Designing for Tier Two, Part Three

Note: This post is part of a series - First Part Here

What happens if you don't introduce a fundamental weakness in a character's area of strength?

In a PvE game, the answer is typically boredom. In a PvP game, the answer is typically toxicity or simply unbalanced.

For example, how many single player games have you played, where the ranged option is so strong, that you might as well never actually melee attack? In Fable, for example, using a bow or magic combat could become so fast, powerful and ubiquitous - that comparatively, melee combat wasn't required and was actually suboptimal in a lot of cases.

In Mass Effect 1, the assault rifles particular balance of firepower, ammo count, accuracy and range meant that there typically was no point in using other weapons (outside of some extreme examples with the Pistol, which you could eventually make into an assault rifle.)

In League of Legends, Jax's main strength is to be an unstoppable one on one killing machine. When Jax is good, any kind of one on one fight is a terrible prospect and distinctly unsatisfying. Poppy's main strength is to assassinate one character without fear or reprisal, again, any kind of one on one fight is a terrible prospect and distinctly unsatisfying.

Why does this happen?

 If your primary strength has no weaknesses in that field, then one of two things typically happen:

1. You fight with your primary strength - ranged combat for instance - and you win and dominate, because you have no weakness. In a PvE game, this tends to lead to boredom. In a PvP game, this leads to unsatisfying gameplay or simply OP gameplay.
2. You fight in something that is not your primary strength - and then you find ways to just ignore those fights so you can fight #1.

For example, you have no incentive to become a better melee character if your character's ranged attacks has no weakness. You simply want to find as many opportunities to fight in ranged - eschewing any case where you might have to melee - You typically only do so if you are forced to.

However, since your ranged attacks have no weaknesses, you don't have to put in a lot of thought to use them in the first place - you simply dominate and so, you have a distinctly boring experience because the best way to play, is to first find a way to use your ranged attack and then grind away with that boring route.

Why can't I introduce weaknesses that aren't in their strength?

I believe that most people intuitively understand that things without weaknesses are inherently uninteresting - The perfect hero is not a character that holds your interest for very long. However, the dominant line of thought is that as long as they have some kind of weakness at all, then it is fine. Designing for Tier Two says this is not the case - It is much much better to have a weakness built into the inherent strength of the character.

For example, let's take Fable again - The crossbow was a very effective weapon - It had high damage, low reload speeds, the ability to combo and the ability to hit multiple targets with a spell and had a range high enough to be safe - It has no essential weakness. You could even spec a repositioning spell if you dabbled in magic so that you could blink away from foes.

The ranged character, frequently had low health or terrible melee ability - However, the key question is: Does this matter? If everyone dies before they enter melee range, does low health or terrible melee ability matter? If you died in one hit in melee but usually killed everyone at range 95% of the time, is this decent gameplay? Is this even interesting gameplay where you stand in a corner and snipe away?

You see, inherent weaknesses in fields other than the one you are using means you typically play so you never have to think about them. If you have an inherent weakness in the area of expertise that you are using, it means you constantly have to overcome them to leverage your core strength.

For example, a sniper rifle or a rail-gun is the perfect example of a ranged weapon with an absurd strength (one shot kills, insane range) with equally absurd weakness (terrible reloading, single target). When you are using a railgun or a sniper rifle, you always keep these two facts in mind, even as you abuse your core strength - adding a level of depth of thought to your play experience, even as you destroy people with your strengths.

It is when your weakness doesn't matter where games start to get boring. Let's say your character is super durable and super fast in melee, but has no ranged attacks as his "weakness." Does this matter? Do you even need to think when fighting? You simply run to the person and hit them until they are dead. Your primary strength overcomes anything that could fight in it, and fighting in your primary strength has no obstacle to overcome - the result is that you always fight in melee but you never really care about what you do.

Designing for Tier Two, Part Two

Note: This post is part of a series - First Part Here

Recapping - Making something memorable and non-toxic means two things:

1) Strongly emphasize one or two elements.
2) However, even in those strengths - have weaknesses in that element to highlight those strengths.

In this part, I'll talk about some examples from a variety of sources.

Color Contrast

You've seen this before - An entire black and white painting with a single element of color. This serves to emphasize both the bleakness of the black and white setting *and* the element of color.

It's fairly trite by now - but it's a good example to lead off of with.

Ninja Gaiden  - Melee Master

One of the keys here, in making you feel like a ridiculous Ninja is actually due to your primary weaknesses - you are bad at ranged combat and you go squish when things look at you the wrong way.

However, it means you have to compensate with mobility, a great melee moveset, evasiveness and flexibility.

Your moves are as powerful as they need to be, to compensate for your essential weakness in those moves. Imagine if Ryu had a rocket launcher in Ninja Gaiden - now.. none of your moveset has any meaning because you wouldn't need to use any of it - This is a common flaw in a lot of games where, since you don't have a weakness to overcome, the game is far less interesting - simply spam your ranged button.

