I talked through my thoughts on both intros as I replayed them in the videos here, and I’ll summarise and add some conclusions through the magic of text. Obviously both parts of this post spoil the intros to these games.

Prey

• No intro cut-scene, you’re in control right away.
• Starting in your apartment gives you a safe place to play around, and a few hints at who you are in this world.
• If you’re intrigued, there are e-mails to read for more background, but the game is not held up for this exposition if you don’t want it.
• The mysteries are big, and central to you:
• Who am I in this world?
• What is my brother’s work and what’s my part in it?
• What are these tests for, and why is everyone so surprised when I do the obvious solution?
• For each, you get enough info to speculate but not enough to clear it up, and they’re all intriguing to me.
• The tests are framed as a thing you must do before you can go to space and Talos 1, treating that as an exciting reward. Going to space is exciting, I relate to this motivation. And it makes it cooler to be there, especially as it comes sooner than you’re led to believe.
• Waking up as if the day is repeating raises further intriguing questions about your place in this world – especially when you realise it isn’t.
• Breaking the glass is a great visual reveal: your first dramatic action is also the game’s most dramatic revelation so far.
• Behind the scenes, all the notes, e-mails and environmental storytelling are interesting because they’re about you or people directly related to you, and feed into your many pressing questions about what’s going on.
• I didn’t get to it in the video, but later when you emerge into the lobby, that’s a big, beautiful, visual reveal of a big piece of information – or a satisfying confirmation of what you’ve already twigged through your own investigations.

Sorry the mic gets drowned out in parts.

Mankind Divided

• Non-interactive intro cut scene.
• Starts with a news report about a terrorist incident, layered over footage of unknown men attacking other unknown men. Same incident? Seemingly not. Same men? Maybe. What’s this incident? Don’t know yet. Trying to tell two stories at once, and both are just ‘terrorists do bad things’ so far.
• Long, talky briefing, all tell and no show. We’re going after an arms dealer. He’s selling to some faction. One team is gonna do one thing, I’m gonna… block? An entrance? To keep the Jinn out? Aren’t the Jinn already there? Isn’t that who the deal is with?
• Also interact with some gizmo in some way that’ll save? Our undercover agent? Why, how, which one was he again?
• Long, unusually difficult stretch of gameplay with no further explanation. What I do in the level seems unrelated to what the briefing said: I’m not stopping the Jinn getting in, I’m moving through a level beating them up.
• Peter Serafinowicz and I keep calling each other up to be assholes to each other. I don’t like either of us.
• Get to the deal. Bad guys are there but other bad guys kill them. I must unplug a helicopter!
• I don’t know who the gold mask guys are but it doesn’t seem interesting or important. Some bad guys killed some other bad guys over some weapons. The new ones are mysterious, but to be honest I knew next to nothing about the folks they just killed either. They’re both just violent people who want weapons, that’s all the plot that’s been communicated after about 30 minutes of talking and fighting.
• Long credits sequence of disjointed news reports and symbolic imagery.
• Long conspirator chat that doesn’t clarify anything.
• Game suddenly goes back into intro mode, with a long non-interactive talky sequence arriving in Prague. The game’s biggest twist so far – I’m a double agent! – is never really mentioned, only indirectly implied by the nature of this conversation about Interpol logistics.
• Another inciting incident! An explosion! It doesn’t reveal or relate to anything else so far.
• In the third of three intros, you wake up in your apartment. Some of the augs you didn’t choose are disabled now but some aren’t and you can’t see which ones because that screen is broken – until you go and do a mission that’s hard and annoying without knowing what your augs are.

Lessons:

Start from a place that needs no explaining

MD needs you to understand all the factions and political context of an arms deal, and a double-agent within one of them, to make sense of what you’re being asked to do and why you should care. You can’t really show that, so they just have to talk to you about it for 7 full minutes before you can start playing. The result is I didn’t really follow it and I don’t really care.

When you wake up in your apartment in Prey, all that really needs saying is that you’re going to work for your brother on a space station. The other stuff you don’t know is fun to figure out.

Unanswered questions are not automatically mysteries

Unanswered question: who are the gold mask guys who kill the other terrorists?
Mystery: why am I waking up as if my day is repeating?

The difference is that this mystery is:

• Consequential: it matters a lot what the answer is.
• Personal: the answer will affect my character specifically.
• Hard to answer: there’s no obvious answer that isn’t interesting in itself.

With the gold mask guys, it’s not clear why it’s important who they are, they have no relation to my character yet, and a very likely answer is very boring: they’re just another group of terrorists who want weapons. If they at least didn’t take the weapons, that’d be something to pique some interest – a vendetta? A hit? But still, faction-kills-faction is always gonna struggle to rank on those three points.

Pick a reveal you can show

MD’s intro does have a cool piece of information to reveal, but it comes more than half an hour in, delivered through dialogue, and only implied. You’re a double-agent! Whoa! That makes both you and Interpol more interesting. But I learned that from a loading screen tip, after a long conversation that conveys it so indirectly I didn’t grasp it at all.

Could MD have done their reveal visually? Maybe. If your first mission had been to retrieve some vital drive, you could have a scene like:

MILLER (VO): When you get to Prague bring it straight to my office, Jensen, we can’t take any risks.
JENSEN: Understood.
We see him put the drive in a brown paper bag and leave the train. As soon as he steps onto the platform, he drops it in the trash. He passes a woman sitting at a cafe, touches her table as he squeezes past, and without looking at her:
JENSEN: Package is in, you’ve got 20 minutes.
We stay on Jensen as he blends into the crowd, but can see her get up as she leaves the frame.

There’d still be some Tell before and after the Show, but the reveal itself is a big, dirty betrayal we see with our own eyes.

Prey’s big reveal is that your reality is an artifice and you’re the subject of a test. That’s an easy one to show visually, and they do it with style: you unwittingly shatter the false world’s thin facade with a wrench blow.

