The biggest issue I had with XCom 2's turn timers was that the game itself is designed to punish unnecessary risks, which is why the 'safe' strategies came to the forefront in the first place. So adding the turn timers in XCom 2 simply felt like playing the game was lose-lose. If you played it slow and minimized risks, you'd succeed at avoiding the risk punishment, but get punished by the turn timer. If you played it fast and risky, you'd succeed at avoiding the turn timer punishment, but you'd get punished by your risky plays. There was simply no incentive to play risky at all, and on the same note, the game provided you with very few tools to play fast without getting punished. A good example of this is the way the game handles untriggered enemy groups. Namely, it forces them to patrol into your path, forcing you to eventually fight them all -- and usually if you tried to move through a mission fast, you'd end up triggering multiple enemy groups at the same time, sometimes all of the enemies left on the map in particularly egregious offenders. So as a player, if the game forces you to play slower to avoid getting completely destroyed by combat system and enemy encounter design, while at the exact same time forcing you to play faster or you lose instantly... yeah, you can see why most people vehemently hated the system. You can punish a player for playing too fast, or punish them for playing too slow, but when you do both at once, you just make the player feel like they're being kicked when they're down.
yeah man well said, I guess the only thing you could do to counter activing mobs is to have a team of snipers and just 1 assault guy running around scouting with a heavy as crowd control eh ? heh
I think a good example of incentives certain play styles is Phantom Doctrine another XCOM inspired game that has a greater emphasis on stealth like Invisible Inc. What Phantom Doctrine allows players to choose whether they play stealth or loud with each having their own pro's and con's. stealth keeps injuries to a minimum and can get you a greater amount of free gear but can be more boring and less experience for your agents, while combat is more interesting, gets you more experience but increase the likelihood of injuries and mean you might get less gear. So you can play either style freely as it doesn't restrict them barring the Occasional mission.
TyrannisUmbra I was okay with the turn timers, I just wish they gave you a couple extra turns because I felt there wasn’t enough time to deal with OP enemies and a timer
well the way i see it, is xcom 2 isn’t supposed to be a power fantasy game like many other strategy games. it’s actually leaning hard into the rogue-like genre. where the gratification comes from just surviving and being able to finish such a punishing game (like FTL or Teleglitch, or even the original xcom). like, in many situations i was force to make risky decisions/sacrifice one soldier in order to finish the mission. or in some cases, fail a mission in order to save my squad. and a failed mission isn’t a failed campaign, it’s just a set back in the larger campaign that I have to work around. I don’t know of many other turn based strategies that have forced me to do that. and i actually appreciate games where failure is not an end, and has consequences for the larger game. not many games do that. like the dark souls/ blood borne/ sekiro brand of games does this and it’s super interesting
Just to be clear, this was one of the clearest points in *favor* of XCOM 2 from my point of view. I was never especially fond of painstakingly moving one person at a time, then overwatching the whole squad, but strategically that was almost always the right move in XCOM 1 - meld or no meld. Maybe that puts me in the minority, but it points out the issue with Rosewater's quote, because the fun way to play is subjective, while the correct way to win often isn't.
JB Problem is that players will, as the quote goes: "optimize the fun out of an experience." So if one playstyle is time-consuming, griny and boring, but safe and as valid for beating the game as a playstyle that inclues risktaking, alternative costs, loads of choices etc. Way more players will do the first one than would enjoy it because humans are riskaverse by nature. So we have to make players take risks in games. Another great example of this is the shields in dark souls. I had a (comparatively) misarable time with DS hiding behind constant blocking. I didnt play the more fun way with loads of dodging and parrying because it looked risky and hard in an already hard game. By the time blood born came around From software had just thrown out the shield when they realized players were playing the game incorrectly for them to enjoy it. And once I got trained on BB, the other souls games were much more fun!
But Simon, if players are having fun being safe, where's the problem behind it? Don't get me wrong, but there're the right and the wrong way to punish/reward players for good/bad decision making. Throwing the instalosing screen for playing the way you aren't supposed to be playing is wrong, ramping up the difficulty level of the said mission is right. There's missions where the clock will be your enemy(like bomb ones) and that's fine, it'll take you from the confort zone from time to time, but when EVERY FUCKING MISSION have a timer, you'll taking too much risks, thus it'll be a routine, and finally the player will realize that being safe is the only real risk you'll be taking, because that leads to a LOSING SCREEN instead of a proper punishment, and that sucks. And Dark Souls worked differently. You've used a shield, i proceeded to use it only when strictly neccessary. Dodge, Parrying and Backstabbing all day long my friend. Is the easiest way to do it, but until you get a grip of it, is the riskier way too. But you have the option to play it safe and there's no problem on doing so. And TBF, it gets old pretty fast when you dominated it. You take the "risks" knowing that the "risks" aren't real risks y'know... You get fucked until you learn the pattern or until you learn that the devs are shouting "TRY ANOTHER WAY, BRO!". After you realize those things, there aren't too many risks, using a shield or parrying/dodging everything.
I think I might actually be a bit in love with Invisible Inc's approach. Gradually ratcheting up the tension sounds perfect, especially for that game's theme.
And it would have worked so well with how Xcom 2 wanted to do things. Instead of just rigging their own supplies to explode, wouldn't it be more reasonable if the aliens called in extra reinforcements every few turns? That way you would have to make the choice whether to rush so you don't have to face as many enemies, but potentially put your squad in danger, or to play it slow and and never put any of your squad in a vulnerable position, but risk being overrun by pure numbers.
This is kind of like the banner saga, enemies can call in reinforcements over time, but they take a couple turns to come into affect so if you rush to take down the enemy who is calling it in you can stop having to face extra forces but put yourself at risk.
The extra reinforcements idea is what I thought they were talking about with turn timers the whole time, up until release :/ It would at least be semi-reasonable if the timer only started when you were detected (within proper context of course so not on every concealment mission)
Yes, yes, yes. I don't mind time pressure elements so much if they are gradual and balanced, and more importantly if they feel they are part of the story/lore rather than being an obvious game mechanic that shatters the fourth wall. Some of the missions in XCOM 2 do have reinforcements arriving at the end, and there were many missions where I pushed just hard enough to evac out my last soldier and leave freshly-arrived alien reinforcements sucking wind at their LZ. Those are fun moments!
Nice video, Mark! Small correction though, in XCOM:EW Meld self-destruct timer is always ticking. When you spot the canister, it reveals the timer value, but Meld can expire even if you never seen it, so you are always encouraged to move as long as there is Meld on the map.
NowIaNewMaster yeah I was about to say the same thing. Great game. One of my top 10 games I played. He was right by saying they added junk. The meld upgrades are nice but u can beat the game without them. I love that u can get meld using run and gun. I use run and gun just for meld or the bombs.
@@derrinerrow4369 wonder how that works logically clear the mission and yet have the time to find them post mission to get them? even if not found? how does that work?
I think the main problem XCOM has is that it's so incredibly punishing for making mistakes. While I do love the turn timers, I think the developers make a mistake if they think you can both encourage players to take risks and punish them harshly for making mistakes at the same time.
I think the problem the way it is set up in both games, advancing is always a tactical error because there is no advantage to be had. In XCOM, moving is the thing you do to bait enemies; Not to outflank, surprise, or reconnoiter. Movement's only reward is more enemies.
@@Xandros999 Man that reminds me of playing Darkest Dungeon. I do love the game and it looks cool as hell, but it can be a downer to do well in a dungeon and then your entire team gets bad traits and someone contracts Rabies. There's just too many chances for things to go wrong and go wrong BADLY...
I just recently started playing XCOM 2, and up till now the turn timers are still OK (I do reload the mission when I fail though, since for me XCOM is more like a tactical puzzle: "how do I succeed the objective, without losing any soldiers?"). But I'm now in this mission where I need to steal data from a cache on a train within X rounds. And so I decided to evade all the enemies and stay concealed, setup my squad in a defendable position, hack the cache, fall back under cover fire, and extract the team. Perfect heist! Aaaand *"MISSION FAILED, you didn't kill all the enemies"*. Wait, WHAT? I successfully extracted the VITAL DATA that the resistance needs, so who cares that I didn't massacre the train's security detail in the process?! I haven't picked the game back for a week now...
another example: Demon's Souls vs Dark Souls 3. The health system is almost exactly the same, but in Demon's Souls when you die, your max health gets reduced by 50% and you need to use an item you restore it to its default state. In Dark Souls 3 there is an item that increases your maximum health until you die. It's basically the same system, but in the player's mind one is a punishment and the other is a temporary upgrade (and a reward for beating bosses).
I have a friend who thinks that losing usable items on death is bad game design. (I don't agree with this friend, but he uses it as a slam against Dark Souls which he really doesn't like.)
I can understand him, but I wouldn't make that statement so generally. But there are a lot of consumable items in the dark souls games that give you a buff of something for a minute or so and when you die it's "wasted". Because of that I never use these items, because "you never know when you might REALLY need them" (never). The embers in Dark Souls 3 are not that kind of item though, definitly not.
Depends on your take of it, to me Embers were that kind of item 100% (temp buff items, not badly designed items). I only ever used them if I needed a full heal mid-boss fight, or needed a heal without any estus left. Actually all the Souls games I played without using those items much, So Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2's penalties were always in effect (short of having just killed a boss in DeS) and Dark Souls 3's bonus was also only in effect post-boss.
Kygsgarq the key difference I see is that in Souls games, all of your deaths have continuity. In most games, dying causes you to basically go back in time, we’re as in Souls games dying and coming back to life is part of the world, not just a game mechanic, so it makes sense that a consumable would stay consumed.
Another one. Fire emblem. Lots of pressuring methods: 1. Thieves going for the treasure chests so you will lose treasure. 2.Pirates going for villages losing you characters and items. 3.Enemy reinforcements. Strong enemy's appear behind you forcing you forwards. 4.enemies attacking neutral/allied soldiers forcing you to save them. 5. Possible recruitable characters leaving if you aren't fast enough.
A youtube channel If you wanna add something more I remember that in the sacred stones you have that chapter in Eirika's route where you can recruit Amelia but she flees if you take too long
Fire Emblem Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn will frequently reward the player Bonus Experience that they can freely distribute among their units by meeting certain conditions on each map. There's almost always a Speed Bonus to be earned.
Laggalot101 oh cool those are the 2 games I still haven't played from the series. Is emulation fine for them or should I go and invest my life savings on them?
It's so dualistically great. Conservative players will usually be ok with ignoring bonuses to focus on preserving party members all together, while risky players will run it down to replace anything they lose on a miss-play. It's so perfectly adaptable to both playstyles. If the math and trade-offs are done well, it really is a solid conceptual basis for avoiding overly-enforced playstyles -when attempting to protect players from themselves, as Mark Brown probably got inspiration from.
It's wonderful because it's not one or the other sometimes. I normally go for Meld but occasionally a mission is so crazy you decide for the one mission to go super safe. It allows a decision of risk/reward, which is interesting
I don't like it, but that's just my personal opinion. I like practicing the game until I am good enough to pass the challenge presented by the developers (usually finishing the level). If the game allows you to win easily by being slow and not taking risks, then you can end up beating the whole game and still not have a very good grasp on the games mechanics. That's why, if a game gives you bonus rewards for beating the level "better", then I'm going to assume that that's the most rewarding way to play the game. Because of that I feel the need to restart the level until I can master it, i.e. getting the highest rank/collecting all the things/killing all the bad guys, before moving on to the next one. I prefer multiple difficulty settings for that reason; that way I know for sure that the developer intended the game to be played in more than one way, by allowing players with more or less gaming experience a fair challenge each. That way I don't have to feel like an idiot for not playing on the hardest difficulty, it's meant for the best players after all. TLDR: I don't want to see the end credits until I feel like I've overcome the whole challenge.
@@cupriferouscatalyst3708 in a way, you've described the option to play slower or faster as an alternate difficulty level choice. If slower is easier, that's like picking Easy mode. And then faster would be Hard mode. It's rather like games that add or slightly change things in higher difficulty settings. But there are benefits too, like allowing players to react in the way they naturally would - potentially making players feel more connected to the game since they can express themselves through play style. Another benefit would be greater novelty in replayability. Giving players an opportunity to mix things up can keep things fresh, and thus keep players playing. TLDR, options can help keep things interesting and allow difficulty selection in real time
This is truly a brilliant channel that always fills me with love for the art of game design. Your channel is one of the main factors that got me so motivated to start my own channel on game making :) ! Cheers Mark !
@@HelperWesley Awesome, thank you for the suggestions. If you don't mind me asking, why specifically early Extra Credits vids? I've heard of the channel but never poked into them myself Edit: Also, do you have any more examples of game development resources that aren't necessarily a direct comparison to GMTK?
@@equinn4840 Oh, they started branching out and doing mythology and history videos. When they first started they did purely video game related videos. That's all.
Protecting the player from themselves reminds me of a comment from a dev giving a GDC talk. The comment summed to: "If the player isn't playing the game the way we intended then they're exploiting and should be punished." I know it's not a one to one with the theme of the video but it's close enough for a broadside. My favorite games have only gotten more enjoyable when they've been played outside of the intended ways. Dota 2's history is full of exploits that when discovered were codified into the game itself and added depth. e.g. stacking and pulling. So please be careful on removing ways of play; patches to boardlands 2 that fixed exploits years after release turned the game from enjoyable to a waste of time.
I think that one of the best examples of this is Fire Emblem. Here’s the scenario: Yes, It’d be so much safer to just “turtle” and move super slowly, but here’s the catch, all the way on the other side of the map is a chest, and an enemy thief is moving towards it, effectively starting a timer until the extremely useful item in the chest is lost to you forever, very effectively speeding up play. Fire Emblem games do this a lot, replacing the chest with an ally who will die, or something like that. I really enjoy this because it provides a challenging scenario for me to overcome, and the rewards help you do better from then on out, almost to the extent that not getting it is a punishment, instead of getting it being a reward.
Glad I found this comment without having to scroll down too far, otherwise, I'd have mentioned it. With the ally dying it, there's actually 2 ways they can handle it: either have an enemy that will inevitably reach the ally unless you stop them or have the ally be a complete fool and rush straight into enemy territory. I believe either Roy's or Eliwood's game does the former at some point while Radiant Dawn does the latter with the chapter where Elincia is an unarmed green other unit who slowly but surely heads towards the boss that is equipped with a Silver Bow. Radiant Dawn also rewards faster gameplay by giving extra bonus experience if a chapter is beaten within a certain number of turns. From what I've played of the series, it doesn't seem to often throw the 'do x in y amount of turns or you fail' sorta thing at you
Sometimes you have to survive for a certain amount of turns, but the only turn limited mission I can think of is the one with all the medicine pots in Fates.
