A dragon stands before you, your attacks against its skin bounce off it harmlessly. A pang of helplessness surges through you as you swing your sword wildly, narrowly dodging the beast’s claw. It breathes in deeply, the sinewy smoke tendrils waif through its nostrils as the mouth begins to glow. A moment later a fountain of fire blooms from its open mouth, searing the earth around you as you roll out of the way behind a rock.
All seems lost until you spy a glowing, red spot on its chest. You swing your blade at its glowing heart and the beast reels from the blow, lurching backwards. The dance continues, but now you know how this game is played and victory feels close at hand.
Slaying the Beast
The sequence I just described has been played out hundreds of times in legends, games and the imagination for as long as anyone can remember. Little wonder then that so many games seek to recreate that exact experience. But what is it about the story above that hits home so deeply with people?
The answer is not simple, but one piece matters heavily for today’s lesson:
There is always something you can do to handle the monster’s attacks.
The Heart
The dragon has a weak spot. You must attack that weak spot in order to slay it. However, the creatures attacks prevent you from safely approaching it. Furthermore, the heart is only exposed at certain times. The bright glow draws your eye to its location.
The Skin
The dragon’s armor deflects your sword effortlessly. It is clear that attempting to attack any other location is useless. This is reinforced with a metal deflecting sound which is highly unsatisfying.
The Claws
The dragon’s attacks swing fiercely, but slowly, giving you ample time to raise your shield or roll away. However, it can only claw in front of itself, giving you a safe area to completely avoid the claws while it is frenzied.
The Breath
The dragon’s mouth glows brightly for a time before the flames are hurled at you. You can either dodge the flames once they start, or take cover behind a rock to wait out the attack.
A Masterpiece of Responsive Mechanics
Despite being a difficult, highly damaging and dangerous boss, you are solely responsible for your survival. The beast doesn’t attack you without warning, its most powerful attacks are clearly telegraphed and the exposed safe spot of the heart makes it abundantly clear where you should strike.
These are the types of fights players like the most. The path to victory is clear, but fraught with peril.
There’s a sea of details, exceptions, theme and nuance that I could delve into here, but the lesson here is clear:
Give the player a response
The Types of Responses
There are three major categories of responses:
- Reaction – I see it occurring and I take action to counter it now.
- Preparation – I know it can occur and preemptively take actions to prevent it.
- Recooperation – It happened and I take action to recover from the consequences.
What are your favorite examples of these categories of response?
Next time, I will write some more about these three points and how I’ve put them to use.
I have to say that for reaction, one of my favourite pieces of design is PvP in WoW, as each player is sheerly reacting, with bits of prepartion here and there. Only the best have long plans ahead.
For preparation I’ll go with Mass Effect 3, more specifically the fight to save the Biotic children from Cerberus and get past a load of troopers, engineers and an ATLAS. My preparation was that I had died so often that I knew what to shoot in what order and where to go for cover. So preparation in gaming is mostly hindsight, you can never know until you have seen or heard about it, just what is about to happen.
And for recooperation, I’ll go for Battlefield 3 online (rush). It’s a fight where you progressively lose positions as defender and take them as attacker, but it’s all centered around once that place has the charge set. If it’s defended you have to regroup and attack again, if it’s taken then you have to set up defenses for the next point.
In Team Fortress 2:
You immediately react when a large force starts bearing down on you, or if you suddenly notice an enemy opening fire on you. This can range from returning fire to calling out your position and SOS over voice chat (often both).
You prepare because many of the levels have choke points or hidey-holes, and a basic understanding of game mechanics leads you to conclude that sentry guns, Spies, or other unsavory enemy types may be lying in ambush — and let’s not forget Spy-checking Pyros.
And you recooperate when your flag is captured or a control point is lost by regrouping (something the game inherently encourages with the moving spawn points) to figure out how the enemy got through your lines and retake the lead.
Team Fortress 2 has always been one of my favorite FPS games. The quality of the classes, the attention to detail on the art and the adaptive quality of the gameplay is ridiculously fun.
It’s interesting to see people referencing PvP first, since it seems as though while PvE presents the same set of steps in a response situation, PvP does it much more quickly and possibly in a manner more eclectic than a boss encounter. I think we’ve all heard the “PvP requires more skill” or “PvP is harder” shouts before, but it seems as though when you reach the highest level of PvP in any game, it becomes the same set of Reaction, Preparation and Re-cooperation you’d find in a PvE situation.
Having said that, one my of my favorite examples of this is probably Half-Life 2. Almost every level is so well built, and gives you the chance to constantly respond differently to each situation, learning from your mistakes each time and giving you the chance to become better. It seems as though each time I play, I find something new or some new way to go through each encounter.
One great example of this is Bosses in Tera. While Tera has a LOT wrong with it, it does provide an engaging, fresh, combat model.
