When we were working on Elite: Dangerous, during the alpha we found that players could die and end up in situations where restarting the game was a better option than continuing, due to losing their ship and cash. In the end we made a 'debt' player tag, where players can always buy back their ship in the early game, but end up in debt and will be offered missions to clear the debt. This might be humiliating missions, like transporting dung, or questionable/dangerous missions like high profile assassinations. It was a nice way to let a player turn around a death spiral situation.
A game providing an option for a way out of a bad situation, a way that exists *within* the fourth wall (meaning instead of reloading a save, or restarting a game, or creating a new character) is awesome.
I remember as kids my sister was absolutely unbeatable at Mario Kart. She had a hustle where she would bet candy or pokemon cards or whatever and she would act like she sucks. She would hang back, and take advantage of the reward system, get a good item and save it while she utilized the rubber band system to launch herself toward the front and take out the winner right at the last moment. She didn't understand the mechanics fully as we do now, but she had an inherent understanding of the rubber band and item system. She wasn't sure how it worked, but knew how to take advantage of it anyway! Those were good days. She won me an awesome World Industries skateboard that had flame boy and wet willy on it in like a cool yin-yang type design.. it was a really cool board in the late 90s-early 00s! Haha My sissy is the best.
The good thing about GMTK feedback loop is that they're all beneficial to the channel. He gets a positive feedback loop for the better videos (more viewers, subs, money, leading to more determination towards future videos), and negative feedback loops for his worse videos (constructive criticism from friends, leads to fewer poor quality videos). Literally a win-win in this scenario. Not that I've seen the latter possibility yet, but it'd still be beneficial for him to fail.
This feedback loop system in Pyre gives me an interesting idea for solving the Xcom problem you mentioned. You could have it so troops that become promoted to a certain level in combat become non-combat officers that provide bonuses for lower ranked troops, which would easily have an in-fiction explanation. You could make it so it's a constant forward progression of making your entire army more powerful, rather than the current state in Xcom where it's a rather static affair. I've had playthroughs of Xcom 2 where I had a group of extremely powerful troops fall prey to some dome tactical mistake I made, only for that to turn into the entire game being a miserable failure because I simply wasn't prepared to continue on with rookies or low ranked squaddies.
Haha, I really like that idea of promoting a soldier into a non-combat role if you use them too much. It would need to be carefully balanced (and it would probably be a controversial mechanic that many would mod out of the game!) but could be very interesting...
I think ideally the bonuses would be something the player would actively seek out, otherwise you'd run into issues of players benching their best troops for important missions and avoiding ranking them up. You'd probably have to balance the game to be slightly harder as a result but I think the outcome would be at least interesting.
The Non-Combat troops could also end up having powerful one-use abilities in a battle or something like that, such as an airstrike. Something that players genuinely wouldn't mind giving up a soldier for.
You have to make sure not to make the officers too powerful either, otherwise failing players, who don't manage to promote a unit that far, miss out on the bonus buffs/abilities and fall behind the desired strength curve once again. Maybe the officers get their own command and you can call in a very powerful one-time-only favour which can help you crack a level you are struggling with. This way the day to day gameplay isn't impacted too much but it would still be worthwhile to send off powerful units.
It would also be fitting for a possible XCOM 3 scenario. Imagine this: After defeating the aliens on our hometurf (once again) it is now time to take war back on these suckers! This is why we need more troops now, an army even. And as you are invading the aliens' home planet these officers become increasingly important because they can lead strike teams that go on missions on their own which in turn rewards you with important resources.
Ironically, because he said that, I thought for a moment it was real world basketball but with everyone moving as if they had a plague. Then I realised what was happening and was reminded of the depressing inverse relationship between progress in graphics and average quality of available games.
I'm playing Chess Evolved Online, which is free to play. It's basically chess crossed with a collectible card game, with many new pieces and some new game mechanics to go with them. One thing that is a very good point is that there is *no* energy mechanics that prevents you to play to push you to spend money. Furthermore, you can get both currencies by simply playing, so using money will just help you build up your army faster (and thank the dev for his work). The way the game limits what pieces you can put in your army also makes it so that you're not going to end up constantly chasing to catch up to paying players. Well, there are new pieces added and a rebalance done with each patch (there is one every few months), so you can end up constantly reworking your army and being in need of money, but it's not inherent with the game, just with the fact that it's still being worked on. I recommend it.
Ahhh, Pyre is one of my fave games of 2017 for so many reasons, and this is one of them for sure! One little thing that wasn't mentioned is that the very first time you lose, the characters that lost that Rite get a 'Valuable Lesson', in the form of a huge exp bonus - bigger than you would normally get from a standard victory I believe. This both gives players a bit of a boost now that it has confirmed that they are struggling, but it also helps convince the player to *not* restart the rite again like so many would do in this genre of game, and instead take the loss as canon - and so give the game the chance to demonstrate how losing isn't the end of all things in the process. I also appreciate the many genres of games used as examples too, it really is helpful to see how the concept of feedback loops translates across games like that. :D Looking forward to the next Boss Keys!
An additional aspect about the Valuable Lesson mechanic that I just thought of: if the reason you lost is beacuse you decided to experiment with new, out-of-comfort-zone characters and don't do well as a result, those characters that you found it hard to play with now get a significant boost that could make them easier to play in the future as compensation.
I found the negative feedback loop In darkest dungeon very interesting that when a champion became high enough level they would refuse to play the easier fights because it was "below them" meaning that you couldn't power level one squad but to continue to get rewards from the lower tires you would have to use newbies also a smart choice because it forced the player to level backup champions for when the others got permanently killed this loop also didn't seem to have the effect of makeing me feel punished for playing good or rewarded for being bad
That and also you still had access to lower level missions to train up new adventurers, and the Heirloom currency helped develop the Hamlet to make it easier to train equip and recruit new(and even better) people, while the game is painfully punishing at higher tiers of dungeons and quests its never "Game Over".
Yes, exactly. And also, as far as I am not mistaken, the amount of missions you have available of each difficulty level depends on your current roster. So if you have a lot of high level heroes sitting there, you'll be getting more champion difficulty missions popping up and less apprentice ones. But if you have more rookie heroes in the roster and hardly any high lvl ones, then you'll be seeing more apprentice missions available (and hence more choice of what to do with them).
I quickly modded that and their refusal to go with an abom. I don't care what they think, I am the boss in that town lol. I also did not abuse one team, just changed something that annoyed me
I was hoping someone would bring up Darkest Dungeon. Personally I didn't like having to go back and beat the things I already did so much, because yeah, losing your units is so punishing. I didn't hate it and it could certainly be interesting to use new classes and squads, but well I certainly never finished the game.
Wait, Tekken 7 HAS a negative feedback loop of of sorts, though. When you’re low on life, not only do you get a damage boost, but you also gain access to the game’s version of Supers and EX moves (called Rage Art and Rage Drive respectively), all designed to allow the losing player to amount a comeback. Granted, Tekken 7 isn’t the only fighting game to have this sort of mechanic; most fighting games since Street Fighter 4 has one (for better or worse, depending on who you ask). But it still has one all the same.
Ack, you're right! I didn't know that. Luckily the major point still stands that nothing carries over from round to round. But thanks for the correction.
Mark Brown Oh absolutely, your point still made perfect sense. I just wanted to clarify that there WAS in fact a negative feedback loop there, just not in the way you where using the game to make your point :). And as a fun side note, there ARE fighting games where the damage incurred on the winner of a round is carried over to the next round (Darkstalkers and Killer Instinct comes to mind). But that’s almost more like having one big permanent health bar that stretches between rounds, rather than a negative feedback loop per say. Still a design decision I always found interesting.
Almost ALL fighting game designs have a feedback loop inherent in juggles/combo systems that revolves around the stun locks for chaining consecutive hits. Of course all good fighting games will cap combo/juggles at some point (usually by the insertion of uninterruptible cooldown frames in the animation, or offer an invulnerability frame for the damage recipient at the end of a long combo chain to give a chance to escape.). I do believe there have existed some perpetual slippery slope exploits in older, archaic fighting games that make escaping some juggles basically impossible. Artifacts of when management of feedback loop mechanics in games were less well understood.
Just a note with TF2, and that it has both! When the attacking team captures points, their spawn moves closer to the objective and pushes the team defending team back, but soon the points that need to be captured end up getting closer and closer to the defending teams base where they have less distance to travel and more map control! Great video as always, you're always expanding my shopping list :)
Hm, I've noticed systems like this in other games too. Like League of Legends, where doing well and pushing towers means the enemy now has to travel less far to engage with your team, meaning it'll take a lot longer for your team to get back to pushing than your enemy. I wonder what these types of systems are called? I would call them Distance Feedback systems, since most of the it's simply a matter of you and your enemy getting closer.
another TF2 positive feedback loop is that tf2 has random crits (yes, in a shooter game) and the amount of random crits you get increases when you do well
This actually reminds me of a really clever Negative Feedback Loop in XCOM: Long War, a community-made mood for XCOM: Enemy Unknown which makes the game far more complex and - you guessed it - long. Anyways, the mod has a Fatigue System where soldiers that go on too many missions in a row become Fatigued. Whilst it is still possible to bring them along for missions, they always come back wounded no matter how well you perform, encouraging players to let even their most elite troops take a break every now and then. This results in them trying out B Teams, C Teams, D Teams or - dare I say - E Teams, allowing members of these squads to level up, making them more capable and thus convincing you to bring them on more missions to level them up even further, advancing them from Rookie to Expendable to Least Concern to Veteran to Protect Immediately to Elite to God or somewhere in between. As a result, you start bringing them on much more missions, making them fatigued and ending the cycle. In fact, the game’s entire roster system is based around this - you have a few squads of elites, some get tired so you bring along some fresh meat, eventually turning them into elites making them fatigued making you try out more and more rookies until nearly your entire roster is made up of tired elites and you have to hire a crapton of rookies. It’s also why Long War is considered to be a vastly different game to XCOM and its subgenre. The official games are based around avoiding losses as much as you can whereas Long War is about examining the losses you will be presented with and choosing which ones to cut, making Long War stories darker and about expendability whereas offical XCOM stories more generic and about personal strife.
Positive Feedback Loops are the bread and butter of most roguelike games, many of them do however fix this issue by a simple trick: By being short. If you get powerful early on and steamroll through the game, then there is no issue if the game is over after one or two hours and you have to start fresh again. These loops can be really exciting too, especially if you are struggling with the game and suddenly have a shot at winning. That's also why they are an issue for Xcom, Xcom is essentially a Roguelike (without fail states), but a playthrough will take the average player several days.
Piece of advice, always keep close to the person in second place. When the blue shell comes along, pull back to second. If the shell isn't circling you yet, it'll actually target the person you just put in first place instead of you
If you watch Resident Evil 4 speedruns, players deliberately exploit the dynamic difficulty by taking hits so the following areas will have fewer enemies.
