[Article] Hardcore Game Design and Subsystems

I. Hardcore Game Design

Path of Exile bills itself as a game for hardcore gamers, by hardcore gamers. But what does that really mean? Hardcore as in Hardcore League? No, don't be silly. Instead, it refers to the lengths to which the GGG team is willing to go in certain elements of game design.

For some clarity on this issue, here's a montage of quotes from Mark Rosewater, the lead designer for the Magic: the Gathering trading card game.

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The design of most products is about making things as easy as possible. When you're designing a lamp, the goal is to make the lamp simple to turn on and off. Game (and puzzle) design is unique in that the goal of the design is to actually make the thing harder to do. Once you've set out the goal of the game, the next part of the design is to make meeting that goal a challenge.

Let's suppose that a game designer set out to design a game lamp. Well, how to turn on the lamp wouldn't be obvious. The switch wouldn't be where you expect it or even necessarily look like a switch. How the lamp moved or plugged in would not be simple and the reason being that the point of a game lamp would be for users to figure it out.

Game playing is essentially about overcoming obstacles. You want to do your thing and the game, of its own accord or often through the other players, tries to stop you. Accomplishing your goal is fun because there's a rush in completing a difficult task. Biologically, the body has to be able to motivate you to do things, so it tends to reward you chemically and emotionally (some would argue those are the same thing) for doing them. As a game designer, you have to build the hurdles. Make them too easy and there's no thrill in victory. Make them too hard and the player never gets to win.

Regular readers of my column known that my favorite mantra is "restrictions breed creativity." Nowhere is this more true in game design than rule creation. Your job as a game designer is to force your players to have to be creative to overcome the restrictions you create. Spend time thinking about what goals you've set and how your players would naturally want to complete those goals. Then start throwing obstacles in their way.

"Hardcore," in this case, refers to the relationship between the obstacles game designers create and the sense of victory that players feel. For each individual gamer, there is a threshold point of difficulty past which the gamer won't ever progress — if a game is too hard, the player won't ever win. However, the closer you get to that threshold, without actually crossing the line, the more intense the feeling of victory is. "Hardcore" gaming refers to game design that flirts with that threshold, like a blackjack player flirts with 21, and is tailored towards players with higher than average thresholds

Specifically, "hardcore" means making the game difficult enough where you can't cater to everyone's threshold and, knowing that increasing the difficulty for the high-threshold people would increase their enjoyment but prevent some low-threshold players from ever winning... you decide to increase the challenge anyway. Thus, by definition, hardcore is not status quo; hardcore is not mainstream. A hardcore game that becomes mainstream indicates a shift in player difficulty thresholds, which may indicate that the game is historically significant... but since the threshold has shifted, it is, by definition, no longer hardcore.

Not saying, of course, that we want PoE to be a super-elitist game that no one could beat. Far from it. However, for the most part, this has been a community of hardcore gamers who want (need?) challenges beyond that which we have found elsewhere, but managed to find them here; the game is not meant to take the hardcore concept to a ridiculous extreme, but to a level that differentiates it from other ARPGs. And, as designers, it's GGG's job to give us the hard stuff that others won't. GGG's design principle is the puzzle lamp principle.

II. Subsystems

This principle applies not only to part of the game, but to the entire game. This is a point on which I think there is much confusion. Virtually everyone on these forums understands that the core obstacles — the monsters — are supposed to be difficult and variable enough where many different strategies may be required (the variance thing applies most to endgame maps). However, I think a lot of people erroneously believe that supporting game subsystems, such as trading items between players and passive skill customization, should be designed to be as "smooth" and "user-friendly" as, say, a normal lamp.

This is flawed design for hardcore gaming, as we can see in Diablo 3. The endgame there was designed to be challenging, but by leveraging a subsystem that was designed to be easy — the auction house system — players were able to hyperefficiently prepare themselves for those challenges, making something that should have been challenging trivially easy.

Most people, by now, understand that failure, so there is a lack of public support for auction houses. However, that public sentiment is specific to auction houses. What is generally not understood is the principle behind that failure and how it's a bigger issue than that one subsystem.

Game subsystems should be like the game lamps Mark Rosewater mentioned. Should you be able to turn them on? Yes. Should it be easy? No.

Two common examples from complaints common to these forums recently:
1) Full respecs should not be allowed. Part of what makes PoE a hardcore game is that all kinds of passive builds are possible, but investing in any one build requires a lot of commitment. Allowing full respecs makes the lamp too easy to turn on, minimizing the effort required to try out new builds. Instead, allowing many characters per account allows players to experiment with various builds, and Orbs of Regret minimize the effect of misclicks or minor misallocations.
2) Floating combat text should not be enabled. A good way to alleviate difficulty is to know exactly what is going on, and a good way to know that in an ARPG is floating combat text. Knowing how effective you are is one thing, it allows you to brag about your character or reach milestones in character development. Knowing the statistics of the monsters is something different. Keeping the monster stats relatively hidden allows for additional surprise when you do manage to turn the lamp on, and has minimal impact on whether an appropriately geared/leveled character can actually progress or not.

