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Sometimes I get something stuck in my head and I cannot dislodge it no matter how hard I try.  You as my readers occasionally are forced to indulge in whatever this nonsense is…  so that by hopefully sharing it I can move on with my life.  This mornings post is one of those cases.  Yesterday I talked about Radical Heights and how it would have been much more interesting were it to change the Battle Royale genre in some way rather than just attempt to hit all of the high points.  This is when I went down a path leading to… Smash TV would be interesting to reboot as a Battle Royale game.  What I mean by this actually is the concept of Smash TV which was a room based dungeon crawl with randomly spawning nonsense, big bullet sponge monsters and showers of cash and prizes.  After finishing yesterdays post this idea clung onto the brain and I started piecing together what something like this would look like.

As a result you have the above nonsense which is my attempt at sketching out what the setup of the game would look like.  In this configuration 48 players spawn into the game in little rooms off of a grid of battle chambers.  There are four color based cohorts of players that are ultimately fighting to arrive at the purple central region.  The sequence of play looks a little something like this….

1. Exit Starting Room
2. Make your Way to the Key Room
3. Collect Key
4. Make your Way to the Mini Boss Chamber for your Color
5. Defeat Mini Boss
6. Make your Way to the Final Boss Chamber
7. Defeat Final Boss
8. Profit

Key Room and Grouping

The Key is a shared resource in that the first person who unlocks the Mini Boss Chamber unlocks it for their entire cohort.  Where things get weird is that each cohort has the option of either grouping together or competing against each other.  When a new player enters a room where an existing player is already at both are giving 5 seconds of invulnerability and are prompted to make a choice “Friend or Enemy”.  If both players choose friend they are dynamically grouped together and from that point the victory condition is shared.  If one player chooses Enemy both are flagged as targets to each other when the invulnerability shield drops and now they are officially competing.  This continues as players move through their own cohort with the option to set a match default of either a sort of Carebear mode or Ganker mode.  Important note… there is no way to group up after this flagging period so it is a fast decision that sets the fate of the rest of the match.

Battle Chambers

Now we move on to the battle chambers themselves…  each of them spawns a semi-randomized encounter.  It could be a spawner full of small easy to kill, but also easy to overwhelm you trash mobs.  It could spawn in a single champion and with a couple of minions that requires some measure of tactics to take out.  It could also be an agility room where you have to avoid a pattern of damage for a certain amount of time before the doors open again.  Regardless of what type of room it is… it enters a lock down within 10 seconds of the first player arriving there and then prevents any new players from entering or exiting.  After defeating the encounter you have 30 seconds to clear out before the room resets and signals that it has “reloaded” and will begin the cycle of a 10 second lockout and encounter spawn.  As you move away from the starter rooms towards the key room the encounters increase in difficulty, and similarly as you move towards the final boss room in the central area.

Mini  Bosses

The Mini Boss rooms are some sort of large bullet sponge juggernaut that requires you to hit some sort of a weak area to deal damage to it, all the while avoiding its attacks.  I linked in an image of one of the Smash TV Bosses for reference but I wouldn’t necessarily say that these juggernauts look anything like this.  Basically the idea is to have an encounter hard enough that it rewards players choosing to group up together to try and take it down.  Similarly it needs to be largely avoiding a pattern so with enough skill and execution prowess you could solo the encounter if someone is feeling super murdery and decides to go it alone.  That is a constant tug of war… incentivizing both solo and group play in different ways.  After the mini boss room has been cleared the way to the central area opens for everyone in that cohort… with one caveat.  There can only be one group alive…  it is a dual condition of both boss down and only one active group…  before moving into the central zone.

