Author: Josh

Fixing Artifact by breaking it

~ Josh ~ Leave a comment

In Part 1 I discussed various ways on how to design better heroes, but this time I want to discuss how to create a more interesting game by breaking it. A classic way to spice up games is to set general rules for the game, and then have something be able to break that rule.

In Starcraft, all units are either ground units or air units. So they added the Viking, which can switch between modes. This is similar to Dota 2’s Troll Warlord who can swap between ranged and melee. All Dota units die when they run out of health, so they added Skeleton King who respawns on the spot when he runs out of health, provided the ability is off cooldown. Some of the cards previously shown on this blog break the game, but ideally you want cards that break the mechanics in unique ways. Only they can do what they do. Now remember to focus on the ideas, any variables can be altered to achieve balance.

These cards are all focused on manipulating the gameplay phases of the game. Ordinarily, you have the same phase order every game. This lets you change it. Repetition allows you to theory-craft and build decks around the idea of the Pre-Action phase. Lucent Beam, Jinada, Mist of Avernus and Ignite are all examples of things that can be repeated by using this card. Instead of a simple stat boost which many cards are, this allows you to synergize in new and interesting ways. Every time new cards come out you can revisit the old cards to see what has changed, many stat boosts don’t allow you to do this.

But these are very minor changes, why not do something a tad more extreme or creative?

Mr Reverso is the spice of life. Suddenly you are now starting with Lane 3 and ending with Lane 1; it completely changes the value of lanes. You might now be Paydaying in Lane 1, and focusing your heroes on Lane 3. It shakes up the game in an insane and unique way.  If you’re really clever it might all be an elaborate ruse as you intend to use a second Mr Reverso next round to put it back to normal now that your enemy has deployed so many heroes into Lane 3. Likewise, both Frosty Fusion and Double Step have some interesting concepts that change the game.

Once you start going down the path of going crazy with how the core game functions you realise there are so many more options that can be done. Morphling allows the Cloak that gives +4 hp to end up giving him +4 attack, but suddenly he’s very low HP. Perhaps instead you equip a Stonehall Cloak which gives HP every round. You eventually swap the stats to create a giant glass cannon who deals incredible tower damage. You will want to figure out the best way to abuse cards and items, as 1 attack damage is more valuable than 1 hp. This hero example is a pretty simple way to make a stat changing ability interesting. It allows you to make strategic decisions while interacting with other cards and abilities in enjoyable ways. Ultimately cards should be more unique, and more crazy. These are a bunch of cards that change how certain parts of the game are done.

One of Artifact’s many problems was dull card design. Using the ‘break the game’ concept you can create an endless stream of vastly more interesting cards, many of which feel nice to use.

How to make Artifact’s future cards more exciting: Heroes

~ Josh ~ Leave a comment

Artifact has a swarm of problems with monetization, gameplay and a lack of features. But one of the less-mentioned problems is how incredibly boring and uninspired the base set cards are. So here is a core design strategy with some example cards on how the next set of cards could avoid making the same mistake.

Foreword

Two things you must keep in mind while looking at these cards. First, any mana cost or base stats can be altered. You should instead focus on the core concept of the card; numbers are easy to tweak. Second, while I try to keep heroes similar to Dota, I ultimately go for gameplay first. This might tweak a hero a bit or use their lore instead. The gameplay concept is more important than the hero’s name, or even their colour.

Heroes with Deck Altering Passives

These sorts of abilities have an impact on how you build your deck. The moment you include them, your deck must change. Alchemist will alter your item deck and make you favour stats over ability centric items like Blink Dagger. He’s weak early on and super item dependent, probably the first hero in the game that’s best in the fifth position.

Warlock makes you go for the cheap and dirty. It’s all about cheap cards and this includes hero signatures. The numbers can be altered, but he’s a hero focused on a heavy draw of cheap cards. He may be great with something like Rising Anger in mono-red, or perhaps partner him with black to ensure you get your gold generation out fast. There’s lots of great concepts to be tested, and decks to try.

