The Hidden Benefit of OnLive

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One of the biggest stories to emerge from GDC 2009 was the emergence of OnLive, a server-based gaming platform which would allow any PC or Mac, including bare-bones ones, with a fast network connection to play any game by running all the code – including the graphics rendering – on the server instead of on the local machine. In many ways, this service is a return to the “dumb terminal” model of the ’70s where no calculations were run on the user’s computer itself. So far, reactions have been mixed. Osma Ahvenlampi argues that, due to network lag, this model could never work; Adam Martin claims that it could work if the servers are located intelligently. Keith Boesky points out that the actual business model is simply acquisition.

I don’t claim to know if OnLive’s specific tech will work or not, but I would like to talk about the implications of this potential shift to server-based games. (Even if OnLive doesn’t make it work, clearly this technology will arrive at some point.) Of course, we already have server-based games – World of Warcraft runs on numerous servers spread around the world, with appropriate bits of game info set to thin clients running on local machines. However, a client is still a tricky piece of software, and as Raph Koster like to remind us, “The client is in the hands of the enemy.”

With OnLive, the client is so thin, I’m not sure if it’s appropriate even to call it a client. It’s more like a video-player. In fact, while the phrase “YouTube for Games” always refers to user-generated content, one should recall that YouTube had a second, perhaps more important, innovation: regardless of how a video was created, as long as the viewers had Flash, they could watch it immediately. The same concept hold for OnLive – as long as you have their app, you can play any game capable of running on their servers.

The implications of this change are huge – simply put, it spells the end of client-server architecture. Developers no longer need to optimize what data is sent to the client and what is kept back. Or worry about cheating. Or piracy, for that matter. While these advantages are huge, of course, what really interests me is that making a game multi-player is now, essentially, trivial. Put another way, the set of developers making one-man MMO’s will now be larger than just Eskil Steenberg.

Writing multi-player games is very, very hard. Trying to keep everything in-sync between servers and clients in a safe, responsive, fair, and accurate manner is no small challenge. With a system like OnLive, these issues evaporate because there are no clients anymore. Developers simply write one game, run it on some server, and update it based on user actions fed in from the network. If such a technology existed when we made Civ4, not only could we have saved man-years of development time and testing, but we could have easily implemented advanced features (games-of-the-day, mod sharing, massive player counts, asynchronous play, democracy-game support, etc.) with very little effort. Of course, I don’t know if OnLive will be the one to do it, but – from a developer’s point-of-view – the importance of this change cannot be overstated.

The Case for Metacritic

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Over the last few years, Metacritic has become a popular whipping boy within the games industry. A recent example would be Adam Sessler’s bit at GDC’s journalist rant session. At the risk of beginning to sound like a reactionary contrarian, I feel a case needs to be made for Metacritic. Unlike my argument for used games (or, rather, for thinking critically about what we are trying to sell consumers for $60), I feel much less conflicted in this case, so let me state my thesis very clearly: Metacritic has been a incredible boon for consumers and the games industry industry in general. The core reason is simple – publishers need a metric for quality.

What should executives do if they want to objectively raise the quality bar at their companies? They certainly don’t have enough time to play and judge their games for themselves. Even if they did, they would invariably overvalue their own tastes and opinions. Should they instead rely on their own internal play-testers? Trust the word of the developers? Simply listen to the market? I’ve been in the industry for ten years now, and when I started, the only objective measuring stick we had for “quality” was sales. Is that really what we want to return to?

Yes, I know translating all ratings onto a 100-point scale distorts them – a C is not a 60 is not three stars – but we need to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What are the odds that we can get every outlet onto the same scoring scale? Not likely. Can Metacritic improve the way it converts non-numeric ratings into scores? Absolutely. However, the whole point of an aggregator is that these issues come out in the wash. When 50 opinions are being thrown into the machine, a 74 is actually different from a 73.

I use Metacritic all the time, and I love it. It’s changed my game-buying (and movie-watching and music-listening) habits for the better, which of course funnels money into the pockets of deserving developers and encourages publishers to aim for critically-acclaimed products. Have we gotten so jaded that we have lost sight of what a wonderous thing this is? Metacritic puts an army of critics at our fingertips. Further, consumers are not morons who can’t judge a score within a larger context. We all realize that, due to the tastes of the average professional reviewer, some games are going to be over-rated and some will be under-rated.

Ultimately, the argument against Metacritic seems to revolve around whether publishers should take these numbers seriously. Some contracts are even beginning to include clauses tying bonuses to Metacritic scores. Others are concerned that publishers are too obsessed with raising their Metacritic averages. Actually, let’s think about that last sentence in detail. Note that when I just wrote “others,” I was referring to journalists, not to investors. As John Riccitiello famously said, “I don’t think investors give a shit about our quality.” How bizarre is it that once the game industry starts taking journalists’ work seriously, they complain about it?

I’ll give my own perspective on this issue. Over the years, I have seen many great ideas shut down becomes someone in charge thinks they won’t impact sales. However, when I am in an EA meeting in which we talk about the need to raise our Metacritic scores – and the concrete steps or extra development time thus required – I’ll tell you what I feel like doing. I feel like jumping for joy. How incredible is it to work for a publisher who cares about improving the quality of our games in the eyes of critics and uses an independent metric to prove it.

As for the renumeration issue, isn’t it a good thing that there is a second avenue for rewarding developers who have made a great game? Certainly, contracts are not going to stop favoring high game sales, so – hopefully – Metacritic clauses can ensure that a few developers with overlooked but highly-rated games will still be compensated. Now, if a game doesn’t have high sales and also doesn’t get a good Metacritic score, well, there’s a name for that type of game, and these developers should not be protesting. Further, developers also need to stop complaining that a few specific reviews are dragging down their Metacritic scores. Besides the fact that both good and bad reviews are earned, in a world without Metacritic, one low score from GameSpot, GameSpy, 1Up, or IGN becomes a disaster. Score aggregation, by definition, protects developers from too much power being in the hands of one critic.

Journalists also need to have the guts to give games a score and stick by it. Putting a score on a review doesn’t take away the ability to add nuance to one’s criticism. My favorite music book is the Third Edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide. As the reviews were written by just four critics, I have learned to understand the exact difference between five and four-and-a-half stars (or, for that matter, between two-and-a-half and three stars). If you are a great reviewer, the score you give a game helps me place it in context with everything else you have rated. Moreover, your score lets you contribute, via Metacritic and all the other aggregators, to the meta-critique of games on the Net. What exactly is the problem here?