Boss Rush or Buffs

Once you enter the central purple area you have two main choices to make.  Do you rush the boss and try and get it down before the other teams…  or do you go collect one of the buffs scattered in the four corner rooms of this area.  Each individual buff can be collected only once so there is a high likelihood that two teams may be going after the same buff given that there is no clear buff for each cohort to collect.  You can only collect one buff and it is an aura applied to your entire team from that point forward.  It scales based on the number of players you currently still have in the game…  so the fewer players you have it attempts to give you a buffer to compete against larger teams by making each player a little more bullet-spongey.  So if you clear your cohort with only five players alive… then chances are you are going to want to go for a buff.  If you instead have all sixteen players alive and well… then you are probably going to want to rush the central chamber and attempt to take down the boss.

Essentially there are two possible win conditions…  either every other player is eliminated or your cohort has taken down the Final Boss.  The only way the elimination condition can be triggered is if you are playing in solo play…  literally you have to be the last player standing and if you are grouped you are not the last player standing.

The Drops

So you are immediately thinking now…  sure there is one central path that you need to take to cross the least number of rooms possible to get to each objective and that is obviously the golden path.  Well that gets complicated in the fact that every time you take down a battle chamber you are getting loot and that loot is ultimately what is going to make you strong.  Each player enters the arena with a single six shot sidearm with unlimited reserve, giving them a fairly low damage but always available option.  As you traverse the map you start picking up weapon drops and buffs that make you stronger as you zero in on the objectives.  Since the rooms get harder as you go… there may be some benefit in farming a few of those early rooms to get kitted out before trying the harder encounters.  Loot starts as instanced to a specific player, but if for some reason they discard an item it becomes essentially free for all… showing up for all players regardless of cohort.  Here is a quick rundown of the sorts of things I thought would be drops.

• Weapons – very obviously different types of weapons that have different damage to rate of fire mixtures.  There are no ammo drops but picking up the same weapon twice will refresh its ammunition back to full.  Players can carry three weapons at once and have to discard a weapon if they choose to pick something new up.
• Auras – these items when picked up apply a short term buff to the entire cohort.  You can have three auras at a time and attempting to pick up a fourth aura item will simply fail and leave the drop on the ground.
• Consumables – these are items that can be held in reserve and used on demand.  Each player can hold three of these and they range from granting auras to med packs to providing some additional effect to your weapon.
• Cold Hard Cash – Since this is a game show when you kill anything it erupts in a shower of cash upon death, and this serves as both a scoring mechanism and a spendable resource.  Occasionally when a room clears a vending machine will appear allowing you to spend a bit of your cash to buy some of the things you could get as drops.  Each machine has six items for sale…  three weapons and three consumables… which are randomly pulled from the total number of those available in the game.  At the end of the game any cash you have still in your inventory gets converted to a sort of savings bond currency that can then be spent outside of game….  but there is a pretty hefty tax at the conversion.
• Favor Chests – if you do particularly well in a specific encounter there is a chance of the viewers watching you fight… providing a favor chest showing how much they appreciate your prowess.  These are by nature fairly rare but directly reward some of the cosmetic nonsense that you can collect like outfits and weapon skins.

Changing the Genre

Ultimately this is all I was talking about with Radical Heights… is that they could have taken that Battle Royale formula and changed it significantly.  This concept of “Smash Royale” still feels like Smash TV, but is also still very much a Battle Royale genre game in that the playing field slowly funnels players towards a central showdown.  This one however throws in a heavy PVE encounter focus in that killing things rewards loot… which then makes you stronger as you make your way to the final boss showdown.  Once opened that Final Boss chamber remains open with no lockdown period…  so as you start the fight you could have the other cohorts showing up in the middle of it sniping you as you attempt to finish off the boss and collect the loot.  I also feel like maybe I have not given enough concrete reasons why you might want to go that final boss encounter solo…  ultimately it is greed.  The final boss might drop 2 items per player in a maximum sized cohort and this is a fixed point….  so the final boss will always drop 32 items in this scenario.

