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.