Digital Initiative – Page 64

Encounter Design

May 26, 2015March 27, 2015 by Tamrielo

The first thing people usually think of when I mention “encounter design” is boss fights. Big, fancy battles in custom-made arenas, usually at the end of a dungeon. For a lot of games, they’re the only encounters that matter, and we’ve been trained to think of them that way.

In fact, if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ve probably heard people talk about “trash mobs”, all of the encounters leading up to those boss fights (read: the only encounters that matter). There’s nothing to make them interesting or rewarding, there’s often no compelling mechanics, it’s just enemies that you have to beat to get to where you really want to be. Gotta do your chores before having fun. Gotta take out the trash.

This line of thinking has led to a lot of reduced complexity in encounters. We’ve so focused on the boss as the only end goal that it’s seeped back into game design itself.

Here’s a map of Molten Core:

Linear design with offshoot tendrils that contain bosses at the end, all spiraling into the center, for the Big Boss Fight at the end.

Here’s an earlier dungeon, from Everquest– Befallen:

(from http://www.allakabor.com/eqatlas)

WAY less linear, still offshoot corridors but there’s no obvious linear path through the place. In fact, people don’t even play it the same way they play Molten Core; it’s an entirely different dungeon experience.

Don’t believe me that the “boss fights are the only thing that matters” mentality affects the design side? Here’s (part of) Befallen in EQ2:

(from http://eq2.zam.com/)

Kind of a big difference.

I do a lot of encounter design in my tabletop RPGs, where I have a bit more control over things. I take a lot of my inspiration from stealth games, where there are (ideally) multiple ways through an area and you can make your own path, figuring out who you fight, who you don’t, and how to approach each area.

I very, very rarely have boss fights. I think in a nine-month campaign, I had two, and I’ve had entire campaigns go without a single boss fight. Instead, all of my encounters are cranked up. If it’s a non-life-threatening encounter, it exists to whittle away my players over time, because I’m probably not letting them rest for a while. If it isn’t doing that, it’s going to tax them.

I think this has a lot to do with why I like stealth games so much. Every encounter is relevant, and how you approach it matters. There’s no such thing as “trash” in a stealth game. Even if you silently drop someone, you still often have to figure out if anyone else saw you, or what will happen if they find your victim. There’s little room for thoughtlessness.

If an encounter is just “trash”, if it serves no purpose other than to waste your time and offer no meaningful reward in return, I think that’s bad design. FFXIV vastly improved the fun of running dungeons when they added money drops to every mob, often in not-insignificant amounts as you get higher in level. I think they’ve failed in making treasure chests worthwhile, particularly when it comes to pulling encounters that aren’t on the linear path just to access the chest, but with any luck they’ll improve that.

Source: Digital Initiative
Encounter Design

New Emotions

May 26, 2015March 26, 2015 by Tamrielo

(from Clannad, visual novel)

I really wish dating games would take off in the US. We, as a country, are terrified of them.

They’re a big hit elsewhere in the world (often called visual novels), some of the most played games out there, and they’re often held up as an example of other cultures being “perverse”. As a bit of an example: it’s been suggested to me that I include more images in my posts, so I figured I’d do some google image searching. My Google.com search picked up this:

Note: Nearly every image is focused on a female character, pretty much all of whom are sexualized in some way, text is a tiny bar at the bottom, often an afterthought. Everything is about looking at the pictures, the story is just a hurdle for you to see more pictures. This is the Western view of dating games.

Here’s Google.jp’s return:

Looks pretty similar, but a few noticeable differences. First, note the variety: particularly the ones with text in Japanese are doing rather more interesting things, visually, with their art, with a wider range of characters. Also, the text. Whereas text covers maybe a quarter of the average image in the .com search, the .jp search text takes up a LOT more, and there’s no fear of obscuring the image with story.

I’m not going to try to claim that it isn’t predominantly showing sexualized content, but it appears not to be the sole purpose of the medium.

