Anonymous asked:
askagamedev answered:
Sure. It’s kind of like a magic trick - knowing how it is done often robs the audience of some of the wonder and excitement of the experience. There are a good number of examples in past games that mislead or downright lie to players about how things work in order to make the experience better for them. Here are a few examples of misleading or non-obvious mechanics we put in place for a better player experience:
- In one FPS I worked on, while you were grabbing an enemy, you just couldn’t drop below 50% health. Getting killed while performing a grab attack is not fun.
- In Bioshock, the first shot from an AI always misses the player. It acts as a warning shot.
- Gears of War gave players new to multiplayer some significant buffs that would diminish after each kill they obtained.
- Fortnite drops new Battle Royale players into matches with bots instead of other players to give them a much better chance at winning and/or doing well.
- Lots of games have anti-streakiness code in their random numbers because real randomness is often streaky but human perception of what it should be isn’t. Random things “feel” better if they aren’t streaky, so we fake it for players. The Fire Emblem series actually rolls twice for its combat math and picks the better number for the player.
- Street Fighter has a “magic pixel” where the fighters’ life bars don’t evenly distribute the fighters’ health pools. The red portion of the life bar actually represents significantly more health than it looks like. This allows for a better chance at a close match and a comeback.
- In games with brawler combat like the Arkham titles, enemies will often move themselves into position for players to continue the combo and hit them next, rather than the ideal position to hit the player. They also often will only attack one at a time in clearly telegraphed moves. The rest of the time, they’ll move forward in a threatening manner and then back off without attacking at all.
As you can see, a lot of these are designed to make a player feel better about something, or to smooth out a potentially rough experience for somebody. Humans are not rational creatures, despite what we might like to believe. We’re driven by our emotions, so little bits here and there to massage that experience will make it feel better - especially to new players. In the case of Amnesia, the lie helps make the game feel better. If you want to see how this was done even earlier, check out the [details of the Pac-man ghost AI]. A huge amount of AI personality was instilled into the AI characters by giving them each a different desired destination.
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Supposedly in the very last moments of gameplay in Portal 2, it autocorrects so that you can’t lose by firing a blue portal when you should’ve fired orange, or vice versa
Incidentally, I absolutely hate when games lie to me or invisibly changes game mechanics while I’m not looking in a way I’m not supposed to notice - and it retroactively tarnishes my memory of the game if I learn it later.
An example that didn’t suck - Doom 2016 never deals damage to you when the game takes control from you. It’s not spotlighted it just never happens and it’s kind of obvious that it never happens.
An example that was severely tarnished in my memory - Farcry 3 dials down the enemy difficulty when there are more enemies. I felt really good about completing the game on the highest difficulty and really fucking let down when I learned that actually the difficulty was dialed down several times along the way.
Then it doesn’t count you twatwaffles! It’s not an achievement to accomplish something you can’t fail at! You’re like a dungeon master telling me I didn’t really defeat the dragon because he fudged a critical hit so I wouldn’t get murked like a chump on turn 2.
It’s even worse when you can easily discover the lie just by playing the game, like in Subnautica.
I honestly don’t know what part of Subnautica you’re talking about?
EDIT: But the way I see it, if the rules are weird in the service of gameplay that’s fine (e.g. in Doom the demons suddenly don’t know how to hit if you’re not in control) but if the rules are lying to me in the service of gameplay I want my money back.
Random things “feel” better if they aren’t streaky, so we fake it for players. The Fire Emblem series actually rolls twice for its combat math and picks the better number for the player.
And in doing so, you perpetuate and worsen the problem. Fire Emblem seems to me like the worst entry on the list that lies about not only its own rules/interface but the rules of probability in general. This results in players who have an expectation that 50% means 75%, and 80% means 96%.
Never mind getting my own money back, I would jokingly suggest the Fire Emblem devs should pay a fee to the developers of other RNG-dependent games for shitting up the commons.
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Old X-COM had an odd mechanic where a shot would roll to hit, then if it missed, roll for where the shot goes instead… in a 3D location manner, which meant the shot might still pass through the alien’s hitbox and hit anyway. Or, if you were firing into a dense cluster of aliens, you might hit someone else than your intended target, which was neat. This cuts both ways, don’t cluster up your soldiers in front of spray-and-pray aliens. :-D Kinda cheaty in that actual accuracy was higher than displayed accuracy, but in ways that made sense and were fair.
New XCOM has much more explicit cheating: on low difficulties, every missed shot adds +10% to the hit of your next “reasonable” shot, stacking until a shot hits. (”Reasonable” meaning it needs 50% base chance to hit.) If you have less than 5 soldiers, you get +10% to hit and aliens get -10% to hit for every soldier who died that mission. Both of these are removed on the highest, honest difficulty setting.
