Q
Anonymous asked:
I just watched a War Story from a developer of Amnesia. According to the dev, they let the player think there would be much worse consequences for becoming insane then there were in the game, even lying to the player via a tip that monsters would be able to more easily detect insane people. Is misleading and lying to players about how mechanics work common in games?
A
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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Notes
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shieldfoss said: it’s a functional website! Also I didn’t see this post until today (because it’s a funcitonal website!) but thank you very much for typing it out.
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“Don’t lie to me” is harder than you’d think. Video Games are already, fundamentally, a kind of lie. They’re something...
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comicsansstein reblogged this from shieldfoss and added: The are many (I can think of one from the top of my head, but there are probably more) platformers where you can jump...
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doc-crab reblogged this from terrastone3 and added:
There are absolutely times when hidden gameplay rules are done poorly, but it’s also important to remember that AI in...
brazenautomaton reblogged this from shieldfoss and added:
Given that your standards preclude Bayo and Doom 2016 from being good games, perhaps the bar is not as low as you...
morlock-holmes said: @shieldfoss I mean… At that point why not just complain that demons don’t set up sniper nests and immediately headshot you in every level?
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If doom is a good game why does it feel pointless to play?I am aware that I have idiosyncratic tastes, but I feel like...
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Mario Kart is a funny example because its method of rubberbanding is both fair (all players equally benefit from it) and...
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I understand feeling good and cool because you were placed in front of a (apparently) hostile system, which is conveyed...
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