Design Lateralism, the Demon’s Souls Remake and Why AI Art Can’t Be Creative, but Is Still Inevitable
March 26th, 2024My friend Mirai has been doing her first play through of Demon's Souls and, bless my heart, she's been playing on the PS3. Mirai and I talk a lot about art stuff, so I couldn't help but to throw random screenshots from the Remake at her so we could have a giggle. Surely this wouldn't devolve into hours of screenshot comparing, and grumbling, and... well(It always ends up as an article, I swear to fucking god Mirai).
... I thought I was over this, but here I am, accidentally scratching open old wounds.
To be clear up front, I hate the art direction of Demon's Souls Remake. I mean hate hate it. If you like it, that's cool, no shade, we all have our own priorities. We care about different things, and tolerate different things differently and it's fine IT'S FINE YOU'RE FINE~
I think it's deeply important for a remake to have it's own identity. I think it's impossible to make a perfect remake without having your own opinion. Even if you slavishly upscaled everything exactly to match the original designs, changing the fidelity of the content changes the context. You get the repeating grass field in the ps3 Shadow of the Colossus(Don't ask Neolucky, the BEP cutscene artist about Bluepoint's SoTC remake, she might be a bigger hater than me) remaster. Stuff just doesn't work the same way when you scale it up(so stop upscaling and smoothing out vagrant story you fucking animals oh my fucking god).
You gotta make decisions and they made decisions, as they should have! But I swear to god, somehow, as far as my tastes are concerned, and despite all odds...
Every single one of them was bad.
That sounds like an unfair statement. It kinda is an unfair statement(Some of them are at least mid). Some less invested people look at me crazy when I say it! Bluepoint has tons of technically great artists! These designs aren't poorly executed or awkwardly designed. Everything is high fidelity, perfectly color graded, well performing, and well optimized... but there's a problem.
Years ago I wrote an article, "Design Literalism vs Lateralism"(which, while no longer on this site, is available here). It's rough, even by the standards of most of my writing, but I think the concept holds up. From Software excels at this "Lateral design", doing things just a little weird, a little different, seemingly picking the literal options that people shy away from, but going lateral where people like to play it straight. For those of us obsessed with From's designs and art, this is one of the biggest appeals, and one of the things about them that is the most difficult to imitate.
The problem is... Whenever confronted with a situation that forced them to make an artistic choice, Bluepoint would choose the most standard option. Make the most expected decision... Almost as if they saw From stray from the formula, and assumed they made a mistake.
What, you had some fat evil men and forgot their BOILS? Amateurs.
What, why would this demon look so goofy and unnatural? Amateurs!
What, is this, a child's scribble? Don't you know a 3/4ths pose is more dynamic?
AMATEURS!
I could keep going, weapon and armor designs, to environmental design choices, weird details that make no sense...
Why does Vanguard have shackles and chains on him? Was he captured? No that's... just what you do? Why does he have holes in his wings? To look more gross, obviously! That's just what you do! It looks cool, right?!
You could do this with so many design decisions in the Demon's Souls Remake, but I want to focus on one.
We're going to talk about why Bluepoint's Flamelurker sucks shit
Click that link and give it a good look. Look at the inspirations, look at everything. Now, to be fair, I hold no individual artist responsible for anything. I don't know what their briefs looked like, what their art directors said, or how much time they were given. Most of the concept art is very well executed. These are talented artists. I know factually that there were people on that team who fought for details they thought were important. I hold no one person to blame.(At least one person on that team thinks Blizzard and WoW are the peak of Fantasy Art and that person needs to be ashamed of themselves. But I don't know who it is, so the whole team gets off scott free... this time.)
This isn't even his final design(If you wanna see it, there is a video lower down in the article). This design was in the first trailer, where fan outrage made them change the head. All that aside, seeing what was originally intended(even though they claim it was a "placeholder", despite concept art) gives insight to how they think because... this could be a fire demon from anything.
Fire demon? You gotta do LAVA, right? and BIG, BIG demon horns. Why would the original design have small, goofy horns??? Gotta be built like an ape, like hellboy! Gotta look BIG and MONSTEROUS! How else are we supposed to know it's POWERFUL? And the Arena? Gotta make it look like some Diablo hell shit! Also the mouth of the temple? It should be a BIG DRAGON HEAD cause it leads the DRAGON GOD and that would be EPIC!!
None of this is bad but it feels like every other game, resembling the well executed but utterly forgettable work you see all over Artstation. Art that gets you hired. When your director asks you for a fire demon, you know what he's thinking. Do you really want to to give him something weird or goofy looking? Even if you had a great idea, do you really want to bother when you know your Director won't go for it? Even if the Director likes it, the Executive Producer will send it back for revisions. Why are you making yourself more work?
So you do what's tried and true. You can look at the references to the left of the concept art and see that is well worn ground. So... what did he look like on the PS3?
Flamelurker isn't lava. Flamelurker isn't fire. Flamelurker is on fire.
