I haven't blogged much lately, and the blogging that I have done has sort of faltered, given up on itself after a few paragraphs (sorry about that).
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There are two primary reasons for this: one is I have a lot on my plate in real life; two, there hasn't been much going on in the game world that I've cared to blog about. I haven't really been playing games (playing anything, period) because there isn't much I'm interested in right now. More than that, anything that I do play (and blog about) has to feel well worth it because there are so many other things that I should be doing (like getting a job). Combine all of these factors with the fact that the blogosohere has been pretty quiet lately and you have a formula for my lack of blogging.
I guess I could blog about the things that I'm doing irl, and other topics that I have much more to write about at the moment, but I don't know if I want to distract from the purpose of the blog (a place for discussing MMOGs, and I don't know if people would care for other ramblings being here).
Anyway, today it was nice to see a new post from Nils pertaining to game design, and it stirred up a topic I've been meaning to talk about but never got to: the fine line between challenging and needlessly irritating.
I think a good place to start is my opinion that 'conscious redundancy' is at the heart of why things go from challenging to irritating. 'Conscious redundancy' here meaning both how conscious you are of redundancy and the degree of redundancy you are conscious of. Everyone has different thresholds and values for this.
So the moral of the story is you want to keep the player's mind primarily busy with constructive mechanics, in other words mechanics that give a sense of progression. You can have mechanics that lack a sense of progression and have aspects of mechanics that are inherently redundant, but those mechanics and aspects of mechanics should likewise not require a lot of the player's conscious attention (the fact that you hit the same button over and over shouldn't be the conscious focus).
I got the game Demon's Souls and then recently Dark Souls (I heard good things and supposedly it had improved and expanded), and they both go against this principle incredibly hard. By going against this principle so hard (to the point of going out of their way to break it) they are trying to establish a 'hardcore' feel. What they are actually doing is butchering the design integrity and quality in the complete opposite direction from what modern games normally do. For a gamer who is tired of the 'win button' genre of modern gaming, this extreme change comes across as refreshing and as producing a better game, which is more of a perception given circumstances than a credit to the quality of the design of the game itself.
What these games are doing wrong is working to be consciously difficult. They throw in relatively arbitrary and cheap design methods to make things obviously difficult (the intent is for it to feel difficult; you see it in both the design setup and the marketing). It only takes a few hits to get killed, so you are killed very often, and every time you do you lose any gold you have and usually have to redo the area (there are shortcuts but you will be doing the same content, even the mobs and such that you've completed, on more than a local scale).
In the first game every time you died as a human you came back as a ghost, which actually meant your health bar was capped half way and your character was made to look like a ghost (a constant visual reminder that you were not at your full power). So when you go for the second time to confront the thing that killed you, you are clearly even weaker than before. This can be taken either way, you can focus on the redundancy due to the fact that you have been handicapped and the game isn't being 'fair', or dismiss the redundancy because you know you are handicapped and can rationalize resulting failure.
For me it varied depending on context. When I went from being a full-health human to a half-health ghost in the beginning (before you are numb to everything), I was most aware of the mechanic and I was firmly in the first camp (irritation). After being a ghost for a while it became subconscious validation for redundancy. This is flimsy design with it's feet on both sides of the pond. You are putting a system in with the odds stacked against the player that makes death a significant focus to the experience in a game where death is frequent. It is only because of a quirk in the individual psychology of the player that the mechanic can have any merit and not just be blatantly detrimental to the perception of the experience. It makes sense that the mechanic was removed in Dark Souls.
I did not play much of Dark Souls, and for good reason, the control mechanics did not have the fidelity to match the amount of risk in the combat. Your animations all required a decent amount of time to complete in an action game context where you could get killed in one, quick hit. The camera controls made it so that the only way you could see what you were doing was by locking on to the enemy, which worked by holding the R3 button (continually pushing down on the right analogue stick). This setup gives a lot of room for the player to clearly see an 'unfair' reason for frequent death (maybe lifted up on the R3 for a second, maybe couldn't dodge because he was mid animation), and therefore brings attention to the redundancy (dying means redoing content in most games, and here you are redoing it because of shortcomings of the game).
