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Is 'Safe' Gaming The Best Kind Of Gaming?
An anonymous reader writes "James Portnow has written up an in-depth article about 'risk in game design'. He discusses the concept of the safe game, 'any game where given X hours (with minor variance for skill) any player will beat the game and get the prize.' Do you prefer your games tricky and studded with failure points, or does smooth and easy win the race?"
I prefer to 'Play' the game.
If it's good, I might finish it.
I like games that have a sandbox or arcade mode, that just let me ride/shoot/build whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want, but also a career mode that poses more of a challenge.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
When I first get the game I just want to know how to play it and watch the eye candy. And admire it on a technical level. After that I want to go with increasing difficulty and make it harder to play. Harder to play doesn't mean just more monsters to kill but harder to find stuff, different keys for different doors, more locked doors etc...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It should be easy to beat in a given time on easy, more difficult to beat on medium, and impossible to beat in hard.
There's no game which isn't beatable in X hours though; given long enough anyone can beat any game.. Except Ikaruga.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I played resident evil 4 on easy mode (and have done about 4 times through) and it was very enjoyable, it had pretty clear goals and was all fairly smooth sailing. I don't think I got stuck for too much time on anything. It's still one of my favourite games. I tried playing it on the harder mode, but it just seemed like it would all be up hill work, so I gave up pretty quickly... I like a lot of playablilty but don't want to spend my free time smashing my head into a wall
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Take a game like Quake 3 -- I really couldn't care whether I beat it, or whether I use cheats, or what. It's really intended to be multiplayer anyway. Given x hours, I will have fun, even if it means gauntleting bots on "I Can Win." Or I can play on Nightmare, or online -- either one, I will lose most of the time, but damn, is it fun to win just by the skin of your teeth -- or to get kicked into that higher gear and come back from 5 points behind to 5 points ahead.
Now, consider a game like, say, one of the Final Fantasies. Those are challenging, but you can generally beat one, given enough hours. This is good, because you don't want to pay $50 for a game and not get to see the end of the story. But, being able to see the end does not imply getting all the Legendary Weapons, and damnit, we deserved ours. I say "we", because my roommate and I traded off playing the Chocobo Training (for Tidus' weapon) -- even tossing the controller halfway through, as we were each better at different parts of it.
Or Halo, maybe the best example. Legendary is about as hard as you can make it and still have it be possible. Easy is a bit like "I Can Win" -- if you're trying at all, you'll beat it easily.
I can enjoy a game like, say, Half-Life 2 -- hard was too easy, but it was still fun. But nothing gives a game replayability like a decent set of difficulty levels. And if your game is, say, Enter The Matrix, you NEED as much replayability as you can get -- DAMN that game was short.
I can also enjoy a game that is hard, but not impossible. The Jak games were like this for me, especially Jak II. Often, required missions were ridiculously hard, requiring 10 or 20 tries to get it right. But it was possible, and the plot, animation, and humor makes it all worth it, no matter how short the cinematic.
So, in short, you are permitted to make it hard, provided you either provide a way around it (by making it an optional sidequest, or by allowing an easier difficulty level), or make it worth it. Difficulty levels are really the answer you are looking for -- the casual gamer won't buy Midnight Club 2 or Jak 2, the hardcore gamer won't buy Half-Life 2, but they'll both be happy with Halo 2 for quite a long time.
Oh, and crappy, old, still hard arcade versions of this game are to be unlockable secrets (PoP: Sands of Time had PoP 1), NOT requirements for beating the game! (Donkey Kong 64 required you to beat the original Donkey Kong!)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I would say that I like a game that:
a) allows you to at least play even if you aren't that skilled
b) has rewards for people who have/improve skills
c) games without "real" endings. Even if there is some kind of ending (like the end of a particular round), I want a game with replayability.
I enjoy real time and turn based strategy games, mmorpgs... right now I'm playing a lot of Puzzle Pirates, which I think is a good example. I really don't care for shooters (I'm just not wired that way, I guess), nor do I care for single player "rpg" titles, most of the time.
