency’s orders.

Once you have freed the island of government control, the President uses every asset he has left to make a mad dash for the airport on the other side of the island. Three convoys of tanks and APCs, a squadron of attack helicopters and a fleet of gunboats all leave the palace area, and there’s no way of knowing which he’s in.

You have half an hour to do at least one of three options. You can destroy all convoys before they reach the airport, to make sure he’s dead. You can try to take back the runways: the government has their last aircraft carrier stationed off the coast there, shooting down rebel air support, scrambling fighter jets and sending in boats of troops. Or you can fight for the terminal building itself, taking control of the government’s anti-air and gun emplacements, and laying mines on the approaching roads to ensure the convoys will be destroyed on arrival.

The first is a very tough fight against vehicles, the second requires evasion and tactics, and the third mostly involves fighting a lot of infantry. None actually take half an hour, and failing doesn’t mean you have to restart, you just get a slightly different ending. But of course the player isn’t told that going in.

Dealers lurk in backalleys of major cities, huts in remote villages, villas in the middle of nowhere, boats in the middle of the ocean. Their prices for each of four or five narcotics vary by region: nearby dealers have similar values, distant ones massively different.

You can see how much dealers you’ve met are offering for what you have at a glance, on the map. But their prices fluctuate over time, so you have to move soon to get there while the price is high. They also change in response to your deals: sell a lot of cocaine and the price crashes in that area.

The legal status of your cargo and questionable ethics of trading it make a good excuse for why you can’t fast-travel while carrying any drugs: if you try, you’re offered the option of instantly dumping your stash with the nearest dealer for whatever their current price is. If you’re feeling ethical, you can buy up drugs just to destroy them at your camp. And if you’re feeling zealous, you can just kill the dealers: they’ll stay dead.

The idea is that this inspires the player to come up with his own travel missions, generated as a result of a changing system that will make different routes profitable at different times. Since the market evens out when he makes a big run, it’s not going to be lucrative to ‘grind’ trading for more than a few good deals every half hour or so, giving a natural motive to vary his activities. Embarking on a mission that was your own idea, for a reward that you’ve calculated, is much more satisfying than doing what you’re told.

You’ll sometimes see processions of vehicles of various types crossing the country – they’re always guarding something important, and you can always steal it.

Military motorcade: truck carrying weapons. Take out its escorts without destroying it and you can grab a rare weapon from it: a high-tech assault rifle, sniper rifle, missile or grenade launcher, or a powerful demolitions charge.

Police motorcade: well-guarded prisoner van. Free the prisoner safely for a free Revolutionary.

Boatorcade: (I don’t know the proper term, okay?) Well-guarded boats are carrying drugs. Nab them, and you’re free to sell them to any dealer.

Private Jet: if you spy one of these with the government flag on it, it’ll be a corrupt official fleeing the country with his cash. If you can board the plane in flight, you can choose to rob him instead of hijacking it. While you do so, though, the pilot panics and flies erratically, so you have to be ready to abort and take the controls if you’re in danger.

When a region’s under Martial Law, the Officer who locked it down is usually safe inside a building until it’s invaded by a Revolutionary. But rarely, they’ll leave and patrol the area with a team of elite soldiers. They’re tough and well protected, but if you can take one out before he gets back inside, Martial Law is ended.

The idea is to provide a rare chance to make a real difference with a relatively quick and fun type of challenge. Once a large number of regions have fallen under Martial Law, you could even patrol them with a sniper rifle, hunting Officers but staying within the law until you spy one.

I hate that term, because it encapsulates how tacky and incongruous these little scavenger hunts often feel in open worlds. But there’s definitely a large contingent of gamers who love them, and I think I’d be one of them if anyone ever did them well.

They need to fit with the fiction to feel appropriate (like Assassin’s Creed 2′s feathers), they need to improve your character to be truly worth hunting for (like Crackdown’s Agility Orbs), they need to include scraps of story to make the world feel rich (like Fallout 3′s characters), they need to include unique items to feel special (like Fallout 3′s items), and they need to be common enough that you feel there could be one just over the next ridge, nook, clearing or summit (like Fallout 3′s quests).

Here’s my idea:

Some foreign, some from your own agency, all rotting away in the most secluded and obscure parts of the islands. They’d be tough to find, except that you’ll occasionally see a coloured light flash. You’ll find it’s a Beacon, the device agents like you use to call in air support or mark targets, and this agent’s other kit will be scattered in the area. The various bits you might find are:

Beacon: its occasionally blinking light tips you off that there’s other stuff nearby
Tracker: usually close to the beacon, this small screen reveals all his other kit on your map.
Pistol: if he’s Agency, he’ll have a gun with some upgrades you can take – whether or not you’ve unlocked them.
Main weapon: These are often unique and powerful, and some even have one or two slots that can take the same upgrades your pistol can.
PDA: states his objective and any notes he took.
Phone: some agents record their conversations; you can play back his last.
Memory card: most agents keep some sensitive images with them: photos of a target, compromising pictures, facility blueprints, scans of incriminating documents.
Cash: some agents need to carry large quantities of it for their work. Others are just corrupt.
Drugs: ditto.
Corpse: dangling from a tree, crushed under a rock, half-buried in the desert, frozen in the foetal position in the snow, impaled on a branch, twisted at the bottom of a cliff – it usually gives you some idea how he died. If he’s Agency, his suit might have some upgrades you can use.

Types of agent:

Native: beacon light is green, they’ll have a main weapon but no Agency pistol or equipment. They’ll always have a PDA with some info on what they were up to, but usually no phone or memory card with full details.
Agency: red beacon, they’ll have an Agency pistol and there’ll always be at least some decent info on what their assignment was.
Foreign: beacon light is yellow, these are rare, unknown agents with little comprehensible info on them but exotic and powerful custom weapons.
Special: blue beacon, these could be any of the above three agent types, but they always have some major info on their PDA, Phone or Memory Card relating to the assassination of the last president.

The idea is that finding this stuff is a little adventure that tells a story, in the order you discover it. Most will be fairly simple stories: guy was chasing some drug dealers, drove his speedboat off a waterfall and buried it into the side of a mountain.

But some, the ones with phones, tell the stories of people who shaped the history of the place. Finding all of these pieces together a subplot about your Agency putting the current president in power in the first place, by ruthless means.

Finding this enables a special Epilogue mission after the main game is complete, to undermine the new regime before it gets started and put a local hero in power.

I mentioned both upgrades and finding special weapons above. The two don’t often work well together: if you can keep upgrading your favourite weapon, loot becomes irrelevant, and if you ever find loot better than your most upgraded thing, upgrades feel like a waste of time.

My idea is to unlock and then buy upgrades for your Agency-issued equipment, including your infinite-ammo pistol, but larger weapons are things you find or buy. You unlock one equipment upgrade after every mission, then pay to have it installed if you actually want it. Or you can find upgrades, sometimes ones you wouldn’t have earned for hours, on dead agents.

To save fussy ferrying, every larger weapon you find is automatically added to the weapons locker at your base, and you can take a freshly loaded one from there any time. You can carry two and your pistol.

You’ll unlock more upgrades for your kit than it can take at one time, but you can switch them around freely.

Specifically:

Each bit of equipment has a number of slots, and higher-level upgrades take up more of them: you can have level 2 Calibre and Accuracy upgrades in your pistol, for example, but if you want the level 3 of one, you’ll only have room for the level 1 of the other.

(+) Full List

The idea is that you customise your core kit to suit your style, but you can be free and easy with what main weapons you pick up and try. Eventually you’ll settle on one or even two you always want, and you can then reconfigure your pistol and equipment to complement it. With the above loadout, you’d probably want something with a decent rate of fire and mag size for mid-range fighting.