And it’s great. It takes a bit of getting used to: the levels are much higher security than Blood Money’s, so you pretty much have to use the Opportunities provided to get your targets alone, but there’s still lots of scope to mix that in to your own evil plans, and the levels are so much bigger, richer, and more complex.

But each of the big systems I mentioned does have some shortcomings, and their strengths suggest an even better way to embrace what makes replaying Hitman missions so enduringly fun. So first off, here’s where I think they fall a little short:

Challenges

Yes, for all you know I did this all in one run.

These are like achievements, and completing them is how you earn XP to unlock new kit – the main form of progression. But they’re an odd mix: some are single actions for which you’re rewarded immediately (eg drop a chandelier on the target), and others are more like play styles you stick to for a whole mission (eg leave no bodies or evidence). Because they’re so vital for progression, it encourages you to do the single-action ones, then reload your save and do another. On one mission I drowned, poisoned and strangled each of two targets, in that order, reloading my save after each kill so I could finish on the stranglings, since that Challenge requires you to do both in the same run. Because it’s how you unlock stuff, it encourages a weird kind of save-scumming murder tourism.

The other curious thing about it is that because Challenges are only unlocked once, the playstyle ones are only acknowledged once. I don’t know if I got Silent Assassin on my last run, because I’ve already unlocked it. Now that rating is just gone from the roster, as are most of the rest at this point. Now all I get is…

Ratings

20,000 objectives in 35 minutes, not bad.

At the end of the mission, you’re given points for No Noticed Kills, No Bodies Found, Never Spotted, No Recordings, and for not killing anyone but the targets. This is all geared around one particular way to play the game, one that many of the Challenges require you to betray. But no matter what goals you set for yourself, or what playstyle you were going for, you’re always judged by how close it was to this One True Way of playing. Previous Hitman games also penalised you for not being subtle, but you’d at least get a phrase describing your playstyle: “Psychopath”, “Bagman”, “Thug”, “Silent Assassin”. In this one, you just get a score: 3 Hitman logos out of 5, for how Hitman you are. It seems completely at odds with a game that’s otherwise all about encouraging a variety of play styles.

Contracts

Recommending is all I can do, because the Contracts system doesn’t recognise falls as a valid cause of death.

Contracts mode lets you pick anyone in the whole level and mark them as a target. Then however you kill them, and whatever you were wearing, you can choose to make that the requirements for this Contract, and challenge other players to pull it off. It’s a very promising idea that is rendered completely useless by a few things:

1. You can never save your game when creating or playing a Contract. I have no idea why, but this alone completely kills the whole mode for me. I’d never play a Hitman game where you can’t experiment, or roll back from an unfair failure.
2. It only has certain, very conventional weapons that it recognises – most of the times I’ve tried to make a Contract to do something interesting, the way I killed my target is not one of the ones they have in their secret list, so it just says “Any Weapon” and I can’t challenge others to do what I did.
3. You also can’t specify anything other than the weapon and disguise. So it can never be part of your contract that the player has to do it undetected, or only in the suit, or only killing the targets, or avoiding certain weapons, etc. There’s not nearly enough here to actually specify a play style or a particularly interesting set of constraints.

My Idea

I’d break all of this down into two things: Stunts and Styles.

Stunts

These are the single-action Challenges – kill the target with a chandelier, dress as the target’s lover, etc. Having these as a big list is great for making the player aware of all the crazy possibilities, and the only change I’d make is that these are no longer the way you unlock new equipment. Completing them checks them off the list, so you have a tally of how many you’ve done and can try to complete that list if you like. But nothing practical is withheld from you if you don’t, so there’s not an extrinsic motive to save-scum these unless you enjoy doing so.

Styles

A Style is just a set of rules, and if you finish a mission having abided by all those rules, you successfully executed that Style. There’d be a bunch of Styles set by the developers, including stuff like Silent Assassin:

And on your end of mission report, you get a list of all the Styles you executed. These become your Rating – rather than a single term like previous Hitsman, or a numerical score in this one, it becomes a full description of every noteworthy aspect of your performance. On this run, you were a Silent Assassin and a Master Poisoner and a Ghost. And for every one of those you’d never earned before, you get an XP reward toward unlocking new gear. On future playthroughs, you’ll still be awarded these styles if you met the criteria, but you only get the XP the first time, to encourage people to explore the possibilities before they settle on one style.

Then, every rule that’s used in these is also available to the player, to concoct their own Styles. You can see a huge list of all of them, and just click a checkbox next to each one to say it’s part of your Style, then give it a name. You can do this just to challenge yourself – ‘tracking’ a style would tell the game to let you know if you break any of its rules as you play. But if you manage to fulfil it, you can then challenge your friends to do it too, and upload it publicly. Any time you meet all the conditions of a Style a friend has created, it appears on your report screen – even if you didn’t know about it before.

Playstyles are the soul of replaying Hitman, they’re why I’ve done every Blood Money mission at least 8 times. Hitman Episodes is a step towards a game built around replaying, but in a few big ways it fights against its own idea of you replaying in different ways – always judging you as if you were trying for Silent Assassin, forgetting about playstyles as soon as you’ve done them, and not letting you define your own with any of the interesting restrictions the developers built their own Challenges from.

To finish, here are some Styles I’d love to be able to make and challenge people to, that can’t be done with the Contracts system:

Silent Strangler
– No weapons other than the fiber wire
– No unarmed attacks
– Never spotted
– No bodies found
So you can kill as many people as you like, as long as you always use the fiber wire to do it. This gives you no nonlethal options, so it’s avoid or murder.

Tin Man
– Poison Silvio with a tin of expired spaghetti sauce
– No weapons except the tin of expired spaghetti sauce
– No unarmed attacks
Poisoning with sauce is understandably not lethal, nor is hitting people with the tin, so you’ve got to figure out a way to actually finish off your unconscious targets without using weapons.