I've been playing a little BF2, and I'm not very good (but I enjoy it nonetheless). With games like BF2 having user accounts and tracking all kinds of stats, it came to me that it would be possible for the server to give handicap to a team based on the stats of the players in it. Say in BF2 for instance, the server will have access to the player's kill-to-death ratio, not only for the current session, but back to the beginning. Based on this it could, for instance, open additional slots on a team -- effectively giving them a handicap -- if they're "too low" in this ratio. Or give that team an extra vehicle, etc.
This could be fun for both good players who might enjoy and even seek out the opportunity to play the 'underdog' to a team with a numerical advantage, and for new players who risk getting frustrated and even bored if they're on the losing side all the time.
As it is now, the server relies on the random allocation of players to a side to 'balance things out', but I postulate that it might actually make the game more fun to bias this to give it that 'skilled underdogs vs overwhelming force' tint. As a server option, of course.
Any MP games out there doing this already?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If the game has a good-to-great story and compelling characters, then I'll strive to complete it no matter how easy or difficult it might be.
That ability to push yourself again, when you'd gotten used to the game, is hardly new, but it really felt new when id did it.
The Sandbox element of a lot of games is great, and can offer loads more playability when you've done a game to death, but bear in mind that many games are in fact based on the Sandbox, some with goals stuck on top to give you drive and reward - GTA, Sim City, just about an Civ game, [insert] Tycoon, Sims, Oblivion and so on. The majority of these make it possible, with enough time, to complete the game whatever your skill level
However, the point of these is often not to "complete" the game, but to develop your skill, to become the master of your virtual world. As such, it is only fitting that such games allow you whatever time you require to do so. Nobody likes to feel like a fool or be totally frustrated.
The real issue here is those games that have a solid, immutable goal (get to the end and complete the game, in effect). In such cases you can affect the speed (timing or time limit) or the gameplay difficulty (certain hard elements pulled out etc). In the case of the former, it should absolutely be customisable. Again, if you such at a game you might really enjoy then it's a good thing to be able to ramp it down a touch so you can get into it, and then - assuming you enjoy the challenge and not the cruise - pick it up again later.
In the case of the latter, however, I always find I'm disappointed by such options. The reward just never seems to be there. It's an obtuse example, but does anyone remember Monkey Islands 3 (possibly 4) where you could choose the easy mode? It basically removed half of the puzzles - they were supposed to be the harder ones, but that's such a subjective decision to make that it kind of flattened the experience. Somebody mentioned different keys for different doors etc. All that would do, I fear, is take a really well-designed game and remove the challenges - and thus, the reward.
I can see that this is a valuable debate, but I honestly feel that the ability to sandbox, the ability to slow a game down, and the ability to make a game functionally easier are all very different issues, and shouldn't be considered together. Of course, I've expressed my personal views here and you're welcome to tear them to shreds :-)
Meta will eat itself
Making games so easy you can just mash the buttons and win is clearly silly; games that aren't challenging aren't as rewarding. Without the chance of failure, success means little. However, the one thing I DO ask is that failure not force substantial loss of progress. For example:
- Puzzle adventure games, where missing an item early forces you to restart the entire game to be able to win
- Simple action games, where dying enough times (running out of credits) will force you to start over
In contrast, consider the Monkey Island games where, AFAIK, you can neither "lose" or get into an unwinnable situation; also, Gradius V which (despite being fairly challenging) eventually unlocks a "Free Play" mode that lets you keep playing, picking up from right where you died, as often as you like. Neither game is stupidly easy, nor necessarily "winnable".
There's no excuse for wasting the player's time. That's not to say that I don't, for instance, play single credit games in Gradius V to improve my skill and see how far I can get WITHOUT a continue, but that's my choice, not something forced on me by the game. The game shouldn't allow the player to continue without passing whatever obstacle, but sending the player a long ways back to redo earlier sections for no good reason is just bad design.