League of Legends - Gragas/Rammus/Riven

One of Gragas' strengths is mobility - he has one of the best moveblocks in the game and excels at chasing. Rammus' strength, is also mobility - he has one of the fastest movement speeds in the game and excels at chasing. Riven's strength, is also mobility - she has the most flexible movement pattern and ignores slowing effects.

How can they compete with each other? It's from the weakness in their strength that they begin to diverge and feel unique.

Gragas' body-slam cannot go through units - He will stop at the first unit hit - He is an amazing chaser/evader, so long as there are no obstacles in the way. Surrounded, Gragas cannot escape, despite the fact that he is a very mobile character. However, Gragas can go through walls, mimcking the Kool-Aid man to some extent - This gives him excellent ambush opportunities. The Gragas player needs to think about how to most effectively use his strongest element.

Rammus is similar in that he cannot go through units - He will stop at the first unit hit. However, Rammus' land-speed is three or four times higher than Gragas' overall. However, since Rammus cannot go through walls either, the paths that Rammus can take are very restricted, even though he can take them at lightning fast speeds, giving the Rammus player the need to think about the path that he takes.

Riven's mobility comes from that fact that she has four distinct surge abilities, enabling her to ignore slows and do lots of fake-outs and weaving through disparate elements - She can also attack on the move with these, providing continuous threat while moving at the same time (or defending, in the case of her last movement ability) However, Riven's mobility is highly localized - She cannot go through walls and her top speed isn't that high, comparable to 550 MS - since each movement ability also moves her a very short distance, the Riven player must chain her movement abilities together to actually reach where she goes - often trading damage in the interim.

Designing for Tier 2, Part One

In a competitive environment (or for enemies in a PvE environment) - How do you design such that things are both memorable and non-toxic?

This is my personal take on it - which I call designing for Tier 2 - For this specific example, I'll be talking a lot about League of Legends champion design, since that's.. currently just what I do.

Making something memorable is actually the easier of the two problems to solve for: Find one or two distinct elements and execute them cleanly and powerfully. In Ninja Gaiden, for instance, you are a ridiculous badass with every move in existence. In Prince of Persia, you are one of the most agile characters in games. In League of Legends, you make a champion excel at one or two particular fields - typically with that in mind as their Marquee ability.

Let's take Blitzcrank, the Steam Golem - Blitzcrank excels at disruption. His marquee ability is Rocket Grab - a move that sends out a tethered fist that grabs opponents back to him. His other abilities also ramp up this disruptive element on blitzcrank - He has a melee range uppercut that disables opponents briefly and he has an area of effect silence on a relatively long cooldown.

If you need to channel a spell or stand in place for a while, Blitzcrank will ruin your day.

But wait, doesn't that sound incredibly frustrating to fight against? Moreover, what if I want to make another champion who's memorable moment is disruption? How would I accomplish that?

This is where designing for Tier 2 comes in, the essential principle being: Even in a character's 'top-of-the-line' strength - they have limitations that they need to overcome.

Or rephrased - The strongest element of a character is still limited and has obstacles that need to be overcome.

Let's go back to each individual ability -

Ranged Grab - Skillshot reliant - The opponent's can dodge - It has a long cooldown.
Power Fist - Melee-only - The opponent can kite or stay out of his range.
Area of Effect Silence - Short duration - Melee-only - Longest cooldown.

Then take a look at the abilities as whole -

It lacks a strong area of effect component disruption.
The disruption durations are very short - the opponent is only locked out from actions for a total of perhaps 0.75 seconds.

When you fight Blitzcrank, even when fighting him in his area of expertise - disruption, you know his set of limitations within that field. It also allows you to design another character that excels at disruption without making Blitzcrank feel poor - because you can design another champion to excel at areas where Blitzcrank is weak at, and have weaknesses where Blitzcrank does not.

But wait - Doesn't that mean Blitzcrank doesn't excel at disruption?

The combination of Rocket Grab and Power Fist means that Blitzcrank's movement disruption is very strong - even if he doesn't actually cause lock-down and is only single-target.

Because Blitzcrank has weaknesses in his area of expertise, you are allowed to ratchet up even farther in terms of their relative strengths - Power Fist has one of the lowest cooldowns in the game for a disable of that type (2 seconds) - while remaining safe due to the fact that his kit is self-limiting, even when successful.

Design Philosophy at Riot Games: PvP

I'm gathering my thoughts on a more comprehensive list of design principles but as a fun experiment, I thought I'd combine some anti-patterns into broader and more easily understood principles.

What I've discovered is that principles tend to be contradictory. You can be devoted to honesty and compassion, for example, but there are always instances where the honest thing to do isn't the compassionate thing to do, and vice versa.

1. Self-Actualization and Responsibility

"I have a large degree of control over my personal success and my failure."
"I am not overtly punished for other people's mistakes."
"My victory or success is determined primarily by things I can control." 

Things that violate this principle:

- Chaos Bolt / Dodge Procs - Excessive random chance in abilities.
- Allied Forced Movement / Friendly Fire - Moves that primarily punish allies on your failure.
- Stat Donations / Self Sacrifice - Moves that make characters excessively dependent on others.