Something in the Water
– Kill both targets
– Poison only
– No unarmed attacks
– Never spotted
– No recordings
Kill as many as you like, as long as there’s no trace that you were ever there to do so.

Loud And Gone
– Kill both targets with the shotgun (only found on certain guards)
– Never spotted
– No other kills
I set this as a challenge for myself and did it tonight, it was great fun figuring out how to a) get hold of a shotgun, b) get to the target with it, c) get the target alone in a position that you can get away when everyone comes running to investigate the shot.

Unfortunate Events
– Kill both targets
– Accidents only
– Never spotted
– No recordings
Again, no restrictions on killing, and doesn’t matter if the bodies are found, but everything has to look like an accident – and to sell it, no-one can know you were ever there.

If you’re finding the game easy, it gets easier. If you’re finding the game hard, it gets harder.

That’s bad. And it’s not just theory-crafting, that’s exactly how my XCOM 2 campaign played out: early on we got crushed repeatedly, then a few lucky missions got us off the ground, and after that my people became almost unstoppable for 35 missions straight – even after I upped the game difficulty.

Any game with persistent resources will have some snowbally tendencies: success has to get you something, or failure has to cost you something, otherwise it’s not really persistent. And some parts of XCOM’s snowballing are too good to lose: unlocking cool abilities for my favourite troops is why I play XCOM.

So you can’t scrap that, but what could you do? Here are some ideas.

Vary Squad Size By Mission

Stop getting more badass, you stupid badasses.

The number of soldiers you can take on a mission starts at 4 and can be upgraded to 6 if you’re doing well enough in the strategy part to afford the facility, and well enough in the tactics part to already have soldiers of high rank. That is snowball central. Even one more troop is a huge advantage to everyone’s survivability, and having a team 50% larger makes the game more than twice as easy. You don’t want to reserve that for the players who are already doing well.

I’d take squad size completely out of your hands, and make it a per-mission variable. The game does this once, and that mission was refreshingly brutal. I’d have every mission come with a squad size: “We can only get three people past the checkpoints leading to the mission area for this VIP extraction”, or “Security’s light here, we can drop six people in for this Retaliation mission.” That way it’s not snowballing, and it also adds more variety – I took the same six people on about 80% of my missions, which meant my tactics were pretty similar each time.

Level Out Soldier Health

That’s Bladestorm. You don’t want to tongue-snare Bladestorm, for reasons we’ll get into if you try it.

Currently this starts extremely low and increases fast as a soldier levels up: faster than than the enemy’s damage output. It makes the early missions of the game the least forgiving, and discourages you from mixing up your squad lineup later: every time I brought a rookie along to try to diversify my squad, they were insta-brained by a single shot.

I’d start it higher and not increase it at all, except for kit bonuses. That way new recruits get a fighting chance to last long enough to gain experience, and your best people aren’t unkillable when the enemies step their game up.

Health is not a particularly exciting upgrade anyway – I didn’t even notice it was increasing until the first time I fielded new troops next to old and looked at the healthbars. The idea of keeping your favourite people alive is appealing, but it’s also the problem: that’s what happened in my campaign, and it means I have very few interesting stories or desperate moments to recount. It’s one of those things players think they want but which subtly makes the game less interesting when you have it.

Low Profile Missions

These people have no idea who Nika Harper is or why she just railgunned their friend.

There’s a great little touch in some of the more urban levels: rotating holo-screens with portraits of your most veteran soldiers, presumably warning the public about these dangerous dissidents. That suggests a great way to stop you using the same unstoppable people every time: they’re too well known. Not just their faces, but their bio-signatures are on file or something. So for a new type of mission, in populated areas, you can’t bring any of your Most Wanted soldiers.

Injury recovery times do try to make you mix it up like this, but they’re not a great anti-snowball mechanic for obvious reasons: the better you do, the less injured you get, the less your recovery times, the more often you can field your best people. Only once did it really work for me: I stupidly took on a mission while a more time-sensitive one was still pending, so I had to do the second immediately afterwards with none of my best people. It was one of the most nutty and enjoyable missions in my campaign, and my team had that ‘motley crew of scrappy misfits’ feel that the game’s fiction obviously wants to inspire. But I never used them again, because the game severely punishes doing this any time you don’t have to.

These Low Profile Missions would both give you a reason to field those B-teams more, and give them a viable route to becoming part of your A-team. It’d reduce snowballing and, again, increase variety.

Conclusion

This was the first time our team met an Archon. It was also the first time an Archon met a Trin, which you can see in his face.

In conclusion: all those things I just said. It wasn’t that long a post.

I forgot part of the plan for this: your near-lightspeed space ambulance would also be indestructible and have perfect inertial dampening. So to decelerate, you just try to crash into all the debris you were trying to avoid as you picked up speed. So it’d go:

• Accelerate away from planet – dodge debris!
• When you’ve gone far enough fast enough, decelerate – hit debris!
• Turn around.
• Accelerate towards planet – dodge debris!
• Crash into planet!

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 their favourite place, upgrade it with the features they want, and liberate other areas they like 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 them 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 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 they want 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 their 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 they make 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 their 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.

This is my idea, in ten steps, for how BioShock could have unfolded after your encounter with Andrew Ryan in his office. It was written in 2009, but coming back to it in 2020, I feel like I should clarify a couple of things at the top:

• Although I did vaguely try to limit myself to stuff that’s not too outlandish, I actually have no idea what it’s like to make a game of this kind so I don’t claim my version is practical in scope.
• It obviously comes from dissatisfactions with BioShock’s actual ending, but I’m not imagining those were down to a lack of ideas. I know games are made under unseen constraints, triple-A games triply so. It’s very easy to sit back and do armchair game design, and it’s also very fun, and you also can’t stop me, so here we are.

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.

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, once you’ve found out someone who can violate your mind is on the other end of it, maybe leave the radio. Since Tenenbaum knows about your conditioning, she could order you to do it.

