Unusually for most of the old titles I talk about, Covert Action isn’t actually a very good game. It’s yet another relic from the age where Microprose was essentially cranking out collections of minigames with a loosely-connecting theme. In Covert Action’s case the theme is spying, so you do stuff like planting bugs, tailing cars, infiltrating hideouts, breaking codes etc., but while this is not the worst idea for a game that’s ever been had there’s just one small catch: unusually for a Microprose game – and for something carrying the Sid Meier name – nearly every single one of the minigames sucks.

This is only partially a reflection of the era Covert Action was released into; the game’s 256-colour graphics are vomit-inducingly ugly and 1990 apparently predates computer mice or something so you have to use the keyboard, but these are the least of the game’s worries.¹  The problem is that whereas something like Pirates took care to come up with interesting minigames first and then based the game around them, Covert Action’s minigames are almost an afterthought. They play like filler content that pads out the main gameplay (so I suppose in some ways Covert Action is simply ahead of its time) except because Covert Action is all minigames nearly the entire thing turns out as filler content. The only remotely interesting one is the bug-planting minigame, where you have to redirect… electricity? I think it’s electricity. Anyway, you have to redirect electricity to the target nodes while avoiding activating the alarm nodes by swapping out circuit board components, and it’s not half-bad as a minute-long puzzler. The rest are just awful; codebreaking is asininely simple, tailing is unremittingly tedious, and while infiltrating hideouts can be entertaining, it’s the same sort of entertaining as Sumotori Dreams.

Which begs the question: if the game isn’t very good, then why am I bothering to talk about it?

The thing is that while Covert Action’s minigames are a stale and tedious bunch, the overplot that ties them all together is actually a really interesting attempt at representing a spy agency’s investigation of a terrorist organisation. When you start a case the game generates a group of conspirators and a plot they’re trying to carry out, tosses you a few clues to get you started in your investigation, and then leaves you to get on with it. You can follow up the leads you’ve been given in any order and in any way that you want, but everything you do in the game takes a certain amount of time during which the conspirators will be trying to move their plot forward. Spend too much time running down a blind alley and you’ll miss opportunities; key conspirators will go into hiding once their role in the plot is finished and you won’t be able to arrest them, and if you’re a truly world-class ditherer they’ll actually accomplish whatever it is they set out to do like bombing the embassy or assassinating the president or whatever.

This is the key element that keeps me slogging through all those terrible minigames – just knowing there is a plot running entirely autonomously in the background that needs to be foiled is a remarkably compelling story hook. The best thing about it is that aside from the starting clues – and a few teletyped bulletins if you’re playing on the lower difficulty settings – the only information you have about what the terrorists are doing is the information you uncover yourself during the course of your investigation.  You can get this information through a number of channels; planting bugs will give you fragments for each target node you manage to successfully connect to, while tailing a suspect can lead you to the lair of another conspirator. Every piece of info you discover is another piece of the jigsaw that will eventually allow you to crack the plot wide open. Crucially, though, each method of investigation has an associated risk of discovery attached to it. For example, busting into a terrorist safehouse in person and photographing all their secret files is an excellent way to get information, but it carries a very high chance of being spotted by a patrolling guard. Being discovered tips the terrorists off that you’re on to them, and while they won’t stop their plot it’ll both make non-essential plot members more likely to go into hiding and beef up the security during subsequent infiltration attempts, making your job much harder.

It can be worth the risk. Each plot has an associated mastermind figure, who doesn’t get involved directly and is very difficult to identify. Apprehending the footsoldiers and mules in the conspiracy is relatively easy, usually requiring only one or two bits of incriminating information. Just figuring out who the mastermind is, on the other hand, requires you to stuff your dossier full of as much evidence as possible without the terrorists finding out that law enforcement is after them. Of course while you’re gathering this evidence the terrorists are moving forward with their plans, and so if you want to bag the mastermind it turns into a race against time to get their name before they advance their plot to completion. This is made doubly tricky by the fact that once a plot can no longer be completed (due to you arresting a key conspirator or seizing essential equipment) every member of the conspiracy that is still at large will go into hiding; you may have stopped the plot, but you didn’t get the plotters, and this is reflected in the score you’re awarded after wrapping things up.

