Video game design: you need to understand what you inherit
Last year, I gave a short report to the GDC on the importance of understanding on what legacy of the past your game is based. Video report published here (my part starts at 28:50):
Link
Three strikes - and you drop out.
This phrase is so popular that it almost became an idiom. And in fact, even though some of our non-American friends may be confused by the rules of baseball, they most likely know this rule. But…
If the catcher misses or drops the ball, then the batter is not eliminated and has a chance to get to first base. This almost always ends in an out because the catcher just picks up the ball and makes a simple throw, but sometimes this little-known rule becomes very important, as happened in the last game of the playoffs between Chicago Cubs and Washington Nationals in 2017. Max Scherzer threw a third strike that flew past the striker Javier Baez, but look what happened:
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Catcher Nationals Matt Withers missed the ball between his legs, which allowed Baez to get to first base. This was supposed to be the third inning out. But instead, the Cubs earned two more wounds, and later won the game, having the advantage of just one wound, and moved on to the next round.
That's how this little-known rule knocked the Nationals out of the playoffs.
Where did this rule come from?
It goes back to the first printed edition of the rules of baseball, released by the German Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts-Muts.
He described a game called “English baseball,” in which there were innings, batter, fielders, bases and scoring points for touching the house. However, it has not yet had strikes and bols. The pitcher stood close to the batter and practically “delivered” the ball for a comfortable kick. Pitcher did not try to compete with the batter; the game was to catch the ball in the field after it was hit.
However, what should have happened if the striker was so terrible that he could not hit the ball? In the game on the publication of Guts-Muts for such a situation there was a special rule: the batter had the opportunity to inflict only three blows. On the third hit, the ball automatically entered the game, even if it was not hit. Therefore, the kicker had to run to first base, hitting the ball or missing a third time. Indeed, there was no catcher for catching the ball; therefore, the pitcher needed to run to the house to pick up the ball and throw at first base.
In 1845, the American Knickerbocker Base Ball Club recorded their own rules of the game, and something changed in them.
The pitcher was now much further away from the kicker and threw the ball horizontally, so a new catcher position was needed. However, they retained the logic of the old rule - the ball remains in play after the third missed strike, like the old Legacy code.
A “strike out” (knockout after three goals conceded) essentially arose by itself (that is, became an “emergent gameplay”), because after the third slip, the ball now theoretically remained in the game, and the catcher turned it into an out, catching filing. That is, now there was no difference between what the catcher makes an out, catching the batted ball and what the catcher makes an out, catching the serve after the third missed strike. In both cases, the ball now remains “alive,” and the catcher makes an out, catching the ball before it hits the ground.
However, later they had to “patch” the game, because they did not bother to make the strike-out an official rule. Since the ball would have been considered “alive” after the third strike, there was the possibility of an ugly double or triple.
For example, if the bases are occupied by runners, then the catcher can intentionally drop the ball, pick it up again, stand on the home base, to make an easy strike, and then throw the ball on the third base, and then on the second. Therefore, in 1887 a new rule was added, according to which the batter automatically makes an out if the runner was on first base. And there were fewer than two outs.
Consequently, the “three strike and you drop out” rule, which, by all accounts, is used in baseball, is “true”, but only under very specific conditions.
The creators of the rules decided to use a clumsy patch, instead of just rewriting the rules according to how they really play the game!
Think about the situation with Javier Baez. He was a runner at first base, so even though the catcher dropped the ball, it had to be considered a strike-out ... but there were already two outs, so we are back to the original rule about losing the third strike.
It would be possible to rewrite the rules so that the principle of "three strikes and you drop out" is always applied. Wouldn't it be easier? More intuitive? Why bother trying to fix one obvious problem of a catcher who intentionally drops the ball, and not get rid of this old rudimentary rule?
The reason is that we inherit the design of the game from everything that came before us.
Sometimes this inheritance is obvious - Civ 6 inherits from Civ 5 , which inherits from Civ 4 , and so on.
Sometimes the designer inherits from those games that he played in his childhood ( Mario -> Braid , Myst -> The Witness )
Sometimes games borrow from themselves. This is how the process of developing our economic RTS Offworld Trading Company looked like.
In the early stages of development, you can add simplifications or hacks to make the prototype playable, but all these assumptions are now fixed in the design, whether you like it or not. You need to remember that it was a random or random choice.
However, game mechanics are most often inherited, usually in games of the same genre.
For example, although Offworld Trading Company is an RTS, it is notable for the fact that there are no units in it.
But we did not start from this, because we inherited from other RTS that existed before us - from StarCraft , Age of Empires , etc. Therefore, we had scouts, builders, transports, pirate ships, police ships and the like.
Over time, we found that inheritance lowers the game down, forcing the player to spend time taming units instead of playing in the market. Gradually, one by one, we got rid of these units: first from the transports, then from the combat units, then from the builders, and finally from the scouts. The game now looks like a complete break with the past, but for this we had to go a long way.
The problem is that iterative design development can be a trap - you can no longer see which parts of the game prevent you from creating much better design. It is easier to make small changes that correct the most obvious problems, rather than revising the design as a whole.
Sometimes the problem of the game can be at the conceptual level. Take for example Spore ...
... which was perceived as a game, varying in dozens of degrees - from the scale of the cells to the galactic level. This was the bait, the reason for creating the game.