Earning a steady stream of upgrades – without enough slots to fit them all – is a system that works brilliantly in Dawn of War 2′s Last Stand mode. You’re always excited about what you’re going to get next, and you try it out eagrely, but the unlocks don’t have to keep getting better to sustain this. It’s just nice to get more options, play with them, then settle on the combination you like.

Most of them kinda suck though, don’t they? Not the games themselves, necessarily, but their approaches to filling these sprawling open spaces with stuff to entertain you. They know how to make a traditional game, and they know how to make an open world, but their attempts to fit the two together amount to mashing a square peg into a round hole until it splinters.

I’m interested in whether there’s a way to take the most successful of these systems and make them work with the world, and each other. To fit with the fiction rather than jar with it, and to draw attention to the world rather than distract from it.

So ignoring how much we like them as games for a moment, what do some of the better open worlds fill their lands with, and how well does it work?

Assassin’s Creed 2:

• Series of story missions that lead you through each new city
• Scattered mini-missions that conform to one of a few templates (contracts, courier, etc)
• Informal missions like chasing any thieves you see
• Isolated unique puzzle/platform levels
• Collectibles, some of which assemble to shed light on the plot

The broad variety means there’s always something you feel like doing, and most of it is integrated into the fiction – albeit by clumsily grafting two different fictions together. The informal missions feel like fun because no-one tells you to do them, and failing is no big deal. The puzzle/platform levels are usually welcome because you know what you’re getting into when you take one on.

World of Warcraft:

• Miscellaneous quests
• Large scale co-op dungeons
• Resource nodes
• PvP arenas

It’s nice that there’s stuff to do wherever you go, but the lack of a main quest and presence of other players doing the same ones makes it hard to feel like what you’re doing matters.

Fallout 3:

• Series of story quests
• Character-driven sidequests without obvious rewards
• Occasional unique locations, people and loot (Oasis, Dogmeat, Alien Blaster)

The density of hand-scripted missions to find is enough that exploring is always appealing, and the unique stuff is rare enough to feel special, but common enough that everyone finds some of it. The main story has its moments, but your motivation for it is disastrously weak.

Far Cry 2:

• Two main story mission threads that sometimes merge
• Optional extra objectives to those missions with little reward
• Template mini-missions: convoys, assassinations
• A set of FedEx missions you have to keep doing to stay alive
• Trickily placed collectibles with a material reward

The main missions feel annoyingly disconnected from your objective, and the choice between them is illusory. The template missions are excellent because the templates themselves are compelling, but they never feel like more than that. The thoughtful placement of collectibles makes them much more fun to hunt, even if you don’t need the money.

Prototype:

• Series of story missions that change the city from peaceful to wartorn
• Fairground-style challenges
• Collectibles and destroyables that grant XP

The story missions are mostly bad, and the challenges are ridiculously divorced from the fiction. The changing city would be cool if you could make any of it yours, but instead the only influence you have is deciding which of two factions that hate you control certain bits.

Red Faction Guerilla:

• Series of story missions that conquer each area, making it safe and unlocking new one
• Template mini-missions: hostage rescues, defenses
• Fairground style challenges

The mini-missions do a good job of providing a choice of fun stuff to do without breaking fiction. The fact that the story moves on from each area, though, makes it feel less like a world and more like levels.

Just Cause:

• Series of story missions
• Scattered identical mini-missions to take over settlements
• Template mini-missions
• Collectibles

Since the mini-missions keep you in a small area and are very similar to play, they don’t offer much of a break. Neither do they or the collectibles carry an appealing reward.

It seems like the things that work best, or are most needed, are:

• Informal missions – opportunities you spot rather than jobs you’re ordered to do
• Collectibles that improve you, in places it’s fun to visit
• Categorised missions, so you can choose what kind of job you want to take on next
• Scraps of story scattered about to make your adventure feel meaningful
• Unique things you can find, take and use
• The ability to change or add to some part of the world
• Variety – at every stage you should have more than two meaningfully different options for fun things to do next

Any additions? Anything you really like in open world games in general, or a specific one? The next post will be figuring out how to cram all the good stuff into one specific open world.

You can unlock weapons for a class by earning its achievements. That means everyone plays the same class when its new weapons are released, even before they’ve earned any of them. We’re bribed to play that class at the very time when TF2′s primary problem is inevitably going to be too many people playing that class. And we’re often bribed to play it in counter-productive ways to fulfill achievement criteria, some of which are just fun little jokes.

You can ‘find’ weapons and hats randomly. On the plus side, that sometimes gives you a weapon for a class you don’t normally play, encouraging you to try it out. On the down side, well:

• A lot of what you find is duplicates of what you already have, which means that little gold message comes to be associated more with disappointment and absurdity than excitement or pleasure.
• People’s fortunes vary wildly without any correlation to skill. Some people play for hours a night, rarely get a weapon, find only dupes, and have never seen a hat in hundreds of hours of play. Others consistently get unlocks every half hour or so, and have copious hats for classes they don’t even play.
• Consequently, very rare and exclusive class items like hats don’t signify anything when you see a player wearing them. What does the mighty Camera Beard tell you about a Spy? Nothing, he just got lucky.

You can ‘craft’ items by combining lots you have to produce one you might not. Presumably meant to tackle the dupes problem with the random drops, but what we understand of the current system is totally bizarre. If you don’t have the Eyelander, you seem to need six copies of the other two Demoman weapons, plus at least eight melee weapons, to craft one without losing anything you need. In a given time period, you’re about 13.8 billion times more likely to just find an Eyelander than what you need to make one.

For a hat, you’d have to find eighty-one weapons you don’t need just to make a random one. To have more than a 3.4% chance of crafting the one you want, it takes a hundred and twelve. At the end of which, you’ve got something a new player might find in his first hour with the game.

That’s what’s wrong with the current system. I think it needs a few changes to work as an addictive RPG, as a way of customising your characters to your tastes, and as a way of showing off your skill or dedication in the way you dress. The unlocks system ought to make the repetitive violence feel like part of a larger goal, and give you a sense of progress even if you lose. Here’s how I’d do it:

Unlockable Weapons: You’d be able to browse these from the main menu to see what’s available, and select one you want to unlock. Each requires somewhere between 250 and 500 points, and once you select it all the points you score in-game, as any class, count towards that. That’s about 2-4 hours play – the Flare Gun might be 250, the Direct Hit 500. You need to be in a game with at least four non-idle players or bots for your points to count, but beyond that anti-exploit measures are probably futile.

On top of that, every five hours or so you’ll get a random weapon unlock that you don’t already have. If it’s the one you’re working towards, points earned so far transfer to what you pick next.

The idea: Every match gets you closer to something you really want, and the items you choose first make you a different player to those around you. At the same time, you can still get something unexpected for a class you don’t normally play that might encourage you to try them.

Achievements: I think they should stay – I even think the silly ones should stay. In fact, I’d get rid of the sensible ones, and just leave the ridiculous accomplishments – taunt kills, ironic deaths, corpse dancing and tortured puns (Slammy Slayvis Woundya? That’s what you’re going with?). But they no longer earn you weapons, they’re just an acknowledgement for any time you do something remarkable.

The idea: Silliness absolutely has a place in TF2, and trying to get things like taunt kill achievements just makes the game hilarious for you and your enemies. But no-one should be bribed to go for them if they don’t want to.

Feats: This is where the sensible achievements would go. They’re things that genuinely benefit your team, so you’re rewarded each time you do them: some bonus points towards your unlock (but not your in-game score) and a little pop-up: “Medic Feat! Extinguished five team-mates, +2 points”. Things like multi-kills, capturing a point alone, setting light to a cloaked Spy, killing a fully charged Medic, or making the winning capture would always be rewarded.

The idea: By letting people know they’ll be rewarded every time they do this, it both teaches and incentivises intelligent play. Achievements already do this a little, but not reliably: plenty of the actions they suggest are actually pretty dumb.