Before it does this, though, Covert Action will deploy its masterstroke of game design.  All the time you’ve been playing the game you’ve been trying to tease apart the various threads of the plot based on nothing more than the information you uncover yourself. You know it’s going on in the background but all you have to work on are the barest glimpses of the full picture, and you’re constantly fighting against this fog of uncertainty as to whether e.g. flying to Caracas to visit the safehouse there will be a worthwhile lead or a complete waste of your time. Not being sure about what is going on or what to do next is a key part of Covert Action without which the game simply wouldn’t work, and this makes what it does at the end rather cathartically rewarding: once a given plot is finished – either through all conspirators being arrested/going into hiding or the conspirators successfully achieving their goals – Covert Action whisks back the curtain and shows you a complete, step-by-step replay of the plot from start to finish. Often this shows you that while you were farting around in South America the terrorists were mailing bombmaking materials around Asia without you ever suspecting a thing.  It’s Covert Action’s equivalent of the literary detective calling everyone together in one room so that they can deliver dramatic revelations about the crime, and it is truly marvellous.

Covert Action pretty much exemplifies what I like so much about the old Microprose games; they didn’t always work out so well, but because they were being made at a time when traditional genres had yet to be established they’ve almost always got at least one very interesting element to them that you just don’t see in games today. I simply can’t imagine a modern mainstream title even attempting what Covert Action does in its metagame² because it’s so completely at odds with the accepted tenets of game design. Instead it’s left to the indie developers to do so – that is, if they’re not too busy making 16-bit platformer homages and physics-based puzzlers. I doubt we’ll ever see a game like Covert Action again, and that’s a real shame. It may not have been a very good game, but it at least had some very good ideas.

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The post In Praise Of: Covert Action. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Difficulty is one of the hardest things for a modern game to get right. Because games are catering for a much wider range of players than they were even ten years ago, deciding what level you should pitch your game’s difficulty at is very tricky and potentially very risky. Make it too hard and you’ll alienate the coveted “casual” gamer market that makes up the bulk of game sales these days; too easy, and you’ll piss off the hardcore gamers who are most vocal about their hobby and generate most of a game’s buzz. Either outcome hurts sales, and pleasing both camps is nigh-on impossible. This is why the difficulty setting exists.

Difficulty settings are theoretically very, very useful tools for developers. Not only can they provide the best of both worlds by accommodating both extremes of the ability scale, but they’re also incredibly valuable in their pedagogical aspect. Taking the most generic example of an FPS, these will typically start the player out with a simple pistol fighting some weak enemies and gradually introduce more weapons and more enemy types with more complex behaviour that require complex responses. What started as a very basic matter of moving forward and pointing and shooting ends as something that requires the player to think and react very quickly, juggling two or more weapons plus grenades and a melee attack and constantly repositioning to respond to new threats.  There’s a definite difficulty curve involved, and getting the shape of this curve right is half the battle. Most games manage it. Some games don’t. This is bad news for them since nothing will kill a game faster than a poorly-judged difficulty curve, but even games which dodge that bullet can end up being immensely frustrating experiences if they balls up the other half, which is the difficulty level.

Difficulty levels exist as a way of allowing players to choose what point of the difficulty curve they enter the game at. What they shouldn’t be is a simple multiplier that shifts the curve up or down; this is the laziest implementation of difficulty and it’s something that FPSes have been getting wrong for years. With difficulty levels, new players can be eased into the game at the very start of the curve, while veterans can skip all that tedious learning crap and get straight to the meat of the thing, starting the game halfway up it and ascending to greater heights than the average player would normally experience. Even that isn’t the best way to implement difficulty, though; in my opinion, the most important thing about difficulty levels is that they should keep things interesting.

Lets take the FPS example again. Shooting a bad guy with twice as much health as usual isn’t particularly interesting. Fighting a wider variety/larger number of enemies is, since you’re facing a different challenge to the one you did before. Running through the same level you did the first time you played the game isn’t particularly interesting. Having to complete additional objectives that force you to explore and go places you normally wouldn’t is. I’d go so far as to say the key to difficulty is to provide a challenge that is not only harder, but substantially different from the one the average player experiences; this rewards them for taking on that challenge in the first place and provides an incentive for those who might otherwise feel that trying to play the game on Hard is just asking for trouble.

