28 April 2008

Bad Karma

Written by Gareth ( Contact the author of this post )
Published on April 28th, 2008 @ 11:14:10 am, using 1287 words, 352 views

Well, the last post generated a fair amount of discussion on the forums and elsewhere. And it served to illustrate how, as a designer, no matter how you envision some feature in your mind, your end user will probably see something different.

The general reaction to the Karma system has been unfavorable. Reasons vary; some dislike the fact that the system draws them outside the world, killing immersion. Others feel that casual players, without the playtime to build up Karma, will feel punished. Which was the opposite of my intention, really. I thought that the system was easy enough to ignore, more an easter egg, a way to tempt players into a behavior you desire instead of forcing them to it. But I suppose it is like having 2 children, and giving one a present in front of the other. Sulking and discontent ensues ;)

Scorpia even raised the question of “why bother"? Isn’t there enough failure in life, why do we need to experience it in games? What is the point of getting the player to accept “small failures"?

Well, the reason is simple. Drama. Tension.

Heroic fantasy is almost an oxymoron these days. You see it is impossible to be heroic unless there is some type of challenge to overcome. And for the “heroic” title to apply you can’t face some minor challenge, either. Delivering the post is not the stuff that champions are made of, no. In fact a key feature of any heroic tale is the triumph over incredible adversity. Often the hero suffers some sort of setback from which he or she makes a dramatic comeback. It’s a simple trick but one which works. (In some of the greatest tales the flaw the hero overcomes is within themselves, but that is a topic for another time, heh.)

The problem is developers have become convinced that the only acceptable form of setback for a player is the scripted setback. You know the type, you and your party have hacked and slashed your way through the Ultimate Caverns of Doom, a well-oiled, death-dealing machine, when a script kicks in, cue cutscene with rocks falling and half your party is separated from you! Oh no! Drama and tension ensue! Or do they? Is that drama or annoyance you feel?

The thing is, if this wasn’t a scripted sequence, most players would reload until they passed their “spot trap” roll or something. Add a succession of these reload-around-misfortune events and you are left with a peaceful romp through the dungeon, devoid of the dramatic high notes that fill stories and books, any moments that might have gotten the player’s pulse racing quickly undone. Aware of this, the designers force these dramatic events on you via scripting. But that doesn’t work very well either, does it? The sense that the game designer has stepped in, circumvented your control of your character and forced you into a situation where you are disadvantaged? Sacrificing player agency is another cardinal sin. And it just serves to reinforce the reload problem. If you know the only “real” setback is the one that occurs in a cutscene then why wouldn’t you reload around anything else? If the designer doesn’t tell you specifically that it is “alright to fail” there via a cutscene then how are you supposed to know?

Is this just a situation we have to live with, due to the nature of video games? I don’t think so. I remember playing Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time. A fantastic game, but one moment stands out in my memory in particular. There is a part where you as the Prince fight your monstrously transformed father and his soldiers. The thing is I had been in some hard fights before this point and had arrived with about 5% health. PoP used save points with the added ability to rewind time if you had enough magic sand. But I was out of sand. All I could do was attempt the combat or glumly reload my last save point, which was quite a way back. The combat was…something else. I/The Prince whirled between and around opponents, graceful, fluid, always one misstep away from disaster. The whole battle was dreamlike, more a beautifully choreographed ballet than a video game fight sequence.

The elation I felt when it was over, my opponents all dispatched and crumbling around me, was incredible. I felt…heroic. It was a moment to match any in a movie or book, and it was mine. And it was an experience I wouldn’t have had if I’d arrived with full health and plenty of sand. I was never in any actual danger, there was still that save point a while back, but time and effort I’d invested was enough to make me try. To push myself and experience the thrill of overcoming the challenge.

