I have a question which I’m trying to find out for a while and I’d like to ask opinions about it.
So, in game design we utilize both the predictability and unpredictability for a certain degree.
I mean if you do A, B happens, usually when you do A it’s a good idea to let B happen, otherwise the player will be confused for a little and if you introduce more of this discrepancy, the player will be totally confused since they can’t know when to do what to achieve their goals.
On the other hand, there is this interaction among humans. Humans are not reliable, they aren’t predictable, especially when it comes to skills and ability.
The question is, do you think it’s a good idea to build it in to game play?
Let me add some example.
Player is hiding behind the corner, the others are looking for they.
If the player is leaning out to see what’s happening, the chance of their discover is rising a bit.
But, the others have some kind of perception ability which is different for everyone.
So sometimes, when the enemy is looking in the direction of the player will discover them, sometimes not.
What do you think, is it a good idea to utilize such RPG-like elements?
Obviously I have done some basic tests, but I’m very biased, I play(ed) a lot of RPGs both pen&paper and computerized, so I think I have a giant tolerance to unpredictable events.
And of course, it’s applicable to many other nuances of the game play, but the question is if it’s a good idea to implement and if it is to what degree?
Unpredictability is a tricky topic in game design. It’s nice to add variance to the game, but you don’t want to annoy players by arbitrarily changing how things work.
A stealth game is a great example as you have pointed out.
In stealth games, there is a learning curve where you start to understand how guards move, what they can see, how far they can see, how effective darkness and cover conceals you.
Learning how this all works is part of the game, but if you start changing things on a per guard basis, you turn your game from a game of skill and practice, into a game of chance, and your learning curve just turns into spaghetti.
Imagine this scenario: You’ve made it past 5 guards in a level, slipping past them in medium darkness at about 10m range, you’re almost at the end of the level and you find yourself in the same conditions for the last guard, so you make your move and - BLEEEP! the guard saw you because his perception stat was 2 points higher than the other guards!
To me, that’s just frustrating, and I would not want to play a game like that.
However, that’s not to say you have to do away with variation completely.
Let say that guard in particular was wearing clearly visible glowing night vision goggles which cast out a beam of green light which shows his extended range. Now we’re adding variance, without the element of chance.
I think it’s fine to have variance, as long as it’s learnable and understandable.
Certain variance is ok, in certain game types.
All is fine, as long you can weight chances, for minimum and maximum chance of happening.
Lets say you fight enemy, and you can hit it with 15 to 20 damage, with some % of critical hit.
You probably take an average of 15-20, before attacking, to evaluate your chances. Extra critics hits are bonus, but shouldn’t be relay on it. In worse case scenario, you should have option of retreat, or relevant escape action.
In RTS for example, you compensate uncertainty, by sending more troops. Probably much more than minimum requirement, to ensure win condition.
But in platform 2d arcade type game, if you got unpredictability of some enemy jumping on you, or maybe not, then your chances to win shrinks dramatically. Which may increase frustration and which reduces enjoyment.
An extremely unpredictable action RPG in which tribes who don’t have salt attempt to massacre tribes who have too much salt all the while everybody agrees salt is bad for their health.
I’m inclined to agree with @BIGTIMEMASTER . There is no absolute correct answer to this. Players enjoy both Frozen Synapse and Dwarf Fortress.
Random musings to consider:
How often is your game intended to be replayed? Single play troughs should have very low levels of randomness. Multi play through games can gain a lot of replay value from random elements.
Make the randomness big. Lots of randomness in small areas doesn’t give that much value, and may frustrate the player. Go for big elements. Game defining enemy encounters. Key story moments. Make all options roughly equivalent in difficulty/enjoyment, but make them very different.
Give the player control over the amount of randomness. Diablo has a great example of this with lightening vs fire damage. The average DPS of both was fairly equivalent. But the RNG was wildly different. With fire the player knew “it will take me 6 hits to kill the enemy”. With lightening the player knew “I could kill them on the first hit, or it could take 30”. Shotgun vs sniper rifles is another good example.
However Diablo (specially Diablo 2 from my memory) was linear as hell (pun intended), I loved it for randomized loot (including names) and maps.
Restarting, or even loading last saved game, has regenerated whole region.
So even playing Normal, Hard, Hell with colleagues online, didn’t made it so boring.
But that was decades ago of course.
Correct. Diablo 2’s quest/story system was completely linear. Drops and encounters were randomized. Maps were a hybrid, there were four maps for each region, and the game loaded a different reason each time you played. It gave the impression of randomness, but after enough playing one tended to learn all of the region combinations.
Yep. It happened that I played once or twice alone D2.
I was able to finish first difficult level. But don’t remember passing second difficulty level, as I get typically bored alone, in mid game.
I hated jungle.
But liked desert.
And of course famous holy Secret Cow Level with Tristram.
