Patchwork Solutions

Recently I made a post on the Terraria subreddit regarding the most recent boss added to the game, the Moon Lord.

For the uninitiated, the Moon Lord is far and away the toughest enemy in the game ever to be added.  It deals and tanks massive damage and drops the current best equipment and resources in the game.  It has been referred to by the developers as the “final boss” and been subject to no small amount of hype.  Come the 1.3 release, the only turn of events faster than players’ finding ways to “cheese” (come up with methods and game mechanic exploits to trivialize the battle) Moon Lord was their reaching the point in the game where they fought him in the first place.

Then came the patches.  1.3.0.2-1.3.0.7, all of which contained both blatant and subtle buffs to the Moon Lord and/or nerfs to the players’ preferred cheese methods.  Where before the boss was vulnerable to HP draining attacks, he now inflicts a debuff that blocks them.  Where before the player could use teleportation back to home base and quickly heal while he flew to your location from a distance, he now teleports along with you instantly.  Where before players would exploit the damage from spike traps and weak enemies to trigger invincibility periods against the Moon Lord himself, the Moon Lord’s attacks now operate on a separate timer than every other damage source in the game.

It seems the developers have been systematically targeting and amputating unintended methods of defeating this boss, and this is where my post on Reddit comes into play.  In it, I argued that these patches aren’t such a great thing for the game experience overall.  I won’t reiterate the entire post here, but it definitely spawned some… er, controversy as to the nature of developer intent, and what the player “should” be allowed to do in a game.  A lot of commenters made some interesting points, on both sides of the issue.

My stance, in short, is that game exploits, if they require the player to go out of his way to use, do no harm to casual and “normal” players, and enhance the experience for those who enjoy using them.  Why is it, then, that developers in the age of DLC and patches seem so hell-bent on enforcing their own “version” of how to play the game?  Given the medium’s fundamentally interactive nature, the user experience is probably as important as it ever could be in a work of art.

I find that the games I most frequently return to are the ones that give me some element of control over the pacing, difficulty tuning, or other aspects of play.  Minecraft.  The Elder Scrolls.  Terraria.  All highly dependent, even essentially so, upon the player to decide how the game mechanics come together to make the experience.  Even franchises like Metroid provide examples of the same principle (albeit to a lesser degree).

I think the best relationship between developer and player is one where the developer wants the player to succeed, gives him the tools to do so, and lets him decide the rest.  In the age of patches and balance fixes, the relationship is in some danger of becoming player vs. developer, rather than player vs. game (please note that I’m not addressing the implications of the use of exploits in multiplayer scenarios, where I’m a lot more likely to be against it).  What I mean by this is that the developer begins to see patches as ways to curtail “naughty” player behavior, rather than ensure that the game is stable and enjoyable for as many people as possible.  If you remove sequence breaks from a special edition re-release of your game, but leave in game-breaking camera bugs or softlocks, your priorities might be a little skewed.

Developers are always in danger of it, but they should never forget that just because their job is to place obstacles in front of the player doesn’t mean they’re on opposites sides.  The more “open” the game, the more their preconceptions of how the game should go take a back seat.

Power to the people, stick it to the man, etc.

“Just” a Game

The introduction of Metroid Prime does much to bring its series into the world of modern gaming after skipping a console generation, making the 3D leap and boasting surprisingly slick controls and fantastic presentation (every bit as good today, frankly).  It also serves as an “excuse” to strip Samus of her signature abilities granted by upgrades to her power suit.  To explain why the hunt for power ups was necessary in a sequel after collecting them all in the previous installment was uncommon.  Usually the audience just accepted that the game would be boring if they began with access to every item from the get-go.  It’s about the journey, after all, especially so in the Metroid series.  But nope, says Prime, we’re going to explain why the planet crawl and item progression is necessary.  And so a quick cutscene was devised wherein an explosion threw caused Samus to take critical armor damage and lose most of the upgrades it had.  Now players could feel completely comfortable with the need to re-collect all of them, without the inconvenient narrative hangups.

