2009.12.05. 16:16, saxicola
BIOSHOCK 2 PODCAST: EPISODE SIX TRANSCRIPT
December 3, 2009
ELIZABETH TOBEY: During out last two podcasts in the BioShock 2 series, we have been discussing aspects of the multiplayer experience where you are transported back in time to fight in Rapture’s Civil War. You have learned about the experience and the characters whose shoes you will step in to. Today, I’m back in the studio at 2K Marin with two of the multiplayer gurus you have heard from in past podcasts, and they are going to talk more about ranks and trials in the multiplayer experience, and what they mean for you, the player, in BioShock 2.
M. E. CHUNG: Hi, I’m M.E. Chung, I’m a multiplayer designer for 2K Marin.
MELISSA MILLER: And I’m Melissa Miller, senior producer for 2K Marin.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: We begin our discussion by talking about ranks in BioShock 2 multiplayer. Many multiplayer games have ranks, and each treats it slightly differently according to specific needs of gameplay. For our multiplayer experience, which goes beyond gameplay and incorporates the story of Rapture’s Civil war, rank has a bit more to it than simply its functionality.
MELISSA MILLER: There’s two parts to it. I’ll probably let M.E. talk about the gameplay aspect of it, but in terms of the rank, there’s actually a….it’s part of the fictional backbone of the multi-player part of BioShock 2. So the idea is that you’re just this citizen of Rapture, you’re living your life, you’re under the sea, you’re like, “whoo hoo!” And then the civil war breaks out, and you’re like, “uh-oh, people are throwing fireballs at me and crap now, so I gotta protect myself.” So you enroll in this program run by this company, Sinclair Solutions, and you become part of their home consumer rewards program. So they give you some products to test out in the field, and when you come back and you do a lot of stuff with them, they get really happy with you and the fact that you’re giving them information that they need, so they will bump you up to the next part of their rewards program. It’s like a pyramid scheme. So that’s the rank in a fictional sense. There are four clubs to it. There’s the bronze club, there’s the silver society, and so forth.
M. E. CHUNG: So one of the reasons we went with a progression for the character was that we kind of wanted players to get ramped in to the game, and one of the best ways to do that just from a gameplay perspective is, “Hey, here’s just a couple of things. We’re going to give you a couple weapons. Try them out.” And once you learn the gameplay itself, then we reward you with, “Hey, here’s more stuff to expand your gameplay.” A lot of games are doing this with multi-player and it’s really inspired by a lot of the other shooters that are coming out right now. A lot of people are naysayers and saying, “Oh, we don’t really like being able to…you don’t get your stuff right from the beginning.” But we find that there’s a big…it’s really great for accessibility purposes, because a lot of people who especially aren’t familiar with Rapture and aren’t familiar with the BS elements are able to come in here and all have the same equal, level playing field, and learning how to use their weapons at the same pace as everybody else. We find that being able to do that from the beginning, we’re able to train you more concretely, instead of just “Here’s all this stuff that you can go and buy and do whatever.” And it was just easier to ramp players in that way.
MELISSA MILLER: And that’s important thing to really emphasize is the fact that we are really excited about the fact that the multi-player component may bring in people who didn’t play BioShock 1, and so they don’t have all this knowledge of how the Plasmids are useful and have all these indirect benefits when you use them. You know, like “The One-Two Punch” that was so iconic to the BioShock 1 gameplay, we need to teach that in multi-player. So as M.E. is saying, giving them a few at a time and limiting the amount of weapons that you have from the beginning and giving you a limited number of plasmids allows you to experiment more. And then once you get used to that, you go up to the next rank, and you’re like, “Hey, I got another one. Well, let’s see what this thing does…”
M. E. CHUNG: It’s also a lot easier to deal with matchmaking in general, because you don’t have people coming in from the beginning and just owning everybody from the beginning. You want to come in, experience just a few of the things, and then just slowly pace them in before they have everything, and be able to play like pros.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Now, you may be saying “okay – that’s a ranking system. Ranks are ranks, whether you have story or not!” So my next question was “what can people look forward to with BioShock 2’s ranks, specifically?”