Your typical fire demon seeps lava like a monster drools. The lava is a natural part of itself. It, often, is the lava... but with the original flamelurker, all aspects of his design point to distress. Skin melting, not like rock, but like flesh. Clothes? Armor? Skin maybe? All peeled back painfully, flaying out, like birch logs curling in a fire. His soul is so hot it is used by the Blacksmith Ed to forge weapons. He looks blown out on screen compared to the PS5 version. Lava isn't that hot. You don't forge with lava unless you've seen too much bad fantasy. Lava melts, but fire burns. Wood burns. Flesh burns and carbonizes. These are the hottest flames. This is a fire disruptive to the being wielding it, destroying him from the inside.
Add to that all the potential lore... Flamelurker as the Legendary Big M, the man who killed dragons with his bare hands. Is this him, becoming like a dragon, like his likely descendants Ed and Baldwin, getting burned up alive by his obsession as is the usual metaphor in Souls game? Or did he die fighting the Dragon God? Is this burning his soul suffering and living on?
... Or is he just Lava Man Big, Very Hot? Just being strong and scary and posturing like a gorilla instead of being both uncannily monstrous and yet uncomfortably human? Fighting in a demonic hell temple, or in a temple of an old, fallen civilization... a mausoleum containing a great hero, used to symbolically seal away a god that didn't actually exist until the Fog brought it forth from legend?
Everything about the PS5 flamelurker, and his environment, and animations are so well executed... but they don't build to anything. They don't inspire any thought. While maybe not literal, as my old article would say, they are direct. The statistical average of a fire demon, in a statistically average arena, all executed with incredible skill. Is that not the true dream of videogames? To fight the most technically well executed big lava dude?
For me, as someone who doesn't care much about fidelity, designs like this leave me feeling nothing. This design does nothing to excite the imagination, or inspire curiosity. Even without all the possible lore, without all the deep readings... PS5 Flamelurker is an enemy I've seen in a million other games. He's probably a character in at least 3 different MOBAs. Even if the same design doesn't quite exist, it's existence is practically implied, an aspect of the ur-flame demon that exists at the center of the zeitgeist. Familiar and boring.
The original, at his worst, even if ALL the things I said about his design were bullshit and happenstance, he's still... a weird dude with a goofy face and a giant round dome of a head that makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe I am a little nuts, but I value that more. "What the fuck is up with HIM?" is a at least a thought I can dwell upon, where the Remake's design, if in any other game, would flow past me as soon as I looked away. Rote to the point of inspiring incuriosity. At best it is a pretty image to distract me for as long as I choose to look at the screen. Modern media rarely tries to intrigue you with depth, but instead by keeping up the pace. Aggressive animations, colorful, complicated, dynamic arenas, bright particles and lights. Please don't look away, we've worked very had on this.
A child who is used to screaming for attention doesn't understand the power of marinating in silence.
This isn't exactly Bluepoint's fault, because they're not exceptional in this regard. Heck, if they're exceptional at anything it's genuinely at the technical ends of art. But they are the unfortunate technical team that's being given Art Games to remake. They represent the whole industry, they represent movie VFXs, and even the future of AI.
Cogs in the Machine
Mirai and I end up talking about AI art a lot and a point she made, as professional CG artist herself was... the industry already treats talent like AI. The pipeline strips out creativity. Everyone is given a task so small that they can't really have much expression. The spots where you can add your personal touch are almost invisible.
You don't make the whole 3d set, you either make one or two assets for a set. They have to match, so don't be ambitious. When you're assembling a 3d scene, you're working from the props made by other artists. You may rig a model exceptionally well, but you're working with the animators so you can't be too ambitious or experimental. The animators? They're cleaning up mocap data. The more the work is spread, the more consistent the output becomes. Then when it comes back, you get notes, and the process moves again, like tweaking a prompt or re-generating with a different seed. The bigger a production, the less influential one person becomes.
You still needed a concept artist, but that time is passing. A person in this context often becomes not so much a contributing artist but a machine that turns time and money into random pictures. Or... at least that seems to be how it feels to the people in charge. They don't want the most creative, interesting, or unique version of something, they want the boring thing they see in their head done well. They want an exceptional version of the average. You can look at that flamelurker reference sheet. It had no hope of being an interesting design, because the only reference it pulled was from art that already existed and a few pictures of lava. Things get made a certain way, so artists who want to get into the field copy those things, feeding those images to producers, who then expect things that look like that, creating a pretty but numbing feedback loop.
This is what AI does. It can't be creative, because it can't think laterally. It can't even think. It can just analyze a prompt and predict the average. "Trending on Artstation" is a common AI prompt for a reason.
To go back to my old article... An AI will give you McCreeCassidy from Overwatch, but it won't give you Bayonetta(Well, it'll give you Bayonetta because it's trained on a million pictures of Bayonetta because Bayonetta is so fucking cool). It can't give you Bayonetta because it doesn't know how to make a Witch without making a Witch. It won't give you Johnny from Guilty Gear because even though he is in no way an outrageous, or complicated design, you can't say 'make me an air pirate katana dude' because it doesn't know how and is fundamentally incapable of finding the design between the prompt. You'll get a... steam punk samurai with a cog for an eye patch.
