I'm probably going to be asking a lot of questions in the coming weeks/months. I need to do research and there isn't many ways other than asking people their opinions.
This time it's difficulty and related topics.
The first and most simple question, do you prefer easy or hard games?
At the moment I am aiming for a hard game. A ball breakingly hard game. One that will hopefully require you to play both smart, and fast.
The next question is simply, how long are you willing to play before difficulty in a game makes you give up? (This is a bit hard to answer, but if you got game over for failing, how many game overs until you quit?)
Those are the two major things I need to know. But that isn't all. These next things are slightly related to difficulty.
First is punishment. When you die, or fail, do you believe you should be punished for this with some kind of loss of some sort (experience, gold, items and so on)? What is the maximum amount of punishment you'd be willing to accept? Would you play a game with permanent death (one that you would ideally invest a lot of time into at that)?
The system I am going for at the moment is something along the lines of, everytime you die, you get a penalty to your stats. The more you die, the bigger the penalty.
This penalty will gradually disappear over time, or you can pay a hefty fee to get it removed. (Or you can just play with it applied)
IF permanent death was to be introduced, if this penalty stacked too high and your stats drop to 0, you'd die from it. This would become harder and harder for stronger characters (as they have higher stats).
Next is consequences. Would you willingly play a game where your actions come with consequences that are both bad, and potentially permanent? Ones that could effectively lessen the effectiveness of your character (compared to other players)?
A lesser example is skills/abilities. If you're a wizard and your skills are fireball and explosion, going into a volcano is going to suck for you. But that other wizard with iceball and freeze, he's going to rend everything in this volcano.
A bigger example is during a quest you have the option to side with one of two people. If you side with one, you lose access to the other person and any quests they may provide (and by extension items/locations these quests unlock).
ID:1470600
 Jan 13 2014, 5:15 pm
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BYOND probably isn't the best place to ask these questions. Which is why I'm asking them in other places too.
Death it's self will be mostly avoidable if you're prepared, or just good at the game. If you walk into a volcano with no protection against fire, you're not going to last 10 seconds. And it's kind of your own fault. The punishment for dying right now is either wasting your time, or money. The first death wont be significant. But every death after that without first recovering will become more and more significant. If you walk into that volcano unprepared and die, you'll lose maybe 5 minutes of your time or maybe 3-5% of your money. If you walk in a second time (without recovering), now you're losing 10-15 minutes or 8-12% of your money. Do it 5 times and you've lost an hour or two of your time, or at least 50-60% of your total wealth. But dying 5 times like this is your own fault. As for permadeath. If I add it, it will 100% be the players fault it happened. There will be ample warnings that continuing to die will result in you staying dead, forever. You'll literally have mangled arms and legs and have to get someone to push you in a wheelchair to the volcano before you die forever. You will always be able to simply wait it out, or pay a fee and remove the risk of dying forever. | |
It may be a massive cop-out thing to say but this really depends on you and your intended audience. Also, Death penalties are a topic that can fill many essays/articles on its own.
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Look to the past. Castlevania, no save points, 4 regions. You win by learning attack patterns. Metroid. Sprawling mazes.
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I'm kind of stuck in the middle. I like a game that can be classified as "easy to learn; hard to master." With a nice, steady difficulty curve to help push along your mastery. Players get better by playing on harder difficulties or with other, better players, so if the relative difficulty curve remains very linear, the players aren't encouraged to ever get better. When they start seeing more resistance and a more tactical opposition, they begin to rethink their strategy a bit and start learning from their mistakes.
The difficult part comes when you really brick-wall the difficulty curve, going from one difficulty to another tier very rapidly with little to no build up. Players then get stuck, start dying a lot more and can, in a lot of cases, get frustrated and quit. You really want to try feathering the difficulty on that line of being challenging, but not blood boilingly hard, which comes at the price of a LOT of play testing (Fortunately though, that's one of the more fun parts of game development ^-^). | |
Games that are relentlessly difficult (at least modern games) such as VVVVVV or I Wanna Be The Guy provide the player with many respawn points and allow the player to die as many times as needed until he gets it right and moves on. If your game isn't that hard, I think think the idea of lives and permanent death is at the very least depreciated and at the most completely pointless. It has its place in game design, but very rarely. If the player does die, I think consequences can be fitting depending on the difficulty you're going for. The best way to die is by feeling like you messed up and did it yourself. The worst way to die is when you get so frustrated with how insane the game is that you shoot yourself in the head, ie Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania. Just pick a NES game.