Unlockable Hats: These are handled separately, but again you choose which you want to unlock. When you do, only points and feats earned as that specific class count towards it, and the number required is in the thousands – twenty hours’ play for most, more for some special prestige items. You still earn points towards your weapon unlock at the same time.

The idea: A hat says “I play this class, I play it well and I play it a lot”. A Camera Beard says “I am amazing or crazy.”

Crafting: No crafting. I don’t think the system is entirely unsalvagable, and Chris Livingston does a good job of salvaging it in a much shorter post than mine. But ultimately any full crafting system hinges on finding dupes, which I think ruins the “ooh, I found something!” moment by diluting it with disappointment.

• Makes you feel like you’re achieving something by playing.
• Gives you new abilities to try at well-paced intervals.
• Lets you enjoy feeling more powerful than you used to be.

All this makes repetitive tasks feel worthwhile and even fun, which is particularly useful in a massively multiplayer game, because you don’t want players to get through all your content quickly, get bored and stop paying you a monthly fee.

But it has some problems:

• It means players who’ve played for different amounts of time can’t play the same content together and still both progress.
• It makes player-versus-player combat imbalanced unless strictly and artificially organised.
• It can’t go on forever, and when it stops, even if there’s new content you haven’t seen, your game life feels empty.

All of these bother me, but the first in particular is absolutely ridiculous. If Tim and I are playing World of Warcraft at the same time, I can’t kill level 80 bears with him because I’d get slaughtered, and he can’t kill level 26 bears with me because he’d destroy the challenge and gain nothing in the process. The two activities are functionally almost identical, we don’t mind which of them we do or even if we do something completely different, but the game can provide absolutely no way for us to enjoyably play together. So I hate levelling.

Champions Online and City of Heroes get around this with a cool side-kicking system, where you can bump a friend up to your level for a bit. But it really just demonstrates that levels are meaningless anyway, and suspending them briefly shows how good life is without them. Champions has other level-related problems (I’ve run out of doable quests), and it’s that which got me thinking about what the perfect superhero MMORPG would be. This post is the first of a few about that.

What I’d like to see is a system where content – zones, quests, groups of enemies, bosses – has no level. It would work like this:

• Whether I’m new or I’ve played for a hundred hours, a single monster or thug of a type I’ve never fought before is a serious threat to me. I can’t easily take on more than one at a time.
• As I defeat more of this enemy type, I get better at fighting them. I start to do more damage to them, then learn to better dodge or block their modes of attack, then gain the ability to completely evade certain attacks or very quickly kill certain sub-types of enemies.
• Each enemy group has a series of missions associated with it, usually culminating in defeating their boss. Once I’ve completed that, I can choose a new power.

Firstly, it means me and any friend can go to a zone neither of us have done and be on equal footing. Until between us we’ve done everything the game has to offer, there’ll always be some new challenge we can take on together, have fun and make progress.

Even if we go to one that one of us has made progress through, the newer player can still take on one enemy at a time effectively. Talking to roBurky about this, he suggested the newer player could just generate less ‘Threat’ – so even in a large brawl, only one or two enemies would go for him, the others would concentrate on the more dangerous player.

The second obvious benefit is that you can start anywhere in the world and the challenge will be appropriate to you. As well as the freedom that brings and the ease of joining friends with existing characters, it means that when you start a new character yourself, you can immediately be playing stuff you’ve never played before. Starting again is as fresh an experience as continuing. That’s particularly important in a superhero game, because there’s all sorts of fun stuff we can do with alternate characters made by the same player that I’ll get into.

The third is that all new areas, enemies and quests added to the game after launch are relevant to all players. That spectacularly increases the efficiency of content creation: every little thing you work on makes every player of the game happier and gives them more and more varied stuff to do.

The fourth is that it means anyone can fight anyone in PVP and have a chance. More experienced players will have a wider selection of powers, but late-game powers wouldn’t be outright better than your starting ones, just useful in different circumstances.

Aside from the problems fixed, it also builds on all three of the key reasons levelling is fun:

• You’re making progress much faster, since a four-hour questline takes you from struggling with one dude to diving into huge crowds of them without fear.
• Gaining new powers is still carefully paced, but now coincides with a major victory against a formidable opponent and the accomplishment of your quest. Rather than just spontaneously exploding in a sudden jump of progress when the fifteenth Spider Hatchling slain tips you over the edge to level 63.
• And you’re always seeing how much more powerful you’ve become, because you regularly dive into mobs of enemies that were a problem individually not long ago. In most MMORPGs currently, there’s rarely any reason to take on enemies you used to struggle with.

The biggest potential problem with it is the notion of getting one new power per major questline completed: depending on the number of powers and zones, it might need to alternate between new powers and improvements to old ones. Adding new questlines in free updates seems like it could take as much work as raising the level cap on all classes, but whether that’s significant depends on how the end-game works, and that’s for another post.

Oblivion’s main quest wasn’t unusually long, bad, or difficult, but it’s rare to actually find someone who bothered with it. The overbearing waffle of the introduction didn’t help, but I think it’s mostly that we just don’t want a single, long main questline in open world games. A primary story that’s the same for every player sits awkwardly in a game about freedom and customisation, and Oblivion’s sits more awkwardly still if you attempt it as the wrong class or at the wrong level.

You could have no main quest, but that might feel aimless or trivial. Even if we don’t do it, the existence of a main quest gives purpose to the world.

So what if the main quest was split up and woven into the guild questlines? People actually do those, because you can pick one that makes sense for your character and suits your style of play. In the case of Oblivion’s demons-invade main plot, each questline could have three key missions where the guild business brings you into contact with the invasion:

• One in which you first discover the demons in the course of your work.
• One in which the escalating invasion directly affects the guild and becomes a priority.
• One in which you find and kill a Daedric Prince and end the invasion.

Luckily, the guild questlines are already structured into three neat groups of quests. These special missions could come between each group, like this:

Fighter’s Guild

• Five quests for Burz gro-Khash in Cheydinhal.
• Main Quest 1: you’re hired to investigate the disappearence of a small expedition of travellers. You find them all slaughtered, and follow the trail of blood to encounter a single Dremora, who you kill. The guild are disturbed, but want more info.
• Five quests for Azzan in Anvil.
• Main Quest 2: a portal opens near Chorrol, and the overwhelmed city guard enlist the Fighter’s Guild to help their defense. In the aftermath of the battle, the Blackwood Company move in and exploit the lack of Imperial presence to take over the town and extort its citizens.
• Five quests for Modryn Oreyn in Chorrol against the Blackwood Company, culminating in their termination.
• Main Quest 3: a portal opens outside the Imperial City and you, as guildmaster of the Fighters’ Guild, are called to deal with it. You lead a team of the key guild characters through to face a Daedric Prince. It’s almost impervious to your attacks, but Modryn has brought some confiscated Blackwood Company Hist Sap for you as a last resort. Drugged up, you’re strong enough to kill it and end the invasion.

If you haven’t got far enough in any other guild questlines at that point to have encountered invasions during them, it’s not made clear to you at this point that you’ve only truly quelled a quarter of the demonic forces about to break through to this realm.

