8 ms·

"I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re maki

by PSeitz 12y ago

"I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re making games. We should allow them to go crazy sometimes." This goes to blizzard

eswat 12y ago
…and most of the industry I think. It’s very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists because developers have been getting paranoid about players not experiencing their game they want them to experience it.
- pjc50 12y ago
  very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists Minecraft? The internet has a role to play in this, for good or ill. One person's emergent gameplay is another person's exploit. Especially in multiplayer games this makes it a huge risk. In MMOs any unusual gameplay is quickly swept away by a horde of minmaxers - everyone insists on following the optimal path, whatever it might be. It seems that emergent and scripted mix very badly. If you want emergent gameplay the game has to be built entirely around that, like Minecraft or KSP.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    Emergence is a weird concept. I've played a lot of Minecraft and I wouldn't consider it to have a whole lot of emergence. It's certainly open-ended, but once you learn all the gameplay mechanics, the game gets a bit flat. You have to keep yourself interested in it somehow via community or huge building projects or whatever. It's been awhile since I played Dwarf Fortress, maybe it's changed a lot since then, but I didn't find a lot of emergence there either. Once you get survival down, you have to make your own challenges. That to me is the exact opposite of emergent gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate fantasy simulator, but as a game it's quite flat. A game should be able to hold your interest using nothing more than its mechanics if you want to say it has emergence. The classic example of emergent behavior is Conway's game of life. The mechanics you see when you start playing the game, are exactly the same mechanics that keeps you playing the game years later. There's a depth to the flatness. But it's not a game. It doesn't present you with hurdles to overcome and a path to winning. It's emergent, but it's not emergent gameplay. The other example is Nethack. There emergence seems to arise from the sheer combinatorial magnitude of the interactions that are possible. Kill a cockatrice and swing it's body around as a weapon, stoning all in one hit. Make sure you're wearing gloves. Don't descend stairs while you're holding a cockatrice and are burdened, or you'll fall down and the corpse will land on you. There's also Angband. Here strategy and tactics plays the largest role. You spend a lot of time dying learning different ways of handling the games many, many, many ways of killing you. You learn the finer points of when it's okay to use a teleportation staff or when that's too dangerous and you have to use a scroll of teleport level. The actual difference between the two escape devices is very fine, but having one or the other, and the knowledge and experience to know which to use, provides a hurdle any budding player will have to jump before they can become a good player. There are dozens of these hurdles to learn, all evolved over decades of development. Roguelikes have been the traditional bastion of emergent gameplay, with simulators and world-building games providing a different kind of combinatorial experience, another sort of emergent gameplay arises in fighting games. Huge depth of gameplay dynamics arise from little invisible boxes moving across the screen. Changing the amount of time an attack lasts by a single frame can make a huge difference in how that character fares against certain opponents. It appears to me that each form of game, be it the top-down roguelike, RTS, fighting, FPS, has to find its own way to be interesting. MMOs come in many shapes and sizes, people play them for different reasons. I think the ultimate reason why you don't find emergence in MMOs is because combinatorial effects don't work as well when you're compounding human intelligence rather than algorithms. You can strike a careful, delicate balance game design-wise when all you have is one source of intelligence to contend with as opposed to thousands.
FD3SA 12y ago
Definitely. And it has to do with the MMOfication of everything. I'm playing Baldur's Gate 2, and the things you can do as a player in that game are just absurd. You can stop time. You can be permanently invisible and kill bosses without ever being detected. You can summon extremely overpowered monsters. It's honestly so refreshing to have unique abilities. World of Warcraft ruined a generation of RPG design because devs believed that everything had to be "balanced", whatever that means. So we have a bunch of uninspired game mechanics in a pretty shell. I'm glad to see there's people still acknowledging that games do not have to be fair or sane or balanced. Their beauty is in their madness. And yes, a wizard who can cast Project Image, Spell Immunity: Abjuration, Spell Immunity: Divination, Improved Invisibility, Time Stop, Abi Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Power Word: Stun and Power Word: Kill is not comparable to a Fighter with a big sword, and he shouldn't be. Attempts to make the two "balanced" just become absurd, as World of Warcraft has shown.
- PSeitz 12y ago
  Yes, I love how unbalanced Baldur's Gate 2 sometimes is. I think this makes it actually a great game.
- Qworg 12y ago
  A player shouldn't have to play your game just to learn in the end game that their fighter isnt going to cut it and they'll have to reroll as a wizard. That sucks (and is bad game design). Things shouldn't be perfectly balanced, but all play styles should be equally viable.