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A game doesn't become difficult with punishment. Punishment is just way of speaking a message of failure. Difficulty comes from a combination of game mechanics interacting with controls that form a challenge for the player OR from something that takes place in the mind (puzzles, memory challenges) and requires thought turned into control output.
Your death penalty could just be a "game over" screen or a "try again" or a "insert 100 dollars". Neither screen makes your game harder. | |
The screen doesn't make it harder, but the penalty certainly can. If the penalty is to start from the beginning of the entire game after you've made much progress, that increases the difficulty immensely.
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Arguably. Making it more punishing doesn't make the game more difficult it makes it more tedious and well punishing.
The game can be really easy and if you mess up once you have to start all over. This would be a horrible game, tedious and badly designed. | |
Punishment doesn't make a game harder. It's a deterrent from the goal. You're adding time to completion, but not necessarily making the game harder.
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How can you tell me that a game that allows you to continue where you left off when you die is just as difficult as a game that bumps you back to the absolute beginning when you die? That's ludicrous. If the point is to make it to the end, bumping you to the beginning when you die makes it a lot more difficult to reach that goal than if you can continue from a later point. It's the difference between being flawless and consistent to reach the goal and being able to make many mistakes at multiple points throughout the game.
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Fugsnarf wrote:
How can you tell me that a game that allows you to continue where you left off when you die is just as difficult as a game that bumps you back to the absolute beginning when you die? That's ludicrous. If the point is to make it to the end, bumping you to the beginning when you die makes it a lot more difficult to reach that goal than if you can continue from a later point. It's the difference between being flawless and consistent to reach the goal and being able to make many mistakes at multiple points throughout the game. Consider math problems. 1. Take a test with a bunch of easy problems, and fail if you miss one. 2. Take a test with a few hard problems, and get partial credit on problems you miss. Obviously, the 2nd one is harder, despite the first having a lower margin of error. | |
Your analogy isn't really a one-size-fits-all though. Consider two versions of the exact same game. One game gives you three lives and sends you back to the beginning if you die. The other game gives you three lives and only sends you back to the beginning of the area if you lose all three lives. In the first scenario you need to play through the entire game without losing three lives. In the second one you only need to play through a single area without losing three lives. Difficulty spike? I'd say so. The first demands you to play almost perfectly, which is difficult.
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There's a huge difference between making a game harder to play and harder to win. Yes, by increasing penalty, you are making the game harder to play. But you're not increasing the difficulty of the game itself, you're just provoking less frequency of success. To me, this is not "difficulty", this is just frustration.
If you have a game where the goal is to "reach the end" and you allow a check point wherever the player dies every time he dies, you're not making the game "easier". You have definitely made it easier to "try", but the player still has to keep "trying" to win. Removing that check point makes it harder to try, but doesn't make the game itself harder. It just makes the game HARDER TO PLAY. Edit: It is very easy to switch the words win and play as well, so my ultimate point here is this: don't make your game hard by putting time-wait systems or rewind mechanics, that's just frustrating to the player and honestly requires no creativity from the producer of the game. Focus on how to make the game challenging in a fun way. | |
It does make it easier to add check points, and it makes it harder to remove them. Sure, each obstacle is just as difficult to get past; the difference is whether you need to get through all of them without dying or just one of them. If each obstacle has a checkpoint, then the difficulty is limited to each checkpoint. If there are no checkpoints, you now need to get through every single obstacle in a row without dying once. That is significantly harder than trying each one separately.
You seem to be limiting difficulty to game-play, which I think is wrong. On whether one type of difficulty is better than another, that's a separate issue. | |
Yes, that is technically true. But you're talking about ones and zeros in an emotional situation. To make the game fun and challenging, you don't present the player with the robotic mode: "if you can't win this entire level without dying, you will have to try again". To me, that is very black and white, and very boring and not hard, just frustrating. That's Mario 1 on NES. You can argue its the best selling game or whatever, but it literally is not fun to me, and not my idea of difficult. What mario DOES do right is require you to learn how to interact with the controls and the inner game mechanics to avoid obstacles to get to the end, that is where the real difficulty lies. That is the game.