Now these cards lend themselves more towards constructed play than draft, but that’s exactly the point. I like cards like Rising Anger or Storm Spirit because they alter the deck, yet draft lovers hate them because of this reason. Catering too heavily to draft players results in boring cards. It severely limits you from having cards that interact well with each other, perhaps even rely on each other. The card has to be good in isolation, or drafters tend to go for other cards.

There are many other ideas that can be applied here, but an increase in cards that alter how you build a deck would make deck building more enjoyable. They alter what is considered best. Time of Triumph is good, but it cannot be used with Warlock which means there is an entirely new set of cards that are best in any Warlock red deck. If balanced correctly, it creates decks that are viable when played against the auto-include, but don’t have the auto-include cards.

Heroes with Mechanic Manipulations

Troll Warlord removes restrictions from target-specific cards. So Bellow can only be cast on a creep, well it can also now be cast on Troll Warlord because he doesn’t care about your petty human restrictions. Sven’s God’s Strength can only be cast on Red Heroes, well Troll doesn’t care about that, so you can use it on him too. There still has to be a Red Hero in the lane to allow you to use Red cards, but he provides some interesting interactions and fun.

Vengeful Spirit, or rather her Signature Card, is different almost every game. Do you want to swap your own abilities, putting Prellex’s ability on someone else because she is about to die? Perhaps you fancy an enemy ability and are willing to swap something like like Bristleback’s passive in order to steal the enemy’s Rix’ fast deployment.

Both cards switch things up as they can be different every game, but they also allow you to manipulate pre-existing mechanics. Mechanics are meant to be broken, it’s what makes them good. Dota is filled with this. You have a movement speed cap? Okay, here’s a hero who can go faster than it. You have stats, okay here’s a hero that can shift one into the other and back.

Epilogue

This is just part one of my series on card design, and I’ve only looked at heroes. One of the problems with heroes at the moment is that because so many of them are so simplistic, it’s incredibly easy to determine who is better. Most don’t change play style or decks very much, and thus some are objectively better. Take the PA vs Storm Spirit example. PA gets +4 damage against heroes, Storm only gets +4 damage (against anyone) if you use 2 black cards. PA has better base stats. PA has an amazing signature card, instantly killing someone. Storm’s is ultimately best in mono-black decks, and yet he is so objectively worse that most mono-black decks don’t even use him. His ability could have allowed for some interesting deck building in mono-black or with extra draw, but because he is so badly balanced his deck altering ability is useless.

Which is the massive point. Adding the type of cards I’ve suggested is sorely needed, but for some reason the few that exist in the base set seem to be intentionally weak. The best hero on launch was Axe, a hero with no ability. That’s incredibly dull. Greater care needs to be dealt with balance; namely you want your popular cards to be interesting. It’s bad if you’re most popular heroes lack abilities, or have basic stat boosts. It’s bland. So spice life up a little.

A conversation on female heroes in Dota 2

~ Josh ~ Leave a comment

For some time there has been a debate on whether negative representation is better than no representation. For example, in order to have a stereotypical representation of a homosexual male, you must first admit that they make up a proportion of the population and by doing so they are no longer invisible. This is an important element as many countries flat-out deny the existence of homosexuals in their populations. Others argue that it is better to be invisible than to have a poor representation which is likely to cause harm by propagating negative stereotypes. Dota 2 has an issue with female heroes, but it’s more complex than most other games and doesn’t fit very neatly into this argument.

Sexualisation of Characters

Many believe it is completely viable to sexualise female heroes so long as the same is also done for male heroes. Thus a game with a busty female can be offset by a shirtless bloke with a six-pack. Some dislike this approach entirely and say any overt sexualizing is bad unless it is a core proponent of the character, as it too heavily favours reducing a character to sex and making them primarily a sex object. League of Legends does the former, where both male and female characters are overtly sexualised, often to insane degrees. Dota on the other hand takes the latter approach, where almost all characters are completely unsexualised within the game world.