This part of the game has disappointed many - five separate levels seem to be five different games, connected with each other with tape. However, with the failure of Spore , something interesting happened ...
... it turned out that in fact it is not a failure. That's how many people are playing in Spore right now - not so bad for a game released 10 years ago.
And in fact, look at this chart, where Spore compares with the two most popular PC games released in the same 2008. Now Spore is beating them, and do not forget that Spore did not even go out on Steam.
It turned out that the most interesting part of the game is not the concept of “dozens of degrees”, but in-game editors, especially the creature editor, who dynamically animated creatures created by the player.
However, these editors were created in the middle of project development; Maxis was starting to make a game about one thing, but suddenly made a game about something else. One of the unanswered questions about Spore is what could we do if we abandoned the concept of “dozens of degrees” and instead focused on the editors?
Here is a classic example of bad design inheritance. Creep denial is the mechanics of the original DOTA : you kill your own units to prevent opponents from gaining gold and experience.
Creep denial is one of the most important elements of a high-level game in DOTA , which allows you to maximize the number of experience points gained against opponents in order to outrun them in level. However, the question is still open whether this is in fact a good design.
At least the creep denial is a random design because DOTA inherited it from Warcraft 3 . In fact, even the fact that Warcraft 3 allowed you to kill your own units was most likely a belated decision of the designers.
DOTA inherited this rule because the game was literally built inside of Warcraft 3 as a mod. Therefore, the MOBA games inherited many of the design elements and mechanics from Warcraft 3 . Perhaps the DOTA designers wanted many aspects to work differently, but they generally had no choice, given the assumptions and limitations of the Warcraft 3 editor.
Of course, DOTA 2 and League of Legends inherited their design from the original DOTA mod, but their developers made different decisions about inheriting creep denial. In essence, the League refused it, and DOTA 2 kept it.
This is a screenshot from a post on Reddit about why creep denial was not left in the League . Do not worry, you can not read it; I just want to show how RandomGuyDota is trying to explain why creep denial is bad for design, with the help of the game mechanics themselves. This is a fairly typical justification for what has become part of the legacy of game design - you always need to prove that the element needs to be removed from the game, and not the importance of its initial addition.
However, I have a simpler explanation of why creep denial is a bad design ...
"This is stupid."
Do you want players to spend time killing their own units? Is this really the fundamental part of a MOBA device? The game will fall apart if you do not kill your own assistants?
aahdin sums it up better than I could: “Yes, it improves the skill of playing MOBA just as it increases the skill of playing chess by burning half of the pieces.”
At some point, as a game designer, you need to take a step and review what you inherit. Will basic gameplay survive without this feature? Is this feature unintuitive, does it complicate the game or familiarity with it? Can players spend their time better than doing this function?
In the case of creep denial, the answer to all these questions suggests that the game would be better without it. In the MOBA genre, there is only one magic function that cannot be discarded - it retains the scale and complexity of the RTS, but focuses the player’s control on just one unit, which makes the game accessible to a wider audience (by an order of magnitude). Everything else, everything else - this is just a random inheritance, which arose from the fact that the genre originally appeared as a Warcraft 3 mod.
In fact, even today there is no creep denial in the League ... initially it was present.
Here are the notes on the very first League of Legend patches published in July 2009. The developers inherited creep denial, but got rid of it in the early stages.
That is, even though the developers used the heritage of the original fashion, they still sought to critically examine the past of the game.
But for comparison, the transition history of creep denial from DOTA 1 to DOTA 2 . Designers obviously realized that creep denial might not be the best part of the game.
Look at the description of version 6.82 "Killed creeps now give less experience." - a clear sign that they have revised this feature by changing the reward for it. However, instead of getting rid of it, designers make small changes around the edges.
In fact, they do what baseball players do when they patch the third strike rule so that it does not apply in certain conditions, rather than cutting out this stupid rule entirely.
Remember my questions about the value of creep denial?
Will basic gameplay survive without this feature? Is this feature unintuitive, does it complicate the game or familiarity with it? Can players spend their time better than doing this function? Having asked these questions about the rule of the missed third strike, we find ourselves in the same position - this is a bad random design that harms baseball.
And now here is a comparison of these two games and some other MOBA. There are many reasons why League overtakes DOTA 2 by an order of magnitude - and a fairly significant factor is the three-year handicap, but I believe that a very important part was also the Riot philosophy of reassessing inheritance from the original DOTA mod that has spread beyond creep denial.
I still have thoughts of last hitting, but fortunately, there is no time for that. I say “fortunately,” because Heroes of the Storm , the only one who refused to last hitting, is less successful than DOTA 2 , not to mention the League . Therefore, I cannot say that last hitting is a bad design, and this has been proven by the market. In addition, I do not think that it is now reasonable to expect from Riot experiments with the rejection of last hitting; It is too late. League is one of the most popular games in the world. In fact, they were lucky that they abandoned creep denial so early; if this was done later, community views could be divided.
We do not always have the opportunity to look at the market to confirm our decisions, and therefore the overestimation of the inheritance of the game is such a complex and important problem.
Refusing inheritance requires real courage. Sometimes, if you see a problem, you have to trust your own rational design process. Sometimes you have to rely on flair. But ultimately you need to strive to see your story, find out how it brought you to where you are, and have the courage to abandon the past.
(You can read more about the rule of the missed third strike in this article .)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/449640/
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