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On Luck and Randomness In Games
Gamasutra has an article analyzing random events in games, and how they can add or subtract to a player's experience. It looks at the different ways luck plays a part in games; from landing a critical strike instead of a miss to the scatter of a shotgun blast to waiting for that blasted straight piece in Tetris. "Game developers are sometimes faced with similarly challenging decisions when contemplating whether to include some kind of deliberate randomness. For example, in the video game Unreal Tournament, when a player shoots at a target with the 'enforcer' weapon, the projectile does not necessarily hit the point that is aimed at; a random deviation is added that scatters shots. This introduces a degree of realism from an observer's perspective and no doubt gives beginners a fair chance against more experienced players, but it can also potentially frustrate skilled players."
Game devs would be well advised to remember they are creating a G A M E - not an alternate reality.
They are subject to the same limitations as story tellers, song writers and actors...their imaginations.
The enforcer in Unreal Tournament is a quick-fire weapon, so it's not comparable to a sniper rifle - in far Cry, if you spend 5 second lining up the perfect snipe and it misses because rand(t) = 0.5 instead of 0.1, I understand your frustration.
On the other hand, Unreal Tournament uses randomness to add a level of strategy to the game, rather than pointless realism. You can shoot the enforcer in "primary" mode, which is a semi-accurate but slower shot. Or, you can shoot in "secondary" mode, where you shoot twice as quickly, but half as accurately. Think of it as a dynamic shotgun, where the gun sprays all over the place. In this case, randomness was truly the best way to implement the spray.
The game would be boring if this gun (or any of the automatics, for that matter) always hit the target dead on - the opponent would die from 20 bullets in less than a second. Instead, the player has to plan out his distance from the opponent and his path so he has enough time to do some damage.
There is no need to add some sort of boost when larger armies battle it out, because the user's intuition about better odds is correct.
I believe that Civilization defines a battle between two armies as a series of duels between a unit from either side. This goes on until one army has no units left anymore.
Assuming even chances (50/50 in each duel), a 3-to-2 battle has 68% odds in favor, but a 30-to-20 battle has 92% odds. It has to do with the sample variance, like Jonas Koelker said.
Likewise, a 5-to-4 battle has 63% odds in favor, but a 50-to-40 battle has an 85% success rate.
Realism is never the goal in computer games - or any games. The goal of a game is to allow the player to have fun.
Depending on the game, a certain amount of realism may be needed in order to accomplish that; sometimes more, sometimes less. But realism is always a means to achieve an end, namely fun, and never an end in itself.
Maybe not. But how long does it take to write all the books that go into it? The building 'library' is a token representing the development in that city of an intellectual elite that considers ideas to be things worth writing down, storing safely and making available to others.
And anyway, if you want a building and don't want to wait for it, you're an ancient-world ruler. Get out your whip! Cities with a granary and decent food production will replace their populations quickly enough, so discover Bronze Working, implement Slavery and have yourself a construction boom.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Really?
I don't think so. The National Rifle Association in the United States has slapped their logo on various games that did a very good job of replicating the real-world problems involved in shooting accurately. IIRC, there have been games covering benchrest, hi-power, and varmint (if you're a shooter, you'll know specifically what those are).
Those games got panned by the gaming press as boring, boring, boring. They actually required people to think, account for all the variables, and then be satisfied when they merely score a correct hit. Just like real life. The gamers, however, wanted things to move faster. They wanted more Bang! Splat! Oof! to go with their game play. The notion of actually taking something close to real-life time to set up a shot was, to them, just needless tedium.
So, no, I don't think if you make the difficulty of in-game shooting more accurately mirror real life, gamers will be happy.
Then again, if you give them an infallible auto-aim, they'll complain about that, too.
Hmmm.
I'm really glad my livelihood doesn't depend on making decisions about these kinds of things.
