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This thread is inspired by another: view original post
Edited by Hylebos:
1/17/2014 10:30:24 PM
29
1/16/14 Bungie Podcast Summary
[url=http://downloads.bungie.net/podcasts/bungie_podcast_01162014.mp3]You need to freaking listen to this Podcast[/url], but if you can't I've got you covered. I spent about four hours typing up a very rough account of everything that was said over the hour long podcast. Please let me know if I get any of the details wrong, my sanity got a little strained near the end of the summary, and I'll probably go back through it slowly and edit it for readabillity.
The summary is split into five posts that are loosely daisy-chained with hyperlinks, but if you lose your place, all the bullet points are numbered for your reading and discussion convenience. There's a ton of new delicious info, and a lot of exciting things to discuss, so let's begin.
[quote][b]Introduction[/b][/quote]
[b]1)[/b] DeeJ, Urk, and Halcylon are back for the first Podcast of the new year.
[b]2)[/b] They recorded this just after the Game Informer Article came out, before the beginning of the new year.
[b]3)[/b] The guests for this podcast are Tyson Green and Lars Bakken. This is going to be gory and delicious.
[b]4)[/b] This was also recorded right before the Winter Build that they held right before they all left for break, where they stand up the current version of Destiny and they all play together for a day to see what is good and what sucks as they push towards the public beta.
[b]5)[/b] Tyson specifically is very excited to talk about what he's working on because there's been a lot of question as to "What does it mean to have an investment game?", "How will that get incorporated into the gameplay we know from Bungie?"
[b]6)[/b] We're going to hear about the nuts and bolts, the details, their goals, oh god I'm so excited to hear the rest of this podcast.
[b]7)[/b] There's a nice bit of parrying between the two guests because Tyson wants to create this grand investment system that defines a player and Lars has to then take that and balance it for a multiplayer universe, and how they communicate that and fight back and forth over what is what.
[b]8)[/b] They have a mindset where they try to anticipate what people want and feel over months and months to try to keep the experience organic and evolving and engage players.
[b]9)[/b] For Tyson he's constantly making new characters and going through the system, how does he keep in the mindset of "I'm a new player!" when he's done it so much?
[b]10)[/b] There is a bit of teasing about reading off the Destiny Script that is sitting a few feet from them in the Foley Sound Lab. Tyson is about to enter.
[quote][b]Part 1) Tyson Green, 8:00[/b][/quote]
[b]11)[/b] Tyson Green is the lead investment designer at Bungie, he tries to make people care about the game.
[b]12)[/b] Once people get Destiny, how will they recognize the investment team's finishing touches? The stuff that they do is woven throughout the game, you want to care about the game because it's fun, you want to care about the game because it's got a good story, but the investment team wants you to care about the game because it gives you things to do, things to want, it gives you things to have a social group work together around, basically they try to pull all the parts together and make you want to stick with this game.
[b]13)[/b] One of the things that has struck DeeJ as he's watched people look at investments is that people just assumed that they're tacking experience points on top of the experience, but Tyson cares about the moment to moment gameplay and what happens when people collide together, how do you make those experiences better, how do you reward people for doing the things you think they're going to want to do...
[b]14)[/b] There's a really shallow understanding of investment, most people think of experience points and grinds, but what the investment game does is it tries to broaden the spectrum of ways for you to care about the game, the goal isn't to make you play the game for a thousand hours, the goal is to make a game that you want to come back to and your friends come back to and you all feel like you want to keep playing this game; you have a social game at that point, a communal experience as opposed to the "Done in One" experience you pay $60 for a single play through and then you never touch it again. There's lots of layers here , in some of Bungie's past games there was investment systems that were based on skill, skill is a form of investment, if you spend time to become amazingly good at team slayer on lockout that's totally valid and real, if you spend a ton of time to learn every detail of the lore of the Marathon series that's also a form of investment, it's just as valid to an investment designer as having a couple of items and characters that are leveled up to the max. When you talk about investment, there's surface level investment, which is experience points and item drops, but then there are deeper layers of investment like caring about lore or caring about an experience you shared with other people.
[b]15)[/b] DeeJ says that when they're introducing people to this game who might not know it as well as the people on Bungie.net, they paint it in very broad strokes, the more you play the more dangerous you become the more rewards you earn the more you change the way you look and fight, are those the sorts of things you're creating with your systems?