Likewise, in Diablo, the save mechanic serves to heighten tension. Many people dislike the limit on saving but Blizzard know their business. Fights with “bosses” are that much tenser when you know you can’t just reload and continue from the exact same point. I remember the tension of meeting the Butcher distinctly, I’d blithely walked through his door, that menacing “Ahhh, fresh meat!” of his sending me into a panicked flight through the darkened church as I desperately tried to bring him down before he cornered me and tore me apart. In many RPGs a lot of players would just reload at that point and “buff” up before going through that door. I know I’ve done that myself, reloaded because I wasn’t “prepared".

So it isn’t that I want to take something away from the player. I don’t. I want to offer them something more, the chance to experience that same elation, the tumultuous ride of tension and drama that emerges every so often in games, those moments when video games prove their power as a medium for communicating emotion, a capability far beyond books or movies, because it is something the player can own, something personal. An experience the comforting saftey net of constant reloading robs from you. The Karma system was an attempt to encourage players to embrace that tension by choice rather than it forced on them, as save points do.

Now the PoP example is a combat one. Can storyline contain “small failures” and still be enjoyable? Yes, I think so. A great example was Star Control 2. You were all that was left of humanities fighting forces in a galaxy controlled by the Ur-Quan. Your job was to collect resources and allies in your fight. But you weren’t forced to do anything really. You could drift around if that was your thing. But the longer you left the plot the more the situation degenerated. Your enemy would gain ground, your potential allies being eliminated one by one. Yet, right up till the end you could claim victory from the jaws of defeat. Three novel concepts, the idea that the player can fail just by sitting around doing nothing, that the enemy actually does something of their own prerogative instead of waiting for you to come whack him and that that failure is not an absolute, that it is a continuous process that can be reversed, not through a scripted sequence but through effort and determination in the face of adversity.

Truly heroic, I’d say. And yet we are supposed to believe game design has advanced since the era of SC2 and the like? I was playing Assassins Creed recently, yeah, it was SO tense watching the prescripted sequence when Altair gets stabbed and then, (luckily, because I was worried!) was shown to be ok in the next scene of the video. Whew. Close call indeed.

Comments, Trackbacks, Pingbacks:

Comment from: Samrobb Email
Being heroic, or being a tool?

There's a game I'm playing now (Avernum 5) where you have an in-game limit on the number of critters you as a party can summon. OK - you can't summon more than two things to fight on your behalf at one time, it takes "too much concentration" or something. I was willing to live within those constraints...

... until I encountered an opponent that summoned three monsters to attack my party. At that point, I was out looking for cheat codes, 'cause if the stupid *game* was going to cheat, then I was, too!

I was perfectly willing to accept the "challenge" so long as it was a level playing field. Once the game broke that implicit agreement by allowing my opponents to have a special advantage, that willingness was gone.

How does this tie in to your arguments? Well - I'm willing to be heroic, but I'm not willing to be a tool. If the game "cheats" in order to challenge me, then I'm going to cheat right back: save and reload, save game editors, cheat codes, whatever. I'm playing the game for enjoyment, not to master the 693 separate actions that must be done in *exactly* the right order to defeat the Ultra Mega Mondo Boss.

Two of the few games that did *not* eventually make me feel this way were Fallout and Arcanum. In both cases, I never felt like the game designer pulled a "rocks fall, everybody dies" type of cheat. Things may have been tough, but I generally knew before hand that they would be, and I was able to go into situations with my eyes open... and I was satisfied that if I got killed off by an opponent, it was because I had made a mistake, not because someone decided that "NPCs get this ultimate damage power that you can't have."


PermalinkPermalink 04/28/08 @ 13:03
Comment from: Gareth [Member] Email
A good point. Nothing inspires fury quite like the designer cheating you. I remember trying to beat the Hard AI in an RTS game, watching the replay and discovering that it started off with FAR more money than me. Very annoying.

In the context of RPGs, those cut-scenes tend to be the worst offenders with cheating. The lamest example of this is killing off a party member....when your party has a priest who has been able to resurrect your characters up till that point. But NOW it is permanent, because the designer wanted a bit of tragedy. Or in fact any important NPC death in a game when you as a party are resurrecting each other willy-nilly. The king killed by an assassin? No problem, the priest will have you right as rain in a minute.