There’s a number of ways to approach this. Some work better than others.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Otherwise known as How Not To Do Difficulty. Picking a harder difficulty setting in CoD doesn’t make the enemies smarter, it doesn’t add more varieties and it doesn’t even increase their numbers. What it does is turns all the baddies into the terrorist/commie Russian equivalent of a Terminator who has combed the phone book for the player’s name and address. They target the player mercilessly, ignoring NPC allies who are stood right next to them blazing away in favour of picking on the squishy meatbag. They are super-accurate; sticking your head out of cover even for a second is just inviting the veiny red screen of death. And they never, ever die. Watching AK-toting goons get back up after you fired eight rounds from an assault rifle into their torsos reaches the point of absurdity at times, and – worst of all – utterly shatters player immersion. It becomes clear that you’re not fighting people; you’re fighting robots with intrinsic advantages that you can never hope to match. And that’s no fun at all.

Halo.

Bungie have always had an unorthodox approach to game difficulty (see the article on Myth for more info) and Halo was no exception. It had an advantage in that the sci-fi game universe allowed for enemies that were difficult to bring down but which didn’t seem implausibly tough, but Halo at least paid lip service to the idea that playing on Legendary should be a fundamentally different experience from playing on Normal by varying the enemies you’d encounter at specific points in a level. On Normal you’d go into a room and face down a blue, moderately tough Elite and some grunts. The same room on Legendary would contain lots of grunts, some jackals, multiple blue Elites and a single, very tough gold Elite commander who’d probably be armed with an instant-kill weapon like the plasma sword.  This changes the way the player perceives the game in three different ways:

• The player can see from the extra enemies and the gold Elite that the game is very visibly different on Legendary.
• The extra threat of the gold Elite is accentuated by contrasting him with the same blue Elites the player fought and beat before. Their toughness hasn’t been increased and they’re no more accurate than they were the first time around. It’s just that this time they’re flunkies of a bigger, badder Elite.
• The enemy AI isn’t necessarily better, but the increased number of bad guys means it’s more likely that one of them will throw a grenade or flank the player, making them seem smarter.

Unfortunately while every subsequent FPS stole Halo’s regenerating health, two weapon limit and dedicated grenade and melee buttons, they largely ignored the steps it took in making playing FPSes on a harder difficulty setting compelling.

Goldeneye.

A half-and-half mix, here. Playing on 00 Agent in Goldeneye could be immensely frustrating since it goes with the tried and tested method of making all the bad guys really really tough (so much so that my defining memory of Goldeneye is walking an entire magazine of AK fire along a closely-bunched line of Soviet guards at head height that didn’t kill a single one), but unlike CoD’s approach 00 Agent was a setting you wanted to play on. This is because the difficulty settings gradually ramped up the complexity of what you had to do in a mission. To complete the first dam level on Agent you simply had to jump off the dam. Completing the same level on 00 Agent required you to plant a bug in one part of the level and then access a computer withing the dam structure itself while shooting out all the alarms, and then jump off the dam. Again, a substantially different experience to the one you’d have on Agent.

Hitman: Blood Money.

A game that allowed an astonishing amount of freedom in the way you could approach (most) missions. Walking in the front door guns blazing was almost always an option, and doing this made the game very easy even if the gunplay was a little bit stale. However, Blood Money was a game that had some very, very creative ways to kill people — none of which involved guns except for the one in the opera where you swap a fake pistol for a real pistol, causing an actor to inadvertently murder his co-star –  and which it encouraged you to find by breaking down your performance in excruciating detail at the end of the mission. Here, I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

If the player, during a mission, gets caught on CCTV or is witnessed committing murder, Agent 47′s notoriety will rise.^[3] Conversely, if the player executes the mission perfectly with none of the aforementioned events occurring, 47′s notoriety will be minimal. … The higher Agent 47′s notoriety is, the easier it will be for NPCs to identify him. Players may use the bribery system to negate accumulated notoriety.^[3] Notoriety gained in early missions will affect later missions. Earlier missions in which 47 has gained notoriety in can be replayed in order to attempt to reduce notoriety in later missions. The notoriety system is not enabled on “Rookie” mode, the easiest difficulty setting.

At the end of each mission, a newspaper article is displayed regarding the hit, in which the content varies depending on the investigation results and the player’s notoriety. It will detail the weapon most frequently used, how accurately it was used, the number of police, security, and civilians killed or injured, and if there were any witnesses. Any injured people will be counted as witnesses, who affect your notoriety. Sketch drawings are also sometimes visible of Agent 47′s face, which grow progressively more accurate as 47′s notoriety grows.

