Here are some news about how FPS should me made on the Wii. Enjoy
Working at IGN isn't just about playing games early and attaching numbers to final products. Throughout each wave of gaming goodness, we have a chance to meet up with developers, form bonds with publishers, and step further into the industry than most people have the honor of doing. Most often the best information we obtain on a given game or series isn't found in press releases, but during casual chat over lunch or when killing time at events. As part of what we hope can be an ongoing feature here at IGN Wii - "Industry Insight" - we've taken the opportunity to open things up a bit, giving industry members a chance to not only give us the scoop so we can then relay it to all of you, but actually let our fan base hear directly from the people we talk to on a weekly basis.
For our first Industry Insight feature, Lead Designer and Producer for Medal of Honor Heroes 2 Matt Tomporowski has written a postmortem on Heroes 2, outlining exactly what the team went through in achieving the final control setup in its first Wii - and console - effort.
Enjoy. ( Hey, IGN just stole my word!)
By
Matt Tomporowski
Lead Designer and Producer, Medal of Honor Heroes 2
Overview
When we started developing Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for the Wii, we recognized that great FPS controls were key in order to create an awesome game experience. The original Medal of Honor Heroes for the PSP received critical-acclaim for its solid FPS controls and we viewed this as a considerable achievement given that the PSP hardware is limited with only a single analog stick.
Medal of Honor Heroes - PSP, 2006
Although we proved that excellent shooter controls could be delivered on PSP, the Medal of Honor Heroes 2 team felt that it was an even greater challenge to create exceptional controls on the Wii. We found that the early shooter games for the Wii were more difficult to play than we'd like and we set out to improve and simplify the game and make it accessible to both casual and hard core gamers.
In addition to designing solid core FPS controls, we wanted to focus on adding innovative new Wii gesture-based gameplay that would make Medal of Honor Heroes 2 stand out from the other FPS games out there. The challenge was to create a Wii FPS game that didn't feature gesture gameplay that would feel forced or gimmicky. We asked ourselves, does a World War II shooter really benefit from a gesture for climbing ladders, rowing boats, or digging ditches? The answer we came to was "No! Shooters are about action and shooting!", so ultimately, our gestures had to be a core part of our action.
Now, the real challenge, of how exactly to accomplish this began...
ustomizable Controls and Learning from PC Shooters
Although we aspired to create awesome controls from the beginning, we actually started out with a false assumption. We assumed that our game would likely ship with two control schemes, one called "Elite", intended for hardcore FPS gamers, and another that we called "Easy" that would be used by casual gamers. We got to work and we found it actually very difficult to come up with a so called "Easy" control scheme and you'll notice that in the end we didn't actually ship a control scheme called Easy in our final game! Ultimately, we learned that we would need to take much more dramatic steps with our controls (and game modes) if we were going to make an experience that was easy for casual Wii gamers to pick up and play.
Although progress was painstakingly slow for the Easy scheme, we got to our core Elite controls fairly quickly. The problem became one of tuning these controls for both the single player and for our 32-player multiplayer online play. We quickly recognized that controls optimized for the single player campaign are not necessarily ideal for multiplayer. This is because in single player you're fighting against AI enemies that have programmed speed and tactics, while in multiplayer, you're fighting against human opponents who are capable of constantly surprising you with ever-evolving tactics.
The core of elite customization: The bounding box.Ultimately, we found that our core Elite controls would work for most gamers in a single player campaign. However, we felt it would be impossible to come up with one "perfect" control setting that would work for the challenging and highly variable competition that players would face in 32-player online multiplayer matches. This is where we started to look at other very successful online multiplayer shooters and see what they did to make their control schemes work for hardcore gamers who took online competition extremely seriously.
One thing we discovered was that there seemed to be a false assumption that PC gamers could handle lots of options and were more willing to tweak their controls, while console gamers were somehow better served with fewer customization options. In practice, we found that no matter what we chose as our "default" setting, everyone who played Medal of Honor Heroes 2 in multiplayer basically had their own preference on how the controls should be tweaked and we realized that we weren't going to satisfy anyone if we shipped only our "default" single player Elite controls with only a few customizable options..
That's when we really started exploring how many options would be meaningful to open up to the player. It helped that in terms of a FPS, the type of precision you get from the Wii Remote is closer to a PC's mouse than a standard dual analog stick controller, and so it was logical for us to allow the player very similar tuning options to what we would give him if we were making a PC shooter. We took this to the extreme when we added the option that allows the player to resize the dead zone that controls how sensitive and fast the player can look around. After we added this, we found that the serious online gamers in our multiplayer matches quickly sized this down to the minimum in order to give themselves the absolute fastest reactions and pinpoint accuracy.
