Player Choice

The venerable Sid Meyer says that a game is a series of interesting choices. What makes a choice interesting? It has to be non-obvious. All alternatives need to be viable, but not necessarily optimal. It has to be possible for the player to see the results of the choice. If you make a choice, but cannot tell if you made the right or the wrong one, you may as well make a random choice. And the choice has to be significant. If the result of the choice has no real impact on the game, then the player will not care for it.

I think that there is a lot of merit to this, even though I don't believe that all entertainment in games comes from choices, as many arguably successful games rely on fast reactions, hand-eye coordination and timing to make their core gameplay fun and interesting. There are, however, a lot of elements in games that would not fare so well if they were only considered from that perspective. As an example, in order to open certain doors in God of War, the player needs to mash a button repeatedly for a period of time. This is not a feature that is unique to God of War, but plagues many games. Personally, I'm at a loss to explain how this can be appealing to anyone. The first choice you, as the player, make is if you want to open the door, or leave it be. This is not much of a choice, since there is little reason why you would not want to open the door, as you have to go through it in order to advance to the next area. As the player don't really have a choice, the choice isn't very interesting. After deciding to open the door, the player has to decide if he or she wants to continue mashing the button or not, again, given that the player wants to open the door, there are again few viable options. If you stop mashing, the door closes and you have to start over again.

How could you make this feature more interesting, putting interesting choices in it? First of all, ask yourself if it is really necessary. The overall effect of the door is to prevent the player from leaving the current room before all enemies are eliminated. That can be achieved by keeping the door locked while there are still enemies, for instance by letting the last enemy drop the key. Another alternative is to have an infinite number of enemies, and have the player drive them back enough to give him- or herself time to open the door (using an animation that takes time instead of the button mashing), and the ability to abort if the situation prevents a completion.

Cut Scenes

Cut scenes are mainly used for three purposes; to create atmosphere, story and motivation for the player character's actions, and, sometimes, convey important gameplay information like mission objectives and clues.

Firstly, the cut scene is not gameplay. That means that if the player wants to play the game, rather than spending his or her valuable gaming time on the cut scene, he or she should have that option. And that in turns means that all cut scenes must be skippable, even the first time, and any information in them that are critical for successfully finishing a level must be accessible in some other fashion (HUD messages or indicators, a journal, etc.). This latter requirement is also important for any player that watched the cut scene, then saved the game and did not pick it up until later, when the cut scene had been forgotten. Also, most cut scenes are only interesting the very first time you see them, and if a failure to complete an objective forces the player to replay part of the game, he or she most likely will not want to watch that cut scene over and over again.

Secondly, a lot of people do enjoy cut scenes, and like to watch them both to marvel at the many times impressive art in them, and to get that extra flavor they bring to the game with deeper characters and richer stories. To allow people to do this, make sure it isn't too easy to skip a cut scene. I've played games where I've inadvertently skipped cut scenes I wanted to see when the cut scene was triggered as I was pressing a button. A 'do you want to skip the cut scene'-dialog is adequate for this. If the cut scene is more than 15-30 second, I'd like to be able to pause it. Many things can happen outside the game that can interrupt it, and I don't see why I would have to miss a cut scene just because the phone rings. And why are there so few games that let you see the cut scenes again? I have many times found that I missed something in the cut scene, because I wasn't paying attention to that detail, and that I would like to review it, but there is no way I can do that with anything less than loading my last save game and play to the cut scene again. And on that note, a forward and a backward button would be nice together with that pause button.

God of War is not the Perfect Game

Let me start off by saying that God of War is an excellent game. It is one of the best examples of how to incorporate a story into a game. It has a strong protagonist, that even though not very likable, is different, and far from the clichés that the heroes of action games typically are. And the game has terrific production values, it is tight, beautiful and action packed. But it is not the Perfect Game. If you find that obvious, let me tell you that I've met enough people who hold it in such high regards to make me really worried, and if you do think it's perfect, let me tell you why it's not.