I don't dedicate huge quantities of my time to gaming, so when I do I want it to be fun. After playing Burnout: Revenge for half an hour, I realised that I was going to have to go through the whole gradual-collection-of-cool-cars thing just like with Burnout 3; and that it wasn't going to be any fun doing so. So I stopped after half an hour and haven't played it since.
Knights of the old Republic on the other hand is rewarding every time. I'm not putting huge effort in, but there is something to do every time I switch it on. It doesn't require that I have spent X hours in order that this time it's fun.
It's obviously a difficult balance to achieve, but I don't believe that a game should be "hard" in order that it's fun.
A game which had huge potential - "Destroy All Humans" - and I was loving, got bogged down in impossibly difficult levels that I was playing over and over. All I wanted to do was toss tanks around and blow stuff up; the constantly regenerating bad (good) guys made it all feel a bit pointless - there was effectively no way to win. I wanted to obliterate everyone on a level and survey my handywork with a happy grin.
Thinking about it, I think the games I enjoy most are those that have a progression, but are fairly easy. If I have to play a section more than once, then I'm working, not playing.
Multiplayer is a different thing completely of course. There, the goal is to laugh while destroying friends. A friend and I still get original Worms out on the playstation regularly. (Why has no one made classic worms for a modern console - 3D worms is not welcome)
Carpe Daemon
I guess if there are a number of solutions to a game's obstacles, I like it. I enjoy the process of attempting a strategy, refining it, possibly failing and having to find a new strategy. If I can beat a game without exhausting my strategies for dealing with challenging situations, then that game fulfills my needs, I suppose. I see it as completely independent of the amount of time it takes myself or another player to play through the game.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
As I read the article, the author seems to assume that "game" means an avatar-centric, single-player experience (ACSPE), along with MMORPGs thrown in. Certainly all his screenshots are of this type of game. So-called "puzzle games" (Tetris, Popcap's catalog, etc.), sports games, strategy games, and multiplayer games of all kinds, seem to fall outside his analysis.
For one thing, the concept of "beating" a game only really applies to the ACSPE, where there is "content" to burn through that usually doesn't merit a second look, like most movies. I think this is one of the main problems of gaming today that leads to lack of variety, a narrow audience, and excessive time commitments in order for a game to be fun.
Consider the pre-computer era definition of game: A game was something that was played against someone else, could have been physical (sports) or purely cognitive (board/card games) and almost always lasted less than a few hours (obviously, cricket strains this definition). Early computer games followed this pretty closely, replacing the human opponent with an AI (chess simulators, combat simulators, etc.).
The advent of paper-and-pen RPGs, and their subsequent translation into CRPGs changed all this. Persistent state that spanned play sessions, extemely large time commitments, and the elmination of what was traditionally thought of as competion created something that arguably should never have been called a "game" (how many of you were ever asked "How do you determine who's the winner" when you first explained RPGs to a layman?). These ideas soon bled over into most of the other genres, as they proved to be very effective in building franchise loyalty. Today, it's difficult to find a "serious" game that doesn't incorporate the features of "leveling", "extrinsic reward" (e.g. cutscenes, loot, etc.), "guaranteed success" (the main idea of the article) or "hidden rules" (my personal pet peeve), common in many Japanese games - the techique of withholding the rules of the game from the player, forcing them to "discover" them as a part of the process of playing, essentially turning rules into "content". I realize "hiddne rules" is a mainstay of some genres (fighters and Japanese RPGs comes immediately to mind), but I find them unforgiveable gimmicks for milking extra play-time out of a system, and forcing the player into an OCD-like monomania in order to actually get their money's worth (thereby wasting their time).
As popular as the ACSPE is, thousands of years of human history shows that the other sort of "game" (directly competitive systems, or abstract puzzle) can be quite successful as well, but it's been overlooked by almost everyone other than the online Flash/Java minigame market. Is this really the only venue for this type of fun? Even systems that would seem to be ideally suited for this type of game (e.g. the GBA or mobile phones) have precious few "strategy" or "puzzle" games, compared the mountains of action and rpg ACSPEs that have always struck me as inappropriate for systems that seem designed for short games with other people, as you're usually out in public with a few free minutes when you have the opporunity to use these.
