"I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re making games. We should allow them to go crazy sometimes."
Definitely. And it has to do with the MMOfication of everything.
I'm playing Baldur's Gate 2, and the things you can do as a player in that game are just absurd. You can stop time. You can be permanently invisible and kill bosses without ever being detected. You can summon extremely overpowered monsters.
It's honestly so refreshing to have unique abilities. World of Warcraft ruined a generation of RPG design because devs believed that everything had to be "balanced", whatever that means. So we have a bunch of uninspired game mechanics in a pretty shell.
I'm glad to see there's people still acknowledging that games do not have to be fair or sane or balanced. Their beauty is in their madness.
And yes, a wizard who can cast Project Image, Spell Immunity: Abjuration, Spell Immunity: Divination, Improved Invisibility, Time Stop, Abi Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Power Word: Stun and Power Word: Kill is not comparable to a Fighter with a big sword, and he shouldn't be. Attempts to make the two "balanced" just become absurd, as World of Warcraft has shown.
A player shouldn't have to play your game just to learn in the end game that their fighter isnt going to cut it and they'll have to reroll as a wizard. That sucks (and is bad game design). Things shouldn't be perfectly balanced, but all play styles should be equally viable.
It's fine if your world is designed this way, but in that case you shouldn't be allowed to play as a fighter. Do it like Magicka, say, and offer your players their choice of wizards.
On the other hand, there are things warriors can do that mages cannot. For example, in many fantasy texts, wizards are social outcasts and warriors are anywhere between accepted (but maybe not highly regarded) members of society all the way through respected members of the court. A warrior and a wizard might not make sense going head to head in combat, but they occupy different places in the social structure.
Low level wizards are incredibly weak, and are basically free kills for anything, fighter or otherwise. It's only if they survive into high levels that they become demigods. Most of the spells I mentioned aren't available till the very end of the game.
This makes sense, as mastery of the Weave grants powers that are physically impossible to perform within the world's natural laws.
Magic by definition is bending/breaking the rules of the universe, and as such it should feel like it if you spend the countless hours needed to master it and persevere to the end. It took me dozens of hours of reading the spell descriptions from scrolls to just understand how spells interacted and worked together. It would have been far easier to say "screw it" and go with a fighter or paladin that focuses on disrupting enemy magic users. But I stuck with it, and am glad I did because using the magic system in BG2 is immensely satisfying. It requires an absurd amount of knowledge and expertise. It rewards future time orientation, patience and planning over impulsive "give me whats best right now".
Fighter and wizard wouldn't be very different if they were equally as effective from level 1 to level cap. They'd just be the same class with different variations of the same skills...which is exactly what happened in WoW.
Furthermore, unless you're soloing BG2, you have a party of six consisting of a variety of classes. Therefore, you'd never have to re-roll as a mage, because there would be a mage in your party ready to make up for any magical shortcomings you may have as a fighter. Your role then becomes keeping him safe and taking care of the less magically inclined enemies.
The MMOification I mentioned also has this issue of only allowing you the control of one character. This means all characters must be jack-of-all-trades, because otherwise someone will have to be stuck doing the less sexy roles such as tanking, healing or buffing/debuffing. Or in the case of the BG2 wizard, being completely useless for half the game.
Multiplayer game design has a long way to go before it reaches the wonders achieved in the past decade in single player games.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that enemy wizards also turn all of your strengths against you, because the player does not have any particularly special powers that enemies are denied. In fact, the player is at a far lower level for most of the game than enemies encountered and must rely on wits alone to survive most fights. There's a mod (Sword Coast Stratagems) that enhances enemy AI, and it is universally acclaimed as making BG2 into one of the most difficult games in existence. Every fight becomes a high stakes chess match...one small mistake leads to instant death. Aside from Dark/Demon Souls, I don't know of any games that come close to this level of tactical difficulty. I find these experiences to be immensely rewarding, and have a hard time playing mainstream games because they seriously lack this element.
One of the things I liked about BG was that it faithfully implemented all kinds of loopholes in the AD&D rules (which have since been "balanced" more-or-less out of existence). E.g. the optimal way to create magic users was as two-classed (indeed the female character you pick up is designed to be turned into a two-classed mage). So you go to level 5, say, as a warrior, then switch to mage (starting at level 1 all over again, but with warrior hit points).