The only exception in Dota would be Akasha, the Queen of Pain. Akasha is extremely sexualised but this does not detract from their stance. Akasha’s entire lore and backstory revolve around themes that lend themselves to sexualisation, and thus her suggestive voice lines complement her lore.

It would be a mistake to assume that this means the females in Dota 2 are a good example of positive female representation. While there is a number of sexless heroes, the bulk of heroes are male. There are 117 heroes in the game yet only 19 are female. Strength heroes tend to be more masculine and muscular, but even excluding all strength heroes there is still only 18 females out of the remaining 79. The core fact is that the amount of female characters is noticeably lower.

Additionally, heroes like Medusa and Naga Siren have to be female as both are also female in the Greek mythology they are adapted from. Likewise, Zeus would most logically be male.

Female Origins

However, Dota’s origin is more unique than most games as it primarily used pre-existing assets from Blizzard, most notably Warcraft 3. Drow Ranger and Windranger are both adaptions of Warcraft’s Sylvanas Windrunner, much like Crystal Maiden is Jaina Proudmoore. This could be the very core of the problem when it comes to the lack of female heroes in Dota.

Dota 2 has an origin unique to modern games. The hero roster is very limited by Warcraft 3 and the popularity or quality of certain characters there, along with the pre “Official Dota” mods that circulated before the most popular heroes were put into All-Stars.

The only female strength hero, Tresdin the Legion Commander, was male in the original mod. She was intentionally changed with the transition into Dota 2. This suggests the development team were acutely aware of the sex problem in the Dota 2 roster. This is a step up from Team Fortress 2, where none of the 9 playable classes are female. Perhaps this is where the diversity concern ended. Neither Grimstroke nor Pangolier had to be male, while viable arguments could be made for why Mars and Monkey King had to be. The five original Dota 2 heroes, and yet only one is female. This suggests that the problem still does exist. Only 16% of the roster are female, and while quota obsession is controversial even in professional contexts, the incredibly low percentage is noticeable. While many groups that have been historically under-represented in media change from country to country, we still by in large have a 50% split when it comes to sex. The evolutionary model Fisher’s principle explains why most species that reproduce sexually have a 1:1 ratio with sex. Assuming most Dota species follow this principle, then their universe would have a comparable ratio.

It’s probably a bit complicated and even unnecessary to use evolutionary biology to discuss sex ratio problems in a video game. Ultimately though, there’s a severe lack of female characters in the game, and this post also did not look much into how they were represented in both physical appearance and personality. Both of which can be a problem in games. The female characters are mostly fine in the areas addressed, but there just isn’t very many of them. Whether this is considered a problem will mostly depend on you. One would imagine most Dota players care very little about such things, but do note that the League of Legends team recently included homosexual heroes in their game. They said diversity wasn’t an explicit goal, but rather something that evolved naturally over time. So perhaps when designing future heroes, the development team should ponder on whether sex is something they should consider. Biological sex that is…

Dota has become too obfuscated

~ Josh ~ Leave a comment

244. 450. 169. These numbers used to have meaning, but not anymore.

A Clockwerk limps back to fountain on 260 health, his armor rattling as he goes. Tinker’s Heat-Seeking Missile has seeked Rattletrap’s heat, and will hit in mere moments. Should he activate BKB? Should he smoke dodge it? It’s anyone’s guess.

In previous versions of Dota 2, numbers were mostly static. Heat Seeking Missile did 325 damage when maxed, which was 244 after default magic resistance. For this Clockwerk it was easily knowable if BKB would avoid death or not. Zeus’ ultimate was no different, things were static. Aghanim’s occasionally increased damage; Veil was added to the game but was rarely bought for years. Glimmer Cape did not exist and it was common for the vast majority of even high tier pubs to not have a Pipe or Hood. There is power in having static values, a value that has since been lost.