I’ve talked before, on the podcast, about how I’m thrilled that games are exploring emotions other than wrath, going for things other than wanton mass murder, but that I’ve quickly gotten tired of the shift from anger to sadness. We’ve figured out how to make heartbreaking games, and we need a new emotion.

I brought up dating sims above because they’re a longstanding genre that’s been exploring emotions other than “rage” and “sads” for decades, but sits in its little niche without much attention (negative attention, usually). What more emotional experience is there than detailed interactions with other people? Look at the popularity of Mass Effect– as an adjunct to the shooting/stabbing/killing game, there’s some incredible, emotive storytelling that fires on all cylinders, hitting every part of the emotional spectrum. Why not make that the main focus of the game?

Japanese dating sims get a bad rap because people hold them up and show the predominantly school-aged characters, casting aspersions on the kind of person who’d want to play a game about finding love in high school. It’s absolutely a problem, particularly in the questionable ‘adult’ segment, but it’s a problem borne of too little input. The porn association is extremely strong… yet we’re playing the same type of game in Mass Effect, just with this attached shooting and killing thing.

I’d be interested in seeing a modern dating sim focused on a twenty- or thirty-something protagonist done in the style of Mass Effect’s conversation trees. It’s fertile ground for provoking compelling emotional responses, and it doesn’t have to be a) schoolgirls or b) porn. There’s more to relationships than that.

I’d like to see games that explore relationships beyond “press all the right buttons enough times to sleep with this person”. Let’s apply the grey-area, “whatever choice you make keeps you moving forward, you just have to live with the consequences” choice structure of Dragon Age to interpersonal relationships. Even that game, which I love, quickly devolves into “talk to X person enough to sleep with them”, and there’s so much more that could be done there.

Source: Digital Initiative
New Emotions

The Joys of Unsophisticated Play

May 26, 2015March 25, 2015 by Tamrielo

I spoke yesterday about playing “solved” games, and how quickly it can make the fun of playing a game evaporate for all except the players at the top of the heap. Games tend to fall apart when there’s unequal skill and meta-level understanding between the players involved.

One of the places where this can become a huge problem is tabletop RPGs. I’ve heard countless stories of players who figure out an unstoppably powerful character in a game where the other players aren’t doing that, who dominates the game as the only relevant player– either the DM has to throw challenges appropriate to the super-player that would crush any of the others or the super-player just walks all over every encounter.

I’ve been running tabletop RPGs on and off for quite a number of years at this point, and I’ve had to figure out how to balance parties of players who absorb the rulebook and look for loopholes and players who throw together something fun and/or have never played a pen-and-paper RPG before, and figure out how to make it fun for everyone.

The tack I’ve taken is to enforce unsophisticated play. I tend not to give my players the resources to become unstoppably powerful, offering “interesting” rather than “good” rewards. Rather than giving powerful loot, I like to create powerful choices. The phrase that comes up in my group is “bad ideas treasure”. I use next to nothing from the standard magic items tables in D&D– no simple +1 swords of frost here. Instead, here’s a sword that casts a cone of flame out from your target when you kill it or roll an even number on the attack roll. The direction of the cone of flame is random. 25% of the time, it’s going to blow up in your face, but the other 75% of the time it’s going to deal a bunch of extra damage, possibly hit some extra targets, and hey, magic sword!

This item was hugely effective in mixing up the combat strategies of the group. The alternative being a stock, non-magical sword, the fancy-but-potentially-dangerous fire cone sword was quite good. The player wielding it started prioritizing things that would protect him from fire, and turned into more of a flanker than a frontline warrior, since staying close to his allies was a liability. There were some tense moments when something REALLY needed to get smacked with a magic sword but there were nearby wounded allies, and that fire cone might’ve been a disaster.