You can maybe sit there and come up the design and all the little details in your head, trying to generate it by banging on Stable Diffusion for days... but ultimately if you want something like Bayonetta, you gotta pay someone like Mari Shimazaki. Either way, the creative thinking is coming from a human.
At the same time though, while AI is bad at these things, the systems in place right now are also bad at these things. Maybe not as bad, but often close. Young artists training for decades to be the mechanical turks of executives who have "the vision". Of course they'll be replaced, they're practically designed to be replaced. Commodified assets whose real value is only known by those closest to them.
But these cogs are still human, and despite the restrictions in front of them, they still try to bring their passion to the things they work on. Losing them is not just a matter of lost jobs and wages, but that little bit of extra care, the safety valve for rich men and their unearned creative confidence. Human cogs can push back when they feel something is wrong with the machine. Because as utterly basic as Bluepoint's corporate tastes are, without real people around, there would have been no one to say no to this horrible Dozer Axe design(The one that ended up in the remake looks great and is proof at least one person on the team ACTUALLY loved Demon's Souls).
It’s Not About Yellow Paint
February 17th, 2024Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth released a demo and... there are yellow painted cliffs, reigniting a conversation that keeps coming up every few months. Now, I have no exact opinion on it's use in FF7R. It seems to be explained in universe (it's a temporary route, purposefully marked), and marking paths is hardly a sin. Hinting at the so called Golden Path is a fundamental aspect of level design. This isn't about FF7R.
... But oh god did it unfortunately choose that yellow paint that has come to symbolize a type of hand holding that has been wearing on players over the last decade. It has started to feel similar to the ancient Old Man Murray "Start to Crate" system, judging a game on "How long it took to see a crate", representing the point where "the developers ran out of ideas".
This standard wasn't exactly fair and neither is judging a game on using yellow paint. FF7R is probably fine, because again, this isn't about FF7R. It is, of course, not even about the yellow paint. It's about what the yellow paint represents.
It's Not About Leaving the Player to Struggle
A lot of people have responded to this pushback saying of COURSE modern games have to do this. They have to appeal to everyone. People didn't spend $60 dollars on a game just to get lost. Companies have to do this to make money you know!
But they don't have to. People will quickly point to Souls games, and while that works, those games always seem like they don't count. The exception, no matter how much they sell. You can't actually learn from them (even if you obviously can)... but I'm going to talk about Nintendo. Nintendo has played around on all fronts of tutorialization. Nintendo has many different kind of designers working for them. They can fall into bad habits like all of us but they tend to be ahead of the curve. Even going back to Super Mario Odyssey you can see what they chose to and what they chose not to communicate. You get your magic hat. It tells you to use it immediately. On the side of the screen is a video of human hands, doing the motion to throw your hat. The game wants to make sure you know how to use this basic ability.
... But then it doesn't tell you what to do with it. It doesn't even tell you what it does. It just surrounds you with things that can interact with this ability. It creates a space for play. You're here to play the game, right? "Oh here is a ledge that is too tall? Try catching this frog" ... and then what? Like obviously you know, and the game isn't even trying to make you feel clever for using the ability to jump without being told. You're not being told what to do because there isn't any rush. You'll jump up when you're ready. Because you're here to play... right?
Nintendo games will do things to help stuck player, to nudge them along. They'll use, like everyone else, basic level design to guide you around, but the goal usually isn't to get you to go The right way but to show you all the places you can go so you can play.
... And Dark Souls isn't much different. We might want to pretend the game is negligently unconcerned with our enjoyment but it is merely doing as much as it feels it needs to do to encourage play. Getting lost is part of the play, so you are given enough room to get lost. But discovery is also an important part of the experience so there needs to be enough things to entertain yourself finding before you stumble onto the right path. The game isn't indifferent to you, it's trying to enrich you and give you what it sees to be a good experience.
It's Not About Tricking Players into Thinking They're Smart
A type of response I saw from a lot of fellow game designers who didn't immediately dismiss the issue went kinda like this... "Okay look, players don't mind being lead around! They just don't like when it's obvious! They want to be lead around! So we have to trick them better so they think they're clever."
The painful thing here is that the general idea isn't wrong. The framing though... it bugs me. It bugs me a lot. People would accuse me and I Wanna be the Guy of adversarial game design, but honestly, no. I think this is adversarial. Not having a fun, playful relationship with the player, but looking at the player as an obstacle between us and our intended experience.
A designer friend of mine, Zara, said "Maybe it'd help if we didn't see players as a particularly stubborn breed of dog" and I feel like that's how a lot of designers look at game design. Like we're magicians, trying to fake emotions and accomplishments. We will lead the horse to water, and we will make them drink their $60+ worth of game. Nobody thinks they're smart for finding the ladder... and sure, they might feel dumb if they can't find the ladder. But we all feel dumb when we don't feel like we're trusted enough to even try.