MELISSA MILLER: Well, we can probably talk about the early ones. Basically the ranking system is the way you unlock the rest of your arsenal, whether that’s plasmids, tonics, further weapons, melee weapons, that type of thing. All that is through the Home Consumer Rewards Program. So things like, you start off super basic, their “starter kit” is your pistol, the shotgun, and you get the three elemental plasmids. So you’ve got Electro-Bolt, Incinerate, and Winter Blast. And as you go up in ranks, you start to unlock another weapon, the machine gun. There’s some weapons that are unique to the multi-player, that we’ve developed just for multi-player and the same thing with Plasmids. I think on Cult of Rapture, you’ve seen the Geyser Trap Plasmid and we’ve also talked about Aero-Dash, and definitely we have tonics that are completely unique to multi-player as well.
MELISSA MILLER: One of the things to emphasize for multi-player is that it’s not just kills and assists that will earn you ADAM in matches. There are tons of other things that you can do in the match that are going to give you ADAM, and it just makes it that much more accessible for people who maybe aren’t like, “I don’t really go online and play these multi-player games, but I really like that BioShock game.” And you know, things that are like core to the BioShock experience, like hacking turrets: you get ADAM experience for that. So, we just tried to make it really accessible for people to find their own play-style, whether it was treating it like any old multi-player and having, “Oh, I got my gun, and that’s what I do,” or people who are really into the BioShock experience and want to experiment with the Plasmids and the world and whatnot.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: As I said before, maybe multiplayer games incorporate rank into their experience, and 2K Marin too many other titles into consideration while building their own rank structure. Personally, I have gotten into more debates than I can count on both hands about which shooters are my favorite multiplayer experience, and why, and these kinds of discussions happened often as BioShock 2’s multiplayer experience took shape.
M. E. CHUNG: Well, CoD4 is the big example. They’re successful for a lot of reasons. It’s funny because they talk about how a lot of the elements that they were inspired by was from WoW, and I could say that very similarly, we were also inspired by WoW, just because giving players experience at the right times and letting them get more stuff at the right moments helps them get re-engaged with the game. It’s like little candy treats and carrots that you’re giving to the players. Small goals, as they’re trying to get to their end goal. Left4Dead is another example of gameplay elements that they had. They had moments in the game that they emphasized and then used those in the achievements side, so they gave out little achievements for interesting things that happened in the game, and we also capitalize on that, because we felt like BioShock has a lot of interesting things that can happen, so there’s the trial system that is based on that.
MELISSA MILLER: Yeah, and one of the things that in BioShock 1 that was really cool was all the different things that you could do, and all the different combinations you could make with the tonics and plasmids and weapons and everything. I remember that there were just so many that even after being on the game for months and months and months, I was still able to go read reviews after the game came out and see people come up with new combinations that I’d never even thought of. But one of the things that I don’t think was as great about that was that it really depended on the player’s own motivation. We didn’t successfully really incorporate that into some kind of reward system in game.
M. E. CHUNG: For example, I was the player who had Electro-Bolt and wrench the entire time, because I’m a min-maxer. We kind of sat around and said, “How do we get people to experience other things, and get them to do and experience all those cool moments that we have in the game, but not force them to do it?” Encourage them.
MELISSA MILLER: Yeah, I was one of those players who… I kind of suck, accuracy-wise, so I’m picking up boxes with Tele-Kinesis and putting them in water, and dropping them down so then I can jump on the box, lure splicers towards me, so then I can use Electro-Bolt with them, and I’m just doing all this weird, “Ok, Cyclone Trap! And throw the prox mine on the ceiling so he goes into it and explodes!” So that’s something that’s the multi-player does really well, is you do something really cool in the match, and then you’re like “Bloop! You completed this trial!” And you’re like, “I did?!”
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Before I even asked, Melissa had skipped into our next topic for this podcast: Trials. There is a reason we discuss the two together: They really do go hand-in-hand. Ranking up happens naturally throughout the matches -- you can gain ADAM from a plethora of different actions – and trials are one of those ways you can gain rank. M. E. CHUNG: Trials are basically tasks or challenges that the players can do with all their mechanic sets. When we started thinking about trials, we kinda said, “Well, they serve a couple purposes.” They show off just general BioShocky gameplay goodness. They show off some of the cool things that you can do in the game. We wanted them to also train the players in some of things they could do. For example, I was the player who just tried to get the highest damage, and the highest DPS, in the least amount of time and the smallest amount of money that I spent. So, I didn’t even know about things that you could do. That you could freeze a vending machine before you hack it, I had no idea that you could do that, that it would actually affect the game. So we wanted to treat some of the trials to also do that for the players, so when they look at their trial list, they say, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that,” and then hopefully expand and add depth to the gameplay, because a lot of that stuff is hidden. And then the third benefit to having this is it’s extra content for your players, and we really wanted players who aren’t so great at shooting to be able to do other tasks in the world, to be able to rank up as fast as other people who are really good at it.
