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Should Computer Games Adapt To the Way You Play?
jtogel writes "Many games use 'rubberbanding' to adapt to your skill level, making the game harder if you're a better player and easier if you're not. Just think of Mario Kart and the obvious ways it punishes you for driving too well by giving the people who are hopelessly behind you super-weapons to smack you with. It's also very common to just increase the skill of the NPCs as you get better — see Oblivion. In my research group, we are working on slightly more sophisticated ways to adapt the game to you, including generating new level elements (PDF) based on your playing style (PDF). Now, the question becomes: is this a good thing at all? Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (i.e. you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression for the game designer. But still, game players have very different skill levels and skill sets when they come to a game, and we would like to cater to them all. And if you don't see playing skill as one-dimensional, maybe it's possible to do meaningful adaptation. What sort of game adaptation would you like to see?"
I'd like to see it configurable. Check box that allows adaptation, with sub-items that define what type of adaptation will occur.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Rubber-banding is no different than a golf handicap, tennis ladder, or beginner/expert/pro leagues in most sports. It's simply not fun to play too far out of your skill range. The talk about "rewarding mediocrity" is misplaced in an activity that exists only for fun - it should be rewarding for everybody, otherwise players would (and should) quit.
Maybe the system works in the long run, but in my experiences over one season of a franchise, the difficulty adjustment is a little too jumpy. If my I.Q. is low, I can absolutely slaughter the opponent, causing it to go artificially high. If it is high, I can't successfully do anything, and I get steamrolled. End result? With one exception near the season's end (as things finally balanced out), I lost every even-numbered game.
Adaptation is great, but unless you're playing to win (in a Deep Blue style competition), don't let your game adapt too quickly (in either direction). Or better yet, let the user have some control over the adaptation rate.
Most games already have a option to choose how hard or easy you want your game. This works better than autoleveling, because If I set the game to be hard, and I die too much, maybe thats exactly what I want, and If set game too easy and I kill everything, maybe thats what I want.
Good games, like World of Goo, have options to skip night imposible levels (since is a puzzle game, you could be stoped totally to experience the whole level). This is like these ols space games with "megabombs" that clear the screen. But that "megabomb" is limited.
Challenge is good wen you want challenge, havin games that kill challenge would be fatal. And this one of the reasons Oblivium was a bad game, and Morrowind was a much better game.
postdata:
Also, dificulty is not that all important. Fun is important. Games sould be fun. The dificulty is not the reason. But since we are talking here about dificulty, I have talked about it, and what it means.
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for a game to achieve a given level of revenue at a given price then you can compute the number of items you need to sell. if you make it too hard, your demographic won't support it. if you make it too easy then you bore the hard core and also may lose the demographic size you need.
the question is does medium hard work?
if not then you need to have variable difficulty to capture the area under the demand curve.
Also if lets freinds and guests compete on the turf of an expert. the expert may enjoy having more freinds than the person at his level.
Configurable is nice but i'd probably not be an expert enough to know what i needed until I had played it for a while and gotten frustrated.
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One problem, potentially, if you 'adapt to players skill level' *too* well, is that as they get better (or as their character gets more powerful in an RPG type system), they might feel like they never get to enjoy the increase in either their skill, or power. It can feel like treading water, if as you get better, the game gets so much harder that you never get any feeling of accomplishment, no sense that you are any better or stronger than you started out, even though you *know* you've gotten better, or have more powerful abilities.
However, at some point, you do want more challenge. The trick will be, adapting to the players, while still giving them some opportunity to experience their increase in skill or strength.
This could be applied to almost any game genre, btw. I mean, consider an FPS. If you've gotten better at managing your economy, strategizing attack tactics, etc, but the computer remains in lockstep with your real skill increase as a player, then it can be very frustrating. At some point, you want the satisfaction of just slaughtering the AI player that used to beat you on the same 'skill level', because your skill has actually increased.
Basically WoW has it right. Oblivion was annoying as as soon as i level those "bandits" suddenly had very very good gear. I don't like that it's no fun, sometimes it is nice to walk to an area you have been before with your gear and butcher the low level stuff for fun.
Bestheda also fucked up Fallout 3 with this, you can pretty much complete the game in under 3hours (iirc) with hardly any leveling as the monsters are pretty much all scaled to the player.
I do like rubber-banding as long as it is managed (eg a lvl 4 monster, depending on my skill, can have the stats of say a lvl 5 monster but never any higher) this allows for a small degree of rubber-banding so good players will have a harder time but can still return to low level places.
The enemies did not "Increase in skill", as if they matured and became better fighters, they simply leveled up as you did. :/
That's not adaptive AI
There are 2 things that need work in games-- AI and facial animations. It's been 10 years since UT99 and in UT3 the computer basically rolls a dice that determines if it's going to kill you. If it's going to kill you, it usually kills you on the first shot. Which never happens in real life. Something as simple as this, which would be so easy to get around, makes the game feel so cheap. Yes, I play with people online, but when there's only 3 and we need a 4th for iCTF, having a bot ruins the fun.
Facial animations-- see Half Life 2, in my opinion. Even though the character animations themselves are a little stiff, the lipsyncing is top notch, and the Gman can display emotions such as confusion, malice, irritation, etc. Combined these all work together for a great suspension of disbelief.
Heh, how about game difficulty set via Breathalyzer!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I've always liked the way RPGs and the like handled this, where as you progress in the game, the enemies become increasingly difficult - however going back to an earlier point in the game awards you a clear advantage over anything you may encounter. MMOs work on this principle as well with the concept of "zones." This has always worked best for me.
