Notes on Uplink
Ok, more on the Indy Game front. (Although Uplink may not qualify anymore, now that they've got a deal with Infogrames.)
I've only played it for a couple of days, and there's still a lot more to explore, but let me get some first impressions down:
Uplink simulates being a hacker, but it's even better than it sounds: it simulates being a
good,
cinematic hacker. Something we learned from
Die By The Sword is that people didn't want to simulate swordfighting; they wanted to simulate movie swordfighting. They want to parry and riposte, and all that exciting stuff. The realism of
Die By The Sword went too far.
Uplink does not have that problem. When playing, you feel like the guy from Swordfish. (Side note: my friend Jon Ross actually knows a guy who does computer interfaces for the movies. Says he mocks them all up in director. Apparently most of the movie development houses work with this guy. Just a factoid I found interesting.)
Is simulation always good? Not necessarily. IMO, what makes simulation good is the immersion it gives, and the more accurate a sim is, gameplay can be improved because the sim will behave the way the user expects it to behave.
Uplink succeeds in both of these areas.
When the game kicks in, it drops you straight into the simulation. You can almost imagine that you're a real life hacker, being given access to a hacking-server-farm somewhere on the internet. Elements that add to the immersion of the sim: there is a newsreel you can access. When the game begins, certain news items hint at a story, and show that there are other hackers at work doing the same things you're doing. When you start doing big hacks yourself, there are news items about you. Talk about feeling like you're in a world.
And I won't spoil them, but the elements of the sim that mimic real life allowed me to come up with strategies that actually worked.
Still, in
Uplink gameplay trumps simulation: there are 'time controls' clumsily wedded into the interface which allow you to "get to the good bits" quicker, whether it's waiting for a mission to pop up, waiting for a stock price to change, or waiting for hardware to be installed on your hacker rig. And although sometimes the hacking is unrealistic so it can be more cinematic, mostly the hacking is unrealistic so it can be a better game.
(And moments of humor. "Government" is just another company, which probably simplified their coding slightly, and evokes
Snow Crash And there's a
Steve Jackson Games that has had their server seized by said government.)
One of Noah Falstein's 400 is "Provide Parallel Challenges with Mutual Assistance" and
Uplink does this in a couple of ways; one by providing you with a set of missions, each one of which you complete earns you money which you can use to buy hardware to defeat still harder missions. Also, you can always hack additional systems to increase your chances for a given uber-hack. Another Noah Falstein rule is "Emphasize Exploration and Discovery", and
Uplink does this as well. You can hack the systems that you're on a mission to hack, or you can explore a world of internet nodes, discovering as you go.
The fundamental mechanic of hacking is this: you have a certain amount of time to hack a system before you're caught, but all the software you can bring to bear on the problem takes time to execute. For me, the constant time pressure created actual adrenaline rushes, a level of excitement that is rarely acheived by other games.
So what about the 'breadth' and 'emergence'? The hacking in uplink relies on adding new elements as you go (you start with the password cracker, then the voice analyzer, then the encryption cypher, and so on) instead of taking what you've learnt so far and extending it, although you definitely can take some of the simpler systems and multiply them for added power. But, like
Pikmin, the game is more about discovering how to use and deal with simple elements. Which means for it to remain interesting and challenging, the tutorial has to be sparse; the game is about figuring out how to play the game. Rather than being "Simple to Learn, Hard to Master", it's just "Hard to Learn". I'm sure some people like this aspect of it. (There were some flames on the
Uplink forum against people who asked for advice, implying that figuring it out for yourself is what the game is all about.) Not exactly my cup of tea, but I'm willing to accept it, and it can still be worth many hours of attention.
To hack tough systems you hack a lot of smaller systems first. I'm reminded of digging lots of horizontal holes in
Lode Runner to get deeper. This brings me to my big complaint with the game. Games can frequently be broken down into their micro and macro aspects. For example, a typical console FRPG will have the fight-with-monsters as the micro-game, and the resource management of your characters hitpoints, skills, and items is the macro-game. With FRPG's the micro-game often becomes tedious -- it crosses the gray area between 'game' and 'chore' -- and it's just the macro-game that pulls you along.
Uplink has the same problem. It also has the same benefit; when you hack a system in seconds that used to take you a whole minute, it feels a lot like that party of orcs that used to be tough to kill but now only takes one fireball spell to eliminate; "I'm a badass now!" There are many games out there that prove that if you get the macro-game right, the micro-game doesn't have to be that involving:
Animal Crossing and
Diablospring to mind. (My wife
still plays
Animal Crossing and, frankly, I'm getting a little worried about her.)
Uplink, for me, is right on the edge; when an uber-hack fails and I say to myself, "I've got to hack all those little computers
again," I come pretty close to quitting forever.
Minor nice touch: someone who's name I forget wrote in
Game Design Perspectives that Doug Church's "Perceivable Consequence" meant that the consequences of a game action should be severe -- severe enough to make a difference, anyway. It's not clear to me that's what Doug meant, but it may be true whether he meant it or not.
Uplink's software economy has an interesting feature along these lines: version n of any given software package costs the same no matter what version of the software you already have. Which creates an
interesting choice: do you hold out until you can afford the full deal, or do you accept the weaker software knowing that you're going to have to still pay full price later?
On superstitious learning: part of the game is you have to delete log files to avoid capture. When you get caught, you don't get arrested right away. Which causes a lack of clarity I don't particularly like -- "Why did I get busted that time?" -- but has a nice side benefit: (one is it gives you the opportunity to booby-trap your equipment, which is probably why it works that way) it allows us to think that there may be more going on inside the sim than there really is. In the forums, people seem to be split about whether you have to delete just the routing logs, or if you should delete everything.
They have a brutal save game system: when you lose, they delete all your progress. I'll skip the arguments for and against this, and point out that you can easily hack the save files. This may be a case of Introversion knowing their market, and understanding their metagame: the kind of people who like this kind of game will easily be able to figure out how to save their progress, if that's what they want.
Uplink is buggy, which may be an unavoidable side effect of being an independent game. No army of testers on a battery of computers. What can be done about this? Either indy game developers have to slow down and spend more time testing (which may speed them up in the long run, according to some studies) or maybe the indy movement could use some kind of indy testing community.
So there it is. Since I'd never played
Hack or
Neuromancer, for me,
Uplink was a very fresh experience, and you should check it out if you're looking for something new.
On the topic of indy games, I noticed that there are supposedly 10,000 people in the Uplink forums. If they all bought legit copies, and they make a $20 profit on a $25 sale, that's $200,000. Supposing it took a year to develop (pulled that out of my ass), and there's about four of them...sounds like they're in the "barely surviving" stage. Hard to say. It's not much, but it may be worth it to come up with something fresh, where you own the IP. I'm sure they've acheived their 'minimum profitability', to riff off of Peter Drucker and Greg Costikyan. You go, guys.