Came to say the same thing! Fire Emblem makes each battle feel like a puzzle that you are encouraged to solve in the way that's most optimal for your play style. Awakening was my first Fire Emblem, and I was so motivated to recruit some of the optional characters (more characters = more marriage options = more children, who typically have way better stats than their parents) that I ended up playing the difficult battles multiple times in riskier ways than usual, looking for different approaches that would get me the right win condition. If earning that loot or character ends up being too difficult, I can still win the battle without them and progress. FE also does an excellent job establishing a narrative for allies and party members intermixed with the combat, which further compels me to save and recruit them.
The experience system also works in that - sure, you COULD send the nuclear option in, but there's a solid chance that character is either already overleveled if not an outright exp sink (Jeigan types, etc.). That forces the player to think more strategically about how to handle the situation from the start, too. And making the map (minus reinforcements) usually visible prior to starting gives information without solving the problem for you. Plus the thieves are so natural to the gameplay that I honestly hadn't thought about their pressure value until watching this video.
To me, most of this is missing the core problem when it comes to XCOM2 and the trouble with aggressive approaches. I felt the underlying issue is rather that the inherent game mechanics itself heavily punish conservative play. Mostly, the Pod system, how you trigger enemy groups, who instantly have ~3 enemies spring into action. Purely line of sight, randomly catching a glimpse of an enemy through 3 windows and past 2 buildings will suddenly make your day much worse. There is no accounting for that. So you are encouraged to move as little as possible, actively limiting that line of sight, and to never flank. Because if you wanna aggresively flank an enemy, which is clearly an intended part of the game, you usually run into risk of suddenly having the soldier himself being flanked by a bunch of enemies and get murdered instantly. Made worse by the inclusion of powerful abilities like the snake-grab. This becomes worse because the battles have very little strategical options, you almost always just make decisions from one turn to another, while there is little overarching choices or strategies. And, all of that together... the game heavily punishing aggressiveness, then also punishing conservative play via timers, but also not giving you tools to effectively mitigate that risk with skill and experience... to me, that just results in a game that feels frustrating und unfair. I like hard tactic games, but I want to have choices and the ability to fix problems myself, not just pushed along by very narrow, counterproductive design principles. XCOM2 has some great stuff I really like, but it just feels frustrating to me.
Termitreter I wonder if this is because of the legacy systems from the original XCOM. In the original you had up to 14 soldiers on a field I think, so you had a lot more movement potential every turn, and you could also split up while keeping your "buddy system" in play. The whole point of the battle system is to realize you're probably going to be ambushed and take steps to mitigate the damage that will occur. In the new XCOM, that results in a much narrower path because you can't have as many soldiers on the field at a time, so you can only take one or two paths at best if you want to have a chance of staying safe. And staying safe is important because, y'know, permadeath. Of course you're gonna play conservatively when mistakes are punished heavily and you have no way to mitigate those mistakes by moving faster. And I say this as someone who likes playing tactical games patiently. I feel like that's kinda part of the point.
XCOM 2 does have some pretty neat options for flanking, but it's almost always a calculated risk. Reapers are perfect for this, as they can get in position unseen, but run and gun rangers also do a solid job of the same thing, once pods are triggered.
I was never a heavily conservative player, I would move my squad towards the objective or what looked like a tactically viable position deliberately, but almost always in heavy cover. I definitely wouldn't sprint someone out unless I knew the area I was sending them to was safe however. What I hated about Xcom2's stupid timer is that it was totally counterproductive. Instead of becoming more risky and playing more quickly, I had to play METICULOUSLY. A single turn after concealment could take me as much as 10 minutes! Never in my life have I played a strategy game as arbitrarily tedious as Xcom2. I gave up after about 20 hours, compared to the hundreds and thousands spent playing other Xcoms or Xcom-likes. I did like the somewhat randomized maps though.
+Reilly Miller On the higher difficulties, if you trigger a pod unnecessarily, your team is usually finished. Flanking is just not worth it unless you know for certain that it won't bring more enemies down upon you. I still like XCOM 2 though.
I like Invisible Inc's alarm system mechanic, though i did feel like it should only start counting up when someone in the facility knows you're there. Thus giving you incentive to go true-stealth and never be seen, and either never hurt anyone, or make sure that those you do hurt don't wake up until you're long gone. luckily there was a mod that let me have that option at a reasonable price of the loss of one of your starting program slots. So i took that option and had a ton of fun, getting in and out without being seen.
Options in games are great. Not everybody is the same skill level, has as much free time or the ability to give a game 100% of their attention. As a father working 40 hour weeks & most days can't sit down to play until after 8pm, I crave easier difficulties. My brain is just about ready to shut down after a full day of work & fathering, I don't often look for the challenges I did as a single man. Something like the xcom 2 timer is a real turn off to me because if I've just wasted all that time only to hit a fail state, I'm not going to want to come back & waste my limited time doing the same thing. There's too many great games available these days at ridiculously cheap prices. I'm going to go where the fun is.
And this is a huge advantage of being single player! In a MMORPG you have to balance things, but in single player you can leave in weird things. Skyrim doesn't have to patch out the bow of oneshot Dragon slaying. Celeste can allow infinite boost. Yes, devs should pick reasonable defaults, but they shouldn't let that keep people from having fun.
Steamworld Heist (another turn-based game quite similar to XCOM) has its own system similar to those used in XCOM 2 and Invisible Inc. In the game I believe it's referred to as "threat level" and with each passing turn the threat level increases either increasing the number of enemies that will spawn in periodically or activating turrets. In some missions there is also a self-destruct sequence which puts a hard limit on the number of turns you can make before you reach the end with the added extra bit of challenge being that to get a full three star rating, as well as get a chance at collecting rare loot, you have to deviate from the main objective to collect additional "swag" (the game's loot) which in some cases can leave you exposed to enemy gunfire or a "wasted" turn that could have been used to shoot any enemy or edge further towards the escape pod.
Darkest dungeon has a good turn timer. The stall timer starts as soon as there is 1 enemy left, and excluding bosses, 2 size enemies and the octopus enemies in the cove. As long as there are 2 or more enemies the stall timer will not kick in no matter how long you take or how little damage you do. Once the stall timer starts, you have 2 full turns where you won't get any stress - on the 3rd turn you will get stress, and on the 4th turn reinforcements will appear. It's a neat system to avoid players leaving just one enemy alive and then healing the party using moves (Which are free to use and unlimited), instead of items while out of combat.
I really enjoy Invisible Inc's security system. I keeps you moving as it ticks up every turn but it also encourages you to plan your actions and not get spotted since being seen raises the alarm a level even if you eliminate what saw you. Also it gets progressively harder in what the alarm adds to the map. At first it's only more cameras but they can sometimes help since now these are things you can hack to see through. Then it increases the amount of firewalls you need to break to hack something and then it adds real risks with new guards (that are generally stronger than those normally in the level) and eventually it will mark out your agents to the enemy allowing them to track you. This makes it so even though it is always ticking up and the final parts of it are very hard to survive through, it gives you plenty of time before then (especially if you don't get spotted by guards) and the slowly increasing difficulty encourages you to move on and escape but if you are confident enough you can endure for more loot.
Great video, Mark. All I want to say is that for me, part of what I loved about X-COM: EU was the fact that it rewarded you for being tactical, for playing smart and not rushing. It felt rewarding and gratifying to bring all your people home, because you played carefully and didn't rush or get too aggressive. It was still a challenge, it still felt action-packed and exhilarating, even at that slower pace. So if the devs think that the game is at its best when you're rushing through and making poor decisions or trying to make do because you don't have the time you need to have a good strategy, that's BS to me. Instead of trying to dictate their vision of X-COM, they should've embraced their audience and made room for differing play styles. X-COM was always a game about time management, but the turn counter made the game about time management to its own detriment. I'm going to steal this statement from another video, but I think it's apt. If the number one thing your players mod (or want to mod) about your game is to remove a key part of the game, you missed the mark.
But XCOM 1 wasn't about time management at all. The optimal playstyle was nearly always moving a single soldier at a time, then overwatching the entire squad. There was no decision to make, except whether you were feeling patient that day or not. I'm not going to argue that patience isn't an interesting notion to make an important part of your gameplay, but if there's no in-game tension, no pressure on that patience other than your own mindset, things get ugly.
Reilly Miller well, I was thinking more along the lines of the overarching game and making sure you completed major objectives in a timely manner. Whereas XCOM 2 made even your sorties all about time management. The game play you describe is not my experience of XCOM 1 at all, but I'm sure people exploited boring strategies, because that is human nature. Still, I'd rather that than not have any strategy at all because I have to run halfway across the world in 12 turns or fail. XCOM 2 is by no means a bad game, but it isn't without it's flaws. The turn counter was poorly implemented. I didn't exploit overwatch in XCOM and I had a blast and took my fair share of risks. Had plenty of close calls. No timer required. So it comes off as patronizing for a game dev to try and tell me that I was having fun wrong. XCOM 2 is an excellent game but the complaints over the turn timer is a valid one.
In Duskers, the longer you take, the more likely a bad random even will happen, such as incoming asteroids, broken doors, pipe bursts, and failing airlocks. It's not turn-based but it's very similar in the way it creates a time pressure without failing the whole mission, and it's subtle enough that players don't realize there's an incentive to go faster until they start paying closer attention.
Hi Mark, I just to thank you again for giving me constant material for my video game design classes. I used your videos constantly to give examples of some topics. Thank you thank you so much!!
My biggest problem with xcom 2s turn timers is that with the whole “concealed” mechanic and making the game more like a rugged guerrilla warfare type the timers just seems to ignore that completely you start the mission concealed with lets you set up good ambushes and such. But the turn timers ignore that completely. That’s why I never play without the mod that pauses the timers while in concealment
What a bonus to get a second GMTK video so quick! Thanks, Mark. Has anyone mentioned the Rockstar games? GTA, Red Dead, LA Noire? Rockstar clearly wants you to have fun messing in the sandbox of craziness you can do in each of these worlds, but they want those moments to feel fleeting and valuable, like a little bomb of outlawism. Famously, the crazier things you do, the more the authorities come after you, and the faster the pace of the moment gets. It's obviously different from a turn-based game like XCOM, but Rockstar clearly put a lot of thought into how to control the *pace* of their games, giving players control over the trigger to speed things up, but with a clear tradeoff so that their choices still feel valuable.
I really appreciate you taking the time to rethink and readdress a video instead of slamming the door shut on a concept just because you felt it was all said and done. Yet another reason this channel is excellent.
Great stuff. Long time viewer and a fan of your work. I'm a designer on League of Legends, which is an online MOBA and encouraging players to take the more interesting (and often aggressive) action it's an issue we grapple with all the time. This is true across a number of layers, ranging from within a character's abilities themselves (using all your skills instead of just spamming the most 'efficient' one), to encouraging players to take more niche or situational but interesting options instead of taking the most generalist option to mitigate risk. In a PVP game, I would argue this concept is even more than important than in a PvE experience as you need to keep an eye on the opponent's experience as well. Typically really passive safe strategies are extremely boring at best and keyboard breaking levels of infuriating at worst. When players opt into these strategies they don't just make the game worse for themselves they make it worse for their opponents as well. This makes the costs of those types of mistakes from a design perspective incredibly high.
I think it's worth mention how the Fire Emblem series does this usually. Typically a map will have a village or a treasure chest that's being threatened by thieves or bandits- if they reach it before you, you lose the goodies, but not the mission entirely. Another example is that some entries have side chapters you can go to if you fulfill side objectives in the preceeding chapter- clearing in a certain turn limit, keeping NPCs alive, visiting a village, etc. Again, in your words in this video, it's just a missed opportunity, not a totally failed mission. The Fire Emblem games also tend to provide enemy reinforcements, oftentimes behind you, to push you to play faster, again in your own words, making it more challenging, but not an auto-fail. The execution of this idea isn't always great in Fire Emblem, but it's almost always there in some form or another. I love this series personally and it'd be pretty cool to see you break down how some of its entries go about crafting certain experiences- specific entries I'd recommend personally to look at here would be ones such as Thracia 776 on SFC, Blazing Blade (simply known as Fire Emblem on GBA outside Japan), or even Awakening on 3DS. Keep doing what you do man, love your videos.
FE3H/FE16 did something really interesting with reinforcements on the sprawling new maps - some reinforcements are now conditionally triggered when a player unit moves into range. Thanks to the rewind system, this isn't strictly punishing - you can pull back and prevent them from popping out. But you have a limited number of rewind charges, so it pays to not move vulnerable units on their own if you can help it - there's a difference between an isolated healer running ahead to Physic someone across the map vs several varied units moving up at roughly the same pace. The way it handles Monsters also makes it much harder to fling a few overpowered units onto a field and call it a day, since it's nigh-impossible to break the shield (garnering extremely valuable resources) with only one or two attackers, and the shield regenerates - plus the Monsters have multiple health bars (even if you can smash through with pure power, losing those ores HURTS). It even incentivizes the player to really think about who gets what companies, since company attacks are guaranteed to draw a Monster's fire if it isn't stunned, making glass cannons much more situational.
Mission failure timers are ok for a few levels in the game, as long as they're not nearly the norm. Then there are levels that give the enemy chances to get reinforcements if you don't do things snappy. And finally there are games that *reward you for being careful/stealthy*. The timed loot like "meld" isn't a bad idea either. None of these should be neglected. They could all fit in XCOM. I don't remember which game this was, but I remember playing a game where in a specific mission the enemy army was moving supplies out of an area. The faster you completed it, the more supplies would be left for you to intercept and take over. Unavoidable alarms on the map that gives you X amount of turns to get to and disable to avoid a punishment aren't bad either.
Well-said. X-COM 2's major expansion, War of the Chosen, does a good job of varying the pressure mechanisms. It still uses some straightforward turn timers, but other levels have the sort of thing that you describe (completing it faster gives you more supplies), and some even have a security level system like Invisible, Inc.