  - apalmer 12y ago
    I mean but one has to expect this. In what sane world is a wizard and a fighter going to be equivalent? I think the main thing as pointed out is that in seeking balance a lot of 'fun' or 'interesting' elements have to be thrown out.
    - saucetenuto 12y ago
      It's fine if your world is designed this way, but in that case you shouldn't be allowed to play as a fighter. Do it like Magicka, say, and offer your players their choice of wizards.
Someone1234 12y ago
I know I'll sound like a broken record, but honestly that's why WoW got worse and worse over time. As balance improved fun went down. It seemed like in classic there were all kinds of hidden tricks, and bugs to exploit. Most of which were pretty harmless. However the best players knew all the tricks and used them to their advantage. If you wanted to do some of the top tier content you essentially were required to know tons of little tricks to min/max the game. Now everything is super streamline, no tricks, everything is documented. But the game is a little less fun. Instead of finding fun, we now have to be handed it. Plus the game is orders of magnitude easier... When was the last time you died in a 5 man?
- slm_HN 12y ago
  >As balance improved fun went down. I don't think balance ruined WoW, I think it was that Blizzard just kept dumbing it down. Once they decided that every single player gets to do every single thing in the game it was ruined because you have to make everything so accessible. I remember killing C'Thun... we had a diagram on where to stand, responsibilities for which stalks to kill and in which order, hell, even running into the room wrong could wipe the raid. We were the only guild on the server who could clear AQ40. It was challenging and it was fun. Now 25 strangers can queue up in raid finder and just mow down every boss, usually without even knowing a strat. Just move out of the fire and cycle your 3 buttons. All of the complexity has been relentlessly striped out of Wow. What's left is a game where you can logon, join a raid, kill the biggest boss in the game, and logoff all within an hour or so. They took chess and turned it into tic-tac-toe.
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    Actually the high end fights now are, in general, far more technical than they were in vanilla WoW (BWL, AQ40, Nax). They just offer dumbed down versions ("LFR") for the masses -- which is fair enough. Everyone pays for the content, why shouldn't they get to see it? It's no different from "please don't hurt me" difficulty levels in FPSs. My big problem with WoW is the reduction of classes to three roles (tank, healer, DPS) where class is really just a skin on the role, and the reliance on repetition. (We must have cleared some 40-man raid zones over fifty times.) Scripted technical boss fights are, in my opinion, the equivalent of shooters where you need to memorize where every enemy will appear -- it's "challenging" but it's not interesting.
bitwize 12y ago
StarCraft isn't just a game. It's a sport. When you're creating a sport, you have to eliminate factors outside of player skill that could affect the outcome. That's why the characters in vs. fighters, and the races/factions in RTSes, have to be balanced w.r.t. each other.
- Fargren 12y ago
  Your definition of a sport would exclude Magic: the Gathering, and I guess also poker. I don't think I agree with a definition that claims StartCraft is a sport but excludes those.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    May I ask why you didn't say Hearthstone as your card game example? Seems very fitting: also from Blizzard and has one of the biggest e-sport scenes at the moment.
bentcorner 12y ago
I love finding little tricks like this. I recall playing a D&D gold box game and realizing you could prevent trolls from respawning by standing on their corpse. Of course, things go quickly sideways when your fighters that are spawn camping the trolls get knocked out...
simple1 12y ago
The problem with emergence in MMOs is that once an emergent trick is found, it becomes an exploit, and then the emergent behavior has to be eliminated somehow, for the good of the game. For example, in the MMO I am creating, you can catch bats, hold them for a while, and then they become your pets (if you don't hold them long enough, they remain wild). Some people gathered up hundreds of bats, then released them in a small room. When other players came into that room, they were swarmed and die. After letting the trap sit for a while, they would return, cast a fear spell to disperse the bats, and then collect the loot. It was a cool trick, and probably super fun for the players involved. But, if I left the exploit in, it would be happening all the time, and would wreck the game for everyone else. In single player games, the worst a player can do is beat the game using an exploit, which is not necessarily bad.
- sukilot 12y ago
  If you don't want PvP, turn off PvP. There a million ways for players to kill each other.
  - simple1 12y ago
    The problem was not with the killing itself, but that it was instant death with virtually no way to escape and no warning.
Gbits 12y ago
Funny you should mention that. I wrote this story, and Jeff spoke about Blizzard specifically (in a clip that didn't make the cut - lord that story was long already). Paraphrasing heavily, he said that they're one of the companies currently exerting the tightest control -- but that they're also one of the best companies in the world for taking an incredibly complex game experience and making it available and accessible to, as commenters above point out, 25 random people on a moment's notice. He saw it as one thing following from the other.