Once you have, you’re sent to see Raminus Polus at the Arcane University who explains their mystic types had feared as much: that the prince you vanquished was one of many. From there, the other guild questlines would unfold as if they were your first, each woven into a demon invasion of a different part of Cyrodiil, each of which is ultimately stopped in a style befitting that guild’s unique talents. It’s a bit redundant to say things like that in vague terms, so specifically:

Thieves’ Guild

• Four quests for Armande Christophe in the Imperial City.
• Main Quest 1: a wealthy home is found half-destroyed, its valuables ripe for the picking. During your escape, you brush witht he daedric forces that destroyed it.
• Three quests for S’Krivva in Bravil.
• Main Quest 2: creatures start appearing near Anvil, a prelude to a portal opening. You have to get Hieronymus Lex and his best guards reassigned to that city to better protect it. (This is the same as S’Krivva’s fourth quest, only the context and motive are different.)
• Four quests for the Gray Fox, gathering esoteric artifacts to use in the theft of an Elder Scroll.
• Main Quest 3: The Scroll details how to close an Oblivion portal, but the Empire were refusing to consult because it involves dark magic. The method requires a filled Black Soul Gem to be brought to the heart of the Oblivion plane, so you have to locate and steal one, then sneak your way into hell itself to collapse that realm, killing the Daedric Prince inside.

Mage’s Guild:

• Seven ‘recommendation’ quests.
• Main Quest 1: Your final recommendation quest involves a summoning spell that unexpectedly brings forth a Dremora. It slaughters a guild member before you can bring it down.
• Four quests for Raminus Polus.
• Main Quest 2: Your research for Raminus on Black Soul Gems suggest they might have caused the Dremora’s appearence. You’re tasked with replicating the event, which backfires and briefly sucks you into Oblivion.
• Seven quests for Hannibal Travern further investigating Black Soul Gems and Necromancy.
• Main Quest 3: The Necromancer King you kill at the end of Hannibal’s quests was responsible for the dimensional breach. You use his staff to intentionally summon a Daedra Prince to this realm and take him on, with your guildmates.

Dark Brotherhood:

• Four quests for Vicente Valtieri.
• Main Quest 1: an early target turns out to be a Mythic Dawn member, and Daedric creatures spill forth as he dies.
• Four quests for Ocheeva.
• Main Quest 2: Lucien believes the Mythic Dawn have infiltrated the Brotherhood, and charges you with rooting out their agent the only sure way, as in The Purification.
• Seven dead-drop quests after Lucien sends you into hiding.
• Main Quest 3: The Mythic Dawn agent is alive and has been tampering with your orders. When you’ve rooted him out, you’re made Listener and entrusted with what the agent was after: a perfect blade capable of slaying even a Daedric Prince. The Night Mother can transport you to his realm, but he can only be killed if caught unawares.

Dedicated players may ultimately do all four questlines, and a final Main Quest chunk ought to wrap them up and confer a final reward. But most people would probably play the same amount of Oblivion as they already do. The point is not to try to make players see more of the game’s content, but to turn missed content from a negative thing to a positive thing.

Right now it’s a negative thing because people get bored with the long linear quest, or struggle with it because it’s not for their class, or don’t want to do the standard thing. They don’t know how much they’re missing, and they feel indifferent or even guilty about missing it.

If it were split, the stuff you don’t end up playing is just paths not taken, and the more of them there are the more meaningful and personal your choice feels. Spending masses of time and money on content most players will never see is inevitable when making an open-world game. But if it’s structured in many strands rather than one long line, unplayed content can have a positive effect on even the players who don’t play it.

Prototype’s a game about having absurd powers – here I am surfing a man’s corpse – and you earn a steady stream of new ones until the end of the game. Those powers are what makes it fun. But the sheer number you have access to by the end of the game turns the controls into a finger-breakingly awkward mess of accidental stunts misfiring while you desperately will your hoodied twat to do what that combination of buttons used to or should do.

There’s also a redundant level of redundant redundancy: there are about seven powers that deal damage to everyone around you, and no reason to use any but the one that deals the most. The best powers are good against both large infected like Hunters and armoured vehicles like Tanks, and the only other type of enemy, crowds of zombies or soldiers, are never a threat. You fall into a pattern of using the most powerful for every situation, and your brain disengages.

I’d trim the powers dramatically and give each set a narrower range of uses, so there’s a reason to switch between them. I’d also make each upgradable three times, so that you still have loads of options for what to spend your experience on.

I’d also want dangerous enemies among the crowds: military deathsquads with guns customised to seriously hurt you, and proto-zombies with claws like yours that really sting if they reach you in one piece. It’d give power sets one more thing to be good or bad at, and coupled with stronger differentiation could require that you actually think about which to use and upgrade. Here’s how it’d work:

Musclemass

Claws

Currently, since claws are less damaging and no faster than other powers, they’re just flat out worse. I’d make this the only mode in which you can pick up and throw large objects. Picking up the wrong thing is the number 2 cause of death among prototypes, a recent study revealed, so assigning one mode to be the chuck-stuff mode means you’re never going to grab a taxi instead of an army sergeant in any other mode. In a similar vein, you should be able to pick up weapons in any power mode, only when you’re a normal human.

The previous Claws secondary attack was cool but had little to do with claws – I’d keep it as a Devastator move instead.

Hammerfist

Primary attack: pounds slowly directly ahead, no splash damage. Slow against crowds, okay against Hunters, great against tanks.
Secondary attack: flings yourself at targeted enemy rocky fist first, as in the Hammertoss. Upgrades increase damage and range.
Jumping attack: elbow drop, as current, damage increases with height.

The idea is that this mode should be all about flinging your enormous weight about, dropping on stuff and knocking choppers out of the air. Right now this is an anti-tank mode that’s not as good against tanks as Blade or Musclemass, and its star move is an elbow drop that’s not as good as the Musclemass Bullet Dive, so it’s utterly redundant.

Whipfist

Primary attack: Whips ahead, killing things in a long but narrow cone. Meek against everything, but potentially hits more stuff at once. Upgrades increase length of whip and hence size of cone.
Secondary attack: pulls a single target towards you and puts your fist through them. Upgrades increase pulling force: down a chopper or skewer a Hunter at level 3.
Jumping attack: swings your whip arm down beneath you like a giant deadly skipping rope, batting everything beneath away. Upgrades increase the area it covers.

This mode would still be for when you’re concentrating on a specific target, whether to hijack it, eliminate it quickly or keep damaging it while staying away from it.

Blade

Primary attack: slashes and moves forwards at a decent rate. Okay for crowds, great for Hunters, not great for tanks. Upgrades increase speed.
Secondary attack: dashes forwards with blade vertical, splitting anyone in your way. Upgrades increase how far this dash takes you.
Jumping attack: as current.

The only trouble with Blade as it stands is that it’s great against tanks too, which makes everything else except Musclemass obsolete. And Musclemass makes Blade obsolete.

Human Mode

All moves scrapped except punch, kick, flying kick and bodysurf. Anything that doesn’t require a specific keypress can stay in as an automatic flourish. And as mentioned, this is now the only mode in which you can pick up and use weapons.

Useless, all scrapped for simplicity.

Defense Modes

Shield: as current, but upgradable to increase the amount of damage it can take before breaking.
Dodge: new mode – automatically dashes you out of the way of incoming projectiles and blows. Upgrades increase how soon after dashing the power is ready to save you again.
Armour: as current, but upgradable to decrease the damage taken while wearing it.

I like the current ones, but I’d like even more the ability to specialise, find cool combos of Defense and Offense powers, then upgrade the bejesus out of them.

Movement

Free running is already fun, but it’s reliant on using this very artificial airdash that shoots you forwards in a not very physically convincing way. It also really hurts my fingers to do it a lot. I’d like it if, once you were airbourne, there was only one control:

Glide: press jump while airborne to toggle. All your velocity, downward and otherwise, is translated into forward velocity, letting you get enormous speeds by jumping from a great height and activating it at the last minute. Once gliding, you can angle it up to gain height and lose a bit of speed, or down to lose height and gain speed. The idea is to combine it with wall-runs along skyscrapers to gain height without losing speed, then spend that height on an extra boost by diving.