As I said I did not play much of Dark Souls, so there isn't much more I can say about it. It is definitely going out of its way to be 'hardcore', something that the first one did and is generally a weak design idea (unless the difficulty is organic, but at that point it probably wouldn't feel 'hardcore'). Something interesting to note is that there is a habituation that goes on when playing games, and these games are no exception. If I had played Dark Souls for long enough (longer than the one short session I had) I probably would have gotten used to how it works, and have become less conscious of the inherent redundancy. The problem is getting habituated, which I guess is part of what makes it 'hardcore'. For me approaching it without habituation, it comes across as what it is, poor and inorganic design.
While generally agreeing with your idea that it's easy to cheapen a difficult game experience with arbitrary barriers or redundancy, I think I have a different take on the mechanics in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. I'll start with the former, since I've completed that game.
ReplyDelete"...the needless redundancy of death..." as you put it, isn't needless at all in the context of this game. This is an RPG that requires attention. Especially in combat situations. What it drives home very clearly to the player is that he/she will not win by overpowering an enemy. They won't overwhelm their enemies. They can't. The game teaches the player that to be successful in combat you must know your enemy, time your attacks, and keep ready your defenses. It teaches the player that every battle isn't the same, even with similar enemies.
When dying in Demon's Souls after first buying the game, I just couldn't stop laughing at how difficult it was. But why did I laugh? Because I realized that I was so used to action games, where if you push buttons fast enough, jump high enough, collect enough weapons, etc ...you couldn't fail to defeat your enemies. Very little tactical decisions have to be made in your traditional action RPG. Which is what makes Demon's Souls distinctly *not* an action RPG. It's a pure bred.
There's only redundancy when the player doesn't learn what they need from each encounter. I got to a point where I was so comfortable playing as a spirit (dead, with less life) that I was often surprised I had plenty of Ephemeral Stones to revive myself. At one point, that just didn't matter unless I wanted to PVP.
Same goes for Dark Souls so far. Both games emphasize tactical decision making. And that kind of game isn't for everyone. Dark Souls has been much harder for me to conquer.
This design, I'd argue, is far from cheap. There are games that are difficult for the sake of being difficult, where chance plays too great a factor. That's not Demon's/Dark Souls. The game isn't difficult for the sake of being difficult. It's a game about strict combat skill and gameplay, and it focuses on this aspect sharply in order to deliver the actual experience. It's difficult for the average player because it requires things the average player doesn't encounter in your average RPG. In your average RPG, it doesn't matter where you stand while fighting, where you hit your opponent on his body, whether you parry a certain enemy ...the most common things RPGs ask of players is to enlarge their health bars, shrink their enemies, and to do it with a larger weapon than said enemy. Tactics scarcely come into play, and strategy is questionable if present at all.
In Demon's/Dark Souls, you learn, through failing in combat, that if you had just parried the knight, you would have taken him and his friends out much more efficiently. You learn that if you had blocked the high blow, it would have staggered your enemy, making it far easier to slay him. On the contrary, if you play behind your shield, you'll die. If you charge headlong into battle, you'll die. If you don't time your dashes, dodges, leaps, and sprints, you'll die. The game emphasizes combat tactics well and to a staggering degree. This is the crux of the game's difficulty.
On the opposite end, a game like Dark Souls asks the players to pay attention and have patience. It's not a game for everyone. That's why there's God of War :)
"There are games that are difficult for the sake of being difficult, where chance plays too great a factor. That's not Demon's/Dark Souls. "
ReplyDeleteI'd argue that _is_ what Demons's/Dark Souls is doing; that is how the games are marketed and that is clearly what the intent is behind the design choices. Demons' Souls was designed around cheap kills: walking into a room and getting blindsided and one/two-shotted or hit by some random boulder, falling into a random pit, etc. The game _expects_ you to die at these points; it expects you to die and then you redo things with your newly acquired knowledge (there is something that will attack and kill me as soon as I step over there). This is stalling and isn't organic difficulty; it is difficult by requiring the player to pound their way through.