You mentioned there being a positive feedback loop in Splatoon in how a team with more ink coverage has more opportunities available to them, but something else in Splatoon (1 & 2) that I think is very important is how negative feedback loops are built into the rules for many of the game's ranked modes. In the King-of-the-hill-like Splat Zones mode, when a team takes control of the point away from the other team, the other team is given an amount of penalty points proportional to how long they held on to the point before losing it. These penalty points must be burned through before the team can start ticking down their timer. This is great because it means that, if a team captures the point right away, almost gets the timer to zero and then loses the point, the opposing team still has a fighting chance because the first team won't be able to just recapture the point for another 5 seconds to win. The new ranked mode in Splatoon 2, Clam Blitz (which is much harder to explain all the rules of) also has a negative feedback loop wherein a team is awarded a free "super clam" (which is carried to the other team's base to score) immediately after the opposing team scores. Kinda like hitting people back right away in Bloodborne to regain health, Clam Blitz always gives a team the chance to strike back after losing some points. Not to mention how each ranked mode includes a generous overtime that allows the losing team to pull through in one last-ditch effort. Those are just some examples, but they contribute to an overall design philosophy that makes Splatoon the single most fun and exciting multiplayer game I've played. The rules are designed so that quick comebacks are always a possibility which means that all players need to give it their all for the entire duration of the match. The losing team can never give up because they always have a decent chance of turning things around, and for the same reason, the winning team can never get complacent.
Cameron Tauxe I think one interesting part of splatoons negative feedback loop is how supers are earnt: its easier for a losing team to get supers quickly, as they have more turf to ink and gain super meter. Balanced out by the fact that they have a harder time movinf around the map. Splatoon is great imo
The stages, too, are (mostly) supermassive negative feedback loops. Most stages have the middle ground be the lowest area in the stage, and the closer you get to one teams spawn the higher up you are. So if your team falls behind you then get the higher ground to help give you an edge in turning the tide.
After watching this video a question popped up: In CS:GO, there is an economy system for every team, for buying guns, grenades etc, necessary equipment to win the match. Since the game is round based, every round win nets you $3000 and every loss $1400 (per player). A mechanic of the economy is that if a team is on a "losing" streak, they get more money each round, from $1400 all the way to $3400 (a _Negative_ feedback loop, since you get more for losing). But if you chain wins, the reward doesnt get bigger, its the same. On the one hand, chaining wins helps you win the game faster, but on the other hand, the losing team can get _more_ money than the winning, and if economic damage has been done in previous rounds (players getting killed ,losing their gear), even if a team wins it can be weaker in the following round. So is this a positive or negative loop. You get the same (big) amount of money every round (~positive) but the opponent can get more eventually and be more prepared in a round (~negative). Maybe Im just confused, but opinions are welcome.
NextDoorGuy so winning one round gives you the short term advantage next round, but going on a winning streak will eventually give the other team a bigger advantage? I like that idea of a slow curve negative feedback loop
charlie rose Yes thats the tl;dr of the system. Essentially it evovles into a negative loop is what you're saying. Interesting. It makes sense to be a negative loop ,but I was confused with the winning rounds part since its, you know, the goal of the game lol.
Wait, if your team looses for multiple rounds in a row you get more and more money to compensate? I never new it, and always wondered how the hell CS can be balanced when there is this obvious positive feedback loop of winners having more money for arms and equipment.
I never understood that mechanic (DeS). It would make much more sense to add stronger enemies after you win a boss fight to increase replayability of an already finished level while not punishing the players who are struggling.
Well, some positive loops allow for people that overcome larger challenges to get more power, which means that losing more means harder challenges that will make you stronger if you surpass than.
(my previous comment was meant as a response for Payadopa) Anyway, Dark Souls 2 also had some negative loops in regard that enemies would only respawn a limited number of times. As a mid to bad player, you would enventually empty out places with enough patience.
i think the game Massive Chalice solves the Xcom pretty well by having move incredibly quickly and have it basically become the income for the game. Over time your best troops retire or die just because of old age but instead of just losing them as Pyre does you can match your best players to create new and interesting team members.
I really liked Massive Chalice overall. The only issue with that game is that the difficulty gets a bit flat about the midpoint through the campaign. Since the entire game is about playing defense, and there are only so many enemy types they ever introduce, you're always only ever reacting on the battlefield and you're always only ever facing a limited number of enemies that you eventually learn how to counteract hyper-effectively. There's just no good endgame to thing, ultimately. They needed a final quest to actually set off the chalice where you had to go into the void and defeat a unique boss or something and return to set off the bomb.
The feedback loop in XCOM is actually a selling point for me and I don't want them to get rid of it. The game has a reputation for being a brutal meatgrinder for new recruits, which is fun in its own way. Then, when your guys survive, it's satisfying to have them level up and become tougher at the same time you grow attached to them. It's the best of both worlds and helps you construct your own narrative.
The issue is the 'when your guys survive' part. The aliens never tone down their assault, meaning if your ace squad gets wiped because of some unlucky crits, or mechanics that aren't explained (muton parries for instance), then your rookies are not only stuck with limited options, but thrown against the brand-new units that have weaknesses your rookies can't exploit, likely resulting in another wipe. Then another wipe. Then another wipe. For instance, quite early in the game, enemies with armor appear. And quite notable armor sometimes, with 3 on MECs being the most abrupt spike. Sure, grenadiers can shred the armor with a specific skill, or with their long-range grenade launchers, but if you have rookies? You're screwed. Plinking away at heavy armor while mission timers tick down. Sectoids camp far back and are weak to melee, just fine for an established Ranger with boosted movement distance from doing special operations, but for a brand new one? He can't even keep up with the rest of the squad, nevermind flank ahead to exploit the melee weakness. Add in that soldier aim/evasiveness/armor/health/movement distance/will are all tied to essentially how long they are alive, and you run into some huge problems. While your ace squad can tank more hits, dodge shots that should have hit them, hit targets they had no right to, and reach advantageous positions like flanks or cover in a turn earlier than anyone else, you quickly hit the downward spiral if you lose them. Can't tell you how many times my rookies on ambush missions get killed by exact damage that they could have tanked if they had armor or +1 health from a mission. Or missed a shot that was really important because they don't have good aim yet, or the movement capacity to gain height advantage.
@@Winasaurus while I might be late to this, even difficult missions are possible with low-level units (I’m doing a four-man campaign at the moment and an avenger defense left all my best units tired or wounded by the assassin) You have to shift your power from abilities to consumables and use them carefully No shred or run and gun for flanking? Equip a war suit and a shredder gun. Use grenades to break cover and abuse the crits Bring flashbangs and frost bombs to stall enemies and a refraction field allows concealment to make sure you’re not activating more enemies than you can handle Always train two psi-ops and keep one in reserve Etc. Robot enemies just don’t matter when bluescreen and AP rounds exist The game has plenty of recovery options: and your rookies and sergeants will level up FAST if they’re hitting above their weight class
@Duke Wang The issue is there's no point in a negative feedback loop that is intentionally crippling. Because it just means players will either restart the campaign when it happens (basically meaning it was a game over), or savescum to avoid it happening in the first place. There is precisely 0 incentive to keep playing if your ace squad gets wiped. The missions become longer and more difficult, sometimes outright impossible. The only method to avoid game over is to abuse the resistance ring missions to stall the avatar project, and even then you're not always going to be able to take those. I could understand seeing it as a good thing if there was some sort of unique comeback mechanic, like peril and danger in paper mario, where you ride the razors edge with a glass cannon build as a comeback mechanic, some sort of "crisis mode" on the avenger where recruits lose armor and health to gain movement distance, aim and damage (argue physical training substituted for combat drugs, armor synthesis swapped for high power ammo), then you could have a sort of "last stand", you put everything into a last punch and hope they go down before you do, creating super tense missions where you're still on the back foot but not so much you can dump a whole squads fire into a guy and deal 6 damage as it is now. As someone who has played xcom a disgusting amount I can say it's literally not fun and a waste of time to play on after the tipping point of losing people, and it may as well just say game over try again.
Yeah I really like how in both defeats and victories, Pyre has a way of encouraging you. Getting XP when losing prompts you to keep going. Letting your best teammates go means moving on to strengthen overs. I like how it basically uses both loops in different situations, more the negative loop though. I like how, similar to your dark souls examples, there's an increased incline when it comes to levelling up in shooters and how in a way it helps newcomers. Each time you level up, the next level will take that extra bit of time/XP to earn, so high level players have a steeper climb while a newcomer is jumping through the levels for a while, generally working as a confidence builder. It's not quite a balance, but it encourages play.
I think Tekken deserves a touch more discussion here. Sure, winning or losing a round doesn't directly impact how likely you are to win or lose the next round, but within the individual rounds, landing a hit will (almost always) get you frame advantage and often times wall carry, making it more likely for whoever landed the hit to land the next hit-a textbook positive feedback loop. Also of note is that many fighting games today (tekken included) have introduced negative feedback loops in "rage" systems that grant players at low health extra damage, defense, meter, or additional options in general. Regardless, this was still a great vid! I just wanted to comment on the one thing that I noticed.
I was looking for this. Fighting, platforming action, and hack/slash have the positive feedback loop of stagger and air combos, and some have the negative feedback loop of reduced damage for longer combos or attacking downed units.
I found losing against a certain team in Pyre actually kinda helped the story, when you finally battle them again in the Liberation match, you grow a sense of rivalry to them throughout the game and when that match actually comes, it made wanting to beat them even more satisfying even if that meant permanently losing a party member.
I really love the built in comeback systems in Splatoon 2. Almost every map (I'm looking at you Port Mackerel) is designed such that players have easy mobility on their side of the map but extremely limited mobility on the enemy's side. Usually the maps are a bit of a grove where both spawn points are higher up than the centre so and there are a lot of cliffs and drops you you can jump down effortlessly but can't get up, forcing detours to get around and get near the enemy's spawn. Inkblot art academy has an especially ruthless one that almost seems impossible you you don't know one specific jump.
I was just thinking about Shadow Of Mordor and how wonderful its feedback loops are. A big part of that is because of how the Nemesis system utilizes randomization to create both positive and negative loops. Defeating enemy leaders earns you experience and can grant you powerful runes, but that leader may then be replaced by another dangerous enemy that you don't have any information about, or the leader may return with new strengths and immunities that it didn't have before. Frightening an enemy leader can cause it to run away, making your mission easier; that leader may appear later with new fears or vulnerabilities, or he may end up becoming stronger and could seek revenge for his humiliation at an inopportune time. If you die, available missions and events will play out without your involvement, which can cause some changes to the enemy hierarchy that are beneficial or detrimental. The game makes a point of ensuring that all of your successes and failures have consequences, and although it always rewards successes and punishes failures through guaranteed positive feedback loops, the Nemesis system incorporates numerous other positive and negative feedback loops that keep the game challenging for skilled players and fair for struggling players. It also adds a ton of variety, giving each player a unique experience.