If we design our games with the assumption that the player is an idiot, then they will feel that resentment when we hold their hand.
Enrichment, Agency, and Overly Paternalistic Game Design
As a kid, did you ever plan on doing something useful without being asked? Taking out the trash, or doing the dishes unprompted? Being proactive, showing thoughtfulness? ... and as you walk out of your room to do to the thing, a parent turns to you and goes "Hey, can you take out the trash?"
Maybe it's not with a parent. Maybe it's a boss, or a loved one. Regardless, no one in this situation is doing anything wrong but gosh does it feel like something was taken away... Worse, it often isn't as enjoyable as it would have been if you just went out and did it without them saying anything. It has been turned back into work. Repeat this too often and a person might feel like no one thinks they're capable of making the right choices on their own. They lose their feeling of agency.
Game Designers force this situation a lot in modern times. Overly aggressive popups, color coding, 'helpful' partners who bark the solution to a puzzle at you while you're just looking around for a moment. Waypoints for everything, markers for everything. All of these things good in their own context, useful design elements when appropriately applied, stacked upon each other until the game designer becomes a hover parent trying to ensure the perfect experience. You must be protected from yourself. What if you get lost? What if you don't know what to do?
Hinting through level design is not new. It's ancient technology. Super Mario Bros' coins, Donkey Kong Country's bananas, every aspect of Doom's level design always tries to give you some idea where you should be going. Dark Souls does not lead you to grope blindly. Buildings convey their importance in the distance. Lighting cues help guide you. Even enemies can be a way to funnel you were you should go. The thing is though... Most of these old things aren't 'compulsory'. They are used to set the expectation. To get you to try new things. Mario will use coins to get you to jump places to do things you don't even expect to happen. Oh, what, I can break out of the ceiling? And I only noticed because I tried to get some coins? You are taught what to look for, and then you are allowed to find it later on your own. Games like DKC, or something like Super Metroid create a relationship with the player. These hints get played with, subverted, omitted, and inverted, all to slowly expand the problem space in your mind to help you have enriching play.
A lot of modern, condescending game design fails to create enrichment. It's about going on the ride. It's the overly scheduled trip to Europe your friend planned that has an itinerary down to the hour. Homie, we're not going to Europe again for years! We gotta MAXIMIZE. But by maximizing, you miss the real experience. You miss the lazy morning in Paris, wandering around until you find an espresso place. You don't look at the reviews, you just go in. You have an authentic, human experience. Could you have gotten better coffee? Could you have planned to take a bus at 8:45 over across the city to have coffee at the 3rd best reviewed espresso place in all of France? Sure, but are you here for the coffee, or are you here for the experience? It is the down time, the space between the notes that make experiences special. You don't get that when your character is telling you what you should be doing every 10 steps in whatever current grey goo ubisoft game is out right now.
People worry about games now being made for stupid people. Dumbed down for idiots. I don't like that kind of disdainful thinking, judging peoples intelligence by how they interact with mainstream videogames. No, instead, we make games for the uninvested. Games for the people who want the sampler plater of the current zeitgeist. A child, with an brain not yet fully developed, will get through these games. They will look up answers. They aren't getting every release. It isn't about intelligence. They are getting through these games because they care more, and they have been doing this since home consoles were a thing. Meanwhile, most of my peers are more concerned with avoiding FOMO.
Do players get stuck on the simplest things? Absolutely. But no one buys a 60 dollar game and gives up on it because of some easy problem that can be solved with a google search. They give up because they have 3 other 60 dollar games waiting to be played. I am left wondering if game devs are more concerned with fun experiences, or avoiding negative ones. That when you don't finish their game, you at least remember it fondly. That you come back for the DLC. That you consider the sequel. If you have to make too many decisions, you might make unfun ones, so they keep you on a tight gameplay loop.
It's not the made-up mythical "stupid gamers" (we all get stuck in silly ways and no one should be ashamed of that) bringing things down for everyone. It is our peers, who care more about being current than taking in an experience. Because we'll all get through whatever game ultimately catches our interest, no matter how obtuse it gets. But game devs can't count on that, so they keep you moving. It's Speed, with Keanu Reeves. Drop under 50 MPH and the player gets bored and moves on to the next Call of Duty game. Players will buy a game but don't play it with respect, instead turning a lot of their playtime into some weird cultural obligation, like watching the next marvel movie.
Game developers have a problem too. A huge problem is that watching someone get stuck is a thousand times worse than being stuck. This isn't just a developer problem, look at any twitch chat while someone is playing Dark Souls. Now imagine you made the game and you're watching. It's torture. My friend who conducts testing has to tell game devs to stay hands off. No interfering with the test!! The urge is there though. Every spot must be sanded down because watching someone get stuck for even a minute is worse than having a grain of sand stuck in your eye. But testing has it's limitations. It can help you see how intuitive a menu is, or how well new players can understand your mechanics, but you can't recreate the moment of a bunch of people buying a new game and talking about it. Or recreate the focus and stubbornness of someone who has been waiting for this game for five years. It's the same reason you get a lot of weird stories about successful movies having bad test screenings. You cannot simulate your release audience. But you can polish a game until all texture is gone, and the experience is like a line at disneyland. Well designed, impressively built, highly detailed, but still... a vapid experience, cosplaying as a richer one.
