(NOTE: I wrote this entry back at the beginning of January, and FINALLY found it again. Hopefully now that I feel this gap in progression has been filled, I can actually post shit again. Wonder of wonders, huh? Anyhow)
Here’s a question: how predictable does one want a game to be? Doom 3 took hits for being too predictable – power-ups in plain view would inevitably have a demon near them, ready to pounce (although in all fairness, this has been countered with those saying that particular setup was only common for those who played on the Hard difficulty, leading one to believe it was balanced towards Normal, which begs another question of “how do you properly make a game harder,” which I’m not going to try and tackle now [NOTE: there’s actually a good article on this in the February Game Developer Magazine, which is pretty boss and you should all read if you can]). But make a game too unpredictable, and it becomes pure luck: the player feels that their success is merely based on chance, not skill, and likely gets discouraged (the only place I’d say this works is on slot machines, and even then, it takes a particular type of personality to be really attracted to those – and I think some of their allure is making the player believe that somehow they DO have the power to affect the outcome).
So how do you balance these? This question came to mind for me because I’ve been playing a lot of Persona 3, who has some really nifty system design, but who also has some situations where the best-laid-plans of the player are sort of disregarded. The game progresses in a day-by-day format, where usually you can decide what to do after school, in the evening, and later at night – but occasionally you have situations in which your after-school plans are curtailed without warning, and you as a player don’t know until after the event how much time of yours was taken. And in the other half of the game – a dungeon crawl through a monster-filled tower called Tartarus – occasionally bizarre things will happen to the levels. The party gets separated; enemies are fewer; enemies are multiplied; no exit to the first level appears (meaning you need to go up the stairs and hope the next level has one); or Death appears (basically an unwinnable battle if it catches you). As a player, you get no warning for these (with the exception of Death, which occurs when you’ve spent - I believe - about 10-15 minutes on a floor), only a notification when you reach the floor (or, for the lack of exit, when you’ve explored the entire floor and realize oh crap, I’ve got to go up another story). Persona 3’s systems encourage you to use your Spell Power frequently (unlike other RPGs, physical attacks aren’t all that useful on a regular basis), but items to refill that power are few and far between. And you can’t go simply to any floor you choose: you have to find a special floor (usually where a boss is) and activate a machine. Most floors have a device where you can return to the base of the tower to recover – but unless you’re on one of those special floors with the machine, you’ll lose your upward progress. This sort of puts visits to Tartarus in two categories: an XP grind, or a mad dash upwards - avoiding as many encounters as possible in order to save your strength.
Now, if this sounds like I’m crapping all over Persona 3, I’m really not trying to: it’s a great game. It’s just HARD. And I mean it makes no bones about that fact. It’s sort of oddly refreshing: the game will occasionally do something really cheap (like having your instant-death and status effect skills hardly ever hit an enemy, while theirs are preposterously more accurate) but somehow be able to get away with it with a sheepish shrug and a kind of “that’s life!” look. If you’ve been going up floors in Tartarus at a rapid rate, your “handler” character will warn you to be careful and take a break if you’re tired (which is another thing about Tartarus – characters will get tired in there, which affects their stats, and if you can take them along the next day, and it’s complicated and really annoying at first but it makes sense – except for the fact that it’s hard to predict WHEN a character will get fatigued – another part of the game going “whoops, guess what, this is tricky!”). The only concession it makes is to warn you to “be prepared,” the most predictable thing about it is that certain things are unpredictable. And I guess that makes sense: as a player you don’t know WHAT could wipe your party out – only that if you don’t be careful and watch out for certain things, that it’s a very real eventuality. Even fighting lower-level enemies, sleepwalking through battles rarely happens: which is likely what makes it succeed at being something as simple as a dungeon crawl.
By the way: Persona 3 is really good. It’s just HARD. And it’s unforgiving. But somehow it’s fairly unfair – or, er, it’s fair about being unfair. You know what I mean.
I wonder what it would take to try and get systems like that to work in another game: what does it require? So many games shoot for challenging and just get frustrating, aim for the occasional bit of chance and end up too unpredictable. I’d say you need to keep as close an eye on your systems meshing together as Persona 3 does (if the game required you to use SP as much as it does but items to refill it were plentiful, would it make having to watch out for ambush or character fatigue seem more unfair?), but that’s sort of a thing one would hope a game does ANYWAY. Is it a cultural thing that Westerners expect Japanese RPGs to have a certain level of difficulty from the start, where Western games seem to have a lot more adjustable difficulty (well, this isn’t ALWAYS the case, I know, but I’m thinking about RPGs here in particular. But there’s that question about difficulty again. Hm.)? How much difference does it make that you get a sort of warning from the game itself (in Persona 3, your teammate’s comments about being careful), and how should that warning be delivered – in character or as a tutorial? How often – and in what way – do we want the player to be surprised?
I wish I could spend more time ANSWERING questions in this blog instead of just ASKING them, but with a lack of caffeine in my system currently I fear I’m far better suited to navelgazing at the moment than coming up with answers. Maybe I could hack it on a case-by-case basis when I’m this tired. Hm. But instead of answering that positively or negatively, I’ma get some tea. Hooray! Talk amongst yourselves.