PermalinkPermalink 04/28/08 @ 13:11
Comment from: Chris Email
I've been reading quite widely on this topic recently, and Chris Crawford has come to the conclusion that the way to ensure dramatic tension is the concept of balanced-choice.

In your standard dungeon crawl, there is no balanced choice - its simply success or fail. You either defeat the enemies, or you fail (or lose a character or some buffs) so you attempt it again. There's nothing lost by restarting. Your solution is to introduce something artificial to add a loss and therefore making the player make a choice, but the artificial and "gamey" nature of it simply makes it adversarial between the designer and the player.

A better solution is to build the "choice" into the drama (and immersion) itself, rather than into the system. What this means is if you have an encounter (of either story or combat or otherwise), the options are not success or fail. Instead they are total failure (suggesting you WANT the player to retry, there needs to be some challenge for them to overcome), partial success with reward A, partial success with reward B, or complete success with reward C.

If your outcomes are framed like this, the question then becomes is the player willing to accept reward A or B as compensation for not fully succeeding and achieving reward C. Reward A and B need to be valuable, and most importantly of all, immersed in the setting.

Example: The party comes across a powerful grey wizard. After a discussion - the wizard challenges the party to a duel to prove their worth. If they are totally wiped out, they may as well restart, because games should always require some measure of success to continue, otherwise there is no challenge. If they suffer the loss of their warriors but their casters win the day, then the Grey wizard offers a powerful sword/armour to help balance the party. Vice versa with the loss of casters, perhaps a new spell or a wand or rune or whatever. In the situation of complete success, the Grey wizard presents some kind of general power-up that helps the entire party.

The trick is taking something that can be made to work for a scripted encounter, and building it into your unscripted encounters, if you really want to dissuade restarts. However, since random encounters rarely slow the party down, its not actually that necessary.

If you wanted to make an attempt at it, what I'd probably recommend is allowing PC's who die to still earn experience, and perhaps earn a special kind of experience - maybe a death marker or something, and also reward using buffs/consumables as well. At least then its not a purely negative event, but something that has a balancing aspect to it. Maybe each death brings a PC closer to the astral realm, something like that.
PermalinkPermalink 04/28/08 @ 21:25
Comment from: DGM Email
"Aeris, I don't know if you can hear me where you are now, but... No matter how far Sephiroth runs, no matter how powerful he becomes, I swear to you... I will get our money back on this Phoenix Down!"
PermalinkPermalink 04/28/08 @ 22:56
Comment from: caster Email
Im all for failures being enabled if they will force you to find another way to succeed or push you into other paths through the game.
In essence if they give you more options and further appropriate consequences, from small ones to big.

As for combat, one thing i enjoy the most is accidentally getting low hit points and then trying to go through some part like that without saving too much - if thats allowed.
Some of the most enjoyable gaming moments sprung up from such situations.
the bigger the danger the bigger the satisfaction. I cant remember how many times i went through some areas with only 1 hp left in HL2 while all my friends screamed at me to
at least save somewhere.
And i found Far Cry system of checkpoints worked really well in that game. Made me plan my attacks and take care more then any other shooter.

Disabling saves in combat sounds like a good idea to me and instead having checkpoints maybe allowing just a few quick saves along the way.... maybe even allow the player to buy saves or earn them in some interesting way could work if right idea could be found....hmmm...
PermalinkPermalink 04/29/08 @ 09:25
Comment from: Chris Email
As for combat, one thing i enjoy the most is accidentally getting low hit points and then trying to go through some part like that without saving too much - if thats allowed.
Some of the most enjoyable gaming moments sprung up from such situations.
the bigger the danger the bigger the satisfaction. I cant remember how many times i went through some areas with only 1 hp left in HL2 while all my friends screamed at me to
at least save somewhere.


