This week’s post will be short.
The second major factor of care has nothing to do with mechanics. Instead, you can often make someone care, simply by displaying factors which echo lessons, feelings or beliefs that are already ingrained into their habits.
My favorite example of this is the art of a huge, flaming fireball. Fire is dangerous, Red is dangerous, Burning Sounds are dangerous. Little wonder then that player in a sidescroller naturally avoids the incoming attack. These were not lessons you had to teach the player.
Which is why sometimes they are the most powerful and most annoying thing you can deal with.
I recall a time when we discussed having a dragon who breathed healing fire as a mechanic on a boss fight. While the creative director was stoked at the idea, experience quickly showed that players avoided the fire, unless they were utterly required to sit in it.
While players will often adapt if the rewards are high enough, the price of trying to break these ingrained lessons is rarely worth the cost.
Nice and concise. I suppose escort missions can often lean too far in the other direction: The emotional appeal is there, but they are often paired with frustrating mechanics (usually poor AI that’s out of the player’s control).
Poor AI in WoW’s escort missions is a mechanical issue, yes. Seeing a guy who is trying to escape run directly into a monster is weird. But a lot of them also have a thematic problem: the NPC just doesn’t look like he is incapable of getting out by himself. Yeah, he might need help getting out of a cage but after that, they seem to be fully functional. And whenever I see this, I think, really you can’t get out on your own?
Sometimes playing the heart in the opposite direction can make a game more exciting, such as a creature making cute sounds until it attacks, or an enemy crying to lure you in (Left 4 Dead Witch, for example). It breaks the expectations you’ve been conditioned to over time, and makes things a bit more interesting. But doing that too often in one game can lead to confusion, for sure.
As long as it’s clear what needs to be accomplished after the first mistake, reconditioning can work.
Dumass in the new Hillsbrad was a good example of how to lampshade the problem (even if the AI still fundamentally sucks).