There's always a sense of satisfaction in beating the odds, working diligently, and overcoming an arduous challenge. You've proven that even though this challenge is something that would stop some people in their tracks, you managed to tough it out and come out ahead in the end, proving your skill over those who have tried and failed before you. Which is, let's be honest, pretty damn sweet. However, there's a difference between overcoming a difficult challenge and surviving something brutally tearing you apart by the skin of your teeth, and it seems like some gamers are becoming so experienced that they're dulled to any challenge short of that.
I think the initial problem is that with games of old, the bar was set too high. The arcade and NES titles were both unforgiving and unintuitive, and losing meant restarting the whole game or begging your mom for more quarters. This isn't to discount those games, but later developments, such as those of the SNES, were on the whole more friendly for new players to get themselves into, and the trend has gradually continued as improved hardware and more complex control systems allow for a more immersive and gradual accustomization to the game. Compare and contrast the opening areas of the first Mario game to the newest one and it should be obvious what I mean. Unfortunately, those of us raised on the vicious games of the NES find the newer developments too soft for our tastes, which is to say, actually forgiving.
The second problem is something more attributable to the Internet than the game developers of today: cultures of like-minded individuals can meet up anonymously and with little effort to discuss their interests, be it surfing, the writing of Christopher Moore, or some crazy sexual fetish. This means that all the people who like their games harder than what is usually offered by the gaming industries of today can get together into one group and make their voice known to a given company, or in some cases, develop brutal games of their own. If these people like their games really hard, we get what you usually find in game romhacks: people who have beaten the original game all the way and want something more challenging to up the ante.
So what, you might say? Maybe the games of today really are too easy, and these people are doing us a service by bringing back the challenge to gaming as we know it. I actually consider this a pretty fair argument, except that the problem remains that a lot of game developers cannot design challenges that are actually challenging but can be reasonably figured out by a player without resorting to a guide of the game. That's the big one, I think. If someone with no Internet access and no friends that have beaten the game (this is more likely than you think) picks up the game, will they be able to beat it?
As before, this might seem to clash with my preference for roguelikes, but even as difficult as they are, well-designed roguelikes like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup or Spelunky are always fair. They might still be really difficult, as trying to fight a hydra head-on in the former or robbing a shopkeeper unarmed in the latter are, but they let you learn how the game works and play according to their own rules, which you are subject to as well. That's what really interests me, actually: the player has a lot in common with some of the enemies they face. In fact, there's probably a unique in DCSS that uses almost the same style in combat as the player does, but while the unique has extra strength to back it up, you have a few aces in the hole in the form of consumables.
Or maybe I'm just Stockholming it up and either they're badly designed or most other games that pride themselves on beating you to death ten times before you finally get to grasp the strategies involved are being fair as they do it as well, but I have yet to see evidence to either one.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
gamedesign.dev: Random drops
Yes, all these posts concern elements chiefly from RPGs. That's because I mostly find myself being bugged by their bad choices than those of other games.
Anydangfreakinway, I'm sure you've played a game where enemies have a chance of dropping items upon their defeat, sometimes minor consumables, sometimes average equipment, and sometimes they drop super-rare and super-powerful techniques or weapons or what have you. I have no idea who thought this was a good idea but they need to stop it right now. Seriously I am not kidding.
For starters, a given game could have several different types of enemies in a single area alone. Say, for example, in Pokémon, in which the first game had 150 such creatures to fight, and up to the newest DS installments, the number has reached 400, all of which are usable in these entries. In a given area, you could see as many as twenty of these enemies. Pokémon is especially bad about this because some of them might hold rare items, and you can only see or obtain them by either catching the Pokémon or using special abilities which aren't that good in the long run.
Secondly, the best items are usually dropped by exactly one such enemy, and you get almost no indication of what enemy might do this. I've played a lot of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon lately, and in that game, Nathan Graves depends on magic cards, dropped by specific enemies, to cast spells. The game abuses this by hiding some of the best cards in places you'd either have to backtrack to find without any indication about it, or enemies in the bonus area where you have no magic, no save points, no ability to backtrack to a given room, and all the enemies are extra tough. And Xom help you if these enemies are only randomly present.
And perhaps worst of all, the actual drop rate for anything rarer than "starting potion" is somewhere in the range of winning the lotto. So even if Nathan backtracks to the out of the way room, each time he kills that enemy, he's got about a 1% chance of his card dropping. If he doesn't, he's got no indication that anything could happen from killing this enemy save for the obscurity of the enemy. A sane player would then ignore the enemy and go do something more worthwhile, like beating the game without the card, but the collectors would either have to try every enemy in the game to see what their rare drops are, or use a guide. And if you ask me, neither of these options should be required. The later entries in Castlevania at least give you an indication of if enemies might drop valuable stuff, but that's a small comfort when the drop rate is still 1%.