The concept of “Gameplay and Story Segregation” is a pretty familiar one if you’ve played video games for basically any length of time.  It’s almost omnipresent in the medium, and probably one of the few conventions to exist solely as a result of games’ own inherent nature: interactivity (as opposed to their borrowing plots, physics, presentation, or other elements from film or TV).  Because it tends to highlight the tension between player actions and writing decisions, one sort of tends to get the impression that it’s a bad thing.

Even if we grant this (which I’m not sure we should), though, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.  The bigger impact the player has on the progression of the game, the more egregious it tends to become when writers try to maneuver around the resulting contradictions.  This can lead to some clumsy-looking/sounding ambiguity in dialogue and other text or voice acting; and it can  raise issues with continuity when sequels roll around.

Back to Metroid Prime, whose intro explosion set the stage in the simplest possible way.  It’s more than its distant ancestor, Super Metroid, did to explain why Samus was only armed with the basic beam back in 1994 (i.e., nothing at all).  This fit overall with Prime, which was ever so slightly more focused on the narrative than Super.  In a way, that one simple explanation foreshadowed the equally simple but elegant presence of the lore in the rest of the game world, which, thanks to the scanning mechanic, was only there to the degree that the player desired.  Still, as an isolated incident, it wasn’t exactly incredible – “boom, your power ups are gone” in a literal sense doesn’t integrate much better with the rest of the story than it does in a figurative one.

The sequel, Echoes, on the other hand, took every aspect of the narrative one step further.  There were more mandatory cutscenes, more mandatory lore, and more integration of the loss of power ups into the gameplay.  Prime gave you one vague objective (“track the Space Pirates and stop them”) that snowballed as you opened up the map, and whatever you found along the way to help was fair game.  Echoes spelled out the main conflict explicitly from the start, but it also set up the recurring theme of getting your own abilities back from invading the monsters that stole them – much more implicit, but still central to the game.  Showing Samus lose her items to the enemies in Echoes arguably worked even better than the one-off cutscene explosion in Prime because it gave the player (not just Samus) targets to hunt.  This was much better plot integration, a point of real development in a sequel.

Here’s the thing, though: it created a bit of an issue for future installments.  Lo and behold, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption comes around.  The developers eschewed the ability loss this time around, and it might seem puzzling at first.  After all, the Prime series had always been praised for its marriage of the franchise’s signature gameplay with a more modern narrative sensibility.  Why lose that?  Personally, I think the developers realized that it might be getting a little tiresome to keep coming up with new ways to justify the treasure hunt from the standpoint of story.  And for all of Corruption’s departures from the previous games that didn’t turn out so well, I think this one was spot on.  After all, the only thing more important in good game design than pushing boundaries, inter-series as well as internal to individual games, is quitting while you’re ahead.  The more you disguise the same tropes, the more the disguise is going to look like a pair of Groucho glasses (I’m looking at you, Pokémon).

It became tragically ironic when Other M eschewed the eschewing a couple years later, perfectly displaying the danger of trying too hard to justify gameplay with narrative.  Instead of Samus losing her abilities and finding them all over the course of the game, we had Samus lacking military authorization to use them and progressively activating them only as instructed by the general in charge – ostensibly because of their sheer firepower and the danger they would pose to other soldiers (who, to be fair, are usually absent or already dead when Samus arrives on the scene).  But this explanation fell apart in the worst possible way when Samus couldn’t or wouldn’t activate a purely defensive function of her suit in a life-threatening situation.

Ultimately this was one of the most damning incidents in Other M’s plot, and it definitely didn’t do the rest of the story any favors when fans leveled criticisms against it for portraying an abusive relationship between Samus and her “father figure” commanding officer.  It’s far from the only culprit involved in the game’s overall mixed-at-best reception, but it is the best example I can imagine of pushing too far to explain things that don’t need to be explained.

I think there’s this assumption among game writers that the old tropes and tricks, such as starting your protagonist from scratch in the sequel without any previous power ups, are just too juvenile to work in a game meant to be taken seriously.  But titles like Other M make me wish developers would accept more often that sometimes it is enough to say “here it is” and leave the rest to be explored.  I would contend that if gamers wanted everything in the experience to be told to them rather than left to be determined, they would be reading novels or going to movie theaters.

