[Article] Hardcore Game Design and Subsystems

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Jojas wrote:

If you asked me, the fun went out of gaming when they stopped being developed by bucktoothed fat ones, loners, bespectacled pimplefaces and women with moustaches who don't shave their armpits for an audience of bucktoothed fat ones, loners, bespectacled pimplefaces and girls with moustaches who don't shave their armpits.
The fun went out of gaming when the normal people took over. No normal person would sit for hours over some obscure, ugly, difficult as fuck game trying to figure out ways to beat it, drawing maps and making spread sheets and memorizing keyboard combos and whatnot. No normal person would feel the need to be as dedicated.

So since nowadays everybody and their moms play videogames and since this is where the money is everything is designed for everybody and their moms. And THEY, the normal ones, want to consume a game like a movie, just sitting back, with their brains and their life for this half hour on standby. I don't blame them, don't despise them, it's just the way it is.

Well said. Absolutely true. And made me giggle, too.

A+

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

I don't get this point. That's artificially creating difficulty by keeping players ignorant of what is going on in the game. If you want to continue off of the point, Path of Exile should be just a blank black screen where you don't know what's going on until you die, which the screen will light back up, and a resurrect button will appear.

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mushioov wrote:

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ExiledToWraeclast wrote:

text

Normally you write some serious bullshit but that text had some good points.

Definition of fun: Fun is achieving victory in an isolated system with defined set of rules.

Winning is fun, but so is the process of losing, if by losing you always progress a little. By progress I mean it can be anything from learning a boss' behaviour to jumping at a right time at a cliff to increasing your stash value just a little bit more (PoE HC example).

Don't agree. Losing is never fun. The reason most people play HC isn't to have a pretty stash and a character screen of former HC characters. Playing in a setting where you death = booted from the server, it is a greater challenge, so when you accomplish something under a higher difficulty, the sense of accomplishment is greater.

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Jojas wrote:

If you asked me, the fun went out of gaming when they stopped being developed by bucktoothed fat ones, loners, bespectacled pimplefaces and women with moustaches who don't shave their armpits for an audience of bucktoothed fat ones, loners, bespectacled pimplefaces and girls with moustaches who don't shave their armpits.
The fun went out of gaming when the normal people took over. No normal person would sit for hours over some obscure, ugly, difficult as fuck game trying to figure out ways to beat it, drawing maps and making spread sheets and memorizing keyboard combos and whatnot. No normal person would feel the need to be as dedicated.

So since nowadays everybody and their moms play videogames and since this is where the money is everything is designed for everybody and their moms. And THEY, the normal ones, want to consume a game like a movie, just sitting back, with their brains and their life for this half hour on standby. I don't blame them, don't despise them, it's just the way it is.

On the one hand, the lifestyle you're describing there -- unabashed, full-tilt nerd -- is something that's under attack in our culture, and your point rings true overall.

On the other hand, I think you could have made that point without stereotyping nerd as ugly. Speaking from my personal experience, I was pretty much a clone of that polo-shift wearing guy from SLC Punk -- into various subcultures, very much not mainstream, felt no need for the ridiculous "costumes" my friends were wearing. By the same token, a marathon-running fitness nut can be a grade-A nerd; don't judge books by their covers, or vice versa.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I. Hardcore Game Design
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.

I loved the overall flavor of your original post. This part, however, is more than a little bit hokey.

I have seen hardcore games where facilitative trading subsystems have not made things easy. An easy example would be EVE Online. If anybody tells you that game is easy, they are basically full of shit. However, there are endless facilitative subsystems.

The reason those subsystems worked in that game and didn't break any of the difficulty curve was a simple reason, the economy was extremely well designed with many sinks, and check/balances.

Adding subsystems reveals much about the underlying design of games, for good or bad. If the economy is not well tuned with proper sinks, and trading is introduced, the difficulty plummets. If it is well tuned/designed, introducing these subsystems is natural.

So in the end I agree with you. If you aren't incorporating proper economic sinks, and do not have a system that can keep a stable state for a long period, or at least do something predictable....If you don't have this, adding facilitative trading systems will almost certainly injure the game.

The PoE economy is absolutely not stable.

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HopTortoise wrote:

I have seen hardcore games where facilitative trading subsystems have not make things easy. An easy example would be EVE Online. If anybody tells you that game is easy, they are basically fully of shit. However, there are endless facilitative subsystems.

I think the thing is the ARPGs are simple games at their core, which MMORPGs are not. Ultimately ARPGs about build, and gear, and to a lesser extent smart play. But once you have a good build and strong gear, smart play almost goes out the window, as you end up with a character that's strong enough to be able to play stupidly and still wreck almost everything.

Builds can be figured out and shared in guides, and copied by others.

And gear, not being earned from quests or professions or anything of that sort, is earned from either farming or crafting. And the currency to craft comes from farming, so everything basically goes back to that.