Constantly breaking the suspension of disbelief
One of the most notable features of God of War is the special moves that you get the opportunity to make when you have weakened an opponent. For ordinary enemies, these are optional brutal finishing attacks, and for bosses, these are sequences required to move on to the next part of the fight. To make sure that you know what move to make, the game present you with an image of the correct button to press in the center of the screen. I don't believe I've ever encountered anything that so needlessly and efficiently breaks my immersion. There is absolutely no way that you can forget that you are playing a game when your required button presses are presented in this way. And somehow, this seems to have become industry standard!? Yet there are much better ways of doing this, of achieving the same effect without blatantly destroying any shred of immersion. Prince of Persia: Two Thrones have a similar system in its quick kill system. Unlike God of War, Two Thrones uses the game world to signal when you can activate your quick kill ability. The prince is carrying the dagger of time, and when the dagger starts glowing, a quick kill can be executed. Granted, there is a difference, in Two Thrones, the challenge is timing when to press the only quick kill button, while in God of War, you could be asked to press any button, but that could easily be incorporated by making the dagger glow in different colors, or maybe making the sword, or a fist glow for different required buttons. The point is that there are much, much better ways of doing it. Part of the entertainment I derive from playing a good single player game is living the fantasy of the story, the world, and the characters of the game. Throwing buttons from the controller in my face rudely and forcefully yanks me out of this fantasy, and that detracts from my entertainment.

Adjusting difficulty
Next is an issue I have with the difficulty of the jumping puzzles. God of War consists of two main elements, it is one part a fighting game, and one part a platform game. If you die a lot, the game helpfully offers to lower the toughness of the enemies, and this is a feature I like, however, it also informs you that it will not do anything about the platform bit of the game. And it is always the platform bit that I find difficult. And the difficult part always have the same elements in them. Basically, you are sometimes asked to traverse areas filled with lethal obstacles that require significant timing to avoid. It is also common that you are under time pressure to do so. I would be very surprised if the designers of the God of War team is not aware that these are significant challenges, and it would be easy enough to make the timing requirements laxer on lower difficult levels. It is the biggest source of failures for me while playing the game, and yet there is nothing I can do in order to progress the game other than try to overcome them at the highest (and only) difficulty there is. Excessive failure is not entertaining, and it is a shame that I can't adjust the difficulty of this...

Beam balancing
Beam balancing is a game element I have a very hard time to understand. The challenge is to walk your character along a narrow beam and not fall off. This is done by steering your character in the direction of the beam, and if you fail to do this, your character will start leaning more and more until it finally falls off. At this point, the character grabs the beam, and you have to press a button in order for the character to heave himself back up again.

My problem with beam balancing is that the balancing act isn't terribly exciting, particularly when the cost of failure is so low (just heave yourself back up again). There's no timing involved, there are no decisions to be made, and the only real difficulty comes from the fact that the beam and the camera is not properly aligned so you have a hard time judging which is the proper direction. To me beam balancing is a time consuming nuisance, it takes time from the interesting, entertaining parts of the game, and adds nothing. God of War is far from the only game incorporating this, for instance, the Prince of Persia games have had it, and it was just as bad in them.

How Okami did it

In Okami, the player gain experience and can then use that experience to improve the character's stats. There are two ways to gain experience: Through exploring the world, and through progressing the story. Gaining experience from progressing the story is simple, when the player defeats a boss or completes a mission (including side missions), he or she is rewarded with some experience. Exploring the world allows the player to find places where experience can be gained. The player can gain experience by feeding animals, reviving withered clovers (the game is made by Clover Studio), and by making cherry trees blossom. Each group of animals can only be fed once, each clover can only be revived once, and each cherry tree only need to start flowering once.

This has the effect that there is only a fixed amount of experience points to be gained in the game, and it is also relatively easy to know roughly how much experience the player will have at any point in the game, since the player must have completed certain experience rewarding tasks to get to a that point, and also there are only so much exploring and side tasks available before that point.

There is a certain entertainment value in exploring, finding something new, or hidden is fun, it's rewarding. Particularly in combination with actual, game relevant rewards. Exploring does not have the same, repetitive nature as grinding, since there is little need revisiting the a place when exploring. The drawback, of course, is that you have to produce interesting areas to explore (see Shadow of the Colossus for what is probably the best example of this, I have never ever in a game so thoroughly enjoyed just exploring the world, wherever you go, you find a beautiful, intriguing new place).

The whole point of this example is not that every game should replace experience gained by killing monsters by experience gained from exploring. It is rather to point out that there are alternative ways to reward experience. As gaining experience is normally a very important part of the game, players will naturally engage in a behavior that rewards them with the most experience. Realizing this, and you can use this to your advantage, guiding the way the player plays your game, to maximize the player's entertainment.

How to avoid grinding

So you've decided not to have grinding in your game. Good on you! But you're worried that the some players will grind anyways, just because they are used to it, or as a way to avoid the challenge. You fear that grinding players will ruin the balance, that a boss at the end of level 1 is suited for a level 8-9 character, and that players that grind may face the boss as level 20s. Though this is a valid concern, it is no reason to put grinding back in to the game, requiring all players to grind so that the hard core grinding players will not gain a significant advantage.