Two Thoughts on GDC 2009

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2009 will not go down as my favorite GDC. In many ways, this year may have been the worst of the eight I have attended. However, to paraphrase Woody Allen, even when GDC is bad, it’s still pretty incredible. The problem was not one with organization or speaker selection or much anything else that could have been controlled by the people in charge. Indeed, GDC 2009 was more notable for what was not said instead of what actually was. More specifically, nothing even semi-official about the next console generation was mentioned anywhere. Even the rumor mill was pretty dry. Compare this year to, say, GDC 2004, and you’ll see a huge difference as all three manufacturers were already beginning to jockey for position. Furthermore, the online revolutions which have made GDC so fascinating lately (free-to-play, casual MMO’s, virtual goods, web-based gaming, social networks, etc.) are, at least from the conference’s perspective, old news now. Finally, an actual, profitable indie market is no longer a theoretical concept to be taken on faith – the success of Braid, N+, Desktop Tower Defense, Castle Crashers, and World of Goo proves the viability of micro-studios. Our industry can once again support the idiosyncratic visions of the type of single designer/programmers that served us so well in the ‘80s (Bunten, Meier, Wright, Molyneux). Cleary, these transitions are still just beginning, but there are few left who would deny that massive changes are underway. The problem for GDC, perhaps, is that with so many new avenues open, most developers are now simply focused on execution. Hopefully, we should have some fascinating post-mortem in a few years.

One final note should be made about GDC’s current format, one which I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere. For years and years, the conventional wisdom was that the first two days of the conference were a waste of time, composed entirely of bloated tutorials that stretched single topics thin over a numbing 8 hours. However, over the last three years or so, the organizers have nurtured a collection of summits – for casual games, for virtual worlds, for indies, for mobile, for AI, and so on – that are now a smorgasbord of interesting speakers and topics jammed into flexible time slots (sometimes only 30 minutes). Instead of the paltry four or five talks per day available during the main conference, one can see eight, nine, even ten presentations a day by jumping from summit to summit depending on one’s personal preferences. This mixing and matching is aided by the reduced size of the conference on those days – most of the summits were all located along a single hallway in the North Hall. The growth and development of these summits has lead to an interesting inversion of GDC’s traditional balance – today, the first two days of GDC are actually more interesting than the “real” Wednesday-Friday conference.

This Will Surely End Badly

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So, I have finally joined the pseudo-masses and am now on Twitter. I’m not sure how this will all play out – perhaps my blog will someday report that I lasted twittered 283 days ago – but it’s worth a try. I’ll be twittering my GDC thoughts this week (assuming I can make it work from my BlackBerry). Come to think of it, this might actually allow me to record the GDC notes I’ve always wanted to take but never did (or misplaced). Also, by twittering, I’ll get to skip writing my annual, three-months-late GDC summary! So, there’s that…

Mind the Gap

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I am on a GDC panel this year on the overlaps, conflicts, and parallels between AI and game design. We’ve got a mix of designers (Alex and Josh) and AI programmers (Adam and Tara), so it should be an interesting conversation. Here’s the info:

(307) AI and Designers: Mind the Gap
Speaker: Soren Johnson (Designer & Programmer, EA Maxis), Alex Hutchinson (Creative Director, Electronic Arts Montreal), Joshua Mosqueira (Creative Director, Ubisoft Montreal), Adam Russell (Lecturer, Derby University), Tara Teich (Programmer, Double Fine)
Date/Time: Monday (March 23, 2009)   3:00pm — 4:00pm
Location (room): Room 2018, West Hall
Track: AI Summit
Format: 60-minute Panel
Experience Level: Intermediate

Session Description
Game design and AI development have always been close relatives. Indeed, defining a line that separates the two is almost impossible as one cannot exist with the other – a feature that the AI cannot handle, for example, is worthless, and the behavior of the AI itself is core to a game’s pacing, challenge, and feel. Thus, almost every decision an AI programmer makes is essentially a gameplay decision, yet AI developers are neither hired as nor trained to be designers. On the other hand, pure designers are often at the mercy of AI programmers to turn their broad strokes concerning AI behavior into reality and have few options if the outcome is wrong. In the panel, we will explore ways to manage this gap between designers and AI programmers to help establish better practices for this important (and inevitable) collaboration.

The Perfect Strategy Podcast

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It’s called Three Moves Ahead, and the cast of characters is Tom Chick, Bruce Geryk, Julian Murdoch, and Troy S. Goodfellow, all familiar names for strategy gamers who like to read about their hobby.

In the latest episode, they tackle an issue that I am going to be addressing in my next GD column (#5), which is whether separate strategic and tactical sub-games can live together happily in one single title. They use the Total War series as the primary data point, and I’m not surprised. I’ve never enjoyed the tactical battles of the series – too slow and ponderous for my RTS tastes weaned on StarCraft and Age of Kings – while also finding the strategic levels too vague and opaque to enjoy, with simply not enough meat on the bone. Having the top-level game be constantly interupted by the unwelcome tactical battles certainly didn’t help matters either. However, the mix can be done well, as games like Lord of the Realms or X-Com prove. The trick, in my mind, is to make sure that one half of the game is always subservient to the other half. X-Com, for example, is clearly about the tactical combat while Lord of the Realm is clearly about the strategic level. Still, in general, I’m not sure it’s a challenge that is worth tackling. It’s a lot easier to make one great game than two good (let alone great) ones that actually fit together.

Why Multiplayer is So Important

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I was on Amazon the other day, and it struck me how well some older titles are holding their price points, especially older titles with a compelling multiplayer component. These games are still making significant profits for their publishers over a year and a half after their release. Perhaps the most important reason is that gamers tend to hold onto games with fun multiplayer – not giving GameStop a glut of used copies to drive the price down across all retailers. Consider these prices:

PS3 – Call of Duty 4: $56.99 (’07) vs. Metal Gear Solid 4: $39.99 (’08)

360 – Halo 3: $36.99 (’07) vs. Mass Effect: $19.99 (’07)

GD Column 4: Designing for Free

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The following was published in the November 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine…

In China, a new MMORPG with a very aggressive business model, entitled ZT Online, has gained significant popularity. With an ARPU of $40/quarter spread over one million paying users, the game has made its publisher, Giant Interactive, one of the most profitable online entertainment companies in China.  Like many Asian games, ZT is free-to-play (F2P) and focuses primarily on player-vs-player gameplay. Not only can players steal from their defeated foes, but weaker characters can even be kidnapped and held for ransom, locking their owners out of the game.