Players don't respect the games they play enough to let themselves get stuck, and designers don't trust them enough to get stuck. This is the end result of a relationship built on disrespect, condescending parents speaking down to their disinterested children, who are so used to being micromanaged that they've gone numb. Testing can tell you a lot of things, but not what years of disrespect will cause in the player base.
It's not about yellow paint, it's about the fact the modern AAA space has forgotten how to have a dialog with the player. It has forgotten how to enrich and has instead decided to only try and wow. Most players don't even notice. They're so far behind in their backlog that they want content that can go down easily, not because they're not capable, but because they're overwhelmed. Culture moves so fast.
The yellow paint is just a reminder. Another unneeded reminder to do the dishes.
Why would you make a Hard Game Easier???
October 3rd, 2023So Lies of P had patch that adjusted difficulty and I haven't played it, but I have played though AC6 who had the same thing happen and the discourse seems to be... about the same and it really just got to me how poor the nuance around difficulty discussion can be. Maybe it's more accurate when talking about Lies of P, maybe it's the same crud, but whatever.
Now, I'm very much on record saying the AC6 patch stuff is massively overblown. Only one thing really seems like a significant nerf and that was probably warranted but like... whether any of these changes are good is definitely something you could talk about. The changes, for example, (especially including the weapon based changes) seems very much designed to make more builds viable in more situations. You could easily make the case that "Even if the changes are kinda small, this is a game about building mechs, sometimes a build shouldn't viable for a situation to encourage you to use more options and explore the game" and I wouldn't agree with you (I think you're still rewarded plenty of tweaking a build for a mission you always could beat AC6 with one design anyways) but like... that's a discussion, right? Where do you draw the line? My line isn't right and talking about our lines is a great way to build perspective.
... But most conversations aren't going like that. It's a lot of ARGGGGHHH BABY MODE!!! PEOPLE CAN'T HANDLE HARD GAMES!! THEY NERFED IT!! NERFED IT TO THE GROUND!!! They have to sell more copies so they RUINED IT!!! People will only be able to play the BABY version!
... like come on, how many more copies do you think they sold because they made Balteus's missiles track a little less?
There is a lot to unpack here. How people mythologize their own experiences as The One True Way, how any backward slide gets exaggerated by communities and repeated so often they become almost permanent lore. Instead, we're going to talk about people not understanding the many reasons why a designer might change their game to be easier. Why they might make these changes for reasons besides public pressure.
I think a thing a lot of gamer brained players don't realize is that Making is hard game is actually really really easy. It's so easy, that if you're making your first game, there is a good chance it's going to be way harder for other people than you think it is. It's so easy you'll do it on accident!
Making a hard game people want to actually play is the hard part.
I think it's hard for some people to realize that there is, almost certainly, a harder version of their favorite hard game that the devs had in testing and never released. That they are, by their own logic, even immediately from release, receiving the ""baby mode"". That outside of shitty as old LJN 8 and 16 bit games, that devs, even when they were making balls to the walls hard games, were... focusing on trying to give you an enjoyable experience. That the released game isn't some pure artistic expression that exists naturally, only to be corrupted against the devs wishes by player feedback.
Games are, largely, unnatural experiences. A lot of us designers try and make the unnatural feel as natural as possible. Some people hunt for really obscure, poorly made games, enjoying the weird emergent "natural" challenge that comes accidentally from naive design. But they are still, largely, an unnatural construct.
These constructs are, for the most part, made for our enrichment. We can argue the value of changing something, but we have to remember, even with the most Hardcore no normies, skill only!!!! games that these are constructed experiences. There is no true difficulty, no "real version" of the game. There is just the what we ultimately play.
I saw someone ask "Why would you make a hard game easier?" and I think if you're a gamer, looking for challenging experiences, that... makes sense. It's naive, but like, yeah why WOULD YOU? Well, here are are a few that have been stewing in my head!
It's Hard but it Sucks
This is the simplest. Pre-Patch Lost Izalith. A rushed area, filled with reused, rare mobs. "Hey this dragon butt only got used one other place so why not, we're in a hurry."
Pre-Patch Izalith has the player basically playing a poorly made stealth game to not get gang stomped by a dozen giant dragon legs. Later patches decided instead to turn this early Izalith section into a bit of a non area. It's not that bad, there are still things to kill you if you go exploring but the Dragon Butts are so hard to aggro.
If something sucks there usually isn't much of a pushback, but I've actually seen people defend pre-patch Izalith BECAUSE of the weird "stealth" gameplay.
... It seems to largely come from the same place as other difficulty arguments. "I had this happen to me so if other people don't, this means they were denied a complete experience"
Real proof that any changes, no matter how stupid the original behavior was, will be decried by someone as giving into babies.