You say these games require a tactical approach, but the combat is not designed to favor tactics, it is weighty action combat that isn't amazingly responsive coupled with unfavorable stats and controls. What this ends up doing isn't so much requiring 'tactics' as requiring the player to take the same overly cautious approach to everything.
Dying itself isn't too unforgiving (tankfully), but the game is still designed expecting you to die frequently(repetitive) and dying itself is still a failure and very conscious to the player. I'm saying designing a game to favor this type of repetition (conscious repetition: death equates to failure and having to redo content), is a poor design choice. The fact that the game is artificially stacked against you makes this repetition less organic and harder to justify.
The games aren't difficult in that they require you to be very clever or to be incredibly responsive even in combat (the attacks and actions have a delay unlike a twitch action game which have progression based around player responsiveness); it is difficult because it requires you to pound your way through it, figure out what has been stacked against you this time, and still take as reserved an approach as possible in order to get through it.
In my opinion this all adds up to a fundamentally flawed game design: the product of artificially stacking the game against the player to a crippling degree, of expecting that the player will not have a chance unless trying the same content multiple times, of not giving the player much room to grow beyond the same cautious approach.
As I said in my post this all doesn't mean much if you play the game (or any game really) long enough; you become habituated to how the game works and numb to what is normally a tedious and undesirable part of the experience.
I'm not saying I'm a fan of the opposite side of the spectrum ('win-button' games), but these 'hardcore' games are also an artificial extremity.
If you know how to play the game, you realize you don't merely overcome obstacles; you obliterate them. That's not chance. That's successfully learning how to play the game. I'm left with the impression you have not successfully completed the first level (either game)? This isn't an attack, but a question of the breadth of your experience with the game mechanics. It would help to know where you're coming from.
DeleteYou don't believe tactics plays a roll because you perhaps haven't learned how to play the game; that doesn't mean it doesn't require tactics, which is hardly debateable. One on one combat situations where terrain, lighting, and manuevers play a role are *all about tactics*. What do you define as tactical? Again, it would help to know the standard the game is being held to.
Combat doesn't need to be twitchy (quick) to require a tactical response, and this in fact shows the deliberate, calculated design of it; you don't need fast reflexes or perfect eyesight to master this game. Yet you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at all the friends I've seen play the game who *never* try to block, parry, riposte, backstab. They walk right into *obvious* traps, back themselves into corners, run head long into areas that *scream* ambush ...the observant player will almost always see these things before they happen.
The game itself isn't stacked against the player. There aren't any situations which a good fighter cannot make trivial. The use of the death mechanic to teach the player how to fight is medieval at worst (in a medieval game no less), but hardly a cheap mechanism just because the player doesn't like dying. All games use it. In most games though, you don't get to keep your stuff. You don't get to keep your experience. In Demon's Souls, you do. This means even the worst player can simply outgrow his surrounding enemies by repeatedly dying and leveling up. Is there a reason you don't consider *that* a cheap mechanic? Is there a reason we're overlooking this design aspect?
While incredibly challenging to play, the game is also incredibly rewarding to conquer. It's also forgiving to the exact same measure in which it is punishing. There are no RPGs on the market which manages the risk:reward ratio better. Demon's Souls is incredibly well designed in this regard. When you die, the worst that happens is your *unspent* accumulated souls get left on your corpse. A player can spend them right away to avoid losing them, effectively leveling up. Players can collect the souls from friendly corpses, which can never be lost upon death. A player also can collect the same amount of souls up to the spot where he/she died ...which means recovering your body gives you double the souls. These are the full extent of the death mechanics. The worst that can be said of it is that you have to start over. That's where the punishment ends; you don't lose items, you don't lose experience, you don't lose anything as you would in some other RPGs which are considered fair and well designed.
But I don't begrudge you for knowing a game which you don't find fun to play. These games aren't the kind of challenge you enjoy, and that's ok. To call them poorly designed is ... more than not fair. Your criticism here doesn't seem to accurately reflect the reality of the games mechanics. It seems more your experience with the difficulty of the game and dying, and that's ok. I just need to know where you're coming from.
As to Dark Souls ....death in Demon's Souls is handled much better than in Dark Souls if you ask me, where the difficulty has been made more arbitrary. This is something I haven't decided serves the game overall, but I'm leaning towards no. I'll let you know when I've gotten further along. Demon's Souls, however, I feel is a properly tuned, genuinely challenging game.