I got giddy seeing Mario + Rabbids come up, I was thinking about this the second I saw the video so I was pleasantly surprised to see it. It's a great game and I enjoy the timer a lot because it's an invisible one, removing any pressure from less interesting players while making the perfectionist players take risks and play fast to get the best rating. It's a pleasant surprise beating the par time rather than a constant threat looming over your head. And when you fail that time, I can almost always think back to fight and remember why it took so long and how I can improve that time. Glad the game lets me replay the stage later for those bonus coins. I also enjoy how the timer is used in its unique challenge missions. Many challenges impose a somewhat short time to force the player to think fast but others have a 1 turn limit, making the battle more of a puzzle based on the unique mechanics of your characters, the enemy, and your environment. It's pretty cool to be able to respec on the fly to meet the needs of a puzzle. And beating them is well worth it, netting you extra money and experience points to make the next levels easier. Definitely a great use of the timer, can't wait to see how they use it in the DLC.
I also like Mario + Rabbid's escort missions. To get par time Toad needs to move every turn towards the exit, and you have to take risks protecting him or sending out bait so the enemy shoots the bait instead of Toad. Rabbid Peach is a godsend for those missions thanks to her sentries and heals.
@Afrohawk weirdly related to your profile picture, the 2d Sonic games included one design philosophy similar to that of the Mario + Rabbids where there is little-to-no punishment for exploring and taking your time, while replay value is shot-up -and exciting playstyles are also rewarded for possible perfectionist and high-tension gameplay scenarios.
Glad these examples were mentioned. Just a note: XCOM’s added security cameras over time is an extended version of the reaper in many mystery dungeon games. Players may be able to overcome the added threat, but it’s ultimately the player’s choice whether the extra loot is worth the risk. I can’t remember what game, but I recall a game that implemented a lava wall that slowly moved across the level when time was up. It’s a bit more forceful but is still based on risk over time.
A similar thing as in "XCOM enemy within: is done in "Fire Emblem awakening". In later levels a certain type of enemy spawns: the thief. The thief does take a turn every time it's the enemy's turn. He'll move closer and closer to the edge of the playing field until he escapes. If you fight and kill the thief before he is able to escape you'll get the treasure he stole (Most often some gold, which is needed to buy weapons and consumables). Thanks for this awesome episode of GMTK. I hope everyone who reads this comment does have an awesome day. Greetings from Germany. Marcel
Hi, I'm an Invisible, Inc. modder and I thought I'd mention that we have a Discord: discordapp.com/invite/aQrXEse, we are a small but tightly knit community, so feel free to come and discuss anything Invisible, Inc. related.
You made me realize just how much the meld upgrades change my play style. It's not just the timer on the canister; a large number of the upgrades and tools you can buy with meld increase player mobility and encourage risk-taking. The mechs, for example, can take a large amount of punishment, move very far, and serve as full cover. Once I got two fully upgraded mechs in my team, I could take risks I would never dare otherwise, even with a team of 6 maxed out assault soldiers.
In the game Pit People (an early acces turn based-RPG, a bit similar to XCOM but it's cartoony) there is a mission where you have to save 2 hostages from 2 bombs. If you don't save them, they die. However, if you manage to save them, they actually become your party members for the next battle. I thought that was cool. And this video was cool. Good job, Mark!
Some members in my extended family love to play heavily strategic board games. Most of these games are inherently competitive, but some are actually cooperative in nature (everybody wins or everyone loses). A common element in at least two of them _(Flashpoint_ and _Pandemic)_ is that between every player turn, an extra "task" is added to the board and while these are little things that players routinely complete during their turns, should they accumulate unattended, they hit some breaking point which slowly progresses towards a global Game Over. For example, in Flashpoint's case, which is themed around firefighters rescuing people from a burning building: - Between each turn, a new "smoke" tile is placed somewhere in the building (as determined by a dice roll). Players can extinguish smoke as a standard option during their turn. - Smoke tiles stack: two smoke tiles become a "fire" tile, and a third a smoke tile (i.e. added to an existing fire tile) triggers an explosion that causes structural damage (marked by placing black damage counters on walls) and potentially even a chain reaction. - There is no way to repair structural damage, and it is Game Over if players exhaust the game's supply of damage counters.
I think Dungeon of the Endless is also a nice example. It's a turn based rogue-like tower defense game that has you take turns exploring rooms in a level to find the exit and then carry a power crystal (which is in your starting room and acts as your "base" for the tower defense aspect) to said exit. It has a mechanic where you can power up rooms using "Dust", which is a limited resource that you may find while exploring. This lights up the room and allows you to build towers/resource nodes in it. On some levels though you may not find enough Dust to light up all rooms. When you open a door to a room there's a chance of enemies spawning in it as well as a chance of waves of them spawning in unlit rooms across the level, so you may end up overwhelmed depending on how many rooms you've opened and left unlit. The turn timer comes in the form of the risk and reward of racking up the tension to explore and gather more and more resources/items/upgrades to help you combat the levels to come versus just gunning for the exit as soon as you find it.
Literally seconds before you presented the first example I was thinking to myself, "Invisible Inc addressed this issue perfectly. I wonder if he'll show-" GMTK: "Let's start with Invisible Inc..." You never disappoint.
One example I found fascinating was Dungeon of the Endless. In this game, you do some improvised base building as you explore. You power up rooms after you explore them, to use them as your "base". At some point, you won't have enough resources to power every room up and at that point, every new room you explore starts spawning enemies in these unpowered rooms. At every room you explore you also gain resources, so it's worthwhile opening many of them, but the tradeoff is that you'll make the game more and more challenging, yet this challenge is always present to a certain degree as you don't know where the exit is.
This video and the first one you made really made me want to go back and try games that I'd dismissed out of hand because I wasn't enjoying them. I realized that perhaps it wasn't the game, but the way I was playing it, and I'm looking forward to getting higher scores and having more fun doing it. Edit: Whoops, sorry for the insanely late comment, just realized that this video is a year old.
I can’t believe you made a video about better ways to encourage faster play in Tactical RPGs without mentioning old school Fire Emblem’s “timed optional objectives” design.
Your videos are so fascinating. I don't play video games much at all, but it's so interesting watching your take on them that I've ended up subscribing to your channel. Keep up the good work!
I enjoyed both of these videos. I really like that you're presenting a controversial issue and addressing it in a positive way by showing why those mechanics went into play and how other developers have dealt with similar issues? Great stuff, keep it up.
Invisible Inc's countdown timer reminds me of the one found in Steamworld Heist. Most levels either start with one or have one triggered midway through, with each level of the countdown spawning more numerous and difficult enemies. What I enjoy about it is that your score is not based on how many enemies you kill, rather it is based on how much of the treasure you collect, and how many of your characters survive. In addition, characters that die on a mission come back afterwards, but are punished by not receiving experience points.
Undoubtedly. They give you a choice of how to play rather than force you to play a certain way, and there's a very clear trade-off of resources in a game where resources are a big deal.
But you don't HAVE to complete the objective in any of XCOM 2's missions, it just means you don't get the reward. You don't lose anything from failing missions, you just don't gain anything.
Oliver Morris shhhh, let the Overwatch Crawl babies cry about how they can't get all the things while only advancing 2 squares a turn before panicking and slapping the whole squad in overwatch.
Oliver Morris How much have you played xcom2? Failing missions do affect to the areas you control and failing constantly means you lose the area and you need to get more resources to get towers back up and to open next area for the places where you do more missions, gather intel, heal/build faster or find black market from. Also in the DLC not having connection to some area can mean that the map-timer goes down since you can't prevent it from progressing so you will have to do extra mission (and if you fail it i guess it's then game over... haven't failed those myself nor seen anyone else fail so not sure what happens then). Also failing missions constantly means lack of resources which will mean you will be behind in technology and equipment which can lead into missions you only can lose because aliens don't stop developing to wait you to catch up.
Honestly, it's about mimicking the gambler's high. Risk vs reward. I think the brilliance of Invisible Inc is the fact that the ramp up in difficulty and unpredictability rolls out in stages, and there are a lot of secondary objectives to entice you into taking more risks. By making the "safest" and "most rewarding" playstyles an uncertain middle ground between extremes, it turns the metagame of optimizing your strategy into part of the game itself. If you got out easy, you start second-guessing yourself: what did I leave behind? If you get too greedy, you might find yourself in over your head. Since each level is randomized and hidden by fog of war, it's impossible to truly optimize - you're always faced with the unknown. Frankly, it's a brilliant marriage of theme and mechanics.
I'm designing a TRPG for my Master's degree thesis that I'd like to release in the future and videos like yours are quite useful. As it is based on real historical battles I'm using the moral of the soldiers and how easily they are to command as a way to put pressure on the player. The player uses the "underdog" rebels. For example, the final battle of the game is going to be one in which 100,000 rebels (agriculture workers, miners, etc) attacked a fortress defended by less than 6,000 professional soldiers (spoilers: historically the soldiers won the battle by destroying the resources of the rebels with cannon fire). The longer the battle takes the more units there will be in the battlefield but the less they'll listen to commands, forcing the player to finish the battle as soon as possible, the longer it takes, the more units he'll have but the less effective the strategy will become.
RUclips won't let me like this video multiple times so instead I shall leave a comment here for yourself. Love your channel, great video and thank you for the work you put in!
Hey again Mark! Boy, this channel is exploding in success. Hope you're feeling proud. Really enjoyed this two-part topic and I appreciate that Invisible Inc - a highly favored game of mine - got some attention. You're a pleasure to watch.
Yes! Great point. I commented on the last video that the turn timer approach was a valid way to solve the problem of conservative strategies being optimal strategies, and it is, but as you point out, the problem is that having a black-and-white cutoff point could be unfair on players who just slightly misjudge. There's still a debate there, of course, but there's the crux of the matter.
Hi Mark! I loved both this and the previous video. I think you didn't mention the Advance Wars series, which is another good example of what you have being exploring. In case you haven't played those games, let me explain. In Advance Wars, you have to conquer the enemy base or kill every enemy unit. In order to achieve this, you need to produce units in airports, ports or factories. In order to avoid slow gamemplay without any risk, the developers introduced an interesting mechanic: money. In order to produce units, you need money. You get 1,000 coins per turn and per controlled building. If you risk and control more buildings, you will get more money and thus, you will be able to produce more and better units. However, if you don't take those buildings in early stages of the game, probably the enemy does, which means it will have more and better units.
I'd love to see an episode about customizable campaign/difficulty modes. I feel like a lot of games just make enemies bullet sponges. There are a few games, like Crysis, that actually make the enemies speak in English if you played on a lower difficulty setting. There are other games that let you fully customize what makes the experience difficult. XCOM itself has options to facilitate this.
I'm sure it's been mentioned, but in XCOM: Enemy Within, the self-destruct timer on the Meld doesn't actually start when you find them. It starts at the beginning of the level, at least on the console version (which is what I played it on). It's rather easy to test this by, after finding a canister, jumping to the autosave previous and purposely avoiding it. You'll see that the next time you find it, the turn counter is lower. This timer ticking is also where the "noise cone" comes from, where an ally close to a canister can hear the timer ticking, allowing you to track its general location. It's a relatively minor difference, but it does mean that the game is pushing you to move quickly through the entire mission, rather than just when you find a canister.
Hi Mark! I really like your videos. I enjoy watching video essays about game design and your journalistic level is top notch as well the technical quality. Also I enjoy that you spend the time to edit your videos to support what's being said in the voice-over. I personally was pleasantly surprised to see this GMTK Extra video only a short while after your last video. I would encourage you to do small spinoff or replies to comments as such like this one. I felt this was a nice addition to your earlier more indebpth video. Thanks for great content! -DR
As a matter of fact, X-com war of the chosen had had a few new missions where they implemented better ways of speeding you along. There was a mission where you had to rescue a vip before they were killed, and then escape a large amount of reinforcements. There was also the addition of the lost in some missions, basically zombies which slowly trickled in, forcing you to go faster. So they did find a way to get around the problem of timers.
The first thing I thought of when starting this episode was Steamworld Heist, which is a sort of 2D X-Com (with steam-powered robots in space). In most missions, a timer counts down (either from the start or after a mid-mission trigger) to activate turrets or call in reinforcements. The game doesn't reward XP for kills, just completed missions, so the player is incentivized to complete objectives and leg it rather than creep slowly through the level as increasing waves of enemies come at them.
One more to think about, Final Fantasy Tactics! If one of your characters die on the battlefield, and you can't revive them in 3 turns, then they are gone for good. Might make you play safe to start, but if an ally gets hit by a big attack from across the map do you waste time to go and save them with a healer, or rush in with your damage dealers and try and finish the map before they vanish away. The small party size might also influence your decision. Then in Tactics Advance they took out that system, but instead had Laws. Nothing to do with turn timers, but there would be a rotation of skills where you would be penalized for using some or rewarded for using others. It had a huge impact on what you could do each battle and helped make it so you would have to switch things up and try new "tactics" haha. Both some really great designs I would love to see in more modern strategy games.
Very interesting. A good example IMHO is the game design of *Space Tyrant*, where the enemy fleets get stronger over time. Often, pushing hard in the beginning and midgame of a level really rewards you, while playing conservatively can backfire.
This reminds me a lot of some of the "Battle Masteries" in the Super Robot Wars games. Like sometimes some of these optional challenges ask of you to defeat a certain enemy or wave of enemies within a certain turn limit. And the bonus is that if you complete enough of these otherwise optional challenges, you get a secret boss at the very end. I've only played OG1 and OG2 on the GBA (but I plan to get OG:MD and V since they're the only other ones officially in English) and the secret bosses were respectively a major plot device come to life, and an upgraded form of the final boss.
Something similar to the meld system is in Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon. Emeras are items you can wear for a dungeon that give you special effects. As soon as you enter a room with an emera, a timer appears, showing the turns till it explodes into shards. The shards can eventually be formed into a new emera, but obviously getting to it fast is preferred. It’s more gentle than the meld tuner, but Super’s items are also only temporary.
Realy good follow up :) It's cool to see how many ways there actually are to influence the player withouth him even noticing and just guiding him into the most fun playstyle.
an example I can think of come from the fantastic tactical JRPG Valkyria Chronicles as the quicker you do things the more XP you're likely to get which is based on how many turns the level was finished in and how many kills you got and it calculates that which leads to XP which is used to buy gun upgrades for your units, tanks upgrades, perks, etc. the unique thing about it though is how in most tactics games each unit has an individual level but Chronicles settles for a leveling system based on classes, you spend XP on the class you want to level up and every unit in that class gets leveled up, it solves the issue of grinding in such games
I actually like the Security level idea. Steamworld Heist uses the exact same system in many of it's levels and I find it very fair. And if you haven't played it, you really should. It's like a 2D X-com set in a universe of steam powered robots.