Indeed, I didn't comment on multi or dual classing because that just changes everything. I haven't played any of the 3rd/4th/5th edition games, so I am unfamiliar with those rule sets. But I wouldn't be surprised if multi and dual classing were heavily nerfed. They really are just too much...unless your character is actually a demigod.
But again, the fact that they allow you so much freedom in creating your character is incredible. You can even triple class! I sincerely miss this kind of freedom combined with the incredible depth of the AD&D 2nd ed rules.
I'm looking forward to Pillars of Eternity, but I'm quite sure that mechanically it won't be nearly as fun as BG2. Those developers just know better than to implement such insane mechanics again. Which is why it won't be nearly as entertaining.
Starting with 3rd edition, two-classing is completely nerfed. Multi-classing is the norm (each time you go up a level you pick a class to level in) but unless you pick highly compatible classes you just create a basket case.
The problem with emergence in MMOs is that once an emergent trick is found, it becomes an exploit, and then the emergent behavior has to be eliminated somehow, for the good of the game.
For example, in the MMO I am creating, you can catch bats, hold them for a while, and then they become your pets (if you don't hold them long enough, they remain wild). Some people gathered up hundreds of bats, then released them in a small room. When other players came into that room, they were swarmed and die. After letting the trap sit for a while, they would return, cast a fear spell to disperse the bats, and then collect the loot.
It was a cool trick, and probably super fun for the players involved. But, if I left the exploit in, it would be happening all the time, and would wreck the game for everyone else. In single player games, the worst a player can do is beat the game using an exploit, which is not necessarily bad.
I know I'll sound like a broken record, but honestly that's why WoW got worse and worse over time. As balance improved fun went down.
It seemed like in classic there were all kinds of hidden tricks, and bugs to exploit. Most of which were pretty harmless.
However the best players knew all the tricks and used them to their advantage. If you wanted to do some of the top tier content you essentially were required to know tons of little tricks to min/max the game.
Now everything is super streamline, no tricks, everything is documented. But the game is a little less fun. Instead of finding fun, we now have to be handed it. Plus the game is orders of magnitude easier... When was the last time you died in a 5 man?
I don't think balance ruined WoW, I think it was that Blizzard just kept dumbing it down.
Once they decided that every single player gets to do every single thing in the game it was ruined because you have to make everything so accessible. I remember killing C'Thun... we had a diagram on where to stand, responsibilities for which stalks to kill and in which order, hell, even running into the room wrong could wipe the raid. We were the only guild on the server who could clear AQ40. It was challenging and it was fun. Now 25 strangers can queue up in raid finder and just mow down every boss, usually without even knowing a strat. Just move out of the fire and cycle your 3 buttons.
All of the complexity has been relentlessly striped out of Wow. What's left is a game where you can logon, join a raid, kill the biggest boss in the game, and logoff all within an hour or so.
Actually the high end fights now are, in general, far more technical than they were in vanilla WoW (BWL, AQ40, Nax). They just offer dumbed down versions ("LFR") for the masses -- which is fair enough. Everyone pays for the content, why shouldn't they get to see it? It's no different from "please don't hurt me" difficulty levels in FPSs.
My big problem with WoW is the reduction of classes to three roles (tank, healer, DPS) where class is really just a skin on the role, and the reliance on repetition. (We must have cleared some 40-man raid zones over fifty times.) Scripted technical boss fights are, in my opinion, the equivalent of shooters where you need to memorize where every enemy will appear -- it's "challenging" but it's not interesting.
What's wrong with their changes? You sound like a nutcase if you think that having to coordinate diagrams on where to stand, and discussing the required method for "running into the room", are fun whatsoever. Video games are not chess... except maybe video game versions of chess. Excluding 90% of the population from enjoying these areas of the game would be a horrible plan. When the amount of time and effort needed to play a game requires one to be unemployed and without any worldly responsibilities... that's just going too far. A game like WoW should not encourage people to drop out of school or lose their job because they need to spend 3 months of 18 hours a day trying to figure out how to defeat C'Thun.
