It’s all in the Details: How Little Things make a game Better

There’s a saying that goes, “God is in the details.” There’s another that says “The Devil is in the details.” Theologically confusing? Yes, but it does tell us about how important details are. Details add color and richness to experiences that you can’t get if you’re just looking at the whole thing. Games are no different in this regard. Details keep you involved in a game’s story, it’s world, or its characters.

Each of these shops is a little bit of detail that made the world a little richer, if confusing. Who do these shopkeepers sell to?

How do small details enrich a world? What are some good examples?

Mass Effect 3 is the epic end to a space opera that took our Commander Shepard from a special ops soldier to the hero of the Galaxy. You meet companions, fight enemies, and even find love along the way. In such a large series of games, one might assume that the little things would be left out.

Mass Effect 3 is the story of a person very in love with shooting things and chest high walls.

After all, who the hell has time to figure out why the spaceships still make noise in space? Mass Effect 3's writers, that's who.  In a scene with your dropship pilot, Steve Cortez, on the Citadel, Steve relates you to how he comes to the viewing port to relax. He has a line, “When I was alone, I'd turn off the auditory emulators and just watch them drift by silence.” The ships in Mass Effect 3 don't make pew-pew noises, you just thought they do because of the emulators!

in fact, because they have sound in space, they can take it away at crucial moments like in Mass Effect 2 when your ship is destroyed and you walk through it's hull.

The writers know that people expect to hear something when they see something on screen, even if real life physics would disagree. With one little line, the universe of Mass Effect becomes that much more concrete, unrealistic expectations of sounds in space and all. It's nice to know that not everything will change when we figure out how to punch holes in the fabric of reality.

Also a strong entry into the "generic white guy holding a gun" poster contest.

Alone in the Dark (2008) is not a particularly well made game, small details or otherwise. The story is meandering, most of gameplay is dull and repetitive, and the numerous set pieces wear out their welcome quickly. Alone was not without it's good qualities, however. The fire in the game behaved so realistically that it was shocking at the time, and the melee combat was more visceral than anything most triple AAA games feature.

The moment it really shined for me, however, involves one of the most common tropes in gaming: a locked wooden door. In most games, you'd have to go find a key, or find some way around.  Alone in the Dark threw me for a loop. When I swung my axe at the door, I busted a piece of the door right into the next room. I stared, totally shocked, for about 30 seconds. Then I gleefully hacked out a protagonist sized hole in the door and walked on through.

You swing melee weapons by moving the thumbstick back and then whipping it forward. Awkward? Yes. Better then pressing the mouse? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Most games will tell you you're a super powerful warrior or mage, but when you try to knock down a damn wooden door the whole lie the game built up around you falls apart. Alone in the Dark says, knock yourself out kid. Beat down that stupid door. Maybe even burn it? Shoot the lock out! Be a real person! Reality is funny in games; we want all the good parts without any of the bad parts. Alone in the Dark actually delivered what I would argue is a better version of game reality than most games. Bit of a shame the rest of the game had more technical issues than a giraffe trying to use a fax machine.

The Witcher 3 is full of things to amaze you, big and small. You can lose hours of your life to Gwent or just walking around the countryside. One of my favorite little details is one that many people might not have even found.

Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, or "how to make all other open-world RPGs look like yesterday's trash"

Doesn't this guy look trustworthy? What with the drying blood and general look of hate?

On one monster hunting quest you are sent to deal with a Leshen (a kind of forest spirit) that was aggravating a small village. Once you get there, you find the whole village slaughtered. On closer inspection you find a little girl alive, who says that a man with eyes like yours did this. Eventually you find the witcher Gaetan. He took the quest before you and killed the Leshen, but the villagers tried to stiff him on payment. Two of the villagers tried to kill him with a pitchfork when he argued. Enraged and wounded, he slaughtered the whole village. The whole tale is deep and winding, but the best part comes as you approach Gaetan. If you're wearing the School of the Cat witcher armor he will remark “Well well, what have we here? Feline armor, wolf's head medallion- a crossbreed?”

Witcher Schools are notoriously strict in their traditions, so it makes sense that he'd be more than a little amused with your copycat style. In fact, he's one of the few people who would actually know anything about different kinds of witcher gear. His one line makes you think differently about him and consider your options for completing this quest much more carefully. He's not some mindless brute, he has a sense of humor, and he appears to regret what he did. Any way you chose to end the quest, that one line made Gaetan a little more human.

Video games have gone from little pixels on the screen to massive, engaging, sprawling wonders of technology. No matter how long or massive games get, little details are what is going to engage people. Nobody is going to remember the 85th firefight in Halo: Combat Evolved, but they'll always remember Sarge's pep-talk in the first level. God's own anti-son-of-a-bitch machine indeed.

Hit me one more time: Death and Punishment in Games

Dying is a big part of life, both in reality and in videogames. Since the first games, there has been a need for some kind of failure state. After all, what’s the fun in playing a game you can’t lose? Some games, like Atari’s Pong had “loss” as a failure state, but most games went with “death” of some kind. In any game, there needs to be some kind of factor that makes death unappealing (besides the fact that it’s an uncomfortable reminder of our own fragile mortality) so you avoid it. Different kinds of games have tried different things to make death unappealing, though some work better than others.