I've heard people excuse game design decisions like this with "it's optional content for the most hardcore of players who love the game enough to milk it for every last penny and you have no right to complain about it if you aren't dedicated enough to do this yourself". That's no excuse at all. If I want to replay a game over and over to look for hidden secrets, I expect the game to give them to me for trying new things with it, not doing the same thing over and over again until the dice decide I'm worthy of the Ultra Bazooka 3000. In Iji, while there are some very well-hidden secrets, each of them can be discovered by figuring out the rules of the game and applying them in situations where they aren't explicitly asked of you. None of them requires you to repeat an obtuse action several times without any indication whatsoever that you're doing it right. Even those that do make you repeat actions are (a) telling you you're doing it right in their design or (b) minor things like flavor text, not the super powerful weapons.
Kids, don't design your game so the best items drop randomly. If you absolutely must make chance a factor, do it by having the player react to a rare occasion in a way expected of them from the game. Have a rare monster show up, tougher than usual, but that is guaranteed to drop it (and if you give that monster the ability to run away you are a bad person). Even that is stretching it, though.
Okay, so this is a bit hypocritical considering I'm a big roguelike fan, and those games thrive on your abilities never being assured. At least they have the courtesy to scatter several items on a given floor, and most enemies in these games won't hoard the items away from you. Those that do will always drop them, but they tend to wield these items as they do, so at the very least you know that fighting them will give you something. I've had an otherwise mediocre battle with Ijyb in Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup turn a lot more exciting because he looted the artifact armor I couldn't reach.
(and yes, I have gotten the Uranus and Pluto cards legit in Circle of the Moon. I'm not crazy enough to try for the Unicorn or Black Dog cards without exploiting at least one glitch, though)
Anydangfreakinway, I'm sure you've played a game where enemies have a chance of dropping items upon their defeat, sometimes minor consumables, sometimes average equipment, and sometimes they drop super-rare and super-powerful techniques or weapons or what have you. I have no idea who thought this was a good idea but they need to stop it right now. Seriously I am not kidding.
For starters, a given game could have several different types of enemies in a single area alone. Say, for example, in Pokémon, in which the first game had 150 such creatures to fight, and up to the newest DS installments, the number has reached 400, all of which are usable in these entries. In a given area, you could see as many as twenty of these enemies. Pokémon is especially bad about this because some of them might hold rare items, and you can only see or obtain them by either catching the Pokémon or using special abilities which aren't that good in the long run.
Secondly, the best items are usually dropped by exactly one such enemy, and you get almost no indication of what enemy might do this. I've played a lot of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon lately, and in that game, Nathan Graves depends on magic cards, dropped by specific enemies, to cast spells. The game abuses this by hiding some of the best cards in places you'd either have to backtrack to find without any indication about it, or enemies in the bonus area where you have no magic, no save points, no ability to backtrack to a given room, and all the enemies are extra tough. And Xom help you if these enemies are only randomly present.
And perhaps worst of all, the actual drop rate for anything rarer than "starting potion" is somewhere in the range of winning the lotto. So even if Nathan backtracks to the out of the way room, each time he kills that enemy, he's got about a 1% chance of his card dropping. If he doesn't, he's got no indication that anything could happen from killing this enemy save for the obscurity of the enemy. A sane player would then ignore the enemy and go do something more worthwhile, like beating the game without the card, but the collectors would either have to try every enemy in the game to see what their rare drops are, or use a guide. And if you ask me, neither of these options should be required. The later entries in Castlevania at least give you an indication of if enemies might drop valuable stuff, but that's a small comfort when the drop rate is still 1%.
I've heard people excuse game design decisions like this with "it's optional content for the most hardcore of players who love the game enough to milk it for every last penny and you have no right to complain about it if you aren't dedicated enough to do this yourself". That's no excuse at all. If I want to replay a game over and over to look for hidden secrets, I expect the game to give them to me for trying new things with it, not doing the same thing over and over again until the dice decide I'm worthy of the Ultra Bazooka 3000. In Iji, while there are some very well-hidden secrets, each of them can be discovered by figuring out the rules of the game and applying them in situations where they aren't explicitly asked of you. None of them requires you to repeat an obtuse action several times without any indication whatsoever that you're doing it right. Even those that do make you repeat actions are (a) telling you you're doing it right in their design or (b) minor things like flavor text, not the super powerful weapons.
Kids, don't design your game so the best items drop randomly. If you absolutely must make chance a factor, do it by having the player react to a rare occasion in a way expected of them from the game. Have a rare monster show up, tougher than usual, but that is guaranteed to drop it (and if you give that monster the ability to run away you are a bad person). Even that is stretching it, though.
