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Why Do Games Still Have Levels? 512
a.d.venturer writes "Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Angband)? Why do games still have levels?"
HL2 Has Levels? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:5, Informative)
Although there are 'loading' screens, but that is just because the game is programed that way.
Portal is similar, but much more distinct in the way of 'levels.' But that works into the gameplay quite a bit because each 'level' is a new test. Once you get into the behind-the-scenes area there is no real 'level' change. Just loading screens, which you have with all Valve single player games.
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In half life 2 you did have a few of those moments.
Thats funny, I never really thought of it that way.
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These scripts are slower, if you have too many in memory a machine would slow intolerably. Thus you split it up into portions. Transition between levels can be made seamless, but the separation is still required. Do you want scripts involving an area you won't reach for ages resident in memory? Nope. Seamless transitions are good, even bac
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That doesn't necessarily scale (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess the best way to say it is: it boils down to how long your loading times are. If they're fast enough, sure, you can put them in a background thread. If not, not.
It may sound like merely stating the obvious tautology, but there are some actual game design implications there.
If we decide that all games must be seamless and loading screens are sooo last century, then that puts an upper limit on how complex your game can be. Complete changes of scenery (e.g., from jun
Invade-a-Load (Score:3, Informative)
but as far as I know, "putting mini-games into load sequences to avoid user boredom" has been patented at least once. Way to go for innovation, dear patent system.
Namco's U.S. Patent 5,718,632 is still listed as valid only because nobody has been sued yet. If Namco were to sue someone, someone would complain that the invention was obvious to anyone skilled in the art who had seen Invade-a-Load [wikipedia.org].
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So, when textures and other such data are loaded into the video card itself, it can't do much else at the same time, like rendering gameplay. So you need to stagger the loads of data to be "in the background" and with some cards, that's just not possible. On shared memory card schemes, where the card itself is reading data directly from the main RAM,
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In HL2 you did have a few, fade to black then a few hours later, moments.
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:5, Informative)
If you count halflife, hl2, ep1 and ep2 as one game, there are 6, one at the end of each game, where you get take out of time and space, or knocked unconscious, the teleport in hl2, and the when you get knocked unconscious in halflife and put in the trash compactor.
Even including these, from the time you get on the train at the start the game is a complete presentation of Gordon Freeman's life, with no gaps where he goes off and does something without you.
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh no, wait a minute, he doesn't exist, and I'm just making stuff up.
Re:Toilets are overrated (in games at least) (Score:5, Funny)
Constipation. He's stuck on it 'forever'.
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:4, Informative)
In HL2 you did have a few, fade to black then a few hours later, moments.
Yeah 'cuz in HL1 the military special forces don't ambush you after you fight a bunch of ninja guys, knock you out, carry you away and you wake up in a trash compactor some time later weaponless... Oh, wait...
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Half-Life has a continuous space which loads as you move throughout it. Half-Life 2 has loading screens that sit between each map - forcing you out of the game experience. Sure, both games have the same underlying map mechanism. But Half-Life 2 interrupts your game play to load the next stage. That's why I make a distinction in this instance. Of course, both games are on the same side of a lot of the other arguments I give for the existence of levels.
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:5, Informative)
Now, on a modern PC, the load times in Half Life are so short that you won't notice them - you'll get a really fast blip of text saying "now loading", and that's about it. But when Half Life was new, there was a good 20 seconds of wait time between levels.
Also, Portal's elevators are rarely actual loading screens. The first 18 test chambers take place on something like 6 separate levels, but there's still an elevator ride between each one. You're confusing a pause in the game with a loading screen.
While we're at it, it was rare for a C64 game to have in-game loading. The vast majority of C64 games ran on tapes, so didn't have access to the tape after it had finished loading. The entire game had to fit in that 64Kb of RAM (possibly less, depending on how the game set up the RAM).
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Gordon! Weren't you supposed to be in the test chamber an hour ago?
Because they are useful (Score:4, Insightful)
In short the existence, or lack of, all depends on the type of game in play.