When arcades died, the continue screen died with them. IT's a real shame, considering how awesome some of them are.

What are some interesting methods of de-incentivizing death? Which of them are well designed?

In the Pokémon series “death” is not much of a hurdle, and that’s a good thing. You “lose” in Pokémon by making all of your Pokémon “faint.” You wake up at the last Pokémon center you visited after blacking out. Nurse Joy heals your Pokémon and tells you three or four lines about how the center is always here to help you.

No, I think I'd like my poor electric rat to just stay terribly poisoned, thanks. Is this free? Is there Pokémon healthcare? Do we have an HMO? Hold on, I need to call my mom.

If you just mash the A button to get through it quickly she’ll heal your Pokémon and you’ll have to listen to the whole spiel again. It might not seem like punishment, but having to read the same lines over and over again is just annoying enough to make “dying” a pain. This whole process incentives good item use and keeping an eye on your Pokémon’s health as you travel. If you let your Pokémon faint too often they start to dislike you which leads to your Pokémon disobeying you in the middle of battle.

I guess this is what I get for putting Caterpie first against that level 75 Charizard.

This system is well designed because it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay in a large way while also ensuring that you want to avoid dying, just so that you don’t have to hear Nurse Joy lecturing you again.

Death is such a part of the Souls series that the first DLC-included version of Dark Souls is called Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. You’d think that because death is so common in that game that there’s no way to de-incentivize it, right? When you die in Dark Souls, all the souls you’ve collected (used to level up, upgrade weapons, etc) are left where you died.

Welcome to the Souls series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter.

After death you respawn at the last bonfire (the game’s checkpoints) that you used. To get them back, you have to make it back to the spot where you bit the dust. What’s so clever about this method is how it changes based on how many souls you were carrying and where you died. If you only had a couple of thousand souls, you might not even care about them but if you had several hundred thousand, you would probably want to head back super carefully because losing all those souls means losing hours of game progress.

All your souls are right there in that little green light. You will die many times trying to get back to that light. You will resent that light.

If you just rolled off a cliff by accident, then picking up your souls is a simple as going back to the spot and grabbing them. If you died in the middle of a boss fight, you might have to dodge around a giant dragon while maneuvering towards your souls. It’s a multilayer form of punishment that really fits the tone of the game and incorporates directly into the gameplay nicely.

In Bethseda RPGs, death always results in the same thing: reloading your most recent save. Most modern games have an autosave system that will save your game every x minutes, but some older games require to manually save your progress. Bethesda RPGS are famous for their massive amounts of content, and each game just keeps adding to the pile.

This bear is actually a metaphor for how badly the massive amount of content (the bear) is going to crush you (you).

Every time you die, you can lose hours of progress depending on when the game saved, or when you did. This is unfair because it feels like saving should be a system that the game handles, rather than the player. It’s almost like you’re being punished for enjoying the game so much that you forgot to take yourself out of gameplay and go through a bunch of menus to save. This is a case where the game goes too far towards dis-incentivizing death, to the point where death results in you putting the controller/mouse down, maybe for the day. This can be mitigated, based on how often the game autosaves, but that’s more of a band aid than a cure.

Dying in The Legend of Zelda is a slap in the face that you see coming a mile away. You know that you shouldn’t have gone into that high leveled temple with one and a half hearts, but you did anyway.

This is not going to end well for me. What's that, Giant Dino-corn? You agree? Nice to have consensus.

Before you know it, you hear that sad little sound effect and you wind up back where you started the game. Every time you die you respawn with three hearts, no matter the maximum amount of hearts you have. In the beginning of the game you only have three maximum hearts so you can shoot (maybe throw? It’s unclear) your sword no problem. However as you progress though the game you get more hearts, so death means that you start out hobbled. Now you have to start out every new life by either grinding for hearts, grinding for money to buy medicine to restore hearts, or you need to find a fairy pool to heal yourself. This feels poorly designed because the game is putting an artificial time sink between you and more progress. The only difference between starting like this or starting will full hearts is about ten to fifteen minutes of wasted time.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!” Videogames have to make sure that death is aggravating because they’re the only place where you can die every five minutes and still be doing what you’re doing. Exactly how to go about making death aggravating must be a hard concept to wrestle with, given how final it is in reality. Clever developers come up with systems that play into the game mechanics, but others go for the low hanging fruit of time based frustration and quicksaving. Next time you die in a videogame, think about what you have to do to progress again. Is the mechanic well designed? Is it annoying? Why so?

Thanks for reading, everybody. Please share and send feedback, if you’re so inclined. 

Where the Hell do I Go?: Direction in Games

Figuring out where to go is one of life’s really big questions. Choosing a career, romantic partner, or even a place to live can be difficult, frustrating, or just plain confusing. You would think that games, where somebody can design everything exactly so, would be easier to navigate, but you’d be wrong. Whether deliberate or not, a lack of direction can harm your enjoyment of a game just as well as bad controls or a boring story can.

But, what is good direction? How does direction make a game enjoyable?

