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Little secrets for game designers to make a player hate your game a little less

Three years ago, ArenaNet lead game designer Jennifer Scheurle tweeted a very interesting thread on the topic “excellent game mechanics hidden from the player’s eyes to achieve a certain emotional effect, reaction or behavior”, where any game designer could share his in-game “chips”.

This thread has collected a huge number of responses and could serve as an excellent collection of all kinds of game design tricks, such as:

  • In Hellblade , the pre-game warning was carefully thought out to make players believe that the permadeath system works in the game if the player dies too often, although in fact it is not there.
  • Pacman can bend around corners more sharply than ghosts do, giving the player a slight edge.
  • , « ». System Shock 4 , .
  • , , Shadow of Mordor , .
  • Bioshock Devil May Cry, , .
  • Xcom, , . , , .
  • It seems that there are pity timers in Heartstone - pity timers. Many other games shamefully used them in earlier years.
  • In Resident Evil 4, after too many deaths, fewer enemies spawn to give the player a better chance of going through a difficult episode for him.
  • Adaptive AI is implemented in any racing game to make the competition tougher.

The list goes on and on. This is a real storehouse of tips from successful game designers.

In this article, we will delve deeper into this topic and try to grasp the meaning of such tricks through the prism of player experience.




Why is all this necessary?


First of all, we’ll figure out why developers should cheat at all. Would a game be better without these artificial tricks?

Well, let's start by saying that games and their rules are themselves artificial. Over decades of gaming, gamers have learned that there are certain paradigms that can only be applied in the game world and nowhere else.

Just think: the hero of any platformer costs nothing to stay on the ledge at your fingertips, make a double jump or change the direction of flight. In shooters, a shot in the heart is less deadly than in the head, and a silencer completely eliminates the sound of a shot. Racing games show that an off-road car drives slower, and that’s all, and fences and streetlights can easily be demolished. Role-playing games taught us that for each completed quest there is a reward and recognition, which real life can never guarantee.



In this article, we will not talk about classic game paths that define genres or specific games. Instead, we will concentrate on tricks hidden from an outside observer - when developers hide something from the player, or even lie to him directly.

Why do they need it?

In fact, there are many good reasons:

  • To be “honest” with the players;
  • So that players feel control over the situation;
  • To create tension or maintain it at the required level;
  • To make players spend more time in the game;
  • To create more variety in the game;
  • To control the behavior of certain players.

And so on and so forth.

The quotation marks in the first paragraph are not accidental: the players are, first of all, people with many prejudices and shortcomings. The fact is that they do not need real justice. A very good example illustrating this is the displayed probabilities that can be found in many games. Like in this screenshot from Xcom2 :



99% chance of hitting! Safe enough, but still not perfect, because there remains a 1% chance of a miss. Unfortunately, most people do not understand statistics very well, especially when they are not on their side. In many forums, players complain about the disgusting gaming system due to the fact that they did not hit the target, although the chance of hitting was 90%. But a slip is possible in only 1 out of 10 cases - not so often!

At the same time, interestingly, no one complains when a successful attack had only a 5% chance of success. No, everything is fine here, the player was just lucky! Is not it?



This again brings us back to the question of whether such things should be introduced into the game. First of all, we will deal with the motives that make game designers resort to such tricks.

The most important of them is very trivial: in fact, the players are simply spoiled.


How game mechanics pamper a player


Let's start with the most common trick: preventing a player from failing by convincing him that he survived solely due to his incredible gaming skills (or luck). This is somehow found in almost any game:

  • PvE- - : , . , , , .
  • - ― , . « », .
  • Half-Life 2 , - : , .
  • DOOM , , ― .
  • Control , . , , , .



There are another million such examples (and we didn’t even mention the mechanics of auto-aiming). There is one reason for all this: a player’s defeat destroys the effect of immersion in the game. Music breaks off, the loading screen appears, the game resumes from the last save point ...

Super Meat Boy copes with this problem with an instant restart, which makes death a part of the gameplay. But this is rare: many games simply can not afford it. This leads us to a difficult problem: on the one hand, if a player does not lose at least sometimes, what will be the challenge for him? On the other hand, losing it will hurt engagement in the game.

Various solutions to this problem that developers resort to can be summarized with one piece of advice: , , .



Now let's talk about in-game combat systems, in particular - about hitboxes and hitboxes.

A hitbox is an area of ​​a weapon or character that fires during an attack. It is often implemented in the form of one or more simple geometric shapes - usually boxes covering the specified weapon. When a hitbox collides with an opponent’s hearthbox, which identifies the unit’s weaknesses, the system captures a hit on that opponent.