I think you'll find that's not universal. I personally hate checkpoint-style saves... nothing frustrates me more than having to repeat 3 or 4 fights in a row just to repeat the sequence I failed on. Its enough to make me stop playing a game (Lost Odyssey I'm looking at you). And if I end a fight with 5hp, you can bet I'm going to hit that quick-load button, assuming I was hitting the quick saves frequently enough, which in a game like HL2 or Deus Ex I certainly was.

While low HP/high Risk encounters are fun for some, for other people they are just unnecessarily stressful. Everybody has their own way of finding enjoyment in a game.
PermalinkPermalink 04/29/08 @ 16:45
Comment from: Stuart
I think the negative reaction, in spite of the good and logical arguments for and against, really comes from the desire to not be messed with, manipulated into doing anything, as a player.

You speak of dangling a carrot in fornt of me. Excuse me? No, I actually -don't- want you dangling a carrot in front of me; I don't want you dangling -anything- in front of me. Who are you, to do something like that? I'm not your donkey, I'm not your puppet.

I want you to put the world in front of me, put the story in front of me, put the rules in front of me, and step back.

Of course you're always going to be dangling somethng in front of the player; the difference comes in when it FEELS like you, the designer, KNOW that you're dangling it. It breaks everything; it forces an automatic repulsion and reaction in the manner I describe above.

I don't want to FEEL like anyone is trying to control or entice me into doing anything. Stuff like this you describe not only feels like it, it actually flaunts it, celebrates it, shoves it in my face; 'you're a player, and look, I'm trying to get you to bite the carrot, hee-hee, look!'.

Diablo's portals were a carrot, sure. But they didn't -feel- like one. There was no visible designer giving you stars for getting to the portal, the portal was just there, and it was up to you whether you decided to find it or not. They were subtle in that regard. This is not, IMHO.
PermalinkPermalink 04/29/08 @ 21:53
Comment from: caster Email
quote from Chris
-I think you'll find that's not universal. I personally hate checkpoint-style saves... nothing frustrates me more than having to repeat 3 or 4 fights in a row just to repeat the sequence I failed on.-

I know that. I just felt that having check point in Far Cry worked for some reason.

And to avoid this kind of system that invariably annoys a part of the players i suggested doing something like this:
-
Disabling saves in combat sounds like a good idea to me and instead having checkpoints maybe allowing just a few quick saves along the way.... maybe even allow the player to buy saves or earn them in some interesting way could work if right idea could be found-

The way i play i rarely use saves anyway.
But instead forcing a player to just get low hit points and then leaving him to play on, the designer should provide something interesting as additional solution.
Dont know what exactly, at the moment.





PermalinkPermalink 04/30/08 @ 04:43
Comment from: Terje S. Bø Email
I love playing roguelikes. They have permadeath. Traditionally, they delete your savegame when you load it, and exit the game when you save. Modern roguelikes handle this slightly differently so that crashes won't give you an unrecoverable game, but they're meant to be played the same way. If your character dies, you must start a new game. So no re-trying picking that lock.

They also have incredible replayability because the dungeon and the items are randomly generated from game to game, so no two "Dungeon Level 1"s are ever the same, and you never meet the same enemies in the same order. This means that losing all progress on that one character doesn't mean that you have to slog through the same beginning game again; the beginning game will be different each time.

You might start to see some similarities with Diablo here. Rest assured this is not a coincidence; Diablo was strongly inspired by roguelikes.

They are also (with very few exceptions) pure dungeon crawling games with combat, combat, combat, resource management, and combat. This is because random plot generators are very, very hard to write well, and most of these games are one-person projects (though two of the bigger ones - Nethack and Dungeon Crawl - have dev teams).

In addition, they are all gameplay. Graphics take the back seat - most roguelikes use ASCII characters to represent tiles; walls being "#", floor being ".", and a goblin being "g".

Obviously permadeath isn't the way to go in a story-driven deep-interaction persistent non-random world roleplaying game, as doing the same 3 starting quests talking to the same 3 starting NPCs will get boring quite fast if you always die in the first battle. However, some ideas from the genre might do well to carry over.
PermalinkPermalink 05/03/08 @ 18:49

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