by PSeitz 12y ago

eswat 12y ago

…and most of the industry I think. It’s very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists because developers have been getting paranoid about players not experiencing their game they want them to experience it.

pjc50 12y ago
very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists Minecraft? The internet has a role to play in this, for good or ill. One person's emergent gameplay is another person's exploit. Especially in multiplayer games this makes it a huge risk. In MMOs any unusual gameplay is quickly swept away by a horde of minmaxers - everyone insists on following the optimal path, whatever it might be. It seems that emergent and scripted mix very badly. If you want emergent gameplay the game has to be built entirely around that, like Minecraft or KSP.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  Emergence is a weird concept. I've played a lot of Minecraft and I wouldn't consider it to have a whole lot of emergence. It's certainly open-ended, but once you learn all the gameplay mechanics, the game gets a bit flat. You have to keep yourself interested in it somehow via community or huge building projects or whatever. It's been awhile since I played Dwarf Fortress, maybe it's changed a lot since then, but I didn't find a lot of emergence there either. Once you get survival down, you have to make your own challenges. That to me is the exact opposite of emergent gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate fantasy simulator, but as a game it's quite flat. A game should be able to hold your interest using nothing more than its mechanics if you want to say it has emergence. The classic example of emergent behavior is Conway's game of life. The mechanics you see when you start playing the game, are exactly the same mechanics that keeps you playing the game years later. There's a depth to the flatness. But it's not a game. It doesn't present you with hurdles to overcome and a path to winning. It's emergent, but it's not emergent gameplay. The other example is Nethack. There emergence seems to arise from the sheer combinatorial magnitude of the interactions that are possible. Kill a cockatrice and swing it's body around as a weapon, stoning all in one hit. Make sure you're wearing gloves. Don't descend stairs while you're holding a cockatrice and are burdened, or you'll fall down and the corpse will land on you. There's also Angband. Here strategy and tactics plays the largest role. You spend a lot of time dying learning different ways of handling the games many, many, many ways of killing you. You learn the finer points of when it's okay to use a teleportation staff or when that's too dangerous and you have to use a scroll of teleport level. The actual difference between the two escape devices is very fine, but having one or the other, and the knowledge and experience to know which to use, provides a hurdle any budding player will have to jump before they can become a good player. There are dozens of these hurdles to learn, all evolved over decades of development. Roguelikes have been the traditional bastion of emergent gameplay, with simulators and world-building games providing a different kind of combinatorial experience, another sort of emergent gameplay arises in fighting games. Huge depth of gameplay dynamics arise from little invisible boxes moving across the screen. Changing the amount of time an attack lasts by a single frame can make a huge difference in how that character fares against certain opponents. It appears to me that each form of game, be it the top-down roguelike, RTS, fighting, FPS, has to find its own way to be interesting. MMOs come in many shapes and sizes, people play them for different reasons. I think the ultimate reason why you don't find emergence in MMOs is because combinatorial effects don't work as well when you're compounding human intelligence rather than algorithms. You can strike a careful, delicate balance game design-wise when all you have is one source of intelligence to contend with as opposed to thousands.

FD3SA 12y ago

Definitely. And it has to do with the MMOfication of everything. I'm playing Baldur's Gate 2, and the things you can do as a player in that game are just absurd. You can stop time. You can be permanently invisible and kill bosses without ever being detected. You can summon extremely overpowered monsters. It's honestly so refreshing to have unique abilities. World of Warcraft ruined a generation of RPG design because devs believed that everything had to be "balanced", whatever that means. So we have a bunch of uninspired game mechanics in a pretty shell. I'm glad to see there's people still acknowledging that games do not have to be fair or sane or balanced. Their beauty is in their madness. And yes, a wizard who can cast Project Image, Spell Immunity: Abjuration, Spell Immunity: Divination, Improved Invisibility, Time Stop, Abi Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Power Word: Stun and Power Word: Kill is not comparable to a Fighter with a big sword, and he shouldn't be. Attempts to make the two "balanced" just become absurd, as World of Warcraft has shown.

PSeitz 12y ago
Yes, I love how unbalanced Baldur's Gate 2 sometimes is. I think this makes it actually a great game.
Qworg 12y ago
A player shouldn't have to play your game just to learn in the end game that their fighter isnt going to cut it and they'll have to reroll as a wizard. That sucks (and is bad game design). Things shouldn't be perfectly balanced, but all play styles should be equally viable.
- apalmer 12y ago
  I mean but one has to expect this. In what sane world is a wizard and a fighter going to be equivalent? I think the main thing as pointed out is that in seeking balance a lot of 'fun' or 'interesting' elements have to be thrown out.
  - saucetenuto 12y ago
    It's fine if your world is designed this way, but in that case you shouldn't be allowed to play as a fighter. Do it like Magicka, say, and offer your players their choice of wizards.