There’s nothing wrong with pre-determined narrative experiences, of course, but video games have the unique potential to create that tension between what the developer presents and how the player handles it.  Perhaps it’s not always a bad thing when the gameplay doesn’t quite align with the story, and perhaps it’s not universally desirable for them to be mangled to fit in with each other?

When you as a player make something happen in a game that maybe wasn’t quite intended, that contrasts with what is pre-determined by cutscenes, it’s a reminder that this is an experience where you too have a degree of control.  I think that’s an important aspect to the appeal of video games as a whole, and that’s powerful.

For the Challenge

I think a lot about the concept of difficulty in games.  Why can I be totally immersed in one difficult game when another just as totally turns me off immediately because of that difficulty?  What about that whole concept of “legitimate” difficulty?  When is it fitting for a game to be difficult, and when does it just ruin the experience?  It’s a huge aspect of what makes or breaks a game, and there are a lot of different angles to explore.  Here’s one of them.

It seems like a good chunk of the market these days has become geared toward “challenge” games, or maybe more accurately, “exercise in frustration” games.  Is it about the masochism inherent in the video game experience?  Exploiting a sense of nostalgia born from a perception of older “classic” games’ being less forgiving?  Simple appeal to every gamer’s desire for bragging rights and a sense of accomplishment?  I can definitely sympathize with these things, since I do love experiencing them myself.

The problem is that not nearly as many games as claim to hold this appeal do it well.

Take Dark Souls, for instance (because why not start off writing about video games by bashing a nigh-universally adored favorite).  The entire selling point of the game is how difficult it is.  Merciless and unforgiving.  Feed your inner masochist.  Relive the days when video games didn’t hold your hand.  Feel the ego boost when you finally defeat that boss.  The problem is that it tends to conflate “difficult” with “miserable.”

The game balance is tuned such that the player is on guard constantly, with even the lowliest enemies presenting legitimate threats.  Credit where credit is due, when you play Dark Souls you have to observe and adapt a lot.  Where I start to lose it is the point where the game discourages you from doing just that.  Exploration and experimentation are usually unnecessary risks because of checkpoint starvation combined with harsh consequences for dying.  But in a game where the tagline is “prepare to die!” it becomes questionable to punish deaths so severely.  If the expectation is that death is a normal and frequent part of the gameplay, that could be a really interesting opportunity to explore the concept of trial and error as a learning method.  Instead, the player learns early on that even though Dark Souls includes frequent deaths, it’s ultimately not designed around them any more than most other games.

Consider how in-game death is used in a “normal,” (i.e., not Dark Souls) game: as a deterrent, a way of saying “oops, you dun goofed.”  Given this usage, a well-tuned game will give you the knowledge and training to avoid a hazard consistently such that when you do meet it, you’re expected to react to it based on what you’ve already learned.  This is the entire foundation on which difficulty curves in games are traditionally built.  You know how to string together complicated jumps in world 8-3 of Super Mario Bros. because you worked your way up to them building on the skills you learned in world 1-3.  If you should fall down a pit, the game restarts you from the beginning of the level as a way of saying “come on now, bub, you should know better than to do that.”

Dark Souls can’t make up its mind on whether death should be avoided or embraced, though.  Again, the tagline is “prepare to die.”  That is entirely accurate, because right from the start, enemy stats and attack patterns make it clear that you’re in for it.  It’s also entirely inaccurate, because a good chunk of the game is spent with the player nearly paralyzed by the fear of losing all his progress and gained experience/currency as the consequence of that death.  If your game’s main method of teaching the player is also something to be avoided, what you’re essentially telling the player is “avoid learning.”  Put another way: when the entire point of the game is to be difficult, the player must be given the tools to adapt to it, whatever form they might take.

Let’s look one of those forms.  When you play Super Meat Boy, you definitely don’t expect an easy time of it.  Like Dark Souls, it’s gained a reputation for being tough as nails, and for killing its eponymous character liberally.  Unlike Dark Souls, however, those frequent deaths are an integral part of the design, and they work as a teaching tool because they don’t punish the player.  “You died on this insanely difficult passage?  No worries, there was a checkpoint about ten seconds ago.  Keep trying until you learn to do it right.”