This here is a Lion with an Aghanim’s increasing his base Finger of Death damage to 1025. This used to be the only change. Now you have to factor in the 17 previous kills which give him +50 damage each and check for the +200 finger damage talent. Then you notice he has a Kaya which gives 8% spell amplification, wait no, it’s combined with a Sange so it gives 12%. Add in the 10.9% amplification from his intelligence and how much damage does it do? By now it’s easy to forget if you add the 1050 boosted damage before or after the spell amplification. So it’s 2075 plus 22.9% amplification, an equation that difficult to do in your head. It’s 2551… Maybe? Well it will be 2600 now that you’re dead, and then probably 26 something by the time he gets another intelligence item. You have no idea if he can one tap you from fog at any given time.

This here is a Sven with Warcry active. Warcry gives a 150 shield against physical damage, plus an additional 2.5 times his strength. 90 + 83 x 2.5 = 433 + 150 = 583 blocked damage. Does this go down when he tread switches or when he loses his +30 strength from his ultimate? Probably not. The tooltip and buff icon don’t tell you how much the shield blocks. There is no visual indication on the hero that the shield is low. At best you can work out that his helmet cosmetic is cute, but not much more.

These are two examples of how Dota has increasingly become a guessing game when it comes to the numbers of skills. But it’s not isolated to scaling numbers, but also to basic data. You used to be able to highlight an enemy skill to see its cast range. Not anymore. Allegedly the devs found it easier to remove the functionality entirely once an exploit involving enemy leveled skills was used in a pro game. The circle would only show up if an enemy had leveled that skill, thus you could exploit it to see what an enemy had leveled before they had revealed it.

One must understand that Dota 2 has always has done something better than any of the similar Dota-clone games. That is the beauty of information.

League of Legends in this example doesn’t tell you how your spell scales with levels. How much does damage increase each level, how much does the cooldown change? It’s hidden. Dota 2 liked taking this information and plopping right where you could hover. Over time this became more so with the various updates. The simplification of damage types removed the need to search online what Universal Damage was, and the tooltips – while often lacking – have been a solid step forward in putting information in easily find-able ways. Is this dispel-able? Well check the tooltip!

Tooltips do often become left by the wayside. Many returning players become confused when playing Doom for the first time in a while. There’s no in-game reason as to why you’re not receiving abilities from creeps, even I had to google that one when I returned. The assumption was the auto-cast would just be an auto-cast like old Lich Ice Armor, not fundamentally change how the ability operates. Isolated issues are part of a greater trend; the devs find constant maintenance of tooltips problematic. Perhaps boring or tedious, likely also difficult and expansive. Having someone else do it just isn’t Valve’s way.

The addition of tracking changes in tooltips was great at first, but now patches become so frequent and are often so mundane that they cycle through very quickly. Even a nicotine patch addict would find Dota’s love of patches to be a bit much.

Dota will always change over time, and perhaps some things are lost forever. But some of it does feel like there’s a better way. Warcry should have a visually identifiable strength, and a number in the buff bar. Permanent buffs should stay visible, even when they go into fog when they’re selected. Items like Kaya should always factor in when you press alt to see the skill’s boosted damage values, even in fog, and it should also add in modifiers like talents and Finger of Death bonus. Ultimately a shift in the attitude towards this information on behalf of the developers would be ideal. Some never played the original Dota yet still have up to 7 years of Dota 2 under their belt. As games like Dota Auto Chess brings in players, now would be an opportune time to buckle down and seize the recent interest in the game. Turbo is also great for previous hard-core players who now are drowning in adult life and often don’t want to deal with the long and enraging normal Dota games. Mathematics may seem dull to many, but one thing Artifact did right was giving every piece of information you needed. No more hiding in the trees.