Anyway, my overall point is, if developers would expand the types of games they'd develop beyond the ACSPEs focused on in this article, many, if not most, of these points would become moot. I also think that the emphasis of the effort would move from content generation to game design as you reduced the number of art resources required to produce a title. I see this as a good thing, as the content creation is probably the largest cost component of most modern games, the most time-consuming, and the least able to change dramatically if large changes need to be made during the middle of development to accomodate new ideas.
-BbT
The more a game wants to tell a detailed, interesting story, the less risk seems desirable. For example, the Final Fantasy series usually (starting with FFII) tells a reasonably complex story and gives you a chance to care about your characters. Soul Caliber, on the other hand, strongly discourages caring about anything other than hitting them until they run out of life and die. When a fighting game gets absurdly difficult, it's all fun and good, because it would be boring to win easily, since really all that the game has going for it is the gameplay. On the other hand, getting stuck in FF is annoying, because you kinda care about stopping the villian from destroying/dominating the world and would like to know just how it is that you defeat [Garland/the emperor/Golbez/Ex-Death/Kefka/Sepheroth/Ultimecia/ Kuja/Sin] and what happens then. Basically, if the game asks you to care more about a plot, it should be safer, but if it's mostly about the beating things down then it should be harder.
IANA*
I depends on the game model quite a lot. Is failure the inability to succeed or is failure caused by passing a threshold where you could never succeed.
Here's a little freeware game I made for a Ludum Dare http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/TTN.zip
It's sort of like lemmings only with tiny ninja. Of course Ninja are more hardy than lemmings. In this game they cannot die at all. That doesn't mean that it's easy to get them home. To beat a level takes a long time of careful placing of influencers and watching them run around. You tweak the setup much like you would with sim-city.
You can never make the level unsolveable. But It stil presents a challenge completing the levels. Of course in lemmings it's easy to get to a point where you have to nuke them all and start again. Neither way is the 'best' way to make a game though. It's just a different way of doing things.
To say one way is intrisically better than another is silly. You could do that for games with any particular point of difference. Are games where players race to acheive the same goal (such as reach alpha centuri) better than games where players aim for polar opposite goal (destuction of the other player)
It's just a difference. If you like one sort more than another, that's a preference.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
Many games (ok, the better ones) offer difficulty levels. That can range from "if you die, you must've done something reeeeeeally stupid, like standing in your own C4" to "enemy saw you. You're dead". And depending on your skill, you choose the appropriate one.
If you tie diff level to some unlockable goodies (but PLEASE make it eye candy, not something essential), even better. But what really puzzles me is games that allow you to go "god mode" after you've beaten the game on the hardest level. I just ask WHY? When I can beat the game in top hardcore ultimate impossible killer mode, what would be my motivation to play it in god mode where I'm unkillable? I already proved that I can beat it when I'm EASILY killable. Why should I even bother doing it in god mode, which is incredibly boring for someone who is a god in the game anyway?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A nice game of chess? No, I want to play Global Thermonuclear War.
The popularity of World of Warcraft suggests the latter.
I've finally gotten around to playing Lego Star Wars over the past few days (gonna jump into the second one next week). I'd say that it fits this category, since it doesn't really take much skill or effort to get through. You just need to sit down and invest the time to chug through it. And the best part is that it's highly entertaining. So much so in fact that I'm looking forward to playing through the levels again to 100% it.
This guy's the limit!
Nothing bothers me more than a game that's way too hard and doesn't have any options to change the difficulty level. Great games like F-Zero GX have just been ruined by that. I've never seen a highly anticipated, graphically beautiful, accoustically amazing, what-should-have-been-first-rate game drop to the $19.99 bin than F-Zer GX. It's so sad that all they would've had to do to make that game a success was to add a simple difficulty setting.
