Conflicting Desires: Player Power vs. Fun and Challenge

I believe that there is a design oversight that is very rarely addressed or remarked upon.

This is due to the fact that many problems look like they have only one facet to be modified and so they look like impossible balancing acts. Today, let's talk about the player.

There is a fundamental tension between these two statements:

Players want to feel powerful vs. Players want to have fun / Players want to be challenged

1. Players want to feel powerful...


Games are escapism. Players don't want to feel mundane. They want to feel like they've done things right. They want to feel like their character or avatar is great. They want to feel good about themselves, in that they've done well.

In an RPG, this would mean that players don't want to feel weak. They don't want to have to constantly juggle to do impressive feats.

In an FPS, this means that the player doesn't want to feel like he's holding a pea shooter. He needs to have some visible effect on the environment around him.

In short, in a game, the player needs to feel good and have a character that can affect the game environment very strongly. If the player spends 36 hours to whack one thing until it dies, the player instead feels weak, pathetic as if he's not doing something "right" or that he is missing the point.

...and yet.. when players are TOO powerful...


Players, however, get very bored when all they have to do is plow through the same things over and over again. The most engaging game is one where you are constantly challenged a half-step beyond your skill.

If every single enemy dies in easily in a single blow with no chance of success, that may be fun for a little while as the player would have an enormous impact on the world... but if that's the entirety of the game then the game isn't going to be very fun or challenging later.

If every single monster dies in a single bullet or the player is allowed to stock 9 billion health and be utterly immortal, then all that is left for the player's enjoyment is that he "feels" immortal but in reality, there is nothing pushing him to play better or get further "into" the game.

In short, if the player is super powered what gameplay turns into is a simple mindless button pressing exercise that doesn't need the player to actively engage in. A simple robot hitting 'A' for the next 12 hours would play just as well.

...but this seems impossible to get juuuust right...

You can tweak player power all along the spectrum but too little health and the player is frustrated because he dies at everything and too much health and the player feels immortal again.


Some sections might be harder than others.

Or how about, you can set the difficulty of the entire game so that the player has less health on harder difficulties and more health on easier ones...

...but that leaves the player with little choice over the matter since he knows nothing about your game and if he can't change the difficulty level in between sections of the games he is now "locked in" by his decision at the beginning of the game.

...so what's the answer?

The core oversight here in design is: They are too focused on the player and how much he effects the world and vice versa.

When you realize that the player is an active part of the entire game world then the solution becomes easier.

If the player has a large impact on the game (which he should), then the game world has to be interesting and varied enough to handle that impact.

For example, let us take a first person shooter.

If the player can kill every enemy with a single bullet that may still be interesting.  Imagine the movie 'Aliens'. If the aliens are in open terrain, they are reasonably easy to deal with. They are soft, fragile creatures. However, the trick is the aliens are intelligent and swift little buggers. The player has a huge impact on the world, he can easily end the life of an alien with a swift burst of fire but the aliens themselves aren't stupid either. They'll hide in walls, leap in weird patterns or swarm in unconventional ways.

Once you realize that making enemy's more difficult can be done without decreasing the power of the player, then you can see the solution...

I'll give another example, this time in Crono Trigger. Crono Trigger was an excellent example of good game design in this regard. If there was an enemy that seemed to take a million years for you to defeat, it was a sure sign that you were missing something tactically.  The acid slimes that were immune to physical and took 12 hits could be defeated by Crono's slash technique. Every creature had counterattacks that made you stop attacking at specific instances. You could avoid monsters if you were fast enough to move around them.

The players are enormously powerful in Crono Trigger but the game itself was not a boring grind because the encounters the player faced could be dealt and often had to be dealt with in a variety of changing ways; From proper target selection, to holding back on attacks, to attacking in a correct sequence, none of the encounters artificially increased the difficulty by making monsters simply have more defense or do more damage and thus take away from player power.

To rephrase a line from Dungeons and Dragons:

Powerful heroes need Interesting encounters.