Unlike you, I play Gran Turismo and grew up playing Flight Sims. Lots of games can be both realistic and fun.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
It's got much worse than leaping lizzy and valk. emperor! (Though I know a guy with multiple 75s but still no leaping boots). In Salvage, a 2 hour event, there are certain items from certain monsters that have a horrific drop rate. We're talking 0/142 or more. If split evenly between the 4 areas you can go, we're talking over a year of doing this same event 2 hours every single night, and getting NOTHING. Not just you didn't get it because somebody else did, but your group has still never even seen it. Then they also added ZNM. It's a system of tiered monsters you fight, in 3 "branches". To get to tier 2 of branch 1, you kill one of the tier 1 branch 1 monsters. TO get to tier 3 branch 2 you kill one of the tier 2 branch 2 monsters. To get to tier 4 branch 1, you kill all 3 tier 3 branch 1 monsters. Tier 5 has no branch, and you get to it by killing the tier 4 monster from all 3 branches. Only, the tier 4 monsters, unlike the rest, have about a 10% drop rate for their "trophy", instead of 100%. Assuming your group is good, and you never lose, you have to collect 66k points to get a shot at each tier 4 once. You get points by taking picture, pokemon safari style. Pictures are worth 50-100 points, but its rare for the "pic of the day" choice to be worth more than 80 except if you chose a really hard version to track down. (And you have to take those pics with it claimed by you, and at 1% hp). So thanks to the drop rate, although it's possible to only spend 100 hours grinding out a tier 5 pop item, on average you'll spend at least 500 hours, and only 50% of people who spend 1000 hours will accomplish a full set!
On top of that...the name of the tier 5 monster is "Pandemonium Warden". Look it up. It's been on the fucking news. It's one of two unbeatable gimmick monsters in the game. There's Absolute Virtue who's been around what, 3 years now? That's been defeated by what SE considers cheating, and whenever its been beat it's been adjusted so the strategy people came up with doesn't work anymore. Pandemonium Warden is newer. AV always wins because it 2hrs at will, so you're doing fine till it recovers full HP, or it uses chainspell at does back to back to back to back to back AoE spells for 1000 each (most people have about 1200 HP, nobody has much more than 2000 under best conditions). Or it uses manafont and casts meteor, which hits everybody within a stupid radius for 3000 damage. You can get killed while so far away you can't even see him on screen.
Pandemonium warden is much less overpowered, but in his own way, more retarded. He appears, then transforms into a new form, complete with 8 "lamps" that assist him. These lamps are super powered, and you have linked hate so you can't fight one at a time, and kite the rest around. People eventually managed to repeatedly die and burn all the lamps down, then fight PW. They beat it and it reverts to its original demon form. For 3 seconds, then it transforms to a new form. Fast forward 18 hours, they've gone through over a dozen forms, and now it's back to demon and staying demon. They kill its lamps again and get it to 75%. Astral flow. It pops out 8 avatars, not one, does over 8000 damage with 8x astral flow. Then the people who were out of range, it charges at them and does it again. And again. And again. At least 4 times, until everybody was down. They surrender. Yahoo news and kotaku and several other gaming websites all pick up this story, of the valiant 18 hour fight that ends in unavoidable loss. People played 18 hours straight and are vomiting due to sleep deprivation and exhaustion. (morons but anyway). Square-Enix blames it on them being dumb and not using the secret. People say they are doing it wrong, they should have known soon as it change forms a second time. They counter that it seems like they were making progress, and they kept going because you hate to give up when you're making progress, and the longer you go the bigger a waste it is to stop early ;) Plus, in an interview abo
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I recall that the original Doom did random amounts of damage (since the designers were also roleplayers). This was most evident for the berserk pack, where you might do the same damage as an ordinary punch, but occasionally your fist would cause demons to explode. Also the shotgun would usually kill an imp in one shot, but not always. I loved this style of randomness, as it makes the game a little different each time, and not completely deterministic.
Meanwhile, I like the idea of adding a random direction to a shot fired. It means that a pixel perfect shooter doesn't always get his mark, but on average he'll still be more accurate than a poor shooter. I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain that their machine gun has spread, so unless it becomes too random, why worry if it affects the rest of the weapons? In real life there are plenty of factors that make guns not shoot the exact same spot every time.
Finally, (being someone who enjoys tabletop roleplaying, and also a researcher who mainly deals with stochastic simulation), randomness is a great way to allow people to play games without substituting the character's abilities for the player's. If your character is supposed to be good at shooting, and you point him at an enemy, then he'll hit more often if he's good. If you give your mook a gun, don't expect him to shoot accurately just because you can move the mouse to the right spot, because your character isn't very good at it. Conversely, he'll sometimes make a shot which is very difficult, but less often than the trained sniper (the same argument applies to other activities than shooting guns).
Dedicated to randomness. Maybe.