Okay, so this is a bit hypocritical considering I'm a big roguelike fan, and those games thrive on your abilities never being assured. At least they have the courtesy to scatter several items on a given floor, and most enemies in these games won't hoard the items away from you. Those that do will always drop them, but they tend to wield these items as they do, so at the very least you know that fighting them will give you something. I've had an otherwise mediocre battle with Ijyb in Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup turn a lot more exciting because he looted the artifact armor I couldn't reach.
(and yes, I have gotten the Uranus and Pluto cards legit in Circle of the Moon. I'm not crazy enough to try for the Unicorn or Black Dog cards without exploiting at least one glitch, though)
Saturday, September 25, 2010
gamedesign.dev: Healing
I touched on this issue last post, but I don't think I covered it enough. As I mentioned, the classical adventuring group has among it a benevolent and pious healer, usually a cleric or a person chosen by the setting's chief religion. I might be wrong in thinking this, but as gamers usually don't have much interest either in religion or healing, this role doesn't see a lot of focus as the starring role of a game. And yet, healing is almost completely required in games nowadays, to the point where FPS games let your character regenerate instantly when behind cover or RPGs assume that you have a healer regularly keeping your team safe.
Let's get right to business: healing is really, really, really powerful. In real life, the reason wars and violent crime and so forth are so effective is because recovering from these things is ridiculously tough (if not impossible). In games, however, healing is as effortless and instant as picking up a powerup or selecting the Cure spell. This is all well and good from one perspective, i.e. it's not fun to play as a character who's crippled to the point of uselessness, but it also tends to either eliminate the challenge of anything when you can instantly recover from their attacks, turn battles into drawn-out slogs while you alternate between chipping away at their ten-thousand hit points while repeatedly recovering your meager five hundred, or both.
The first issue, that healing is usually both easy and powerful, is probably the most prevalent one. Most encounters in games are designed so that you only have to expend a perfunctory amount of resources to survive it, but these encounters are spaced out across the course of a level, so you may have to expend these same resources ten or more times through the level. Which is all well and good, except that the level also resupplies you, through looting fallen enemies, finding items throughout, and purchasing items if the option becomes available. And as anyone who's studied basic algebra knows, adding something to both sides of the equation means nothing has changed. Oh sure, you might have more, say, shotgun ammo and less sniper rifle ammo, but on the whole you're no worse off than when you began. Healing is especially important, because it is possible that you might handle encounters without taking any hits at all, and if you should happen to have a way to regenerate health automatically, then encounters become a net gain, letting you save consumable healing for whatever end-of-area boss might be waiting.
Secondly, the problem of healing being required simply to outlast a difficult foe. When I play games, I tend to regard defense as an afterthought, usually charging headfirst into a fight and hoping to seize victory within the first few turns or whatever. In some games (Devil Survivor, Battle for Wesnoth) this tactic can have amazing results. It can just as easily lead to an early loss, but if I get a chance to retry, then I'll do so, using what I learned to cover my weaknesses for the next assault. Most games, however, have bosses that simply can't be blitzkrieged in this way because they have too much health. The idea developers have for these battles is that it's a give and take, where you chip away at their health and then recover what they do to you. The problem with this is that most boss fights usually don't have interesting enough tactics to last for a ten-minute fight. The worst of these is when they do vary their tactics depending on health (usually quite sharply) but it takes a hefty amount of time to whittle them down to the point where you do have to change tactics, and you usually only get the barest of indications. The Shin Megami Tensei titles are especially guilty of this one, which is a shame since they can usually make their fights very challenging. What's even worse is if these bosses have healing moves of their own, because as you should know by that point in the game, usually a single healing move can undo the efforts of the enemy over a good few turns/minutes.
There's two games which I think have come close to dealing with the problem of healing with any degree of effectiveness. The first of these is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. The most basic method of healing is through resting, which is balanced out by your character's need for food. Granted, food is usually quite plentiful for most characters, but being both hungry and wounded is still a very vulnerable position (especially for casters, who also use hunger for their spells). The next method of healing is through consumable items. These are fairly infrequent, and the strongest of them, the wand of healing, is especially rare (and dependent on your skill in Evocations). There are methods of healing aside from this, but they require specific spell schools (usually Necromancy) which have downright terrifying miscast effects and usually an additional cost aside from the spell itself, and the various gods, which are usually a risk/reward all on their own. The god of healing, Elyvilon, is the biggest cost, because in addition to trying to be as peaceful to others as you can and the healing invocations costing a lot of hunger, Elyvilon rewards you for destroying weapons, the deadlier the better.