Someone1234 12y ago

I know I'll sound like a broken record, but honestly that's why WoW got worse and worse over time. As balance improved fun went down. It seemed like in classic there were all kinds of hidden tricks, and bugs to exploit. Most of which were pretty harmless. However the best players knew all the tricks and used them to their advantage. If you wanted to do some of the top tier content you essentially were required to know tons of little tricks to min/max the game. Now everything is super streamline, no tricks, everything is documented. But the game is a little less fun. Instead of finding fun, we now have to be handed it. Plus the game is orders of magnitude easier... When was the last time you died in a 5 man?

slm_HN 12y ago
>As balance improved fun went down. I don't think balance ruined WoW, I think it was that Blizzard just kept dumbing it down. Once they decided that every single player gets to do every single thing in the game it was ruined because you have to make everything so accessible. I remember killing C'Thun... we had a diagram on where to stand, responsibilities for which stalks to kill and in which order, hell, even running into the room wrong could wipe the raid. We were the only guild on the server who could clear AQ40. It was challenging and it was fun. Now 25 strangers can queue up in raid finder and just mow down every boss, usually without even knowing a strat. Just move out of the fire and cycle your 3 buttons. All of the complexity has been relentlessly striped out of Wow. What's left is a game where you can logon, join a raid, kill the biggest boss in the game, and logoff all within an hour or so. They took chess and turned it into tic-tac-toe.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  Actually the high end fights now are, in general, far more technical than they were in vanilla WoW (BWL, AQ40, Nax). They just offer dumbed down versions ("LFR") for the masses -- which is fair enough. Everyone pays for the content, why shouldn't they get to see it? It's no different from "please don't hurt me" difficulty levels in FPSs. My big problem with WoW is the reduction of classes to three roles (tank, healer, DPS) where class is really just a skin on the role, and the reliance on repetition. (We must have cleared some 40-man raid zones over fifty times.) Scripted technical boss fights are, in my opinion, the equivalent of shooters where you need to memorize where every enemy will appear -- it's "challenging" but it's not interesting.

bitwize 12y ago

StarCraft isn't just a game. It's a sport. When you're creating a sport, you have to eliminate factors outside of player skill that could affect the outcome. That's why the characters in vs. fighters, and the races/factions in RTSes, have to be balanced w.r.t. each other.

Fargren 12y ago
Your definition of a sport would exclude Magic: the Gathering, and I guess also poker. I don't think I agree with a definition that claims StartCraft is a sport but excludes those.
- Kiro 12y ago
  May I ask why you didn't say Hearthstone as your card game example? Seems very fitting: also from Blizzard and has one of the biggest e-sport scenes at the moment.

bentcorner 12y ago

I love finding little tricks like this. I recall playing a D&D gold box game and realizing you could prevent trolls from respawning by standing on their corpse. Of course, things go quickly sideways when your fighters that are spawn camping the trolls get knocked out...

simple1 12y ago

The problem with emergence in MMOs is that once an emergent trick is found, it becomes an exploit, and then the emergent behavior has to be eliminated somehow, for the good of the game. For example, in the MMO I am creating, you can catch bats, hold them for a while, and then they become your pets (if you don't hold them long enough, they remain wild). Some people gathered up hundreds of bats, then released them in a small room. When other players came into that room, they were swarmed and die. After letting the trap sit for a while, they would return, cast a fear spell to disperse the bats, and then collect the loot. It was a cool trick, and probably super fun for the players involved. But, if I left the exploit in, it would be happening all the time, and would wreck the game for everyone else. In single player games, the worst a player can do is beat the game using an exploit, which is not necessarily bad.

sukilot 12y ago
If you don't want PvP, turn off PvP. There a million ways for players to kill each other.
- simple1 12y ago
  The problem was not with the killing itself, but that it was instant death with virtually no way to escape and no warning.

Gbits 12y ago

Funny you should mention that. I wrote this story, and Jeff spoke about Blizzard specifically (in a clip that didn't make the cut - lord that story was long already). Paraphrasing heavily, he said that they're one of the companies currently exerting the tightest control -- but that they're also one of the best companies in the world for taking an incredibly complex game experience and making it available and accessible to, as commenters above point out, 25 random people on a moment's notice. He saw it as one thing following from the other.