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. They do take Vita Chambers away from you much later, before the boss fight, but not for any stated reason.

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!” I’d like to see it flood.

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 say BioShock should have ended in Ryan’s office, but some of the most fascinating places and moving scenes are in that final section. The places where Little Sisters and Big Daddies are indoctrinated are two I’d want to keep in here.

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 you hit them. 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 see 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 bathysphere 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 shotgun and blows her away. Her body bobs 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 already too deep for them to cross.

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 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 hand and carry her over to the bathysphere. If you’re shot from the front by Fontaine, the blast will kill the Little Sister you’re carrying and she’ll fall 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. Once our view is entirely underwater, everything goes silent and slow. The body of a little sister drifts slowly past behind you.

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: 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.

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.
• With your body, 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.

Like Tuesdays, the melee combat in Mirror’s Edge has no feel. Despite loading-screen guff about run-ups giving your flying kicks more damage, every blow bounces off every enemy, triggering a fake ‘stagger’ animation. Nothing is physical, everything is the result of abstract rules.

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.

Waiting for an enemy’s weapon to flash red during a specific frame of the same nonsensical shoulder-nudge they each perform is preposterous. I feel like I’m standing there as a favour to the game’s animators, because they only know how to show me grabbing a wrist in one particular position. It’s a terrible challenge, relying either on using slow-mo so slow that the wait becomes boring, or learning the animations by rote to anticipate the absurdly brief red flash.

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. Enemies 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.

I love all the different words reviewers have found for this: loose, hollow, shaky, weak, fuzzy, bland. Obviously to make an unprecedented free-running game you can’t devote the time and budget it would take to make a really punchy shooter too. I wish DICE had seen the bright side of this, though: they didn’t have to! Shooting doesn’t have to take up the player’s time or be their source of fun. You can just have guns outright fucking kill people, the way they actually would.

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.

Obviously we’ve all thought about this a bit at one point or another. I thought the most interesting way of doing it would be to think up just one alternative to every weapon, device and ability in the game. Then I realised there are 29 of them, and did it anyway. I hadn’t originally planned on illustrating them – for reasons I hope will be obvious once you see my illustrations – that just kind of happened. Sorry.

I’m more interested in ideas that would make you think about and play a class differently, than in trying to ensure everything is perfectly and exactly balanced. Partly because this is more interesting to talk about, and partly because I don’t think you can just intellectualise about balance and call the problem solved. If I’d never played TF2 and you just described it to me, I would have said the Spy’s near-perfect disguise system was absurdly overpowered, but today people groan that it’s virtually useless. They’re wrong, but still: there’s no substitute for trying this stuff.

I also have some ideas about how this stuff should be unlocked, but they tie in to another major change I’d like to see, so that’s for another post.

Shield Spanner: when whacking your own full-health structures, this thing builds up an uber-like protective shield around them that can absorb a few hundred points of damage before the structure itself is damaged at all. The Spanner can repair neither the shield nor your buildings, so once they’re up, there’s no point hanging around. Sappers take a very long time to eat through the shield, and don’t disable the building until they get through it. The Spanner can remove them, but again, not repair the damage. It can also add a much weaker shield to the buildings of friendly Engies.

Why? For fatalistic Engies bored of baby-sitting. Once they’ve set their stuff up, the Engy is free to roam around setting up dispensers elsewhere, helping out other Engies, and flanking those who attack his own stuff. A shielded Sentry is resistant to many of the best ways of taking down an ordinary one (Sticky pile-on, point-blank Heavy, sap-and-stab) but vulnerable to attrition.

Portable Sentry: mini Sentry that can never be upgraded past level 1, but which once built, the Engineer can pick up and carry with him. While carrying the Sentry, the Engy moves at 75% speed and neither he nor the Sentry can fire, but the Sentry is safe from damage. It takes one second to snatch up and three seconds to re-deploy elsewhere. If the Engy is also using the Shield Spanner, the Sentry’s shield is lost when he picks it up, but can be re-applied after deployment.

Why? Lets you play a harrassment Engy: reaping kills by quickly erecting small sentries in unexpected places, and moving them before the enemy has time to strategise around them. This is often more fun to do, and to fight against, than holing up beind a level-three hitting it repeatedly.

Mini Dispensers: Engie can build three smaller dispensers: one that only supplies ammo/metal, one that only heals, and a third that’s a booby-trap. The booby-trap explodes with the force of a crit rocket if sapped or damaged in any way, only damaging enemies. It looks exactly like a healing-only dispenser to enemies (so traditional dispensers are still safe to sap/attack), but to the Engie’s team, it appears as a cardboard box full of dynamite, with dispenser decals drawn on in crayon.

Why? The constant need for metal to take care of your Sentry leads most Engies to put their dispensers directly next to their gun, dissuading them from setting up a useful recharge point for their team’s forward troops. Here, he can do this without sacrificing his vital metal income, and partially protect that forward station against Spies by associating a degree of uncertainty and fear with sapping them.

Telepault: teleporter exit that launches the teleportee forwards and upwards, in the direction the Engy places it. The Engie sees the projected arc before placing, obviously, so he can see where they’ll end up. Teleportees are immune to fall damage until after they land, and trajectories that end in killer chasms like those on Hydro are considered invalid placements and disallowed. The nametag for the entrance pad indicates that it’s a telepault and, in addition to displaying its recharge progress, quotes something like “Safe landings: 3/5”. Players can crouch on the tele entrance to choose to be teleported normally.

Why? I think the virtue of a Heavy being flung over a train is self-evident.

Laser Pointer: replacement for the pistol – switches Sentry to manual mode while equipped, where it will not fire on anyone automatically, but will shoot whatever the Engy points the laser at when he clicks Fire.

Why? Lets the Engy spy-check and prioritise targets better, at the expense of automatically firing on unexpected enemies, and of being ready to repair the sentry when it’s damaged.