Access to equipment in ZT is very limited. First of all, there are no loot drops from killing monsters or completing quests. Further, all items in the game are completely bound to the owner, so there is no way to trade for better weapons with other players. Instead, the primary way to gain equipment to empower one’s character is by paying real money directly to the publisher to open “treasure chests.” Essentially in-game slot machines, these chest have only a small chance of producing something useful, and finding the best equipment often requires opening thousands of chests. In fact, each day, the game confers a special bonus to the player who has opened the most chests, meaning the player who has spent the most real-world money to obtain better items.

ZT Online‘s complete embrace, at every level of the game, of real-money transactions (RMT) may be appalling to some in the West, but the game is in many ways at the vanguard of a trend to develop games that take advantage of the players’ appetites for spending money to gain in-game advantages. Ironically, the F2P-with-RMT model traces its origins to the challenge of getting Asian gamers to buy boxed, retail games, most of whom preferred the free ride of easy and widespread piracy. In response, Korean companies like Nexon and NCsoft built server-based online games which could not be pirated and would require alternate business models.

Starting with subscriptions (including the world’s first million-subscriber MMO, NCsoft’s Lineage), the Korean industry eventually shifted to F2P games that made money from micro-transactions, such as Nexon’s KartRider and MapleStory. With many of these online games serving tens of millions of players, the Korean model has begun attracting the attention of major Western publishers, who have chartered their own F2P games in Asia, such as EA’s FIFA Online, Valve’s Counter-Strike Online, and THQ’s Company of Heroes Onine.

The promise of F2P games is that gamers will get hooked on a free game and then eventually spend their own money on their new passion. However, designing these games is not a simple endeavor; in fact, the challenges of F2P design can make developers appreciate how fortunate they were when they could design for a fixed-cost product, either a boxed, retail game or a standard, subscription-based MMO. In a fixed-cost world, the designer can focus on just one thing: making the player’s experience as engaging and interesting and fun as possible.

For a F2P game, however, designers have to balance making free content fun enough to engage first-time players but not so much fun that they would not yearn for something more, something that could be turned into a transaction sometime in the future. Every design decision must be made with a mind towards how it affects the balance between free and paid content. Thus, the true cost of piracy is that the line between game business and game design has blurred. As games move from boxed products to ongoing services, business decisions will become increasingly indistinguishable from design decisions. Of course, the industry has seen game designers play businessmen before – a fundamental part of arcade game design was understanding how to suck the most quarters out of players. Thus, understanding how successful F2P game have navigated these waters is instructive.

Business or Design?

The aforementioned 2D MMORPG MapleStory has an in-game RMT store in which players can purchase items for their characters. These purchases can range from purely cosmetic items, such as funny shades or blue-colored hair, to consumables which give actual in-game bonuses. These consumables include tickets for earning double experience points over 24 hours, avatar warps for triggering instant travel, and ability resets for realigning character traits. In a nod to in-game fairness, these bonuses only save the purchaser time instead of directly increasing the power of his character. This distinction is important as RMT can still have in-game meaning without needing to be tied to the game’s best weapons and equipment, as with ZT Online.

Maple Story Cash Store

Another popular F2P game with a different business model is the web-based MMORPG RuneScape, which uses optional subscriptions instead of optional microtransactions. Subscribers gain access to more quests, new areas, player housing, and extra skills. Again, the designers have to decide where to draw the line between free content to grow the game and paid content to drive revenue. As one in every six active players currently chooses to subscribe, they have struck a good balance.

Travian, a successful web-based MMO strategy game, does allow players to purchase temporary in-game bonuses, such as +10% attack strength or +25% wood production for a week. These bonuses have been controversial among the community as many players feel obligated to buy them in order to compete at the highest level. Gamers can also purchase Travian Plus, which unlocks an improved interface to make playing the game more efficient. The Plus mode includes a larger map display, a combat simulator, empire management tools, graphical info screens, and queued construction orders.

As a comparison, all of these features would be expected in a similar boxed, retail strategy game, such as Civilization 4. However, by withholding their best, the designers are walking a dangerous line here as players could be turned off by the purposely crippled interface. For example, in Travian, each of your towns can construct only one upgrade at a time. Thus, players are encouraged to visit their towns every time an upgrade is finished, and as each upgrade might take half an hour, players may need to check the site many, many times each day just to keep pace with their competitors. A simple order queue would fix this problem, but the designers purposely decided to offer this feature only to players willing to pay for Plus.

Whether this decision was right or wrong remains an open question, but perhaps a more important question is who made this decision? Game designers or businessmen? Does it even make sense to think of them as being different in a world where every element of a game can be given a price? Without a good balance of the needs of profit and of fun, F2P games will feel either like a con job designed to suck away all of the player’s money (as with ZT Online) or a charitable endeavor that never acquires the resources needed to develop and grow. However, when facing a difficult decision, one should always err on the side of providing the best free content possible. Greedy developers looking to maximize profits in the short-term risk losing their evangelizers willing to spread the word about a great game which is genuinely free-to-play.

A Free Market Solution

One interesting way to solve this problem – pioneered by Korean companies like Nexon – is the dual currency system, which lets the free market manage the balance. The Java-based MMO Puzzle Pirates employs such a system to meet the needs of both players who are time-rich and players who are cash-rich. One type of currency, Pieces of Eight (PoE), is earned by spending time playing puzzle games while the other type of currency, Doubloons, is bought directly with real money. A wide variety of items are available for purchase, with effects ranging from aesthetic changes to in-game upgrades. However, as items often cost both types of currency, players who cannot afford to buy Doubloons can trade for some by giving their PoE to cash-rich players. These latter players may need the PoE because they don’t have the time to spend earning it by playing puzzles for hours. By allowing players to freely trade the two currencies, the designers have created multiple paths to earning any single purchasable item.

Puzzle Pirates Exchange

Thus, the designers avoid the balance issues faced in Travian by making sure that all content and features are available to all players, whether they are willing to spend money or not. In fact, when a time-rich player trades for Doubloons, the cash-rich player is essentially “sponsoring” her peer – every Doubloon spent in Puzzle Pirates earns the developer money, whether the Doubloon is spent by the original purchaser or not. A natural free market dynamic keeps the two sides balanced. If too many time-rich players flood the game, the value of PoE will plummet, tempting players on the bubble to spend a little cash to take advantage of the low prices. Thus, with the help of the auto-balancing market forces of the dual currency system, the designer’s goal simply becomes creating a compelling experience that keeps people playing the game.