The final controls in Medal of Honor Heroes 2 achieved a uniquely rare result as we managed to create controls that appealed to hardcore shooter fans who traditionally were PC FPS gamers and that were accessible to casual gamers. That broad appeal came out of our drive and focus on creating best-in-****/u> controls on Wii.
What About Casual Gamers?
However, all this work we were doing to make our multiplayer controls appeal to online gamers wasn't helping us solve our other big challenge: a lot of casual gamers that owned a Wii also wanted to play our game and wanted easy and instantly-graspable controls.
Midway through the project our progress on our Easy controls for casual gamers had stalled and we were unsure how to progress. From our experience working on the controls up until this time, the Medal of Honor fan feedback we gained from online message boards, plus our own internal focus testing, we now had the following conclusions to work from:
(a) For a casual or first time gamer, learning to move through a 3D game environment is highly complex.
(b) For a casual or first time gamer, learning to aim and shoot at objects in a 3D game environment is highly complex.
(c) It is a highly frustrating experience for casual or first time gamers to try to learn to do two highly complex activities at the same time when all they really want to do is pick up their game and instantly start having fun!
At the same time we were also looking at prototypes for the Wii Zapper and the idea of our casual "Arcade Mode" came to mind. What the team realized was that although moving and shooting in a 3D environment can be equally complex, the shooting part is the most fun! We concluded that we should experiment with letting the game take care of movement for casual players and let the player concentrate on the fun shooting action.
The Medal of Honor Heroes 2 casual appeal wasn't about an "easy button mapping" but rather it was about simplifying the experience and boiling it down to the essence of what a shooter game is about: aiming and shooting. This experience was greatly helped by the intuitive feeling of the Wii Zapper as a very natural toy for aiming and zapping based gameplay. Although you can play the Medal of Honor Heroes 2 Arcade mode without the Wii Zapper, we find that the mode really achieves a greater level of interactivity and immersion when played with the Wii Zapper.
Meaningful Wii Gestures
While we were solving our control challenges to satisfy both casual Wii owners and the hardcore FPS gamers that would be playing our game, we were also facing the challenge of how to design unique Wii gestures that we wanted to include in Medal of Honor Heroes 2.
We felt that some shooter games for the Wii didn't take advantage of gestures that were really meaningful to the core shooting experience. What helped us overcome this pitfall was that we created the rule that in order be a part of Medal of Honor Heroes 2, a gesture had to be "easy, relevant, and fun."
By easy, we meant that after a simple tutorial, players could correctly perform the gesture 100% of the time. Also, it meant that a player couldn't accidentally trigger one gesture while he was trying to perform a different one. We called these "gesture conflicts" and we cut many gestures that happened to conflict with the better ones.
Pump that shotty.
By saying our gestures must be relevant we meant that the gesture actually needed to relate to our core shooting experience. For example, we cut "digging a hole" from our gestures because although soldiers in the war often had to dig, digging wasn't something we felt added in any way to the shooting action. However, we left in the "holding the Bazooka over your shoulder" gesture because we recognized that this gesture was a really fresh, yet authentic way of using the Bazooka and firing the weapon is clearly a major part of our shooting action.
We asked ourselves would it actually be fun for a player to perform this gesture over the length of the game. The shotgun is my favorite example of this. In coming up with the shotgun pump gesture, we thought about how awesome it was to see an action movie hero pumping a shotgun as he blasts the way through bad guys. We had never really felt that same feeling of power from a shotgun in a video game, and once we put in the pump gesture, we felt the same satisfying and powerful feeling in our game that was there in the action movies.
These basic guides allowed us to create the gestures that we finally shipped. We found that there was also a lot of variation needed because some gestures that felt natural with our "Elite" control scheme didn't feel natural while playing with the Wii Zapper. We did a lot of modification and customization to tailor each gesture to work for both the Wii/Nunchuck and Wii Zapper control schemes. In the end, our team felt really satisfied because our gestures became a major part of our gameplay and make Medal of Honor Heroes 2 a very fresh and uniquely interactive experience as a Wii first person shooter.
Conclusion
We are very happy with what we achieved with innovative controls for a FPS shooter for the Wii with Medal of Honor Heroes 2. Ultimately, we learned that the challenges we faced were actually terrific opportunities for our team to be creative. We also learned that the uniqueness of the Wii Remote, Nunchuck, and the Wii Zapper really lend themselves to creating fresh and highly intuitive FPS game experiences. This is an exciting time to be developing FPS games. As people who love games, we're really grateful that with Medal of Honor Heroes 2 we were able to do our best to develop great FPS controls on the Wii!