MELISSA MILLER: So, the trials are really integral to the ranking system, because when you complete these trials, it’s not just a little “whoo-hoo, you got a trial! You did this!” It also gives you an ADAM reward. Now, ADAM, of course, is multi-player experience for us, so the more ADAM you earn, that’s when you start to rank up. So you get ADAM for kills, for kill assists, but the trials definitely offer a really good ADAM reward for the effort.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Now, I’m a gal that likes challenges. You put a list of things I can possibly do in front of me and tell me that I get a reward for doing them – I go nuts trying to get everything done. M.E. and Melissa were happy to explain more about trials – their wide variety – and how they work organically in gameplay so folks like me aren’t running around the maps trying to finish trials but instead playing and accomplishing what they need through natural gameplay.
M.E. CHUNG: Some of them are as simple as some of the good moments from the first game. You get put on fire and you walk into water to get rid of it, and that’s one of the trials. Another example is to use Tele-Kinesis on a rocket launcher…err, sorry, not a rocket launcher. Another one is to use Tele-Kinesis off of a rocket turret and use that to destroy it, so we have a trial for that. Then we have some more accumulative ones, more like “get 100 kills with this specific weapon,” or some unique ones like “You just got put on fire, so run into the guy and set your other guy on fire, because you just sent it along.” And they are basically…we wanted to think about how we were going to do the percentage and how many trials should go towards what. So, we started off, as a result, like we talked about before, how the trials used to be given to you as a mission to get more stuff. When that was the case, they were really hard, like hard trials. And we decided to go back and pull away from that. They ended up still being really hard trials, and then everybody’s like, “I can’t do any of them,” and they got really angry. So we had to go back to the drawing board and say, “Ok, what do we really need?” So we kinda set the goal of saying half of them should be more of the easy accumulative types, so you do a simple task over and over again, kind of Gears of War 2-esque. They did something really great which was update you every once in a while and say how are you doing on some of your challenges. Taking inspiration from them, we also decided, “hey, let’s give the player progress notes on how they’re doing on some of those easier ones.” And then some of the more difficult tasks, we might ask you just to do once. We split those into 2 categories. One is, “I’m going to teach you how to do something,” like we talked about how you can freeze a turret before you hack it, or something, and then the kooky, really hard to do ones, that hopefully people won’t cheat to do, that they are easy enough to pull off with skill. It was a really big goal for us from the beginning to say that 90% of these should be done in the average player in x amount of hours, that they didn’t actually have to try, that a lot of them were incidentals, and a small portion of them, the player-base actually had to try to get.
M. E. CHUNG: Some of them are special to the modes and special to whether you’re on a team or not.
MELISSA MILLER: There are basic categories. There’s the weapons, there’s the plasmids, and then there’s the kind of special ones that are either mode-related, team-related, or whatnot.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: As with all games, there is a learning curve, and BioShock 2’s multiplayer takes great care to help you master all the tools you need to be successful, whether you know Rapture well, or are a master at multiplayer games, or perhaps are new to everything entirely. Because of this, trials are not available from the very beginning, but begin to unlock as you dive into the game and rank up.
M. E. CHUNG: We want players to learn the game before they go off and do all these other crazy things, because what we really didn’t want is for a whole bunch of people to go through and play the game, and not pay attention to the actual objective of the match. So, one of the things that early-on in development, we tried doing a system where you do trials to get those rewards, instead of doing this meta-experience ramp, and what we found were that people would just ignore each other and just do trials. And we were like, “That’s cool, and all. Trials are cool, but there is a game going on here, you guys.” So we really needed to separate that, and one of the goals was to make it so that it is extra content and we can go into it, the design of trials, and what we were into later, but that was why we ended up in that direction instead of going with the reward per trial.