Yeah, I got completely bored with Oblivion because of the same thing. I think that they should have made the world completely open, but have various areas that you simply will not survive in and enemies you simply cannot defeat until you get to a high enough level -- this would give you a real feeling of accomplishment, and let you stomp all over lower level enemies as well as giving you places to go if you want to be challenged -- which leaves it entirely up to you.
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Mario Kart and F-Zero most certainly are racing games. They're just not racing simulations.
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Except that's yet another case of talking out the arse without knowing what the real problem is.
The problem is: in many of those games with rubberbanding, there is already another mechanic for those tiers you describe. And the rubberbanding is nullifying the other mechanic. _That_ is what some of us complain about.
E.g., in the Gran Turismo series (and many similar games), the focus isn't on just jumping into a random race and having your 15 minutes of fun. You have to earn the car and the upgrades to qualify for the next league, and then even more upgrades to win in it. There is already a mechanic to simulate those leagues, and to justify why you should spend several days grinding your way through them. (Read: why you should play each of the few race tracks more than once.) Throwing in rubberbanding is nullifying all that, and turning it right back into a kiddie kart game. Suddenly it's hard not to notice that the whole tuning and upgrading aspect is bogus, since the opponents really are just tied to your car with rubberbands. What's the point in grinding to upgrade your engine HP by 50% when, effectively, every single opponent just got the same upgrade?
E.g., in Oblivion and generally an RPG, there's already a mechanic for simulating those leagues and tiers. It's called xp and levels. (Or skills, if it's skill-based a la Oblivion.) If your skill is too low to beat this opponent, you're supposed to go raise it somewhere else, and if it's too low, well, then just go fight something higher level instead. Do you understand that crucial aspect? There is no need to simulate those leagues and tiers in a game which already has another mechanic for just that. And adding some form of rubber-banding just makes the other mechanic a pointless waste of time. Why bother grinding your character to level 50, when effectively it gave you no advantage at all?
And it doesn't help that all too often it's done _badly_ too. E.g., since we're talking about Oblivion, the end opponent is actually a lot easier to beat if you somehow manage to get there as a level 3 character, than if you did all the quests and have a level 30 character. Effectively, you're better off if you skip 90% of the game and just do the absolute minimum that gets you through the short main quest arc. It's not that all that grinding and exploring and getting equipment doesn't give any advantage, it's that it actually becomes a disadvantage.
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You're missing the point of an MMO. If you walked into a dungeon knowing you're going to get an upgrade (if you haven't farmed it all already), you're going to quickly realize that you'll get everything you need in X runs. At that point you're going to get bored and leave the game.
The developers _purposely_ make it all random in the hope that you'll keep coming back for more, month after month. If they give you what you want too quickly, you'll get bored and leave.
The same thing goes for difficulty. If they just tuned it so everyone would win, why would you ever do the lower level stuff more than once? You'd just go for the uber difficult stuff knowing that's where the best items drop. So what if you fail? It'll auto-tune to be easier next time and then you'll have every item you want.
And again, you'll get bored and stop playing/paying.
Like it or not, the grind is what people _want_ as it gives them a sense of accomplishment. It's what the developers want as well since, at least on average, more people will play longer as they keep _hoping_ to be successful and _hoping_ their items drop. It's just the way it works.
I'd specify that "rewarding mediocrity" is a misleading term in a single-player game.
Single-player games are not as single-player as you might think, with online high score boards and achievements and the like.
There is a big difference between man-vs-machine and multiplayer games. In multiplayer games, there is certainly the need of a certain handicap to make the game fun to everybody. In man-vs-machine, I'd say that yes, the game can get more difficult, but also that the rewards must increase. So if the enemies get stronger, you have to at least have the option (if you are skilled enough) of getting better weapons or whatever. Also if the measure of the game is the score, for example, then the score should reflect that you have walked a more difficult route.
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"Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (i.e. you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression for the game designer."
What, their freedom to guess wrong and alienate a large chunk of their playerbase? Player skill is going to be on a bell curve, and the best you can do without some dynamic adjustment is to hope to hell you've nailed the difficulty perfectly at the top of the curve; that way you're the least wrong for the fewest number of players... but even then, you're still going to be unplayably wrong for 10% and irritating to another 20%. And this will only reward skill for that narrow slice of players for which the game was initially slightly too hard (and then becomes pefect as the player improves).
The flaw in rubberbanding is only that it still can't read your mind. The developer's idea of "normal" may actually still be too easy or too hard, and then the game guarantees that it stays too easy or too hard throughout, no matter what you the player do. Really what we need is a hybrid between the old "easy/normal/hard" choice and dynamic adjustment. That puts enough wiggle room back in that the developer can be wrong yet the player can still fix it and have fun. And the holy grail here is to have it require minimal interaction - if you implement this right, it's correct by default for the largest reasonably attainable number of players, and for the rest it's correctable through the simple and well-understood easy/normal/hard mode choice.
Let me explain: what I want is a game where not only the world doesn't adapt to how I play but, also, that it's not even designed to how the developers *think* I'm gonna play. Things like Final Fantasy VII, for instance, where even the strongest bosses in the first few areas would be killed in a single hit from the random encounters you get at the final dungeon. I want a game where I feel I was just thrown in a different world, that I'm merely a participant in something bigger, rather than The One True Hero around whom the whole world is built.
STALKER did this, to a degree, where in the beginning with your trusty pistol and simple jacket you're forced to run from mere bandits, while in the end-game you can hunt military soldiers for fun and profit with your customized AK-74 and bulletproof suit. It did have an "NPC difficulty curve" (mostly due to quests leading you to more dangerous areas as the game progressed), but it was flatter than most and that worked to the game's favor, IMHO.
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