There may be other examples in the future, but those are the two most prominent. And I'm also not saying the right answer is always to make things more difficult; the game should be beatable, because players winning (eventually) is a good game design goal. We just want eventually to not happen too fast. If it did, it just wouldn't be hardcore.

Quotes taken from Rosewater's dailymtg.com articles "Ten Things Every Game Needs" (1st, 3rd, 4th paragraphs) and "Why We Make Bad Cards Redux" (2nd paragraph, which adds more detail on his "puzzle lamp.")

This right here.

This is a good post. This guy gets it.

Updated main post with more detail and some additional opinions. (Hypnagogia's continued approval not guaranteed.)

Bravo.

*tear rolls down from eye*

This is what we all want to say but haven't been quite so eloquent enough to say it.

Thank you for writing this out for us.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

II. Subsystems

This principle applies not only to part of the game, but to the entire game. This is a point on which I think there is much confusion. Virtually everyone on these forums understands that the core obstacles — the monsters — are supposed to be difficult and variable enough where many different strategies may be required (the variance thing applies most to endgame maps). However, I think a lot of people erroneously believe that supporting game subsystems, such as trading items between players and passive skill customization, should be designed to be as "smooth" and "user-friendly" as, say, a normal lamp.

This is flawed design for hardcore gaming, as we can see in Diablo 3. The endgame there was designed to be challenging, but by leveraging a subsystem that was designed to be easy — the auction house system — players were able to hyperefficiently prepare themselves for those challenges, making something that should have been challenging trivially easy.

Most people, by now, understand that failure, so there is a lack of public support for auction houses. However, that public sentiment is specific to auction houses. What is generally not understood is the principle behind that failure and how it's a bigger issue than that one subsystem.

Game subsystems should be like the game lamps Mark Rosewater mentioned. Should you be able to turn them on? Yes. Should it be easy? No.

As both a player and a retired programmer analyst with some experience in game design and development, I agree with the majority of the OP's post. However, the section on subsystems is one where I disagree partially.

In particular, applying that to the vendor interface for example. There we have a really clunky user interface, that is not good game design - rather bad user interface design. It doesn't make the game harder, simply makes it more of a mind numbing chore.

When it comes to subsystems, they must be taken on a case by case basis and examined carefully for their impact on the main course of play.

Well said.

Oh shit, so I clap and it turns on, i had no idea!


Damn man, this is on point

Thank you

Nice post OP. I agree mostly except the subsystem part about showing damage numbers.
As Omnivore61 had pointed out, artifically restricting certain elements (such as user interface) in order to create difficulty is not real difficulty. A perfect example would be the diablo 3 identify all, which people will accidentally swap and sell their equipments. Certainly you cannot say it is a hardcore desisgn to make the game more difficult by making you lose your gear.

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Omnivore61 wrote:

As both a player and a retired programmer analyst with some experience in game design and development, I agree with the majority of the OP's post. However, the section on subsystems is one where I disagree partially.

In particular, applying that to the vendor interface for example. There we have a really clunky user interface, that is not good game design - rather bad user interface design. It doesn't make the game harder, simply makes it more of a mind numbing chore.

When it comes to subsystems, they must be taken on a case by case basis and examined carefully for their impact on the main course of play.

I think the question to ask in situations like this is always "what defeats the player?" If the answer is "the user's past choices regarding passive allocation," that's an example of a good challenge. If the answer is "I can't stack portal scrolls in this interface, although I'll be able to stack them as soon as I click confirm," then that's something that should probably be smoothed out, "normal lamp" style. I really can't think of any borderline cases here where it wouldn't be very easy to use the "what defeats the player?" test to easily determine whether or not the system should be given user-friendly improvements.

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cleric_01 wrote:

A perfect example would be the diablo 3 identify all, which people will accidentally swap and sell their equipments. Certainly you cannot say it is a hardcore desisgn to make the game more difficult by making you lose your gear.

It's actually extra-bad design, because you made the game easier in an area it shouldn't be (automatically identifying all items instead of making it an optional thing you only use on items you care about; this was compounded by not being able to sell unidentified), and then additionally making it too easy to accidentally equip your junk rares (an attempt at making gear-swapping super-easy - perhaps yet more bad design - but in reality just made things harder in a bad way). Unfortunately, D3 is full of instances where you can spot 3 to 4 instances of bad design within very, very close proximity to each other.

good post meng