Even Giant Interactive is beginning to understand the limitations of the soak-the-rich design of ZT Online. The publisher is developing a subscription-based version of ZT (without the casino-style treasure chests) that is being launched for the low-income market not happy about playing a game full of rich players who have bought their way to the top. Another game they are publishing, Giant Online, aims for the middle-income segment by allowing RMT but adding spending caps to prevent a monetary arms race.

These developments are welcome because the free-to-play format holds great promise. F2P games have a much larger potential audience than their fixed-cost counterparts because of the former’s ability to satisfy different levels of player commitment, both in terms of time and money. Further, the potential for innovation is greater because consumers are no longer required to make a “leap of faith” when making a large, up-front retail purchase. However, the challenge of developing F2P game is that being “just” a game designer is no longer sufficient. Success, both in terms of profit and popularity, will be determined by how well the game design matches the business model.

GD Column 3: Game Economics

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The following was published in the September 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine…

Game design and economics have a spotty history. Designing a fun and functional economy is no easy task as many design assumptions tend to backfire when they come in contact with the player. For example, the early days of Ultima Online were infamous for the game’s wild and chaotic economy. Zachary Booth Simpson wrote a classic analysis of UO in 1999, detailing some of the more notable problems experienced at launch:

  • the crafting system encouraged massive over-production by rewarding players for each item produced
  • this over-production led to hyper-inflation as NPC shopkeepers printed money on demand to buy the worthless items
  • players used vendors as unlimited safety deposit boxes by setting the prices for their own goods far above market value
  • item hoarding by players forced the team to abandon the closed-loop economy as the world began to empty out of goods
  • player cartels (including one from a rival game company!) cornered the market on magical Reagents, preventing average users from casting spells

MMO economies have come a long way since then; World of Warcraft‘s auction house is now a vibrant part of the game’s economy and overall world, with many players spending much of their time “playing the market” to good effect. CCP, developers of EVE Online, even hired an academic economist to analyze the flow of resources and the fluctuation of prices within their game world. Indeed, understanding the potential effect of market forces on gameplay is an important ability for designers to develop.

Can the Market Balance the Game?

Many designers have used economic game mechanics as a tool for balancing their games. For example, in Rise of Nations, every time a unit – such as a Knight or Archer – is purchased, the cost of future units of the same type goes up, simulating the pressure of demand upon price. This design encouraged players to diversify their armed forces, in order to maximize their civilization’s buying power. By allowing the “values” of different paths and options to float during a game, designers present players with a constantly shifting landscape, extending replayability by guaranteeing no perfect path to victory.

However, if taken too far, efforts to auto-balance by tweaking the economy can destroy a game. In 2006, Valve conducted an interesting economic experiment within Counter-Strike: Source, implementing a “Dynamic Weapon Pricing” algorithm. According to the developers, “the prices of weapons and equipment will be updated each week based on the global market demand for each item. As more people purchase a certain weapon, the price for that weapon will rise and other weapons will become less expensive.”

Unfortunately, the overwhelming popularity of certain weapons trumped the ability of the algorithm to balance the game. For example, while the very effective Desert Eagle skyrocketed to $16,000, the less useful Glock flatlined at $1, leading to some extreme edge cases (such as the pictured “Glock bomb”). A game economy is not a real economy; not everything can be balanced simply by altering its price. Gamers just want to have fun, and if the cost of the option considered the most fun is constantly tuned higher and higher until the price becomes prohibitive, players may not just alter their strategy – they may simply go play another game. The current price of gas may be making our real lives “unfun”, but only one real-world economy exists, leaving us no choice. Gamers are not in the same situation.

Ultimately, designers should remember that achieving perfect balance is a dubious goal. Players are not looking for another game like rock/paper/scissors, in which every choice is guaranteed to be valid, essentially encouraging random strategies. Players are motivated by reasons beyond purely economic ones when playing games. Raising the cost of a player’s favorite weapon is simply going to feel like a penalty and should only be done if the imbalance is actually ruining the core game.

Glock Bomb

Putting the Market Inside the Game

Perhaps a more appropriate use of economic dynamics is as a transparent mechanic within the game itself. The board game world provides some great examples of such free market mechanics at work. German-style games Puerto Rico and Vinci both use increasing subsidies to improve the appeal of unpopular roles and technologies, respectively. In the case of the former, every turn no player decides to be the Craftsman, one gold piece is added as a “reward” for choosing that role. As the gold increases slowly, few players will be able to resist such a bounty, which nicely solves the problem of making sure all roles are eventually chosen.

Puerto Rico still has some clearly better and clearly worse options – they just change from turn to turn based on the current reward. In this case, auto-balancing actually keeps the game fun because players are rewarded for choosing less common strategies, instead of being penalized for sticking to their favorites. Perhaps more importantly, the effects of the market are spelled out clearly for the players ahead of time, so that no one feels the game is biased against them.

Perhaps the most elegant example of a pure free market mechanic based around actual resources and prices can be found in Power Grid, another German-style board game. In this case, players supply their power plants with a variety of resources (oil, coal, uranium, and garbage), all of which are purchased from a central market. Resource pieces are arranged on a linear track of escalating prices. Every turn, X new pieces of each resource are added to the market, and players take Y pieces away as purchases. As the supply goes up and down, the price correspondingly goes up and down, depending on where the next available piece is on the market track.

By making the supply-demand mechanic so explicit and transparent to the players, the market becomes its own battlefield, as much as the hex grid of a wargame might be. By buying up as much coal as possible, one player might drive the price out of the range of the player in the next seat, causing her to be unable to supply all her plants at the end of the turn, a disastrous event in Power Grid. Thus, with a true open market, price can be used as a weapon just as much as an arrow or a sword might be in a military game.

Power Grid

The Benefits of Free Trade

Similarly, a number of modern strategy games, including Sins of a Solar Empire and the Age of Empires series, have included free markets in which players could buy and sell resources, influencing global prices with their actions. These markets serve as interesting “greed tests” in that players are often tempted to sell when they need cash or to buy when they are short on a specific resource, but they know in the back of their minds that each time they use the market, they are potentially giving an advantage to another player. Buy too much wood in Age of Kings, and your opponents can make all the gold they need selling off their excess supply.