The Curve is Wrong
A lot of dragging peoples asses through a hard game is tricking them to get in and into the game before tightening your grip... then releasing... and repeating. I Wanna be the Guy tried to have different, but reliable pulses of actual difficulty to keep things feeling fun in between the sections that made you want to die.
It's basically fixing a pacing problem. Usually people don't complain too much about these because their minor. I feel the AC6 weapon buffs hit this, giving better and more varied options early game. This certainly made the game easier, but no one talks about that aspect of the "difficulty nerf" because... well okay it's because people are bad at talking about difficulty as a holistic thing.
Anyways most games usually don't have that much of a mis-step here. When the first boss is way too hard that's usually not an unexpected bump in the curve, that's usually an intentional crest. That said, sometimes that difficulty spike doesn't quite work out how you wanted it to and...
The Wrong Thing is Hard
I feel like Balteus's missiles fit this. Watching my friend (hi Miko!!!), a hardcore AC vet, 1-shot Balteus pre-patch on her first playthrough, could kinda trick you into thinking the missiles were never that big of a problem to begin with. It seems the type of thing where, when you know how to play and move, it's not that big of a deal, but when you're new, it's a monstrous hurdle and that hurdle existing can be easy to miss.
"Oh we wanted to teach about pulse armor and want to encourage movement so this isn't just a slugfest but whoooops for some players and builds, this might as well be touhou."
This is one of one of the most common reasons for things to be hard, by the way. The designers, or testers, or whoever get too good at their game and underestimate certain elements because they're so much better at fundamental things like movement. Blind testers help but you're still trying to extrapolate a lot of data. For indie games, this can get super stupid. There is a 1-frame jump in IWBTG that's optional, but exists because I tested it once and got it the first try. Can't be THAT hard...
By reducing the difficulty in one area, you can allow the player to focus on the enemies you were meaning to highlight.
You Don't Want Them to Google it!
AC6 works great here again. Sea Spider was made vulnerable to more weapon types and while you can make the argument that the game is about builds!!, that type of attitude is what leads to someone going on reddit for help, realizing Double Zimms, Double Songbirds are strong, murdering the boss, and then never really switching.
Fighting a boss and not doing enough damage is generally a sign to a lot of players that they're doing something wrong and the response to that is often to look some stuff up. Easing certain parts of a fight, or making more builds viable can actually, in a weird reverse way, encourage to explore more, or use off the beaten path builds. You increase the likelihood of a player just endures and actually tries to learn on their own. That applies well to situations like Sea Spider where the biggest barrier was a knowledge check that... wasn't even a very good knowledge check (varied weapon type defense isn't well established in a game, and a lot of people are going to get to the fight with a build that already passes the check and not realize they were checked at all).
You Want to Make it Easier to Learn
Sometimes an early attack is too strong, or a boss does too much damage, or a checkpoint is too far. All these things are things that can be fine, or lead to a great experience, but other times you're like... Oh god wait no, it's taking people way too many attempts to get to phase 2, or to this hard jump or whatever, so you make that easier. I Wanna be the Guy had a lot of difficulty tweaks in both boss behavior and is save placement to try and help this along.
Brave Earth Prologue used to have lives, a feature I really wanted and defended to a lot of people who tested early versions of the game. Whenever the game is released though, it won't have them and part of the reason was because "While the repetition created by lives creates a novel learning experience in modern gaming... if I wanna have cool complicated bosses, I need to give people permission to fail". Making that area easier allowed me to make other areas harder because it gave players more chances to learn hard things.
To go back to AC6, I think this is where the IBIS damage nerf comes in. I feel less certain about this one, but I feel like, at least personally, when I finally beat Ibis, it wasn't by an inch, it was a mile. Her damage wasn't relevant for my eventual victory. Where it was relevant is... each attempt allowed me to get more information and to experiment more. The boss felt like she was going to murder you unless you learned her patterns anyways, so easing up on damage just seemed to encourage learning them more.
Inconsistency is Beautiful: In Defense of Fighting Game Jank
September 7th, 2023This is a repost of an article from my cohost, posted on august 23rd, 2023. People seemed to like it a lot though, so I'm reposting it on my blog.
Gonna babble for a bit and hope this is coherent:
I was weirdly saddened today reading Strive's patch notes. A removal of the character weight system. A younger version of me would be SO RELIEVED by this. "Oh god I don't have to memorize a million different combos"! Yet now, an older me, is oddly sad?
Now, I'm not gonna hate on or argue about Strive, or any other game. Plenty of games I like have equal character weights and consistent hurt boxes. I'd rather game designers do what they want to do, rather than pander to me.
(Granted, I do wish more people were pandering to me, but that's a me problem.)
... Instead I want to be more positive about the stuff. So much of this conversation gets caught up in arguments about gatekeeping and "git gud" "Baby Game" BS but not a lot of people really go into why they might like some of these arcane systems.
A nice and polite twitter follower, immediately after I tweeted my disappointment, asked...