Neutraliser: techy shotgun firing sparkly blue electronic charges which defuse Stickies, knock off Sappers and drain enemy ammo – but do no damage at all. Defuses a Sticky in two shots at medium range, one at close (close enough to hurt if it went off). Sappers take four shots at medium, two at close.

Why not… a flame-thrower Sentry! I think the real question is: why?

Why not… an ambulatory Sentry! It kind of removes the strategic element of deciding where to put it. And would be rather costly to impliment.

Hmphalm Hmphs: shotgun that fires napalm globs. They do no damage, but each successive shot slows the target slightly more, adds a few seconds onto their burn duration if you then ignite them with the flamethrower, and renders them unable to put out any flames by jumping in water. Needs reloading after every shot, and this takes a short while.

Why? The Pyro shouldn’t have an effective long-range weapon, but could use a way to catch opponents, slow their escape to safety and force tougher opponents to seek healing rather than waiting for the flames to die.

Hire Hmph: a longer, heavier fire-axe that always critical-hits against burning opponents, but takes twice as long to swing.

Why? The Pyro could do with a satisfying way to end a fight, particularly when there are allies around who usually get the credit for killing those who would have burned to death if left alone. But it shouldn’t be easy – she/he’s got to get even closer than usual, to an opponent who knows he/she’s there.

Hmpherno: flame-thrower with a more fierce but briefer burn, whose forceful stream can be used as a makeshift jetpack if pointed directly down. The force also means he/she cannot move forwards while firing normally, and while firing heat builds up in the weapon that will eventually cause the Pyro to explode in a large and dangerous fireball. Five seconds of uninterrupted fire is enough to blow him/her up. Ten seconds is enough for a nearly-full heat bar to entirely dissipate.

Why? The Pyro needs a little more tactical flexibility, lends him/herself well to comedy, and was born for a firey suicide option. This also means (s)he can propel her/himself into an area quickly by walking into it backwards whilst holding fire – to which the drawback is hopefully obvious.

Why not… a longer range flame-thrower! A class with its defining limitation removed is a class improved, as my grandmother used to say.

Why not… smoke grenades! Not being able to see is fun!

Why not… ignitable oil slicks! You spray an area with oil, then set light to it, and it burns for a while. Leads to exciting wait-around for the enemy team!

Why not… the napalm rocket-launcher from TF! Then we could give the Soldier a flame-thrower, the Spy could have Sasha, and we could save everyone the confusion of having to pick a class!

Luba & Kiska: knuckle-dusters, knock the target flying but never crit.

Why? Pow!

Tatyana: mini-gun with an electromagnetic coil built around its motor which sucks in weapons from fallen enemies (or friends) any time the barrel is spinning. The added weight leaves the Heavy unable to move at all while firing. He can still move while spinning the barrel.

Why? Lets the Heavy perpetuate a winning streak by avoiding running dry on ammo, but hinders his rate of advancement so that it’s not easy to exploit this on offense.

Sonya: very obviously stolen Scout Scattergun to replace the standard shotgun. Obviously in that the Scout’s ripped-off hand and forearm are still danging from the triggerguard.

Why? I don’t have a good justification for this.

Why not… an assault rifle! The most boring weapons in all of first-person-shooterdom! Much of TF2’s design philosophy apparently stemmed from the notion that one guy just firing a lot of bullets at another guy is about the least interesting interaction two players can have.

Last Ditch Digger: broken trench-shovel whose damage and attack-rate are proportional to the amount of health the Soldier has lost.

Why? Apart from encouraging unlikely comebacks, it makes rocket-jumping spade-attacks more effective. And fun things should always be made more effective.

Imploder: rocket launcher whose blasts suck people in rather than knocking them away. The actual damage radius is smaller than a standard rocket, but the ‘suck’ radius is larger than either.

Why? Lets the Soldier cluster large groups of people into a tight space for maximum damage, but sacrifices his ability to juggle enemies, keep them at bay or rocket-jump – though some wall-climbing and ceiling-sucking is doable by firing the rockets above you.

Skeet Shooter: shotgun which only and always crits on airbourne opponents. Can be drawn, fired and holstered by pressing Right Mouse, whichever weapon the Soldier is currently holding.

Why? If you manage that, you deserve a crit.

Why not… grenades! Hey, good idea! It looks like Valve completely forgot to put these in TF2, despite how fun it is to get killed by speculatively flung munitions bouncing arbitrarily around corners by trigger-spamming morons! Thank God we reminded them!

Why not… heat-seeking rockets! Because aiming highly explosive projectiles to hit within a few meters of a target is still too hard! Not only should the modicum of skill required to play a Soldier successfully be removed, but it should be removed by an unlockable weapon that only the most skillful players will earn. Perfect!

Why not… a rocket-launcher that’s more powerful but has to be reloaded more often? Reloading all the damn time is the least fun part about playing as a Soldier, and dying in one hit is the least fun part about fighting one. Let’s not exacerbate either.

Not A Grenade Launcher: here’s an idea for the grenade launcher: REMOVE IT. It is a twat. The Demoman’s other weapon, the sticky launcher, is probably the single most devastating weapon in the game, the trade-off ought to be that he has no quick direct attack if an enemy gets past his sticky trap and confronts him. Instead, there’s no trade-off: he’s tough, and if he can aim worth a damn, he’s got a quick to use weapon that’s nearly as powerful as the Soldier’s rocket-launcher and litters the place with deadly spam fire if he misses – or just if he feels like racking up a load of talentless arbitrary murders.

Why? Why would anyone choose to unlock the ability to not have a grenade launcher? That’s the beautiful part; they wouldn’t have to! This excellent upgrade would be automatically applied to all Demomen free of charge.

