Firefall (Beta) – Designer Review

Game Information

Game Name: FireFall (In-Development)
Game Publisher: Red5 Studios
Game Platform: PC

Game Overview:

“Firefall is a sci-fi MMO shooter set in a future Earth… Uniting in the form of armies, players will need to collect resources to craft weapons and vehicles to fight back the apocalyptic threat of the Chosen invasion. Special Nano-technology suits of armor called Battleframes enhance the human race in this future Earth and allow players to jumpjet across battlefields, wield a variety of exotic weapons of heavy destruction, and employ special abilities to reclaim the world.”

Effectively, FireFall is a cooperation-oriented MMO shooter that attempts to combine the extrinsic and submission-focused appeal of MMO’s with the intrinsic engagement of the modern FPS.

What did this game do that was different from its predecessors?

FireFall is attempting tocombine standard MMO dynamics with the intrinsic satisfaction of FPS gameplay. In addition, FireFall champions cooperative play, emphasized by a Left 4 Dead-reminiscent system that allows players to be rescued by other players when they fall below zero HP. The game also features jetpack-assisted traversal, giving players the ability to explore the game world vertically as well.

Red5 has also put ample focus on marketing FireFall, as seen at PAX11 and PAX12 (left) with large displays, commissioned cosplayers, and playable demos. When compared to similar predecessors, such as Hi-Res Studios’ Global Agenda, this improved publicity helps build a stronger pre-launch testing community.

My favorite part about the game

In the moments where FPS gameplay peaked, I found myself particularly engaged by the fact that aiming was required for combat effectiveness, and movement became significantly more important to survival than in standard MMO combat systems.

I also greatly appreciated Red5’s effort to implement a UI that players can rearrange (similar to many third-party mods for other MMO’s). This shows an increased effort to appeal to end-game and meta-game enthusiasts, and I imagine Red5 will be carefully watching the modding community for further UX improvements.

My least favorite part about the game

When I first started the game, the number of stimuli fighting for my attention was overwhelming; one character was speaking at me while several UI windows were cuing me to perform verbs (some of which I wasn’t actually capable of performing at the time). This pattern of excessive prompting continued as I played, and often led me to miss important details needed to progress in the game.

How I would change the game to make it better

The first problem that occurred to me was the blatant UX failure – too many stimuli were fighting for my attention. To improve the play experience, Red5 will need to space out the player’s starting experience such that there are only a small number of demands made on the player in a given moment. It would also help immensely to remove the audio-based prompts, as this emphasizes the conflicting stimuli further, and makes it so that players need to pay attention to that particular stimulus before it is no longer accessible.

League of Legends – Designer Review

Game Information

Game Name: League of Legends (2009)
Game Publisher: Riot Games
Game Platform: PC

Game Overview:

League of Legends is a action/strategy game that pits players against each other in 3v3 and 5v5 team matches. The game is inspired heavily by the popular WarCraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, but appeals to a much broader audience.

Players begin a game by selecting a “Champion”, a character that they will control exclusively for the entire game. After the game begins, players converge at several mid-field locations between the two teams’ bases, and proceed to attack AI-controlled minions (as well as opposing players, given the opportunity). The more enemies you destroy, the more powerful your Champion becomes. The game ends when one team of players manages to overwhelm their opponent and destroy their base.

What did this game do that was different from its predecessors?

League of Legends‘ biggest accomplishment over its predecessors is its focus on the new user experience; compared to its competition (Dota 2, Heroes of Newarth, etc.), League focuses less on exclusively appeasing the hardcore elite and instead puts ample focus on pushing more casual appeals, such as heightened player expression (custom Champion skins and player icons), in-depth game lore, and a diverse thematic variety of Champions. These strengths mobilize an otherwise untouched casual audience in action/strategy games, and can be attributed to League‘s rampant success and popularity.

My favorite part about the game

I love League‘s attention to the core aesthetics of challenge and expression. Often seen as two mutually exclusive aesthetics, League successfully combines strategy with customization so that players can work to overcome a challenge, while also exploring their personal tastes and playstyles (a huge relevance factor to the game’s 18-24 target demographic).

As a game balance and content design enthusiast, I also appreciate the game’s dedication to creating dynamically different Champions that feel unique and powerful, but are relatively well-balanced. This process (as I’ve learned working on Nakravax) is difficult to master, but can yield very memorable and satisfying results.

My least favorite part about the game

As an Achiever/Socializer (Carry/Support), I enjoy winning together with friends. This experience is emphasized in League, but due to the high-level of challenge and unpredictability of PVP gameplay, cooperative play tends to devolve into intra-team arguments, player griefing, and otherwise volatile chat. This is entirely expectable in cooperative/competitive online gaming – and Riot has made an effort to crack down on player harassment and griefing – but it is still a limiting factor within the genre, and the industry as a whole is attempting to find solutions.

How I would change the game to make it better

While the core of League of Legends is incredibly well-executed, there are certainly features that could shift the game’s content towards a more appealing scenario for other Achiever/Socializers. The cooperative game mode is a great start for players looking for a more PVE-focused environment, but it seems to discount the PVE community as softcore players, who simply need more practice before joining the PVP community. In truth, the PVE community is a full-fledged and thriving community that League is underserving, but very close to encompassing. Solutions? My first thought is a new game mode – yes this will dilute players from the existing game mode, and yes this will require a lot of expensive development and testing, but could prove worthwhile. This game mode puts emphasis on the PVE elements of League – neutral monsters. Whereas standard games encourage players to slay neutral monsters to aid fighting other champions, a more PVE-friendly focus would challenge players to overcome scripted PVE encounters featuring non-champion monsters. These encounters would typically require players to reach the max champion level to complete, and requires players to demonstrate the standard skills in the League of Legends toolbox (movement, target prioritization, team synergies, etc.). My goal is to design one such encounter in-full, and post it here as an update to this article.

While the idea would be incredibly expensive to develop, it is worth determining if the ROI may be worthwhile for mobilizing the PVE community. It may even be possible to accomplish this with League‘s existing champion set, but could negative impact champion turnaround, as they are now being balanced for even more disparate circumstances across even more game modes. In the end, I trust that Riot’s current talent is eagerly exploring ways to improve their game, and I seek only to supplement their toybox of potential ideas.

Additional Improvement Areas

• Tribunal Integration – To take anti-harassment to the next level, Riot will need to integrate their Tribunal into the actual game launcher. This keeps anti-harassment in the forefront of player’s minds while playing, and eliminates unnecessary steps from the UX of the adjudication process.
• “Train Skill” Buttons (UX Flaw) – [Now Fixed!] Currently, the buttons used to train skills are activated on “mouse down”, not on “click”. This means that if a player clicks down on the button without releasing the mouse, they cannot cancel the action by moving the mouse away before releasing (as is convention in most computer software).
• Story Integration – Currently, the canon behind each of Riot’s champions is entirely flavor – it serves little purpose towards enjoyment of a character. While relatively expensive to accomplish, I would propose a 5-10 minute tutorial/story level featuring newly released champions. This is a single-player experience that guides players through a champion’s abilities and playstyle, and also introduces the champion’s role in the League of Legends canon. While expensive to produce, my assumption is that this brief taste of a new champion would likely lead to greatly increased week 1 sales. Worth investigating if nothing more.