Your video reminds me of Faster Than Light, in that it also has a positive feedback loop system with every encounter you take, so if you make too many mistakes early on, you'll never defeat the boss at the end of the game. It also has chance encounters where the right decision will boost you and the wrong one will screw you for the rest of the game. However, it felt like the game was balanced by the fact that each run, no matter how far you get, is pretty short. You're meant to die a bunch and start from the very beginning all over again until you figure out how to make it through without dying.
I remember encountering a feedback loop similar to Pyre in Mega Man Zero. The game gives you the option to skip almost every mission. On paper this sounds good. However, the game eventually reaches a point when you can no longer skip. Since i had very low skill with this game, I had skipped every mission that was skip-able. This left me in a state of screwadge. If you don't beat any missions or bosses, you don't get any power ups. Though i had skipped almost every mission, I still had played for more than 4 in-game hours. I am convinced that at that point in the game with no power ups, it is impossible to complete it, thus I needed to reset my progress.
I think Tales of Symphonia has an interesting positive feedback loop, where you get points for doing good in battles which dont help you at all until you reach the end of the game (sort of like donkey kong). Then you can use them for bonuses during your next playthrough and you can even take negative bonuses to make the game harder for yourself the second time round.
Pyre is my absolute favorite game I played this year! And now thanks to this video I understand that part of why it was so great, was that the feedback loops were so masterfully intervoven with the game's narrative and setting that it didn't stand out like a gimmick; in fact those elements worked together to deliver a great experience.
A new GMTK video to enjoy! Yeah! Now I can watch it and then inevitably come back to see it over and over again since these videos are so well produced and thought provoking.
I came from your “Telling stories with systems” video wanting so hard to mention Pyre’s solution to storytelling, because I found it genius! The compartmentalized format of the story allows for branches and results in a story that holds up quite well without having to merge to a central story!
One of the things I love about the game Titanfall 2 is one of its negative feedback loops. When a team loses a game, thy get a chance to 'evacuate', So if they escape to the aircraft which appears soon after the game ends, they get the same level of xp and rewards as if they had won.This means that even if you lose, you still get a chance to earn xp if you can survive and get past the enemy players to the aircraft.
Matthematosis did a review of Devil May Cry in its entirety. Once I saw the Devil May Cry part of this video, I realized that the two of them should do a collaboration video together.
How didn’t you mention bonus (green) exp for characters who don’t play in a match? It encourages you to use every character yet not forcing you to do so, which is neat!
I really like the way Tom Francis counteracts the ‘snowballing’ in his latest game, Heat Signature. Basically, as you complete the missions with a certain character, you get some money to buy upgrades, new items you may find during the mission and liberation points, which progress the story. As you play more missions with the same character though, he gets more and more famous. The more famous your character is, the less liberation points you get, and as the result the story advances slower. So, while you can play a certain character for however long you want and get the best items for him, at some point you just stop advancing the story, and if you want to continue, you have to pick a new, empty character. These small, barely noticeable, but very impactful decisions are what I love about Tom Francis’ games.
The thing I love about Mario Kart Wii is that experienced players can still win the vast majority of games despite the negative feedback loops. The shortcuts like the DK Summit double cut and the Grumble Volcano rock hop allow good players to get leads so big that they can tank blue shells and still be in first. If a player is in a middle position, they can use power items at the right time to dodge the shock and make up for a lot of lost ground, take tighter lines to avoid red shells, smuggle power items into higher positions and of course take big shortcuts. Even if you're in last place you can target shock people in front of you so they fall into pits and/or lose their items right after getting them or smuggle, take shortcuts and smuggle items up into the front of the pack (this is especially useful with bullet bills because when used in about 5th place it'll try to bring you all the way up to first instead of bringing you from 12 to 8). That's why you can see people on wiimmfi with max vr, they're so good that they can overcome all the bull.
Ah man, all those old CoD clips bring back childhood memories. It's a pity CoD 4 and mw2 multi-players are unplayable nowdays, I really enjoyed them back then
This is very noticeable in boardgames too. There is one cardgame I love, called "The great Dalmuthi", which has the biggest positive feedback loop I have ever seen. If you lose once, it is very likely, by clever design, that you will lose again, and those who fared better in the first round, will likely continue to do so. The game is to be roleplayed on a meta-layer, the high ups become the great dalmuthis, while the losers become the great servants. And another card game, Felix, the cat in the bag, called in english i think, has a very nice negative loop, just by player positioning around the table giving players who lost a pick-me-up and so on. clever design. Thanks as always for the vid, pro quality :)
11:45 - 12:27 I can only say... The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's Trial of the Sword is exactly this. A challenging set of trials that you have to accomplish as a gauntlet, only to... upgrade the effectiveness of what's already the best item in the game. Players who WOULD benefit from the assistance are those who struggle, and aren't likely to actually complete the Trials. Players who don't NEED to compete the Trials because they're already so good at the game... are the ones who actually succeed in the Trials.
it's not really the best weapon in the game as you can find weapons with much higher damage in hyrule castle much more easily than completing the trails.
Valkyrie Profile is a perfect example of combined positive/negative feedback loop like in Pyre. In each chapter you have to train warriors in the usual RPG way. But at the end of the chapter your boss (the Norse gods of asgard) expect you to send one or more of your party members to Valhalla. Players could choose a character(s) to send, but the gods would have specific criteria for which warrior they would accept. The more characters you send off at the end of a chapter, the greater the approval you'd receive from the gods, but you'd lose those characters in subsequent chapters. In addition, a sent warrior would leave behind an epic weapon or item depending on their level. The better you leveled your team in the limited time provided, the greater the pay out. The gods overall favor would also factor in to which ending you get, and extreme disfavor would end the game prematurely.
I've been playing Tiny Metal recently and it's helped me realise that the original Advance Wars had one of the best mitigation techniques for positive feedback loops creating snowball victories. In Advance Wars, you have to build units to capture buildings which give you money to build stronger units. The weakest units, infantry, are the only units which can capture buildings, so no matter how ahead one player gets, they will always need to use and defend their infantry if they want to increase their lead. Players tend to get advantages by either having more buildings than their opponent, which lets them build comparatively stronger units, or by having more factories than their opponent, which lets them build more units per turn so they can capture more effectively. If a player is losing in building count, they can build the Mech unit which is cheap but trades favourably with the more expensive tanks that the opponent is likely making, and the only downside of the Mech is that it can't move far so it can only be used defensively. If a player is losing in the factory count, they can build the Recon unit which is excellent at destroying infantry but loses fights against more expensive tanks. Either way, the losing player has options which can swing initiative away from an overly aggressive player, so neither side is able to achieve a victory without making key strategic outplays. I think that if either the Mech or the Recon didn't exist, every game of Advance Wars would end in a snowball victory.
One thing I think might be worth mentioning is that in Devil May Cry, you never actually get powered up like in an RPG. You just buy new moves (and occasionally very small health/mana boosts which you find more of in the environment and quickly become drastically more expensive at a rate that should convince you to stop buying them after a few), and the moves aren't any more powerful in a DPS sense, they just give you more ways to approach combat. I'd say it's more a way of making sure the rate at which you acquire new moves is roughly the rate at which you're ready to start applying them in your game plan. Which of course does give you a bit of a feedback loop, but that loop is then mitigated somewhat by the fact that the complexity of the game requires that much thought to understand and apply well. And with that very long overly anal nit pick out of the way, great video, man. I love videos that encourage people to think about game design so thoughtfully.
And rewarding these bonus stages with the ability to play everything in a more difficult way again really blew my mind (and my sanity at some points too but whatever the game's great :D )
Pyre was the best game of 2017 in my opinion, and I'm incredibly hear someone else talking about it. You perfectly nailed what makes the game feel so great.
I'm not sure why but I've often struggled to wrap my head around the positive / negative loop terms... your explanation with the graphs just cleared it up in a flash. Thanks!
This was an incredible video. Thank you for explaining Pyre (a game I've been on the fence about trying) and also for making another damn good video about game design.
This is why Top Trumps isn't fun. The whole game is just a massive positive feedback loop. As you get more cards, you have better cards which help you get more cards and vice versa.
Getting more cards also means you get a lot more shit cards, more often than not you can get a very good comeback in Top Trumps because you're just cycling through the 2 excellent cards that the opponent hasn't managed to get.
Yeah, in any Top Trumps game, there's a best card in each category. It's not a perfect measure of advantage, but the player with more of those aces is generally going to have the advantage, regardless of how many filler cards each player has. For a Chess analogy, if one player has 8 pawns and their king, against an opponent with just king and queen, the player with the queen has a significant advantage (so long as they can prevent their opponent from promoting any of their pawns) - quality of pieces is more important than number.
You had me thinking about the feedback loop problem with XCOM before you even mentioned it in the video, and I didn't even know what a feedback loop was until this video. haha
Man I love how you use so many different games and different types of games to explain your thought process. It really helps sell your ideas makes it really easy to understand in context. Cheers Mark!
Splatoon's ink was an interesting example for a positive feedback loop, as it is also includes a negative one, at least for the standard turf war. Yes, if you have more area covered, you will have more hiding places and mobility, but it also means you have more territory to defend, allowing the other team an opportunity to slip through your defences/around your advances.
Fantastic analysis! This is one of my fave channels. I wish I had more friends that talked about game, art and music design. So interesting! Thanks for the upload!
That's the recently released "Ultra" chess, it's a game that was released with the exact point of having good graphics. You can find free chess games, or you can pay for a game with great graphics like ultra chess
Hey Mark! Quick note on TF2. On KOTH maps (the map with one control point) have negative feedback loops. The team that has the control point has longer respawn times forcing them to play smart or have the tide turned by a faster respawning enemy. Maps with more than one control point (like 5cp or 5 control point) uses a positive feedback loop, like you said. The team with more control points have faster respawn times to quickly end a match.
Very interesting. I'm going into game design major for college and when I start making games, I'll definitely keep things like these kinds of loops in mind.
One of my personal favorite feedback loop systems can be found in the Burnout series of racing games. You have a limited ability to boost your speed and improve your chances of winning the race, but boost needs to be earned by closely dodging traffic, driving in the oncoming traffic lane, drifting, and catching air. It's a system that rewards skillful players, but also requires those players to drive dangerously and risk crashing. Furthermore, it's possible to continue earning boost while boosting. On one hand, this makes earning boost easier. Faster speed results in more frequent opportunities for near misses, longer distances in oncoming traffic, longer drifts around corners, and and more air time from jumps. On the other hand, the increased speed makes earning that boost much riskier, as the player has less time to see and avoid incoming obstacles. As a bonus, trying to keep your boost up without crashing keeps the game fun and exciting even when you're miles ahead of your opponents.
When I played Witcher 3, the beginning was incredibly difficult, because I played it on the second highest level of difficulty, but later in the game the challenge was completely lost, hardly any opponent was really a challenge, except a few exceptions. And then came the final boss in the last expansion pack, he was so incredibly hard to master that even a prepared player is overwhelmed. A friend of mine just reduced the difficulty to easy, but I tried it multiple times and was so relieved when I did it.