I like to play games that are more gray area, like in zelda, where multiple solutions can be used or different play styles are rewarded in different ways when you play. Those games also have black and white difficulties (how about the boss that knocks you to the level below, that's incredibly frustrating). Point is, I don't think games that have harsh penalties are difficult, to me they just suck and the producer didn't try hard enough. | |
I agree, I hate harsh penalties in games. It's why I've actually finished very few NES games -- including Mario. I think it's usually poor game design. Regardless, I've made an argument that while it may be poor game design it is certainly a way to increase difficulty in a game. It's annoying, but it's damn hard to beat those NES games.
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Here's a couple videos directly on target for you to dive into.
Extra Credits on difficulty in games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toVNkuCELpU PBS Game/Show on difficulty in games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkfKrO1oEbQ In fact, you should probably watch everything from Extra Credits before you do any more game design. | |
I've been watching those Extra Credits videos a lot for the past few days. Really good stuff. Thanks for the tip, Iain.
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BYOND is a niche community that currently has maybe a handful of games that would cater to a mainstream audience. Inevitably, I feel that targeting these questions to the BYOND community will result in answers that push you away from a mainstream audience, which is going to result in a substandard product forever doomed to have no marketability.
What I will say, however, is that you have to look at it from a different aspect. I love the game Dark Souls.
It's tough, but it's fair. You get one chance to screw up. if you die once, you leave a bloodstain with all of your experience on it, and you lose your humanity.
If you can't get back to the point where you died and recover that bloodstain before dying again? It's gone.
This gives you reason to be cautious, and not just throw yourself headlong at a challenge until you eventually luck out. You have to learn boss mechanics, and it results in a possible situation where you have left a bloodstain in a boss room and have no option to recover it because you weren't prepared for the boss battle, and thus have to go elsewhere (risking death on the way) to prepare to even manage to beat the boss. Further attempts when not prepared could result in even further experience loss due to compounding your failures.
This isn't so much a punishment for death, so much as a justification for caution. It doesn't feel like the game is punishing you for failing, it feels like the game is giving you incentive to learn to not fail.
Now, as for the MMO genre, it gets a little tougher. People don't like to lose, and it does depend on the audience you want to attract. Eventually, you are going to have to make a choice that reduces your target audience pool, because some people won't like that you made that choice.
So really, it's all up to you. Permadeath, if not managed properly can turn the community into a loose grouping of isolated, paranoid people who keep a solid distance from one another. On the other hand, it can actually incentivize griefers and pirates to band together and become extremely dangerous to maintaining a solid community of non-griefers.
When it comes to the punishment for death, it has to suit the ease at which death occurs. If death is meant to be part of the game, and a frequent result of failure, then you probably aren't going to want to make each single death catastrophic to recover from.
However, if death is meant to be a punishment only for the absolute dumbest things you could have done, catastrophic deaths are almost fitting.
It also pays to consider the cost you are incurring through dying. How long does it take to gain experience? How long will it take you to recover? How expensive was that gear I just lost?
Games that implement major consequences for death do still exist, but mainstream games have started to avoid them because audiences have repeatedly proven that they want the game to be challenging without punishing you.
It's all really relative, honestly. I play permadeath games quite often. Haven and Hearth had a solid permadeath system, and I do play a lot of roguelikes. In the end, having one life and one life alone makes me less of a sociopath when I play games, but depending on the community, it definitely does run the risk of having a playerbase that would rather not have a chance to die, and thus band together in huge, insurmountable numbers to overwhelm any possible threat against them. When it's 5,000 goons vs 500 pockets of 5-10 players, the game starts to get un-fun very quickly.
It should also be noted that severe consequences to your actions significantly will impact exploratory and experimental gameplay, in which players will more often rely on the safety of taking no actual risks, and will tend to grind on safer, lower-level content until they are confident that they can easily tackle the next tier. It's really about balancing your goals. If you want exploratory, and fun-oriented gameplay, permadeath or severe consequences may very well work against you in that endeavor.