I miss the A/B switch on my old Atari.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
The more the merrier.. of course it must be fun content. However, I definitely prefer games which don't hide over 50% of the content from you unless you do 100% of this or 100% of that. I just don't have the time to do 100%, its usually between 50 and 75% completion for most things.
Been a game player for many years and I think every format has it's time and place, I love FPS's and indeed still play for a Wolfenstien Enemy Territory clan. I still play NeverWinter and Guild Wars when in the mood and Empire Earth and the like still make me giggle, specially when you send a load of cybers against rock throwers :D. as I say, depends on the mood, sometimes I'm happy to sit and struggle my way through a game (one section on Q4 on nightmare took me about 2 days) other times I like to ramp up the cheats and go in all guns/swords/axes/rockets (delete as applicable) blazing.
On a cautionary note... DONT HAVE CHILDREN IF YOU PLAY GAMES!!! So far i'm addicted to Disney's Toontown, Lego Star Wars (the new one is awesome), Runescape and a vast collection of shockwave games...not good for married life when the kids go to bed and the wife keeps saying "you coming to eat with me?" and your reply is "yeah, I just need to beat these last 10 cogs to get my next gag, be there in a minute" As we all know, a gaming minute = about 3 hours real time. I'm sure I'd be divorced by now if it wasnt for the fact that the kids keep asking me to help when they get stuck
I have played a few games that are basically just time suckers. You press the buttons appropriately and in a given amount of time the game is over and I hate it. If its an adventure game or RPG, I want a challenge. I want to screw up and have to figure out what I missed and go back for it. I think it should be a challenge.
For people that don't want this challenge, there are always walkthroughs that can spell out exactly what needs to be done, but I don't think the game should do that for you. And I think those walkthroughs will be produced en masse for a game that is really difficult because people will be proud to write them.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Bosses always have a hidden "trick", something that once you learn it, the boss goes from challenging to easy in about 3 seconds. Once you realize that a certain footwork pattern means "Get out of the way uberattack coming", the boss is much easier, because unless you happen to miss the "tell" (to barrow a poker term), you'll never be hit by the attack. Or if the way to survive the ride through the angry marine base is to take out the platforms they stand on, (one puzzle in Oddworld) the level itself becomes pointless -- it's almost impossible to lose.
On the other hand, there are games (I've seen it a few times in sports), where once the AI realizes it's losing, it suddenly gets much better at the game it's playing. In a fighting game, it might gain some new moves or have a move that takes 1/4 of your health etc. That's annoying, 'cause I'm not losing so much because I suck as because the game is cheating.
I don't mind a game that's hard on its own, but I hate games that are difficult for cheap reasons. I hate not being able to defeat a boss because I haven't figured out the "correct" answer yet -- or realized the tell for the special attack. I hate games that cheat me out of a victory by cheating. If the game is hard because the designer thought out the challenge and made it harder be requiring me to be good at the game, rather than good at guessing the solution that the designer had in mind.
I like a game to have a fairly even learning curve, even if it's steep. I like to think of myself as a fairly hardcore gamer as far as geekness and amount of time gaming, etc. But the one thing that will stop me from playing a game is a "hard spot" that I just can't get past for multiple gaming sessions and has me wanting to tear out my hair.
Console games seem the worst in this regard, and I can remember a number of PS2 titles that I enjoyed playing until I came across a boss monster whose "trick" I couldn't figure out. I'll spend a couple gaming sessions trying to beat him and if I can't do it before getting really frustrated then I'll usually just lose interest in the game. I like a challenge, but it's impossible for a game to offer the same level of challenge to everyone.
Sometimes I wish the really hard spots would auto-adjust (very minutely at a time) after a certain number of failures so that I could just get on with the game without having to go online looking for cheats or strategies.
The game that pisses me off the most is the first NFSU. You can be driving the same exact car as the AI, but for some reason the AI is not only faster, but handles better as well. The AI should have the same limits that I do. Just because they're controlled by the computer, does not mean they should be able to out-perform me in every way. Sure the AI could "learn" to drive better, and even drive perfect laps to make it harder, but don't give them the ability to turn hairpin turns at twice the speed I can in the same car. Also, don't suddenly make my car impossible to control on the last lap just because I'm far ahead. I didn't have any problem controlling it before then, I shouldn't suddenly lose all ability to handle the car.