Currently, Prototype has over fifty distinct powers that require different button combinations. This would be a little over twenty, all told; none that require simultaneous button presses and none with overlapping controls. But the hope is that it’d make it a more complex game, because the fifty powers it currently has don’t have even twenty meaningfully diffrent uses – they have about six.

I wrote this post – a rant I’ve bored many friends with about how BioShock should have ended – on the 10th of October 2008, but never got round to taking shots for it. Then on February 10th, I got to see what 2K Marin are doing for BioShock 2. And annoyingly, some of it overlaps with what I suggest here.

That meant a) I couldn’t post this, since this would look like me leaking the details I was under a non-disclosure agreement to keep secret, and b) by the time I could post this, those details would have been announced and it would seem woefully unoriginal. I’m posting it anyway.

It’s my plan, in ten steps, for what should happen after your encounter with Andrew Ryan in his office.

1) As in the game, Fontaine forces you to hand control of Rapture over to him using Ryan’s key. You can’t help but obey.

I’m also going to add a few comments on these steps as I go along, there’s no need to read these if you just want the gist. This one’s a note about voice acting. Atlas has a very exaggerated, slightly comic Irish accent. I wish that when he turned out to be Fontaine, his true voice was very plain, deadpan and serious: I think the contrast could have felt really menacing. Instead he turns into just a different kind of sing-song histrionic moustache-twirler, and that’s a shame.

2) Tenenbaum manages to reach you on the radio for the first time since you entered Ryan’s office. Having heard about your command phrase, she asks if you would kindly DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO then meet her at her nearby hideout.

Seriously dude, once you’ve found out someone who can violate your mind is on the other end of it, you lose the goddamn wireless. If the Would You Kindly command to pick it up in the first place prevents that, TURN IT OFF. Either way, since Tenenbaum knows about your conditioning, she could order you to do it. This is fridge logic at its worst.

3) At the Little Sister sanctuary, Tenenbaum impresses on you that Fontaine is nearly unstoppable now that his genetic key is tied to Rapture, since Vita Chambers now work for him rather than you.

This factor never came up in the game, but to me it seems like the most important part of the handover of control to Fontaine: it would make him invincible, and you vulnerable. Double strange since 2K evidently wanted you vulnerable for the final fight, but didn’t seem able to think of a reason why you would be. So instead we get an unspeakably lame text box popping up to tell us that we are, just before we ascend to fight Fontaine.

A good design tenet is that if you need a pop-up text box to do something, it’s not worth doing.

4) She explains that the only way to stop someone who’s invincible within Rapture is to flood the whole city. You have to breach a wall in the central ventilation system, but the only thing that could drill through glass that thick and survive the ensuing flood is a Big Daddy.

The whole mood of the game is about the menacing inevitability of the sheer force of the sea. Enormous work went into making every room and every corridor of the whole city scream “THIS PLACE IS GOING TO FREAKING FLOOD!” To make a game about this place which ends without oceanic incident is pretty goddamn absurd.

5) You have to become a Big Daddy. Tenenbaum tells you how, and says to meet her at the bathysphere station you came in on once you’ve breached Central Ventilation. Near the Little Sister orphanage, there’s an iron-maiden-like steampunk machine that stitches you agonisingly into the suit.

People who say BioShock should have ended in Ryan’s office surely can’t have paid much attention to the game thereafter. Some of the most fascinating places and moving scenes are in that final section, and the places where Little Sisters and Big Daddies are indoctrinated are two I’d want to work in before all this.

6) Once Big Daddied, you’re virtually impervious to the Splicers between you and Central Ventilation – you can drill them in the face or charge them with right mouse to knock them flying. When you reach it, there’s an obvious crack in the glass there to drill.

It’s tough to model what happens to a live human when you put a conical drill into them, so let’s just have them die when it hits. There’d be no pacing reason to make this section challenging – it’s the reward for the terrible thing you’ve just done to yourself. Vita-Chambers no longer work for you, so challenge runs a higher risk of frustration anyway.

7) When the wall is breached, the force of the ocean smashes you into the opposite wall. But once recovered, you can stomp out of the wrecked room and out onto the sea bed. All around you can sea water surging through Rapture’s walkways and buildings, spreading out from Central Ventilation.

I was slightly sad that after that enchanting vista on the way in, you never got an impressive overview of Rapture’s scale again. This would be that, but with a twist of drama.

8) There’s an airlock that gets you into a room adjacent to the flooding station, but the door between the two slams shut just as you arrive. Through the glass, you see Fontaine wade over to the bathysphere where Tenenbaum is helping Little Sisters inside. He cocks a custom shotgun and blows her away without a word. Her body bobs and twitches in the water, Little Sisters scream blue murder.

There’s only one way out. Tenenbaum wants it for the sisters, Fontaine wants it for himself, and whatever your plans, you need it.

9) There’s a conspicuous crack in the glass between the two rooms which you can drill through to break in. Some Little Sisters are already inside the Bathysphere, the rest are huddled on a windowsill by the door – the water is thigh-high on Fontaine in here, so it’s already too deep for them to cross.

A watery end – both to the game and to whoever dies in this scene – seems appropriate.

10) Fontaine attacks you immediately, and his weapon is vicious enough to significantly hurt you. He’s an unspliced human, however, so a single ram or stab of your drill kills him gruesomely. Only for him to respawn ten seconds later, from the nearby Vita Chamber.

The idea, of course, is that your final fight with Fontaine should be a reversal of all those Big Daddy battles you’ve had. They were big and tough, but you could respawn again and again. It always seemed like the hardest decision to make in BioShock was not what to do with the Little Sisters, but whether to attack the Big Daddies in the first place. Getting to feel what it’s like from their perspective could be a fun play on that.

At this point, you’ve got two options:

A) If you don’t care about the Little Sisters, you’ll have to physically drag the ones already inside the bathysphere out before there’s room for you to get in. You can leave them splashing in the water anywhere. Once you’re in, closing the door behind you activates the bathysphere. Before it rises, Fontaine appears at the window, screaming something you can’t quite hear through the glass. You ascend, and the end scene rolls.

B) If you want to save them, you can pick one of the huddling ones up from the windowsill in your enormous hands and carry her over to the bathysphere. You’ll drop her if shot by Fontaine, however, and she’ll splash helplessly there until you can pick her up again. Actually: if you’re shot from the front by Fontaine, the blast will kill the Little Sister you’re carrying and she’ll fall limp into the water. You can keep your back to him to protect her, but he’s powerful enough to kill you before you get all the Little Sisters across. Killing him gives you enough respite to carry one Little Sister across safely before he respawns. At any time, you can close the bathysphere door from the outside, at which point a control panel by it lights up, and you can use that to send it to the surface and save whoever’s inside. Once it’s gone, the end scene rolls.

End scene: You, as a Big Daddy, standing motionless as the water rises time-lapse fast, everything zipping in motion-blur streaks around you. As soon as our view is underwater, everything goes silent and slow. The body of a little sister drifts slowly past behind you, its back to us. When all is still, Fontaine suddenly scrambles into view, thrashing spasmically, screaming bubbles, clutching his throat, red in the face. After some violent jerks, he lies completely still. A few seconds pass, then a light flicks on in the background. We cut to a close-up of it: after a beat, the Vita Chamber doors slide open and Fontaine bursts out again, screaming bubbles louder and louder as he thrashes towards us, and his terrified face almost fills the frame before we cut to black. Fin!

Obviously this needs to be re-rendered a few different ways:

• Without you, if you got in the bathysphere and escaped.
• Without the Little Sister body, if you saved them all.
• Without Fontaine, and with you collapsed, if you died in the final fight.

It turns out that if you start talking about Mirror’s Edge in the Future offices, pretty soon a small crowd gathers to weigh in. In a group of editors and writers – one who gave it nine out of ten and another who thinks five was too high – it turns out we mostly agree. We all love to run, and we all get angry when we’re stopped by something difficult.