It sounds simple enough, but there are many subtleties, thanks to which a good fight can be transformed into a magnificent one. In particular, we are interested in the opportunity to become as generous as possible to the players.

Hitboxes and hearthboxes are placed manually by designers, usually attached to the bones of the 3D skeleton. Their shape and size remain entirely at the discretion of the developers, and nothing prevents them from expanding one box and reducing another. And guess what: usually this is what they do.

For example, take Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor . The picture below simplifies the described idea:



Here we see four boxes:

  • Hitbox of a player’s weapon. It is stretched a little more than necessary: ​​thus, the sword is longer than it looks visually.
  • Hitbox of enemy weapons. It accurately repeats the length of the sword, and in some games it is even shorter.
  • Hurtbox player. He carefully repeats the width of the body, ignoring most of the protruding limbs and other parts of the body.
  • Hurtbox opponent. On the contrary, it covers all possible unit geometry.

The above scenario is a very good approach in order to avoid a player’s sense of deception, because many players will not take a hit if the enemy’s weapons only slightly touch their character’s hands. Also, they will not really like the miss if they are sure that their weapons are within the reach of the enemy.

The following screenshot shows the real situation from Shadow of Mordor , where the player makes a successful attack, without actually touching the opponent.



Looks funny, doesn't it? However, many players will not even notice this, because attacks occur very quickly.

Combat mechanics is a crazy interesting place to look for ways to reward a player: one could mention enemies specially moving to another place to give players enough time to heal, or those opponents who completely disable their attack mode if they are behind outside the camera ...

But in general - are we still talking about how to pamper the players? Or is it about giving them an accessible, generous, enjoyable experience?

Let's go back to some reasons why designers resort to such tricks: retaining the attention of players, quality immersion in the game, creating tension, shaping the desired behavior ... After all, this is not done to show the game different from what it is, but to creating an exciting gaming experience by achieving the correct perception, psychological state, the choice of players.


Rubber-banding - the method of "rubber thread"


If you have ever played racing against AI, you should be familiar with this feeling: now you are almost at the finish line ahead of everyone else, when suddenly your rivals begin to magically accelerate and are already breathing in the back of your head. Or vice versa: you are struggling to catch up with the leaders, and suddenly their cars begin to break down right in front of you, thereby giving you a chance to win. This is rubber-banding. And clumsy.

Each racing game faces the same problem: minor management errors can lead to significant consequences. It’s worth making a turn a little wider or getting out of it earlier than necessary, as you find yourself a hundred meters behind the car that coped with it better. As a result, the rest of the way you trail in the end in splendid isolation. Naturally, games likeNeed for Speed , can not afford it. Therefore, cheat.



Imagine that an AI machine is tied to a player’s machine with an imaginary rubber thread. The farther they are from each other, the more this gum stretches, the more AI will accelerate or the more likely it will break the car to return this gum to a state of rest. As a result, we have an extremely intense race from start to finish and competition with (seemingly) worthy opponents.



Game designers are like magicians: everywhere they have smoke and mirrors. But as soon as the player notices this, the magic disappears. And in the case of races, sooner or later you still notice it.

Have you ever noticed that in racing games the formula often works: (number of AI opponents) = (maximum number of players) * [x]? When playing races, you can see for yourself that each player will have at least one AI opponent attached to their car. This ensures that even the most terrible player, far behind the other, can still experience the thrill of the race against his personal AI opponent.


Understanding Your Players




Talk about Hollow Knight. This game has very beautiful mapping mechanics: every time a player finds himself in a new zone, he must first open it blindly for himself until he finds a Cornifer who will sell the player a level map. Usually they hide him in some special place, so the player must search for the cartographer literally by bread crumbs: by his singing or by pages scattered on the floor.

But then the player reaches the Deep Nest - the most terrible level in the game: dark, deadly, built like a maze trap. Without a card, the player would die every now and then, so the development team resorted to a small indulgence and placed Cornifer not only close to the entrance to the location, but also duplicated it twice - one NPC for each of the possible inputs. When a player finds one of the cartographers, the other disappears as unnecessary, because the player already has a map. This is both elegant and caring - another small subtlety that makes a game a masterpiece.




Is it okay to lie to the players?


Difficult question. Each solution described here is somehow a little lie to the player. No, the player did not survive only because of his skill and was not in the immediate vicinity of the enemy when he was killed. But can this be considered normal only because the player does not notice this? Do you need to deal with such tricks for the benefit of the future of the gaming industry? Everyone will have to answer this question independently.

How epic your adventure will be depends on both the players and yourself. But, since the game designer here is you, you have the last word. You can change the rules, encourage or punish the players, spin the game again when the gameplay has slowed down. Use this power. But be careful, because the best game masters are those who can let the player go on time.

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