That means if you go into that final encounter with fewer players…  then each individual player serves to benefit significantly more from the win condition.  It becomes a balancing act…  how many players do you really need in your group in order to be effective in the final encounter.  Only one group can emerge from the cohort area… but while in that area you could for example form 8 individual 2 player teams…  or 3 4 player teams.  Ultimately you as a player need to determine what your best course is when it comes to the Friend/Enemy decisions and how many additional players you need to make the final push.  There is no betrayal, but also no second chances…  from the moment you make that first binary decision you are locked into a specific path.  This is my idea for a Battle Royale game…  and I think it would ultimately play extremely well given that there are a bunch of points where a meta could develop.

I think to add pressure… there would be global callouts when an event has happened…  for example Red Mini Boss Down would tell every other cohort how much progress that they had made, or if Green picks up the buff.  I think even something like a “Blue Team Finalized” might be interesting because it could be one of two things…  either all of blue team decided to band together or one group managed to eliminate all of the other players in their cohort.  Since monetization is so damned important in a game like this right now…  I think the best option is a mix of limited time direct purchase cosmetics along with the ability to purchase directly the savings bond currency allowing players to buy anything currently “not on sale”.  The savings bond currency also serves as something that players can gradually save up over a large number of matches and be able to purchase the same “cash shop” cosmetics through copious amounts of grinding in game.

Those are my thoughts on how to tweak the genre and make it more interesting while also wallowing heavily in nostalgia in the process.  If you have actually made it this far down in the post… I thank you.  Mostly I just needed to get this out of my head and onto paper.

 

I don’t really have a ton to talk about this morning.  I played some Gorgon last night but was in truth mostly out of it.  I feel like maybe I am coming down with something, either that or it is simply just allergies going nuts with the start of spring.  Whatever the case I have been sitting around in large part numb and hazy.  None of these make for great writing fodder.  Instead I am going to talk a bit about Boss Key productions and the track record they are starting to develop for creating uninspired “also ran” titles.  Lawbreakers was not a great game…  it wasn’t horrible but it also really didn’t add much in the way of unique and interesting game play that made it stand out among the already large pack of “Arena Shooters” or whatever you want to call the “Overwatchian” genre that seemed to evolve rapidly and then quickly devolve into Overwatch and everyone else.

The above is a clip that my friend Ashgar loves to link when we start talking about derivative games in a genre… and it is bookmarked to the important part.  For those without YouTube access when you are reading this I will do my best to quote Graham Stark from Loading Ready Run.

The Following is a public service announcement for any game publishers trying to get in on the Battle Royale craze now…  you are too late.  If you’re already in progress you might be okay if your game has a compelling hook like the team at automaton promising a cloud-based server structure that could support up to a thousand players on a map larger than Skyrim…  but if you’re just starting it will be too late and we need only look to the multiplayer online battle arena genre for proof.

Why this is all coming up this week is that Boss Key after failing to gain traction with Lawbreakers…  set its sights on the next big thing the “Battle Royale” genre and cranked out a game show based 80s inspired game called Radical Heights.  The problem I see however is that it doesn’t really seem to offer something new that Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds or Fortnite are currently offering.  Fortnite became popular for two reasons… it added a Minecraft aspect to the already popular Battle Royale genre and was free to play allowing players to hop in quickly and start playing with zero cash outlay.  Radical Heights is free to play and available through steam…  but seems to lack the “building stuff” hook.  The 80s/90s hybrid theme feels lazy as well…  because there are ways to do genre nostalgia that are amazing…  Blood Dragon for example…  and then there are ways that feel like cheap neon colored pandering.

The most frustrating thing about the “Gameshow” trappings that the game seems to be draped in is the fact that it is a giant missed opportunity.  1990 had an amazing battle game that was inspired by the moving The Running Man, and pitting players against waves of oncoming enemies for cash and prizes.  Smash TV seems like a game that is just begging to be converted to the Battle Royale genre, and could also serve to change it significantly in the process.  Imagine that each player or group of players starts in their own room and are slowly working their way to the center of the maze.  The rooms all start off as PVE encounters as you have to face waves of encounters and varying obstacles, then as you get further you may or may not start encountering other players where you have the choice to group up and split the loot or take each other out.  In both of those scenarios to make it interesting you need to present palpable reasons why you might want to group up, and other reasons why you might want to go it alone and try and take out the interlopers.