So in a game like this, trading is and always will be a shortcut to better gear. It's inevitably more efficient than farming all of your own items. Playing entirely self-found in this game is completely doable, but it will take a lot longer to get everything you want. The easier and more efficient it is to trade, the less efficient it is to farm, by comparison.

And since much of the difficulty of the game comes down to obtaining the gear that will make your character wreck things in the endgame, trading definitely affects the difficulty of the game. The easier it is to trade, the easier it is to obtain that gear, and the less of a reason there is for players to actually try to overcome the challenges that you have presented for them in the gameplay itself.

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realatomicpanda wrote:

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HopTortoise wrote:

I have seen hardcore games where facilitative trading subsystems have not make things easy. An easy example would be EVE Online. If anybody tells you that game is easy, they are basically fully of shit. However, there are endless facilitative subsystems.

I think the thing is the ARPGs are simple games at their core, which MMORPGs are not. Ultimately ARPGs about build, and gear, and to a lesser extent smart play. But once you have a good build and strong gear, smart play almost goes out the window, as you end up with a character that's strong enough to be able to play stupidly and still wreck almost everything.

Builds can be figured out and shared in guides, and copied by others.

And gear, not being earned from quests or professions or anything of that sort, is earned from either farming or crafting. And the currency to craft comes from farming, so everything basically goes back to that.

So in a game like this, trading is and always will be a shortcut to better gear. It's inevitably more efficient than farming all of your own items. Playing entirely self-found in this game is completely doable, but it will take a lot longer to get everything you want. The easier and more efficient it is to trade, the less efficient it is to farm, by comparison.

And since much of the difficulty of the game comes down to obtaining the gear that will make your character wreck things in the endgame, trading definitely affects the difficulty of the game. The easier it is to trade, the easier it is to obtain that gear, and the less of a reason there is for players to actually try to overcome the challenges that you have presented for them in the gameplay itself.

See, it's happening again. This "the game will melt no matter what" mentality without any real evidence or substance behind it.

The reason why the game would melt with an auction house isn't because this game is "simple at heart," it's because the economy isn't stable.

It is absolutely possible to have a stable economy in this type of game, a situation where the difficulty is NOT ruined by having easy trades and subsystems to support it. It just requires a very well designed, stable economy.

Scottie, I think you gave us an outstanding analysis in your original post. The most important thing I think you touched on, though maybe not directly, was the value of player failure. In a way, I think you can judge how "hardcore" a game is by how punitively that game deals with player error and failure to succeed. Obviously, "hardcore mode" in ARPGs means that your character is dead forever upon dying, which would be considered the ultimate punitive measure. Many other games have softer forms of punishment upon failing. However, there has been a greater and greater push for games to be less punitive as the industry has progressed. Sadly, most gamers simply don't understand why anyone would ever subject themselves to these kinds of rules. In modern Action RPGs, the punishment for dying is a 10 second jaunt back to your body. In MMORPGs, it might be some trivial quantity of currency. In first person shooters, in many cases, you never actually lose any progress at all.

At the vanguard of all of these changes to the industry is a simple line of reasoning: "Why have any form of punishment for player failure at all if failure is unpleasant? Why not remove the prospect of failure entirely?"

But this narrow line of reasoning fundamentally misses the point of punishing players for failure. Nobody enjoys the process of being punished by a game. When I play a game in hardcore mode, I'm not glad to see my character die and I don't enjoy losing my progress. But knowing that my character can die makes every other achievement in the game much more significant. It's a lot like watching sports. Sure, I want my favorite team to win as much as possible, but if I knew the game were rigged so that they would always win, then watching would no longer be fun. In Diablo 3, I played through the entire game on softcore and was bored stiff. It felt like nothing I did really mattered. Sure, I could powergame and try to get gear that afforded my character greater damage or protection, but why did it matter if that protection was made irrelevant by no death penalties? If I could sprint back in 5 seconds to the place I died and resume as though nothing had happened?

But when I played Diablo 3 hardcore, it gave the game a tremendous breath of new life because every piece of gear that gave me an edge suddenly mattered. Efficiency mattered, Concentration mattered. Every click I made had consequence and meaning. Something was at stake.

So as I mentioned before, I think what determines a game is hardcore is the degree to which games punish players for incompetence or failure. And its these types of games I enjoy most. After all, with no prospect of failure, victory is trivial.

One of the best threads I've seen in months.

Amen.

Excellent post, restrictions are good.

The one thing that bugs me about POE and other game design in general is the RNG worship that goes on. I'm not so sure if it's best that game progression is dictated by purely random forces like map drop rates. It's kind of like trying to figure out how to turn on the lamp and the secret is that you were doing it right, you're just an unlucky POS. It's much less satisfying than there being an actual trick and seems like a cop-out to artificially create difficulty. Also leads to learned helplessness.