This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options.
I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!"
You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people's time. Doubly so if most of the choice space can be safely eliminated by savvy players. The internet exists after all and someone is going to do the math. Why would you gate the competitive portion of your game behind convex optimization problems? Certainly not to make things more fun.
Some examples of these trends are load-outs in FPS games. Every gun now has
tradeoffs for sights, barrel, under-barrel, magazine, ammo, etc. and these choices only come after you've chosen a class/weapon. When the core of an FPS is tactical positioning and aim, these options feel like a cheap gimmick in order to milk slightly more time out of players. Franchises like Halo and Battlefield fell for this trap and have completely ruined their reputations.
You can still give players choices that _add_ to the core gameplay like counterstrike does with the round economy. If the entirety of a choice you're giving a player happens in a menu, that should be a red flag. The game design industry needs to less emphasis on statistics/combinatorics and more on gameplay/narrative.
It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty".
The most important thing: Don't tell others how to play. Don't tell them "you should pick X because it's the best" unless they explicitly ask for it. Let people play their own way, and don't push how you play games onto others.
> It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty".
Exactly. These choices don't affect players in the same way.
> The most important thing: Don't tell others how to play. Don't tell them "you should pick X because it's the best" unless they explicitly ask for it. Let people play their own way, and don't push how you play games onto others.
I definitely agree with you here.
As a designer, you're defacto telling people how to play by designing choices like this. You're punishing casual, competitively natured players with >700,000 options because they care about performance.
If you don't derive fun from winning the trade-offs are mostly irrelevant and you can simply ignore most of the problem, choose a configuration based on fewer/simpler dimensions (I'm going to pick yoshi and the egg kart because that's awesome), and avoid most of the decision space. This type of player probably wouldn't care if all the configurations performed the same or more likely could be annoyed that their desired configuration performs strictly worse. (If the choices meaningfully affected gameplay, like having an ability to lay eggs or something, that's different).
On the other hand if the dedicated, competitive players are going to solve the optimization problem and coalesce configurations down ~10 choices. The problem space is also irrelevant to this type of player.
But posing this problem negatively affects competitive people who aren't dedicated to the game. Now they have to consider an intractable problem while their friends are waiting on them so they can actually play the game. I know this because I've sat there plenty of times while friends scroll through all the different options wheels/karts/gliders/characters for minutes until they gave up and said something like "Whatever, I just want to race".
So why not just give 10 performance profiles and the same combination of cosmetic choices as before?
In Mario Kart in particular, you might explicitly not want the fastest/highest acceleration cart (kart?) as a new player, especially if you're a younger or older player. Going fast is a handicap if you can't stay on the track at those speeds.
> It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty".
Then why don't you make sure all the pretty wings are on the Pareto frontier?
Back when I was playing D&D 4th edition (fairly casually), I started by assuming that all the fighter "feats" were basically equivalent from a damage perspective, and only differed in application or aesthetics. Then I did the math, and determined that there was a 2-3x difference between the weakest and the most powerful feats; so naturally I chose the most powerful ones. But I didn't really enjoy that process -- I felt obligated to do it because... I mean, I'm trying to increase in power? That's the whole point of the game?
Why should choosing an aesthetically pleasing power mean my character is weaker?I would have had much more fun if they'd balanced the feats such that they were all about the same (or at least, all on the Pareto frontier). Then I could really have chosen based on personal taste or roleplaying reasons, rather than trying to avoid having a nerfed character.
ETA: I feel like StarCraft does this very well overall. If nobody's using a unit, they buff in the next balance update; if everyone's using a unit, they nerf it in the next balance update. The result is that there are millions of potentially successful strategies, even at the grandmaster level, as long as you play efficiently. That's a lot more fun to me than 700,000 strategies, of which only 20 are realistically going to win at high levels.
Yeah, especially for a game like Mario Kart, I'm not too obsessed with making sure I'm picking the most efficient combination of things. I'm picking what I think looks cool or has the most fun personality (in the case of characters) for me in the moment. For that, having more choices is (mostly) better.
Even something like Counter-strike, where a lot of the differences are pretty subtle, I liked having a good amount of choices just to play a couple rounds with a gun that feels slightly different and see how well I do. I had my preferences but I played with them all.
That being said I do think there's something to be said for not just dumping a bunch of options on a player and be like "you figure out how you want to play", even though I've been guilty of that in a couple past games I've designed, thinking more options is better.
Like I remember on of my sequels to a game I tried all sorts of ideas for how to change up options, and instead of pinning down that "okay the hand size is going to be 5 tiles, and if you place next to an ally tile you'll bump them up by X amount, and you can choose what set of numbers the tiles can be (like 1-5, or 1-10, or 1-20)... with my new sequel I've mostly pared it down and I'm taking away game options, because I bet almost no one did anything but use the defaults anyway. At least before I hid them in an options menu you had to choose to open.
Gameplay and narrative don't hook into that acquisitive gambler's streak nearly as well as "all the unlockable things".
I do agree with you, generally, that this is a bit of a cheap trick and far too ubiquitous. However, there is something to be said for giving the player "things to do" like unlocking content. It does add to the experience to have a sense of "this is why I'm still playing".
Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a values statement of the following form: "good games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot of people the frippery is crucial to the enjoyment of the game. (And these are hardly the only two reasons people play games, e.g. there's socialization, mastery, etc.)
And even in the case of the OP, concluding that most items are useless is not a substantiated conclusion. As the OP notes, a Pareto frontier is N-dimensional, and the number of points lying on the frontier grows exponentially as we expand to consider all the other variables. Just because a meta exists among "top players" doesn't mean that's the only valid choice; different people can optimize for different things (and even top players are frequently irrational, lazy, and/or cargo-culting).
> Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a values statement of the following form: "good games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot of people the frippery is crucial to the enjoyment of the game. (And these are hardly the only two reasons people play games, e.g. there's socialization, mastery, etc.)
I don't think my comment was implying any of this.
I was mostly trying to say something along the lines of "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay" rather than discuss micro-transactions, progression systems, or variance/competitive purity.
> I was mostly trying to say something along the lines of "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay"
Consider that Tetris is NP-hard. :) Giving the player optimization problems is one of the fundamental pillars of game design. For many, it's more fun to make a deck of cards in Magic or Hearthstone than to actually play the deck against an opponent.
I'm not here to argue about semantics. The first line of my OP said "options for the sake of options" and then "choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience". The comment you're replying to said "something along the lines of" to encourage readers not to get hung up on the exact wording.
I'd appreciate a bit of a more charitable interpretation of my responses.
Given the context, a more charitable interpretation would have been something like:
"solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay...*in and of itself*"
> Giving the player optimization problems is one of the fundamental pillars of game design.
Yes, but this is not what I'm talking about at all. I don't know how you're interpreting my position as being against optimization problems in games.
> Consider that Tetris is NP-hard. :)
Would you consider that the choices that make Tetris NP-hard significantly enhance the core game experience?
How about MtG or Hearthstone?
---
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Worse than that, it makes marks of some players. The serious player doesn’t just have experience and technique working for them, they can now start with a character that can beat the newbie with one hand tied behind their back.
We all know that guy you can’t play games with because he sucks all the fun out of it for anybody else. As a game seller this isn’t just bad, it’s stupid.
In the ARPG/Diablo genre, Path of Exile is one of the worst offenders. Each character progresses through a 2D locally-connected graph of over 1300 passive skill nodes, of which you only get to pick about 100, where the "undo" action is expensive or impossible.
That said, the sheer amount of options leads to a class of expert players and build-makers that normal players can rely on. I just wish the game itself provided more tools for navigating it (like an ingame build-guide system).
Path of exile is my favourite game and I've played it thousands of hours and have multiple 40/40 leagues, mirrors, and lvl 100 characters. My point, without elaborating, is there are people like me who enjoy the complexity of the game, it's totally fine if you don't but the joy of having almost unlimited things to discover and get over roadblocks is what makes poe amazing to me. It's a game that you're meant to dedicate a lot of you're time to it and it's totally fine if you don't like that, just wish people wouldn't yuck someone else's yum. Lastly, I'm likely not representative of the poe's general population but the game becoming more popular league by league should be a useful indicator that whatever they're doing is working.
A game like mario cart should have two modes. Party mode, where everybody is playing on the same terms. Expert mode, where macro plays a bigger role.
Even during parties, the properties of choosing different characters do make the game more dynamic which in the end means more fun. What sucks is when one of the players have spent the whole week before plugging all the numbers into Excel and knows how beat everyone else optimally. But where do you draw the line? Is this more unfair than practicing driving one track a whole week?
One have to accept that games can not be always fair. Same thing in sports, try playing tennis vs someone who has competed before, a casual player will not stand a chance to even hit a single ball, even if you give the pro a much worse racket.
Balancing a game to allow casual and pro players to compete on equal terms is extremely difficult and can often backfire into making the game extremely trivial, only depending on roll of dice. Knowing if you are playing an excel-game or a reflex-game should be presented clearly to makes things a bit more fair.
This is why I preferred Shadow Warrior 2 to Borderlands. Millions of randomly generated guns sounds nice, except they're mostly trash. I'd rather have the 70 hand-crafted options in SW2.
Nah, Mario Kart 8 is great. You don't _need_ to min/max every stat. Actually, you specifically have to press a specific button to even see the stats at all. Otherwise, everything just appears to be cosmetic.
For the most part, once you've got your kart dialed it. It is still "pick your character and go". It's one of my goto games for "I want to do something for a few minutes to unwind" (which usually ends up with me more frustrated and on edge than unwound haha).
yeah but the new go-kart dynamics are all strange to me with the glider sails and other new gameplay stuff it makes it feel way different then the simplistic N64 version
I have not played many recent games but Scorched Earth was always one of my favorites. The economy allowed you to discover new weapons as you progressed in skill. I do agree as the number of combinations increases that seems like it would take away from the novelty of getting a new item. After all, novelty seeking is what we want, not mindless optimization.
Storyline is nice but if I want to watch a movie I'll pop in a DVD and get popcorn. Cutscenes get in the way after the first play through. Timeless games have some storyline but let you enjoy the game even if you skip the cutscenes.
I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!"
You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people's time. Doubly so if most of the choice space can be safely eliminated by savvy players. The internet exists after all and someone is going to do the math. Why would you gate the competitive portion of your game behind convex optimization problems? Certainly not to make things more fun.
Some examples of these trends are load-outs in FPS games. Every gun now has tradeoffs for sights, barrel, under-barrel, magazine, ammo, etc. and these choices only come after you've chosen a class/weapon. When the core of an FPS is tactical positioning and aim, these options feel like a cheap gimmick in order to milk slightly more time out of players. Franchises like Halo and Battlefield fell for this trap and have completely ruined their reputations.
You can still give players choices that _add_ to the core gameplay like counterstrike does with the round economy. If the entirety of a choice you're giving a player happens in a menu, that should be a red flag. The game design industry needs to less emphasis on statistics/combinatorics and more on gameplay/narrative.