Setting the Player Up
to Fail
Someone who calls himself "One Man Science Team"
wrote, "One design flaw I think definitely calls for Twinkie denial is level
designers unreasonably demanding the player break previously established rules
and risk associated consequences in order to meet goals. Even games considered 'good'
do this sometimes -- in order to find every secret in the original Donkey Kong Country you have to try jumping
into every pit on every level."
"You will get Game Over many times if you don't
go to a FAQ first. Another example is in many RPGs, with impossible battles
where you're punished for actually trying to win through the wasting of healing
items but rewarded for losing because that's what the story wants you to do."
He goes on to say that he doesn't mind level
designers changing up the rules now and then, but they have to give hints that
they have done so -- some kind of visual indicator that things are different.
"But
if accomplishing a goal that the developer can expect/predict a player might go
for (finding all the secrets) involves violating the very rules of play the
designers put forth (and the player getting punished repeatedly for it!) then
the trust that exists between the player and designer is eroded."
Yes it is. Unlike with board games, video game
players don't know the rules when they start out -- they have to learn them by
trial and error, and that means they have to trust that you're not going to lie
to them.
Your Only Save is
Immediately Before Your Death
We'll end on a simple one. Nathan Sturtevant teaches
computer science at the University of
Alberta, and he writes, "What
has bugged me in a number of games that do allow saving, is that they let you
save your game as you die. I think I last saw this in Neverwinter Nights, but I'm fairly certain I've seen it in other
games as well. In NWN it can happen
either in battle, or if you're about to walk over a trap. It's quite frustrating to discover that you
are reliably killed 0.2 milliseconds after loading your game."
I've been bitten by this one myself. Now, I'm a big
believer in letting the player save whenever he wants, and it can be difficult
for the computer to predict that death is truly inevitable if the player still
has a few hit points left. (It certainly shouldn't save if he already is dead.)
But I also believe in letting
the player make multiple saves. OK, the player saved in the last instant before
an inevitable death -- so let him restore an earlier save. Problem solved. If
you only have storage space for one save, then checkpoints might be a better
option -- just make sure they're placed in such a way that the player is
definitely healthy when he saves.
Conclusion
That's it for this year. I'm always interested in more
suggestions, although last year I was rather bad at getting back to people and
thanking them. I promise to do better!
In the meantime, if you know of a really
egregious Twinkie Denial Condition, drop on over to the No
Twinkie Database to see if I've
already covered it. If not, by all means send me a note at notwinkie@designersnotebook.com.
|
Printer-Friendly Version
"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.
This is another biggie: a very, very wrong and bad TDC in an otherwise good game. I'll let a lady named Jessica explain it: "This damaged the ending of Shadow of the Colossus for me -- and it happens in other games too. You allow the player to control their character during a sequence, but no matter what the player does, the sequence can only go one way. Since it's not clear that it would ever happen, when it does happen, it makes you want to try the sequence again, but that only gives you the same result."
---
Let me think this is certainly not a biggie at all. It gives you the impression you can succeed, and the bittersweet taste of failure is precisely what the character would feel for real.
It's not a big deal if it's linear at this point, with enough critical thinking and intelligence, you should realize that it was meant to happen this way.
But sure, stupid designers for not making all games sandboxes, or not accepting the dilemma about "all in your face linear" vs. "rather obvious branching". Let's absolutely NOT try anything else!
---
For tragedy to really work, the audience must know in advance that the hero is doomed, or at least come to realize it without spending fruitless hours trying to avoid it. We can still make games about Napoleon, or the Americans in the Vietnam war, even though the player knows the ultimate outcome will be failure.
---
Damn right yeah! Man! I want all my mana points spent on healing and reviving Aerith back!
Wait.
---
'Push the button when I tell you to' -- what game is that?
---
It's called DDR. And it happens a lot.
I would not have much problems with those QTEs if they allowed much more flexibility in adventure/action games (check my link above to see what I mean).
---
Mouse-based interfaces work poorly on joysticks, and usually joystick-based interfaces work poorly with the mouse too. They don't do the same thing. A mouse is a pointing device. A joystick is a steering device.
---
I agree. I have a good one for you: Vroom. Driving a Formula-1 with a mouse. Although there's no reason you couldn't turn a mouse into a wheel with a bit of tweaking, by default the appendice was clearly not meant for such uses.
Besides, here's a question for Gamasutra staff: what about adding at least the mundane bold, italic and url tags in comments?
---
But I also believe in letting the player make multiple saves. OK, the player saved in the last instant before an inevitable death -- so let him restore an earlier save. Problem solved. If you only have storage space for one save, then checkpoints might be a better option -- just make sure they're placed in such a way that the player is definitely healthy when he saves.
---
Quake 4, despite its flaws, managed the quicksave system fairly well. Nothing special, but the latest quicksave wouldn't erase the former.
On the other hand, there's that classical example of limited saves being the AVP shooter for PC.
Globally, I also notice that many gamers lack the flair to know when to save a game. There are plenty of signs to know when you're in a quiet zone. The frequency of enemy spawns, the magnitude of the last fight you went through, the aspect of the level where the next corridor or door looks like a trap, or you feel you're going to enter the Boss' arena. It's always good to backpedal just a bit, make your save there, and then proceed forward, safely.
--
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!