You see? Killing the crap out of everyone with guns may be easy but it also creates notoriety and potentially makes future missions more difficult. The newspaper headlines you got at the end of each mission were a little generic but were on the whole a very creative way of communicating just how much commotion the player had caused. And the best part is that all this stuff is entirely plausible within the game’s universe. Of course you’d want to do it quietly. Of course you’d want to leave as little evidence behind as possible. You don’t have to, but you’re strongly encouraged to. Using scoring systems to reward good performance like this is fairly common, but the way Blood Money went about it and meshed it with difficulty was rather unorthodox. I really liked it.

Starcraft II.

How do you make a strategy game more difficult while keeping it interesting for the player? There’s the Civilization approach – which I don’t necessarily agree with – of giving the player bonuses on the earlier difficulty levels, but then penalising them on the later ones and giving a boost to the AI. Civilization usually pitches its difficulty levels so that being able to win reliably on one means you’re ready to step up to the next one, but it always sticks in the craw to see the AI marching over your border with a huge stack of troops that you know it didn’t have to pay for. Most RTSes have a highly accentuated version of this problem, where continually having to fend off huge streams of units that a human player couldn’t possibly have built starts to feel more than a little bit artificial – much like the CoD example described above.

Starcraft II’s solution to this problem wasn’t original, but it was unusual. Choosing the Hard difficulty setting would mean facing tougher enemies, yes, and there’d also be more of them, but there’d also be more advanced/harder unit types mixed in you had to deal with and you’d encounter bad guys at a point in a level where there were none before. Additionally the AI was much more aggressive on Hard, and playing missions that were deliberately asymmetric – like the colony defense mission, or the zombie mission – meant that the frequency and ferocity of the scripted attacks were increased. You couldn’t beat the computer by just playing more efficiently than you did on normal; you had to change the basics of your strategy.

Covert Action.

The old Microprose games all had roughly the same approach to difficulty. When you finished a game, you’d see your total score tallied up. This number was essentially meaningless on its own, but it’d always be paired with a verbal equivalent of how the game rated your performance. A low score would invite insulting comparisons with Dan Quayle or Ethelred the Unready, while scoring highly would see you retiring as a Governor in the Caribbean or going on to become President of theUnited States. The highest scores weren’t possible unless you played on the harder difficulty settings; this was a crude but effective way of incentivising the player to do better next time.

However, there’s also Covert Action. Covert Action is a game that casts you as a spy who is out to foil a series of randomly generated plots by terrorist groups, and it wasn’t really possible to make this more or less difficult by giving hardcoded bonuses to the AI. There was no AI. Instead, playing the game on an easy difficulty setting would give you a very, very simple plot to unravel – there’d be no more than three or four conspirators who would be easily identified, they’d use simple ciphers and their phone systems would be trivial to tap. Upping the difficulty level would increase the complexity of the plot, adding more layers, more conspirators and making the puzzles much harder. Often the Mastermind – the guy you were trying to catch – would go into hiding before you managed to work your way up the chain to him, so even though you stopped his bomb plot you’d have to live with knowing he was still at large. Probably the earliest example of a game that was measurably different as you made it harder.

Looking at these examples, the reason why developers often plump for the lazy CoD solution is fairly obvious: going beyond that is a whole load of extra work and you’re cutting a large number of people who have bought your game off from a lot of its content, which I understand is a big no-no in today’s game industry. It’s much easier to just have them play the same game with tougher bad guys and no-one gets left out in the cold! Still, I’d argue that if you’re going to do that you might as well not include a difficulty setting at all. These days you might be able to bait people into grinding their way through your game on Hard with achievements, but unless they’re of a certain masochistic mindset (hi Jim) they’re not going to have fun doing it. Remember the gnome challenge in Episode Two of Half Life 2? Where you had to carry the gnome through the entire game from beginning to end? Nobody really enjoyed doing that because there wasn’t a huge amount of creativity involved in transporting the gnome; you just had to remember where you’d dropped the little bastard when baddies turned up. It was an additional, pointless chore that players who really wanted all the achievements had to carry out. That’s how I feel about playing games on Hard these days. If there’s no additional challenge — if it’s not interesting — then I’m just not going to bother.

The post The Difficulty Of Difficulty. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.