I did not play much of Dark Souls, as I have mentioned, and I have not brought up many points that were solely based on Dark Souls because of that. But I did play a decent amount of Demon's Souls, although it was long ago (I actually had the Asian version shipped over long before the western release), but you don't need to stick around long to understand the design (to get broken into the design, yes, but to understand it conceptually, no).
DeleteDoes someone need to play the entire game in order to understand and analyze its fundamental design and mechanics? Unless the game completely changes halfway in then no, it really shouldn't take very long to understand what the game is doing and why it's doing it. Does it take playing the entire game to feel the complete habituation and to analyze the specific range of content? Yes, but that's not what I'm doing here.
The point of this post is mostly conceptual, using the Demons'/Dark games as examples, so please don't take this as an attack on the series. Both of the games are designed and executed around the idea with the intention being, and more importantly, feeling difficult. Both games are designed based on the fact that you are supposed to fail, fail often, and then redo the content preceding that failure.
There is a reason for this, as you have mentioned, surpassing difficult things can feel rewarding, and once you know how to defeat something you get to show your progression when you do it over and over again, but this says little about the design (it's difficult to stack grains of sand, and probably somewhat rewarding if you can manage it, especially if you get good at doing and and do it over and over again, but I wouldn't consider that a well designed game).
Without further dancing about the argument, the core point of the post was this very simple conclusion: drawing attention to repetition within the game design is generally poor game design. You can use repetition for many psychological things, but at the end of the day each player has a threshold that you are messing with and there are probably better (more elegant) ways of conveying what you want.
The Souls game are designed around the the player having to redo things things he's already successfully completed in order to get to the part he was unsuccessful with (and could very well be for a while). As I mentioned, while this itself could serve as establishing some sense of skill progression, it also is playing dangerously with the conscious repetition threshold (which when passed will have the player going 'what's the point in this?').
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DeleteThis is nothing new, it's been in games (mostly older games) forever as a method of stringing the player along and getting as many coins from them as possible. Just because the player habituates to the game and gets hooked into the stubborn addiction of pounding though it doesn't mean the game is a great game, that it's well designed, or that it's actually even very 'fun'.
The reason I completely stopped playing Dark Souls (after a pretty short session) is because, in lieu of Demons' Souls, I quickly hit the point where I looked at my dead character and thought "what's the point in this; this is getting stupid". As I wrote in the original post, everyone has a different threshold for these things, and as someone who has a difficult time finding the credibility of much more involved and ingrained gameplay elements (like ones that have a context beyond 'pound your way through this because that's how the devs felt like designing it HARDCORE!'), I passed the threshold quickly.
Anyway I'm not saying the game can't be enjoyable, and the fact that some people enjoy it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the design (people can get wrapped up in systems for many psychological reasons, and 'well designed' isn't necessarily one of them). It's well known simple design sense that having a player surpass something which they believe to be truly challenging adds much more credibility and weight to their success. I'm not arguing against that, and I understand that the concept is present in these games (and I'm guessing people are assuming the 'quality' of the design based on this feedback).
I'm specifically talking about conscious repetition in this post, and these games are a convenient and relevant example of that, and yes designing a game around the pounding repetition caused by stacked difficulty is 'poor'(lazy, inorganic, double-sided, not-so-elegant) design. You get the 'hardcore', conquering challenges psychology, sure, but in a very blatant and damaging way.
We're dancing on a fine line here, but whether we attribute the sense of success to the player's stubbornness or perseverance, whichever light we're shining on circumstances, I don't think that a good game is something which a player should feel that they have to endure. At least primarily.
Beyond that conceptual point we can agree to disagree.
You're still only talking about death as the sole repetition mechanic and using that to say it's bad design. I haven't seen you examine the death mechanic. You've only been talking about how it's not fun to repeatedly die. For me, I haven't been able to tell if you have experience with the mechanic or if you're just seeing this all one-sided. So thanks for clarifying.