Most of my suggestions for the combat with cops would make it less difficult, and hopefully less awkward. But it can’t get so easy that you don’t feel threatened, and the grander issue is that it needs to be more avoidable. So this is about that.

The police choppers already work well as a propulsive force for the chase sequences that doesn’t often lead to death or frustration. But I’d like to change each of the three types of ground enemies, and how they’re used.

Cops: Not allowed to fire until they’ve issued two verbal warnings (“Freeze!” – “Stop or I will shoot!”) giving you a window to take one out or escape. Obviously once you’ve attacked one, others in the area can open fire. When they do hit, damage is much more serious – two hits kill – but they’re still wildly inaccurate. It becomes more of a tactical puzzle about how not to get shot, and the way forward never depends on turning a slow valve, climbing a slow pipe or working out where to head.

SWAT: Armoured and with two-handed weapons, these guys can’t be disarmed. But they’re only ever sent after you, so you never have to get past them to progress. They can be killed with stolen cop weapons, knocked out if you drop on them, or pushed into danger by a melee attack.

Chasers: Right now these guys have tazers, which are just kind of annoying. I think they should have mace. They should be knocked back by any melee move – to their death if they’re on a ledge – but if they get right up to you, they grab you and spray a blinding teargas in your eyes, sending your vision haywire and making you scream. You can try to flee while blinded, but if you don’t get away your third macing incapacitates you, and it’s game over.

Being chased was the perfect way to escalate Mirror’s Edge, but the Pursuit Cops are just so lame in combat; dancing about, tickling you with electricity and mild punching. I want to be freaking terrified of these guys. It would help if they didn’t look like dorks.

So one set is easy to deal with, another is hard to deal with but easy to avoid, and the last is hard to deal with or avoid – so do whichever you’re best at. I found lots of fun ways to lure Chasers into positions where I could knock them off a building, but bizarre rules meant that more often than not, I was the one knocked back by the crucial blow.

I was saying the other day that no matter how often the game explicitly tells you to stop and fight, the player still tries to run right past. Replaying the early sections at lunch today, I realised there’s actually a forced pop-up message in the prologue chapter that says “Always try to get away from enemies.” It couldn’t feel more like two different games that were code-merged at the last minute.

The three parts of it suck in different ways, and my proposed fixes are of equal obviosity.

If I, an unarmed action hero, manage to run at a firing gunman and flying-kick him in the face before he kills me, it has to knock him down. Look into your hearts, DICE, you know this to be true. It’s a fundamental axiom of awesome, like glass breaking when I dive through it. The same goes for slide-kicks to the groin, which should lift your victim momentarily from the ground as he’s propelled backwards onto his ass.

Punches should be weak, of course, which is precisely why there shouldn’t be any. You’re a slim woman with unprotected hands, it’s just not wise to hit someone wearing full body armour. If you’re sprinting when you collide with them, the impact should make them stagger. If you’re stationary, Attack should do the same as Disarm – recall that the Disarm button is actually the “Beat them up and disarm them” button.

Design tip! You’re supposed to hide – not force me to study – ridiculous conceits like canned animations.

Disarming should always work – slowly if they’re firing at you when you initiate it, quickly if they’re staggered or prone. Enemy’s shouldn’t try to nudge you with their weapons in close combat: you’re still in front of their gun, there’s no reason for them to stop firing. Instead they should start to run backwards as you approach, trying to keep you at a distance.

Hitman’s the closest model of what I’m talking about: it doesn’t make a great shooter and it doesn’t have to. You spend most of your time in situations where you can’t viably open fire, so enemies don’t have to be tough and interesting challenges when you do. They can just die.

Once you’ve got hold of a gun in Mirror’s Edge, it should make a lot of noise, have a lot of kick, miss a lot at range, but kill when it hits.

If some of this sounds like it would make the combat too easy, that might be because I think the combat should be easy. But I also think it should be used in a completely different way, and I think I’m going to have to make that post number 6.

P.S. Graham’s blog Zeitgasm has also been redesigned, and is also harping on about Mirror’s Edge in tones I mostly agree with. 83% though, honestly.

It’s a moronic undertaking, of course, because the real one will be humiliatingly superior. He’s an easy target, because he’s basically made of dramatic irony – but that also leaves a minefield of awful clichés to step around. Anything that involves someone we believe not to be a Spy turning out to be a Spy is automatically dross.

I love the bit in Meet The Sniper when our man wonders aloud whether he’s been spotted – and is then copiously shot at. Acknowledging the concerns that go through your head playing as him felt truer and funnier than these scenes where the starring class automatically wins against all-comers.

So this script is mostly focused around the characteristic moments of playing a Spy. I reject the perception that he is unwaveringly aloof: aloof, sure, but he’s all about the wavering. No other class experiences more moment-to-moment panic or humiliation.

A warning, though: it’s long.

1. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The title card vanishes to reveal the edge of a table. With a sudden bang, a blue briefcase is slammed down onto it, then clicked open by two gloved hands.

SPYIntelligence, gentlemen. There are those who have it, the conoscenti (gesturing to himself faux-modestly, head bowed) – and those who do not. The – ahem – imbeciles.

Zoom out to reveal a Red Team SPY as he slouches down into a chair, Blue Team corpses of various classes strewn around the briefing room. He takes a wad of papers from the briefcase, licks a gloved fingertip for purchase, and leafs through them uninterestedly. As usual, his accent takes a drunken tour of Western Europe as he speaks.

SPYIn my profession, one is lamentably dependent on the latter.

He rips the topsheet from a dossier, draws his cigarette case, opens a small compartment containing tobacco and, in a deft yet impossible to animate movement, rolls it into a smokeable.

SPYWhen a leopard preys on impala in sub-Saharan Africa, he does not attempt to slaughter the entire herd.

He reaches down and lifts the nozzle of a dead Pyro’s Backburner and lights his intelligence roll-up on the pilot light. He takes a few puffs, then points it at us.

SPYNo! He isolates the slowest of the pack, and eliminates the beast alone. (Shrugging:) It is the same in my line of work, but it is those lacking in mental agility on whom I prey.

With a black loafer, he gently kicks the cranium of a dead Heavy at his feet. A lump of part-chewed Sandvich drops from his slack craw and his tongue lolls out.

SPYOf course, some are slow in both senses of the word.

 

2. EXT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Our red Spy, running along a tunnel, cloaks. We can still see him as a red silhouette.

Blues pour in: a HEAVY, SCOUT, PYRO, DEMOMAN. The Spy has to flatten himself utterly against the wall to avoid brushing the Heavy, dash to the other side to avoid the Scout, dive clean over the Pyro just as he blasts a gout of spychecking flame, land into a forwards roll, and stand up face to face with the obviously intoxicated Demoman, who chooses that moment to stop dead and take a swig of his bottle.

The silhouette tries to go round him to the left, but the Demoman staggers in that direction as he drinks. He tries the right, with the same result. He gives up and stands impatiently as the Demoman glugs, and glugs, and glugs. The silhouette looks at its watch, taps its foot. At last the Demoman advances, veering drunkenly into one wall then the other, and the silhouette tiptoes carefully around him.

And slams into an identical blue silhouette, shimmering in and out of visibility.

SPY (VO)A hunter, of course, must be cognisant of other predators.

Both step back in apparent shock, draw their revolvers, then cautiously circle one another until they have switched. Then, without taking their eyes off each other, they walk backwards in their original direction, and eventually turn to run full-speed.

SPY (VO)They may not be your primary target…

The blue silhouette ducks round the corner and decloaks – a fully visible BLUE SPY, smirking. Simultaneously our man exits the tunnel…

 

3. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

…and slips away to the side, decloaks and straps on a paper mask with a Spy’s face on it.