Wee Creepers: sticky-bombs that roll slowly towards nearby enemies, faster the closer they are. If an enemy’s close enough, they’ll follow him at Demoman walking-speed (very slightly slower than most classes). He can only lay four at a time, and they stop for a while if shot.

Why? Almost every situation involving these conjours an entertaining mental image.

Why not? This would allow players on your own team to screw you over by luring stickies towards you. It’s hard to say how much of a problem that would be, because to an extent it would require the enemy Demoman’s co-operation. If you’re close enough to them to lead them at walking speed, he’s probably just going to blow you up straight away.

The Good Stuff: alternate whiskey bottle which, if not yet smashed, temporarily adds 50 health when doing the drinking taunt – even if it takes him above his usual maximum. The boost decays over fifteen seconds, during which time the Demoman is also immune to fall-damage. The bottle always crits while the Demoman has been airbourne for more than half a second.

Why? Bracing yourself for a good sticky-jump, whacking people at the end of it.

Why not… that swingy dynamite he had in the first trailer! I’m only guessing, but I would think that made it too easy to take out an Engy, all his kit and everyone defending him without actually entering line-of-sight. The swinging charge-up animation was interesting, though – I wonder if you had to stay still during that.

Slugger: full-size two-handed baseball bat that does 150% damage, but precludes all other weapons.

Why? It’s clearly an impractical trade-off, but I’d take it.

Freakin’ Crit Magnets: pistol rounds that do no damage, but successively increase the chance that the next hit against the victim – with a weapon that actually deals damage – will be a critical. A full clip of direct hits gives a 100% crit chance. On close inspection, the projectiles stuck into the victim’s body are small nails each skewering a Post-It note with “Crit me” written on it.

Why? It gives the Scout an option to be more of a team player, or to have the satisfaction of running at someone with his bat and knowing the hit will be a crit. It’s also kind of an interesting risk tradeoff to decide when to stop building up your next attack and actually make it.

Nutcracker: leaner Scattergun that always crits when fired directly down on a target from above, but never crits otherwise and has to be reloaded every two shots.

Why? Funny? I should clarify the name, actually, in case it’s a British idiosyncrasy: here, ‘nut’ means head, while ‘nuts’ means testicles. It is the former that this weapon proposes to crack.

Hobbler: sniper rifle that reduces the victim’s movement speed by up to 50% if the shot hits below the waist, but only charges to halfway up the normal charge meter. Partially charged shots to the legs slow by proportionally less than 50%. Healing steadily restores movement speed.

Why? Lets the Sniper be a help to his team in situations where he doesn’t have the time or skill to line up a perfect headshot.

Croc: Larger kukri that always crits against Spies, never otherwise.

Why? Vengeance.

Shooter: a larger and faster-firing revolver than the Spy’s, to replace the SMG.

Why? I’m forever out-gunning Snipers at medium range when I play Spy – I’m hitting them too often for them to snipe effectively, and their SMG has nothing like my damage output at that distance. Much as I love doing this, the poor Aussies could use a break, and some classic Crocodile Dundee one-upmanship ought to do it.

Man-Sapper 3000: useable on human targets – drains them of all ammo in a few seconds, and stays attached for five, or until an Engineer whacks it off. Target doesn’t get his ammo back when the sapper’s removed, he has to find more. Must be placed from behind, but does not break disguise.

Why? Good for disabling whole groups of people without necessarily giving yourself away, can lead to comedy escapes from angry mobs of sparking melee enemies.

Hack-o-Tron 3000: replacement for the revolver, can hack any Sentry in line of sight from 10 metres away. Hacking takes ten secondsish, during which the Spy must remain still, and at the end of it the Sentry will be reprogrammed to only attack its creator. The Engineer sees his Sentry spark green during this time, so he knows someone nearby is a Spy, and he only has to kill the Spy before the process finishes to abort it. The Spy can remain in disguise throughout, but since he can’t move without breaking the hack, he’s conspicuous for that. The Engy can destroy his Sentry at any time during or after the hacking process, the only disadvantage of which is, well, he’s destroyed his own Sentry.

Why? Firstly, I like the idea of seeing your Sentry spark and having to scan everyone nearby to spot who’s not moving. It’s an easier task for an Engy than de-sapping, because he only has one objective, but the danger is more worrying: losing both his Sentry and his life. Secondly, it’d be fun to find a great place to do this from, and watch the Engy scrambling about above or below trying to find you. Thirdly, realising you’re not going to find the Spy and scrambling for the Detonate control panel before it turns on you could be pretty tense. It has to be only the Engy it attacks once hacked, of course, or noob Engies could ruin the whole game for their team by letting a level-3 Sentry get hacked right in their base.

Identity Thief 3000: large knife that, when backstabbing, utterly shreds the victim and causes the Spy to quickly assume his identity. There’s a puff of smoke as usual, but it lasts only a moment rather than the several seconds that donning a disguise usually takes. The Spy cannot attack again with the knife until after this new disguise is assumed, so it’s slower for repeat-attacks.

Why? For situations when you have someone on their own, but don’t know how long you’ve got until his team-mates show up. Disposes of the body and renders you inconspicuous in one quick move.

Ghost-o-matic 3000: replacement cloaking device which, instead of rendering the Spy invisible, allows him to pass through enemies for ten seconds, and absorb incoming damage. During this time he can’t attack or sap, and enemy fire drains his Ghost charge rather than his health – so it won’t last long if he’s under fire. When his Ghost charge runs out, the Spy is vulnerable but still can’t attack for two seconds, and he gives off a suspicious spark – so spy-checking isn’t any harder. Ghost-mode also takes two seconds to activate, and regenerates fairly slowly when not in use.

Why? This lets him slip through very hairy or chaotic situations where enemies don’t have the time to look for Spies thoroughly, but in which he’d be killed in the crossfire if he was merely cloaked. The kind of crossfires this device would let the Spy get past are also the kind where one least needs his Cloak.