Lancer Tanking is a great example of the above. If you aren’t familiar: you can block attacks, but do zero threat while this is happening. Therefore the skill is blocking the big attacks, while squeezing threat moves in between.
Reaction: constantly looking for boss “tells” indicating an upcoming big attack. These are based on boss animations, rather than cooldown timers. The abilities come randomly, from a smallish set of abilities per boss-type. You watch the boss carefully, rather than your skillbars, timers, or other add-ons. This sucks you into the fight, making it feel more naturalistic than the highly structured modern WoW raid encounter.
Preparation: actively blocking, hiding behind your shield. This is a visceral experience, as you are blasted backwards by the big attacks. Bonus marks for the “successful defense” display, giving you a visual reward for taking less damage.
Recooperation: Most big attacks will knock you to the ground if not blocked. You are given a “retaliate” skill that allows you to jump to your feet instantly, but this has a 30 second (?) CD. This allows you to recover from the occasional failure. But if you keep missing blocks you lose control, taking a lot of damage while knocked down, risking death and stressing your healer.
Two WoW examples:
Good: Vanilla Warlocks had many different ways to beat encounters, especially tough solo quests. Fear dotting, banish/nuke, seduce/nuke, pet tanking, proactively planning death/resurrection via soulstone, different pet abilities, enslaving elite demons, controlling fears by switching curses, etc. This encouraged creative planning before an encounter, and rewarded creative response mid-fight. Most have been toned down now due to PvP, and PvE design doesn’t require/reward this now. Hopefully scenarios will bring this creativity back.
Bad: Cata defensive CD planning. This is a mathematical exercise: calculating timings of boss attacks, and developing raid/individual CD rotations across tanks & healers. As a raid leader, I have to plan out & write down before every encounter. A death leads to frantic re-planning CD rotations mid-fight. It feels stressful/unfun as the success of 9 other people depends on me performing mental arithmatic mid-fight while main-tanking. Also, a different raid team requires a reworking of the CD rotations: “just kill the trash, BRB while re-calculating our CD rotation”.
I am incredibly impressed with the combat in Tera.
Tera is a fantastic example of the “Clear” -> Tells, “Care” -> It really hurts, “Response” -> Ability usage/movement, “Satisfaction” -> completely dodge the attack/hurt enemy, cycle.
The way it makes you play the game, not play your action bars, is incredibly impressive. A masterful example of good combat design.
“it seems as though when you reach the highest level of PvP in any game, it becomes the same set of Reaction, Preparation and Re-cooperation you’d find in a PvE situation.”
PvE encounters very rarely involves any dynamic elements. The encounter basically stays the same after a hundred attempts, “defeating an encounter” is a matter of learning how it works and timing your response.
PvP is extremely dynamic, there are no preset scenarios on individual level (depending on a game, of course). So, speaking of WoW, PvP takes more skill, because you have to “defeat the encounter” at the first attempt, relying solely on your reflexes, knowledge and awareness. Not on memory of past attempts.
Another informative yet concise article, Alex! Keep em coming. I’ll toss another example: Tetris.
Reaction: I see the piece chance has given me, I need to decide where to put it.
Prep: At some point a red piece will come..I gotta make a nice vertical space for it!
Recup: ACK a red piece did not come, need to revise my strategy.
I will lift an example from a fight I Like a lot in kara, it was simple yet effective, moroes.
Reaction – vanish, we know once he does this to expect him to pop on someone, we ensure we are all in range of healers and take the steps to ensure our health is at a good level.
Preparation – adds, assigning people to CC or nuke depending on which adds given and kill orders.
Recooperation – garrote after the vanish, healers know this person needs their attention.
lifting another example from kara which tried to include these but in my mind failed was prince, he had all the abilities to make you think.. reaction on melee aoe damage and elementals, recoup if someone got caught in either. but in reality preparation won this fight with tactics finding positioning of the boss and group to make the mechanics void unless you got an unlucky elemental drop on your group.
p.s. a big fan of blizzards game designs and how we can actively seem them evolve over time in wows progress. aiming to get into it as a career myself.. but damn its a hard field to break into.. any advice?
The best advice I can offer is at the bottom here:
http://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.com/2012/06/why-is-game-design-black-box.html
Spend a lot of your free time making games of your own – pencil in paper, computer games, whatever. Don’t rely on anyone else to give you all of the skills you need to be good – take responsibility for your own growth.
Listen to people as much as possible, even (well, especially) when they are wrong. Often “wrong” feedback is a sign of an underlying condition or an insight into the mentality of your player base.
thanks for the reply, that’s exactly what I’ve been working on. I Have a game in progress for the xbox indie games which is teaching me a lot about both design and development.
overdesign is a major problem I’ve come across stuffing to many ‘cool’ ideas into a small game can make it overly complicated and dilute the actual fun factor that the main concept had. Your mention about netherspite made the penny drop for myself on this one.