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
I don't so much mind the "hidden trick" because that's the challenge - finding the "tells" and figuring out what is effective against the "boss".
But I do hate games that cheat - sports games where basketball players suddenly become 99% accurate when the shoot the basketball, or the football players somehow run slightly faster than yours.
But the worst is game level designers who use what could only be considered a flaw in the game engine as a way to add difficulty. Some games it's just trying to walk along a ledge that would be really easy in "real life", but it becomes part of the challenge of the game. Hidden ledges, and being able to blow up a stone wall because you notice that section had a little crack in it, but using your RPG you can't open a wooden office door, you have to find the key, which you often have to go around in circles to get. Also along the same vein is not being able to save your game arbitrarily, but only at certain points - and putting something very difficult and likely to kill you just before a save game point, so that you have to play the same section over and over again, even though it's just the last part that is giving you trouble.
They throw stuff in there, and then boast that the game takes 100 hours to complete, on average, which makes the $50 price tag seem like a bargain.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It seems as if 'safe' games appeal to one type of gamer, others such as Metal Gear Solid (for example) attract a gamer who is looking for more of a challenge while gaming and not just looking for some relaxation. How can the major gaming companies ever hope to overtake Hollywood if people are afraid to play games? The thing that a lot of people overlook in the comparison of games to other types of multimedia entertainment is that games require a certain level of skill and commitment to be fully enjoyed. Watching TV or a movie can be relaxing and requires zero input which can be the same if you make your games 'safe' and not have the user care about their pogress. The more challenging games however are seen as frustrating; they punish you for being a bad player and lock away much of their content for only experienced gamers to see which is what makes them better.
Business Voyeur
Start the game at a moderate difficulty setting. If the player ends up dying way too often at the same point in the game, switch to a lower difficulty (the worst thing a game can get you to do is make you repeat the same damn point in a level many times. After 5 or so tries, it turns from "fun" to annoying. Especially if the save point is miles away (how about having save points appear more frequently on easier levels?).
Then if the player starts blowing through the level, raise the difficulty again.
There comes a point when a player gets frustrated, and maybe in the beginning, instead of "difficulty", you start with a difficulty threshold - so the lower it is, the quicker the game goes into "easier mode".
And please, don't make it so the entire game has to be redone because you missed X at the beginning, and X was some out-of-the-way place that people won't care to look. For adventure games where exploration is key, this is less of an issue (as long as said explorer isn't on a time limit...).
Dead Rising has it close by letting you restart the game at your current level (makes it easier the next time around), but fails in that you have to restart the entire game.
Part of the problem is the use of rare "continue points." I remember part of Jak II where you had to blast through a big room with a zigzag walkway over a pit, swarming with troopers; hoverboard past lasers; and jump on tiny platforms over another pit. None of that would've been too bad except that you had to do the whole sequence in one go. After a while, the first parts stopped being fun! I'd rather have had the game let me save, or help me out a bit as with boss battles in the first Sly Cooper game.
Revive the Constitution.
I've never used XBox Live, but if it features 'seat-reservation' for groups of players then color me impressed.
If it doesn't it's just another free-standing gaming lobby, of which there are many on the PC (gamespy, allseeingeye, and another popular 'what's my friend playing'-thingy which I've forgotten the name of just now...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Since you know XBox Live, does it feature a [directed] Web of Trust or some such? Maybe it's not considered as necessary on a console network.