It’s easy to think of checkpoints as “easifiers,” and the lack thereof as “challenge enhancing.”  But I would contend that not only do frequent checkpoints not lessen the difficulty of Super Meat Boy, but they encourage the player to keep plugging away at the more difficult portions without worrying about death as deterrent, and they allow the design to throw some nasty challenges at you.

Imagine how a change as small and simple as giving the player a checkpoint upon traversing pre-boss white mist would do wonders for the pacing of Dark Souls.  Bosses would feel so much more justified in the crazy offensive and defensive power they possess because their fights would be friendlier toward learning their patterns and capabilities.  As the game is, though, you don’t get to take another crack at a difficult segment until you recover your progress (and in the case of many bosses, take even more time on top of that to set up buffs, summons, and consumable items that you lost).  What part of that cycle is meant to encourage the player to keep attempting to meet the challenge?

Much of the good design present in Dark Souls is completely overshadowed simply by the omnipresent bad design of punishing the same trial and error it requires to progress.  But let’s be clear, this problem is present in more games than Dark Souls.  The otherwise excellent Terraria requires the player to complete a lengthy endgame quest to fight the absurdly difficult final boss who essentially requires several failed battles before victory can be achieved.  Many JRPGs such as Final Fantasy and even Paper Mario will require the player to traverse a good portion of a dungeon or sit through lengthy in-battle cutscenes following a death due to a boss attack that was literally impossible to anticipate.  The original Metroid respawns Samus with critically low health after death, prompting tedious farming for energy drops from enemies.

All of this amounts to a tedium, wasting players’ time on parts of the game that aren’t challenging rather than letting them spend it conquering the parts that are.  Much of this has to do with padding game length rather than deliberately trying to be punishing, but whatever the reasoning, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to view it as real difficulty.

The player should never experience fatigue while playing simply because he’s tired of the process of continuing from a failure.  If your main appeal comes from the challenge of your game, that doesn’t mean you have license to make everything obscenely difficult and ignore tuning it to the player experience.  The onus is actually even heavier on you, because the game at its core still has to be fun, and it still has to encourage the player to engage with it.

This is harder to do if your game is hard.  If you’re not up to the challenge, then, as the Dark Souls fanbase will universally tell you, “git gud.”

Inaugural

Greetings!

I don’t really know what else to write down for a “first post.”  Writer’s block ensues with frightening and consistent swiftness whenever I attempt to jot down my thoughts.  I’m sure this project will be no different.  But one mustn’t be cowardly, and so the attempt will continue for a while regardless.

In the following posts you will find analyses and ideas having to do with the design and development of video games.  Classic games, new games, games that climb on rocks…  This doesn’t rule out other topics, and I’ll try to keep them tagged appropriately, but boy, have I got some ideas about games.  These have been rolling around in my head for a while, and I will get to plenty of different topics, but first I think it would be appropriate to lay down a foundation of sorts.

Just some things to keep in mind:

• The mind of this blog is to interact with the principles of game development as a science.  I’m not interested in “reviews” so much as what makes the games themselves tick.  I ask questions like “what do we enjoy in this game?”
• The heart of this blog is to respect games as creations that defy exact science.  I also ask questions like “why does this work here but not there?”
• I’m not a professional video game developer.  The ideas I talk about come from me playing games.  Feel free to dismiss them.  I mean, don’t actually do that obviously, but as long as you feel free.
• Um, on that note, I employ and enjoy sarcasm.  “Moist” is not a popular word in modern culture, but “dry” is even worse apropos written text.  The responsible reader will know what to take with a grain of salt.  You know, because salty counteracts moist.
• I reserve the right to veer off games occasionally, probably most frequently into similar creative works in film and television.  The relationship between the two is undeniable (and is probably its own topic by itself), and besides, I like movies.
• I’m flying by the seat of my pants here.  Schedules and categories TBD.

Anyway, that should cover the basics.  Expect more soon.