[b]16)[/b] Yeah absolutely, if you are a person who has really deeply played this game who has done the hard challenges or covering the breadth of the game, you should look different and stand out from other people, your new friends should say "Wow, that's really cool, I want one of those, how do you get one of those?" and instead of you just saying "oh just beat the campaign" you say "oh man me and three other guys got together and we really worked on this one thing for a while and we got good at it and then this led to that and it all came together and that's how I got it. It was totally cool, do you want to work on that?"
[b]17)[/b] DeeJ says they talk about how the weapons tell stories and how many people take that to mean that there's fiction behind them and there is, but what they really mean is when you have that epic gun like the Fate of All Fools and when people go "Oh how did you get that?" you can tell them how to get it or you can help them get it and form a party and you create a story out of that moment for a player and those are super powerful and we see players do that intrinsically, guys like Mythic Tyrant for Halo would go out there and beat the game on the hardest mode and difficulty and what he would have to show for it was people knew his name, they saw his videos, if they wanted to beat the game in that same mode he could take them out and do that, part of Bungie's job with Destiny is to make sure that people know who he is IN the game, he doesn't neccessarily have to create a youtube channel, he can if he wants to, but in the game it will actually show that in his gear or some other stuff that they aren't ready to talk about or when you look at his profile on Bungie.net, those stories are really cool and potent.
[b]18)[/b] Tyson says the Mythic players are a really good example of: Hey once you have a game people care about for whatever reason, that gives you as a Mythic player an audience to play to, and another example with another game is you've got all these players who play Dark Souls a lot and you've got this tiny slice of those players who play through Dark Souls on level 1 characters to beat it, why are they doing that? Because there's an audience of players who think that is awesome! They are always impressed when you can do that and you do it for them, when you have a game that people don't care about because it came and went, well, you don't get that kind of community it doesn't really build up around those games, investment isn't about experience points and item drops, it's about having an enduring attachment to a game and community so that community can exist and thrive.
[b]19)[/b] How do you take this sort of old world order of a skill based first person shooter, 30 seconds of fun, I'm a player I'm powerful I have all these awesome weapons against enemies, be they AI or Human, and then fuse it with an investment game, does that require a whole lot of new thinking, does that require you to work a lot with a bunch of the activities guy sand the world designers to see wholistically how that should work or do you layer it in like icing on a cake?
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63361420&path=1]Link to next post[/url].
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1 ReplyEdited by Hylebos: 1/18/2014 12:27:11 AM[b]20)[/b] You do it really carefully, you start off with a good action game. You can't make a bad action game good by adding investment, but you can make a good action game bad by adding investment mechanisms, so they really have to look at it and say "is the game playing well? Okay, what are the ways can we add to the experience? A good example is breadth versus power, if you unlock new abillities and give people different weapons that are balanced but are different, those are valid rewards that doesn't ruin the game, it broadens the game, they give people more interesting opportunities and varied experiences. An investment game is also interesting because at a given point in time the game is really firm and balanced because you're not upsetting that, but over time you can let parts of that game come and go, you can say (Editor's Note: At this point they bleep out large chunks of what Tyson is saying)... you've gone and said "well maybe those abillities... they're not really availible anymore; those are on old items, things that don't drop anymore", and that creates a new environment, new variety in the experience, new opportunities for skilled players to excel and change their game, it keeps them from settling into a rut and staying there until they get bored of the game and leave. If everyone leaves then you don't have a community anymore. The investment game tries to make the action game better by creating breadth and personalization and personal identity and also helping it to evolve over time and balance itself. [b]21)[/b] Urk shares an anecdote about at one point for Hunter Builds the pistol was a secondary weapon and then one day he walked in and it was a primary weapon and it created huge ripple effects and it absolutely changed the way the sandbox felt, it just ratcheted it up (Tyson takes over) yeah that happened and now people were like "I really like that look and I like how that defines my character with my Hand Cannon Primary and I'm not just some space marine I'm a goddamn space cowboy gunslinger" and that's part of the awesome thing about using an investment game to help you build up self identity. [b]22)[/b] Is that an investment decision or is that a sandbox decision? Like how would you intersect with someone like Josh Hamrick on an investment system like that? Tyson says it would be a combination of a lot of things, for something like the earlier example it's the investment team going to Josh and saying "hey what if we shifted something like the Sniper out of the heavy category where it wasn't really working to the special category where it gets a lot more play? Now do we have a special category that has four items in it instead of three? Maybe it's more interesting if we moved [the hand cannon] up to the primary because what was the hand cannon really bringing to the special category? It was