To me a middleware that adds a WoT-aspect to game lobbies (as in "I trust X, X trust Y, therefore I trust to play with Y" and that is end-user controllable (I decide who/what attributes of a player to trust) is a worthwhile project for some entrepreneur to explore.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Any game longer than, say, "Raiden" on the Sega Genesis is going to require a compelling scenario to make it fun. Even with a nice smooth ramp of feature introduction, power gaming is about learning to beat the engine, not role-playing the scenario. There are power gamers, and there are people who like to play a game to get away from things in a non-passive way. If you as a designer are trying to satisfy power gamers, fire the art and story departments. If you want to attract both types, you need to ask whether your difficulty levels are adding depth or just forcing the player to replay more and more sections. Does success come to the player from learning to beat the engine, or from thinking like a commander/participant in the scenario? Sadly, few games can claim the latter.
The one game mechanic I can't stand is memorization. When a game comes down to simply remembering a series of actions in a certain order to beat it, it takes me out of the scenario and makes it feel like work. There's a big difference between replaying the game out of choice, and replaying it piecemeal out of necessity.
AFAIK most fighting games coming out of Japan give you a practice mode where they tell you all the moves and many of the combos up front.
And I don't know what hidden rules any of the Japanese RPGs have. There's always some NPC who wants to interrupt you and tell you all about them, before asking you "Did you get that? (y/n)".
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Merge Deus Ex with Oblivion/Morrowind.
A free ranging sandbox game with one main quest, or even several, most of which would have 3-4 different ways to solve it. With a setup like Oblivion, that gives you countless different ways to stat-up.
I would also liberalize the game.
a) you can infinitely jack up the stats of your weapons/armor, and your own skills and attributes, if you have the funds / magical items / ingredients to make it happen
b) the enemy has a high chance of stat'ing up right along with you and a high chance of packing equally jacked up armor and weapons. everything from hapless rats to some guy in enchanted daedric armor, reflect damage/magicka enchantments and all that. oops. time to pick a new tactic for taking him down! enemies can stat up even higher than you, too, so if you're resting on your laurels you can actually fall behind. the game can also spawn random people far stronger than you. I like that idea actually, it makes things more challenging.
c) other NPC's should be able to come up to you and ask for training. Or it should be an option in your dialog - as in, when you talk to someone and they happen to want training, the dialog will come up. you train them, get paid, and get 1/10 or 1/100 progress toward a raise in the relevant skill level. there should be quests to make you capable of training, and then the higher level trainer you are, the more stat progress you get from training someone. Imagine the time you'd sink in the game trying to be a trainer for ALL skills. then that NPC trains another NPC who might come back and be your enemy.
d) repeat c) for selling stuff. Why not go on a quest to buy a physical store and stock it and sell stuff? corrupt cops come by and shake you down and then you have more quests to put them down.
e) romance. yeah, romance. what's wrong with romance? you can kill people, why not have romance? at least then you can actually care about a character rather than just use 'em for stats or whatever.
f) keep the arena combat. please. all games need some kind of arena. kudos to Oblivion for introducing neverending arena combat with monsters and stuff. next time, though, bring us some daedra to play with. 2 dremora and one storm giant. major coolness!
g) tons of side quests. tons and tons.
h) take a page from Morrowind: you can join one faction but not its obviously opposed faction
i) random super bad NPC's come in town and kill random (non plot related) NPC's, get a bounty, and you can collect on it. of course, someone else is also trying to collect, too.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Thank god this guy is only a grad student and not actually designing games.
He's seriously advocating that it's reasonable that if you fail at a risk in the game, the game should become harder. A valid idea for some short-length games, like a PvP game of Quake or Starcraft, but insane for longer and especially single player games. That sort of stupid game design is why many people bounce on the quick save key every five minutes. To take the most common example, mainstream first person shooter design. "Oh, you easily blew through the level with lots of ammo and health left over? Okay, as a reward you start the next, harder level with all that ammo and health. Oh, you barely scraped through with almost not ammo or health? As punishment you advance to the next, harder level at death's door." Punish the less skilled players, reward the more skilled ones. In practice this means less skilled players rely on saves and restores, effectively changing it into the time tradeoff the author so dislikes. If you really want to go this route you need to take control of saving away from the player. When you do you change the price of failure for a weaker player from "wasted time reloading" to "restarting the game from scratch because I can't compensate for my earlier failure." There is a market for such games (see Diablo II in hardcore mode, or Nethack), but it's a small, small market. If you want to only discuss game design for hard core players, so be it, but say so up front; don't pretend you're making general statements.