Games that require leveling usually implement it with increasing costs for each level. These games also reward the player with higher returns, that is more gained experience, for killing tougher opponents. The effect is that if a player does not move on to the more difficult areas of the game, and instead remain at the current level and grind, the gains in levels will take longer and longer to achieve.

To further enforce this, the game can reward the player with an amount of experience that is proportional to the difference in level between the player and the enemy. If the player has a certain level, he or she will gain a certain amount of experience for a given opponent, while if he or she has a higher level, the experience gained will be less. This discourage grinding and forces the player to seek new challenges, however, as always, the game should inform the player that this is the case, so that the player does not get frustrated by the lack of experience gained.

Another way is to implement diminishing returns for grinding, is to keep track of how many enemies a player has killed of every type, and reduce the experience gained for enemies that he player already has defeated in scores (there is only so much to learn from fighting the same kind of enemy over and over again).

A game that successfully implemented diminishing returns for grinding, both by increasing the experience needed for each new level, as well as reducing the experience gained is Star Ocean – till the end of time. Unfortunately, that game also required an excessive amount of grinding which makes it very painful to every time you want to progress the story.

Grinding

Have this ever happened to you? You've finished all the side quests available, and now continuing the main quest is all that remains. There is only one problem, in order to continue the main quest, you need to venture in to this new area, where there are new kinds of monsters, and they are all too powerful for you. There is only one thing that remains to be done, go back to the areas you've already fully explored and kill more of those creatures, you've already killed by the thousands until you level up a few more times.

Was that fun?

Chances are that you say no, or at least admit to it not being the highlight of the game. The main problem is that the game is preventing you from actually playing the game, and forces you to do something achingly close to manual labor (and that's certainly not why I play games).
Grinding is used to denote these situations where the player spends his or her time, doing repetitive tasks to increase his or her character(s) abilities. Many games (particularly those with RPG elements in them) have this as an integral part of their gameplay. I will only talk about grinding in single player games, Grinding in multi player games, particularly massive multi player games, is quite a different issue.

I can think of four rationals for implementing grinding in your game.

• Content reuse. If the player spends a lot of time grinding on the same level with the same monsters, you get more play time out of the effort you put in on content creation.
  
• If your game requires grinding, you know it isn't too easy. If someone wants more of a challenge, he or she can just grind less. And if you grind more, the game becomes easier.
  
• Some weird, misplaced, idea that the player must be made to work a little in order to appreciate his or her success.
  
• Game X, Y and Z had it.
  

I'm not advocating not to reuse content, but there is a huge difference killing a thousand skeletons if they are guarding the gates to the castle of the evil warlock, compared to walk round and round the marsh in order to kill the thousand skeletons you need in to level up so that you can enter the warlock's castle. God of War and Diablo II are good examples of games that requires no grinding even though you kill the same kind of monsters over and over again. The difference is that there is a purpose other than just trying to level up, there is always a quest, you always progress the story.

Grinding is not a good substitute for proper balancing and play testing.

If you've created a good game, players will appreciate it just fine, enjoying the unfolding story, overcoming the challenges, and not spend countless of hours doing mundane tasks over and over again in order to be able to get to the good bits. Creating the main story, and its assets like environments and characters are usually the most expensive part. If you plan this phase well, adding a couple of side quests using mostly existing assets should be fairly easy. For instance, take an unused corner of your map, put up an odd formation of rocks, some monsters (you do have both monsters rocks, right?), and add an item that must be retrieved. Once you've got the assets, adding a quest like this should be fairly simple. You can also create mini-bosses by boosting a common monster, scaling its size, or add an extra effect, or maybe tint its textures in a different color. Diablo II is again a good example of this.

Imitating other games to a certain extent is good. It allows you to use conventions know to your players and also reuse proven deigns. However, before you reuse any feature, you must critically study it, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and how these apply to your game. And remember, all features aren't good, and some conventions are outdated. Grinding is on of them.