Re:Because they are useful (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand why Doom has levels, since you're literally descending to a new location. So the name basically fits.
But what about the host WWII games? Ooohhh, Normandy was easy, wait 'til you get to Bastogne... Don't think the troops saw it that way.
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Re:Because they are useful (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium. Sometimes seamless works (HL2 is nearly-seamless, though there is the "slow teleport" which definitely qualifies as a break in the continuity), and sometimes you need the break-up to move around the story (Halo). And some games just work better with discrete campaigns, such as RTS games. And even the FPS example you gave, any WWII game. Well as veterans can tell you, the fighting DOES stop at some points. You make discrete attacks, push forward, and hold. It's not anything like the games of course, but it's not 24/7/365 from the start to the end of any war.
Levels work as both a story tool, and a gameplay tool. If they're eliminated, you need a reason for that too, which is OK, but they shouldn't be eliminated "just because."
Re:Because they are useful (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean 24/7/365 like WWII Online?
There are games that exist. On an individual a soldier doesn't fight 24/7 but there is always something going on like a bombing raid, naval attack, or troop movement on a strategic scale.
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It is funny (if I were snootier I might say 'ironic') but on a really, really good book I don't even notice the new chapters starting. There have been several books I've read that really hit the ground running and the first time I'd notice a new chapter was around 7 or 8.
Antecedent - Behavior - Consequence (Score:5, Interesting)
We need payoff. We need to feel like we've accomplished something bigger than defeating one enemy, but smaller than finishing the game. We need to expunge all the cruft from one section of the game from our minds to make way for new information.
LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM FOLLOWS:
On one level, we're getting reinforced all the time when we play games. We see an enemy (antecedent), we shoot the enemy (behavior), the enemy dies and the path is cleared (consequence). A couple of levels up, we have the whole game as one contingency, where playing the game is the behavior and having the game finished is the consequence. (I was having a hard time coming up with the exact antecedent on that one.)
But other than with very short games, we need something in between those two. Eventually most people will get satiated on the enemy-shooting contingency; without a higher contingency than that, but a lower contingency than the far-away end of the game, there's no strong enough, near enough reinforcement to be worth continuing to play. (At least for a while.)
END LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM
Game designers know all of this, so they space out the payoff so that there's always something near enough (end of a level) to be worth fighting toward. Eventually, most people will get satiated even with intermittent big payoff, but it takes a lot longer than if the game was just one big level. And in the end, the main goal of game designers is to keep you playing as long as possible.
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I forgot to mention that aspect in my post. Yes, unrealistic games like MoH, Wolf, and BoB (don't lynch me) have progressively harder and harder levels but I don't agree with that aspect.
Lets talk about Day of Defeat, WWII Online, and Red Orchestra which are online (mostly) only and against real humans. There are maps, but they aren't scaled based on difficulty but who you m
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Or the opposite like in Oblivion where the hardness is simply adjusted to your power everywhere you go but lets you go wherever you want (mostly).
Now if you want to go complete non-scaled, then lets talk about games by Paradox Interactive [paradoxplaza.com] that create world simulations such as Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.
There are no levels... No end goals... No difficulty progressing as you progress if you ch
Why do games have levels? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Jak and Daxter is completely seamless, no loading screens. Finishing missions will open new areas, but the entire old area is open at most points.
Re:Why do games have levels? (Score:4, Insightful)
why do books still have chapters? (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Well on computers at least (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well on computers at least (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well on computers at least (Score:5, Funny)
Did you have to get the icicle from your house, or his?
Re:Well on computers at least (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, you have to get the icicle from an ice gnome. But the gnome doesn't want to give to you, so you have to get the sleeping herb to put him to sleep to get it. But the apothecary that sells the herb only takes Borgrovians Drikkits for payment. So you have to travel to Borgrovia and..
Chris Mattern
Re:Well on computers at least (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you system is good for making sure that enough is loaded so that wherever the player goes the data is ready, it is quite workable.