I was never aware of how capturing points in Team Fortress 2 would result in a varied respawn timer, I have over 850 hours in the game and have been playing since 2011. Very insightful vid as always, all subs would benefit from hitting that bell button. :>
There are a few in Overwatch: During overtime, the more time that the bar isn’t going down it starts to go down more. The sr system makes it so that if you keep winning you will get more and if you keep losing, you will lose more. The more damage you do, the more of an ult you charge and doesn’t allow the other team to charge it as they are dead. This gives you an advantage.
An infamous example of positive feedback loops going wrong is the stun mechanic in Street Fighter games, where the player applying pressure (and generally speaking winning the round) is rewarded with the chance to land a super slow attack on a stunned opponent, while the other player not only is being pummeled by a flurry of attacks, but also loses control over their character completely. And a popular example of a negative feedback loop is the bounty system in League of Legends where basically a player who is on a kill streak, or simply has been farming for too long, will get a bounty on their head. Usually a kill in League gives 300 gold but if you kill a person who has the highest bounty in the game you're given 1000 gold, that's over 3 kills worth of gold just because you killed someone who's doing super good in the game and this can lead to a comeback for your team.
Great video Mark!! Thanks for drawing the graphs at the beginning. I think the red sine wave as a visual example is exactly what I needed to understand the negative loop.
Nicky Case has created a really cool explorable explanation (interactive demo) with which you can play around with negative and positive loops. It actually really gets you thinking about how loops play out and interact with each other in real life. (I'll link to it in a reply comment because RUclips sometimes swallows up links)
That whole bit about sending away your strongest players made me think about the original Valkyrie Profile game. Every chapter they'd ask you to send up party members for them to use as soldiers, offering bonuses for meeting certain criteria, and giving you money and items for doing so. If you gave them new or underleveled characters, they'd die up in Asgard but strong characters would keep fighting earning your remaining party rewards. I thought it was a neat idea then but it's cool to see how some people might apply a similar solution to another game.
A key element that effects feedback loops is player motivation. If a game as a great feedback loop, it creates extrinsic motivation to achieve the rewards of the in-game feedback. If the game is also simply fun to play, then that creates intrinsic motivation to keep playing the game because the player wants to keep playing.
The press turn system in Shin Megami Tensei 3 and 4 is a pretty extreme positive feedback loop. I call it extreme because in an individual battle it's possible to kill all the enemies without taking a hit, or if you're unlucky your entire team can be wiped out before you even get a turn. Basically if you exploit weaknesses and get critical hits you get extra turns. If your attacks miss or you hit an enemy with an element they're resistant to you lose turns. And the enemies follow the same rules when it's their turn.
Enjoyed the video and the variety of games mentioned I've never heard of. I quickly thought of the weapon system in Cave Story once I started watching.
I very much like this video. I wanted to give the additional example of Gwent :The Witcher card game. It has a very interesting feedback loop. See, matches are based on rounds, the winner is the first to two round wins,(best out of three). The thing is, most of the game's strategy is about choosing when to play your cards. Since you do not have many cards, having more than the adversary is a great, great advantage. Lots of interesting strategies revolve around losing the first or second round on purpose, in order to exhaust your enemy's deck, or to build up forces through setting up combos (some decks get more powerful when lots of allies are in the graveyard, or through using and boosting resilient cards (cards that stay on the board throughout rounds)). Therefore, winning a round often makes you weaker, and if you're clever, losing a round can make you way stronger.
You should make a video about fourth wall breaks. Also my friend and I discovered your channel a few days ago and we both think that you are a genius. Keep doing what your doing!
Can i just say, i loveee your videos. From the typography, music, motion graphics, editing, everything just seems so POLISHED. So much so that I have to watch the video twice, because the first time I was just drooling over the composition of the video. And please dont speed up your release schedule, because I (and Im assuming the majority of your audience) am absolutely content with getting a video at this pace if you put em' out at this amazing quality. You deserve alot more subs, meanwhile people walking through forests with cameras rake in the millions, you (and several other amazing channels) work so hard not just in the videos production, but also in all the research. Keep em up, and I'm sure you will achieve amazing things. God that sounded cheesy... but I meant every word!
Bought this during the Holiday Sale. Now I just need to scrounge together the time, energy and patience to dive into a new game. Any day now. Aaaaany day now.
Valkyrie Profile almost effectively does the same stuff as Pyre by having you send your party members to Valhalla to fulfill Odin's demands. However, the issue of having to switch to weaker characters is alleviated by allowing you to collect bonus EXP, which you can then distribute freely to your party members to keep everyone around an even level.
There are actually hidden negative feedback loops in Xcom (in most difficulties). For example your hit chance is increased the more you miss in a row, the other way around with enemies. You don't notice it most of the time, but I think it's important to avoid frustrating and "unfair" unlucky rounds.
3:25 - In modes like king of the hill, the team without the capture point will respawn faster. This is so retaking the point becomes easier. (the rounds can also only last a maximum of 6 minutes) This is a negative feedback loop. The team that is doing poorly gets an advantage to bring the match back towards an even balance of power. - In attack defence, the attacking team will have a large advantage early in the round. But as they capture points, the ballance will shift towards the defending team, by giving them better positioning and a shorter walk to defend their final 1 or 2 control points. Once again it is a negative feedback loop. The team that is doing well will have disadvantages, and the opposite for the losing team. - In 5cp, the team that has lost the middle point will get faster respawns and/or respawn closer to their 2nd point. Pushing the defending team to take back the middle point. But when a team is pushed back to their last point, it is flipped on its head. With the attacking team getting much faster respawns to push the round to a conclusion. So most of the round has a negative feedback loop, except for the final point which has a positive one. Making a neat crater shaped graph! TF2's respawns system is primarily a negative feedback loop. Not a positive one. Where did you get that from??? Did you only play on cp_steel???
This was honestly something I wanted to talk about in a video myself, but you've done a way better job than I ever could have :O There was one other feedback loop in Pyre that I think I noticed. On my first playthrough on the standard difficulty, though a combination of what I feel was luck and confused AIs, I managed to go a good while through the game without losing a single Rite. It was around that point that I noticed the opposing teams were all maxed in levels while mine were still a level or two away from that same level. It confused me why this was, but I have a theory. You gain a boost to EXP in Rites that you lose to emphasis the point that you learn more from defeat than from victory. With that in mind, given that I had won many Rites, it would make sense that if the opposing teams followed the same rules that my team does, they would gain experience at a faster rate than mine would. If this is the system that is in place, it would give more skilled players a tougher challenge against opponents with access to more skills than you do, and struggling players would instead be the ones with the skill advantage. The thing that throws a rock into my theory are the Titan Stars. For those who haven't played the game yet, Titan Stars give your team a boost in experience after winning a Rite (only after winning, not losing) in exchange for increasing the challenge in one way or another. I rarely made use of them because I was somewhat focused on defending my winning streak, but it is possible that the game is designed around players making sporadic or even aggressive use of them to gain more experience. In that case, the game may have been balanced with that in mind and let the opposing teams level faster to match the potential growth of the player's team. I don't have solid proof one way or the other, I haven't bothered to look it up so this is all just conjecture from my experiences playing the game, but it was something I thought was very interesting when I noticed it.
I often talk about this and always use the comparison of CoD kill streaks and Mario Kart's Blue Turtle Shell (so I was very happy to see you use those examples also!) I however prefer the Negative Feedback Loops, I agree that it can make you feel like being punished for doing well but I think that makes the victory even sweeter as you had to overcome that as well as the opposition.
In Company of Heroes 2 there is a population cap that affects your basic resource income. The closer you are to max, the lower your income. This means a player who looses units, can rebuild his army a bit easier and there are more options for a comeback. Comeback mechanics like this are a great and rare thing to have for an RTS. The positive feedback loop is that more map controll means more of the other two types of resources and not loosing units means they gain veterancy and therefore increased fighting power.
Thank you for the suggested video on psychosis. That video taught a lot to me and I appreciate your awareness of many other youtubers that may never get popular. Thanks for your great videos that are continually amazing!
can you make an episode on ECHO? i loved that game and was blown away by how well it nailed all the mechanics it set out. from the bubble that gives you a natural 3D representation of the enemy distances, to the way you play simon says with the echoes by carefully picking which skills to use and which to drop. come on mark you know you loved that game too :3
When we were working on Elite: Dangerous, during the alpha we found that players could die and end up in situations where restarting the game was a better option than continuing, due to losing their ship and cash. In the end we made a 'debt' player tag, where players can always buy back their ship in the early game, but end up in debt and will be offered missions to clear the debt. This might be humiliating missions, like transporting dung, or questionable/dangerous missions like high profile assassinations. It was a nice way to let a player turn around a death spiral situation.
Transporting dung! Brilliant
But is restarting quicker and less humiliating?
Nazareadain so the idea is that completing the debt mission always leaves you substantially better off than just restarting.
A game providing an option for a way out of a bad situation, a way that exists *within* the fourth wall (meaning instead of reloading a save, or restarting a game, or creating a new character) is awesome.
> Transporting dung! Brilliant
It's possible that this phrase has never been uttered before in human history :D
I remember as kids my sister was absolutely unbeatable at Mario Kart.
She had a hustle where she would bet candy or pokemon cards or whatever and she would act like she sucks. She would hang back, and take advantage of the reward system, get a good item and save it while she utilized the rubber band system to launch herself toward the front and take out the winner right at the last moment.
She didn't understand the mechanics fully as we do now, but she had an inherent understanding of the rubber band and item system. She wasn't sure how it worked, but knew how to take advantage of it anyway!
Those were good days.
She won me an awesome World Industries skateboard that had flame boy and wet willy on it in like a cool yin-yang type design.. it was a really cool board in the late 90s-early 00s! Haha
My sissy is the best.
I had one of those skateboards, really liked it :D
That is actually big brain
Amazing childhood memories. Hope yall are doing well today.
@@Tr0lliPop HUGE BRAIN
Rubber banding is only for AI that was something else she was doing
Personally I'm not a fan of the GMTK feedback loop where the more videos you upload the better you get.
I was about to leave a comment of the same sort. But I am stuck in this loop of appreciation.
BRUH TURBO all you gotta do is upload some videos for a change. Train up 😤
If you're upset at this guy's improvements, you should avoid this youtube channel Turbo Button. He's on the same improving feedback loop as well
The good thing about GMTK feedback loop is that they're all beneficial to the channel. He gets a positive feedback loop for the better videos (more viewers, subs, money, leading to more determination towards future videos), and negative feedback loops for his worse videos (constructive criticism from friends, leads to fewer poor quality videos).
Literally a win-win in this scenario. Not that I've seen the latter possibility yet, but it'd still be beneficial for him to fail.
ill check it
This feedback loop system in Pyre gives me an interesting idea for solving the Xcom problem you mentioned. You could have it so troops that become promoted to a certain level in combat become non-combat officers that provide bonuses for lower ranked troops, which would easily have an in-fiction explanation. You could make it so it's a constant forward progression of making your entire army more powerful, rather than the current state in Xcom where it's a rather static affair. I've had playthroughs of Xcom 2 where I had a group of extremely powerful troops fall prey to some dome tactical mistake I made, only for that to turn into the entire game being a miserable failure because I simply wasn't prepared to continue on with rookies or low ranked squaddies.