The author then dismisses having to replay sections of the game as "not really risk." The air get thin in your ivory tower? Doesn't he get frustrated and angry when he fails at something in a game? There is emotional risk, perhaps the strongest connection any game developer gets to a player. The player is also risking time. Money is apparently a "real" risk in the author's mind, but he forgotten the old cliche: time is money. If someone has to replay an hour of game content, even for people making minimum wage that amounts to a $5.70 financial penalty. Add in the opportunity cost of something more fun the player could be doing instead and even just about any player is paying a large fine for failure.
In addition, replaying sections of the game isn't just punishment. In many (admitted, not all), replaying a section you failed is practice. The author bashs Ico. Yes, you only get one path at a time in Ico, you're forced to replay a section until you beat it. Those failed attempts are called "practice." Indeed, it's far better than directly charging me money for each attempt, or making the game harder as punishment. When I fail the practice improves my skills in general, improving my odds in later sections.
So what solution does the author offer? "Write huge amounts of content, let the skilled players blow through it quickly and not see most of it, and let the weaker players soak it all in and ." A nice idea in theory, but for most games not practical. This means you'll need to vastly increase your budget to support all this content. You'll then have the skilled players (which include many professional reviewers) either blow through it quickly and complain there wasn't much content for their money, or play it slowly and complain it's too easy. Either way you get bad reviews.
Ultimately he's suggesting, "Now that your time's a wager that whole system becomes a lot more fun." The exact same thing he dismissed as irrelevant on page 1 is suddenly great. He's still talking about punishing weaker players by costing them time (which is still money). Perhaps all the additional content will make that additional time actively entertaining. In that case, won't the skilled players be frustrated at missing all that entertaining content, or be frustrated that to see all the entertaining content they need to engage in dull gamep
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Easy games just are not worth the time, if anyone can do it, and I am guarenteed to be able to beat it, unless there is a real and engaging story there is no point in playing, even with a story if it takes longer than reading a book to grind through it than it is not worth it.
For multiplayer games the motivation is a little different, either for fun playing with other people, or to show them I can do it and they can not, and rub it in.
Back to Ninja Gaiden Black. It has one of the hardest first bosses ever, you have to fail 3 times against him to unlock ninja dog(easy) mode and even then any single enemy can kill you fairly quickly, but it is possible to beat the game at the hardest difficulty with any weapon without ever getting hit. No one has done this yet, only parts of it but you know its there if you could play flawlessly. If you are playing to just play the game this makes it very open and lets you set your own goals ended despite the story itself being very linear.
If the focus is the story, and the game play is not critical to it than a safer game might be the right way to go, but if the beauty is in playing it than it should be difficult enough to give you time to appreciate that.
A MMORPG with NPC's is as close an analogy as humanly possible.
:(
I haven't even heard of one MMORPG that isn't infamous for bullies/grievers and their rotten admins who help them out. I don't like subscribing/paying for abuse. That's what marriage is for, folks. MMORPGs are like a marriage minus the occasional sex *grin*. (Ok, well getting out of a MMORPG is cheaper.)
Also, I would never ask for an Oblivion-like game to be multi player. If I wanted that I'd play a MUD or MMORPG.
BTW Dot hack for the PS2 was pretty ambitious as an MMORPG simulator. Too bad it was too hard to even play.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
And you know what? The developers have no reason to change this behavior.
They want you to eventually get tired of the game and buy a new one with new rules to discover.
Also, I think I'm a little confused about your definition of rules. Because it sounds like you are including enemy and power-up related stats in that definition. Would you rather the game came with a fold-out chart with the statistics for every obtainable/encounterable entity?
I think removing that element of discovery would make the game a little too easy (as you could plan everything out quite precisely in that case).
The AI of the enemies faced in role playing games have not evolved to point yet where they could counterbalance this wealth of information provided to the user.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON