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When I wrote the first Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie column over 10 years ago, I thought of
it as nothing more than a personal list of gripes -- published today, forgotten
tomorrow. I didn't expect so many people to take it seriously, and to be so
eager to offer examples of their own.
After last year's column I got a flood of
new suggestions from frustrated players and developers, so here are nine new
Twinkie Denial Conditions for the ninth installment of Bad Game Designer, No
Twinkie!
Failure to Explain Victory
and Loss Conditions
This is a bad one -- one of the worst. Unless the game is an
open-ended sandbox toy like The Sims, the
player must know what he's working
towards -- the victory condition -- and, even more importantly, what he must
avoid -- the loss condition.
Tim Elder of Blue Alto (big up for using your real details,
Tim) writes, "I was playing through the single player missions in the Dawn of War expansion Winter Assault
when I got to an Eldar mission that involved blowing up an Ork power generator
to cause a distraction. My first time through the mission, I read the mission
briefing, which stated that we didn't have enough troops for a full assault, so
we had to blow up the generator to bring the Orks to it, and we could go around
them."
"My troops approached the generator, killing the small numbers of Orks
along the way, and all of a sudden the screen faded out and a message popped up
saying 'You have failed the mission.' Huh? Why?"
So he tried something else, and got the same response. And
again, and again. "Reload after reload and I still have no idea why I
failed the mission, even after once having destroyed the stupid generator. Surely
win and loss conditions should be well spelt out, so that the player knows what
they need to do, and avoid doing." You're damn right they should. It's one
of the most basic principles of design. Bad Game Designer! No Twinkie!
Time-Constrained
Demos
Most of the Twinkie Denial Conditions I write about have to
do with poor gameplay, controls, balancing, or content. This one's a bit
unusual -- it may even be a marketing decision rather than a game design issue.
Rob Allen writes, "Take the Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix demo, for example. I was admiring the
tasteful surrounding of the academy when, lo and behold, 'You have one minute
remaining.' I dashed all over the place to find what I was supposed to do and,
again, got the screens telling me to buy the game. Why would I want to now?"
EA Games' Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
"The
thing just annoyed me by presuming that I wanted the game bad enough to eat up
my bandwidth to get the intro screen, and that would make me buy it... Don't
even get me started on the pointless mini-game that I could not finish that
sapped up 10 minutes."
Now, you might say, "Tough! You can't complain about
something that was free." I would disagree, though. Lots of web-based
games are free; that's no excuse for delivering a crummy experience. And Rob's
got a point about bandwidth. With Comcast announcing that it is placing a hard
limit on users' data transfers, we're going to have to think carefully about
how many gigabyte-sized demos we're prepared to download. If they eat up the download
allocation we have to pay cash for, demos are no longer free.
We already know the demo is going to be limited anyway -- it'll
only include part of the content and part of the gameplay. Why force us to quit
after a fixed amount of time? The longer we play, the more likely we are to get
involved and want to see more. Compare this with Doom. Id gave you the first ten levels, which you could play as
much as you wanted.
It was brilliant and made them a fortune. Suppose the Doom demo had stopped in the middle of
the first level with the words, "You're out of time. Go buy the game."
People would have yanked the floppy disk out of the drive and set fire to it.
They certainly wouldn't have bought it in such numbers.
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"People play games in order to overcome challenges, make interesting choices, and generally express themselves"
That's a very limited (and oldschool) view of games. Yes, simplistic and unchallenging games are generally crap, and QTEs are abused these days, but there's value in letting the player enjoy executing a series of moves just because they are cool and fun to watch, even if there's no challenge, choice or self-expression.
The DKC example wasn't quite the same thing. That's breaking established game rules on a whim. (Probably also a TDC, I can't remember.) But DKC is good for a reason. All of those off-screen barrels either had 'signs' or they were only 95% clipped by the edge of your TV. Or they were visible for a quarter of a second as you flew by them at 90 mph. Then it was just a matter of going back for them. All of the levels were designed to be run through once at full speed and once more by crawling with your spider sense on.
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SEVERAL YEAR OLD SPOILERS!
I agree with this in theory, but in practice, the part in Deus Ex where player death is part of the story worked for me very well (as in, it was a huge surprise when it didn't reload, and instead I had awakened in an strange environment).
Did anyone get frustrated by that part of Deus Ex? One important difference to the "impossible boss battle" is that you are not necessarily led to believe that the encounter in which you inevitably die is going to be that much harder than the rest of the game - that after you happen to die there, you may think "Wow, that was hard", but by the time you've thought that, you're already progressing through the story.
Lufia II on the SNES also had a player death that I thought worked well in the context of the larger story and was an interesting thing to happen (I remember being pretty wowed as a kid) - although I must admit that I probably used up quite a lot of stuff trying to get through it the first time.
Thanks Ernest!
Good read anyway :)
I don't think at this point it is a spoiler to mention that early in the game the player gets captured and partially turned into a Strogg (the cyborg bad guys). This capture occurs during a boss fight that you cannot win. Here's the problem: if you take too much damage and die too early in the boss fight, that's it - you're dead. Reload. You have to survive long enough to make it to the stage of the battle in which your defeat triggers the whole captured-turned-into-cyborg cutscene. Which probably sounds like a bad idea already, but I'll give you an example to explain why it is: I DID die early in this encounter the first time I played it. So coming back in and trying again I assumed the boss could be defeated, even though I was overwelmingly outmatched. Or at the very least, I had decided that I couldn't let myself be killed. So I took cover, I unloaded every last bit of ammunition I had, and still I fought on, trying to survive as long as I could. Eventually I got tired of hiding with nothing left to throw at my enemy, so I let him kill me. Cue cutscene. Cue remorse over 20 minutes of my life wasted.
