The consequences of failure should be integral to the game mechanics. I would not want to play a shmup that either let me start over from 1 second before I died, nor one that made me start the entire game over. It requires a balance, and usually it’s some sort of “level”.
Nethack on the other hand would not be the same without perma-death – but I do get tired of the sheer tedium of that game what with the song and dance you constantly have to go through with every unidentified piece of treasure because the game is so eager to punish you with cursed or worthless items.
There’s difficult and there’s challenging. A lot of old games go too far to make things difficult, but new games don’t go far enough to present a challenge. People are less likely to notice the latter than the former because semi-challenging and casual games saturate the market. Novelty alone sometimes presents enough of a challenge and there are enough games that you can move on when it wears off, but individual games aren’t necessarily as challenging, replayable, or rewarding.
I have heard of the concept “easy to learn, hard to master.” These rules even apply to real-life games too.
Take Dodge-ball for example, the rules are drop dead easy. Throw the ball at the opponent and hit them below the waist, catch their throws, and/or dodge your opponent’s throws to knock them out. To win, knock all opponents out. Your opponent’s have the same goals as you.
What makes the game difficult to master is the variety. You are allowed to move freely within the boundaries, stand behind other members of your team, and use any movements you’ve learned to escape being hit.
Games are interesting if you aren’t told every single little thing you can and cannot do. It makes you believe there is a level of expertise, even in something so simple like Dodge-ball. This is one of the main reasons I always hated difficulty levels, because it takes the fun of trying to figure out how you rate yourself at the game. Instead, the game spoon-feeds you a “fake” branding of how good you are.
I believe that “do not punish the player” really means “do not deceive the player.”
Like in Dodgeball, if you throw the ball and the person fails to catch the ball. (It hits their hand and falls to the ground.) Are they out, or do they stay in the field? (In this case, they would be knocked out.) Make sure people know all the rules behind the game before you have them play it. Once they understand why things happen, it makes them able to cope with losing better. No one likes to be cheated out of a game.
“Difficulty” is controlled by the game, but “challenge” is controlled by the player. The same rules that make real-life games fun and addicting, is the same attributes that make video games fun and addicting. Easy to learn concepts, and the ability to improve on those concepts with what you’ve already learned.
The best games mostly have all the same attributes. They are very easy to pick up, and usually revolve around a basic action. However, the game doesn’t give you any more rules beyond those small boundaries, allowing you to use your imagination to win however you choose. It really doesn’t matter the genre of the game (RPG, FPS, Platformer) or the type (card, board, console).
You give the player a simple boundary, and let the player create their own experience.
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IYHO of course Just watch my kid nephews playing a game, or my wife, or my mum. They are comically inept at anything remotely challenging (ie. my games). Consequently they don’t have a lot of fun playing them, the game is frequently over before they get anywhere and have any epiphanies. I keep saying the problem over and over again: we are the 1% here. We are unusual. We cater for a very small number of people. Those designers who have understood otherwise (Markus, Rovio, Popcap, etc) are making a mint because they have 99x more people to sell games to.
The panacea of game design is a game that is trivially easy for my wife but which rapidly and seamlessly adjusts to a level of challenge that would still be described as “fun” for anyone playing it. This is however rather difficult to achieve with simple systems like computer programs. Fortunately there exists a solution - other people provide the challenge. My next game is co-op multiplayer Let me tell you, network progamming is bastard difficult and I’ve not even done any of the networky part! Hats off to everyone who’s solved it.
I think strategy games like Civilization do it correctly. You can tailor your game to your own needs. You can choose AI difficulty should you play against the computer, but on top of that you can choose the landmass, how abundant resources are and even which nation you play with its own bonus attached to it. If you want a challenge you can create it, but you can also keep it simple if you so please.
Can it be as simple as that? I remember Eggerland on the MSX. It had two simple modes: regular relax play for the average Joe and another mode which did nothing but add a time limit. But that added the challenge as you play the game differently when you have a time limit; more adrenaline involved and your brain has to work faster. You don’t sit back, you are on the edge of your seat.
Another example: the battle minigame in Final Fantasy 7. You go through rounds fighting different monsters and you get points for it which can be exchanged for prizes; the more expensive the prize, the better it is of course. During play you contract penalties which make the game more challenging but you also get far more points, based on how heavy the penalty is. When you play it you actually WANT to get penalized, you WANT the challenge because the reward will be greater and you will get to your goal faster (the best prize you can get of course). Such a simple concept, but it is really effective. I stretch my mind, but I can’t think of another game that utilized it.
Here’s a thing about AI challenge: it’s only fun if you can deduce why you lost against it and if you can see a clear change to your strategy that will help you overcome it. If you can’t see why you lost it simply looks “unfair” and “too difficult” and you give up in short order. Designers who make AI too clever such that you always lose no matter what strategy you come up with have failed in their AI design.
Question for you to ponder on… which was more fun - Doom or Half-Life? Think carefully.
You are very right because that is exactly the reason why I don’t like Civ 5 as much. The AI does not play better, you have the idea that the AI gets help. If I had the choice between playing Civ 5 or the golden oldie Colonization, I would pick the latter because the challenge is more genuine in my experience.
Ooooh fun fun
It was Doom without any question in my case. I’ll leave out reasoning just yet to give other people a chance to play along
Chess is a good example of an easy to learn yet hard to master game. The rules are fairly simple, but the combinations that can arise from them result in a very complex endgame.