2. Actions are what are important, rather than encyclopedic knowledge

"The majority of my time should not be spent figuring out what just happened, but how I should respond to it."
"What I know about my enemy is less important than how I adapt to my enemy."
 "I should not be punished for things that are impossible to understand while playing."

Things that violate this principle:

- Lack of Natural Counters - Moves that need excessive preparation beforehand to counter.
- Skills that demand a single counter-response - Moves that specifically specify what the opponent needs to do to counter it.
- Highly Abstracted Skills - Moves that don't communicate properly what they do. A wall communicates 'don't move.' A debuff that punishes you for moving does not.
- Skills that scale on non-controllable factors - Moves that target numerical statistics or level count.

3. Interaction

"I win the game by interacting with my opponent."
"My character should not be placed in a position where I am shut-out for the rest of the game."
"In a clash between me and my opponent, the one with higher skill should win."

Things that violate this principle:

- Lack of Counters - Skills with no natural responses.
- Hard Lock/Counter Abilities - Skills or abilities primarily designed to excessively punish one character type or class.
- "Shut out" Specialization - Characters that are designed to be unable to lose in specific scenarios.

...Still thinking on ways to encapsulate all the UI principles.. I mean 'Keep it Simple Stupid' pretty much does all of that.

Theorycraft: Incentivizing Difficulty by giving appropriate experience rewards, Part 1: Goals and Basic

Note: Presented here is probably a rethinking of the old 'encounter' based experience system used in Pen and Paper and how to apply it to the digital games of today.

Goals:

1) Gate progression appropriately as needed to let Content trickle down in a healthy manner
2) Incentivize players to attempt to take on the hardest challenge they can at their level.
3) Disincentivize low-difficult grinding (or ease of repeat grinding)
4) Encourage exploration and experimentation of new areas to avoid stagnation.
5) Create a system in which EXP is distributed based on difficulty.

Major Paradigm Explored: 'The Encounter' as a replacement for individual monster exp.

What is an Encounter?

In lieu of granting players experience primarily on a kill/reward basis, where the act of defeating a monster is what grants the experience or rewards, one should take a larger view at the encounter or set of monsters that the player is dealing with.

For example, let's take a look at a basic case: our player encounters a single slime and defeats it. Let's say that defeating a single slime is worth one experience point.

Now let us say that the player can either take three slimes at a time or one slime at a time. For the sake of this simple example, let's assume that the player has no area of effect attacks and has to attack the slimes one at a time. This means that the player is incentivized in this system to always take one slime at a time, as taking three slimes at a time while only being able to attack one means that the three slime encounter is exponentially more difficult while only linearly more rewarding. This is due to the fact that, while the player is busy with one slime, the other two slimes have free reign to attack him. The time it takes to kill the last slime is multiplied threefold while only giving the reward of killing one slime. Hence, taking one slime at a time is the safest and most efficient way of gaining rewards per slime killed. In this system, the player benefits more from avoiding harder encounters.

However, what if rewards were given on an encounter style basis? What if, instead of assigning an experience value to killing one slime, we gave an experience value to the entire pack? If killing three slimes at a time granted the player five times the experience as killing one slime at a time, the player can then choose to be rewarded according to the difficulty he wants to challenge himself to.

This is the basic paradigm: Rewards must be tailored to the context of the encounter. Rewards given or tailored to individual discrete actions lose out on the essential context and thus promote the maximization of performing those small discrete actions.

The Hack'N'Slash Genre: A look at incetivized repetition, part 1: Summary

How many of you have played Diablo 2? It is one of the pinnacle crowning achievements of the Hack and Slash genre.

However, one of Diablo 2's major gameplay faults can be summed up with one word: Repetition.  Because Diablo 2 is so defining to the genre, most of the Hack and Slash genre has also been infected with similar pains.

So, a quick overview of the things I'm going to talk about, taking Diablo 2 as the specific context for analysis:
 
1. Non-specific loot pinatas - Non-specific loot pinatas are encounters or events that give randomized distributed loot across a wide variety of power levels.  These are fun because you always have the chance of getting some godly item. These tend to be bad because you are then encouraged to always play in the area which is the easiest for you.

2. Encounter makeup - The types of encounters have both direct impacts on repetitiveness and indirect ones. The direct impact is when the monster encounters all tend to be the same horde of monsters fighting you. The indirect impact is when players optimize for 90% of the game and then use similar tactics against the last 10%. This tends to create symptoms such as making AoE spells king, even in single target encounters.

3. Disincentives to party - Diablo 2's party system was a heavy disincentive to partying in many ways. Shared loot drops, experience penalties and insufficient scaling vs. the number of players made solo'ing much more profitable overall.

4. Healing Paradigms and Attrition - Healing paradigms and attrition mechanics help force uncomfortable situations onto the player.  These can create periods where the players must adapt their skills and mechanics to face the situation at hand.

5. Skill Tree and Specializations - Specializations make characters unique but often at the cost of making characters marginal in areas which they did not choose to specialize in. This often leads to the syndrome of players only having or needing one tool to deal with everything in the game.