The other game is Cave Story. You have an initially small life bar, but you can upgrade it through hidden capsules, which may be easy or difficult to find. Recovering from attacks completely requires you to find a server, which is usually (but not always) found next to a save point. Enemies do drop health, but it's very infrequent and only heals about 6 or so health with the highest powerup (your health can reach a maximum of 55). Lastly, every time you get hit, your weapons degrade a bit, although you can repair them by collecting energy from enemies, which is far more frequent find than health. This emphasizes avoiding hits more than taking them outright, because if you do take a hit, it's very hard, although not extremely so, to recover from it. Contrast with other games, in which you can take as many hits as you like, provided they don't cross over the threshold of "u dai" before your regeneration can kick in.
Let's get right to business: healing is really, really, really powerful. In real life, the reason wars and violent crime and so forth are so effective is because recovering from these things is ridiculously tough (if not impossible). In games, however, healing is as effortless and instant as picking up a powerup or selecting the Cure spell. This is all well and good from one perspective, i.e. it's not fun to play as a character who's crippled to the point of uselessness, but it also tends to either eliminate the challenge of anything when you can instantly recover from their attacks, turn battles into drawn-out slogs while you alternate between chipping away at their ten-thousand hit points while repeatedly recovering your meager five hundred, or both.
The first issue, that healing is usually both easy and powerful, is probably the most prevalent one. Most encounters in games are designed so that you only have to expend a perfunctory amount of resources to survive it, but these encounters are spaced out across the course of a level, so you may have to expend these same resources ten or more times through the level. Which is all well and good, except that the level also resupplies you, through looting fallen enemies, finding items throughout, and purchasing items if the option becomes available. And as anyone who's studied basic algebra knows, adding something to both sides of the equation means nothing has changed. Oh sure, you might have more, say, shotgun ammo and less sniper rifle ammo, but on the whole you're no worse off than when you began. Healing is especially important, because it is possible that you might handle encounters without taking any hits at all, and if you should happen to have a way to regenerate health automatically, then encounters become a net gain, letting you save consumable healing for whatever end-of-area boss might be waiting.
Secondly, the problem of healing being required simply to outlast a difficult foe. When I play games, I tend to regard defense as an afterthought, usually charging headfirst into a fight and hoping to seize victory within the first few turns or whatever. In some games (Devil Survivor, Battle for Wesnoth) this tactic can have amazing results. It can just as easily lead to an early loss, but if I get a chance to retry, then I'll do so, using what I learned to cover my weaknesses for the next assault. Most games, however, have bosses that simply can't be blitzkrieged in this way because they have too much health. The idea developers have for these battles is that it's a give and take, where you chip away at their health and then recover what they do to you. The problem with this is that most boss fights usually don't have interesting enough tactics to last for a ten-minute fight. The worst of these is when they do vary their tactics depending on health (usually quite sharply) but it takes a hefty amount of time to whittle them down to the point where you do have to change tactics, and you usually only get the barest of indications. The Shin Megami Tensei titles are especially guilty of this one, which is a shame since they can usually make their fights very challenging. What's even worse is if these bosses have healing moves of their own, because as you should know by that point in the game, usually a single healing move can undo the efforts of the enemy over a good few turns/minutes.
There's two games which I think have come close to dealing with the problem of healing with any degree of effectiveness. The first of these is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. The most basic method of healing is through resting, which is balanced out by your character's need for food. Granted, food is usually quite plentiful for most characters, but being both hungry and wounded is still a very vulnerable position (especially for casters, who also use hunger for their spells). The next method of healing is through consumable items. These are fairly infrequent, and the strongest of them, the wand of healing, is especially rare (and dependent on your skill in Evocations). There are methods of healing aside from this, but they require specific spell schools (usually Necromancy) which have downright terrifying miscast effects and usually an additional cost aside from the spell itself, and the various gods, which are usually a risk/reward all on their own. The god of healing, Elyvilon, is the biggest cost, because in addition to trying to be as peaceful to others as you can and the healing invocations costing a lot of hunger, Elyvilon rewards you for destroying weapons, the deadlier the better.
The other game is Cave Story. You have an initially small life bar, but you can upgrade it through hidden capsules, which may be easy or difficult to find. Recovering from attacks completely requires you to find a server, which is usually (but not always) found next to a save point. Enemies do drop health, but it's very infrequent and only heals about 6 or so health with the highest powerup (your health can reach a maximum of 55). Lastly, every time you get hit, your weapons degrade a bit, although you can repair them by collecting energy from enemies, which is far more frequent find than health. This emphasizes avoiding hits more than taking them outright, because if you do take a hit, it's very hard, although not extremely so, to recover from it. Contrast with other games, in which you can take as many hits as you like, provided they don't cross over the threshold of "u dai" before your regeneration can kick in.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
gamedesign.dev: Classes
The archetypal fantasy adventuring group, to most people, usually consists of a battle-hardened warrior, a crafty thief, a good-natured cleric, and an all-knowing wizard. Now, most games which have you play as a single character, or which emphasize a specific character in your party over others, will usually focus on the first of these, although that's not to say the second and fourth don't get playtime. So if people want to play characters in other roles, they have to look for games that allow for you to choose a "class" for your character, i.e. defining their abilities and skillsets. This is such a pervasive trend in RPGs that it's even bled over into other genres, particularly FPS. Problem is, not a lot of people are good at designing these classes with any kind of balance.
