Nokia's street fighting N-Gage title, One, has to be one of the most exciting games to come out in 2005, never mind that it's for a mobile phone. With speedy gameplay and endless combos, it's great fun to play but there is one huge flaw. The ELO ranking system used to decide just how good a fighter you are. Ewan described it pretty well in his review:
When you beat an opponent, you’ll be scored. That score will depend on how high your score is compared to your opponent. You’ll get much more if your opponent has a higher ELO score than you, and much less if you’re the more powerful. It’s roughly the same if you lose. With a low ELO taking on a high ELO, you won’t lose too many points. But if you get yourself whipped by someone hundreds of points below you, you’re going to take a massive deduction.
Now this ELO system seems fine, and so it should be. It's successfully used in Championship Chess and many other games. But unfortunately, Digital Legends (the developers behind One) just couldn’t seem to get the implementation 100% perfect, despite all the design work and real life examples that exist for ELO.
Imagine there are scoreboards, and you are able to challenge other people online. If you beat them and they have a higher ELO, you get a good number of points for a win. Now before you start thinking about the GPRS costs of real time fighting, or the latency of GPRS, imagine that the N-Gage could simulate your opponent using their ELO level. For instance if someone on Arena has a super high ELO - then you play that ELO and it's super-hard to beat. This is what Digital Legends could have had. An impressive ranking system- where the top dog in the rankings would actually have earned their place by beating shadow players with a huge range of skills and a high ELO.
But unfortunately Digital Legends seem to have taken this out (despite early information to the contrary). So what now? How can there be an ELO system like Ewan described when there are only offline opponents to play? You see, the built in, offline, opponents in the MMC only go up to a maximum of 2200 ELO. So if you go past that amount you get a diminishing return on your fighting and eventually your ELO won't rise any higher, no matter how many times you fight.
I think what Digital Legends were aiming for was to encourage Bluetooth multiplayer with friends, after all having multi-player has always been a strong point in N-Gage titles. But the practicalities of this are a bit of a problem. You need to have an N-Gage owning friend, who has One loaded, and a high enough ELO for you to earn significant points from them, in real life. Do they not realise that the chances are extremely slim of actually finding someone that meets all those criteria?
For a game where the main plot is to log onto the N-Gage Arena and beat everyone to become 'The One', I believe the ELO system to be the correct choice, but the implementation is highly disappointing. It’s also such a pity that this is a problem which could very easily be solved by adding a computer opponent into the system which has a variable difficulty value which you can change according to how much ELO you wish to win. Or maybe they could have just had a system of downloading other users ELO along with the look of their custom character to play over the Arena. It really is very hard to watch a great game like this fall at such a small hurdle.
This is not an isolated incident either. Just take a look at nearly every single other Arena game out there. They all have flaws. Some have bigger problems than others - but no Arena game is foolproof. It just makes you wonder if the developers put any real life research or testing into the Arena features of a game. One could have easily been a huge success with more work on the Arena functionality (and the same goes for Pocket Kingdom). It may be all about finding 'The One,' but you'll struggle to find anyone to play against.