It's workable, but from a company's standpoint, is it really worth coming up with the schemes for loading data dynamically (which will probably be more complicated then just having predefined sets of memory loaded at certain points)? I think it's rare that people will refuse to play a game on the sole fact that the levels take 10-20 seconds to load. Now getting towards a minute and upwards, (like the battlefield series) companies may start getting in to problems.
As stated earlier, I think it depends on t
Re:Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
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BTW, I was impressed by Katamari Damacy. This game does have levels, but each level is a big world. You start off tiny. Ob
well (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or was this a trick question?
Accomplishment (Score:5, Interesting)
What I can't figure out is why everyone in my office gets all weird when I start killing co-workers during my XP grind? Sheesh...
Re:Accomplishment (Score:5, Funny)
That's why they're looking at you funny. You're doing it wrong. It's a classic newbie mistake.
Maybe (Score:2)
As for portals, I'm not sure the HL2 engine can stream a level or load one in the back ground.
I think its more a limitation of the technology/power than actual design. As stuff has gotten more powerful, the games have used more power to make them look pretty as opposed to making them look smoother and load seamlessly.
In some cases, you just can't realistically link 2 separate places.
slow news day (Score:5, Insightful)
Portal had individual puzzles in individual rooms. Duh.
Next questions: Why do books still have chapters? Why do plays still have acts? Why do movies still have scenes?
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The summary repeatedly begs the question - "Levels are bad, M'kay? Only a terrorist pedophile would like
The same reason that books still have chapters. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or because "downtime" occurs between levels that the player doesn't need to see, whether they're following corridors or going back to base.
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Also, sometimes books follow more than one thread of narrative at once. Same way, if you're displaying the point-of-view of more than one character, having levels makes the transitions less abrupt.
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Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, Chapter ??: Nothing much else happened that night.
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Vardaman Chapter: My mother is a fish.
Gremlins by George Gipe, Chapter 11: Pete forgot.
Levels provide separation (Score:3, Insightful)
If the basic idea behind a game is a string of essentially separate puzzles, like in portal where each room is a new puzzle, then levels really enhance the gameplay by creating a sense of achievement. I'm thinking of a 2D version, I don't keep up to date on games and I vaguely remember there being several others that might be different.
Levels can be new layers of interest and difficulty. An immersion game is more like a storyline - games with levels play more like a series of puzzles. Some groups of gamers really like puzzles.
See Books, Albums, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever read a book without chapters? It's a pain. Likewise, can you imagine playing a Mario game where you were just running form the beginning to the end? that would be nuts. Sure, for some applications, continuous can be really interesting. But that's just not what is most natural to people, whether it's like the real world or not.
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There's much more to a chapter or level ending than a pause. There's a wrapping up of previous story/gameplay elements, and a feeling of beginning anew: a chance to compress all our experiences in the previous level down to just the important stuff and to expunge the tedious parts.
In a way, like the people above have said, it has everything to
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Jeez people you need to discuss the point, not some extreme case from an example.
Half-life has Levels (Score:2, Informative)
I remember waiting a minute or two to load levels on my old 166 MHz system with a Voodoo 1, and 32mb RAM back in the day.
Changes in pace? (Score:4, Insightful)
any substantial storyline has natural breaks and scenery changes contained within it
what's the problem?
Angband? Get T-O-M-E instead (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because content size scales with storage capacity. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a pretty tough tradeoff, I imagine. Take Half-Life 2. They probably could have more-or-less eliminated load times by scaling down level detail a bit and loading on-the-fly like Oblivion... but would that make it a better game? Apparently Valve thinks we'd rather wait 20 seconds every 15 minutes that have a "seamless" but lower-detail gaming experience.
If we're talking about non-technical reasons for levels (like the different "chapters" in HL2, which didn't change every time a "loading" screen came up), well, games are (ideally) 20+ hours long. You don't expect people to actually play them straight through, so it makes sense to have breaks and intermissions in the narrative, the exact same way almost every novel is broken into chapters.