Unfortunately, the market dynamics of these games tend to repeat themselves, with prices usually bottoming out once the players’ total production overwhelms their needs. This effect stems from the fact that the game maps emphasize economic fairness – in AoK, each player is guaranteed a decent supply of gold, stone, and wood within a short distance of their starting location. Spreading resources randomly around the map could lead a much more dynamic and interesting market mechanic but at the cost of overall play balance for a game with a core military mechanic. If your opponents attack with horsemen, what if there is no wood with which to build spearmen, the appropriate counter unit?

However, a game with a core economic mechanic does not suffer from such limitations. In most business-based games, specializing in a specific resource is a basic part of the gameplay. Thus, a free market mechanic can become a compelling part of a competitive game. The ultimate example of such a game is the ’80s classic M.U.L.E., in which four players vie for economic dominance on a newly-settled world. Although only four resources exist (food, energy, smithore, and crystite), economies-of-scale encourage players to specialize. More importantly, players can rarely produce all the resources they need on their own, requiring them to buy directly from other players.

The game has a brilliant interface for facilitating this trade between players. Buyers are arranged along the bottom edge of the screen, with sellers on the top. As buyers move up, their asking price goes up accordingly. As sellers descend, their offer price decreases as well. When the two meet in the middle, a transaction occurs. Once again, the mechanic is explicit and transparent – player inventories and market prices are all clearly visible to everyone. Players understand that they either have to adjust their own prices to make a deal happen or hope that their rivals cave. Knowing how desperate another player might be to acquire the energy needed to power his buildings or the food needed to feed his labor, the temptation to pull ever last penny from him is strong. In such a case, prices tend to fall only if the player is afraid someone else might sweep in to reap the profits! The game mechanic mined here by M.U.L.E. is deep and rich. Impoverishing one’s enemies can be just as much fun as destroying them.

A History of Fall from Heaven (Part III)

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Fall from Heaven is a dark fantasy Civilization IV mod, built by a team headed by Derek Paxton. The first version was released on December 16th, 2005 and last month – exactly three years later – the “gold” version was uploaded. The project is the most successful Civ4 mod yet created, with hundreds of thousands of downloads and positive nods from critics like Tom Chick. I recently had an opportunity to interview Derek and his team on the final release of his the mod, which is available for download here. (Note: Fall requires a fully patch version of Beyond the Sword to play.)

Soren: One standard way to write a game post-mortems is to list things in two categories: What Went Right and What Went Wrong. I’d be interested to hear what you would put under each heading. (Sometimes, things fit in both places!)

Derek: I think we made the right game for the platform, both from the user-base interest and what the Civilization IV engine was able to deliver.  We didn’t come into this with an idea of the game we wanted to make and then tried to make the engine do that – though, at some point, that’s what it feels like.  We started fresh, played and loved the core game, and looked at what we could offer on top of that.  Because of that, new versions/expansions of Civ made our game better as well.

As for what went wrong, if I could go back, I never would have started the design with 21 civilizations.  I would have had much less, maybe as few as 9 or 10. Although people love the 21 civilizations in the game, and I feel like we did a good job differentiating each one, there is a balance between depth and breath that is a real physical limitation on how much detail we can give to each asset in the game.  At this point in the process, I can’t imagine cutting any of the civilizations, and Fall is a better game for their inclusion, but when I consider the amount of detail and polish that could have been given to a game with only 9 civilizations to focus on, it makes me envious.

Tom: This might not belong here with this question, but one of the things that is both right and wrong with Fall is the fact that Derek is running a nearly perfect ship.  He mentioned above that I’ve been involved in numerous other mods, and they all fail in comparison with Fall in many ways, but the most glaring is that they simply don’t have his leadership.  Many times we’ve had discussions that other mods are being unfairly compared to Fall, and – from first hand experience – it’s true.  Other mods simply didn’t or don’t have Derek and his drive to make a perfect mod.  After playing Fall, its unfortunate that players who aren’t involved in modding hold these other mods to unobtainable levels of quality because Derek makes Fall look so easy and polished.  The bar is set very high for Civ4 mods.

Soren: Let’s talk a little about the gameplay itself. What are some of the mechanics that you are most proud of developing in FfH? What ideas turned out to be the most fun? The most original? The hardest to get right?

Derek: Thats tough.  I’d love to hear the answers form the other team members too.  Lets see:

1. The most proud of: Orthus.  Orthus is a unique, powerful barbarian unit that spawns early on and terrorizes any civ unfortunate enough to be near him.  The unit that kills Orthus gets a special promotion called “Orthus’s Axe” that makes them more powerful.  I learned so much from Orthus.  He made games dynamic, players loved the surprise of seeing him coming into their lands for the first time, and loved hunting him down to gain his axe.  It was the first dynamic component of the mod that showed me what could be done, and he had a huge influence on later game design.

2. The most fun: I really like our vampire mechanic.  One civilization, the Calabim, are a society of vampiric aristocrats ruling over a peasant class that they treat as little more than livestock.  The actual vampire unit comes in the midgame for this civilization, and vampires have a few special powers: they can consume population to become stronger (gain experience), they can feast on weak Calabim Bloodpet units to heal themselves and regain the ability to attack, and they can gift other units in their stack with vampirism if they are above a certain level.  Those changes are relatively minor (in the scope of how much code it takes to do), but it does such a great job of marrying the flavor of the civilization with the gameplay.  It’s so easy to play as the Calabim and picture your population as a food resource for your vampire units.  We try to hit that kind of synergy with every civilization, but I think we got closest to it with the Calabim.

3. The most original: The Armageddon Counter (AC).  Turn-based games tend to go into a late game deadlock situation, and there isn’t much reason to have wars outside of specific victory conditions.  The AC begins to have an effect from the mid-game on.  It rises as “bad” things happen in the world – cities are razed, evil religions spread, powerful demons enter the world.  It goes down as “good” things happen, powerful demons are defeated, evil holy cities are destroyed, graves and city ruins are sanctified.  If the player stays in his borders and doesn’t engage with the rest of the world, the AC may not become an issue or may begin to rise depending on what is happening in that game.  However, the important part is that the effects of the AC, powerful creatures appearing, blight and pestilences striking the world, AI players becoming more and more likely to go to war with each other, are shared by all players. So if you hide in your borders, you will still be subject to them.  Because of that, players have an incentive to come out of their shells and try to direct the outcome of the world.

