Overpowered Combat Mechanics in PvE = Fun?

The following excerpt is from Sirlin.net a website run by a producer and game designer at Backbone Entertainment. The full post can be found here. I encourage readers to browse through his site and read what he has to say. Lot of good stuff to be found there.

“I also have to mention the excellent combat mechanics of the original God of War. These guys have a background in Street Fighter and other fighting games, and it shows. A 1p adventure game can steal all sorts of mechanics from fighting games, but rather than make those mechanics “fair and balanced,” it can make them overpowered and fun. The computer doesn’t mind being beaten, especially if the player is having fun. The secret to translating competitive fighting game mechanics to a 1p adventure: make everything cancellable. Attacks cancel to other attacks or a roll or a to magic or to a jump. You can cancel throw whiff recovery and just about everything else. This allows for freeform combos and makes everyone feel like a hero, even though all that stuff is way overpowered in a 2p competitive game.”

The contrast to the current orthodoxy in MMO PvE is nothing short of heresy. Players in the PvE setting are rarely able to take on more then one monster at a time, especially in group fights. Dungeons are populated with “Elite” monsters, that often cannot be taken on 1vs1 if the player is even level with the monster.

I can only think of two online RPGs that allow for this kind of “overpowered” PvE experience: Diablo 2 and City of Heroes. I think there is really something to this idea of making players truly feel powerful. Granted Sirlin is talking about a single player game, but I think the gameplay mechanic can be applied to an online game.

Adventure Games and The Future

Ahhh, the glory days.

Day of the Tentacle, Kings Quest, Beneath a Steel Sky, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Legend of Kyrandia, Monkey Island. And still many more.

When I think back to previous adventure games, I realize they were essentially a long string of puzzles tied into a linear narrative. Back in those days, it was pretty much a game of pixel hunter to pick up everything that wasn’t nailed down on one hand, and a game of “What have I stored in my pants that can be used to solve this puzzle in a PG way?”.

The problem with this gameplay mechanism I suspect, is that developers found out that most people don’t like being stuck on a puzzle. Quite frankly, most people do not have the time or inclination to be bothered to be “stuck” anymore. This is something the folks at Telltale also expressed at a recent IGDA meeting. Furthermore, the proliferation of strategy guides being released at the same time as the games they cover seems to prove this as well. The solution for them (and the few other adventure game developers) was to tone down the puzzles and make it easier for players to progress in order to attract more players.

This in my mind is a dead end path. Capping off the complexity of the puzzles in my opinion limits what the developer is able to throw at players in terms in ingenuity. After a certain point, developers are simply going to start running out of ideas. Furthermore, that was much of the appeal for gamers who played adventure games, they played for the wacky puzzles and situations their characters had to solve. I recently watched a friend play through the second episode of Sam and Max and we blew through it after an hour. His reaction was essentially: “That’s it?”.

But is the problem really with the puzzles or the entire gameplay mechanism of the adventure game? I believe that the current object intensive interaction methods that the player has to use (ie: interact this hat with this rack in order to get person y to move over here so you can move through the door), is stale. For a media type that proclaims the advantages of interactivity, its rather sparse in this genre. Players can only interact with certain objects, otherwise he would be swamped with choice and might never solve a puzzle if he had to resort to guess and check. This leads to a rather static feel within the game itself.

However, is the solution to create more ways to interact with objects? I would argue no. Why play an adventure game in the first place? I would argue that its the story. Adventure games on average compared to any other genre, had more compelling stories, plot lines, and characters compared to any other genre out there. What kept the player from uninstalling the game in the past was that he wanted to know what happened next.

So how to make adventure games more compelling then? I would say that the developers at Cing have gotten closer to the answer then other developers who publish adventure games. I am speaking of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 in particular.

What is fascinating about Hotel Dusk is that to progress in the game, the protagonist must discover what each of the guests of the hotel are hiding. There is still object interaction, but a large part of the game involves dialogue choices. When a dramatic scene emerges, the only way the player can continue is to get the NPC to spill his guts. To do so, the player must select the right choices when talking to the NPC. However, since the player does not have a history of the NPC’s life in front of him, he must make guesses based on his previous interactions with the NPC.

Therein lies the brilliance of Hotel Dusk in my opinion. Players must watch NPC reactions, pay attention to what they say, and then guess what the NPC had done and is thinking. In other words, players must treat the NPC like they would a real person. No more is the player dealing with an object that does not act back, the player is dealing with a “person” that seems to have a logical set of feelings, fears, prejudices, etc that make him feel lifelike.

This is where I think adventure games should go, focusing on the story and the characters, and creating puzzles and situations that revolve around a solid cast of NPCs. Focus less on solving abstract puzzles like how to get through a locked door, and focus more on creating believable NPCs and forcing the player to interact with said people. Make people feel like they are interacting with people. This will also help the overall story in my opinion and getting players immersed because stories are all about people in the end.

I really think that Chris Crawford is ahead of the industry on this with his Storytron system of interactive storytelling. More on this in the future.