Re:Because content size scales with storage capaci (Score:2)
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Why do movies still have cuts? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Some of the best games also have levels... (Score:5, Interesting)
You are basically complaining about superficial differences in game progression. Traditional, levels-based gameplay can be made to be completed in a non-linear fashion, with minimal loading time, and freedom of movement (see Super Mario Galaxy for a recent, and rediculously good example). Where-as less defined organization (like some of the games you mentioned) can be very strictly linear, and have terrible load times. This is more a result of the programming and overall design, not whether a game has levels or not.
There are great usages of level-based design, and terrible ones. It's about as helpful as saying, "why, after all these years, are there still FPSs?" as if one genre of game is inherently inferior.
Why do Books Have Chapters? (Score:5, Funny)
Answering with another question: (Score:2)
Simple reason (Score:5, Insightful)
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GTA (Score:4, Insightful)
Has some "open" play, but also set scenarios which must be completed in order (and reset if/when you fail). Which, to me, is a clear variant of classic level-based play.
Such level-based content is easier to design and implement than completely emergent, open gameplay that is as interesting (the first time through, at least) and detailed.
Because it works (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that other games have developed alterantive methods of providing structure doesn't mean that existing methods have been surpassed. Linear Movie plots are still being written even after Pulp fiction. heterosexual romance plots are still being
Because they're GAMES (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically this guy decided to criticize a gameplay setup without giving any thought to why it's there in the first place. Some games don't need it, sure -- take Oblivion for instance. But to say that games "shouldn't have levels" is to say every game should be like this other game (or games) and to hell with all other designs regardless of how they affect the actual play.
That bit where he claims cutscenes are anathema to gameplay is also rich. They work wonderfully in some games and not in others. To say that in every game ever released from here on out the interaction should be constant with no exposition or story progression told through non-interactive segments is assinine and privileges any pressing of buttons over simply enjoying visual media, which is nonsense. In other words, sometimes it's a better idea to tell something through film than it is through "gameplay." It simply takes a good game designer to know when that time is.
Seriously, all of this cutscene and "levels" criticism is ridiculous. Is Metroid Prime hands-down the best fucking game ever made or something? Is it the design we all want for every game? Hell no! We want it for *some* games.
It would be just as retarded, BUT NO MORE SO, to say that EVERY game should have cutscenes or should have its gameplay divided into "levels."
Why do books still have chapters? (Score:2)
The answer is that that it is a classic story telling technique. Some (books/movies/plays/tvshows) have successfully done without, and more power to them.
Now that the technology doesn't need so much time to catch up to the player, the game designers and story tellers out there can concentrate on using it purely as a story telling technique, and not as a crutch to
Why do we have levels? Simple. (Score:2)
levels more realistic? (Score:2)
time? (Score:2, Insightful)
wouldn't it be kinda stupid to play all the uneventful years between those "jobs" in realtime?
Hrm (Score:2)
But that aside, when it comes to games with levels vs. games without levels, I swing both ways. Fluidity is important, but so are cutscenes and transitions.
If I have to jump through one more Flood-anus to finish Halo 3, I might start changing my opinion.
Actually, come to think of it, Halo 3 sort of employs both mechanisms. 9 missions, separated by cutscenes
Half-Life has levels (Score:3)
Soul Reaver! (Score:2)
Of course, The Legend of Zelda just had one big world. I don't think I'd count the fade-to-black when entering and exiting dungeons
Half-life two has levels, you dolt (Score:2)
No the don't call them levels, but What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.
An interesting insight is the new half-life two mission they put on steam. You can run it in a mode where you click on a bubble and the devs. talk about the scene, or area. It was very interesting.
My primary concern is that the game is fun. These days that seems a radica
Divide and conquer (Score:3, Insightful)
Ultima Ascension! (Score:3, Interesting)
You walked around the world with no load screens at all, through tunnels under the sea to the island on the other side and swim back again. Walk into buildings, cave systems, castles all in one huge seamless world.
The graphics were incredible. Did I mention no load screens?
1999 or so. And there was not much hardware available at the time to play it with all the graphics turned right up to 11.
Pity about the crap game play tho, it became so boring after a while that the only way I could bring myself to finish it was to use hacks.
So no, lack of load screens does not a great game make.