They may set out on an expedition to raze the holy city of the evil religion or to defeat a powerful demon.  They may decide to go to war with a civilization thats performing a lot of AC-raising activities.  The AC keeps the player engaged in the late-game, keeps the game strategically interesting and is, as far as I know, a unique way to handle the slow late-game issues TBS games are subject to.

4. The hardest to get right: The Armageddon Counter.  Trying to balance its effects so they aren’t too punishing, but punishing enough to make them strategically significant, is very hard and still isn’t perfect.  Part of it is the difference in individual taste and part of it is just the nature of a random game.  Anytime negative effects (those that punish players) are added to a game, we have this challenge.

Tom: I think most every unique mechanic that we came up with is something of which I’m proud.  Trying to make each of the civs spicy and different without making it look like we tried too hard was challenging and fun.  From the Khazad vaults to the Kuriotate settlements.

1. The most proud of:  The spell system and filling every sphere.  Talchas did amazing work, and it’s been one of the things that really makes FfH stand out.  Also, the metal system is so brilliant that I can’t play the original game now because it isn’t there.

2. The most fun: The Sidar mechanic of turning level 6 units into wanes and then adding these as great people to your cities and creating super cities is wildly fun.  When we first introduced that mechanic, I playtested them to death, and it really made them stand out.

3. The most original: The metal system again.  Gaining +1 from bronze, iron, and then mithril is a great way to upgrade older units and adds another reason to fight over resources.

4. The hardest to get right: I’ll write Orthus here.  He used to be much more of a badass than he is now.  He used to make me enter the WB or simply restart a game.  Now, he isn’t nearly as strong.

5. Biggest disappointment that didn’t work out:  Multiple maps.  We had such a good idea originally for hell.  Sadly, hell, the underground, or other areas, simply won’t work with multiple maps.

6. Mechanic still hoping for:  The wilderness.  It’s been on the backburner for 18 months or so after the original idea was dreamed up.  I’d still love to see areas unexplorable that have a fog-of-war for long periods of the game.  Or, when you enter them, you can’t see more than the tile you are on.  Very dangerous.

Randy: The Mercurian and Infernals could probably be a fitting answer to all of those categories, I think. These two civilizations enter the game at about the half way point. The player can choose to switch and begin controlling the leader of the new civilization or stay the with their original and have a new partner or rival, respectively. Obviously, starting a civilization fresh midgame calls for some special mechanics that have to be used pretty carefully to avoid overpowering or trivializing that player, in human or AI hands. Also, they are each tied to one of the more polarizing religions as well as the AC. Quite a balancing act, and it’s taken awhile for them to evolve into their intended roles – it was disappointing at times to summon a huge demon who hides out in the arctic circle for the rest of the game, wishing he had room to settle in! At the moment, I think they are in decent shape. They probably won’t be a major factor in every game but should be able to to provide either a challenge, a decent partner, or a new civilization choice often enough.

On a much smaller scale, the Naval Crews are a pretty neat effect, allowing any ship in a city to make a small optimization by choosing a promotion that adds either strength, movement, or cargo space, but each one has a drawback as well. This can be changed later if the ship is in a city or on a Lanun civ-specific improvement. It adds some strategic variety to what is otherwise a fairly small number of naval units.

Eli: I’m most proud of the way the Balseraph (evil clown) civilization turned out. In my opinion, it has the best overall feeling of completeness in artwork, backstories, and mechanics. For example, the Balseraph Freaks are units that can be built very early on, without requiring a building in the city (in FfH nearly all units have a building req), and starts mutated. In other words, the Freaks all start with slightly different stats and abilities, sometimes good and sometimes bad. Cool by itself, but what makes the Freaks really interesting is the synergy between them and the other Balseraph mechanics. After building a freak, if it has potential to be a good unit, then you can send it to fight in the Arena (Balseraph UB). If it wins the fight (50% chance), then it gets bonus XP and should then be upgraded to a swordsman or hunter. If it dies, then you just build another freak. Or, if the freak’s mutation makes it too weak for combat, then you can use it to build a “freak show” in its city, increasing happiness and culture. Either way, plenty of strategy involved, and that’s just one facet of the Balseraphs.

Derek: I have a question for you Soren, understanding that we had the luxury of taking everything you did and then spend an additional three years on our own ideas and changes, what do you think doesn’t work well in Fall?  What things would you change?

Soren: First of all, I need to start by saying how impressed I have been by Fall from Heaven. Besides the remarkable level of polish – from the graphics to the sound to the lore – I’ve really appreciated how your team has subverted many of the core Civ conventions to make a compelling fantasy game that is unique from Civ yet still feels familiar to long-time fans of the series. It’s hard to stop playing just to see what other new wrinkles the game is going to reveal. There is a tangible sense of discovery to the game, which is hard for a designer to achieve. Your team should be very proud of what they have accomplished.

As for what I would change, I think my criticisms fall into three major categories: communication, pacing, and density. Let’s start with the first issue – as I’m sure you’re aware, many of Fall‘s features are not fully documented, either in-game or within the Civilopedia. However, the biggest problem is that of the new choices and objects that one encounters during the game, quite a few are not even partially explained by the pop-up help. For example, it’s great that the Pool of Tears is identified with a label on the map, but mousing-over it doesn’t tell me that it makes nearby cities happy or that it cures disease, plague, and poison. Similarly, the Fire I promotion allows Blaze, but the help doesn’t tell me what the Blaze spell does. What about the global March of the Trees spell? I see that I can only cast it once per game, but what is the effect?

For some of these more unique items, I’m surprised that you didn’t use the <Help> tag, which I believe is available by default for all of the XML-based game elements. This tag lets you add an extra descriptor to any item if the normal popup help is insignificant. Because our goal with Civ4 was to have a completely dynamic help system, we rarely used these tags. Instead, I envisioned that they would be most useful for mods and scenarios. On the other hand, if you really want to follow through on making Fall a platform instead of just a game, you need to extend our dynamic help system yourself to cover all the features that you have exposed for modders. I see that you have already done some work along those lines as I saw new, unfamiliar pop-up help while playing but much seems left to be done.

