Bugs Not To Copy
Conan females do less DPS than males do because their special attack animations are longer. Even better, it would take too much artist time to fix anytime soon. Sara is on the case.
Zen of Design
;
Don't confuse 'new' with 'innovative' - the latter assumes some level of non-suck.
Sure, on the surface of it, this is interesting for the development implications.
But what about the social ones? Why are female animations longer? I’d argue that animation length conforms to internal (artist) and anticipated external (player) notions of what looks good. In other words, avg. animation length is a variable directly and positively correlated to what we like to look at. Also, what we think the player wants to look at. Case in point, mammaries.
I was surprised at the original story here - female DPS is lower, that’s so misogynistic! But why? What strange coincidence led to such a clearly damaging headline? Answer - emergent trends in our development process.
If raw, seething numbers from a live game environment can say that much about us, what other untapped insights are laying around in something like the Armory? For instance - what are the real player preferences when it comes to robes vs. vests? How does this breakdown by gender? How about the prevalence of 2h swords with really big meshes graphed by age?
Perhaps those examples seem a bit simple, but I remember a professor once saying “all great social research is obvious, after the fact.” Maybe if we anticipated some of this stuff more, we could more effectively reach certain audiences.
So: Reverse engineering market trends in order to model potential users, then optimizing design to target them. That’s the ticket.
Comment by Justin Willcox — July 2, 2008 @ 12:22 pmThat’s not a bug, it’s a horrifying glimpse into a fundamentally broken architecture. Attack timing is driven by the animation loops? Um, what?
Comment by sidereal — July 2, 2008 @ 1:29 pmOn the other hand, if any game should be misogynic, doesn’t Conan fit the bill? Though if FunCom admitted this was deliberate, I imagine the shitstorm would bury the game instantly.
Comment by zapp — July 2, 2008 @ 2:05 pmSo how long have feral attack distances been broken in WoW?
Comment by wewhoeat — July 2, 2008 @ 2:54 pmI seem to remember City of Heroes having something of this problem (with specific attacks - Axe Kick, maybe? - not by gender or size or anything.) I do remember that they had to redo the animations for several of the Scrapper Martial Arts attacks because they were gorgeous, but so elaborate as to be wildly inefficient.
Comment by Jeremy Preacher — July 2, 2008 @ 3:07 pmI’ve been playing Conan some recently. I’m curious if anyone else has been dabbling, hands-on? So far it’s a mixed bag for me.
Comment by Justin Willcox — July 3, 2008 @ 8:32 am“But what about the social ones? Why are female animations longer? I’d argue that animation length conforms to internal (artist) and anticipated external (player) notions of what looks good. In other words, avg. animation length is a variable directly and positively correlated to what we like to look at. Also, what we think the player wants to look at. Case in point, mammaries.”
Yeah, I would guess that the first problem was a miscommunication. The designers deliver a list of animation requests to the animators. The animators make stuff that they think looks cool and throw it back over the wall. The designers are happy to receive the new animations, which do, in fact look cool, and hook them up to abilties and move on with their lives.
It’s actually difficult to tell minor DPS variations when you don’t have a traditional in-game combat log. It’s hard to verify changes to damage, etc. without the ability to go back and see what just happened, you know?
Comment by Sara Jensen Schubert — July 3, 2008 @ 9:02 am‘It’s actually difficult to tell minor DPS variations when you don’t have a traditional in-game combat log. It’s hard to verify changes to damage, etc. without the ability to go back and see what just happened, you know?’
I hope they have such tools, at least internally. If not, it goes a long way towards explaining how they could unintentionally release an MMO with such a controversial gender imbalance in it!
Comment by moo — July 3, 2008 @ 12:38 pm“I’ve been playing Conan some recently. I’m curious if anyone else has been dabbling, hands-on? So far it’s a mixed bag for me.”
I’ve been playing it, alternating between that and WoW. On the balance, I enjoy it as long as I have a zone full of quests. It does have quite a few questionable design decisions that make me wanna go ‘huh?’, but at this stage in my career, almost every game seems to.
I don’t know if I’ll chase the city sieging game, especially since my female barbarian is apparently gimped, but it’ll probably hold my interest a while longer.
Comment by Damion — July 3, 2008 @ 5:23 pmThat’s not unusual, nor is it a bad idea. City of Heroes relies on it for all attacks. Doing otherwise is a good way to end up breaking sense of immersion, stringing together a bunch of half-attacks that shouldn’t be touching an enemy.
Most groups *check first*, though. CoH, for example, links up attack timing in a different stage than the actual creation of the attack animation, so this sorta thing would show up internally before it even made it onto an internal test server. They still had problems with individual attacks being ridiculously wrong, but that’s more because the lead didn’t care about inter-powerset balance.
Comment by gattsuru — July 4, 2008 @ 12:14 pmOh, and as for the social reasons behind it… I don’t do much animation design, yet, but one trick I have found is that animations don’t work as well for one gender as the next on models with more extreme levels of sexual dimorphism. Beyond ‘clipping’ issues, some things just don’t look right.
A 280+ lbs muscular male tossing around a 2-handed axe overhand looks a lot more ‘real’ than a woman who looks about half that much, with 15 lbs of that devoted to back problems. You can reduce this, but most of the tricks involved either set the path of the swing to another location, or involve adding a few pauses. It doesn’t matter that female, record-setting weightlifters look like that (sans the ridiculously oversized chest) and probably toss around the average game designer, it’s just a social expectation.
It’s a tough situation, but you’d think someone somewhere would have noticed it earlier. Animation time differences on this level are both rather notable, and the sort of thing that tweaks the nerves of attentive people.
Comment by gattsuru — July 4, 2008 @ 12:37 pm[…] latest Conan Patch Notes should make Damien happy… * We’re now done with the majority of the process to completely equalize Male […]
Pingback by It's about time | imaekgaemz.com — July 31, 2008 @ 11:42 am