It's not an easy task, of course. Every element that significantly changes the playstyles available to a player has to be checked against all the existing ones to ensure that one isn't just outright better than another. There are a few games that have done this right (offhand, Team Fortress 2 and Golden Sun) but a lot of them are just not even pretending to be balanced. The most egregious offender of this is Final Fantasy III, perhaps more because it's looked at as one of the first game to really put this idea of choosing classes for your characters into play, but it is so loaded with false choices that they may as well have not bothered. If you can recall the Garuda boss who sends out an attack every few turns that only one of your sixteen or so classes can survive, you'll get the idea.
Another problem is that if you choose a class emphasizing one playstyle, they may suffer at the others so much that even offering them as an option is simply a mean move. Final Fantasy X, for example, with each character having a specialty that suits them, but a crippling inability to be useful against other enemies at all. They muck it up even further by giving the healer the ability to summon massive dudes that obsolete everyone else. Team Fortress 2 does this fairly right: even if a demoman's explosives can be used offensively like the soldier, he loses out on close combat thanks to having no sidearm. Which isn't to say he can't do it: his array of melee weapons is formidable and can be unexpected.
One last side effect is that certain playstyles just aren't very fun for some players. I've only ever seen one game make a dedicated healer role fun to play as, and that is, as before, Team Fortress 2. It emphasizes acting fast to save wounded players and prioritizing who can do and take the most damage in a fight before dying, as well as finding players who know enough to defend you and being able to protect yourself when you can't find such players. It's a surprisingly fast-paced playstyle which differs from the usual healer playstyle of "wait for their attack, use your strongest healing move, rinse and repeat until they get bored and go watch stupid shows". What makes this worse is that healers are practically required on most teams with class systems, even with consumable healing items.
Now, there's only one way to fix this one, and it's to question if having a class system at all is necessary or fun for your game. Hint: if you're designing encounters so that you can only clear it with a single specific setup out of who knows how many, you've done it wrong. If it becomes clear that one class is more overpowered or underpowered than the rest, then either you have to change it (without upsetting balance or making the class no fun at all to play) or remove it (I like playing as reavers in Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and I know they're trying to fix it, but if they can't then oh well). Lastly, make sure that the playstyle is at least fun for someone. If no one chooses a class because it's underpowered, that's one thing, because Dan is underpowered in Street Fighter and he's hilarious to play as, but if they don't choose it because it's no fun, you've done something wrong.
It's not an easy task, of course. Every element that significantly changes the playstyles available to a player has to be checked against all the existing ones to ensure that one isn't just outright better than another. There are a few games that have done this right (offhand, Team Fortress 2 and Golden Sun) but a lot of them are just not even pretending to be balanced. The most egregious offender of this is Final Fantasy III, perhaps more because it's looked at as one of the first game to really put this idea of choosing classes for your characters into play, but it is so loaded with false choices that they may as well have not bothered. If you can recall the Garuda boss who sends out an attack every few turns that only one of your sixteen or so classes can survive, you'll get the idea.
Another problem is that if you choose a class emphasizing one playstyle, they may suffer at the others so much that even offering them as an option is simply a mean move. Final Fantasy X, for example, with each character having a specialty that suits them, but a crippling inability to be useful against other enemies at all. They muck it up even further by giving the healer the ability to summon massive dudes that obsolete everyone else. Team Fortress 2 does this fairly right: even if a demoman's explosives can be used offensively like the soldier, he loses out on close combat thanks to having no sidearm. Which isn't to say he can't do it: his array of melee weapons is formidable and can be unexpected.
One last side effect is that certain playstyles just aren't very fun for some players. I've only ever seen one game make a dedicated healer role fun to play as, and that is, as before, Team Fortress 2. It emphasizes acting fast to save wounded players and prioritizing who can do and take the most damage in a fight before dying, as well as finding players who know enough to defend you and being able to protect yourself when you can't find such players. It's a surprisingly fast-paced playstyle which differs from the usual healer playstyle of "wait for their attack, use your strongest healing move, rinse and repeat until they get bored and go watch stupid shows". What makes this worse is that healers are practically required on most teams with class systems, even with consumable healing items.