I think one of the biggest motivators to playing conservatively in XCOM is the Overwatch ability- an ability that greatly rewards the player for conservative play. If a group of enemies moves into line of sight while all your soldiers are on Overwatch, you essentially get an entire turn's worth of shots off for free, against enemies who aren't even in cover yet. Overwatch shots will often inflict enough damage to kill an enemy or two, or weaken them enough that you can easily finish them off next turn, meaning that some enemies in the group will die before they even get the chance to do anything. Using Overwatch to its full potential is often key to completing missions and minimizing losses, especially on the higher difficulties. Turn timers might not be so frustrating if Overwatch were removed and the game's balance was adjusted accordingly. Having fewer tools for slow play would help make it clear to the player that you're not supposed to play slowly.
Great video. Marie & Rabbits did really surprise me to be honest, I never thought that it would work that well. Another thing that this game did fairly well is that combinations of the Japanese "perfect cuteness" and the French in "perfect ugliness" of the rabbits. I really love Invisible Inc. for what it is and tried to be, it's quite smart with it's mechanics.
Destiny 2 also has an interesting example of this with the Nightfall Strikes activity. In Destiny1, these strikes are weekly challenges that take an existing strike mission and add mutators to increase the difficulty. The mutators would change each week, and reward different playstyles, like killing enemies while in the air, dealing damage while in cover, or using abilities over guns. Destiny2 changed these Nightfalls so that they always include a timer that will kick the player out if it ticks down. This was original added by Bungie because most players (including myself) would go slowly and conservatively through the mission without taking chances. They wanted to push players into aggressive tactics. But since every Nightfall now includes these timers, the entire activity now plays very similar week to week. Players are now severely punished for going slowly, running into the same problem as Xcomm. Personally, I wish the timer was another mutator that wasn't enabled every week. It's fun to be pushed to go quickly, but when every week is a speedrun the challenge becomes less interesting. There are still other mutators like Destiny1, but they now feel to play second fiddle to the ever present timer.
I commented on the other video before seein this one but I'll just say it here. XCOM 2's best mod is an adjustment of the timers that doesn't get rid of them. Instead it makes it so that the timer only begins when the new mechanic Concealment is broken. It makes sense within the game world sincr aliens aren't alarmed and start evacuating VIPs until they're given a cause for alarm. It also matches the theme of bein a guerilla fighter, as you can lay incredibly effective ambushes and sneaking is what a ragtag group does, not charge im head first like an army. This mod also puts more value into concealment and everything associated with. Certain weapons, skills and classes become more valuable. Enemies with high vision ranges become more dangerous. Civilians that alarm aliens and break your concealment are now a genuine concern. On top of all of that it adds a new layer of risk vs reward. It puts you in close quarters with melee enemies sooner, it clusters your allies and makes it easier for the aliens to wipe.your squad. Before you would have this big open field when discovered but if you try to go in hard and fail you'll be crushed. It fits with the concealment mechanic so well that somebody who hasn't played XCOM 2 would think that it was part of the base game. I don't find it easy to abuse but I find the strategy more successful than not. That's because the game wasn't made wit it in mind. Thats why I modded my own and made mutons more common. Vast improvement. I hope Firaxis incorporates it in the future and finds better ways to balance it.
This is basically an exploration of the turn based equivalent to hard vs. soft enrages. For non-MMO players, a hard enrage is when a boss ends a fight at a certain moment. (i.e. the boss becomes invulnerable or just lets out an attack that kills everyone in the room at x minutes in) Soft enrages are situations where the mechanics of an encounter effectively make a certain point in the fight a fail state without explicitly ending it. A boss may get a stacking buff throughout the fight that heals or amplifies its damage, and once it reaches a certain number of stacks, the raid group won't be able to outdamage its healing or outheal its damage. Other fights may have increasingly high number of boss reinforcements show up on a certain interval, eventually reaching a point where the sheer number of enemies will overrun the players. I know Mark doesn't play MMOs and I can totally understand the reasons why, but it'd be wonderful to get an indepth look at raid design someday, as they tend to feature some of the most intricate and interesting encounters in all of gaming.
i appreciated the timer in Xcom 2. tbh i feel like xcom 2 shines not in “risk” but in that feeling that you’re constantly on edge and that death looms for you everywhere (much like a rogue-like or survival game). xcom 2 wasn’t just a tatical game, it was a tactical survival game. and this fit perfectly with the theme and story of the game (being that you’re not a guerrilla rebel army) so a fail state timer forces players to play in a state of constant danger. so making very calculated risks was an essential part of the game. This ads further consequence to the risk/reward mechanics already in the game. in particular the expiring item drops mechanic.
Let's not forget things like getting optional missions if you beat levels fast enough. Both the Fire Emblem series, and the Elven Legacy/Fantasy Wars series has played with this idea, just for two recent-ish examples. And then we have the whole "a failure does not have to mean game over", which can be used together with a turn-timer. Games like Panzer Corps has played with this idea, where if you fail certain missions, you're taken to another branch on the campaign tree (this does mean making a bunch of levels that players won't have the chance to see in a single playthrough though).
I remember this snes game called Ogre Battle and it had a reputation system that would give you a worse ending if you take too long in battles. Or it may have been tied to the level gap between you and enemies, I don't quite remember. Either way, it did a great job of sending the message that time is of the essence while not causing you to fail if you spend too long in a certain level.
The challenge Missions of Mario + Rabbids are some of the most fun I've had in that game. They all have a turn limit timer that makes you fail the mission if you go over it. So several of them made me try over and over again until I could do them as efficiently as possible.
Disgaea 4 does this by placing boxes around the level that generally power up enemies. So you can throw your party members all the way to the boxes (where there are usually enemies too), placing your units spread out and vulnerable, or you can ignore the boxes and play within their restraints. Sometimes that means missing out on the damage you can do to enemies by destroying them, or that ranged attacks, throwing units etc. aren't possible within an area and certain things are harder or easier (like doubling damage for all units there, boosting enemies, or increasing/reducing elemental damage).
Fire Emblem games do this pretty well also. Sometimes putting recruitable characters into dangerous spots in order to make players move with a sense of urgency or even just putting some powerful enemy reinforcements into play if you are taking your time. I really enjoyed it back in the GBA days
It's worth noting that Mario x Rabbids also uses the "increase difficulty if you take too long" method in the form of spawning more enemies every few turns. If you play it safe by slowly whittling down the enemies' health, you'll end up getting overwhelmed because enemies will spawn faster than you can kill them. IMO this works better than the reward for beating the level within a certain amount of time because it's a more present threat and you can always go back and beat the levels faster once you're more powerful.
I'd argue a lot of the Mario + Rabbids design decisions promote more aggressive play, especially the enemies. - Supporters can lob grenades over cover, essentially getting a free hit on you each turn. Not to mention that those grenades can burn your units, forcing them out of cover. - Bucklers can't be damaged from the front, so they can encroach upon a defensive position relatively unpunished. - Peek-a-Boos essentially teleport between locations, causing your overwatch sight abilities to be less effective at holding areas - Valkyries can leap over cover, damage your units upon landing, and have a chance to bounce you with their attacks, sending you outside of cover.
Have an obsevation about this: I think a lot of people were so fond of conservative play in XCOM: Enemy Unknown in large part due to how satisfying it was to do this (largely sniper powered) strategy of "overwatch advancement". Where you'd advance half the movement potential per turn with one or two heavily armored characters while the rest stayed behind on overwatch (instant attack on spotted enemies, especially powerful with snipers). It just felt really cool to do that, it was immersive. Dismantling and perhaps retrofitting the core of the enjoyment found in that might help to provide really potent solutions for how to combat the negative sides of conservative play for enjoyment. I havn't done it... But I think it's probably pretty fertile soil to to dig into when looking for more options.
I didn't mind the turn timers in Xcom2. I wasn't as hardcore as some people though. I got enough of a challenge out of normal difficulty. I was there to have fun no a brain aneurysm. The game just got a million times better when Long War 2 was released. I loved it even more then and they modified the turn timers so that they wouldn't start ticking until your team was spotted. If you want to have a fun, awesome, and somewhat challenging game of Long War 2 then I highly recommend playing on normal difficulty and having an ALL shinobi team. I had a few stragglers after the first mission that got classed into the other classes but they were just cannon fodder I didn't care about. None of them survived. Tip: Rush to armors to get the shredding and you can never have too much hp. I threw in a psionic toward the end because it wouldn't be xcom without them but even before they joined nobody could touch my ninja squad.
I liked the Meld system in Enemy Within, but I actually enjoyed XCOM 2's timers quite a bit more after installing either True Concealment or War of the Chosen, which includes said mod's options in the settings. With those mods, which changes the missions in which you start with Concealment to have shorter timers that only begin once you exit it, either via firing off shots or being spotted by enemies. It encourages a less rush-happy approach, with more emphasis on setting up ambushes to eliminate lots of enemies at once, and just opening up many more options beyond that, such as sneaking in and completing the objective entirely unseen where it doesn't necessarily require any overt actions. One mission had me setting up an ambush using the abilities of every soldier in my squad across a city with lots of height variation, placing Sharpshooters on rooftops with EMP rounds to eliminate the tough robots and placing Rangers in position to finish the job, plus a Specialist to use the robots closer to the objective to my advantage. When all of the elements of the game come together like this, the feeling of being the commander of an underground rebellion striking where ADVENT doesn't expect in increased tenfold, and frankly, I'm shocked that it wasn't in the base game. It makes it a far better game.
A modern example is gears tactics, it completely rewards you with more extra action points if you play agressively. Execute an enemy at close range and all the other soldiers will get extra action points, opening the door for combos when approaching with this technique
In late levels of Invisible Inc the security level is probably the least unfair thing in the game. Armour and Shields that amount to a gear check in what is essentially a rogue-like mean you do end up facing almost impossible situations sooner or later but unlike these you have consistent control over the security level. On that topic, the idea of gear checks and invisible barriers to progress might be an interesting video about progression.
In my opinion, the main thing holding players back from playing in a more exciting way is how punishing losing soldiers is. In the future, it might be interesting if there was a way to get higher leveled recruits, and/or a wider range of failure states on the unit level. Perhaps if a soldier gets taken out, the player can try to extract them so they can be used again, after some recovery time. One of the great things about video games is how series can evolve over time to create more engaging gameplay. The Arkham series is my favorite example of this, as the core gameplay from Asylum is already really good, and it is only improved in subsequent games.
Risk of Rain has a unique timer in that the longer you play, the harder it gets. This forces you to balance farming the level for loot and rushing the teleporter for the next level. I know this is very similar to Invisible's security mechanic, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
One example I had in mind was the indie game Risk of Rain, where as you progress through the levels, the game progressively gets harder. But not level-by-level basis, but on a time scale. A meter starts filling up as you take longer, and the game will start spawning new and harder enemys. The risk you can take is to let the timer fill up as you explore the level for possibly newer and better gear. Or you have the choice of speed running the timer and getting to the end with a easy to moderate difficulty. You wont have good gear though. So in this case, it encourages not only going faster, but also not being greedy.
Risk of Rain has some problems with implementation. The sheer time cost of travel made entering new time difficulties a matter of luck as much as skill. It's supposed to be a tradeoff between more money/loot or less time spent, but the wide open spaces and random enemy spawns really did little to make taking your time SEEM worth it.
Great extra video! Thx Mark! I myself purchased Invisible Inc. because I loved Shadow of the Ninja but it was too stressfull for me. Every turn you could only advance a few tiles and since it's usually a closed office space I felt it was next to impossible to outmanouver the guards. Then you had very few inventory and could mostly just stun the guards for a few rounds which wasn't super helpfull since you had to walk back and forth and again only a few tiles per turn. So you found the game - even though the alarm level system is good - too frustrating to play. Also I never played XCOM2 because I already found Enemy Within too stressfull, even though that system is, like you mentioned, pretty good since it's perfectly optional. Still I hate to miss out on things and I hate to be rushed. ^^
I honestly prefer a game where defensive, careful play is rewarded but slipping up or rushing in too early gets you killed pretty quick. It's the reason both XCOM and Dark Souls are among my favourite games. The problem I had with XCOM 2 was that it limited my tactical options. In XCOM 1 I could decide to do things like fall back to lure enemies to an advantageous location, or set up an overwatch trap, or scout the area refining my strategy each time map tiles were revealed. In XCOM 2 the only tactical decision I had was to advance a little or advance a lot. I found this a lot less interesting so I stopped playing after 10 hours or so and haven't looked back.
fire emblem does the "not a turn timer" thing pretty well in a few entries. most games have chests or villages that give items which certain enemy classes can destroy if they reach before the player. sometimes there are allied teams that have to hold out untill the player reaches them, but rather than game overs the player loses out on items or units. sometimes after long periods of time enemy reinforcements come from the players starting point or near a map objective. sometimes not clearing meeting very generous turn requirements means not going to extra chapters, or getting other rewards like more xp.
The biggest issue I had with XCom 2's turn timers was that the game itself is designed to punish unnecessary risks, which is why the 'safe' strategies came to the forefront in the first place. So adding the turn timers in XCom 2 simply felt like playing the game was lose-lose. If you played it slow and minimized risks, you'd succeed at avoiding the risk punishment, but get punished by the turn timer. If you played it fast and risky, you'd succeed at avoiding the turn timer punishment, but you'd get punished by your risky plays. There was simply no incentive to play risky at all, and on the same note, the game provided you with very few tools to play fast without getting punished.
A good example of this is the way the game handles untriggered enemy groups. Namely, it forces them to patrol into your path, forcing you to eventually fight them all -- and usually if you tried to move through a mission fast, you'd end up triggering multiple enemy groups at the same time, sometimes all of the enemies left on the map in particularly egregious offenders. So as a player, if the game forces you to play slower to avoid getting completely destroyed by combat system and enemy encounter design, while at the exact same time forcing you to play faster or you lose instantly... yeah, you can see why most people vehemently hated the system.
You can punish a player for playing too fast, or punish them for playing too slow, but when you do both at once, you just make the player feel like they're being kicked when they're down.
yeah man well said, I guess the only thing you could do to counter activing mobs is to have a team of snipers and just 1 assault guy running around scouting with a heavy as crowd control eh ? heh
I think a good example of incentives certain play styles is Phantom Doctrine another XCOM inspired game that has a greater emphasis on stealth like Invisible Inc. What Phantom Doctrine allows players to choose whether they play stealth or loud with each having their own pro's and con's. stealth keeps injuries to a minimum and can get you a greater amount of free gear but can be more boring and less experience for your agents, while combat is more interesting, gets you more experience but increase the likelihood of injuries and mean you might get less gear. So you can play either style freely as it doesn't restrict them barring the Occasional mission.
yes, it is basically a damn if you do and damn if you don't scenario, you get your ass kicked no matter what.