Yeah, little things changing randomly is whatever. As in, things that don’t make enough of an effect on the gameplay to cause player to have to consider it carefully. So it’s probably a waste of time then to design some method to make two types of low-level enemies randomly spawn if there is little difference in the practical smiting of the varieties.
But a horde of little enemies, or a chance encounter with a powerful enemy – if player is guessing when this might come and always has to be ready for it, that is a total change of the game dynamic versus if they come at set time/places. If player has to stop and think, “eh, should I go foward as is, or should i grind a bit to get some gold so I can stock potions before I head out, just in case a mini-boss catches my scent.”
That’s the kind of thing that makes player get deeper into the game, and spend more time playing it.
I also really like how Stellaris does random event chains (at least in the early game). Players will randomly encounter starting events. These starting events give the players choices, which each lead down a random branching chain of further events. The whole thing is a massive tree.
The results are often game defining. I had a random encounter with a sentient black hole (random). My empire decided to send scientists to investigate (player choice). The black hole devoured the scientists (random). My empire decided to capture the black hole (player choice). The black hole was caught (random). My empire brought it back to the home planet and built a religion around it (player choice). The black whole escaped and shattered my home world into four desolate asteroids (random). As a result I spent most of the mid game scouring the galaxy to find a race that could reinhabbit my home world. Eventually I uplifted a primitive cockroach species that had a preference for desolate worlds, and resettled them on my home world.
That’s the type of situation where unpredictability shines.
I haven’t played that game, but that sounds like fantastic gaming right there.
Similarly, in The Long Dark, which I always use as an example because not only is it a fantastic game but it’s also a small scale Unity indie title, so I think it’s especially relevant here – but anyway, you can edit random parameters but in the vanilla survival game, where you start and what you start with is random. Sometimes you get an easy start, but one time I started in a blizzard at night with a fucking bear on my trail. My initial reaction was “screw this!” but I decided to just go with it and see if I could survive. After all, that’s what the game is all about. Well, after probably about of an hour of desperate struggling, the Long Dark finally took me, but man what an intense hour of white knuckle gameplay. What makes it so great is that doing your absolute best is mandatory, but it’s not enough. You need some luck as well. So when you somehow just keep going a little longer and a little further, it’s just magic.
I think that positing this as a question of predictability or non-predictability is not the best way to go about it. Generally speaking, I see games as an abstraction of mastery over an environment (just like pretty much every ‘game’ of life). The only difference with RPG games being that the player is (usually) given an identity within a meaningful story while mastering the game world, making it a much more personal and characteristic experience.
The crucial thing is that a game must be able to be mastered, at least to a level of great satisfaction. For me, unpredictability is not so much a tool of generating new gameplay content (as it seems to be often used for, almost always to the detriment of a game) as it is a reminder to the player that they must pay attention or else stumble a bit. It’s a way to say “you can master this game but you will never be 100% comfortable”. It’s a small symbol of the eternal unknown. It’s much more subtle than what it’s generally used for in practice.
It follows that if a game can be mastered, it must be consistent. And this leads to something that I think is almost a rule: If a player is ever faced with a situation where something they thought was true was not true, then there must be another truth that supports every outcome they have faced leading up to and including the current point. This means that underneath everything, there must be structure and logic, and consistency. There must be a truth about the game world that the player can arrive at, eventually, that basically explains everything they have and will encounter in the game and how to succeed with it.
The popular idea (not saying this is what you’re doing, but I think it’s worth mentioning) of springing unpredictability - or worse, sheer randomness - on a player as a sort of pseudo-meaningful experience is in my opinion lazy, unless it’s something fairly irrelevant like varying the colors of the flowers on the field. The reason why is that reality is not random, or if it can be (at the level of our human experience) we haven’t encountered it yet. And our entire consciousness is dedicated to formulating structure and meaning out of what we don’t know and understand, such that throwing a bucket of randomness into a game just because one cannot be bothered to structure it is almost criminal.
I do wonder, have you ever play civilization games for example?
No single game play is the same. That doe to randomness and unpredictability, specially at map generation, which has critical effect on game play.
Hence great replayability.
Does it mean civ devs over number of years were lazy, with each civ iteration?
Unless you mean something different, or I misunderstood you, your argument will fall a part in this case.
Not that randomness is good everywhere. But is in number of cases, when executed well.
Multiplier RTS games, introduce high volume of “randomness”. Is hard to predict other players actions. There are things you can learn about players, but still “surprises” are not uncommon.
Wut? Reality IS random. Crash course on entropy and reality:
I think you are arguing with someone else. I’m not talking about laziness, I’m talking about deliberate implantation of random. But if you reread my initial post and take the time to understand, you would know.
BTW thank you for your opinion in the first three paragraphs. That (about the mastering the gameplay) will be taken into consideration and obviously I will reread everyone’s posts and distill a standpoint afterwards.
I disagree, I think people play games pretty much always for the purpose of mastery. And I don’t mean in an absolute sense, just a relative sense of “I’m good at this, I’m winning, this is fun”.
Random map generation has an impact on gameplay, but it does not invert the rules randomly. It does not lead to a different outcome in the same scenario. It creates a different scenario, but not one which contradicts previously learned truths about the game and how to win it.
Bad randomness is when outcomes vary for no apparent reason. For example if you’re playing a stealth game and you have to shift across a doorway, you would expect an enemy to have a consistent probability of seeing you at a particular angle, distance, and amount of light. Otherwise you can’t formulate a good idea of when to make your move. If they are sometimes looking right at you but don’t see you, and other times see you out the backs of their heads, it’s not something consistent enough to master, and it’s just confusing. And it’s not good enough, in my opinion, to simply say that in reality, outcomes vary in unknowable ways. For one thing, this level of attendance to reality is in all likelihood inconsistent with pretty much everything else in the game. For another, in reality, there are always signs and signals too subtle for games to reproduce. For another, randomness in games is very easy (and tempting) to abuse. Games are not representations of reality, they are representations of very limited, distilled parts of reality that, like any stylistic artwork, must be carefully balanced in terms of what they focus on and filter in and out.
Lastly, multiplayer games are different, because there is a human being on the other end of the line. That changes everything. Even if human beings were random (which they aren’t) the exercise in futility would still be worth risking, to try to prove that wrong and master a game played with them, since they are the most complicated and advanced thing produced by the universe and what they do instinctively means so much to us as fellows. Playing against a random number generator on the other hand is not particularly worthwhile.
Entropy is negligible at the level of conscious human experience, and in the context of the human lifetime (let alone a 1 hour gameplay session).
I didn’t want to sound argumentative, and (like I said before) it’s not that I think you’re being lazy. But I think that it’s easy to believe that randomness adds something when it really doesn’t. It’s something I’ve faced and thought about a lot when tempted to pursue simple procedural algorithms for generating game content. Maybe I was a bit too dramatic, but I really do believe that to formulate an idea of what a good game is, you have to know what a bad game is (and have to believe there’s such a thing as a bad game). To know what a meaningful game is, you have to know what one is that’s not worth playing. And I’ve come to the conclusion that a game that cannot be mastered is fundamentally a bad game. It’s a prodding of our instinctive desire to know something new through play, but without reward. Worse, it might also be an attempt to escape the consequences of players judging the quality of any structure we can conceive of and implement.
I think that a game exists for two possible reasons 1) To teach a player something new and/or 2) to strengthen the system that we use to encounter things we don’t know and transform them into things we do understand. Anything that does not do any of these things (or worse, confuses and fragments our perceptions) is not worth playing.
If you look at human psychology, you will realize, people play games, to satisfy they need for a reward for doing things. There is also significant element of the challenge. Taking any randomization, reduces challenge significantly.
For which different players, have different demand on challenge and satisfaction. From very trivial, to highly intellectual.
Game which is linear, gets boring relatively quickly, if repeating over. Often once you won, is no point playing again.
However, dev. can design levels, in pseudo random manner, to keep players occupied for long time.
See for example original mario maps.
Imagine now Tetris is linear. You will get the point, if you ever play Tetris.
Player would memorise movements, while progressing and repeating game.
How many times you would enjoy playing Tetris otherwise?
Seams you trying picking bits, which suites you best. We talking about randomness in general for game design. Not randomness of rules only. Otherwise, we can argue that when I click a mouse, my player do action. Thats the rule. Despite the fact, what cause me to click mouse in first place? It appears you generalize, not really responding based on experience, playing in this case any civ games. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be replaying in this format.
Civ series are very random based game. It has rules true, but player will never know the outcome. Player may loose, or win, depending on range of events, of which many are random. In Civ IV for example, there is actually random seed tick box, where if you check it, every time you load a game, for example when you loose, the next upcoming events are randomized. Otherwise, events happens in the same order, as per seed.
How that is different?
If I play for example fps every time same, against my colleagues, they will learn my moves. Or vice versa.
So I am not taking stairs this time, because MAYBE, my opponent will camp there. Hence I will take one of two remaining routes. Lets say left, or right. I can use to the extent my judgment, experience and prediction, to estimate my chances of shooting an opponent. However, at this point I do it RANDOMLY, hoping for best outcome. For each route I may know where these will lead me, but I don’t know what is behind the corner. From my perspective, this will be random event, for which I need to be always ready. Then sometimes got afterthoughts like “maybe I should take other route?”. But that after fact.
In my understanding from this statement, you may believe, that Notch has predefined each minecraft map generation outcome? Or let algorithm to do it.
Yes there are certain rules, like biomes, but driven by randomized number. And yes you can use seed number, to regenerate same map. In vanilla players tend to choose options, for unknown landscapes. Which brings a new challenge. Which brings back to the first point.