Not all of the rooms need to be mindless waves from a spawner… some of them could be puzzles that need to be solved or crazy environmental effects that are going on that you need to survive a certain amount of time before the door opens.  All of which happening in a behind the back/over the shoulder third person shooter interface with the rooms being large enough to make that not feel completely claustrophobic.  In the end you wind up creating something that is a riff on the battle royale genre that comes at from a different direction…  rather than just cranking out another game going after all of the same beats.  The best thing about this specific formula is it would allow for massive boss battles similar to how the original Smash TV did… and tweak the “map gets smaller” thing into something infinitely more interesting.  Additionally it could hit all of the 80s/90s nostalgia beats without feeling like a costume that your game happens to be wearing.

Regardless of all of this…  I think the core of my frustration comes from having a lot of hope in Boss Key when it was initially founded.  Unfortunately it feels like the Cliffy B brand doesn’t mean anywhere near what it used to.

 

This weekend was a bit of a crazy one, but also extremely fun.  So for those who know my wife is a Teacher, and has been at the State Capitol building every single day this past week protesting.  Originally the legislature was supposed to be out on Friday so I decided to take that day off myself so we could go do something to relax from the madness.  Unfortunately the situation at the state house is a very fluid one and they opted to have a very short session on Friday morning.  This left my wife in a bit of a dilemma wanting to go and be there for all of her coworkers…  and also not wanting to cancel our weekend.  In the end we compromised because Oklahoma City can in fact be on the way to Dallas if you go the Highway 35 route.  So around 1 pm…  much later than I had intended on doing so…  I found my way through the nonsense that is 30,000+ educators inhabiting the Capitol grounds and picked my rain soaked wife up and we went about our weekend trip.

The drive up to OKC was a bit of a nightmare in itself and took significantly longer than I had originally expected.  There were several times where I was just driving based on the lights of the vehicle in front of me because we had white out rain conditions where so much was being blown up into the air by the big trucks that I could not see the route.  In fact I accidentally turned into the midway area of the turnpike…  just because I followed the semi in front of me and I had no clue that it wasn’t the way the road was naturally turning.  However once we cleared OKC the weather improved greatly and by the time we got down to the DFW area… it was 84.  We however apparently brought the cold front with us because by the time we checked into the hotel and prepped to go out for the evening… it had dropped down into the 40s.

The other thing that I feel like I should talk about… is that apparently we brought a Tornado with us…  or at least that is what the DFW area thought.  We need to talk about the difference between the National Weather Service in Oklahoma… and the National Weather Service in Texas.  For us a Tornado Warning is not called until there has been a funnel cloud spotted….  and shortly after checking into our hotel a Tornado Warning flashed across our phones and the sirens started blowing.  After flipping on the local news and listening to a weatherman…  he kept stating that conditions were favorable for a Tornado…  which should have been a Watch not a Warning.  Whatever the case the storm had passed where we were and being Oklahomans very used to Tornado time…  we went on about our business and headed to IKEA to hopefully get that in while the store was less busy.  The folks at the hotel however seemed fairly rattled.

The real focus of the weekend however was a big Half Priced Books sale happening at the Arlington Convention Center, which is another tale…  when you tell me something is happening at a convention center I look for the largest building in an area.  The Arlington Convention Center however is probably the smallest building in the surrounding area flanked by the Texas Rangers and AT&T Stadiums.  After passing the building the first time… we looped back around and found that quite a line has formed of folks trying to get into the parking lot.  After paying our $5 for parking we walked through the wind and rain to find ourselves in a giant Half Priced Books clearance sale.  The photo does not really give it justice as to how much was there laid out crudely on tables garage sale style.  Everything there was priced between $0.50 and $2 meaning that there were a ton of folks loading up entire shopping carts full of stuff.  On either side of the main area there were boxes of books that had yet to be put out on the tables, so in theory you probably needed to come all three days of the dale to really feel like you saw everything.