As for multiplayer being the solution to the adaptive difficulty, I pointed this out before, it all depends on the relative skill of the real opponents, which is the same issue faced by AI implementation: If the skill difference is too vast, the lesser player will not be able to learn why he lost the game, and thus get frustrated.
And the original DooM is still superior in pure fun. ;D
Not to mention Half-Life’s story is a rip-off of DooM’s (Lone character having to deal with the fallout of a teleportation experiment gone horribly wrong that has creatures from another dimension popping into ours and taking control of people… Yes, I am saying that Headcrabs are a less flaming and less airborne version of Lost Souls) 8)
Quite, but the beauty of multiplayer is that we can set the difficulty ourselves in a very informed way by simply playing with friends. We can reason with friends and we know what they’re doing. We can even talk to them in realtime as we play. But the computer… not so, on all counts.
Don’t take me wrong, I’m actually a fan of LAN/Local Play, and enjoy my multiplayer best when I’m in the room with the people I’m playing with, or at least when I can meet them for a cup of coffee somewhere down the line.
But let’s face it, multiplayer in gaming is growing in the direction of anonymous internet play with strangers, which introduces a bunch of new problems (the major one being “assholes”).
Heck, even in LAN/Local Play you have to deal with the usual idiot who thinks driving the transport truck off a cliff when everyone is on board is funny.
I think in that case things get very ugly. It’s one thing to adjust the difficulty of a deterministic system (a single player game), and an entirely different can of arrakeen worms to try and herd players into getting along.
Not really, Borderlands proves that it can make or break a game; alone it is pretty dull and repetitive but add some friends and the game is a riot. But games like Serious Sam are also 10 times more fun when played with mates. Heck, I go all the way back to Doom/Duke3D based games. Redneck Rampage Rides Again: I spent hours just zooming around on motorcycles with friends in stead of actually playing it. Heretic? Deathmatch, create your own levels and turn each other into chickens - crazy. Things that are not special when you are alone turn into amazing fun just because together you make it fun, guffawing all the way. Serious Sam 2 - the game is riddled with these little extras that have no real gameplay value in single player other than some secret, like the basketball hoops or soccer field. Now try in a coop game, I’m pretty sure at times you’re stuck there for half an hour just kicking around the ball and trying to make the more epic “dunk”.
I’ll call it game clutter. Its coop fun and also fun to add as a developer
[quote]Actually the most interesting growth areas are in co-op play.
[/quote]
I’m not sure that’s really true.
I mean, sure it’s growing together with the trend that gaming is an increasingly social thing, seeing the success of things like ‘party chat’, COD multiplayer, having ‘friends lists’ on your gaming account, gaming invites etc.
But has it really become that much bigger (relatively) than when we had the “Terminator 2” arcade, Double Dragon, Time Splitters, Gauntlet, Salamander/Life-Force, Contra, TMNT, Bubble Bobble etc?
Then enlighten me.
I’m one of those strange creatures just playing on consoles and a Linux PC, so I obviously have no idea about what Steam has to offer nowadays in the co-op genre. Are those co-op games exclusively available on Steam really that big?
Steam has made it incredibly easy for friends to play games together on the PC. Not only the fact that it’s got all that friend stuff in it and groups but also the Steamworks APIs that make it trivial(ish) to integrate meta-networking stuff into games to make it easy for it to happen. Even stuff like voice chat is built-in.
Then what Steam does is massively and subtly advertise all the games your friends are playing all the time. And makes it easy for you to ask to join in, or be invited.
Where MMO games are usually time-sinks requiring your dedicated investment, and singleplayer games offer the lonely gamer solace but do very little beyond that to advertise themselves to friends other than mere recommendation, co-op multiplayer appears to be sitting on a relatively underused sweet spot (again, something Minecraft touched upon, but of course Steam perfects the experience).
So steamworks provides convenient API’s to facilitate co-op stuff. But I was talking about actual games.
For me, co-op gaming is usually little more than a single-player campaign that you can go through with a friend. Co-op like that is not going to get much bigger I suspect, nor do I find it very exciting.
On the other hand Journey was quite interesting in how it had a co-op element without being intrusive to the single player experience, which gave it quite a magical touch. Also in Demon’s Souls there was a cooperative element that was quite unique. Expanding the idea of co-op play in those kinds of directions I find very interesting.
Any such examples available on Steam that I should check out?
I found it fun on my own (play with AI). Once. When I make a witch/tanker to kill all of my allies and continue alone, or playing normal with only use that infinite handgun. So I never play normally. It was fun. Once.
You’re overestimating the value of Steam Friends. From my experience playing online games with friends before Steam and with Steam, not much changed. In practice Steam Friends is just another IM/chat system. The advertising of what game you’re playing has very little effect, without Steam it was usually matter of looking into (being in) mumble/TS/irc/icq/whatever channel. Some experimented before with Xfire that provided similar function but had little practical effect. And the other stuff, like screenshots, we’ve used just different service for that and posted links to each other (as we do with Steam links too).
Just watch my kid nephews playing a game, or my wife, or my mum. They are comically inept at anything remotely challenging (ie. my games). Consequently they don’t have a lot of fun playing them, the game is frequently over before they get anywhere and have any epiphanies. I keep saying the problem over and over again: we are the 1% here. We are unusual. We cater for a very small number of people. Those designers who have understood otherwise (Markus, Rovio, Popcap, etc) are making a mint because they have 99x more people to sell games to.