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.
Gems and Relics 