Identi-Kit 3000: replacement for the Spytron 3000 cigarette-case: it’s a device in the same housing which, when pointed at an enemy, tells you their name and health. If disguised, the enemy with your name is tagged on-screen at all times, the way Medic-callers are to Medics. The drawback is that you can only disguise by pointing it at an enemy and pressing fire, rather than selecting a class freely with the number keys. You can do this while cloaked, naturally.

Why? Allows the Spy to identify and eliminate injured targets with his pistol, and lets him strategise around his namesake. The loss of the “Am I dressed as him?” ambiguity is more than made up for by the many “Oh shit, that’s the real Duncan Disorderly!” moments.

Why not… a dummy weapon that lets you make it look like you’re firing while in disguise! This would only increase the believability of your disguise for the brief period before people realised that a disguised Spy can now fire like a real team-mate. Thereupon, you’d still get spy-checked, it would just be incredibly arduous and tiresome for everyone else to do so.

Why not… a silenced pistol! There’s actually nothing terribly wrong with this idea, it’s just not very useful. Obviously shooting people from an unexpected angle is a core tactic of the Spy, and I love doing it, but I don’t think people are pinpointing my location using the directional audio of their 7.1 home theatre surround-sound setup. I think they’re just turning around to find out where they’re being shot from, and seeing me with their eyes. If, like the four thousand people who’ve suggested this, you’re proposing a damage decrease as a trade-off, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole.

Why not… a weapon that can be used while cloaked or disguised! Because… just shut up. Just go away and think about what you’ve done.

The women in Hitman: Blood Money are grotesquely over-sexualised, which is not unusual for a videogame, but I think the reason for it might be. Blood Money’s vision of the world is stylised to let us see it through the eyes of the hitman: a sociopathic clone completely disconnected from human nature. To make someone see the world the way your character does, make the world the way the character sees it.

Its characters are oversexualised in a profoundly unsexy way – both genders are luridly exaggerated beyond attractiveness. The Hitman is asexual, and people’s sexual attributes and inclinations appear exaggerated and repulsive to him. Hence the chesty women, the muscle-bound men, and the endless sex-talk (conversation topics range from “fucking”, “who I’d like to fuck”, “I’m drunk and would like to fuck you”, “how hot are these girls?”, “wow these girls are hot”, “let’s fuck later”, “I’m going to fuck you later”, “I want to fuck you”, “would you like to fuck?”, and “here’s some aphrodisiac to help with the fucking”) . It’s shoved in our face to make us as disgusted by it as a cold, sexless killer would be. I think it even wants you to hate them a little bit, to let you see how someone like this can kill without hesitation or remorse.

The Hitman is usually thought of as something of a blank-slate protagonist, but he’s actually one of the best examples of effectively putting the player in his avatar’s shoes. You’re made to feel something of the way this anti-hero feels just by the filter through which he sees the world, but what he does in response to it is still up to you. The genius of it is that they’re portraying a character by how they paint everything but the character, rather than dictating the character’s actions or story.

One of the reasons games are so exciting as a young artform is that developers are just discovering tricks like this. It’s not entirely new to Hitman: it’s had huge breasts and permanent scowls since the first game. The second one made you feel 47’s disconnection from other people by sending you almost exclusively to foreign-language countries, and the third externalised his stormy disposition by setting every flashback mission on a dark and rainy night – even ones which actually happened by day. But Blood Money’s sex angle is the most efficient ploy so far, and like every aspect of the fourth game, feels like the idea finally coming of age.

The rest of this post is just about the mechanics of Hitman and what I like about them and how they could be improved, which probably should have been a separate post but it’s too late now.

Social Situations And Silenced Weapons

Hitman has always been extraordinary for mixing violence in with polite society, but control, interface and AI quirks have often interfered with the fun. Those are almost entirely gone now, and Blood Money is genuinely the game the series always wanted to be. It’s the first time they’ve consistently kept all the important elements together:

Fuzzy suspicion: Actually this one is largely new, and finally doing it right is the main reason Blood Money is so much better than previous Hitman games. Guards are just a bit more human in how they react to suspicious behaviour, in that they no longer open fire the second you step out of line. That single tweak removes 90% of the frustrating moments a Hitman game normally inflicts on you. It also adds another freedom: the ability to get past AI guards with misdirection and trickery, rather than stealth or violence. My current favourite approach is to just slightly irritate people:
a) My target and his girlfriend are making out in a corridor. I turn the light off. He irritably barges past me to turn it back on, and they retreat to his room for some privacy, but the moment is gone and the girl walks out for some air. As she leaves, I slip in and throttle him. I am the mood killer. Also the killer.
b) A handyman is repainting a doorway to the maintenance tunnels I need to get to. I can’t kill him because the cop opposite takes only very brief breaks from his watch. Instead, I nab his toolbox and toss it across the room with a clang. Annoyed, he goes over to fetch it, and while he’s occupied I stroll through the door.
c) Two guards man the monitors in a security booth overlooked by a CCTV camera. They’re close enough that neither can be killed without alerting the other, no matter where their attention is turned. I back round the corner, and throw my gun into their line of sight. It’s a dangerous item, so of course one of them has to confiscate it and take it to the security HQ in the main building. While he’s away, I throttle his partner, steal the camera’s tape, and take his clothes so that the main building’s reception guard won’t think anything of it when I follow the gun-confiscator into the security HQ – a nice quiet place to strangle him and take my gun back. Psych!

Public areas: without these it’s just a stealth game, a simplistic and degenerate genre compared to Hitman’s actual multi-faceted magnificence. Masses of Hitman missions have lacked a space for you to move around in without disguise or subterfuge, a calm initial phase to the hit in which you can observe patterns and plan your approach. Wonderfully every single one of Blood Money’s jobs includes one, and it ensures you the quintessential Hitman experience – walking around unnoticed, observing routines, seeing a social situation in a killer’s terms: who can be taken out quietly, where the body will go, how attention can be diverted from that door. These considerations exist in hostile environments too, but it’s a stressful and constrictive situation. It’s only fun when you’re allowed to be there, but not to do what it is you must do. It adds an element of audacity: when everyone’s out to get you, killing is just a survival tactic. In Hitman, everyone’s happily going about their lives in normal society, and you’re going to stride in and do something massive and terrible and get away with it.