Saving revisited

Generally, the amount of saving you allow a player is a trade off between challenge and catering to the player's need to be able to leave the game without losing progress at any time. I'm generally for anything that allow the player to play on his or her own terms, rather than being artificially constrained in how he or she enjoys the game by the game's interface. However, I've noticed in games that have quick saving and loading at any point in the game, that I tend to rely on this feature more and more as the difficulty ramps up, rather than improving my skill at the game (for instance using the dodge move against the tougher opponents). This is particularly common in PC FPS and RTS games. I have a hard time not to, even though I know that this will reduce the enjoyment of the game. The solution to this have been using save points, places in the levels where the player can catch a breather, and also save his or her progress. As I've discussed earlier, the problem with these save points is that there may not be one available when the player needs one. And the player may need one at any point in the game as the player may have other, higher prioritised, things that he or she has to attend to (like going to work, take care of the children, do the dishes). If the game does not allow the player to combine these things with a meaningful experience in the game, the game is not going to get played. And this is something that is just gets more and more important as the games' audience grow older.

The problem is not easy, and one that I had not managed to come up with a good solution for until I read David Sirlin's article in the September 2007 issue of Game Developer on saving in games. There are two things in this article that I found to be brilliant (and that I ask myself why I haven't come up with something similar myself).

The first thing regards hard and soft save points (called save points and check points respectively in the article). At the hard save points, the player can save his or her progress to disk, and at the soft save points, he or she can save the progress to memory. The problem with the latter is that that progress is lost as soon as the player quits the game. Sirlin questions the point of the soft save points all together. He argues that it is better to always let the player save his or her progress, though he theorizes that the existence of soft save points has to do with the long save times on older consoles (the ones without a hard drive). I would suggest that if a game has this system, and if save times are a concern, allow the player to save at any save point as an menu option or similar, and prompt him or her to save or do it automatically, when he or she quits the game.

The second thing is nothing short of brilliant. It is the save system of Mario 64 (which I haven't played). The game has save points at which the player can save his or her progress, but it also has something called a save token. A player can create a save token at any point in the game, even in the middle of a heated battle. The save token can then later be used to resume the game with the exact state as when the token was created. However a save token is not a save game. First of all, the player can only have one save token, but more importantly, whenever a save game or the save token is used for loading, the save token is destroyed. This has the effect that the player may quit the game at any time without losing progress (by creating a save token), but will still be equally challenged to make it to the next save point since the save token is destroyed as soon as the player loads it, and he or she will be forced to start over at the last save point again to continue if there is a serious failure. Unfortunately, saving is difficult, and this solution may not be for every game due to technical limitations, but at least, make it possible to save every soft save point!

I got a comment!

I got a comment! It is a milestone for this blog. I am not entirely sure of the popularity of my blog. In fact, I stopped posting when I thought I was the only one who ever read it, as I saw little point in telling myself things I already knew. Now, obviously, there are other people that have looked at my blog, and if you are reading this, and want to see more posts on this blog, please leave a comment, or send me an e-mail. I promise that I'll write at least one post for every person who leaves me an e-mail or comment.

Content reuse

When a game is being created, it usually has a limited budget for content creation. One way of tackle this limitation is to reuse the content so that it appears more than once in the game, and even frequently on the same level. Some games have pushed this so far that they reuse entire levels, and create stories that makes the player character return to a previously visited place.

There is nothing inherently wrong with content reuse, but apart from making the game more repetitive, there are some more serious problems that can occur if the designers are not careful. When a human comes to a new place, he or she unconsciously starts to form a map in his or her mind. This is true for players of computer games too. In real life, unlike computer games, nothing ever repeats itself perfectly, despite the best intentions of the architects. When humans try to form their maps, they start by looking for large, easily spotted differences, and as time progress, they learn less and less significant features that makes their maps more detailed and reliable. The smaller the feature, the longer the time spent before it is discovered. Computer games that rely heavily on content reuse in their architecture can easily create environments that are very difficult for humans to map and navigate. Many games with this kind of level design does not suffer from the problem because they use funnel the player in a direction, uses a bread crumb trail of enemies or even direction arrows to help the player find their way. Games also frequently features a map that the player can read to find his or her way. As reading a map is probably not part of the core gameplay for most games, being forced to do so should be counted as a flaw in the level design. Even worse are games that forces the player to run back and forth in a level to pick something up in one end in order to bring it to another end. If games that rely on this kind of "problem solving" has repetitive architecture (Legacy of Kain - Defiance is a school book example of this, a game that also lacks a map), you create a very difficult situation for the player. Running is seldom entertaining, and if you target the segment of the games market that find running entertaining, then you should make a running simulator. Otherwise, minimize the time that the player spends running in empty corridors, and make sure that they run a very small risk of getting lost. Halo used arrows in the floor of their tutorial level, it can be viewed as very crude but it is non-the-less efficient.