Halo: Combat Evolved is a revolutionary FPS with lackluster direction. Out of the eleven levels, seven could easily lead you to confusion and frustration. Several of the levels are made up of identical corridors, so you can’t figure out which way was forward or backwards if you got turned around.

Aliens really love the color purple. Ever notice that? Why is that? Also, how do they know where they're going in this stupid ship?

Since Halo has no cover system, movement is very important during a firefight, which does play well with the level design. Assault on the Control Room (5th level) has glowing arrows on the ground, but in Two Betrayals (8th level), you have to navigate the whole level backwards so the arrows just confuse you. Also, if your levels are confusing enough to warrant arrows everywhere, you might already have a problem.

The level looks pretty straightforward, but you'll definitely spend a few minutes saying, "Wait, did I come from here?"

The alien design the areas in Halo could be a reason for their confusing nature, but as a game designer, you have to make sure your players can find their way through the game easily. The lack of direction here is a problem because it prevents you from progressing in the story, or fighting new enemies, which are the two principal fun parts of any shooter.

Okay, so I'm a green dot in a grey void. That's helpful for my adventuring.

The Legend of Zelda is another genre-redefining game that suffered from too little direction. Much of this may be due to the technological limits of the time and to their credit, the designers did a good job making the game world memorable enough to navigate, but the “map” in LoZ is useless.

It tells you your general position in the world, but only some of the time. Several areas of the map will not let you past until you have walked through them upwards of three times. Without any sort of landmarks on the map, how are you supposed to distinguish one green (or blue/red if you upgraded your armor) dot on the map from any other position? I think the game designers realized this, because there are several times when you get a hint along the lines of “GO FIND THE OLD MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD.” These hints are an example of the right kind of direction in LoZ; they point you to a distinct place, so it’s easier to figure out where you are and where you’re going. However, the main goal of the game are hidden behind hints like “SPECTACLE ROCK IS AN ENTRANCE TO DEATH.”

Where the hell is Spectacle Rock? Which rocks? There’s like 50,000 rocks in this game world. Are they ones shaped like eyes? Are the rocks a spectacle because they’re impressive? Stop telling me nonsense, Old Man!

LoZ has very impressive scale and exploration for its time, but it also has a mission: defeat Gannon, become the hero of Hyrule. Wandering about aimlessly can be enjoyable for a time, but eventually you want to make progress on your journey and a lack of direction prevents that.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game aiming to capture the playstyle of classic shooters while feeling modern. It’s a pretty tall order, but Wolfenstein did very well in terms of scores and sales, so maybe they managed it. On the surface Halo and Wolfenstein: TNO might seem pretty similar. Both are FPS with a sci-fi bent where you travel to a world unlike any you’ve known. Both take inspiration from older FPS and both are regarded highly.

Wolfenstein: The New Order shows you a truly chilling future, but hey, at least it gives you plenty of firepower to deal with it.

Wolfenstein succeeded where Halo failed, however: direction and level design. Designed by (in-game) Nazis they may be, but the areas in Wolfenstein are very easy to navigate. Part of this is due to the fact that the areas are all very conventional. You spend your time in hospitals, prisons, and cities that are all lain out how you would expect them to be. Want to go up a level in a house? Find the stairwell. Want to find a first aid kit in a museum? Go the bathroom.

Hell, even the literal-actual moonbase is easy to navigate. If that's not good level design, I don't know what is.

The areas also change drastically as you progress through them, so remembering where you’ve been is much easier. The designers could have easily made the world very alien, given that 20 years pass under Nazi rule, but their choice to go with familiar environments means that you’re never unsure about where to go. You’re free to concentrate on the story, the gameplay, and finding secrets.

Hyper Light Drifter is a game in the same vein as The Legend of Zelda, focused on exploration and adventure. Much like in LoZ, you’re just dropped into the game with no real understanding of who you are, where you’re from, or why you’re here. Much like LoZ, Hyper Light Drifter focuses on simplistic combat with a few items and a big world map.

It's also a beautiful game if you're into pixel art.

Unlike LoZ, HLD starts you out on a linear path and then opens up to a huge world. This gets you more centered in the world and also makes choosing a direction to go that much less daunting. HLD also has a map that shows you the general world location, but it has landmarks that give you some idea of where you are in relation to everything else. There’s no stated “main quest”, but “objectives” are marked on your map so you have an idea of where to go.

You will be spending a looooot of time here, so get used to this map.

Their exact location is still a mystery, and given the several tiered nature of the world map, exploration is still more than required and encouraged to beat the game. If Skyrim is the preschool teacher holding your hand as you walk around the park and The Legend of Zelda is the person who puts a black bag over your head and throws you out of a moving car, then Hyper Light Drifter is hiking with a map and compass. You might not know exactly where you are, but at least you’ve got an idea.

Direction is important in life and in video games. Nobody wants to spend their whole life doing something they hate and nobody wants to wander around a game world pointlessly. In games like Elite: Dangerous, the exploration might be the point, but for most other games, some semblance of a path is needed. The next time you’re playing a game and don’t know where to go, ask yourself what the designers could have done to make finding your way feel organic, or if the lack of direction was a design choice, what are they trying to achieve?