TyrannisUmbra I was okay with the turn timers, I just wish they gave you a couple extra turns because I felt there wasn’t enough time to deal with OP enemies and a timer
well the way i see it, is xcom 2 isn’t supposed to be a power fantasy game like many other strategy games.
it’s actually leaning hard into the rogue-like genre. where the gratification comes from just surviving and being able to finish such a punishing game (like FTL or Teleglitch, or even the original xcom).
like, in many situations i was force to make risky decisions/sacrifice one soldier in order to finish the mission.
or in some cases, fail a mission in order to save my squad.
and a failed mission isn’t a failed campaign, it’s just a set back in the larger campaign that I have to work around. I don’t know of many other turn based strategies that have forced me to do that. and i actually appreciate games where failure is not an end, and has consequences for the larger game. not many games do that. like the dark souls/ blood borne/ sekiro brand of games does this and it’s super interesting
As Mark Rosewater says : "Make the fun way to play the correct way to win."
And of course : "Don't confuse interesting with fun."
Just to be clear, this was one of the clearest points in *favor* of XCOM 2 from my point of view. I was never especially fond of painstakingly moving one person at a time, then overwatching the whole squad, but strategically that was almost always the right move in XCOM 1 - meld or no meld. Maybe that puts me in the minority, but it points out the issue with Rosewater's quote, because the fun way to play is subjective, while the correct way to win often isn't.
MELD did this perfectly. Guess what? Playing fast was fun because it gave you super soldiers and Sectopod punching MECs
JB Problem is that players will, as the quote goes: "optimize the fun out of an experience." So if one playstyle is time-consuming, griny and boring, but safe and as valid for beating the game as a playstyle that inclues risktaking, alternative costs, loads of choices etc. Way more players will do the first one than would enjoy it because humans are riskaverse by nature. So we have to make players take risks in games.
Another great example of this is the shields in dark souls. I had a (comparatively) misarable time with DS hiding behind constant blocking. I didnt play the more fun way with loads of dodging and parrying because it looked risky and hard in an already hard game.
By the time blood born came around From software had just thrown out the shield when they realized players were playing the game incorrectly for them to enjoy it. And once I got trained on BB, the other souls games were much more fun!
But Simon, if players are having fun being safe, where's the problem behind it? Don't get me wrong, but there're the right and the wrong way to punish/reward players for good/bad decision making. Throwing the instalosing screen for playing the way you aren't supposed to be playing is wrong, ramping up the difficulty level of the said mission is right. There's missions where the clock will be your enemy(like bomb ones) and that's fine, it'll take you from the confort zone from time to time, but when EVERY FUCKING MISSION have a timer, you'll taking too much risks, thus it'll be a routine, and finally the player will realize that being safe is the only real risk you'll be taking, because that leads to a LOSING SCREEN instead of a proper punishment, and that sucks.
And Dark Souls worked differently. You've used a shield, i proceeded to use it only when strictly neccessary. Dodge, Parrying and Backstabbing all day long my friend. Is the easiest way to do it, but until you get a grip of it, is the riskier way too. But you have the option to play it safe and there's no problem on doing so. And TBF, it gets old pretty fast when you dominated it. You take the "risks" knowing that the "risks" aren't real risks y'know... You get fucked until you learn the pattern or until you learn that the devs are shouting "TRY ANOTHER WAY, BRO!". After you realize those things, there aren't too many risks, using a shield or parrying/dodging everything.
I think I might actually be a bit in love with Invisible Inc's approach. Gradually ratcheting up the tension sounds perfect, especially for that game's theme.
And it would have worked so well with how Xcom 2 wanted to do things. Instead of just rigging their own supplies to explode, wouldn't it be more reasonable if the aliens called in extra reinforcements every few turns? That way you would have to make the choice whether to rush so you don't have to face as many enemies, but potentially put your squad in danger, or to play it slow and and never put any of your squad in a vulnerable position, but risk being overrun by pure numbers.
Patrick Johnson Honestly, I never thought about that, but yeah sounds great!
This is kind of like the banner saga, enemies can call in reinforcements over time, but they take a couple turns to come into affect so if you rush to take down the enemy who is calling it in you can stop having to face extra forces but put yourself at risk.
The extra reinforcements idea is what I thought they were talking about with turn timers the whole time, up until release :/
It would at least be semi-reasonable if the timer only started when you were detected (within proper context of course so not on every concealment mission)
Yes, yes, yes. I don't mind time pressure elements so much if they are gradual and balanced, and more importantly if they feel they are part of the story/lore rather than being an obvious game mechanic that shatters the fourth wall. Some of the missions in XCOM 2 do have reinforcements arriving at the end, and there were many missions where I pushed just hard enough to evac out my last soldier and leave freshly-arrived alien reinforcements sucking wind at their LZ. Those are fun moments!
Nice video, Mark! Small correction though, in XCOM:EW Meld self-destruct timer is always ticking. When you spot the canister, it reveals the timer value, but Meld can expire even if you never seen it, so you are always encouraged to move as long as there is Meld on the map.
NowIaNewMaster yeah I was about to say the same thing. Great game. One of my top 10 games I played.
He was right by saying they added junk. The meld upgrades are nice but u can beat the game without them. I love that u can get meld using run and gun. I use run and gun just for meld or the bombs.
Nice is an understatement for flamethrowers, rocket punches, rocket boots, unlimited invisibility and squad boosting.
NowIaNewMaster they took it out for xcom 2 which hurt the game
also if you complete the mission before the canisters self-destruct, you will automatically secure them even if you haven't seen them.
@@derrinerrow4369 wonder how that works logically clear the mission and yet have the time to find them post mission to get them? even if not found? how does that work?
I think the main problem XCOM has is that it's so incredibly punishing for making mistakes. While I do love the turn timers, I think the developers make a mistake if they think you can both encourage players to take risks and punish them harshly for making mistakes at the same time.
I think the problem the way it is set up in both games, advancing is always a tactical error because there is no advantage to be had. In XCOM, moving is the thing you do to bait enemies; Not to outflank, surprise, or reconnoiter. Movement's only reward is more enemies.
@@Xandros999 Man that reminds me of playing Darkest Dungeon. I do love the game and it looks cool as hell, but it can be a downer to do well in a dungeon and then your entire team gets bad traits and someone contracts Rabies. There's just too many chances for things to go wrong and go wrong BADLY...
I just recently started playing XCOM 2, and up till now the turn timers are still OK (I do reload the mission when I fail though, since for me XCOM is more like a tactical puzzle: "how do I succeed the objective, without losing any soldiers?").
But I'm now in this mission where I need to steal data from a cache on a train within X rounds. And so I decided to evade all the enemies and stay concealed, setup my squad in a defendable position, hack the cache, fall back under cover fire, and extract the team. Perfect heist!
Aaaand *"MISSION FAILED, you didn't kill all the enemies"*.
Wait, WHAT? I successfully extracted the VITAL DATA that the resistance needs, so who cares that I didn't massacre the train's security detail in the process?!
I haven't picked the game back for a week now...
another example: Demon's Souls vs Dark Souls 3. The health system is almost exactly the same, but in Demon's Souls when you die, your max health gets reduced by 50% and you need to use an item you restore it to its default state. In Dark Souls 3 there is an item that increases your maximum health until you die. It's basically the same system, but in the player's mind one is a punishment and the other is a temporary upgrade (and a reward for beating bosses).
I have a friend who thinks that losing usable items on death is bad game design. (I don't agree with this friend, but he uses it as a slam against Dark Souls which he really doesn't like.)
I can understand him, but I wouldn't make that statement so generally. But there are a lot of consumable items in the dark souls games that give you a buff of something for a minute or so and when you die it's "wasted". Because of that I never use these items, because "you never know when you might REALLY need them" (never).
The embers in Dark Souls 3 are not that kind of item though, definitly not.
Depends on your take of it, to me Embers were that kind of item 100% (temp buff items, not badly designed items). I only ever used them if I needed a full heal mid-boss fight, or needed a heal without any estus left.
Actually all the Souls games I played without using those items much, So Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2's penalties were always in effect (short of having just killed a boss in DeS) and Dark Souls 3's bonus was also only in effect post-boss.
Kygsgarq the key difference I see is that in Souls games, all of your deaths have continuity. In most games, dying causes you to basically go back in time, we’re as in Souls games dying and coming back to life is part of the world, not just a game mechanic, so it makes sense that a consumable would stay consumed.
Wow, not one gut gud!
Another one. Fire emblem. Lots of pressuring methods:
1. Thieves going for the treasure chests so you will lose treasure.
2.Pirates going for villages losing you characters and items.
3.Enemy reinforcements. Strong enemy's appear behind you forcing you forwards.
4.enemies attacking neutral/allied soldiers forcing you to save them.
5. Possible recruitable characters leaving if you aren't fast enough.
A youtube channel If you wanna add something more I remember that in the sacred stones you have that chapter in Eirika's route where you can recruit Amelia but she flees if you take too long
Jesus Mendoza oh yea true and FE 6 had that chapter where Percival would leave if you weren't fast enough.
Fire Emblem Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn will frequently reward the player Bonus Experience that they can freely distribute among their units by meeting certain conditions on each map. There's almost always a Speed Bonus to be earned.
Laggalot101 oh cool those are the 2 games I still haven't played from the series. Is emulation fine for them or should I go and invest my life savings on them?
Now these I could get behind.
I think "missing the opportunity" concept works well.
It's so dualistically great. Conservative players will usually be ok with ignoring bonuses to focus on preserving party members all together, while risky players will run it down to replace anything they lose on a miss-play. It's so perfectly adaptable to both playstyles. If the math and trade-offs are done well, it really is a solid conceptual basis for avoiding overly-enforced playstyles -when attempting to protect players from themselves, as Mark Brown probably got inspiration from.
It's wonderful because it's not one or the other sometimes. I normally go for Meld but occasionally a mission is so crazy you decide for the one mission to go super safe. It allows a decision of risk/reward, which is interesting
I don't like it, but that's just my personal opinion. I like practicing the game until I am good enough to pass the challenge presented by the developers (usually finishing the level). If the game allows you to win easily by being slow and not taking risks, then you can end up beating the whole game and still not have a very good grasp on the games mechanics. That's why, if a game gives you bonus rewards for beating the level "better", then I'm going to assume that that's the most rewarding way to play the game. Because of that I feel the need to restart the level until I can master it, i.e. getting the highest rank/collecting all the things/killing all the bad guys, before moving on to the next one. I prefer multiple difficulty settings for that reason; that way I know for sure that the developer intended the game to be played in more than one way, by allowing players with more or less gaming experience a fair challenge each. That way I don't have to feel like an idiot for not playing on the hardest difficulty, it's meant for the best players after all.
TLDR: I don't want to see the end credits until I feel like I've overcome the whole challenge.
@@cupriferouscatalyst3708 in a way, you've described the option to play slower or faster as an alternate difficulty level choice. If slower is easier, that's like picking Easy mode. And then faster would be Hard mode. It's rather like games that add or slightly change things in higher difficulty settings.
But there are benefits too, like allowing players to react in the way they naturally would - potentially making players feel more connected to the game since they can express themselves through play style.
Another benefit would be greater novelty in replayability. Giving players an opportunity to mix things up can keep things fresh, and thus keep players playing.
TLDR, options can help keep things interesting and allow difficulty selection in real time
This is truly a brilliant channel that always fills me with love for the art of game design. Your channel is one of the main factors that got me so motivated to start my own channel on game making :) ! Cheers Mark !
Same here.
Most of the things I know about game development I've learned from GMTK and a handful of others.
@@HelperWesley Could you give some examples of others? I've been starved for more content/resources like this channel
@@equinn4840 Adam Millard is the closest direct comparison I have to GMTK. But I also learned a tonne from early Extra credits videos.
@@HelperWesley Awesome, thank you for the suggestions. If you don't mind me asking, why specifically early Extra Credits vids? I've heard of the channel but never poked into them myself
Edit: Also, do you have any more examples of game development resources that aren't necessarily a direct comparison to GMTK?
@@equinn4840 Oh, they started branching out and doing mythology and history videos. When they first started they did purely video game related videos.
That's all.
Protecting the player from themselves reminds me of a comment from a dev giving a GDC talk. The comment summed to: "If the player isn't playing the game the way we intended then they're exploiting and should be punished." I know it's not a one to one with the theme of the video but it's close enough for a broadside.
My favorite games have only gotten more enjoyable when they've been played outside of the intended ways. Dota 2's history is full of exploits that when discovered were codified into the game itself and added depth. e.g. stacking and pulling. So please be careful on removing ways of play; patches to boardlands 2 that fixed exploits years after release turned the game from enjoyable to a waste of time.
I think that one of the best examples of this is Fire Emblem. Here’s the scenario: Yes, It’d be so much safer to just “turtle” and move super slowly, but here’s the catch, all the way on the other side of the map is a chest, and an enemy thief is moving towards it, effectively starting a timer until the extremely useful item in the chest is lost to you forever, very effectively speeding up play. Fire Emblem games do this a lot, replacing the chest with an ally who will die, or something like that. I really enjoy this because it provides a challenging scenario for me to overcome, and the rewards help you do better from then on out, almost to the extent that not getting it is a punishment, instead of getting it being a reward.
Glad I found this comment without having to scroll down too far, otherwise, I'd have mentioned it. With the ally dying it, there's actually 2 ways they can handle it: either have an enemy that will inevitably reach the ally unless you stop them or have the ally be a complete fool and rush straight into enemy territory. I believe either Roy's or Eliwood's game does the former at some point while Radiant Dawn does the latter with the chapter where Elincia is an unarmed green other unit who slowly but surely heads towards the boss that is equipped with a Silver Bow. Radiant Dawn also rewards faster gameplay by giving extra bonus experience if a chapter is beaten within a certain number of turns. From what I've played of the series, it doesn't seem to often throw the 'do x in y amount of turns or you fail' sorta thing at you
Sometimes you have to survive for a certain amount of turns, but the only turn limited mission I can think of is the one with all the medicine pots in Fates.
