Why the gaming industry should employ Dhark as a exorbitantly-compensated interface/ achievement structure consultant

The video gaming industry has been around for over two decades now. You would think that it would be simple to create a “perfect” interface regularly by this point. However, the creators of Rock Band, one of last year’s best and most innovative games, made just about every bad choice imaginable when implementing their user interface and menu system. I do not understand. Before I dissect these inadequacies fully, allow me to repeat that this game is incredible and I love it.

1.) The most frustrating part of this system is the song selection mechanisms, which in just about every instance autoselects the opposite of what I would expect it to. For example:

- The first time you enter the song list in Solo Tour mode, it jumps to the first song that you have yet to complete. Fair enough, that kinda makes sense. Every subsequent time you return to the menu after playing a song, however, it jumps to the same place. Which means that if you’re trying to, say, get a bunch of gold stars on early songs, and have all but Green Grass completed, you have to scroll all the way back through the list after EVERY SONG. This may have been a situation I was in, recently.

- In Band mode, selecting Random and then backing out after seeing the song title puts the cursor at that song, instead of back at random. Especially frustrating since most of the songs we want to avoid in Random are at the end of the list.

- Selecting a two-song set, however, does the reverse. After selecting a song, the cursor jumps back to the top. What on earth.

2.) After going into Practice mode from the failure screen, practicing for awhile and then exiting, you are taken to the main menu. Wha-huh?

3.) A band needing a Leader in tour mode. This is very annoying, since the first band I created with my roommate had myself on the drums as the leader. This means if we ever want to play anything with that band, I have to play the drums. Fixing the next problem, however, would also enable a good compromise for this one.

4.) Created characters cannot play more than one instrument, and band members’ names must be unique (case-sensitively, thankfully). Why can’t I just create one character who can play any instrument, and have them be the band leader? Maybe even allow the creation of different outfits for different instruments?

5.) The lack of an online tour mode. C’mon now.

I mean, so much of this just seems like common sense. I do not understand.


Now, as for achievement structure, my go-to “lacking” example is Mass Effect. Here is a breakdown of the achievements and if/how I think they should be changed:

275 pts: General storyline-checkpoint achievements. (I’m including the Land on an Uncharted Planet 50-g one, which may be possible to avoid in a full playthrough. Though it would take a great deal of effort if it is even possible.)

I like, keep ‘em as they are.

25 pts: Complete 2 playthroughs.

Not cool. You have a difficulty level that doesn’t have its own achievement, and “do the exact same thing twice” should never be an achievement. Change to “Complete a playthrough on Veteran.”

75 pts: Complete playthroughs on Hardcore/Insane

I like, as long as they also unlock all appropriate lesser-difficulty achievements. Not sure if they do or not. If they do, well done. If they don’t, they should. I’d bump up each of them by 25 pts, though.

55 pts: Get 150 kills with the four weapon types.

I like, also. But why is pistol five points less than the other three, especially since it's arguably the hardest to get? Up it to 15 each.

55 pts: Rengade/Paragon/Scholar

Fine, keep them.

25 pts: Tactician.

A neat achievement that I like a lot. Probably the best of the lot.

20 pts: Paramour / Charismatic.

Fine.

145 pts: Reach lvl 50/60, Register X kills, reach X credits

Also fine.

180: Use every class-specific ability 75 times.

Here’s where ME and I really start to not get along. These achievements are trivial and meaningless. I chose to play through the game as an Infiltrator. This means there are a bunch of these that I can’t get without starting a whole new game as a different character. If I do this, all I’ll do is sit and cast all of these over and over at an inanimate object. This is not an achievement, but I’ll do it because I am a completionist. But I am not experiencing more of what the game has to offer, really, which is, in my mind, what the achievement structure should do. I will address what I would replace these with in the next section.

145: Complete the majority of the game with all the NPC’s

These are egregious. In my experience, the game does not change AT ALL based on which allies you have with you. They just run around and accomplish nothing while you kill everybody. Thus, this basically reads “complete all the sidequests identically a bunch of times”. Artificial replayability at its finest.

So, after giving 5 points from this pool (“complete majority”s combined with “75x ability usages”) to the Pistol kills achievement and 50 to the difficulty achievements, we have 270 to reassign. Check this action out:

20 g – Complete all Feros sidequests

50 g – Complete all Citadel sidequests.

50 g – Complete all UNC sidequests.

150 g – Complete all sidequests

(this would only include the appropriate background-specific quest for one play-through; it would not make you play through as all three backgrounds)

Ta da!

In the Todd theory of achievement distribution, it should generally be possible (and also very, very difficult) to get all the non-multiplayer achievements in one playthrough. Some exceptions can be made to allow for meaningful player choices in plot-based games (such as the paragon/renegade mutually exclusive achievements). I am for difficulty-based achievements, but feel it only common sense that harder difficulty achievements automatically unlock lower difficulty ones.

The games I have played so far that have the best achievement structure are Crackdown and Bioshock. Crackdown has a ton of wild achievements, some easy, some hard, and many are very unique and interesting. They encourage you to continue playing, and all can be done in one playthrough. They add a great deal of replayability and structure to a game that would otherwise have little of either. Bioshock, on the other hand, has a very straightforward achievement layout, but it is also a much more straightforward game. While it would be very difficult, all achievements COULD be completed in a single playthrough, and every single one makes you feel like you have accomplished something skillful rather than just investing a ton of otherwise-meaningless time.

I don’t really feel like multiplayer achievements have much validity, since the conditions under which they are earned are often arbitrary and inconsistent; killing the worst Gears player 100 times with the assault rifle is far easier than killing the best player the same number of times, but beating the game on Insane is a consistent and clearly quantifiable experience. There are sometimes ways to exploit game code or bugs, etc, but everyone who has earned a given single-player achievement has generally exhibited a comparable amount of skill. This is not at all true of multiplayer achievements. There are obviously exceptions (the get 10,000 kills achievement in Gears comes to mind), but largely I think they are unnecessary. Achievements at their best give single-player games replayability and added goals/structure; multiplayer generally needs no such incentive. The makers of Call of Duty 4 seem to agree, and it has been the most-played game on Live for the past three weeks despite having absolutely no multiplayer achievements.

Wow, that was long. I may have thought about this stuff way too much.

Dynasty Warriors 6

I picked up Dynasty Warriors 6 last night and played it for a few hours.

The Good
It's Dynasty Warriors
Graphics marginally improved
Fewer enemies popping in directly behind you
Skill trees
No bodyguards (they don't run off and get themselves killed)
Bows - Sun Shang Xiang, for example

The Bad
It's Dynasty Warriors
2-button button mashing reduced to 1-button button mashing
Why are enemies still popping in? Did you learn nothing, Koei?
"All new engine" apparently means "slight improvement on previous engine"
Cut scenes look like PS2 graphics
No bodyguards (to distract the enemy heros)
Voice acting is terrible, but this is typical

The Inexcusable
No online co-op. Seriously, not that hard. XBLA games have online co-op for crying out loud.

Final Assessment
I'll get my money's worth out of this game, since I enjoy Dynasty Warriors, but I still think Dynasty Warriors 3 (or was it 4?) was better overall.

Updated 2/26: added a few additional points