Now one of the reasons why we love Half Priced Books so much is how amazingly organized it is.  For the purposes of this sale…  that largely went out the window as things were lumped into giant categories like Fiction, Non-Fiction, Coffee Table books, etc.  One of the things I tend to focus on are the pen and paper gaming books…  which were occasionally sprinkled in with art books, music tour folios, and other large format coffee table style books.  My wife was looking for educational resources…  which were in this large heap called Non-Fiction and a few in the Science section… that turned out to mostly be computer books.  Now something of note…  another great thing about HPB is that they seem to shift their inventory around quite a bit.  In each store there is a Clearance section that we often make a beeline to as soon as we get inside the door.  This sale appears to be the dregs of whatever didn’t sell on potentially multiple last chance clearance aisles.

We spent about an hour and a half in the sale and this is the only thing that I personally walked away with.  Even then I only made the purchase out of sheer nostalgia for Dark Age of Camelot…  because this was a far bigger compendium than I had ever seen for that game.  The book is about three inches thick and covers Darkness Falls as well as the core of the three realms.  I have a handful of these MMO guide books that I never actually used, but have kept because they are little snapshots in time when the game existed in that form.  I find them interesting to flip back through and remember just how things were before later patches changed them.  My wife however walked away with a half dozen books meaning the trip was largely worth it.  It was one of those things that I am glad we did so we know what to expect, but maybe wouldn’t make a special trip for in the future.  It felt a lot like a book sale that a local prep school has every year, which is fine but if you go to it looking for a specific thing you are likely going to walk away disappointed.  I kept asking myself “do I actually need this” and if I do get it “what exactly will I do with it” which kept me from picking up many things.

From there we plotted a course out of Dallas hitting up several of the Half Priced Books on the  way out…  first going over to the flagship store and then to Richardson and McKinney before finally getting back on Highway 75 and heading home.  I feel like most people won’t understand our attachment to this store chain, but whatever.  They have lots of interesting stuff and you never quite know what you are going to find when you go to one.  Each and every store has a vastly different flavor to it, and tends to be really good at carrying one or more specific things.  The other part of the equation is that we have none of these in the Tulsa area.  There are three in Oklahoma City which gives us hope that maybe just maybe they will make their way to our neck of the woods…  but even then a few times a year we make a trek to OKC just to hit the ones there.  This is literally the first thing we look for when we travel to a new area…  have have visited most of the HPB locations in Dallas Fort Worth Metro, Kansas City Metro, St Louis Metro, Austin Metro, and Madison Wisconsin area.

The reason in part why we are so attached is because they carry a wealth of educational resources.  Even though my wife has spent the entire week protesting at the State Capitol for more educational funding…  she is still always thinking about her classroom.  She is one of those teachers that never recycles her curriculum.  Each summer she essentially tears down every single prep she has and builds up a new structure based on the best ways she knows how to teach each of the concepts.  This year she knows she is going to be teaching Geometry again, and as a result is on the hunt for new resources to help explain concepts.  Granted in her office at home we have five massive bookshelves full of materials…  but she is constantly looking for new and novel ways to explain things.  So as a result we keep hitting bookstores looking for the next great concept she can glean.

While it was a lot of driving condensed into a very short amount of time…  there are always interesting things to be seen along the way…  like a graveyard of past editions of Warhammer 40k for example.  I have both of these in my bookshelf here at home but it is always cool to see them in the wild… or in this case several of them.  It was a fun weekend and I was glad we managed to get back in time on Saturday night to record aggrochat.  However the whole having multiple people able to record thing meant that the show could in fact go on without me.  We have also started time boxing our shows trying to shoot for 90 minutes of recording time…. which after editing comes down to roughly an hour.  I think this week might be one of the better shows we have recorded yet because compressing things into that time frame seems to help the conversation and keep us from zoning out during the second hour of recording.  I highly suggest you check out this weeks show and let me know what you think about the shorter format.