The next problem is pacing – on default, the game is tuned to last 690 turns. That’s a lot of turns! Fall has a plethora of divergent play strategies, which is great, but I would rather play 3 short 300-turn games with a different civilization each time than one epic games in which I’m waiting and waiting and waiting to see if my choices are going to pay off or not. I think the best answer, though, is not just to speed up the game by reducing the costs of techs and buildings and whatnot. Fall simply has too much Civ-like infrastructure busywork – which is not Fall‘s strength – and all that settler/worker/citizen/building-management really slows things down. To solve this, I would fill at least half of the map with wasteland-type terrain that might hold treasures and dungeons and monsters and mana but could not be settled by civilizations (or, perhaps, by specific civilizations). This change would allow for a faster game with more exploration and more variety. The victory conditions also seem quite difficult to achieve – sixteen different mana sources are needed for the Tower of Mastery, correct? I’d prefer easier to achieve end goals that allow for more of a race-to-the-finish instead of a slog.

The final issue is density, by which I mean the sheer number of options available to the player at any one time. At one point, I had 18 different technologies to choose from! The design provides a great number of paths which the player can pursue – many more than in standard Civ4 – but showing them all to the player at once can be overwhelming. I also have a sense that the game has simply too much stuff in it – over 150 buildings and wonders, 200 units, 160 spells, 56 heroes, 21 very unique civilizations. As you mentioned above, with fewer game elements, the polish could have been much higher. I wouldn’t necessarily start by cutting stuff, but I think it would be interesting to have more civ- and style-specific techs that lock away a significant chunk of the game so that the player is never drowning in options and also so that each playthrough would feel significantly different. Your design heads down this path in many ways – by tying buildings and spells to flavors of mana, for example – but I wish your team would go farther.

One thing I find very inspiring about Fall is how many small tweaks were made to the core Civ rules that led to instantly interesting, new gameplay. For example:

  • Buildings are required in each city to unlock most units (such as an Archery Range to build Archers)
  • Some units cannot be built but only upgraded from other, high-level units (such as High Priests from Priests of level 6 or higher)
  • A few Wonders have simple, one-time effects (such as the Pact of Nilhorn which gives three Hill Giants)
  • Hero units can only be built once (including Guybrush Threepwood!) and share their own extra sub-tree of promotions
  • Spell-casting units receive free XP each turn, letting them access higher-level spells as the game progresses
  • Hybrid units, like Acolytes, which can act like Missionaries (spreading religion) or Great Artists (spreading culture) but can also still fight

Ultimately, many of these changes were natural extensions of our data-driven design that eschewed hard-coding, enabling a lot of variety without having to touch the code-base itself. If I’m not mistaken, Hero units were actually possible in vanilla Civ4 just by using the same mechanism that allowed buildings to be Wonders of the World. We never actually used this feature, but the code supported it because we generalized the concept of “single-build items” across the game.

I find it interesting how the design of mods are always, to a certain extent, a reflection of the core technology decisions made by the original development team. For Civ2, the emphasis was on a flexible trigger-and-event system, which enabled some interesting, story-focused mods, based on works like The Odyssey or Fellowship of the Ring. With Civ3, we punted on events but worked to remove all hard-coding from the game. Theoretically, the game/AI engine could handle any number and assortment of game elements. Thus, the result was the popular Double Your Pleasure mod, which doubled (or tripled) the number of units, buildings, and techs in the core game. For Civ4, we opened up the game’s algorithms and interface, which finally allowed modders to create their own, brand-new systems, of with Fall‘s magic system is one of the best examples.

Soren: I am curious how you hit upon the innovation of giving spell-casting units a steady drip of XP each turn. The mechanic neatly solves the problem of how players can explore the spell tree without having to fight – an important question as these units are not always strong enough to win enough battle to reach higher levels. Did you try other XP systems first?

Derek: The initial mechanic idea was that units would have to study in cities in order to gain spells and levels.  But having to leave the units in cities isn’t fun.  Players don’t want to have to not use a unit for it to become effective, so we removed that requirement and allowed them to gain the xp regardless of what they were doing.

Soren: I also would like to know how much you changed the barbarian code of the core game. Fall definitely has more of a PvE feel than base Civ4, with all the lizardmen and goblins roaming the countryside, not to mention the dungeons scattered across the countryside. This extension of Civ‘s barbarian tradition really helps keep Fall combat focused without requiring full-scale war. What are the underlying mechanics here?

Derek: We really wanted that initial exploration to differentiate Fall from Civ.  From that first trip out into the wilderness, we wanted the player to realize he was in a different world, and it was a much more dangerous one.  Civ was always about quick growth, filling your area and firming up your borders against your neighbors before you began to consider wars or other options.  There wasn’t much of a downside to early growth outside of maintenance costs (which typically didn’t become overbearing until you have started taking over enemy civilizations).

We wanted to disincentive early growth.  Early threats did that for us, but it was a pretty difficult balancing act.  The player has limited resources in the beginning, and he needs to decide how to split his earily hammer on defense, growth, exploration or infrastructure.  And as you mentioned Fall‘s focus is moved down a bit from Civ‘s – a bit more focus on the individual units than at the empire level.  If the focus was going to be on the units, we needed fun things for the units to do even outside of war.  The barbarians filled that role.

Soren: I have seen a number of groups try Fall from Heaven as a multiplayer game, often experiencing frustration from technical errors and out-of-syncs. I’m not surprised by this problem – creating a synchronous game is a very difficult challenge as all calculations must operate on all machines in the exact same order. Further, versioning control for mods is under the user’s control, which throws another possible wrench into the works. However, assuming the technical issues can be solved, what do you think the potential is for Fall as a multiplayer game?

Derek: Huge. Out of Sync errors were #1 on our list going into the latest version.  We added a logging utility that writes out the game state on all the computers on the game specifically so we could diagnose and resolve OOS issues.  I’m happy to report that it worked and, as of the latest version, we aren’t getting any more reports.

The reason I love Fall for a multiplayer game is that the core concept of the game – dramatically different factions – lends itself so well to interesting combinations.  A Sheaim player could be trying to bring on Armageddon while a Ljosalfar player tries to cover the world with forests.  A Hippus player could be raiding all nearby opponents while a Khazad player holes up in strongly defended fortresses.  How each civilizations strengths and weaknesses effect each other, along with the decisions of religion and mana sources, makes for very interesting games.
One thing I dislike in other TBS and RTS games is that since the factions are so similar, players begin to adopt a fixed strategy they always employ.  Often specific enough to have the same build orders and such.  Because Fall is so based on the combination of elements and variety a single strategy becomes impossible and players are forced to react to the specifics of the game.

Soren: Reminds me a little of Alpha Centauri, which also had good multiplayer potential because the factions were so different. However, as with AC, one of the most common criticisms of Fall is that, while the game mechanics are a lot of fun, the AI has little chance at handling them. Do you have any thoughts on this topic? What kind of progress has the team made on that front?