Now, there's only one way to fix this one, and it's to question if having a class system at all is necessary or fun for your game. Hint: if you're designing encounters so that you can only clear it with a single specific setup out of who knows how many, you've done it wrong. If it becomes clear that one class is more overpowered or underpowered than the rest, then either you have to change it (without upsetting balance or making the class no fun at all to play) or remove it (I like playing as reavers in Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and I know they're trying to fix it, but if they can't then oh well). Lastly, make sure that the playstyle is at least fun for someone. If no one chooses a class because it's underpowered, that's one thing, because Dan is underpowered in Street Fighter and he's hilarious to play as, but if they don't choose it because it's no fun, you've done something wrong.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
gamedesign.dev: Status effects
So, the climactic fight in a fantasy story is, usually, a one-on-one duel between the daring underdog protagonist and his nefarious rival, with blades clashing, evenly matches, yet the protagonist wins either through luck or skill. Which is, y'know, pretty great. Before that, though, the protagonist likely has to deal with other encounters. Maybe they have to defeat an opponent sharply more powerful than they, and must resort to trickery of some sort. Maybe they are caught with their pants down and must prevail in otherwise difficult situations. These are more interesting to me, because it favors ingenuity more than direct battle skill. It's a shame RPGs nowadays don't like actually doing that, though.
Status effects are nothing new to most RPG veterans. There's the usual array of status effects, like poison and sleep and blindness and silence, and some RPGs like to mix it up with weird status effects like zombification or turning into a mushroom or whatever. Additionally, there are ways to decrease (or increase) the various stats available to both player and enemy, termed debuffs and buffs respectively. Many games offer these, yet very few of them actually bother to make them worthwhile.
A term I've come up with on my own, but which has it's own variant on various game forums, is "turn economy", or the value of a given action per turn or whatever. The basic gauge for this is the damage your average fighting guy does on an attack. Status effects, debuffs, and buffs tend to screw this up, usually because they're so powerful. Take, for example, the silence status effect. Traditionally, a silenced character cannot use any spells at all. Against a character reliant on spells, this can neuter them completely. Similarly, if you use a debuff on their primary attack stat (probably intelligence in this case) you can cut their abilities down to nothing. Buffs, meanwhile, increase your own stats, possibly raising your magic defense so they can't hurt you. These all mess with the turn economy because they can win the fight before it truly starts, making a conventional attack pointless until you've done this.
Naturally, game developers recognize the threat such things would pose. The climactic final duel isn't so climactic if you can load the final boss up with debuffs and status effects until they can't do a thing. Unfortunately, the usual method of fixing this is the worst: making boss encounters immune to any status effect that would win the battle. This throws the turn economy the other way: any turn spent using a status effect on a boss that's immune to it is a turn wasted. The same tends to be true of debuffs. Meanwhile, your characters have no such luck: bosses can use the worst status effects and debuffs against you with impunity, unless you happen to have equipment that blocks it or whatever.
However, they can't make your own characters immune to their own buffs. The usual solution there, then, is to give bosses a move that cancels out all buffs on the player. This causes the turns (not to mention magic points or items or whatever) used in buffing to be wasted, save for the small damage returns from the usual rigmarole on combat. It also discourages the player from using buffs if they know a boss can dispel them, or if they can figure out what triggers the dispelling move, they may simply buff as much as they can without triggering it. Long story short, status effects, debuffs, and buffs are either no-brainers or false choices in almost all implementations.
I've seen a few games have a "berserk" status effect, which raises the attack power of the character, but locks them into only doing physical attacks (usually default attacks, and not physical techniques). I consider this one of the best ways available to handle the problem of all three at once: status effects come with both a benefit and a drawback. If a character is put to sleep, have them recover a decent amount of health each turn (and stop making it so attack spells don't wake them up, I'd like to think people wake up when they catch fire). If a character becomes blind, make their magic attacks stronger and make up some explanation about sensory deprivation being good for inner knowledge. If you buff a character's speed, lower their accuracy since they may not be used to the speed boost. And lastly, make it so you can use these status effects on both teammates and enemies. Cause the death knight to go berserk so he can't use his evil magic, and then blind your mage so they can nuke them without the death knight setting up a defensive spell (which maybe locks out healing?)
Status effects are nothing new to most RPG veterans. There's the usual array of status effects, like poison and sleep and blindness and silence, and some RPGs like to mix it up with weird status effects like zombification or turning into a mushroom or whatever. Additionally, there are ways to decrease (or increase) the various stats available to both player and enemy, termed debuffs and buffs respectively. Many games offer these, yet very few of them actually bother to make them worthwhile.