Funny you should mention that. I wrote this story, and Jeff spoke about Blizzard specifically (in a clip that didn't make the cut - lord that story was long already). Paraphrasing heavily, he said that they're one of the companies currently exerting the tightest control -- but that they're also one of the best companies in the world for taking an incredibly complex game experience and making it available and accessible to, as commenters above point out, 25 random people on a moment's notice. He saw it as one thing following from the other.
StarCraft isn't just a game. It's a sport. When you're creating a sport, you have to eliminate factors outside of player skill that could affect the outcome. That's why the characters in vs. fighters, and the races/factions in RTSes, have to be balanced w.r.t. each other.
Your definition of a sport would exclude Magic: the Gathering, and I guess also poker. I don't think I agree with a definition that claims StartCraft is a sport but excludes those.
May I ask why you didn't say Hearthstone as your card game example? Seems very fitting: also from Blizzard and has one of the biggest e-sport scenes at the moment.
I love finding little tricks like this. I recall playing a D&D gold box game and realizing you could prevent trolls from respawning by standing on their corpse.
Of course, things go quickly sideways when your fighters that are spawn camping the trolls get knocked out...
…and most of the industry I think. It’s very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists because developers have been getting paranoid about players not experiencing their game they want them to experience it.
very hard to find a game these days where emergent gameplay exists
Minecraft?
The internet has a role to play in this, for good or ill. One person's emergent gameplay is another person's exploit. Especially in multiplayer games this makes it a huge risk. In MMOs any unusual gameplay is quickly swept away by a horde of minmaxers - everyone insists on following the optimal path, whatever it might be.
It seems that emergent and scripted mix very badly. If you want emergent gameplay the game has to be built entirely around that, like Minecraft or KSP.
Emergence is a weird concept. I've played a lot of Minecraft and I wouldn't consider it to have a whole lot of emergence. It's certainly open-ended, but once you learn all the gameplay mechanics, the game gets a bit flat. You have to keep yourself interested in it somehow via community or huge building projects or whatever.
It's been awhile since I played Dwarf Fortress, maybe it's changed a lot since then, but I didn't find a lot of emergence there either. Once you get survival down, you have to make your own challenges. That to me is the exact opposite of emergent gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate fantasy simulator, but as a game it's quite flat. A game should be able to hold your interest using nothing more than its mechanics if you want to say it has emergence.
The classic example of emergent behavior is Conway's game of life. The mechanics you see when you start playing the game, are exactly the same mechanics that keeps you playing the game years later. There's a depth to the flatness. But it's not a game. It doesn't present you with hurdles to overcome and a path to winning. It's emergent, but it's not emergent gameplay.
The other example is Nethack. There emergence seems to arise from the sheer combinatorial magnitude of the interactions that are possible. Kill a cockatrice and swing it's body around as a weapon, stoning all in one hit. Make sure you're wearing gloves. Don't descend stairs while you're holding a cockatrice and are burdened, or you'll fall down and the corpse will land on you.
There's also Angband. Here strategy and tactics plays the largest role. You spend a lot of time dying learning different ways of handling the games many, many, many ways of killing you. You learn the finer points of when it's okay to use a teleportation staff or when that's too dangerous and you have to use a scroll of teleport level. The actual difference between the two escape devices is very fine, but having one or the other, and the knowledge and experience to know which to use, provides a hurdle any budding player will have to jump before they can become a good player. There are dozens of these hurdles to learn, all evolved over decades of development.
Roguelikes have been the traditional bastion of emergent gameplay, with simulators and world-building games providing a different kind of combinatorial experience, another sort of emergent gameplay arises in fighting games. Huge depth of gameplay dynamics arise from little invisible boxes moving across the screen. Changing the amount of time an attack lasts by a single frame can make a huge difference in how that character fares against certain opponents.
It appears to me that each form of game, be it the top-down roguelike, RTS, fighting, FPS, has to find its own way to be interesting. MMOs come in many shapes and sizes, people play them for different reasons. I think the ultimate reason why you don't find emergence in MMOs is because combinatorial effects don't work as well when you're compounding human intelligence rather than algorithms. You can strike a careful, delicate balance game design-wise when all you have is one source of intelligence to contend with as opposed to thousands.
This goes to blizzard