Subtle kills: Subltety and elegance barely featured in the original game, but as Hitman matures it starts to appreciate the finer things in murder. A simple squirt of a syringe, the turn of a dial on a pyrotechnics control panel, the clicking of a detonator, the unseen flinging of a kitchen knife, a short sharp shove to a precariously positioned target, or the removal of a prop gun and the placing of its working counterpart. Approaches that take masses of planning, but which manifest themselves in a single, simple, silent easy action. Blood Money invented most of these options, and by cramming every mission full of them, moved from the pre-scripted puzzle-solution feel of Contracts to a playground of homicidal oppourtunity.

A wealth of interesting options: In general, too, there’s a gorgeously rich possibility space. Full not just of ways to succeed, but cool, dramatic and stylish ones. They made twelve of the best Hitman missions ever, then just kept on making them, again and again, in the same environment with the same targets, adding superfluous alternatives just to suit the depraved stylistic preferences of their players, or simply to increase their chances of stumbling upon something brilliant. Steve and I have spent more time talking about alternative approaches to Blood Money’s missions than I have playing Contracts’.

Meditations On Murder

I’d like to fix Blood Money. It makes one giant mistake, and introduces three new systems that don’t quite work.

Saves: WHAT. The first two limitations are simply mad – you can save seven times, but only in three slots – and only on Tuesdays? Do we get an extra save if we own a domesticated meercat? How about only letting us save when we’re facing Mecca? But the third is criminally derranged. The game will delete – it will fucking delete – your save games if you need to quit or restart. It will delete them. It DELETES them!

Upgradable Weapons: A nice idea, using the money from jobs – and bonuses for style – to bolt on silencers, scopes and new ammo types to your favourite bit of kit. For some reason, though, they decided to make these so cheap that even an inept hitman can afford to buy virtually all of them at every stage. To counter-act that self-inflicted spanner in the works, they then locked off the good upgrades until you reach a certain mission. Despite being the rationale behind the very title of the game, money becomes irrelevant and only progress restricts your weaponry – for no coherent in-game reason. It’s not a huge problem, but it would be so easy to make it so good: just make everything expensive. Let me spend all my earnings on a really good silencer after the first few missions, if that’s how I want to play. I’ll still look forward to getting accuracy and damage upgrades later on, and I won’t be able to afford the good ones until the very end.

Notoriety: The more witnesses you leave, the better photofit the police have of your face, the more likely guards are to get suspicious when you act out. “Hey, isn’t that guy clambering over the compound wall the one from the paper the other day?” But for some reason it’s not based on the number of witnesses – bodies found while you’re still at the scene or just lots of unnecessary killing also increase your notoriety.

It’s obvious two separate metres are needed: Recognisability and Heat. Recognisability is entirely down to witnesses escaping alive and security cameras catching you, and represents how good an idea the police have of what you look like. Heat is down to how many people you’ve killed, and represents how high a priority you are for the police. If you’ve killed hundreds of innocent people but no-one’s ever lived to tell the tale, they’ll want to find you badly but guards will be no more suspicious of you than anyone else. Security will be increased, but you’ll be able to get away with the same things. If you’ve only ever killed your targets and no-one else, sticking to non-lethal takedowns for anyone else in your way, security will be lighter throughout. But if people or cameras have seen you and got away, those few guards will be harder to slip by. Apart from making more logical sense, the point of separating out Heat is to compliment the player’s style. If he likes killing loads of people, increased security will be fun but challenging for him, and he’s not punished. If he doesn’t, but did it because a plan went wrong, the increased security ups the stakes and encourages him to get the subtler methods right.

Accidents: It’s the obvious next step in the subtlety stakes to avoid even the suspicion of foul play, but in Blood Money it’s not quite well-developed enough to be a viable goal throughout. Nearly all of the targets can be killed with accidents, but a) a few can’t, and b) there’s no reward for pulling it off. I’ve heard that the plan was for the post-mission newspaper article to be just an obituary if the death looked like an accident, which would have been great, but didn’t seem to make it to the final game.

I don’t think accidents are enough. Some of them are extremely suspicious, and there are more inventive ways of entirely avoiding heat: faking suicide, eliminating the body altogether, or framing someone. There’s one opportunity to frame someone in Blood Money – getting the other actor to shoot your target on the opera mission – but there could be more. Stealing someone’s gun, shooting the target, then dropping the weapon at the scene and leaving before anyone else sees you ought to work as a successful frame up. As should knocking someone out, dressing up as them, doing the hit, then switching clothes back. “Honestly, a guy in a suit came and did it! But you won’t find his fingerprints on the gun because he was wearing gloves. Also you can’t see the guy.” Getting rid of the body could be in furnaces, downriver, posted elsewhere (!) or even stolen discreetly from the scene (would require a vehicle, I guess). Suicides could be a simple case of fibre-wiring someone, dragging the body to underneath a light fitting and stringing them up. It doesn’t have to be ultra-convincing, the police in Hitman are intentionally dumb.

The Silent Assassin accolade has a few inconsistencies – bodies found while you’re at the scene mean no Silent Assassin rating, even though all bodies will eventually be found either way, and the speedruns show that it’s possible to get Silent Assassin even when you flee the scene in a hail of gunfire, even in Professional difficulty. The point of this system would be to introduce a new accolade to replace Silent Assassin: Case Closed. It would mean that you attracted 0 heat on the mission, that the police aren’t looking for you at all – a much more satisfying result than having been seen at the scene, and leaving evidence of foul play.

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.