A term I've come up with on my own, but which has it's own variant on various game forums, is "turn economy", or the value of a given action per turn or whatever. The basic gauge for this is the damage your average fighting guy does on an attack. Status effects, debuffs, and buffs tend to screw this up, usually because they're so powerful. Take, for example, the silence status effect. Traditionally, a silenced character cannot use any spells at all. Against a character reliant on spells, this can neuter them completely. Similarly, if you use a debuff on their primary attack stat (probably intelligence in this case) you can cut their abilities down to nothing. Buffs, meanwhile, increase your own stats, possibly raising your magic defense so they can't hurt you. These all mess with the turn economy because they can win the fight before it truly starts, making a conventional attack pointless until you've done this.
Naturally, game developers recognize the threat such things would pose. The climactic final duel isn't so climactic if you can load the final boss up with debuffs and status effects until they can't do a thing. Unfortunately, the usual method of fixing this is the worst: making boss encounters immune to any status effect that would win the battle. This throws the turn economy the other way: any turn spent using a status effect on a boss that's immune to it is a turn wasted. The same tends to be true of debuffs. Meanwhile, your characters have no such luck: bosses can use the worst status effects and debuffs against you with impunity, unless you happen to have equipment that blocks it or whatever.
However, they can't make your own characters immune to their own buffs. The usual solution there, then, is to give bosses a move that cancels out all buffs on the player. This causes the turns (not to mention magic points or items or whatever) used in buffing to be wasted, save for the small damage returns from the usual rigmarole on combat. It also discourages the player from using buffs if they know a boss can dispel them, or if they can figure out what triggers the dispelling move, they may simply buff as much as they can without triggering it. Long story short, status effects, debuffs, and buffs are either no-brainers or false choices in almost all implementations.
I've seen a few games have a "berserk" status effect, which raises the attack power of the character, but locks them into only doing physical attacks (usually default attacks, and not physical techniques). I consider this one of the best ways available to handle the problem of all three at once: status effects come with both a benefit and a drawback. If a character is put to sleep, have them recover a decent amount of health each turn (and stop making it so attack spells don't wake them up, I'd like to think people wake up when they catch fire). If a character becomes blind, make their magic attacks stronger and make up some explanation about sensory deprivation being good for inner knowledge. If you buff a character's speed, lower their accuracy since they may not be used to the speed boost. And lastly, make it so you can use these status effects on both teammates and enemies. Cause the death knight to go berserk so he can't use his evil magic, and then blind your mage so they can nuke them without the death knight setting up a defensive spell (which maybe locks out healing?)
Sunday, September 19, 2010
gamedesign.dev: Element systems
So uh, I have a blog.
I may as well post about stuff, right? So, I figure I'll post about game design, since I find myself venting a lot on this subject as of late.
Today's venting point: element systems. To clarify, this is something you usually find in RPGs, most notably implemented in Pokémon. Each attack has an attribute, like fire or ice or whatever, and each opponent has a specific resistance or weakness to each attribute. For example, rock-paper-scissors: each person involved chooses one of these, and depending on their choice, they win or lose against the other players. Rock is strong against scissors but weak to paper, and scissors beats paper.
In RPGs, what you usually find is a four element system, using the Aristotelian elements of fire, earth, air, and water. Fire and water oppose each other, doing more damage to the opposing element, only some to unrelated elements, and negligible or worse damage to themselves. Same deal with air and earth. So what's the problem?
Well, first things first: as time goes on in an RPG, having an easily exploitable weakness can turn a challenging battle into a trivial one. For example, in Persona 4, being hit by an attack you're weak to knocks you down and grants the aggressor an extra turn. Late game enemies in RPGs tend to have no elemental weaknesses at all, and may resist or ignore or even heal from a given element attack. Therefore, people who focus on one type of attack (usually casters) lose out to characters with attacks not tied in to an element (namely, physical characters).
Secondly, part of the interest in having an element system is in exploiting these weaknesses, but these weaknesses may not be intuitive. In the aforementioned fire/earth/air/water system, where fire and water both do heavy damage to each other, it's easy to see how water does that, since it would douse fire. The reverse is less obvious, since while fire can heat water into steam, it takes a significant amount of fire to do so.
So we have two problems: in a given system, weaknesses may be unintuitive, and they might become obsolete, rendering the system as a whole an overall weakness for the player. This isn't to say that element systems are bad, just that they need to be built to accommodate such problems.