I'm really pissed by modern shooters. They are clearly built for consoles (which, imo, is horrendous, as you have to use a turning device for aiming purposes), and then ported to PCs. So we get games with huge aiming sights (and spreading bullets), AI that make large sidesteps, and clunky button layout.
The entirety of the game is about holding on and stubbornly refusing to quit. In the ending you can hold on for a long time, but you eventually have to let go. I believe that the act of the player giving up during the ending is exactly what makes it so moving.
On that game, non-winable fights at a point become quite common, how they work? You fight, fight and fight and after some time the enemy just flees, and the screen shows: timeout.
I tought: Nice solution, so I get rewarded for fighting properly and I do not need to know if I was supposed to beat him or not.
Then in a single cut-scene I was supposed to LOSE the fight, but I did not knew, and I beated the boss like mad, spammed items, fought it with every inch of my soul, expecting that at least it would time-out like bosses before and that.
But no! The boss started to manage to kill my characters, I still ressurected them, after a while the mana items to give to my healer depleted, after a while he killed the healer, but I still fought valiantly, started to heal myself heavily with items, even inneficient ones that are supposed to be used in the creation of other items...
After a 30 minute long fight he managed to kill me after all my healing and MP items (and some other items too, like bombs and stats changing items) depleted.
And then I see a crappy cut-scene where he kicks me into the water, and other characters run from him and jump into the water too, to me land ashore in the last island of the planet (where the final fight of the planet is).
I just looked at the screen and screamed: HOLY CRAP! IF IT WAS NOT THE FACT THAT RELOADING WOULD FORCE ME TO SEE 40 MINUTES OF CUT-SCENES AND DIALOGUES AGAIN I WOULD DO IT BECAUSE THIS DAMN STUPID GAME ROBBED ME ALL MY FRACKING ITEMS THAT HAS A TOTAL COST OF 70% OF ALL THE MONEY THAT I EVER GOT ON THE GAME!
Still, I think that they made it better first by giving you a reward for "winning" the ultimately unwinnable battle, and second by replenishing your stock of wasted items immediately following the fight.
The directions to the game should be clear, you should know when you're trying to kill something that can be killed, and if you as a developer REALLY want a player to figure out how to beat the enemy, at least give a hint. Don't make me have to look up a FAQ just to learn that the only way to beat Psycho Mantis is to take the controller out and plug it into a different slot.
re: Saving just before you die - Set save points in non-danger areas are okay, but sometimes you can forget to save at one, or you might be saving in a totally different place from where you're supposed to be [yay for dying and having to trek all the way to the objective], or may just not see it entirely. Multiple saves is also okay, but in my own experience, I tend to forget to make a "backup save" for so long that if I do screw up my main save I have to go back so far that I don't want to play anymore, though alternating saves usually helps.
Checkpoints are a great way to solve this problem, especially if you have the option to either load from a checkpoint or your own save point. I also like when there are other ways to save yourself from doom, like in Prince of Persia, with the ability to reverse time to before your death [though it's limited, so you might not always be able to save yourself] or like in the new Duke Nukem 3D for Xbox Live that records your progress for the entire level and allows you to replay at any point, but this borders close on the "repetitive loading" method of cheating in games, where dying is irrelevant as you can just load up a save from seconds before until you get it right.
These things aren't easy, but developers really should put more time into these key aspects in functionality. Someday they'll learn. Until then I won't be jumping into any pits looking for secrets.
If you're fighting waves of endlessly-respawning enemies, it's probably because it's a puzzle and you're supposed to find another way around. Unless the game has repeatedly forced you to fight 200 bad guys in a row, or has somehow told you "your mission is to kill every last ghoul with your holy sword," it's your fault for not recognizing the pattern. For example, there are multiple scenes in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones where you are the Dark Prince and you get mobbed endlessly by bad guys who come out of places that you cannot enter. Killing them will sustain your health meter, but they never stop coming. You need to find a way out of the area. The real purpose of the bad guys is to buy you time while you figure out where to go; they're actually there to help you. The game doesn't mislead you into thinking that killing them is going to get you out of trouble. You know by that point that the Dark Prince has a life drain on him and if you don't find your way to water to return to normal, you'll eventually die. If you somehow manage to forget that information, it's your own fault.
There's a big difference between "setting the player up to fail" and forcing the player to figure something out. It sounds like you just give up to fast, or flat-out refuse to think. Seriously, you found out about the controller-port trick on Psycho Mantis by looking up a FAQ? That means that you didn't exhaust the conversation with the colonel before you went online. You actually left the game to look for help instead of using the game's built-in hint system. Furthermore, you went for help without even trying the battle two or three times on your own, because if you had been using continues, the colonel would've contacted you. Not to mention that it's actually possible to win without it anyway.
So basically, you must have given up without asking the game for help and without even trying very many times. That's not the game's fault. That's the player's fault.
Another example is in God of War 2, but that one I think works better for everyone because the animations of Kratos change dramatically to communicate that he's getting very weak and it's impossible to fight properly. It's clear the end is near and that it's intentional because the animations changed.
SOTC's ending is one of my favorite endings because of that part. It made you feel very tragically helpless, and contrasted well with the rest of the game in a very real, interactive way. I can understand why some may interpret it as another challenge and actually try to survive (the thought did cross my mind), but for a good number of people, it was clear that it was helpless. So, it's a matter of how to do it well. You need to communicate to the player, yet don't do it too soon since you want that realization of helplessness. A very subtle, interesting issue indeed.
Serious lack of research: bad game designer, no twinkie!