DeleteI also didn't mean to imply one has to play an ENTIRE game. Just that I'd hope one has cleared an entire level to have a balanced view of what it means to both lose and win the game. Yes, I do think that's required. Otherwise it just seems more like ranting than seasoned criticism. But now I know you don't fall into that category. I just don't see where the balance is in your criticism, i.e. you're talking about repetition of a single mechanic and then not entirely exploring that mechanic as it functions in the game.
The game isn't for everyone. That doesn't make it poorly designed. Still, what do you say about the mechanic in it's entirety as it functions in the game? I'll need you to show me an example of good repetition in a game, since Dark Souls/Demon's Souls is an example of bad repetition. I'm willing to be convinced it's done poorly, but in my experience the mechanic is used perfectly within the context of the games other mechanics. It flows, it maintains the suspense required for an adventurous environment, and it's challenge is as great as the rewards. That's all well balanced from my point of view.
Thanks for engaging a discussion.
I am not just talking about a single mechanic; I am talking about the underlying design mentality of the game and the structure of the game flow. I'm talking about the broad design and intent. It isn't just about the death mechanic itself; it's about the broader picture of the game flow and to what extent the player is conscious of repetition.
DeleteFor me and for many other people who have a lower threshold for 'enduring' a game, we hit our conscious repetition max before we habituate, and we just stop playing. I _did_ play a decent amount of Demons' Souls though before concluding that it just wasn't worth it.
The fact that the game (in the broad sense, not just focusing on specific mechanics) is clearly designed in a way that plays with this threshold, that leads the player toward a conscious sense of repetition, and that the game mostly mitigates this through an assumption that the player will habituate and become 'broken into' the design, is objectively 'poor design'(remember I'm speaking in the broad sense of what the game is doing, not about specific mechanics).
I'm not saying the game is poorly designed because it doesn't appeal to everyone, and I wouldn't say the game is well designed because it appeals to some people, I'm saying it's poorly designed because the broad design intent (the one above) is a very blunt, risky (messing with the threshold), and less than elegant way of reaching the desired effect of player satisfaction. Difficulty and repetition are used crudely to reach the basic design end that surpassing challenges creates satisfaction in players.
I'm not saying the game doesn't do that (create satisfaction), or that it can't be 'enjoyable'. I'm saying the broad design is poor because it is heavily dependent on the willing endurance of the player. There is no interpretation of risk-reward, it is implemented acutely: a rather sharp double edged sword.
Perhaps 'poorly designed' is rubbing you the wrong way, and I'm guessing you are taking it to mean that I think these are 'poor' games. In the context of other games I am not saying that Demons' souls is 'poor'; to be honest I'm not so sure that I've ever played a game that I thought was particularly 'well designed', so me calling it 'poor design' isn't some type of verdict on the game itself.
The intent of this post and blog is to pick apart and explore design, not to give a verdict on games relative to the market. With this in mind, there is no need to be defensive of games you like when commenting here; these discussions have more to do with potential and design ideals than on giving a relative verdict (like a review site would do).
No offense taken. You still haven't shown an example of good repetition to balance the discussion, which is why I asked you this in my last reply. I've explained how I see the balance in the features, whether any player sees them as good or bad. I don't feel compelled to defend the game. I simply want to know what the standard is for "crude" use of mechanics and what a good use would be.
DeleteGood repetition is repetition that is not consciously focused on by the player as repetitious.
DeleteA mechanic can be 'repetitive' but implemented in a way that never feels repetitive to the player. Demons' Souls happens to be designed around the player's 'persistence'; the game is literally based on the player's ability to endure the pounding. You have to feel the pounding to endure it.
As I said, making something challenging is great for giving the player a sense of accomplishment, but if after each failure you are have the player start over and go through a lot of the same content that's already been cleared, you are breaking the flow in a way that brings conscious attention to the repetition (Yahtzee does a good job of describing this).
The result is that you're testing the player's threshold, how much tedium the player will put up with, when the player reaches the point of weighing if it's really worth the bother to go in for another round.
Coincidentally Yahtzee of the Escapist just wrote about his experience with Dark Souls, describing incredibly similar feelings. Makes a good case example http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9361-Death-Mechanics-and-Dark-Souls.2
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