Haha, I really like that idea of promoting a soldier into a non-combat role if you use them too much. It would need to be carefully balanced (and it would probably be a controversial mechanic that many would mod out of the game!) but could be very interesting...
I think ideally the bonuses would be something the player would actively seek out, otherwise you'd run into issues of players benching their best troops for important missions and avoiding ranking them up. You'd probably have to balance the game to be slightly harder as a result but I think the outcome would be at least interesting.
The Non-Combat troops could also end up having powerful one-use abilities in a battle or something like that, such as an airstrike. Something that players genuinely wouldn't mind giving up a soldier for.
You have to make sure not to make the officers too powerful either, otherwise failing players, who don't manage to promote a unit that far, miss out on the bonus buffs/abilities and fall behind the desired strength curve once again.
Maybe the officers get their own command and you can call in a very powerful one-time-only favour which can help you crack a level you are struggling with. This way the day to day gameplay isn't impacted too much but it would still be worthwhile to send off powerful units.
It would also be fitting for a possible XCOM 3 scenario. Imagine this: After defeating the aliens on our hometurf (once again) it is now time to take war back on these suckers! This is why we need more troops now, an army even. And as you are invading the aliens' home planet these officers become increasingly important because they can lead strike teams that go on missions on their own which in turn rewards you with important resources.
9:28 “This is similar to real world basketball” *shows basketball video game*
Ironically, because he said that, I thought for a moment it was real world basketball but with everyone moving as if they had a plague. Then I realised what was happening and was reminded of the depressing inverse relationship between progress in graphics and average quality of available games.
So when can we expect to see a Chess 2 with better gameplay?
You can play Checkers, which is like Chess, but streamlined for a wider audience.
There actually is a game called "Chess 2". Whether it has better gameplay is up for debate.
Chess: Origins. Pre-order now to get the free "Bishop's Remorse" DLC for free
I would hate to be winning at Chess 2 and getting my King Blue Shelled :D
I'm playing Chess Evolved Online, which is free to play. It's basically chess crossed with a collectible card game, with many new pieces and some new game mechanics to go with them.
One thing that is a very good point is that there is *no* energy mechanics that prevents you to play to push you to spend money.
Furthermore, you can get both currencies by simply playing, so using money will just help you build up your army faster (and thank the dev for his work). The way the game limits what pieces you can put in your army also makes it so that you're not going to end up constantly chasing to catch up to paying players. Well, there are new pieces added and a rebalance done with each patch (there is one every few months), so you can end up constantly reworking your army and being in need of money, but it's not inherent with the game, just with the fact that it's still being worked on.
I recommend it.
Ahhh, Pyre is one of my fave games of 2017 for so many reasons, and this is one of them for sure! One little thing that wasn't mentioned is that the very first time you lose, the characters that lost that Rite get a 'Valuable Lesson', in the form of a huge exp bonus - bigger than you would normally get from a standard victory I believe. This both gives players a bit of a boost now that it has confirmed that they are struggling, but it also helps convince the player to *not* restart the rite again like so many would do in this genre of game, and instead take the loss as canon - and so give the game the chance to demonstrate how losing isn't the end of all things in the process.
I also appreciate the many genres of games used as examples too, it really is helpful to see how the concept of feedback loops translates across games like that. :D Looking forward to the next Boss Keys!
An additional aspect about the Valuable Lesson mechanic that I just thought of: if the reason you lost is beacuse you decided to experiment with new, out-of-comfort-zone characters and don't do well as a result, those characters that you found it hard to play with now get a significant boost that could make them easier to play in the future as compensation.
Where can i find/play Pyre? Maybe Mark said it in the video but i missed it.
Pyre's on PS4 and PC. So check the PlayStation Store or Steam. Enjoy!
Steam works for sure, probably the consoles too.
@@daud3171 Bae is bae
I found the negative feedback loop In darkest dungeon very interesting that when a champion became high enough level they would refuse to play the easier fights because it was "below them" meaning that you couldn't power level one squad but to continue to get rewards from the lower tires you would have to use newbies also a smart choice because it forced the player to level backup champions for when the others got permanently killed this loop also didn't seem to have the effect of makeing me feel punished for playing good or rewarded for being bad
That and also you still had access to lower level missions to train up new adventurers, and the Heirloom currency helped develop the Hamlet to make it easier to train equip and recruit new(and even better) people, while the game is painfully punishing at higher tiers of dungeons and quests its never "Game Over".
Yes, exactly. And also, as far as I am not mistaken, the amount of missions you have available of each difficulty level depends on your current roster. So if you have a lot of high level heroes sitting there, you'll be getting more champion difficulty missions popping up and less apprentice ones. But if you have more rookie heroes in the roster and hardly any high lvl ones, then you'll be seeing more apprentice missions available (and hence more choice of what to do with them).
I quickly modded that and their refusal to go with an abom. I don't care what they think, I am the boss in that town lol. I also did not abuse one team, just changed something that annoyed me
I was hoping someone would bring up Darkest Dungeon. Personally I didn't like having to go back and beat the things I already did so much, because yeah, losing your units is so punishing. I didn't hate it and it could certainly be interesting to use new classes and squads, but well I certainly never finished the game.
Wait, Tekken 7 HAS a negative feedback loop of of sorts, though. When you’re low on life, not only do you get a damage boost, but you also gain access to the game’s version of Supers and EX moves (called Rage Art and Rage Drive respectively), all designed to allow the losing player to amount a comeback.
Granted, Tekken 7 isn’t the only fighting game to have this sort of mechanic; most fighting games since Street Fighter 4 has one (for better or worse, depending on who you ask). But it still has one all the same.
Ack, you're right! I didn't know that. Luckily the major point still stands that nothing carries over from round to round. But thanks for the correction.
Mark Brown Oh absolutely, your point still made perfect sense. I just wanted to clarify that there WAS in fact a negative feedback loop there, just not in the way you where using the game to make your point :).
And as a fun side note, there ARE fighting games where the damage incurred on the winner of a round is carried over to the next round (Darkstalkers and Killer Instinct comes to mind). But that’s almost more like having one big permanent health bar that stretches between rounds, rather than a negative feedback loop per say. Still a design decision I always found interesting.
basically like the rage effect in smash 4
Almost ALL fighting game designs have a feedback loop inherent in juggles/combo systems that revolves around the stun locks for chaining consecutive hits. Of course all good fighting games will cap combo/juggles at some point (usually by the insertion of uninterruptible cooldown frames in the animation, or offer an invulnerability frame for the damage recipient at the end of a long combo chain to give a chance to escape.).
I do believe there have existed some perpetual slippery slope exploits in older, archaic fighting games that make escaping some juggles basically impossible. Artifacts of when management of feedback loop mechanics in games were less well understood.
Elia, forse Yes. It’s even called the same thing: Rage. Possibly because Namco was a co-developer on the game, but I don’t know that for a fact.
Just a note with TF2, and that it has both! When the attacking team captures points, their spawn moves closer to the objective and pushes the team defending team back, but soon the points that need to be captured end up getting closer and closer to the defending teams base where they have less distance to travel and more map control! Great video as always, you're always expanding my shopping list :)
Hm, I've noticed systems like this in other games too. Like League of Legends, where doing well and pushing towers means the enemy now has to travel less far to engage with your team, meaning it'll take a lot longer for your team to get back to pushing than your enemy.
I wonder what these types of systems are called? I would call them Distance Feedback systems, since most of the it's simply a matter of you and your enemy getting closer.
Robin Rai Ah, finally a man of culture.
Edit: spelling mistake.
another TF2 positive feedback loop is that tf2 has random crits (yes, in a shooter game) and the amount of random crits you get increases when you do well
This actually reminds me of a really clever Negative Feedback Loop in XCOM: Long War, a community-made mood for XCOM: Enemy Unknown which makes the game far more complex and - you guessed it - long. Anyways, the mod has a Fatigue System where soldiers that go on too many missions in a row become Fatigued. Whilst it is still possible to bring them along for missions, they always come back wounded no matter how well you perform, encouraging players to let even their most elite troops take a break every now and then. This results in them trying out B Teams, C Teams, D Teams or - dare I say - E Teams, allowing members of these squads to level up, making them more capable and thus convincing you to bring them on more missions to level them up even further, advancing them from Rookie to Expendable to Least Concern to Veteran to Protect Immediately to Elite to God or somewhere in between. As a result, you start bringing them on much more missions, making them fatigued and ending the cycle. In fact, the game’s entire roster system is based around this - you have a few squads of elites, some get tired so you bring along some fresh meat, eventually turning them into elites making them fatigued making you try out more and more rookies until nearly your entire roster is made up of tired elites and you have to hire a crapton of rookies. It’s also why Long War is considered to be a vastly different game to XCOM and its subgenre. The official games are based around avoiding losses as much as you can whereas Long War is about examining the losses you will be presented with and choosing which ones to cut, making Long War stories darker and about expendability whereas offical XCOM stories more generic and about personal strife.
EDIT: speling erur
Positive Feedback Loops are the bread and butter of most roguelike games, many of them do however fix this issue by a simple trick: By being short. If you get powerful early on and steamroll through the game, then there is no issue if the game is over after one or two hours and you have to start fresh again. These loops can be really exciting too, especially if you are struggling with the game and suddenly have a shot at winning.
That's also why they are an issue for Xcom, Xcom is essentially a Roguelike (without fail states), but a playthrough will take the average player several days.
Piece of advice, always keep close to the person in second place. When the blue shell comes along, pull back to second. If the shell isn't circling you yet, it'll actually target the person you just put in first place instead of you
If you watch Resident Evil 4 speedruns, players deliberately exploit the dynamic difficulty by taking hits so the following areas will have fewer enemies.
You mentioned there being a positive feedback loop in Splatoon in how a team with more ink coverage has more opportunities available to them, but something else in Splatoon (1 & 2) that I think is very important is how negative feedback loops are built into the rules for many of the game's ranked modes. In the King-of-the-hill-like Splat Zones mode, when a team takes control of the point away from the other team, the other team is given an amount of penalty points proportional to how long they held on to the point before losing it. These penalty points must be burned through before the team can start ticking down their timer. This is great because it means that, if a team captures the point right away, almost gets the timer to zero and then loses the point, the opposing team still has a fighting chance because the first team won't be able to just recapture the point for another 5 seconds to win. The new ranked mode in Splatoon 2, Clam Blitz (which is much harder to explain all the rules of) also has a negative feedback loop wherein a team is awarded a free "super clam" (which is carried to the other team's base to score) immediately after the opposing team scores. Kinda like hitting people back right away in Bloodborne to regain health, Clam Blitz always gives a team the chance to strike back after losing some points. Not to mention how each ranked mode includes a generous overtime that allows the losing team to pull through in one last-ditch effort. Those are just some examples, but they contribute to an overall design philosophy that makes Splatoon the single most fun and exciting multiplayer game I've played. The rules are designed so that quick comebacks are always a possibility which means that all players need to give it their all for the entire duration of the match. The losing team can never give up because they always have a decent chance of turning things around, and for the same reason, the winning team can never get complacent.