Why would you want combos to fail randomly per character performed on
... which like lol, when you put it like that, it sounds super silly. But it's that framing -- a framing I've seen many times. I remember being on a forum... very appropriately, it was David Sirlin's forum (thank god you can't name search on cohost)(edit: uh oh). Being the Sirlin forums, you expect a... certain type of person and player. Very big anti-execution crowd and I was like the only real execution defender (at least who was a semi respected member of the community and not a random SRK troll). I remember one exchange talking about GG combos and the comment "Well what's fun about just doing the same rote thing over and over again?"
"Well you're not? Like I'm adjusting my combos as we go, depending on how high they are and stuff"
"I don't believe you."
Now, this is mid 2000s. I don't think anyone now would deny that's a thing that players do... but I think it still highlights a way a lot of people still feel. Combos as this discrete thing, these bits of work you get through to get to the Real Game (that forum LOVED talking about the "Real Game"). You learn your combos, so you get to play brain chess.
But instead the whole thing is very fluid, especially in a system rich game like the older Guilty Gears. You never stop learning, and that combo you learn isn't a discrete unit. It's a lot of different smaller parts and that perfect hit you need to do your idealized BnB is actually kinda hard to land. You need to learn how to put these things together in different ways. Combos are less raw memorization, and more a matter of a little memorization, but a lot of developed intuition.
This is no surprise to anyone whose played a lot of really nutty fighting games. But the important thing is more the mentality of "Combos are a thing that you need to have, and you fucked up if you weren't optimal" vs looking then as an extra and not taking them for granted.
"... Wait, can I convert to this route off this hit?"
Often in games with open ended combo, you'll get a hit and you won't actually know what you can get off it. I recognized the situation 3 hits in.. what's the gravity scaling like? What's their character weight? This route doesn't work on her hitboxes usually, but I think it might because of the weird height I hit at??
From there you gotta bet on yourself. Take the easy knockdown? Try to extend to a damaging route? What are the stakes of the match? How much life do you have? Is it worth maybe eating shit just to find out? Those sorts of situational, high speed valuation processes, for some people like me, are extremely fun and with games like +R or Rev2, I'm still, after thousands of hours, guessing and developing my intuition. Every matchup has new things to teach me not only in neutral, but on what to do when I even hit someone.
I don't like character weight because I like dropping my BnBs, or because I want to make the game harder for new players, but because they always keep me on my toes and give me great moments where I am rewarded for my intuition. I like it because I can do cooler combos.
... What if input buffers made games harder?
I was playing one day with Lofo, a really incredible +R Dizzy player and a former (lol, recovered?) Sirlin forum poster who ended up a huge execution lover. One day we're talking about Rev2 vs +R and hit me with something that has been in my head for like 2 years. Something to the extent of...
"Yeah, I don't like Rev2's input buffer. I feel like it makes the game harder, because everything is more consistent... I... don't think I like input buffers?"
Which to me at the moment felt like an insane position. Like there was a lot of simplifications made to fighting games I didn't like, but that one seemed like a clear win. That just makes games better, right?
But Lofo kept talking, about things that are borderline impossible in +R that would be consistent in Xrd and how one of the things that keeps +R reasonable is that everyone drops stuff all the time. Not just in combos, but in pressure. There is always wiggle room... and then talking about mashing to tech.
Mashing to tech feels like a vestigial part of Xrd. It doesn't bother me much (I come from X2), but if you're trying to tech and there's a gap, you're gonna get it. +R, much less so. It's almost an analog skill check between you and your opponent. Your ability to mash, vs their timing during the hardest parts of their combo. Defender can piano, so there is a bit of an advantage
Then that got me thinking about ST. "It's fucked up that you need to do a 1f reversal to beat tick throws in that game."
... But you don't. You need to have better timing than your opponent to beat tick throws. Can they time to 1f input? If you're playing someone great, probably, but when you watch mid level play, most DPed tick throw attempts aren't usually reversals. That analog sense of timing is part of the game's skill expression.
This goes into why people didn't care about exact frame data back in the day or players playing "by feel". A move being +1 really didn't matter unless both of you have sick timing. We HAD the frame data. We had Yoga Book Hyper for ST. It did help. But it's influence was different because the play conditions are were different.
In modern games, a +1 situation is often pretty rigidly defined. We have buffers. Our responses will come out on he fastest frame. If my opponent is slow and my suboptimal option keeps winning, people will call that fake... because it is. The expectation is that verse most players, even low ranked players, people will get their moves out as soon as possible. Meanwhile in older games, you can't take that as a certainty even with the best players. They'll hit a lot of frame perfect inputs, but not all of them. Finding where your opponent is being sloppy helps a ton. No one is clean all the time even in modern games, but it's so SO much harder in old games.
I even think a lot about setplay characters. In older games 'perfect knockdown into oki that grants an auto timed safe jump' is actually super hard (or really lucky happenstance). Heck, this is also where GG's variable wake up timing stuff also comes in. You could do it, but it would be so hard that it can never be the expectation. Now safe jumps are so easy once labbbed that if you whiff a normal before doing your oki people will just assume it's a safe jump even if it isn't. You get stronger setplay because frame perfect repeatability, while not at all trivial, is extremely practical.