Came to say the same thing! Fire Emblem makes each battle feel like a puzzle that you are encouraged to solve in the way that's most optimal for your play style. Awakening was my first Fire Emblem, and I was so motivated to recruit some of the optional characters (more characters = more marriage options = more children, who typically have way better stats than their parents) that I ended up playing the difficult battles multiple times in riskier ways than usual, looking for different approaches that would get me the right win condition. If earning that loot or character ends up being too difficult, I can still win the battle without them and progress. FE also does an excellent job establishing a narrative for allies and party members intermixed with the combat, which further compels me to save and recruit them.
The experience system also works in that - sure, you COULD send the nuclear option in, but there's a solid chance that character is either already overleveled if not an outright exp sink (Jeigan types, etc.). That forces the player to think more strategically about how to handle the situation from the start, too. And making the map (minus reinforcements) usually visible prior to starting gives information without solving the problem for you. Plus the thieves are so natural to the gameplay that I honestly hadn't thought about their pressure value until watching this video.
To me, most of this is missing the core problem when it comes to XCOM2 and the trouble with aggressive approaches.
I felt the underlying issue is rather that the inherent game mechanics itself heavily punish conservative play. Mostly, the Pod system, how you trigger enemy groups, who instantly have ~3 enemies spring into action. Purely line of sight, randomly catching a glimpse of an enemy through 3 windows and past 2 buildings will suddenly make your day much worse. There is no accounting for that.
So you are encouraged to move as little as possible, actively limiting that line of sight, and to never flank. Because if you wanna aggresively flank an enemy, which is clearly an intended part of the game, you usually run into risk of suddenly having the soldier himself being flanked by a bunch of enemies and get murdered instantly. Made worse by the inclusion of powerful abilities like the snake-grab.
This becomes worse because the battles have very little strategical options, you almost always just make decisions from one turn to another, while there is little overarching choices or strategies. And, all of that together... the game heavily punishing aggressiveness, then also punishing conservative play via timers, but also not giving you tools to effectively mitigate that risk with skill and experience... to me, that just results in a game that feels frustrating und unfair.
I like hard tactic games, but I want to have choices and the ability to fix problems myself, not just pushed along by very narrow, counterproductive design principles. XCOM2 has some great stuff I really like, but it just feels frustrating to me.
Termitreter I wonder if this is because of the legacy systems from the original XCOM. In the original you had up to 14 soldiers on a field I think, so you had a lot more movement potential every turn, and you could also split up while keeping your "buddy system" in play. The whole point of the battle system is to realize you're probably going to be ambushed and take steps to mitigate the damage that will occur. In the new XCOM, that results in a much narrower path because you can't have as many soldiers on the field at a time, so you can only take one or two paths at best if you want to have a chance of staying safe.
And staying safe is important because, y'know, permadeath. Of course you're gonna play conservatively when mistakes are punished heavily and you have no way to mitigate those mistakes by moving faster.
And I say this as someone who likes playing tactical games patiently. I feel like that's kinda part of the point.
XCOM 2 does have some pretty neat options for flanking, but it's almost always a calculated risk. Reapers are perfect for this, as they can get in position unseen, but run and gun rangers also do a solid job of the same thing, once pods are triggered.
I was never a heavily conservative player, I would move my squad towards the objective or what looked like a tactically viable position deliberately, but almost always in heavy cover. I definitely wouldn't sprint someone out unless I knew the area I was sending them to was safe however.
What I hated about Xcom2's stupid timer is that it was totally counterproductive. Instead of becoming more risky and playing more quickly, I had to play METICULOUSLY. A single turn after concealment could take me as much as 10 minutes! Never in my life have I played a strategy game as arbitrarily tedious as Xcom2. I gave up after about 20 hours, compared to the hundreds and thousands spent playing other Xcoms or Xcom-likes.
I did like the somewhat randomized maps though.
+Reilly Miller On the higher difficulties, if you trigger a pod unnecessarily, your team is usually finished. Flanking is just not worth it unless you know for certain that it won't bring more enemies down upon you. I still like XCOM 2 though.
I like Invisible Inc's alarm system mechanic, though i did feel like it should only start counting up when someone in the facility knows you're there. Thus giving you incentive to go true-stealth and never be seen, and either never hurt anyone, or make sure that those you do hurt don't wake up until you're long gone.
luckily there was a mod that let me have that option at a reasonable price of the loss of one of your starting program slots. So i took that option and had a ton of fun, getting in and out without being seen.
Options in games are great. Not everybody is the same skill level, has as much free time or the ability to give a game 100% of their attention.
As a father working 40 hour weeks & most days can't sit down to play until after 8pm, I crave easier difficulties. My brain is just about ready to shut down after a full day of work & fathering, I don't often look for the challenges I did as a single man.
Something like the xcom 2 timer is a real turn off to me because if I've just wasted all that time only to hit a fail state, I'm not going to want to come back & waste my limited time doing the same thing. There's too many great games available these days at ridiculously cheap prices. I'm going to go where the fun is.
And this is a huge advantage of being single player! In a MMORPG you have to balance things, but in single player you can leave in weird things. Skyrim doesn't have to patch out the bow of oneshot Dragon slaying. Celeste can allow infinite boost.
Yes, devs should pick reasonable defaults, but they shouldn't let that keep people from having fun.
Steamworld Heist (another turn-based game quite similar to XCOM) has its own system similar to those used in XCOM 2 and Invisible Inc. In the game I believe it's referred to as "threat level" and with each passing turn the threat level increases either increasing the number of enemies that will spawn in periodically or activating turrets. In some missions there is also a self-destruct sequence which puts a hard limit on the number of turns you can make before you reach the end with the added extra bit of challenge being that to get a full three star rating, as well as get a chance at collecting rare loot, you have to deviate from the main objective to collect additional "swag" (the game's loot) which in some cases can leave you exposed to enemy gunfire or a "wasted" turn that could have been used to shoot any enemy or edge further towards the escape pod.
Yes! You talked about Enemy Whitin! I love you Mark
I love you too Mark
Darkest dungeon has a good turn timer. The stall timer starts as soon as there is 1 enemy left, and excluding bosses, 2 size enemies and the octopus enemies in the cove. As long as there are 2 or more enemies the stall timer will not kick in no matter how long you take or how little damage you do. Once the stall timer starts, you have 2 full turns where you won't get any stress - on the 3rd turn you will get stress, and on the 4th turn reinforcements will appear.
It's a neat system to avoid players leaving just one enemy alive and then healing the party using moves (Which are free to use and unlimited), instead of items while out of combat.
I really enjoy Invisible Inc's security system. I keeps you moving as it ticks up every turn but it also encourages you to plan your actions and not get spotted since being seen raises the alarm a level even if you eliminate what saw you.
Also it gets progressively harder in what the alarm adds to the map. At first it's only more cameras but they can sometimes help since now these are things you can hack to see through. Then it increases the amount of firewalls you need to break to hack something and then it adds real risks with new guards (that are generally stronger than those normally in the level) and eventually it will mark out your agents to the enemy allowing them to track you.
This makes it so even though it is always ticking up and the final parts of it are very hard to survive through, it gives you plenty of time before then (especially if you don't get spotted by guards) and the slowly increasing difficulty encourages you to move on and escape but if you are confident enough you can endure for more loot.
Great video, Mark. All I want to say is that for me, part of what I loved about X-COM: EU was the fact that it rewarded you for being tactical, for playing smart and not rushing. It felt rewarding and gratifying to bring all your people home, because you played carefully and didn't rush or get too aggressive. It was still a challenge, it still felt action-packed and exhilarating, even at that slower pace. So if the devs think that the game is at its best when you're rushing through and making poor decisions or trying to make do because you don't have the time you need to have a good strategy, that's BS to me. Instead of trying to dictate their vision of X-COM, they should've embraced their audience and made room for differing play styles. X-COM was always a game about time management, but the turn counter made the game about time management to its own detriment. I'm going to steal this statement from another video, but I think it's apt. If the number one thing your players mod (or want to mod) about your game is to remove a key part of the game, you missed the mark.
But XCOM 1 wasn't about time management at all. The optimal playstyle was nearly always moving a single soldier at a time, then overwatching the entire squad. There was no decision to make, except whether you were feeling patient that day or not. I'm not going to argue that patience isn't an interesting notion to make an important part of your gameplay, but if there's no in-game tension, no pressure on that patience other than your own mindset, things get ugly.
Reilly Miller well, I was thinking more along the lines of the overarching game and making sure you completed major objectives in a timely manner. Whereas XCOM 2 made even your sorties all about time management. The game play you describe is not my experience of XCOM 1 at all, but I'm sure people exploited boring strategies, because that is human nature. Still, I'd rather that than not have any strategy at all because I have to run halfway across the world in 12 turns or fail. XCOM 2 is by no means a bad game, but it isn't without it's flaws. The turn counter was poorly implemented. I didn't exploit overwatch in XCOM and I had a blast and took my fair share of risks. Had plenty of close calls. No timer required. So it comes off as patronizing for a game dev to try and tell me that I was having fun wrong. XCOM 2 is an excellent game but the complaints over the turn timer is a valid one.
In Duskers, the longer you take, the more likely a bad random even will happen, such as incoming asteroids, broken doors, pipe bursts, and failing airlocks. It's not turn-based but it's very similar in the way it creates a time pressure without failing the whole mission, and it's subtle enough that players don't realize there's an incentive to go faster until they start paying closer attention.
Hi Mark, I just to thank you again for giving me constant material for my video game design classes. I used your videos constantly to give examples of some topics. Thank you thank you so much!!
Awesome! Glad to be of service!
As a token of gratitude, I'm trying to translate to spanish some of your videos. I hope one day translate them all!
My biggest problem with xcom 2s turn timers is that with the whole “concealed” mechanic and making the game more like a rugged guerrilla warfare type the timers just seems to ignore that completely you start the mission concealed with lets you set up good ambushes and such. But the turn timers ignore that completely. That’s why I never play without the mod that pauses the timers while in concealment
What a bonus to get a second GMTK video so quick! Thanks, Mark.
Has anyone mentioned the Rockstar games? GTA, Red Dead, LA Noire? Rockstar clearly wants you to have fun messing in the sandbox of craziness you can do in each of these worlds, but they want those moments to feel fleeting and valuable, like a little bomb of outlawism. Famously, the crazier things you do, the more the authorities come after you, and the faster the pace of the moment gets. It's obviously different from a turn-based game like XCOM, but Rockstar clearly put a lot of thought into how to control the *pace* of their games, giving players control over the trigger to speed things up, but with a clear tradeoff so that their choices still feel valuable.
I really appreciate you taking the time to rethink and readdress a video instead of slamming the door shut on a concept just because you felt it was all said and done. Yet another reason this channel is excellent.
Saw Invisible, Inc. in the thumbnail, instant click.
Great stuff. Long time viewer and a fan of your work. I'm a designer on League of Legends, which is an online MOBA and encouraging players to take the more interesting (and often aggressive) action it's an issue we grapple with all the time. This is true across a number of layers, ranging from within a character's abilities themselves (using all your skills instead of just spamming the most 'efficient' one), to encouraging players to take more niche or situational but interesting options instead of taking the most generalist option to mitigate risk.
In a PVP game, I would argue this concept is even more than important than in a PvE experience as you need to keep an eye on the opponent's experience as well. Typically really passive safe strategies are extremely boring at best and keyboard breaking levels of infuriating at worst. When players opt into these strategies they don't just make the game worse for themselves they make it worse for their opponents as well. This makes the costs of those types of mistakes from a design perspective incredibly high.
Hey Brian, thanks for sharing!
Invisible inc is so beautifully designed in both gameplay and visually that it easily becomes one of my favourite
I think it's worth mention how the Fire Emblem series does this usually. Typically a map will have a village or a treasure chest that's being threatened by thieves or bandits- if they reach it before you, you lose the goodies, but not the mission entirely. Another example is that some entries have side chapters you can go to if you fulfill side objectives in the preceeding chapter- clearing in a certain turn limit, keeping NPCs alive, visiting a village, etc. Again, in your words in this video, it's just a missed opportunity, not a totally failed mission.
The Fire Emblem games also tend to provide enemy reinforcements, oftentimes behind you, to push you to play faster, again in your own words, making it more challenging, but not an auto-fail. The execution of this idea isn't always great in Fire Emblem, but it's almost always there in some form or another.
I love this series personally and it'd be pretty cool to see you break down how some of its entries go about crafting certain experiences- specific entries I'd recommend personally to look at here would be ones such as Thracia 776 on SFC, Blazing Blade (simply known as Fire Emblem on GBA outside Japan), or even Awakening on 3DS.
Keep doing what you do man, love your videos.
FE3H/FE16 did something really interesting with reinforcements on the sprawling new maps - some reinforcements are now conditionally triggered when a player unit moves into range. Thanks to the rewind system, this isn't strictly punishing - you can pull back and prevent them from popping out. But you have a limited number of rewind charges, so it pays to not move vulnerable units on their own if you can help it - there's a difference between an isolated healer running ahead to Physic someone across the map vs several varied units moving up at roughly the same pace.
The way it handles Monsters also makes it much harder to fling a few overpowered units onto a field and call it a day, since it's nigh-impossible to break the shield (garnering extremely valuable resources) with only one or two attackers, and the shield regenerates - plus the Monsters have multiple health bars (even if you can smash through with pure power, losing those ores HURTS). It even incentivizes the player to really think about who gets what companies, since company attacks are guaranteed to draw a Monster's fire if it isn't stunned, making glass cannons much more situational.
Mission failure timers are ok for a few levels in the game, as long as they're not nearly the norm.
Then there are levels that give the enemy chances to get reinforcements if you don't do things snappy.
And finally there are games that *reward you for being careful/stealthy*.
The timed loot like "meld" isn't a bad idea either. None of these should be neglected. They could all fit in XCOM.
I don't remember which game this was, but I remember playing a game where in a specific mission the enemy army was moving supplies out of an area. The faster you completed it, the more supplies would be left for you to intercept and take over.
Unavoidable alarms on the map that gives you X amount of turns to get to and disable to avoid a punishment aren't bad either.
Well-said. X-COM 2's major expansion, War of the Chosen, does a good job of varying the pressure mechanisms. It still uses some straightforward turn timers, but other levels have the sort of thing that you describe (completing it faster gives you more supplies), and some even have a security level system like Invisible, Inc.
I got giddy seeing Mario + Rabbids come up, I was thinking about this the second I saw the video so I was pleasantly surprised to see it. It's a great game and I enjoy the timer a lot because it's an invisible one, removing any pressure from less interesting players while making the perfectionist players take risks and play fast to get the best rating. It's a pleasant surprise beating the par time rather than a constant threat looming over your head. And when you fail that time, I can almost always think back to fight and remember why it took so long and how I can improve that time. Glad the game lets me replay the stage later for those bonus coins.