SPY (VO)But it is idiocy to assume you are not theirs.

He waits until the Blue Spy also exits the tunnel in search of him, and gives chase just inches behind. As he does so, a blue MEDIC spots them and gives chase. The three run to:

 

4. EXT – DUSTBOWL, APPROACH TO CAP 4 — DAY — PAST

MEDICSpy! Spy!

BLUE SPY(Glancing over his left shoulder, just as our man darts right:) Please, doktor, endeavour not to tell everyone.

MEDICNein! Spy is Spy!

BLUE SPY(Muttering:) That is self-evident.

Meanwhile our man is swishing and thrusting his knife just centimeters from the enemy’s back, and finally he cuts a corner that his target does not. The knife sinks in, our man’s mask drops to the floor, the real blue Spy’s eyes widen, and he drops to his knees.

BLUE SPY(Dribbling blood, twisting his head to look back:) You might… have been… more specific…

MEDICIdiote!

Our man leaves his knife in his victim’s back, and instead pries the Blue Spy’s knife from his hand before he collapses.

SPYThat will do nicely.

We dolly with the Medic as he arrives on the scene, just in time to see the Spy take a different corridor back to Cap 3. We lose sight of the Spy just before arriving back at:

 

5. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

We cut to a close-up of his narrowed eyes as they scan his team for suspicious activity, then pan across the team itself:

A SNIPER squats on the control point on the far right, peering down his scope. A SOLDIER trundles forth from the trench in the center. On the left, an ENGINEER and a Spy wearing an unconvincing Engineer mask stand either side of a level three SENTRY, facing away from it in opposite directions. The Medic’s gaze pauses on them, then pans slowly back to the Soldier, none the wiser.

Before the Engineer leaves the frame, he turns and notices the Spy standing next to him. He reacts and thumps his wrench menacingly into his open palm. The oblivious Spy, without looking round, reaches back and slaps an Electro-Sapper onto the Sentry. We pan away before we see the Engy’s reaction, as the Medic suspiciously watches the Soldier rocket-jump over his head, but we hear:

ENGYBoys, we got a Spy!

And the sounds of vigorous Sentry-wrenching and sapper-fritzing.

MEDICVerdammen! It iz hopeless!

He turns and leaves for the front line.

 

6. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy is lounging in the same seat where we left him, makeshift cigarette halfburnt and forgotten in his right hand, twirling an Engineer’s hardhat on his left. He contemplates the hat.

SPY(Absently:) One breed of impala wear ridiculous yellow hats, and construct robotic impala to compensate for their shortcomings as male impala – all the hurtful things the female impala said to them in impala college.

The hardhat slips from his finger and clatters to the briefing-room floor behind him. The sound snaps him out of his reverie and he sits up straight.

SPY(Reflecting:) At this point, I confess, the analogy falters.

 

7. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

The Engy chases the disguised Spy around the Sentry, the Spy slapping Sappers on the device, the Engy knocking them off with his wrench. By now they’re wading noisily through a heap of thirty bashed-in sappers on the ground. The Engy suddenly reverses direction to catch the Spy, but the Spy doubles back just in time to stay out of range.

ENGYDarnit! Where in tarnation are you keepin’ these motherlovin’ things?

SPYYour tiny mind…

He jumps to slap a sapper on top of the Sentry.

SPY…couldn’t possibly…

He ducks to affix one underneath it.

SPY…comprehend.

As the Engy pauses to reach each one with his Wrench, the Spy catches up behind him and shivs him in the spine. At the precise moment of impact, his mask drops to the floor.

ENGY(Whispering, face-first in the dirt:) Now how in all heck is that any kinda fair?

His eyes close. The Spy begins to brush dust from his suit and opens his mouth to speak, then…

SENTRYBEEPBEEPBEEP!

…his eyes widen in alarm, and he dives into the nearby hut under a hail of fire.

We cut to a Sentry’s-eye view: a green nightvision-style view of the scene with an overlayed wireframe. A box around the entrance to the hut is labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)LAST KNOWN LOCATION OF ELECTRO-SAPPER DELIVERY MEATBAG

After lingering on it for a moment, it pans abruptly to the corpse of the Engineer, draws a box around it, and adds the tag:

SENTRY (TEXT)FATHER. STATUS: DECEASED
…
NOOOOOO.

The view pans back to the hut, and our Spy is now standing exactly in the “MEATBAG” box wearing the Engineer mask again. The view zooms in on the mask and clarifies the resolution, then a box pops up labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)SEARCHING FACIAL RECOGNITION DATABASE.

We see gurning mugshots of each of the nine classes flicker past, the Pyro in a party hat, the Demoman holding up an identity plate at a police station, the Scout in the Heavy’s headlock, until it settles on the Engineer, which is labelled “FATHER”. A new line prints below this:

SENTRY (TEXT)DOES NOT COMPUTE.
…
…
UNCLE?

As it writes, the Spy approaches and withdraws another Sapper. This is highlighted in a box labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)BIRTHDAY GIFT?
…
REMEMBERED THIS YEAR?
…
CONTENTS: LUGNUTS?
…
OH BOY

The Spy slaps a sapper directly over our view, turning everything black except the text.

SENTRY (TEXT)!
…
SO COLD
…
SLEEP MODE

 

8. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

Our man has his feet up on the table, tapping ash into a Soldier’s upturned helmet on the desk.

SPY
Sometimes, to move among the impala, the leopard must become one. He must dress up in their skin, (gesturing:) become fat, oafish… (beat, then with a visible shudder:) Russian.

 

9. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Our Spy is trundling along in a theatrical imitation of the Heavy’s gun-burdened waddle, clutching his tiny revolver in both hands as if it is enormously heavy, wearing a Heavy mask and bellowing for a Medic in a pitch-perfect Heavy voice. Soon the Medic returns from the frontline and latches on to him.

MEDICI am here, kamerad!

The Spy takes a moment to strap on a new Heavy mask that bears a broad grin.

SPY AS HEAVYTHANK YOU DOCTOR!

Soon they reach the four attackers the Spy passed on his way in. As our Spy approaches, we see a close-up of his grinning Heavy mask, and we move into slow-mo as he pointlessly slaps a baleful one on top of it.

His balisong rises gradually in his hand until it is poised to strike, then the three Heavy masks fall from his face in rapid succession: angry, happy, grim, then his real expression: a contorted rictus of fury and dark anticipatory delight. His knife curves slowly downwards, but before it hits we cut to:

 

10. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy swings his legs down off the table and leans towards us, eyes narrowed, intense.

SPYThere are occasions, of course, which do not call for such restraint. When a leopard’s characteristic savoir faire is simply inappropriate. Situations that need no subtlety, subterfuge or deception.

He draws his balisong from his blazer pocket and raises it for emphasis.

SPY

Situations, gentlemen, that demand (stabbing the air with each word for emphasis:) swift! Decisive! Action! In which the only possible course of action is a furious (swish!) blitzkrieg (swish!) of steel (swish!) and viscous spurts of hot (he stabs the table) red (he stabs again) blood!

With the final word he brings his knife down a third time, but an instant before we would see it hit, we cut back to:
 

11. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Close up on the Medic’s face – a vision of dismay. There’s the characteristic critical-hit backstab boom! and:

SCOUT
My scapula!

We see flecks of blood splatter the Medic’s face, causing his horrified expression to flinch. Another critical-stab sound:

DEMOMAN
Me lumbar!

Another stab, another splash of blood, another flinch:

PYRO
Mh mhmphmuh!

Stab, splat, flinch:

HEAVY
My braiaaaahahaaaaghahahaaaa! -ain.

The Medic’s face is now glistening with blood. His eyes narrow, he grits his teeth, spits a gob of swallowed blood to the floor, and we pull back to see him draw his Ubersaw.

