In addition to reaction, there’s two other major forms of gameplay responses: Preparation and Recuperation. Preparation is where you perform an action before the event begins. The most common example of this in WoW is assigning crowd control targets before a pull. Recuperation is the act of recovering after the event has occurred. Healing frequently falls into this area, but so does running back to a monster after being knocked away.
Preparation
Preparation is an interesting response type – you coordinate, plan or otherwise setup for the incoming event. In the outdoor world, you might face a creature who can knock you off a cliff. Preparation is pulling that creature away from the cliff so you aren’t easily knocked off.
In larger group content, high level planning is often assigned to a group or raid leader who communicates what’s happening and helps his team plan out what they should do. At a higher level, the act of gearing your character properly, picking the right items, bringing reagents, food and supplies are further extension of this gameplay type. Even something like picking the right hardware to handle the machine counts!
The Burden of Preparation is High
Preparation is a very difficult mechanic to use. However, the difficulty with preparation mechanics is rarely in the actions required to handle or setup the event. The difficulty with preparation is the burden of knowledge.
Write that one down and keep it somewhere safe.
In order to prepare for an event, you need to know it is coming. How do you know it is coming? Someone must have seen it before. That fact alone is one of the largest blind spots designers have.
“How will he handle this?”
“Oh, easy, he’ll step to the side, flick the switch and stop the blade moments before it impales him.”
That’s great on paper, but what it really means is you’re going to die at least once, if not many times, before discovering the trick. I’ve frequently sifted good games from great guys by the degree to which they sufficiently feed you the information you need to understand what is about to happen.
In Diablo 3, there’s a creature who explodes upon death, unleashing three grub like carrion worms. There is no way to know prior to killing one that it will do this. The animators did an incredible job of making the creature swell before it explodes. However, this alone wasn’t enough.
If you fight one carefully, you’ll notice that not only do they explode upon death, their normal attack is a highly dangerous, but not lethal, point blank AoE with a warning animation. What this means is that before you’ve ever slain even one of these guys, you’re taught to hit it for a bit, then run away.
This way, there’s a good chance you’re already performing the correct behaviour before it’s actually a threat.
Reinforcement
If you want players to use an ability in anticipation to an event, you need to be encouraging them constantly to use it, even before the right situation occurs. One of my favorite examples of this was the Freeze ray in Metroid for the NES.
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| I had a huge crush on a girl who reminded me of Samus. |
The Freeze ray let you do some very cool things – stun enemies and use enemies as platforms, weaken Metroids for the killing, etc. In fact, the final act of the game is highly dependent on your ability to use the Freeze ray correctly.
So what did Nintendo do – wait until the final act where you needed it? No, they gave you access to it early in the game, so you knew what it was, played with it for a while, used it to solve a few puzzles, then moved on to more powerful upgrades.
When you eventually came to a place where going further isn’t possible, the memory of that tool kicks it and you pick it up again when you need it.
If you want players to use a tool – they need to be already using it.
Recuperation
Sometimes bad things happen. In those situations, you can give up and run away or try to recover.
Growing up, I often went with the former. Whenever my brother started to get the better of me in a wrestling match, I ran away. Whenever my homework started to get hard, I ran away. When the girls on the track started to catch up with me, I … well, I guess actually they ran away from me.
However, once you’re behind, all is not lost. It just requires a different kind of mindset.
One of my favorite kinds of experiences is when I’m forced to stop what I’m doing, take up a defensive posture for a time, then go back to my normal behaviour. Fighting games are frequently built around these sequences.
In fact, one of the most thrilling moments is when you make a huge comeback.
When they interviewed Daigo afterwards, he asked what it was that made him capable of this incredible feat. What did he say? “I just didn’t panic.”
Recuperation is a change in mindset
Recuperation is my personal weakness. I’m an aggressive, tunneling, red-blooded American boy. When I’m forced to take up the defensive and patiently wait out a opportunity, I often get impatient and try to deliver the finishing blow prematurely.
League of Legends is one of those games that is a great example of recuperation. Tonight, I was playing around with the new “Pulsefire Ezreal” skin. For people who play league, you’ll immediately groan because you know what happened.
For non League players, Ezreal is a very difficult and fragile character to play. My ally and I lost our lane badly. So badly, in fact, that the game was in peril because of how badly we played.
However, in an unusual show of courtesy, they didn’t rage or get upset at me. After a pivotal battle was lost, the enemy team defeated Baron Nashor and gained a significant advantage. My team was highly upset and I could feel it. The enemy constantly attempted to lure us into into a trap and my allies started to fall for the bait.
I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, I started typing. “I know this is my fault. But please, just be patient. Don’t engage them, just stay back and wait here by our tower.” Then I counted down the minutes until the Baron’s power faded each time my team started to get antsy…
… somehow it worked. We waited until the danger passed, despite the enemy’s attempts to lure us into their traps.
After the game ended, the enemy team’s Ezreal player, who had massively outplayed me the entire game, boasted that I should be ashamed for my poor play. In an incredibly humbling moment, my team, who I had never met before, told him they would gladly choose my ability to inspire teamwork over his higher skill, but selfish playstyle any day.
Such is the power of my team’s patience.
Recuperation is built upon Opportunities
Drinking a health potion is an excellent example of recuperation. However, recuperation is meaningless if you can always do it and without risk. In early WoW PvP, the Paladin was an incredible recuperator. His ability to heal, bubble and otherwise protect himself was so potent that all of the other classes were incredibly frustrated attempting to fight one.
To combat this perception, many abilities were given exclusivity or otherwise limited. The result was that it created windows of time where Paladins could be defeated. Not particularly satisfying for the Paladins, but it greatly improved the experience for everyone else.
Next time, we’ll talk about the most important and most difficult aspect of game design. So hard, in fact, that once you’ve done it right, it’s even harder to do right the second time.
Post in the comments below if you have a guess.
Something that I’ve been trying to develop in my private projects is inspiring story atmosphere through game mechanics. I have the feelings that’s not what you are alluding to, though.
Correct, this is entirely about the styles of ways players respond to game opportunities.
I’m so glad I found this blog, by the way.
This is the kind of stuff I think about all the time. It’s good to see a professional’s opinions on game design. I’m looking forward to seeing more.
“I’ve frequently sifted good games from great [games] by the degree to which they sufficiently feed you the information you need to understand what is about to happen.” What do you think about Demon’s Souls? 🙂
Also, I’m curious on your thoughts about regenerating health in modern FPS’s. I think it suffers from this problem: “However, recuperation is meaningless if you can always do it and without risk.” Back when FPS’s had health pick-ups, it was often a thrill to find them and get to them when you were low. There can be thrill in finding sufficient cover with regen-health, but usually it’s just a matter of ducking under cover or running as far away as possible (Gears, Bullestorm). I haven’t really played the Halo games though.
This blog got linked to on a forum for indie RPG designers in August and I’ve been following it since. Been almost a month since the last update, but I really hope there’s more to come!
This is such great stuff. The issue of preparation is something I’ve struggled with a lot. RPGs have a tendency to give you a ton of opportunity for preparation compared to other types of games. But often, as a player, the only way to know what’s coming is to either die to it once, which is lame, or always be equally prepared for everything, which makes all those situational equipment/talent/buff choices kind of pointless.