Cameron Tauxe I think one interesting part of splatoons negative feedback loop is how supers are earnt: its easier for a losing team to get supers quickly, as they have more turf to ink and gain super meter. Balanced out by the fact that they have a harder time movinf around the map. Splatoon is great imo
The stages, too, are (mostly) supermassive negative feedback loops. Most stages have the middle ground be the lowest area in the stage, and the closer you get to one teams spawn the higher up you are. So if your team falls behind you then get the higher ground to help give you an edge in turning the tide.
I've been watching you for about 2 years and watching that TOP PATRONS list grow is actually really cool. Good job Mark, you've truly deserved it!
Thank you! But it's actually becoming a problem - the sheer number of names has crashed Photoshop at times!
After watching this video a question popped up:
In CS:GO, there is an economy system for every team, for buying guns, grenades etc, necessary equipment to win the match. Since the game is round based, every round win nets you $3000 and every loss $1400 (per player).
A mechanic of the economy is that if a team is on a "losing" streak, they get more money each round, from $1400 all the way to $3400 (a _Negative_ feedback loop, since you get more for losing). But if you chain wins, the reward doesnt get bigger, its the same.
On the one hand, chaining wins helps you win the game faster, but on the other hand, the losing team can get _more_ money than the winning, and if economic damage has been done in previous rounds (players getting killed ,losing their gear), even if a team wins it can be weaker in the following round. So is this a positive or negative loop. You get the same (big) amount of money every round (~positive) but the opponent can get more eventually and be more prepared in a round (~negative).
Maybe Im just confused, but opinions are welcome.
NextDoorGuy so winning one round gives you the short term advantage next round, but going on a winning streak will eventually give the other team a bigger advantage? I like that idea of a slow curve negative feedback loop
charlie rose Yes thats the tl;dr of the system.
Essentially it evovles into a negative loop is what you're saying. Interesting. It makes sense to be a negative loop ,but I was confused with the winning rounds part since its, you know, the goal of the game lol.
Wait, if your team looses for multiple rounds in a row you get more and more money to compensate? I never new it, and always wondered how the hell CS can be balanced when there is this obvious positive feedback loop of winners having more money for arms and equipment.
7:54 These little guys to the right and left side look a lot like a badass Hollow Knight
haha yes I thought the same thing
The imps are pretty badass. Ti'zo is bae
Ti'Zo the wise, ever faithful to the cause of the Nightwings - he stayed true to the end!
Dark Souls 2 deaths actually decrease your overall health capacity. That was a tough feedback loop.
And let's not forget Demons' Souls where enemies got more numerous the more you died.
I never understood that mechanic (DeS). It would make much more sense to add stronger enemies after you win a boss fight to increase replayability of an already finished level while not punishing the players who are struggling.
Well, some positive loops allow for people that overcome larger challenges to get more power, which means that losing more means harder challenges that will make you stronger if you surpass than.
That only happens if you die as a Human tho. As a spirit, you dont get any bonuses/penalties. World tendecy was a weird system admittedly.
(my previous comment was meant as a response for Payadopa)
Anyway, Dark Souls 2 also had some negative loops in regard that enemies would only respawn a limited number of times. As a mid to bad player, you would enventually empty out places with enough patience.
i think the game Massive Chalice solves the Xcom pretty well by having move incredibly quickly and have it basically become the income for the game. Over time your best troops retire or die just because of old age but instead of just losing them as Pyre does you can match your best players to create new and interesting team members.
I really liked Massive Chalice overall. The only issue with that game is that the difficulty gets a bit flat about the midpoint through the campaign. Since the entire game is about playing defense, and there are only so many enemy types they ever introduce, you're always only ever reacting on the battlefield and you're always only ever facing a limited number of enemies that you eventually learn how to counteract hyper-effectively.
There's just no good endgame to thing, ultimately. They needed a final quest to actually set off the chalice where you had to go into the void and defeat a unique boss or something and return to set off the bomb.
The feedback loop in XCOM is actually a selling point for me and I don't want them to get rid of it. The game has a reputation for being a brutal meatgrinder for new recruits, which is fun in its own way. Then, when your guys survive, it's satisfying to have them level up and become tougher at the same time you grow attached to them. It's the best of both worlds and helps you construct your own narrative.
The issue is the 'when your guys survive' part. The aliens never tone down their assault, meaning if your ace squad gets wiped because of some unlucky crits, or mechanics that aren't explained (muton parries for instance), then your rookies are not only stuck with limited options, but thrown against the brand-new units that have weaknesses your rookies can't exploit, likely resulting in another wipe. Then another wipe. Then another wipe.
For instance, quite early in the game, enemies with armor appear. And quite notable armor sometimes, with 3 on MECs being the most abrupt spike. Sure, grenadiers can shred the armor with a specific skill, or with their long-range grenade launchers, but if you have rookies? You're screwed. Plinking away at heavy armor while mission timers tick down. Sectoids camp far back and are weak to melee, just fine for an established Ranger with boosted movement distance from doing special operations, but for a brand new one? He can't even keep up with the rest of the squad, nevermind flank ahead to exploit the melee weakness.
Add in that soldier aim/evasiveness/armor/health/movement distance/will are all tied to essentially how long they are alive, and you run into some huge problems. While your ace squad can tank more hits, dodge shots that should have hit them, hit targets they had no right to, and reach advantageous positions like flanks or cover in a turn earlier than anyone else, you quickly hit the downward spiral if you lose them. Can't tell you how many times my rookies on ambush missions get killed by exact damage that they could have tanked if they had armor or +1 health from a mission. Or missed a shot that was really important because they don't have good aim yet, or the movement capacity to gain height advantage.
@@Winasaurus while I might be late to this, even difficult missions are possible with low-level units (I’m doing a four-man campaign at the moment and an avenger defense left all my best units tired or wounded by the assassin)
You have to shift your power from abilities to consumables and use them carefully
No shred or run and gun for flanking? Equip a war suit and a shredder gun. Use grenades to break cover and abuse the crits
Bring flashbangs and frost bombs to stall enemies and a refraction field allows concealment to make sure you’re not activating more enemies than you can handle
Always train two psi-ops and keep one in reserve
Etc.
Robot enemies just don’t matter when bluescreen and AP rounds exist
The game has plenty of recovery options: and your rookies and sergeants will level up FAST if they’re hitting above their weight class
@Duke Wang The issue is there's no point in a negative feedback loop that is intentionally crippling. Because it just means players will either restart the campaign when it happens (basically meaning it was a game over), or savescum to avoid it happening in the first place.
There is precisely 0 incentive to keep playing if your ace squad gets wiped. The missions become longer and more difficult, sometimes outright impossible. The only method to avoid game over is to abuse the resistance ring missions to stall the avatar project, and even then you're not always going to be able to take those.
I could understand seeing it as a good thing if there was some sort of unique comeback mechanic, like peril and danger in paper mario, where you ride the razors edge with a glass cannon build as a comeback mechanic, some sort of "crisis mode" on the avenger where recruits lose armor and health to gain movement distance, aim and damage (argue physical training substituted for combat drugs, armor synthesis swapped for high power ammo), then you could have a sort of "last stand", you put everything into a last punch and hope they go down before you do, creating super tense missions where you're still on the back foot but not so much you can dump a whole squads fire into a guy and deal 6 damage as it is now.
As someone who has played xcom a disgusting amount I can say it's literally not fun and a waste of time to play on after the tipping point of losing people, and it may as well just say game over try again.
Yeah I really like how in both defeats and victories, Pyre has a way of encouraging you. Getting XP when losing prompts you to keep going. Letting your best teammates go means moving on to strengthen overs. I like how it basically uses both loops in different situations, more the negative loop though.
I like how, similar to your dark souls examples, there's an increased incline when it comes to levelling up in shooters and how in a way it helps newcomers. Each time you level up, the next level will take that extra bit of time/XP to earn, so high level players have a steeper climb while a newcomer is jumping through the levels for a while, generally working as a confidence builder. It's not quite a balance, but it encourages play.
I think Tekken deserves a touch more discussion here. Sure, winning or losing a round doesn't directly impact how likely you are to win or lose the next round, but within the individual rounds, landing a hit will (almost always) get you frame advantage and often times wall carry, making it more likely for whoever landed the hit to land the next hit-a textbook positive feedback loop. Also of note is that many fighting games today (tekken included) have introduced negative feedback loops in "rage" systems that grant players at low health extra damage, defense, meter, or additional options in general.
Regardless, this was still a great vid! I just wanted to comment on the one thing that I noticed.
I was looking for this. Fighting, platforming action, and hack/slash have the positive feedback loop of stagger and air combos, and some have the negative feedback loop of reduced damage for longer combos or attacking downed units.
Exactly. The use of frame data in combos create some sort of short-lived, self-contained feedback loops.
I found losing against a certain team in Pyre actually kinda helped the story, when you finally battle them again in the Liberation match, you grow a sense of rivalry to them throughout the game and when that match actually comes, it made wanting to beat them even more satisfying even if that meant permanently losing a party member.
I really love the built in comeback systems in Splatoon 2. Almost every map (I'm looking at you Port Mackerel) is designed such that players have easy mobility on their side of the map but extremely limited mobility on the enemy's side.
Usually the maps are a bit of a grove where both spawn points are higher up than the centre so and there are a lot of cliffs and drops you you can jump down effortlessly but can't get up, forcing detours to get around and get near the enemy's spawn. Inkblot art academy has an especially ruthless one that almost seems impossible you you don't know one specific jump.
I was just thinking about Shadow Of Mordor and how wonderful its feedback loops are. A big part of that is because of how the Nemesis system utilizes randomization to create both positive and negative loops.
Defeating enemy leaders earns you experience and can grant you powerful runes, but that leader may then be replaced by another dangerous enemy that you don't have any information about, or the leader may return with new strengths and immunities that it didn't have before. Frightening an enemy leader can cause it to run away, making your mission easier; that leader may appear later with new fears or vulnerabilities, or he may end up becoming stronger and could seek revenge for his humiliation at an inopportune time. If you die, available missions and events will play out without your involvement, which can cause some changes to the enemy hierarchy that are beneficial or detrimental. The game makes a point of ensuring that all of your successes and failures have consequences, and although it always rewards successes and punishes failures through guaranteed positive feedback loops, the Nemesis system incorporates numerous other positive and negative feedback loops that keep the game challenging for skilled players and fair for struggling players. It also adds a ton of variety, giving each player a unique experience.
Your video reminds me of Faster Than Light, in that it also has a positive feedback loop system with every encounter you take, so if you make too many mistakes early on, you'll never defeat the boss at the end of the game. It also has chance encounters where the right decision will boost you and the wrong one will screw you for the rest of the game. However, it felt like the game was balanced by the fact that each run, no matter how far you get, is pretty short. You're meant to die a bunch and start from the very beginning all over again until you figure out how to make it through without dying.