Derek: Some – it’s pretty heady stuff.  In the beginning, we intentionally ignored the AI as it didn’t make much sense to invest a lot of time teaching the AI how to play the game when we were still working out how the game would play.  At best, we would have to redo it later, and at worst, we would make the AI less effective.  During the conversion to the Beyond the Sword code base, the entire spell system was rewritten to be easier for the AI to understand.  It made a significant difference, and in the last few months, we have begun to go through the last major hurdles of the AI and resolve them.  We rewrote the play strategy hash to remove any of the logic that didn’t apply (like waiting for anti-aircraft units before blitzing an enemy with fast moving attackers) and added in a bit of our own where it made since.  Fall has building requirements for a lot of its units, and we spent time modifying the AI behavior to appropriately construct those buildings so it wouldn’t get trapped with the obsolete units.

We still have work to do, and the nature of AI is that it will probably never compare to a real human (one of the reasons that multiplayer is so important to us), but we have come a long way.

Soren: I enjoyed trying out Somnium, the card-based, diplomatic mini-game you recently added. Because the game encourages thinking about probability, I would like to try a version of it where all drawn cards are shown, including the ones underneath the top “banked” cards. Considering that humans are so bad at estimating probability, I don’t think that revealing more information would hurt the game. (To mix things up, you could also remove five randoms cards each game.) Why did you decide to build Somnium, and how was it designed?

Derek: Fall is a huge mixture of options that tie together in a variety of ways.  I wanted Somnium to be the opposite, only one decision, but a lot of complexity in it.  I didn’t want there to be a right or wrong answer but instead to simplify the risk/reward mechanic down to one yes-or-no choice.

I thought about showing the “banked” cards but, in the end, it got cut because I wanted the interface to stay simple, and I wanted the player to be running off of instinct and laboring over the choice.  If we let all the banked cards show, the player who drew the 3 of swords could see all the other swords cards banked and would know that he should draw again.  I wanted to avoid that certainty.

As to why it was designed, we like doing things no one else has done, things people don’t expect from modders.  Functionally, it offers a nice break in long games if you want to jump in and play a few games against the AI or play while your waiting for other players in a multiplayer game.

Soren: The final step of the Fall release process is a selection of scenarios. Would you care to talk about them a little bit? What design ideas are you exploring here that you can’t do with the standard game. What surprises are in store for players?

Derek: The epic random game will always be our bread and butter.  Nonetheless, I wanted the scenarios to give players a unique way to play in the Fall universe.  There are three major series of scenarios following three different characters in a shared world.  Originally I wanted different team members to handle each path, so we could really give them different voices and explore different areas.  Unfortunately, one of the team members wasn’t able to commit to the time required, which is considerable, so I designed two of the series and Randy, one of the team writers, designed the other.

Randy took a different approach than I did, which gives us a lot of variety.  In his series of scenarios, which follow a leader named Decius, the players have the choice to turn good or evil.  They can be good, and become a Malakim leader, or become evil, and become a leader of the Calabim.  Although the scenarios they face are similar, they will be facing them from dramatically different perspectives depending on their choices.  Randy focused on tightly scripted sequences to keep the player very engaged in the story with significant character dialog and quests to perform to get to the next stage.

On the other side I opted to feature unique gameplay mechanics, and the storyline is really just a backdrop to the mechanics.  One scenario, The Momus, has the player fighting in a battle with 6 other players.  An AI player who isn’t in the battle, the Momus, sets all the war declarations and randomly decides to have everyone attack the most powerful player, have everyone attack a random player or have everyone attack everyone every 50 turns.

In the Barbarian Assault scenario, the player starts at a random location in a poor jungle environment with a lot of other very basic civilizations against significant barbarian forces.  The end goal of the scenario is to defeat the only truly settled civilization on the map, the Clan of Embers, who are at peace with the barbarians.  To make it even more difficult, every 50 turns the lowest ranked player is removed from the game until only 5 remain.  Forcing the player to not only survive, but to weaken neighbors to stay out of the lowest rank seat.

In Mulcarn Reborn, the player starts as one member of large team against an equally large AI team.  The AI starts with a much better position, but the real challenge is that the player is always switched into control of the weakest member of his team.  Thus, the player has to be careful to protect all team members and will struggle throughout the game since he will always be playing from the most challenging position.

From an overall perspective, we wanted the scenarios to be able to feature unique mechanics like those described above, all running on the same mod.  We also wanted to be able to store information about goals and decisions made during scenarios so that they could impact later events.  For example, you don’t have to play the Barbarian Assault scenario, but if you do and you beat it the barbarians will be weakened in all the other scenarios.  Likewise, a player that defeats Amelanchier, an elven leader, in the Splintered Court scenario and chooses to give him to a werewolf leader in exchange for their alliance in that scenario will find that they face a werewolf version of Amelanchier in a later scenario.  Allies can be made to help out in later scenarios if quests are accomplished, bonus units can be unlocked, and some units carry over experience from one scenario to another.  The story lines along the three series of scenarios intertwine but so do these quests and events.

Soren: So, the final release of Fall from Heaven is scheduled for December. It’s always hard to draw such a thick line in the ground, so is this really the end? What does the future hold for Fall? Do you expect other modders to pick up your codebase and take it to new places, even if this is the final official version? What are your own personal plans? Will the team stick together for future projects?

Derek: We will continue to support Fall, so we will do patch and art additions after December.  But my plan is to be “done” with the mod itself.  No new features, no major changes.  I’m not going to walk away by any means, but not thinking about new features means that I can spend time on documentation, create some videos to show off some features, and maybe work through my game backlog a bit (I hear good things about this Spore game…).

The team and I have talked about whats next.  We have all been interested in working together again, and we have been really fortunate to find such a diverse and talanted group of guys.  We have received offers to help produce a collectible card game or board game based on Fall from Heaven that we have been thinking about, but as of yet, nothing firm has been planned.  Personally, I don’t know what I am going to do yet, but if it’s something that multiple people can work on, the team will be invited to join.

As for what I expect from modders, I hope that, a year from now, there is an even better version of Fall that everyone is playing.  We have some interesting dungeon-level scenarios in the final version, and I’d love to see someone really take that concept and run with it.  A unit-level, turn-based tactical game would be very interesting, especially with all the cool models the team has made.

See also Part I and Part II…