I can think of two good examples of element systems that are well implemented. The first of these is the Pokémon games. It has a slew of element types, each with strengths and weaknesses. While attacks have an element to them as normal, actual Pokémon may have one or two elements, which cause their weaknesses and resistances to overlap. What's more, almost every weakness or resistance is intuitive. So, with a fire move, it's strong against grass, bug, ice, and steel, but fire-type Pokémon are weak to water, ground, and rock moves. If you had a fire-type that had some additional type to it, like Flying, that would change its resistances further (in this case, negating the ground weakness, but increasing the weakness to rock and adding a weakness to electric moves). As an added bonus, while there are two types largely unaffected by the elements (normal and dragon) these still have some weight in the system, and even if they didn't, weaknesses and resistances are fairly balanced throughout.
The second example is Battle for Wesnoth. This one is noteworthy because most units in the game are non-elemental with regards to resistances, of which there are six types. The real times when it comes into play are with special kinds of units, the most notable of which is the Undead faction. While there are a handful of units with roughly normal resistances, skeletal and ghostly units have sharply different resistances, with skeletons being tough against most attacks except for arcane and blunt attacks, and ghosts being almost immune to everything but arcane and fire. This leads to using different kinds of units than you normally would against them, although you could fight with conventional units if you wanted or needed to. It's very rare that a unit is flat-out useless with its attack against an enemy, and when they are, it's only when you're playing very badly that you have no way of countering that situation. This system rewards strategic play without stonewalling players who just want to brute-force their way through.
I'll likely use this blog for more posts on game design, but by all means, comment on this. I'm interested in seeing what other people think about established game design.
I may as well post about stuff, right? So, I figure I'll post about game design, since I find myself venting a lot on this subject as of late.
Today's venting point: element systems. To clarify, this is something you usually find in RPGs, most notably implemented in Pokémon. Each attack has an attribute, like fire or ice or whatever, and each opponent has a specific resistance or weakness to each attribute. For example, rock-paper-scissors: each person involved chooses one of these, and depending on their choice, they win or lose against the other players. Rock is strong against scissors but weak to paper, and scissors beats paper.
In RPGs, what you usually find is a four element system, using the Aristotelian elements of fire, earth, air, and water. Fire and water oppose each other, doing more damage to the opposing element, only some to unrelated elements, and negligible or worse damage to themselves. Same deal with air and earth. So what's the problem?
Well, first things first: as time goes on in an RPG, having an easily exploitable weakness can turn a challenging battle into a trivial one. For example, in Persona 4, being hit by an attack you're weak to knocks you down and grants the aggressor an extra turn. Late game enemies in RPGs tend to have no elemental weaknesses at all, and may resist or ignore or even heal from a given element attack. Therefore, people who focus on one type of attack (usually casters) lose out to characters with attacks not tied in to an element (namely, physical characters).
Secondly, part of the interest in having an element system is in exploiting these weaknesses, but these weaknesses may not be intuitive. In the aforementioned fire/earth/air/water system, where fire and water both do heavy damage to each other, it's easy to see how water does that, since it would douse fire. The reverse is less obvious, since while fire can heat water into steam, it takes a significant amount of fire to do so.
So we have two problems: in a given system, weaknesses may be unintuitive, and they might become obsolete, rendering the system as a whole an overall weakness for the player. This isn't to say that element systems are bad, just that they need to be built to accommodate such problems.
I can think of two good examples of element systems that are well implemented. The first of these is the Pokémon games. It has a slew of element types, each with strengths and weaknesses. While attacks have an element to them as normal, actual Pokémon may have one or two elements, which cause their weaknesses and resistances to overlap. What's more, almost every weakness or resistance is intuitive. So, with a fire move, it's strong against grass, bug, ice, and steel, but fire-type Pokémon are weak to water, ground, and rock moves. If you had a fire-type that had some additional type to it, like Flying, that would change its resistances further (in this case, negating the ground weakness, but increasing the weakness to rock and adding a weakness to electric moves). As an added bonus, while there are two types largely unaffected by the elements (normal and dragon) these still have some weight in the system, and even if they didn't, weaknesses and resistances are fairly balanced throughout.
The second example is Battle for Wesnoth. This one is noteworthy because most units in the game are non-elemental with regards to resistances, of which there are six types. The real times when it comes into play are with special kinds of units, the most notable of which is the Undead faction. While there are a handful of units with roughly normal resistances, skeletal and ghostly units have sharply different resistances, with skeletons being tough against most attacks except for arcane and blunt attacks, and ghosts being almost immune to everything but arcane and fire. This leads to using different kinds of units than you normally would against them, although you could fight with conventional units if you wanted or needed to. It's very rare that a unit is flat-out useless with its attack against an enemy, and when they are, it's only when you're playing very badly that you have no way of countering that situation. This system rewards strategic play without stonewalling players who just want to brute-force their way through.
I'll likely use this blog for more posts on game design, but by all means, comment on this. I'm interested in seeing what other people think about established game design.
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