a longer range shotgun or a shorter ranged marksman rifle with a lot of precision, it existed in this weird space, so a lot of that did come from the sandbox side of things, they wanted to make that change, and investment said "Well cool that's good for us too because it broadens the scope of the primary slot and it makes the secondary slot really interesting even though it reduced the scope of the Heavy Slot, which wasn't a bad thing, because now those two weapons can be much stronger and really stand apart and be the fantasy of a rampage weapon. [b]23)[/b] How do you focus with regards to breadth, what is the thought process to balance that in a shared world and make it so that while "I might be better than Urk and I'm definitely better than DeeJ", how do we play together and have fun? What is the challenge? Sage characterizes balance not as "everyone is equal" but "not everyone is doing exactly the same thing" because if everyone is doing the same thing then something is not balanced because everyone is pursuing that one unbalanced thing, so the way they look at the balance of the investment game is they ask "well, is that driving people to do different things and try different things and explore different directions of using the sandbox and the game, or is it driving people to do exactly the same thing?", when they see the latter they say "well what is wrong with that, what do we need to do to fix that", part of the difficulty is that you just have to let the game mature and develop and then just ride with it. [b]24)[/b] DeeJ says it's interesting that they say that the Investment team has failed if everyone has the same favorite weapon and obviously with the huge arsenal in Destiny they don't want that to happen, they want people to say "My weapon is unique, I am unique, the way I use my weapon is unique", and he notes that Tyson has been with Bungie for as long as DeeJ has been aware of the company and he asks that as Tyson moves into the Destiny gamespace, what has been the biggest change over the years in terms of his approach to games and his approach to designing games. [b]25)[/b] A big part of it would be explicitly thinking about where the game will be 6 months after the game comes out, making sound decisions for the long game that won't make them regret their past selves. They're not building a game just to ship, they're building a game for the launch year, and that's a big shift for the entire studio. They don't build a game and then pivot towards building the next game, they have an evolving understanding of balance compared to what they had in the past where they say "We could drop it and the balance is perfect and nobody had to touch it anymore and it's a shining gem for all time", and that's something a lot of designers aspire to, they want to make the most perfectly balanced game of all time, but the problem is that those games don't hold a community the same way that an evolving game like League of Legends or DOTA 2 do, those games can build amazing communities about them and tons of excitement comes just from the fact that there's a metagame developing over time and the thing that was awesome before isn't so awesome and the thing you didn't think about before is suddenly the best idea you ever had and that kind of dynamic balance where the game is ebbing and flowing and changing and circulating, they think they understand that better and they want more of that now, they want to build a game that is exciting and entertaining always and not just exciting and entertaining because it arrived at a singularity point. [b]26)[/b] Halcylon asks if Bungie is prepared to say "Hey these new things are rolling out there's new investment there's new items there's new progression trees whatever have you" I just load up the game and there's a nag that tells you that the world has changed and you get to go in and experience these new progressions... (Tyson takes over) we want to commit to supporting the game as it's going and part of that means the investment game wants to be ongoing, we want to support that, so yeah, we look at 1000 hour grinds and we say "Oh god that's terrible" and instead they say "Let's make the game satisfying punchy and rewarding, and then support it and keep working on it, and keep making it good!", taking feedback from community and stuff like that, there's no avoiding that, if you don't take feedback, they will give it to you anyways. [b]27)[/b] In the past you can argue that people with these "perfect games" (Urk names CE as a hypothetical example) it endured and you can still play it and people got amazing at it and it's a great experience and game, but had we been able to go back and think "How can we add new maps and destinations and keep the story rolling and find ways to tweak and mess with the investment game and keep people coming back" like "Now gultch is a little different!" or "there's a new warthog variant!" and the way that would shake things up and make things feel dynamic and alive. [b]28)[/b] This happened not to long ago when Halo 3 was made free, there was a huge uptick of interest where they go "Oh my god everyone go to Xbox Live on this particular day and we're going to play Halo 3 just like old time!" and the thing about that which was sad was "Why should it be just like old times? Why shouldn't it just be like Whenever?" because that game is still vital and viable because there's a thriving community around it, why do games have to get old and die? It's been designed into those games. [b]29)[/b] DeeJ mentions that as much as you talk about deliberately sustaining the game with breadcrumbs for the gamers to have their best experiences, he enjoys the fact that it won't be a grind, because he's played games before where they take a great action game and they make it not as good with the inclusion of investment, he's played games where he says "why am I using this gun I hate using this gun!" but he's using that gun because he has to in order to get that other gun, he's force feeding himself a cauliflower to have a cinnamon roll later on. [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63361438&path=1]Link to next post.[/url]
