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)