I also enjoy how the timer is used in its unique challenge missions. Many challenges impose a somewhat short time to force the player to think fast but others have a 1 turn limit, making the battle more of a puzzle based on the unique mechanics of your characters, the enemy, and your environment. It's pretty cool to be able to respec on the fly to meet the needs of a puzzle. And beating them is well worth it, netting you extra money and experience points to make the next levels easier.
Definitely a great use of the timer, can't wait to see how they use it in the DLC.
I also like Mario + Rabbid's escort missions. To get par time Toad needs to move every turn towards the exit, and you have to take risks protecting him or sending out bait so the enemy shoots the bait instead of Toad. Rabbid Peach is a godsend for those missions thanks to her sentries and heals.
@Afrohawk weirdly related to your profile picture, the 2d Sonic games included one design philosophy similar to that of the Mario + Rabbids where there is little-to-no punishment for exploring and taking your time, while replay value is shot-up -and exciting playstyles are also rewarded for possible perfectionist and high-tension gameplay scenarios.
this makes me wanna play xcom. also, "missed opportunity" was the best way to go for xcom imho.
great channel by the way. love it!
Glad these examples were mentioned. Just a note: XCOM’s added security cameras over time is an extended version of the reaper in many mystery dungeon games. Players may be able to overcome the added threat, but it’s ultimately the player’s choice whether the extra loot is worth the risk.
I can’t remember what game, but I recall a game that implemented a lava wall that slowly moved across the level when time was up. It’s a bit more forceful but is still based on risk over time.
A similar thing as in "XCOM enemy within: is done in "Fire Emblem awakening". In later levels a certain type of enemy spawns: the thief. The thief does take a turn every time it's the enemy's turn. He'll move closer and closer to the edge of the playing field until he escapes. If you fight and kill the thief before he is able to escape you'll get the treasure he stole (Most often some gold, which is needed to buy weapons and consumables).
Thanks for this awesome episode of GMTK. I hope everyone who reads this comment does have an awesome day.
Greetings from Germany.
Marcel
Gee! Invisible inc looks good, I keep finding interesting games in these videos.
Hi, I'm an Invisible, Inc. modder and I thought I'd mention that we have a Discord: discordapp.com/invite/aQrXEse, we are a small but tightly knit community, so feel free to come and discuss anything Invisible, Inc. related.
Cool
PaperMint It's a rad little game. Definitely check it out! Favorite tactical turn based game in years.
Truly one of the best games I've ever played.
You made me realize just how much the meld upgrades change my play style. It's not just the timer on the canister; a large number of the upgrades and tools you can buy with meld increase player mobility and encourage risk-taking. The mechs, for example, can take a large amount of punishment, move very far, and serve as full cover. Once I got two fully upgraded mechs in my team, I could take risks I would never dare otherwise, even with a team of 6 maxed out assault soldiers.
Two GMT videos in a week. Best week of the year right here
In the game Pit People (an early acces turn based-RPG, a bit similar to XCOM but it's cartoony) there is a mission where you have to save 2 hostages from 2 bombs. If you don't save them, they die. However, if you manage to save them, they actually become your party members for the next battle. I thought that was cool. And this video was cool. Good job, Mark!
Some members in my extended family love to play heavily strategic board games. Most of these games are inherently competitive, but some are actually cooperative in nature (everybody wins or everyone loses). A common element in at least two of them _(Flashpoint_ and _Pandemic)_ is that between every player turn, an extra "task" is added to the board and while these are little things that players routinely complete during their turns, should they accumulate unattended, they hit some breaking point which slowly progresses towards a global Game Over.
For example, in Flashpoint's case, which is themed around firefighters rescuing people from a burning building:
- Between each turn, a new "smoke" tile is placed somewhere in the building (as determined by a dice roll). Players can extinguish smoke as a standard option during their turn.
- Smoke tiles stack: two smoke tiles become a "fire" tile, and a third a smoke tile (i.e. added to an existing fire tile) triggers an explosion that causes structural damage (marked by placing black damage counters on walls) and potentially even a chain reaction.
- There is no way to repair structural damage, and it is Game Over if players exhaust the game's supply of damage counters.
Great that you followed up your previous video with this one to explore the topic further with some suggestions for the problem :)
I just watched his very popular video that he just made, and wow this channel is amazing and I just love it so much.
I think Dungeon of the Endless is also a nice example. It's a turn based rogue-like tower defense game that has you take turns exploring rooms in a level to find the exit and then carry a power crystal (which is in your starting room and acts as your "base" for the tower defense aspect) to said exit. It has a mechanic where you can power up rooms using "Dust", which is a limited resource that you may find while exploring. This lights up the room and allows you to build towers/resource nodes in it. On some levels though you may not find enough Dust to light up all rooms.
When you open a door to a room there's a chance of enemies spawning in it as well as a chance of waves of them spawning in unlit rooms across the level, so you may end up overwhelmed depending on how many rooms you've opened and left unlit. The turn timer comes in the form of the risk and reward of racking up the tension to explore and gather more and more resources/items/upgrades to help you combat the levels to come versus just gunning for the exit as soon as you find it.
Literally seconds before you presented the first example I was thinking to myself, "Invisible Inc addressed this issue perfectly. I wonder if he'll show-" GMTK: "Let's start with Invisible Inc..."
You never disappoint.
Glad you talked about Within, as I commented about that. Thought you would talk about it more, but the other two were just as interesting.
2:39 The subtle but huge power of renaming stuff is mindblowing. It was games that taught me that.
One example I found fascinating was Dungeon of the Endless. In this game, you do some improvised base building as you explore. You power up rooms after you explore them, to use them as your "base". At some point, you won't have enough resources to power every room up and at that point, every new room you explore starts spawning enemies in these unpowered rooms. At every room you explore you also gain resources, so it's worthwhile opening many of them, but the tradeoff is that you'll make the game more and more challenging, yet this challenge is always present to a certain degree as you don't know where the exit is.
This video and the first one you made really made me want to go back and try games that I'd dismissed out of hand because I wasn't enjoying them. I realized that perhaps it wasn't the game, but the way I was playing it, and I'm looking forward to getting higher scores and having more fun doing it.
Edit: Whoops, sorry for the insanely late comment, just realized that this video is a year old.
I can’t believe you made a video about better ways to encourage faster play in Tactical RPGs without mentioning old school Fire Emblem’s “timed optional objectives” design.
Your videos are so fascinating. I don't play video games much at all, but it's so interesting watching your take on them that I've ended up subscribing to your channel. Keep up the good work!
I enjoyed both of these videos. I really like that you're presenting a controversial issue and addressing it in a positive way by showing why those mechanics went into play and how other developers have dealt with similar issues? Great stuff, keep it up.
Invisible Inc's countdown timer reminds me of the one found in Steamworld Heist. Most levels either start with one or have one triggered midway through, with each level of the countdown spawning more numerous and difficult enemies. What I enjoy about it is that your score is not based on how many enemies you kill, rather it is based on how much of the treasure you collect, and how many of your characters survive. In addition, characters that die on a mission come back afterwards, but are punished by not receiving experience points.
For me personally XCOM Enemy Within's Meld Canisters ARE indeed plainly better than XCOM2's timed missions.
Undoubtedly. They give you a choice of how to play rather than force you to play a certain way, and there's a very clear trade-off of resources in a game where resources are a big deal.
But you don't HAVE to complete the objective in any of XCOM 2's missions, it just means you don't get the reward. You don't lose anything from failing missions, you just don't gain anything.
Oliver Morris shhhh, let the Overwatch Crawl babies cry about how they can't get all the things while only advancing 2 squares a turn before panicking and slapping the whole squad in overwatch.
Thank you for being the garbage human being in an otherwise intelligent conversation . . .
Oliver Morris How much have you played xcom2? Failing missions do affect to the areas you control and failing constantly means you lose the area and you need to get more resources to get towers back up and to open next area for the places where you do more missions, gather intel, heal/build faster or find black market from.
Also in the DLC not having connection to some area can mean that the map-timer goes down since you can't prevent it from progressing so you will have to do extra mission (and if you fail it i guess it's then game over... haven't failed those myself nor seen anyone else fail so not sure what happens then).
Also failing missions constantly means lack of resources which will mean you will be behind in technology and equipment which can lead into missions you only can lose because aliens don't stop developing to wait you to catch up.
Honestly, it's about mimicking the gambler's high. Risk vs reward. I think the brilliance of Invisible Inc is the fact that the ramp up in difficulty and unpredictability rolls out in stages, and there are a lot of secondary objectives to entice you into taking more risks. By making the "safest" and "most rewarding" playstyles an uncertain middle ground between extremes, it turns the metagame of optimizing your strategy into part of the game itself. If you got out easy, you start second-guessing yourself: what did I leave behind? If you get too greedy, you might find yourself in over your head. Since each level is randomized and hidden by fog of war, it's impossible to truly optimize - you're always faced with the unknown. Frankly, it's a brilliant marriage of theme and mechanics.
I'm designing a TRPG for my Master's degree thesis that I'd like to release in the future and videos like yours are quite useful.
As it is based on real historical battles I'm using the moral of the soldiers and how easily they are to command as a way to put pressure on the player. The player uses the "underdog" rebels.
For example, the final battle of the game is going to be one in which 100,000 rebels (agriculture workers, miners, etc) attacked a fortress defended by less than 6,000 professional soldiers (spoilers: historically the soldiers won the battle by destroying the resources of the rebels with cannon fire). The longer the battle takes the more units there will be in the battlefield but the less they'll listen to commands, forcing the player to finish the battle as soon as possible, the longer it takes, the more units he'll have but the less effective the strategy will become.
RUclips won't let me like this video multiple times so instead I shall leave a comment here for yourself. Love your channel, great video and thank you for the work you put in!
Hey again Mark! Boy, this channel is exploding in success. Hope you're feeling proud.
Really enjoyed this two-part topic and I appreciate that Invisible Inc - a highly favored game of mine - got some attention. You're a pleasure to watch.
Yes! Great point. I commented on the last video that the turn timer approach was a valid way to solve the problem of conservative strategies being optimal strategies, and it is, but as you point out, the problem is that having a black-and-white cutoff point could be unfair on players who just slightly misjudge. There's still a debate there, of course, but there's the crux of the matter.
Hi Mark! I loved both this and the previous video. I think you didn't mention the Advance Wars series, which is another good example of what you have being exploring.
In case you haven't played those games, let me explain. In Advance Wars, you have to conquer the enemy base or kill every enemy unit. In order to achieve this, you need to produce units in airports, ports or factories.
In order to avoid slow gamemplay without any risk, the developers introduced an interesting mechanic: money. In order to produce units, you need money. You get 1,000 coins per turn and per controlled building. If you risk and control more buildings, you will get more money and thus, you will be able to produce more and better units. However, if you don't take those buildings in early stages of the game, probably the enemy does, which means it will have more and better units.
I'd love to see an episode about customizable campaign/difficulty modes. I feel like a lot of games just make enemies bullet sponges. There are a few games, like Crysis, that actually make the enemies speak in English if you played on a lower difficulty setting. There are other games that let you fully customize what makes the experience difficult. XCOM itself has options to facilitate this.
FINALLY Invisible Inc used as an example. I love that game. The alarm system is indeed great.
I'm sure it's been mentioned, but in XCOM: Enemy Within, the self-destruct timer on the Meld doesn't actually start when you find them. It starts at the beginning of the level, at least on the console version (which is what I played it on). It's rather easy to test this by, after finding a canister, jumping to the autosave previous and purposely avoiding it. You'll see that the next time you find it, the turn counter is lower. This timer ticking is also where the "noise cone" comes from, where an ally close to a canister can hear the timer ticking, allowing you to track its general location. It's a relatively minor difference, but it does mean that the game is pushing you to move quickly through the entire mission, rather than just when you find a canister.
Yay bonus vid. Also mentioning Steamworld Heist again. Great timer system that pushes the player forward and makes the game more fun.
Hi Mark! I really like your videos. I enjoy watching video essays about game design and your journalistic level is top notch as well the technical quality. Also I enjoy that you spend the time to edit your videos to support what's being said in the voice-over.
I personally was pleasantly surprised to see this GMTK Extra video only a short while after your last video. I would encourage you to do small spinoff or replies to comments as such like this one. I felt this was a nice addition to your earlier more indebpth video.
Thanks for great content!
-DR
As a matter of fact, X-com war of the chosen had had a few new missions where they implemented better ways of speeding you along. There was a mission where you had to rescue a vip before they were killed, and then escape a large amount of reinforcements. There was also the addition of the lost in some missions, basically zombies which slowly trickled in, forcing you to go faster. So they did find a way to get around the problem of timers.
Game Maker's Toolkit Extra...
I like that ring, I just absolutely love it when you say "Game Maker's Toolkit."
The first thing I thought of when starting this episode was Steamworld Heist, which is a sort of 2D X-Com (with steam-powered robots in space). In most missions, a timer counts down (either from the start or after a mid-mission trigger) to activate turrets or call in reinforcements. The game doesn't reward XP for kills, just completed missions, so the player is incentivized to complete objectives and leg it rather than creep slowly through the level as increasing waves of enemies come at them.
One more to think about, Final Fantasy Tactics!
If one of your characters die on the battlefield, and you can't revive them in 3 turns, then they are gone for good. Might make you play safe to start, but if an ally gets hit by a big attack from across the map do you waste time to go and save them with a healer, or rush in with your damage dealers and try and finish the map before they vanish away. The small party size might also influence your decision.
Then in Tactics Advance they took out that system, but instead had Laws. Nothing to do with turn timers, but there would be a rotation of skills where you would be penalized for using some or rewarded for using others. It had a huge impact on what you could do each battle and helped make it so you would have to switch things up and try new "tactics" haha.
Both some really great designs I would love to see in more modern strategy games.
Very interesting. A good example IMHO is the game design of *Space Tyrant*, where the enemy fleets get stronger over time. Often, pushing hard in the beginning and midgame of a level really rewards you, while playing conservatively can backfire.
This reminds me a lot of some of the "Battle Masteries" in the Super Robot Wars games. Like sometimes some of these optional challenges ask of you to defeat a certain enemy or wave of enemies within a certain turn limit. And the bonus is that if you complete enough of these otherwise optional challenges, you get a secret boss at the very end. I've only played OG1 and OG2 on the GBA (but I plan to get OG:MD and V since they're the only other ones officially in English) and the secret bosses were respectively a major plot device come to life, and an upgraded form of the final boss.