Dolly with the Medic as he pursues the fleeing Spy. As they exit the tunnel towards Cap 4, we cut to the chase from the side: the Doc is clearly gaining. But when the Spy reaches the large rock near the cap, he suddenly trots to a halt, spins around and calmly draws his cigarette case. The Medic is an inch from him when he comes into view of a level three red Sentry on his right, which-

Sentry GunBEEPBEEPBEEP DAKADAKADAKADAKA!

-pummels him gracelessly into a rock.

The spy brushes at a speck of blood on his suit, and begins:

SpyYou’ve got blood on my-

Sentry GunDAKADAKADAKADAKA!

Hot spurts of blood geyser horrifically from the Medic’s gibbering corpse, splattering the Spy. The Spy irritably wipes his face with a gloved hand and starts again.

SpyI’ve made quite a-

Sentry GunDAKADAKADAKADAKA!

The spy glares at it, soaked in blood.

SpyI-

Sentry GunDAKADAKA!

SpyDo not make me silence your infernal machine, labourer!

Cut to:

 

12. TEAM FORTRESS 2 LINE-UP SPLASH

The usual suspects, the usual tune. Zoomed, of course, to our man.

Beat.

Sentry Gun (VO)… … DAKA!

Spy (VO)Very well.

 

13. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy is still stabbing the table in a frenzy, woodchips and spittle flinging in all directions, when finally he senses us and looks up, suddenly aware of what he’s doing. His stabbing hand slows until the knife-tip is just tapping gently on the table’s lacquered surface, then he composes himself, flips the knife’s blade back into its housing in a complicated twirl and tucks it back into his jacket pocket.

SpyAh, yes, of course…

He tosses a dossier back into the briefcase, clicks it shut, takes it by the handle and stands up.

SpyIntelligence.

He tosses his lit cigarette over his shoulder as he leaves, igniting the Medic’s coat. He straightens his tie before approaching the camera. We zoom out to reveal:

 

14. INT — 2FORT, BLU INTELLIGENCE ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy steps through a perfectly Spy-shaped hole already cut in the glass wall between the briefing room and the intel chamber. A Spy-shaped piece of glass is propped against the desk outside. A Soldier, Demoman and Heavy guard the two corridors leading in, all facing away from the Spy, and he mimes an eenie-meanie-miny-moe game to decide who to stab first.

He’s interrupted by a sudden pop! as the now huge briefing room fire reaches the Heavy’s ammo belt. All three Blues freeze, and the Spy winces as a rapid series of small explosions causes everyone to spin round and glare at him. Finally, the Pyro’s propane tank blows the entire glass wall out.

The Spy stands frozen, mid-flinch, shoulders hunched, face screwed up, as the last fragments of glass tinkle to the floor and the three stare expectantly.

SpyFiglio di puttana.

 

15. END TITLES W/BOX ART

Team Fortress 2, available now, buy it I guess, yada yada.

You are ein superhero – perhaps of your own design. One super-power that wouldn’t be up to you, though, is invincibility. You cannot die.

But wait! Where would the challenge be?

I put it to you, sir, that you cannot die in any game. Termination of your current existence leads to reloading of an old savegame, or respawning in a different location. In the first case, the death is erased from history and never happened, and the second is not death by any sane definition of the word. Death, look it up, is pretty permanent.

Currently, games punish you for your character expiring. A huge problem with all games is that they don’t know by how much – the inconvenience may be a matter of replaying the last few seconds, or trundling down the road from the respawn point (not just deathmatch games – WoW and San Andreas both use this). Or it could be hours of work, or a huge, utterly dull journey back to where you were. This is disastrous. It’s enormously off-putting to new gamers, incredibly frustrating for existing ones, and any dissatisfaction you felt with the game – particularly if it’s related to the reason for your character’s demise – is magnified tenfold. Modern games like Half-Life 2 do a good job at trying to limit this, with both frequent auto-saves and unlimited quicksaves (of which, by the way, it stores your last two – an achingly sensible precaution I’ve been begging for for years). I’d like to see time-based autosaves (every five minutes, keeps the latest two of these) in tandem with crucial event autosaves (so you can go back and make an important decision differently hours later) and manual quicksaves (for the personal touch). But let’s see what happens if you can’t die.

Superheroes don’t die a lot anyway – hardly ever. The risk is never their own demise, it’s that they might fail. And the objective they might fail at is almost always saving someone.

But wait! Failing is just like dying, only worse because you don’t see why you should have to restart when you’re not dead.

Yeah. Let’s do away with that too.

So you can’t fail?

The exact opposite: you can fail. It’s okay. You carry on. Lives were lost, it was partially your fault, but there’s no reason to force you to erase that part of your life and save everyone.

What’s to stop people reloading and making sure they do save everyone?

There’s no overwhelming reason to stop this, but I will anyway just because it ought to be interesting: you can’t save. You can pause the game, in case the phone rings or whatever, and when you quit the game it auto-saves before it exits, but when you start it back up it loads that save and deletes it. Short of restarting the game completely, you have to live with your mistakes.

So how do enemies stop you from saving people?

By killing them, duh. There are three ways for this to work:

a) The hostage situation. Easily the best excuse for stealth in any game – you have to take out the hostage-takers before they realise an attempt to do so is even underway. If they smell a rat, they’ll do it. Sometimes you’ll save one but in doing so alert another HT and lose the corresponding H or Hs. Sometimes you’ll do it perfectly, an artwork of silent takedowns, goon avoidance and lateral thinking. Sometimes you’ll screw it up and everyone will die, and however many goons you beat up in vengeance, you’ll still feel empty inside and you’ll still know it was your fault. This is what games should be all about – making you feel bad.

b) The time limit. There’s nothing stopping you, but bullets will slow you, enemies will wrestle you to the ground and powerful blows will knock you down. And if you don’t get to the bomb before it detonates – the psycho before he reaches the victims – the controls before the plane crashes – hundreds of people will die. Being fast means dodging bullets, incapacitating nasty bad guys swiftly and dashing by the rest.

c) The villain. He’s as fast as you, as strong as you and also completely invincible. He’ll pounce on you as you try to get to the innocents or the weapon of mass destruction and throw you to the floor, fling you across the room, grab you by the neck, smash you to the ground. Sometimes it’ll be the other way around – he’s trying to get to the objective and you’re trying to stop him. In both cases it’s a case of administering a blow that causes your opponent enough grief to give you time to get to the objective and do what you need to do before they catch you up. I’d love to see a system whereby prone-time is proportional to the force in newtons administered to your head – so if you use the physics system perfectly and drop the corner of a concrete block on his eye, he’s down for the count.

Naturally any mission could be a combination of these – you only have a certain time after the goons discover you to get to the hostages before the villain does, and if you meet each other first it’s the fight that’ll determine the winner. It should also go without saying that we’ll need a ragdoll recovery system, whereby someone flung across the room with ragdoll physics knows how to get back up and into normal animations without too big a glitch. No small feat, but I’ve heard it’s now possible. Knocking a villain down will allow you to drag him into a position to be victim to an even more devastating attack – chuck him under a falling block of masonry, throw him into a meat-grinder. And being invincible shouldn’t mean this stuff doesn’t hurt – getting shot in the face should be a blackout as well as a knockdown, and when you awake in a second’s time, you’re groggy and weak. A good punch causes vision blurring, and sometimes you’ll be taking so many hits you can hardly see or run in a straight line.

Success would mean feeling like a real hero, genuinely making a meaningful difference and feeling cool. Failure would be tragedy rather than irritation – no chore, no inconvenience, just irreplacable loss and anger at yourself. Sadness is something other mediums relish in making you feel, but games aren’t very good at yet. It is – like fear on a rollercoaster – a good thing. Irritation is never good, and games are extraordinarily adept at inspiring it at the moment.