I remember encountering a feedback loop similar to Pyre in Mega Man Zero. The game gives you the option to skip almost every mission. On paper this sounds good. However, the game eventually reaches a point when you can no longer skip. Since i had very low skill with this game, I had skipped every mission that was skip-able. This left me in a state of screwadge. If you don't beat any missions or bosses, you don't get any power ups. Though i had skipped almost every mission, I still had played for more than 4 in-game hours. I am convinced that at that point in the game with no power ups, it is impossible to complete it, thus I needed to reset my progress.
Fantastic episode.
I think Tales of Symphonia has an interesting positive feedback loop, where you get points for doing good in battles which dont help you at all until you reach the end of the game (sort of like donkey kong). Then you can use them for bonuses during your next playthrough and you can even take negative bonuses to make the game harder for yourself the second time round.
oh hi mark
Ivan Nasonov that is bullshit
Ivan Nasonov I did not hit her. I did NOT!
Anyways, how's your sex life?
That should be a part of his opening
You're my favorite RUclipsr!
Pyre is my absolute favorite game I played this year! And now thanks to this video I understand that part of why it was so great, was that the feedback loops were so masterfully intervoven with the game's narrative and setting that it didn't stand out like a gimmick; in fact those elements worked together to deliver a great experience.
A new GMTK video to enjoy! Yeah! Now I can watch it and then inevitably come back to see it over and over again since these videos are so well produced and thought provoking.
I came from your “Telling stories with systems” video wanting so hard to mention Pyre’s solution to storytelling, because I found it genius! The compartmentalized format of the story allows for branches and results in a story that holds up quite well without having to merge to a central story!
"In chess, losing pieces can lead to fewer tactical options down the line".
Anderssen: *I'm gonna stop you right there*
This was really cool to watch. I learned a lot, thanks for all the effort it took to make this video!
One of the things I love about the game Titanfall 2 is one of its negative feedback loops. When a team loses a game, thy get a chance to 'evacuate', So if they escape to the aircraft which appears soon after the game ends, they get the same level of xp and rewards as if they had won.This means that even if you lose, you still get a chance to earn xp if you can survive and get past the enemy players to the aircraft.
At 11:46 I just realized that I needed a Matthewmatosis / Mark Brown collab. That's gotta happen!
Jump Smash Huh?
Matthematosis did a review of Devil May Cry in its entirety. Once I saw the Devil May Cry part of this video, I realized that the two of them should do a collaboration video together.
Thanks for the info, I gotta watch that.
Rounds is a very good example of negative feedback loops having a really positive effect.
How didn’t you mention bonus (green) exp for characters who don’t play in a match? It encourages you to use every character yet not forcing you to do so, which is neat!
I really like the way Tom Francis counteracts the ‘snowballing’ in his latest game, Heat Signature. Basically, as you complete the missions with a certain character, you get some money to buy upgrades, new items you may find during the mission and liberation points, which progress the story. As you play more missions with the same character though, he gets more and more famous. The more famous your character is, the less liberation points you get, and as the result the story advances slower. So, while you can play a certain character for however long you want and get the best items for him, at some point you just stop advancing the story, and if you want to continue, you have to pick a new, empty character. These small, barely noticeable, but very impactful decisions are what I love about Tom Francis’ games.
The thing I love about Mario Kart Wii is that experienced players can still win the vast majority of games despite the negative feedback loops. The shortcuts like the DK Summit double cut and the Grumble Volcano rock hop allow good players to get leads so big that they can tank blue shells and still be in first. If a player is in a middle position, they can use power items at the right time to dodge the shock and make up for a lot of lost ground, take tighter lines to avoid red shells, smuggle power items into higher positions and of course take big shortcuts. Even if you're in last place you can target shock people in front of you so they fall into pits and/or lose their items right after getting them or smuggle, take shortcuts and smuggle items up into the front of the pack (this is especially useful with bullet bills because when used in about 5th place it'll try to bring you all the way up to first instead of bringing you from 12 to 8). That's why you can see people on wiimmfi with max vr, they're so good that they can overcome all the bull.
Ah man, all those old CoD clips bring back childhood memories. It's a pity CoD 4 and mw2 multi-players are unplayable nowdays, I really enjoyed them back then
2 years later, wahetever:
- Tekken has no feedback loops.
- Literally a video of the player with low health having rage, which gives them more damage.
Tbf he was talking aboiut feedback loops _between_ rather than within rounds, but could've picked a better example
I never thought about gaining levels in RPGs as a positive feedback. There is so much to learn!
Tekken has a feedback loop on a much smaller level, because of hitstun.
This is very noticeable in boardgames too. There is one cardgame I love, called "The great Dalmuthi", which has the biggest positive feedback loop I have ever seen. If you lose once, it is very likely, by clever design, that you will lose again, and those who fared better in the first round, will likely continue to do so. The game is to be roleplayed on a meta-layer, the high ups become the great dalmuthis, while the losers become the great servants.
And another card game, Felix, the cat in the bag, called in english i think, has a very nice negative loop, just by player positioning around the table giving players who lost a pick-me-up and so on. clever design.
Thanks as always for the vid, pro quality :)
11:45 - 12:27
I can only say... The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's Trial of the Sword is exactly this. A challenging set of trials that you have to accomplish as a gauntlet, only to... upgrade the effectiveness of what's already the best item in the game.
Players who WOULD benefit from the assistance are those who struggle, and aren't likely to actually complete the Trials.
Players who don't NEED to compete the Trials because they're already so good at the game... are the ones who actually succeed in the Trials.
it's not really the best weapon in the game as you can find weapons with much higher damage in hyrule castle much more easily than completing the trails.
Can the trials be thought of as a tutorial of sort used to help train the players that struggle?
I feel it should remain as a high level challenge which is a great time and if you need to have a tutorial you can go to the easier areas in the game
Zift Ylrhavic Resfear If so, then that's the latest tutorial I've ever seen in any video game to date.
Joe McNamee Higher damage, sure. But it's still the only weapon/shield/bow that doesn't permanently break. Therefore, the most useful and most used.
Valkyrie Profile is a perfect example of combined positive/negative feedback loop like in Pyre. In each chapter you have to train warriors in the usual RPG way. But at the end of the chapter your boss (the Norse gods of asgard) expect you to send one or more of your party members to Valhalla. Players could choose a character(s) to send, but the gods would have specific criteria for which warrior they would accept. The more characters you send off at the end of a chapter, the greater the approval you'd receive from the gods, but you'd lose those characters in subsequent chapters. In addition, a sent warrior would leave behind an epic weapon or item depending on their level. The better you leveled your team in the limited time provided, the greater the pay out. The gods overall favor would also factor in to which ending you get, and extreme disfavor would end the game prematurely.
I've been playing Tiny Metal recently and it's helped me realise that the original Advance Wars had one of the best mitigation techniques for positive feedback loops creating snowball victories.
In Advance Wars, you have to build units to capture buildings which give you money to build stronger units. The weakest units, infantry, are the only units which can capture buildings, so no matter how ahead one player gets, they will always need to use and defend their infantry if they want to increase their lead.
Players tend to get advantages by either having more buildings than their opponent, which lets them build comparatively stronger units, or by having more factories than their opponent, which lets them build more units per turn so they can capture more effectively. If a player is losing in building count, they can build the Mech unit which is cheap but trades favourably with the more expensive tanks that the opponent is likely making, and the only downside of the Mech is that it can't move far so it can only be used defensively. If a player is losing in the factory count, they can build the Recon unit which is excellent at destroying infantry but loses fights against more expensive tanks. Either way, the losing player has options which can swing initiative away from an overly aggressive player, so neither side is able to achieve a victory without making key strategic outplays. I think that if either the Mech or the Recon didn't exist, every game of Advance Wars would end in a snowball victory.
One thing I think might be worth mentioning is that in Devil May Cry, you never actually get powered up like in an RPG. You just buy new moves (and occasionally very small health/mana boosts which you find more of in the environment and quickly become drastically more expensive at a rate that should convince you to stop buying them after a few), and the moves aren't any more powerful in a DPS sense, they just give you more ways to approach combat. I'd say it's more a way of making sure the rate at which you acquire new moves is roughly the rate at which you're ready to start applying them in your game plan. Which of course does give you a bit of a feedback loop, but that loop is then mitigated somewhat by the fact that the complexity of the game requires that much thought to understand and apply well.
And with that very long overly anal nit pick out of the way, great video, man. I love videos that encourage people to think about game design so thoughtfully.
You know why Donkey King does that? Because Donkey Kong is awesome.
Yep, bonus levels are a great, if not the best reward for completing challenges IMO ^^
And rewarding these bonus stages with the ability to play everything in a more difficult way again really blew my mind (and my sanity at some points too but whatever the game's great :D )
@@NIC040901 As someone who got every shiny gold medal, I can comfirm I am insane.
Pyre was the best game of 2017 in my opinion, and I'm incredibly hear someone else talking about it. You perfectly nailed what makes the game feel so great.
Ooooh dang another gmtk is out
I'm not sure why but I've often struggled to wrap my head around the positive / negative loop terms... your explanation with the graphs just cleared it up in a flash. Thanks!
This was an incredible video. Thank you for explaining Pyre (a game I've been on the fence about trying) and also for making another damn good video about game design.
This is why Top Trumps isn't fun. The whole game is just a massive positive feedback loop. As you get more cards, you have better cards which help you get more cards and vice versa.
Getting more cards also means you get a lot more shit cards, more often than not you can get a very good comeback in Top Trumps because you're just cycling through the 2 excellent cards that the opponent hasn't managed to get.
That's never happened to me. You might be right, though.
Yeah, in any Top Trumps game, there's a best card in each category. It's not a perfect measure of advantage, but the player with more of those aces is generally going to have the advantage, regardless of how many filler cards each player has.
For a Chess analogy, if one player has 8 pawns and their king, against an opponent with just king and queen, the player with the queen has a significant advantage (so long as they can prevent their opponent from promoting any of their pawns) - quality of pieces is more important than number.
I've never heard of Top Trumps. The way it's described here, is it the card game "War"?
Soumein Yeah, apparently: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Trumps The difference is that the cards have multiple values you can pick for comparison.
You had me thinking about the feedback loop problem with XCOM before you even mentioned it in the video, and I didn't even know what a feedback loop was until this video. haha
Very interesting video. God bless 🙏🙌😇
This channel is PURE GOLD! all the videos are intresting and full of content!
(sorry for my english if i have made mistakes)
You're videos are like a little treats every time they come out.
Man I love how you use so many different games and different types of games to explain your thought process. It really helps sell your ideas makes it really easy to understand in context. Cheers Mark!
Splatoon's ink was an interesting example for a positive feedback loop, as it is also includes a negative one, at least for the standard turf war. Yes, if you have more area covered, you will have more hiding places and mobility, but it also means you have more territory to defend, allowing the other team an opportunity to slip through your defences/around your advances.