Something similar to the meld system is in Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon. Emeras are items you can wear for a dungeon that give you special effects. As soon as you enter a room with an emera, a timer appears, showing the turns till it explodes into shards. The shards can eventually be formed into a new emera, but obviously getting to it fast is preferred. It’s more gentle than the meld tuner, but Super’s items are also only temporary.
Realy good follow up :)
It's cool to see how many ways there actually are to influence the player withouth him even noticing and just guiding him into the most fun playstyle.
an example I can think of come from the fantastic tactical JRPG Valkyria Chronicles as the quicker you do things the more XP you're likely to get which is based on how many turns the level was finished in and how many kills you got and it calculates that which leads to XP which is used to buy gun upgrades for your units, tanks upgrades, perks, etc. the unique thing about it though is how in most tactics games each unit has an individual level but Chronicles settles for a leveling system based on classes, you spend XP on the class you want to level up and every unit in that class gets leveled up, it solves the issue of grinding in such games
I actually like the Security level idea. Steamworld Heist uses the exact same system in many of it's levels and I find it very fair. And if you haven't played it, you really should. It's like a 2D X-com set in a universe of steam powered robots.
Thank you so much for this mid week present ❤
I have an idea- you should make an episode of Game Maker's Toolkit that specifically points out BAD game design. That'd be interesting.
I think one of the biggest motivators to playing conservatively in XCOM is the Overwatch ability- an ability that greatly rewards the player for conservative play. If a group of enemies moves into line of sight while all your soldiers are on Overwatch, you essentially get an entire turn's worth of shots off for free, against enemies who aren't even in cover yet. Overwatch shots will often inflict enough damage to kill an enemy or two, or weaken them enough that you can easily finish them off next turn, meaning that some enemies in the group will die before they even get the chance to do anything.
Using Overwatch to its full potential is often key to completing missions and minimizing losses, especially on the higher difficulties. Turn timers might not be so frustrating if Overwatch were removed and the game's balance was adjusted accordingly. Having fewer tools for slow play would help make it clear to the player that you're not supposed to play slowly.
Great video. Marie & Rabbits did really surprise me to be honest, I never thought that it would work that well. Another thing that this game did fairly well is that combinations of the Japanese "perfect cuteness" and the French in "perfect ugliness" of the rabbits. I really love Invisible Inc. for what it is and tried to be, it's quite smart with it's mechanics.
Destiny 2 also has an interesting example of this with the Nightfall Strikes activity. In Destiny1, these strikes are weekly challenges that take an existing strike mission and add mutators to increase the difficulty. The mutators would change each week, and reward different playstyles, like killing enemies while in the air, dealing damage while in cover, or using abilities over guns. Destiny2 changed these Nightfalls so that they always include a timer that will kick the player out if it ticks down. This was original added by Bungie because most players (including myself) would go slowly and conservatively through the mission without taking chances. They wanted to push players into aggressive tactics. But since every Nightfall now includes these timers, the entire activity now plays very similar week to week. Players are now severely punished for going slowly, running into the same problem as Xcomm.
Personally, I wish the timer was another mutator that wasn't enabled every week. It's fun to be pushed to go quickly, but when every week is a speedrun the challenge becomes less interesting. There are still other mutators like Destiny1, but they now feel to play second fiddle to the ever present timer.
I commented on the other video before seein this one but I'll just say it here. XCOM 2's best mod is an adjustment of the timers that doesn't get rid of them. Instead it makes it so that the timer only begins when the new mechanic Concealment is broken. It makes sense within the game world sincr aliens aren't alarmed and start evacuating VIPs until they're given a cause for alarm. It also matches the theme of bein a guerilla fighter, as you can lay incredibly effective ambushes and sneaking is what a ragtag group does, not charge im head first like an army. This mod also puts more value into concealment and everything associated with. Certain weapons, skills and classes become more valuable. Enemies with high vision ranges become more dangerous. Civilians that alarm aliens and break your concealment are now a genuine concern. On top of all of that it adds a new layer of risk vs reward. It puts you in close quarters with melee enemies sooner, it clusters your allies and makes it easier for the aliens to wipe.your squad. Before you would have this big open field when discovered but if you try to go in hard and fail you'll be crushed. It fits with the concealment mechanic so well that somebody who hasn't played XCOM 2 would think that it was part of the base game.
I don't find it easy to abuse but I find the strategy more successful than not. That's because the game wasn't made wit it in mind. Thats why I modded my own and made mutons more common. Vast improvement. I hope Firaxis incorporates it in the future and finds better ways to balance it.
This is basically an exploration of the turn based equivalent to hard vs. soft enrages. For non-MMO players, a hard enrage is when a boss ends a fight at a certain moment. (i.e. the boss becomes invulnerable or just lets out an attack that kills everyone in the room at x minutes in) Soft enrages are situations where the mechanics of an encounter effectively make a certain point in the fight a fail state without explicitly ending it. A boss may get a stacking buff throughout the fight that heals or amplifies its damage, and once it reaches a certain number of stacks, the raid group won't be able to outdamage its healing or outheal its damage. Other fights may have increasingly high number of boss reinforcements show up on a certain interval, eventually reaching a point where the sheer number of enemies will overrun the players.
I know Mark doesn't play MMOs and I can totally understand the reasons why, but it'd be wonderful to get an indepth look at raid design someday, as they tend to feature some of the most intricate and interesting encounters in all of gaming.
i appreciated the timer in Xcom 2.
tbh i feel like xcom 2 shines not in “risk” but in that feeling that you’re constantly on edge and that death looms for you everywhere (much like a rogue-like or survival game).
xcom 2 wasn’t just a tatical game, it was a tactical survival game.
and this fit perfectly with the theme and story of the game (being that you’re not a guerrilla rebel army)
so a fail state timer forces players to play in a state of constant danger. so making very calculated risks was an essential part of the game.
This ads further consequence to the risk/reward mechanics already in the game. in particular the expiring item drops mechanic.
Nailed it on the head with stuff like Meld being the way you encourage sped, not the lazy turn timers
Let's not forget things like getting optional missions if you beat levels fast enough. Both the Fire Emblem series, and the Elven Legacy/Fantasy Wars series has played with this idea, just for two recent-ish examples. And then we have the whole "a failure does not have to mean game over", which can be used together with a turn-timer. Games like Panzer Corps has played with this idea, where if you fail certain missions, you're taken to another branch on the campaign tree (this does mean making a bunch of levels that players won't have the chance to see in a single playthrough though).
I remember this snes game called Ogre Battle and it had a reputation system that would give you a worse ending if you take too long in battles. Or it may have been tied to the level gap between you and enemies, I don't quite remember. Either way, it did a great job of sending the message that time is of the essence while not causing you to fail if you spend too long in a certain level.
The challenge Missions of Mario + Rabbids are some of the most fun I've had in that game. They all have a turn limit timer that makes you fail the mission if you go over it. So several of them made me try over and over again until I could do them as efficiently as possible.
Disgaea 4 does this by placing boxes around the level that generally power up enemies. So you can throw your party members all the way to the boxes (where there are usually enemies too), placing your units spread out and vulnerable, or you can ignore the boxes and play within their restraints. Sometimes that means missing out on the damage you can do to enemies by destroying them, or that ranged attacks, throwing units etc. aren't possible within an area and certain things are harder or easier (like doubling damage for all units there, boosting enemies, or increasing/reducing elemental damage).
Fire Emblem games do this pretty well also. Sometimes putting recruitable characters into dangerous spots in order to make players move with a sense of urgency or even just putting some powerful enemy reinforcements into play if you are taking your time. I really enjoyed it back in the GBA days
It's worth noting that Mario x Rabbids also uses the "increase difficulty if you take too long" method in the form of spawning more enemies every few turns. If you play it safe by slowly whittling down the enemies' health, you'll end up getting overwhelmed because enemies will spawn faster than you can kill them. IMO this works better than the reward for beating the level within a certain amount of time because it's a more present threat and you can always go back and beat the levels faster once you're more powerful.
I'd argue a lot of the Mario + Rabbids design decisions promote more aggressive play, especially the enemies.
- Supporters can lob grenades over cover, essentially getting a free hit on you each turn. Not to mention that those grenades can burn your units, forcing them out of cover.
- Bucklers can't be damaged from the front, so they can encroach upon a defensive position relatively unpunished.
- Peek-a-Boos essentially teleport between locations, causing your overwatch sight abilities to be less effective at holding areas
- Valkyries can leap over cover, damage your units upon landing, and have a chance to bounce you with their attacks, sending you outside of cover.
Have an obsevation about this: I think a lot of people were so fond of conservative play in XCOM: Enemy Unknown in large part due to how satisfying it was to do this (largely sniper powered) strategy of "overwatch advancement". Where you'd advance half the movement potential per turn with one or two heavily armored characters while the rest stayed behind on overwatch (instant attack on spotted enemies, especially powerful with snipers). It just felt really cool to do that, it was immersive.
Dismantling and perhaps retrofitting the core of the enjoyment found in that might help to provide really potent solutions for how to combat the negative sides of conservative play for enjoyment.
I havn't done it... But I think it's probably pretty fertile soil to to dig into when looking for more options.
I didn't mind the turn timers in Xcom2. I wasn't as hardcore as some people though. I got enough of a challenge out of normal difficulty. I was there to have fun no a brain aneurysm.
The game just got a million times better when Long War 2 was released. I loved it even more then and they modified the turn timers so that they wouldn't start ticking until your team was spotted.
If you want to have a fun, awesome, and somewhat challenging game of Long War 2 then I highly recommend playing on normal difficulty and having an ALL shinobi team. I had a few stragglers after the first mission that got classed into the other classes but they were just cannon fodder I didn't care about. None of them survived. Tip: Rush to armors to get the shredding and you can never have too much hp.
I threw in a psionic toward the end because it wouldn't be xcom without them but even before they joined nobody could touch my ninja squad.
I liked the Meld system in Enemy Within, but I actually enjoyed XCOM 2's timers quite a bit more after installing either True Concealment or War of the Chosen, which includes said mod's options in the settings. With those mods, which changes the missions in which you start with Concealment to have shorter timers that only begin once you exit it, either via firing off shots or being spotted by enemies. It encourages a less rush-happy approach, with more emphasis on setting up ambushes to eliminate lots of enemies at once, and just opening up many more options beyond that, such as sneaking in and completing the objective entirely unseen where it doesn't necessarily require any overt actions.
One mission had me setting up an ambush using the abilities of every soldier in my squad across a city with lots of height variation, placing Sharpshooters on rooftops with EMP rounds to eliminate the tough robots and placing Rangers in position to finish the job, plus a Specialist to use the robots closer to the objective to my advantage. When all of the elements of the game come together like this, the feeling of being the commander of an underground rebellion striking where ADVENT doesn't expect in increased tenfold, and frankly, I'm shocked that it wasn't in the base game.
It makes it a far better game.
A modern example is gears tactics, it completely rewards you with more extra action points if you play agressively.
Execute an enemy at close range and all the other soldiers will get extra action points, opening the door for combos when approaching with this technique
In late levels of Invisible Inc the security level is probably the least unfair thing in the game. Armour and Shields that amount to a gear check in what is essentially a rogue-like mean you do end up facing almost impossible situations sooner or later but unlike these you have consistent control over the security level.
On that topic, the idea of gear checks and invisible barriers to progress might be an interesting video about progression.
In my opinion, the main thing holding players back from playing in a more exciting way is how punishing losing soldiers is. In the future, it might be interesting if there was a way to get higher leveled recruits, and/or a wider range of failure states on the unit level. Perhaps if a soldier gets taken out, the player can try to extract them so they can be used again, after some recovery time.
One of the great things about video games is how series can evolve over time to create more engaging gameplay. The Arkham series is my favorite example of this, as the core gameplay from Asylum is already really good, and it is only improved in subsequent games.
Risk of Rain has a unique timer in that the longer you play, the harder it gets. This forces you to balance farming the level for loot and rushing the teleporter for the next level. I know this is very similar to Invisible's security mechanic, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
One example I had in mind was the indie game Risk of Rain, where as you progress through the levels, the game progressively gets harder. But not level-by-level basis, but on a time scale. A meter starts filling up as you take longer, and the game will start spawning new and harder enemys. The risk you can take is to let the timer fill up as you explore the level for possibly newer and better gear. Or you have the choice of speed running the timer and getting to the end with a easy to moderate difficulty. You wont have good gear though. So in this case, it encourages not only going faster, but also not being greedy.
Risk of Rain has some problems with implementation. The sheer time cost of travel made entering new time difficulties a matter of luck as much as skill. It's supposed to be a tradeoff between more money/loot or less time spent, but the wide open spaces and random enemy spawns really did little to make taking your time SEEM worth it.
Great extra video! Thx Mark!
I myself purchased Invisible Inc. because I loved Shadow of the Ninja but it was too stressfull for me.
Every turn you could only advance a few tiles and since it's usually a closed office space I felt it was next to impossible to outmanouver the guards.
Then you had very few inventory and could mostly just stun the guards for a few rounds which wasn't super helpfull since you had to walk back and forth and again only a few tiles per turn.
So you found the game - even though the alarm level system is good - too frustrating to play.
Also I never played XCOM2 because I already found Enemy Within too stressfull, even though that system is, like you mentioned, pretty good since it's perfectly optional.
Still I hate to miss out on things and I hate to be rushed. ^^
I honestly prefer a game where defensive, careful play is rewarded but slipping up or rushing in too early gets you killed pretty quick. It's the reason both XCOM and Dark Souls are among my favourite games. The problem I had with XCOM 2 was that it limited my tactical options. In XCOM 1 I could decide to do things like fall back to lure enemies to an advantageous location, or set up an overwatch trap, or scout the area refining my strategy each time map tiles were revealed. In XCOM 2 the only tactical decision I had was to advance a little or advance a lot. I found this a lot less interesting so I stopped playing after 10 hours or so and haven't looked back.
fire emblem does the "not a turn timer" thing pretty well in a few entries. most games have chests or villages that give items which certain enemy classes can destroy if they reach before the player. sometimes there are allied teams that have to hold out untill the player reaches them, but rather than game overs the player loses out on items or units. sometimes after long periods of time enemy reinforcements come from the players starting point or near a map objective. sometimes not clearing meeting very generous turn requirements means not going to extra chapters, or getting other rewards like more xp.