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True, but there were cutscenes too (never mind the fact that they seemed really badly contrived most of the time). The other thing is Ultima IX's Britannia was a helluvalot smaller than in any previous Ultima. Britannia had been shrinking continuously since its largest size in Ultima V, and in Ultima IX it seems that it would be possible to walk from Minoc to Paws in less than an hour of game time, where the same trip would have taken several days of game time in Ultima V. That must have made things a bit
Hard to make continuous worlds (Score:4, Interesting)
It explains a great detail of the issues surrounding a system like this. The more interesting issues are as others have mentioned are memory and disk i/o management, but also there's another lovely curiosity in there... floating point numbers begin to quantize more and more the further you get away from the origin. It means it's impossible to have a global coordinate system.
Enjoy.
There are many reasons... (Score:3, Insightful)
First, you need to look at what goes on behind the scenes.
In some cases where there do not seem to be "levels", there is one, but the transition is done without a pause. The new area is pre-loaded during game play. This assumes that the game areas are contiguous, where the entire game is played in the same area, and there is no "boring travel" that would bore the player between areas. For these contiguous areas, the plant and animal life may not be all the different, so loading new textures and unloading the old textures may not be needed, while for some, this would be a case of needing to predict which textures need to be removed from memory while loading the appropriate textures and objects on the fly.
When one fairly small area is enough to strain the average computer, the small size makes it even harder to predict and properly pre-load what is needed for a smooth transition between areas as well.
There are some very good reasons for having these breaks, including modularity, and allowing for custom content, in addition to saving memory. Back in the ancient days of computers, if you had 16KB of RAM, that was a good amount, but it also meant that you had to really work to reduce how much memory your program would take. Even into the days where 8 megabytes of memory, a programmer had to look at how much memory code would take, and spend a good amount of time trying to cut back on memory usage. So, what do you do to cut back on memory used? One method is to take code that is not needed and clear it out of memory so that more memory is available. By having "levels", it allows a game to clearly define what will be available at one time so that the old junk can be cleared out. If a "new area" will make a huge change to what is going on in the game, that would also be a good reason for a "transition", because the old "rules of gameplay" need to be swapped out for the new.
There is less of a reason for LONG load times these days, but if a game has a lot of options for which areas the player can enter, being able to pre-load the next area may not be a good option. What if the current area takes a gig of memory by itself? Pre-loading the next area may cause the game to go over the 2 gig mark, and may cause an application crash. There is an increasing number of people who are aware that if a game takes up more than 2048 megabytes of memory at once under 32 bit Windows, it can cause the application to crash due to the limits of 32 bit processors, and the design of Windows(blame Microsoft). You can adjust this number, but it risks the stability of the OS if you do.
So, if all you play are games that have ONE path, where you enter on one side, and leave on the other, it is easy to pre-load the next level when you get to a certain point. If there is any complexity to the path the player can take, it may not make sense to pre-load all the available areas that the player may choose to enter.
Several reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Development purposes.
When you design a game with a set of discreet levels or areas, it is easier to cut out a level than it is to do something like cut out 30% of a contiguous game world.
2) Narrative expedience
If you have a game where the narrative jumps from London to Tokyo to Moscow, do you really want the developers to try to tack on a bunch of filler for parts of the world that have no importance to the story? In Knights of the Old Republic, you only ever visit 5 or 6 worlds. Is that game better served by providing you with a hundreds or thousands of habitable worlds when only those 5 or 6 are relevant to the game?
3) Not all games are about exploration.
Wario ware would not be a reasonable type of game to set in a contiguous world. Trauma center is also not a game that really needs that kind of structure.
In any event, not all of your examples are good ones of continuous worlds. Metroid in particular has two types of loading screens. One shows up when your on a long elevator ride, say between an ice level and between a fire level. You may notice the cut scene that does a close up on Samus during that time. The other loading screen is when you shoot a door to open it, and then get to wait 20 to 30 seconds for the next chamber to load.
END COMMUNICATION
Elite. (Score:3, Informative)
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Did you say elevator?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/16 [penny-arcade.com]
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Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
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