Buffers help turn is into robots and, depending on your taste, that can be a good or bad thing.
ALRIGHT THE TAKE AWAY
One thing that I've also thought a lot about is... new players seem to have an easier time getting into +R than Rev2? Part of this might also be the lobby system and speed to matches, but part of it is, in Rev2, even a mid level player can be pretty scarily consistent, but +R... Welcome to the scramble zone, lol. And like granted you can run into cryptids with 10,000+ hours of play time who will Burst Safe Sidewinder Loop you into the negaverse, but even THEY fuck up or get wilded out by weird interactions. And I say this maybe liking Rev2 more than +R.
In a weird way, making games easier, also makes them harder, because you make them more consistent for everyone... and when everything is more consistent, the game is more rigid and unyielding. You're not making an old experience accessible to new people, you're making something new, with it's own pros and cons.
Again, this isn't a judgment zone. I'm okay with Strive. I'm actively loving SF6. But a rigid games forces players to play it how it was intended. This can help new players learn a lot faster. Hell, such design has lead to games that have even taught me lots of stuff! I don't hate these games.
... But I miss that looseness. I miss how you can have a combo so hard that only like 2 people can do it reliably and just this really hazy, unclear idea of what's even possible. Infinite weird, crufty interactions between interactions. Feeling like I wasn't just playing my opponent, but exploring a rich, emergent design space.
Fighting games as a genre increasingly feel like they're (metaphorically) moving from "analog" to "digital".. and like most of those changes, there are usually more advantages and disadvantages, but, even with the new advantages... there are always gonna be people who miss how the old analog models used to feel.
Mechanical Irony and the Suspension of Disbelief
April 2nd, 2014This kills me. This is right by the Shrine of Winter in Dark Souls 2. This tiny bit of rubble — one that would take two big steps to clear — is responsible for half of your epic journey. You spend hours tracking down powerful souls and risking your life, rather than just finding a stool.
I call this mechanical irony. Mechanical irony is when the limitations in control we have over our character become all too real. “If only I could climb over that” or “if only I could jump off this ladder” or “if only I could step over this gap”. or whatever. When the sensible, real life to a video game problem becomes obvious, it becomes difficult to sustain immersion and the suspension of disbelief. To an extent this is unavoidable. We’re making games and not simulations. We don’t want to give the players the ability to do all these things, we want to convince them to think in the verbs we’ve given them. We want the player to trust us and give we get that, they will give us a lot of leeway.
Bionic Commando for the NES is very good at this. The game requires a large conceit (.. can you even use that word like that?when talking about mechanics?) from the player. You can’t jump. You have to move around with your bionic arm. You’d think the game would be litered with moments of “if only I could jump, I wouldn’t have to go through all this hassle”, but it’s surprisingly not. Every situation where you wish you could jump is quickly solvable with the mechanics the game provide. The game doesn’t want to remind you that you can’t jump, it wants you to focus on swinging around. To a degree, new players still get frustrated with the inability to jump, but when you consider what a huge concession that is, the game does an amazing job of making the player think about it’s core mechanics.
The Shrine of Winter in Dark Souls 2 does not do that. It’s downright taunting. It could possibly be ignored as a dead end, except for the item on the other end. While many areas of souls games could be destroyed with climbing skills, you generally don’t think about it (though probably also in Belfry Sol!). Here, it’s preposterous. Here it looks like, without invisible walls, you could possibly even jump over it with the mechanics given to you in the game. It could even get you to think about other things. Like, what is that shrine even for if it would be so easy to walk around in real life? Little stuff exists like this every where (welp, fell down, time to walk all the way back to the stair case instead of pulling my self up from the edge) but usually those are so minor, people don’t notice. Here? It’s HALF THE GAME and totally avoidable. No one looks at the Lordvessel door and goes Well you know, if I had some TNT or a hammer…”. People just go with it. If the Shrine of Winter blocked a bridge, most people wouldn’t think about “simply getting rope”. That’s because they’re not having their face rubbed in it. They’re not being taunted. The players want to be immersed. Not everyone is going to fall down little thought-holes like this, but they’re best to avoid when possible, especially when trying to construct games with structurally sound worlds.
Now, taunting isn’t always bad. Dark Souls taunts all the time (though usually not in ways that damage the integrity of the world). A good example of this is Vini Vidi Vici in VVVVVV, where the character, who can’t “jump” is forced to reverse gravity and fall through several screens of spikes to get around an ankle high block. VVVVVV has little “immersion” to speak of and it serves as an excellent gag for an excellent challenge. You could even argue for this in more serious games. Again, the Belfry Sol is an annoying taunt, but it’s repercussions are mild. Is it a good gag? I personally wouldn’t do it, but I could fancy an argument for it. In most cases though, if you’re making a game with any kind of “world” you want to avoid bringing attention to aspects like this.