Fantastic analysis! This is one of my fave channels. I wish I had more friends that talked about game, art and music design. So interesting! Thanks for the upload!
since when did chees has so great graphics???
That's the recently released "Ultra" chess, it's a game that was released with the exact point of having good graphics. You can find free chess games, or you can pay for a game with great graphics like ultra chess
Cheese always had great graphics, people just make it look like yellow swiss cheese all the time
Ever since it used real-life instead of computers for rendering
Hey Mark! Quick note on TF2. On KOTH maps (the map with one control point) have negative feedback loops. The team that has the control point has longer respawn times forcing them to play smart or have the tide turned by a faster respawning enemy.
Maps with more than one control point (like 5cp or 5 control point) uses a positive feedback loop, like you said. The team with more control points have faster respawn times to quickly end a match.
Strong start to hopefully another great year of GMTK
Bröther, give me LØØPS
Very interesting. I'm going into game design major for college and when I start making games, I'll definitely keep things like these kinds of loops in mind.
I'd just like to say I think the aesthetics and audio for this episode. Keep up the good work!
Mark really hates xcom lol
Haha I don’t! It just has some weird design at times. But when it works, it works amazingly well.
One of my personal favorite feedback loop systems can be found in the Burnout series of racing games. You have a limited ability to boost your speed and improve your chances of winning the race, but boost needs to be earned by closely dodging traffic, driving in the oncoming traffic lane, drifting, and catching air. It's a system that rewards skillful players, but also requires those players to drive dangerously and risk crashing.
Furthermore, it's possible to continue earning boost while boosting. On one hand, this makes earning boost easier. Faster speed results in more frequent opportunities for near misses, longer distances in oncoming traffic, longer drifts around corners, and and more air time from jumps. On the other hand, the increased speed makes earning that boost much riskier, as the player has less time to see and avoid incoming obstacles.
As a bonus, trying to keep your boost up without crashing keeps the game fun and exciting even when you're miles ahead of your opponents.
loved the production values. Your videos keep getting better and better
When I played Witcher 3, the beginning was incredibly difficult, because I played it on the second highest level of difficulty, but later in the game the challenge was completely lost, hardly any opponent was really a challenge, except a few exceptions. And then came the final boss in the last expansion pack, he was so incredibly hard to master that even a prepared player is overwhelmed. A friend of mine just reduced the difficulty to easy, but I tried it multiple times and was so relieved when I did it.
I was never aware of how capturing points in Team Fortress 2 would result in a varied respawn timer, I have over 850 hours in the game and have been playing since 2011. Very insightful vid as always, all subs would benefit from hitting that bell button. :>
"Hey" on the beat at the beginning of the clip. Nice.
There are a few in Overwatch: During overtime, the more time that the bar isn’t going down it starts to go down more. The sr system makes it so that if you keep winning you will get more and if you keep losing, you will lose more. The more damage you do, the more of an ult you charge and doesn’t allow the other team to charge it as they are dead. This gives you an advantage.
Party members that you don't use get "Inspiration" which is an XP boost when they participate again.
An infamous example of positive feedback loops going wrong is the stun mechanic in Street Fighter games, where the player applying pressure (and generally speaking winning the round) is rewarded with the chance to land a super slow attack on a stunned opponent, while the other player not only is being pummeled by a flurry of attacks, but also loses control over their character completely.
And a popular example of a negative feedback loop is the bounty system in League of Legends where basically a player who is on a kill streak, or simply has been farming for too long, will get a bounty on their head. Usually a kill in League gives 300 gold but if you kill a person who has the highest bounty in the game you're given 1000 gold, that's over 3 kills worth of gold just because you killed someone who's doing super good in the game and this can lead to a comeback for your team.
Great video Mark!!
Thanks for drawing the graphs at the beginning. I think the red sine wave as a visual example is exactly what I needed to understand the negative loop.
I always learn something cool when I watch your videos.
Nicky Case has created a really cool explorable explanation (interactive demo) with which you can play around with negative and positive loops. It actually really gets you thinking about how loops play out and interact with each other in real life. (I'll link to it in a reply comment because RUclips sometimes swallows up links)
It's called Loopy: ncase.me/loopy/
That whole bit about sending away your strongest players made me think about the original Valkyrie Profile game. Every chapter they'd ask you to send up party members for them to use as soldiers, offering bonuses for meeting certain criteria, and giving you money and items for doing so. If you gave them new or underleveled characters, they'd die up in Asgard but strong characters would keep fighting earning your remaining party rewards. I thought it was a neat idea then but it's cool to see how some people might apply a similar solution to another game.
A key element that effects feedback loops is player motivation. If a game as a great feedback loop, it creates extrinsic motivation to achieve the rewards of the in-game feedback. If the game is also simply fun to play, then that creates intrinsic motivation to keep playing the game because the player wants to keep playing.
The press turn system in Shin Megami Tensei 3 and 4 is a pretty extreme positive feedback loop. I call it extreme because in an individual battle it's possible to kill all the enemies without taking a hit, or if you're unlucky your entire team can be wiped out before you even get a turn. Basically if you exploit weaknesses and get critical hits you get extra turns. If your attacks miss or you hit an enemy with an element they're resistant to you lose turns. And the enemies follow the same rules when it's their turn.
Hey, this is well-timed; I was just musing on feedback loops yesterday!
Enjoyed the video and the variety of games mentioned I've never heard of. I quickly thought of the weapon system in Cave Story once I started watching.
I very much like this video. I wanted to give the additional example of Gwent :The Witcher card game. It has a very interesting feedback loop. See, matches are based on rounds, the winner is the first to two round wins,(best out of three). The thing is, most of the game's strategy is about choosing when to play your cards. Since you do not have many cards, having more than the adversary is a great, great advantage. Lots of interesting strategies revolve around losing the first or second round on purpose, in order to exhaust your enemy's deck, or to build up forces through setting up combos (some decks get more powerful when lots of allies are in the graveyard, or through using and boosting resilient cards (cards that stay on the board throughout rounds)).
Therefore, winning a round often makes you weaker, and if you're clever, losing a round can make you way stronger.
You should make a video about fourth wall breaks. Also my friend and I discovered your channel a few days ago and we both think that you are a genius. Keep doing what your doing!
Fantastic analysis and explanation. That Liberation mechanic from Pyre sounds really interesting. Thank you for the consistently great content, Mark!
Can i just say, i loveee your videos. From the typography, music, motion graphics, editing, everything just seems so POLISHED. So much so that I have to watch the video twice, because the first time I was just drooling over the composition of the video. And please dont speed up your release schedule, because I (and Im assuming the majority of your audience) am absolutely content with getting a video at this pace if you put em' out at this amazing quality. You deserve alot more subs, meanwhile people walking through forests with cameras rake in the millions, you (and several other amazing channels) work so hard not just in the videos production, but also in all the research. Keep em up, and I'm sure you will achieve amazing things.
God that sounded cheesy... but I meant every word!
Bought this during the Holiday Sale. Now I just need to scrounge together the time, energy and patience to dive into a new game. Any day now. Aaaaany day now.
Valkyrie Profile almost effectively does the same stuff as Pyre by having you send your party members to Valhalla to fulfill Odin's demands. However, the issue of having to switch to weaker characters is alleviated by allowing you to collect bonus EXP, which you can then distribute freely to your party members to keep everyone around an even level.
There are actually hidden negative feedback loops in Xcom (in most difficulties). For example your hit chance is increased the more you miss in a row, the other way around with enemies. You don't notice it most of the time, but I think it's important to avoid frustrating and "unfair" unlucky rounds.
3:25 - In modes like king of the hill, the team without the capture point will respawn faster. This is so retaking the point becomes easier. (the rounds can also only last a maximum of 6 minutes)
This is a negative feedback loop. The team that is doing poorly gets an advantage to bring the match back towards an even balance of power.
- In attack defence, the attacking team will have a large advantage early in the round. But as they capture points, the ballance will shift towards the defending team, by giving them better positioning and a shorter walk to defend their final 1 or 2 control points. Once again it is a negative feedback loop. The team that is doing well will have disadvantages, and the opposite for the losing team.
- In 5cp, the team that has lost the middle point will get faster respawns and/or respawn closer to their 2nd point. Pushing the defending team to take back the middle point.
But when a team is pushed back to their last point, it is flipped on its head. With the attacking team getting much faster respawns to push the round to a conclusion.
So most of the round has a negative feedback loop, except for the final point which has a positive one. Making a neat crater shaped graph!
TF2's respawns system is primarily a negative feedback loop. Not a positive one. Where did you get that from??? Did you only play on cp_steel???
This was honestly something I wanted to talk about in a video myself, but you've done a way better job than I ever could have :O
There was one other feedback loop in Pyre that I think I noticed. On my first playthrough on the standard difficulty, though a combination of what I feel was luck and confused AIs, I managed to go a good while through the game without losing a single Rite. It was around that point that I noticed the opposing teams were all maxed in levels while mine were still a level or two away from that same level. It confused me why this was, but I have a theory. You gain a boost to EXP in Rites that you lose to emphasis the point that you learn more from defeat than from victory. With that in mind, given that I had won many Rites, it would make sense that if the opposing teams followed the same rules that my team does, they would gain experience at a faster rate than mine would. If this is the system that is in place, it would give more skilled players a tougher challenge against opponents with access to more skills than you do, and struggling players would instead be the ones with the skill advantage. The thing that throws a rock into my theory are the Titan Stars. For those who haven't played the game yet, Titan Stars give your team a boost in experience after winning a Rite (only after winning, not losing) in exchange for increasing the challenge in one way or another. I rarely made use of them because I was somewhat focused on defending my winning streak, but it is possible that the game is designed around players making sporadic or even aggressive use of them to gain more experience. In that case, the game may have been balanced with that in mind and let the opposing teams level faster to match the potential growth of the player's team. I don't have solid proof one way or the other, I haven't bothered to look it up so this is all just conjecture from my experiences playing the game, but it was something I thought was very interesting when I noticed it.
I often talk about this and always use the comparison of CoD kill streaks and Mario Kart's Blue Turtle Shell (so I was very happy to see you use those examples also!) I however prefer the Negative Feedback Loops, I agree that it can make you feel like being punished for doing well but I think that makes the victory even sweeter as you had to overcome that as well as the opposition.
In Company of Heroes 2 there is a population cap that affects your basic resource income. The closer you are to max, the lower your income. This means a player who looses units, can rebuild his army a bit easier and there are more options for a comeback. Comeback mechanics like this are a great and rare thing to have for an RTS.
The positive feedback loop is that more map controll means more of the other two types of resources and not loosing units means they gain veterancy and therefore increased fighting power.
Thank you for the suggested video on psychosis. That video taught a lot to me and I appreciate your awareness of many other youtubers that may never get popular. Thanks for your great videos that are continually amazing!
can you make an episode on ECHO? i loved that game and was blown away by how well it nailed all the mechanics it set out. from the bubble that gives you a natural 3D representation of the enemy distances, to the way you play simon says with the echoes by carefully picking which skills to use and which to drop.
come on mark you know you loved that game too :3