MELISSA MILLER: And we did actually, not so long ago, in development, we did have rank…sorry, trials available from the very beginning, and what we were finding in our testing was that people just…there was so much stuff that they were learning about what you could do in a match, outside of just “Hey, I’m killing dudes,” and whatever, that they weren’t even aware that the trials existed. So that was a change that we made to better highlight, “Ok, so you’ve gone into your first couple matches. You’re starting to get used to the world, and understand what you can do in those matches, and then here’s this other thing that’s going to be really beneficial to you to use to the rewards and ranking system.”
ELIZABETH TOBEY: As with our previous multiplayer podcasts, I wanted to chat about user testing one last time. Especially in the case of trials, testing was crucial to getting the balance right and making the experience fun.
M. E. CHUNG: We probably went through the trials list a good ten times before we even got to where we are right now, and we’re still doing testing, we’re still going back and fixing them as they’re going in. And everything goes from how difficult they are to pull off, to how many points are we actually giving for completing them? The thing that you’ll find very clearly from play-testing, is that people are very vocal about what’s too difficult and what’s not difficult to pull off. Generally speaking, people don’t speak about what’s too easy, they won’t talk about that. They want everything to be faster. But, play-testers are awesome because they get so vocal about specific things, to the point where they remember the name of the trial, they remember how many points that was supposed to be assigned to them from completing it, and they’ll go in front of camera and just say, “I can’t believe you did this trial, it’s impossible!” and blah blah blah, and we take a lot of that data seriously. We did a couple of passes on just trials. Penny, who’s our feasibility expert here, she’s been focusing on that over the past few play-tests, just trying to make sure we’re getting the right number of trials. I have this crazy chart of how many trials are being completed at every level and average number of trials that are completed. We get huge spikes at certain levels, and we try to ramp it smoothly across, and doing all sorts of math to get that right. That’s just to give you an idea of what we’re doing for that.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Before we parted, I had one last question that I’m sure many multiplayer gamers are also pondering: How do you keep people honest?
M. E. CHUNG: I think people are going to talk about how, if you’re doing ranking, how are you going to make it so that new people aren’t going to get completely owned by the upper-tier people? I hated it in other games when I got rank 1, and I come in, I’m like, “I don’t have any stuff, and I’m being matched against people who have lots of stuff, and I suck!” And I think CoD4 did a really good thing where they just basically said, “Why don’t you give the best weapons in the first rank?” And their weapon balance is great, and we tried very hard to make sure our weapon balance is great across the board, but we tried to make it so that you get your weapons early on in the game, because that’s the thing that people will be using mostly as their top scale.
MELISSA MILLER: Well, our matchmaking system is designed to match-make, of all things, three things. It’s your fictional rank within the Sinclair program, your skill that’s tracked under the hood, and your ping. So those are the three standards that we use to group people together in online matches that are public, essentially. So, but for people who are like, “I really don’t want to go into that scary online world, but I do want to play some matches with my friends,” that’s why we have the private matches. The one thing that is different is you can not earn experience or ADAM in the private matches, but you have a lot more control, like you can invite anyone in. So say M.E. is rank 20, she played through and she’s gotten all the way to the top, and she’s got her friend who’s like, “Oh, hey. Is that BioShock 2 multi-player any good?” She can say, “Hey! Come play a match with me!” And even though they’re starting out and they’re essentially rank 0, they can still play with her in a private match.
M. E. CHUNG: Honestly, the biggest reasoning for putting the restriction on private matches is just for exploits and cheating. I can imagine people making two people in a match or literally having two gamer-tags or whatnot, and they go through and just rank all the way up to 20 before they end up actually going into the game. So, there’s a lot of reasons for that. I’ve seen some crazy stuff online, like I know the gaming community really well, and they do some things that I think are completely unbelievable. Like they buy those, you know, the 1-month gamer-cards for X-Box Live? They’ll just keep getting new free one-months, and remake their gamertag over and over again, and going in and being TrueSkill 50, they’re like really awesome, but then destroy everybody and creep the crap out of people because they just made a new gamertag. I love them, but I hate them at the same time!
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Of course, for those of you who want to rank up with your friends, you can still group together and start a public match together – there’s a button right on the dash of the lobby that says “Invite friends.” Hopefully, some of you will invite me.
This concludes the multiplayer portion of our BioShock 2 Podcast series. Next episode, we’ll be discussion AI in BioShock 2, and you’ll get to hear more about some new characters that have yet to be revealed.
I’m Elizabeth Tobey, Community Manager at 2K.
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