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)
It made sense in Portal (Score:1, Insightful)
Because they are useful (Score:4, Insightful)
In short the existence, or lack of, all depends on the type of game in play.
Why do games have levels? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or was this a trick question?
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?
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
Simple reason (Score:5, Insightful)
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 written after Brokeback Mountain.
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."
Re:slow news day (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary repeatedly begs the question - "Levels are bad, M'kay? Only a terrorist pedophile would like levels. Your mommy will cry if you see any value at all in levels. Now, why do we still have levels?". It's behavior on the level of a political candidate, and I felt deeply ashamed for the writer who was trying to manipulate me like that.
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."
why do books still have chapters? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
time? (Score:2, Insightful)
wouldn't it be kinda stupid to play all the uneventful years between those "jobs" in realtime?
Re:Why do games have levels? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 background loading, but too much loaded in one go is a mistake.
Divide and conquer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:3, Insightful)
And for short story arcs like the HL2 episodes, especially when there's a fast-moving chase / escape narrative, 60s of loading is as bad as a commercial break in a film. You stop caring as much and the game stops feeling like a whole, and starts feeling like a play with disjointed segments and all the actors disappearing to change costumes.
I appreciate there are technical limitations, but the key is just to hold the player's attention, don't give them a reason to switch off. e.g. Episode 2 has a segment (several like this actually) where you get into a tall elevator and your companion has about a minute-long speech where you're doing nothing, and there is very little to watch
Someone else mentioned Metroid Prime, that does a good job hiding its loads behind clunking doors, Jak & Daxter on the PS2, Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast has a couple of long tunnels
Re:Why do games have levels? (Score:2, Insightful)
Very true, an I can't believe your comment was the first I read here that said that. Levels are a _good_ thing for most games, be they direct or contrived. I will not ever generally save in the middle of a firefight in a FPS or other game, because I'm playing it right now, and it's a dumb time to save. No one wants a game that is 100% action throughout for 24 hours plus (I think). Levels are also analogous to time dependent events in lots of games - it's harder to describe World War II if the player has to play through 6 years of a game (less if you're American obviously ;))
I made a similar point about this a while ago - Why do console titles always place save points immediately prior to dangerous sections? The obvious reason is that people can save and reload and try again, and don't have to worry about dying. In game characters dying is par for the course nowadays - people expect to die loads of times. I personally think that games haven't got easier (I think games have generally got a lot tougher), but games have introduced save/reload as a required feature.
I also personally _love_ Angband and its variants. My favourite two are Zangband [zangband.org] and TOME [t-o-m-e.net]
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.
Re:Because they are useful (Score:2, Insightful)
Scaling everything up to the player's level is the easy way out. It allows for sloppy world creation, and results in a dull experience in which the game is playing you. In my opinion, hard places should be available from the start, and you SHOULD NOT GO THERE. Creating worlds in which one can progress so that they can tackle the tough bits when they are ready is far more difficult than just making everything ok hard at every level.
A couple of games I think that does this relatively well are X2 and X3. If you try to go too far too fast, you'll be in for a shock. They're far from perfect, but they are great games.
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
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well on computers at least (Score:2, Insightful)
But I'm going to stop writing now since this heading into off-topic territory.
Re:The mentioned games DO have levels (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ultima Ascension! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 easier. Pity that a game that had captured the imaginations of people like me were to end that way after a 20-year run.
More to the point, Ultima VII, widely considered the high point in the series, was just as seamless, and in some ways arguably more so.
Re:HL2 Has Levels? (Score:3, Insightful)
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, this is simpler, but it's slower overall that way too.
Re:Simple reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:See Books, Albums, etc. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 do with loading new stuff into RAM and paging old stuff to disk. It's just not the computer's RAM or the computer's disk.
Re:Simple reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Angband? Get T-O-M-E instead (Score:2, Insightful)
If you like pain (the colored text kind) and poor game balance, by all means, play TOME!
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 jungle woods to high-tech research bunker) are right out, because there you get to pretty much replace the whole set of textures. Extremely high polycounts and texture detail are out too, because obviously loading another 16 MB for the next zone is much faster than loading 256 MB for the next zone. And extremely complex scripts and dialogues are out too, because one way or another you do end up loading them.
You can't really have both. Morrowind tried, and it became just a case of annoying breaks more often, instead of them being at points where you're warned and expect a load time. Instead of having one load screen every zone change, it just ended up having one a hickup every 30 ft. It just became a constant annoyance.
Second, keeping in memory the data to decide exactly what you want to load means more memory needed too, so it comes at the expense of something else. Sure, you don't need much RAM to decide it when you load just terrain for a FPS, but in a complex RPG it can be subtly more complex. The more that could have changed in the world as a result of the player's actions -- or of player mods -- the more you might have to process an area before it's ready to render.
Pre-optimizations are also right out. You can't pre-compute too many NPC's paths and schedules, if you have to be ready in milliseconds. So that again will have to come at the expense of something else. Either then you need more CPU power during the game, or you load the pre-computed data to a file... but that again brings you back to the problem that now you're waiting for IO, so you have to reduce some other data being loaded. It also throws a spanner into modding, since now changing a cell -- Morrowind or Oblivion style -- essentially invalidates anything you might have pre-computed when developing the game.
Basically what works for a flight sim, may not necessarily be the best way for a complex RPG like NWN2.
That's not to say that you'll end up with a bad game. WoW can be seamless and a good game. But if you re-read the above paragraphs and have played WoW, you might recognize some of the tradeoffs they had to do, to keep it seamless.
It's not applicable to all games, that's what I'm saying.
Elevators too, are nice but aren't for all games. You'd be hard pressed to justify an elevator in a medieval setting, for example. Heck, even in a modern setting, if you have elevators between bits of outdoor scenery, it looks just bloody stupid.
So basically, yeah, it would work in an old-style FPS consisting of small mazes of small rooms. But I'd rather that not all games became clones of Quake 2 and its engine's limitations.