If that had been a regular +1 sword, it would’ve been boring, and combat would’ve been the same “walk up and hit things” that it frequently was before. The trick is to keep it simple but add a slight twist. Without being able to rely on particular powerful items, the ability for play to quickly turn into a game of “who’s figured the system out the best” goes down dramatically, particularly if players are trying to play around the weird items they’ve gotten rather than mark their stat boosts down and forget about them.

I’d be interested in seeing this kind of thing adapted to other sorts of games, where the level of play is maintained at a relatively unsophisticated level, offering more exploration into the low- and mid-tier play experiences and preventing a rise to the higher tiers of play. Minis games are often very good at this, with supported alternate gametypes and game sizes that significantly change the way the game is played and what strategies arise, and tend to keep things at that nice, everyone-is-still-learning tier of play.

Source: Digital Initiative
The Joys of Unsophisticated Play

Playing “Solved” Games

May 26, 2015March 24, 2015 by Tamrielo

I don’t play card games with Kodra, a reality that I think makes him a bit sad. I’ve also tried, at the behest of a wide variety of friends, to play the Battlestar Galactica board game, which I’m told is a wonderful and amazingly fun experience but for me has been hours of misery as one or two experienced players dictate the entire game for everyone else.

I love the moment of stumbling into a new game experience entirely blind, and trying to make sense of it and turn confusion into victory. Stepping foot into a new dungeon in an MMO without knowing any of the mechanics of any of the encounters and figuring them out on the fly is amazing, thrilling, and magical. The magic evaporates instantly once even one person knows what’s up, because then you have the answer key.

High level play in a lot of games becomes a question of knowing the dominant metastrategy, and very rarely does it correlate to the intuitive choices being made by players learning the game. Once I know how to win a game, or beat an encounter, and can do so reliably, the game stops being fun. This is what’s called a “solved” game, and while there are often elements of randomness and uncertainty that prevent a game from being perfectly solved, there’s not a lot of fun left when a game is *almost* solved, enough so that there’s a clear right-way and wrong-way to play.

On the other hand, that learning process and the associated discovery that goes along with it is a true joy, and one that is all too often lost far too quickly.

One of the reason I like Infinity is that in three years of playing it rather heavily, and keeping up with all of the available information, a dominant, game-solivng metastrategy still hasn’t emerged, and the new releases continually stymie and obfuscate any attempts to create one. I wonder what that would be like in other types of games. I think I’d like PvP more if it were more common.

Diablo and other games of its type do a bit of this with randomized enemy generation and level layouts, and it keeps the game fresh for a lot longer than you might expect, lasting multiple playthroughs. I don’t think this is as big a deal, though, because when you’re not playing against other players the gap between having all the information and knowing all of the combos and not isn’t so stark. When the only point of comparison is how you perform relative to other players, one player having more information or a superior combo is a quick downward spiral.

I want games where I can continually strive to improve without ever reaching a solved state. I also want to have a metastrategy that’s either changing too rapidly for any player to get a solid, dominant foothold or that doesn’t have giant gaps between strategies. These gaps effectively shut out players who are learning from being relevant to the game as anything other than a resource to be exploited, and make for terribly unfun games. I don’t terribly enjoy games that are won or lost before the game even begins, just based on what the players already know/own.

I’m really excited by the potential of games like the new Fable, moving towards asymmetric PvP. I had a lot of hope for Netrunner, but my understanding is that the game devolves into the same “this combo wins” strategies that so many other card games do. I would like drafting in theory, except that most draft games (draft Magic, as an example) have a prevailing *draft* metastrategy that if you’re still learning and don’t have all of the cards in the set memorized, you will lose at– again, before you play the game.

I don’t know how alone I am in this feeling. I get the impression that many people prefer games, even PvP games, where they can use a dominant strategy and win continually without changing anything. Possibly I’m in the minority here, in wanting to be continually challenged and having the ground move underneath me?

Source: Digital Initiative
Playing “Solved” Games