Something really fun and interesting happened to me in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I was fighting against an Hinox and a Guardian at the same time. I was really struggling and I was expecting to die really soon, when suddenly I had an idea: I tried to trick the Guardian to shoot the Hinox with his laser. It actually worked. What happened next is that the Hinox got mad at the Guardian and decided to grab and throw him really faaaaar away. At that point I was able to fight just against the Hinox. It was great.
Same thing happened to me!! Was the hinox in a little grove of trees across from the ruins of some castle thing? I've found it far too easy to just parry the guardian lasers every time though and kill it that way. This is a good example of what Mark was explaining with the silencer in metal gear: one solution to your issues can't be too succesful or you never get to interact with the system in an interesting and meaningful way like you did by getting the hinox to throw the guardian(:
No, I think it was in one of the earlier zones, not too far away from Kakariko. It was fairly near to a stable which was close to a bridge. There were also a few tiny plateaus around there. I don't know how to describe the location precisely to you, I would actually be able to get there pretty easily in-game. By the way, I was aware of that parry trick when that thing happened, I remember that I've even tried to do it in that occasion, but I'm not really that good at it. Eventually I ran out of shields lol So yeah, that certainly brought me to experiment.
This is one of my favorite videos from you. Watched it like 3 times already. All the exact reasons why Ubisoft is kinda killing it when it comes to this stuff (but maybe not some OTHER stuff sadly)
To be fair, there's only a few select areas in the game where it does happen. Try going to Akkala, the ruins just west of Tarrey Town, where there are two guardians. That's one of the areas where you can observe this.
You've probably seen it, but just never realized it. It just feels natural, something that the game's verisimilitude makes expected and commonplace. That's one of the things that makes BotW so awesome.
My favorite moment in Breath of the Wild so far was when I was able to reduce the numbers of a high-level bokoblin camp with a single fire arrow. Ironically, it wasn't the arrow that actually did the damage. It was the campfire they were standing around. The bokoblins jumped up in surprise when my arrow struck (rather uselessly) one of their silver comrades. One of them jumped too close to the flames, however, and quickly caught fire and, being too busy dancing around in pain, neglected to move away from the fire and burned to death. His companions returned to the fire and sat down as though nothing had happened, but one of them sat on top of the dead bokoblin's flaming club and caught fire. He was smarter and ran away, but as soon as he was extinguished, he went right back to that flaming weapon and this time was burned to ash. I thought this was all very funny and saved a video of it, but it wasn't over yet. I still had to deal with that silver bokoblin and a single black one. I shot a frost arrow at the silver one, thinking to deal with the black one first, only before I could reach the camp the black bokoblin had panicked and, in his haste to run away from the yet unseen threat, bumped into his silver friend and sent him sliding off a cliff. And, so, I indirectly defeated nearly an entire camp of difficult enemies with two arrows, but the game's systems did all the actual work. It was absolutely hilarious ;D
One of the great things about botw is that experiences like this are completely unique. No one has the same playthrough. This is compounded by the fact that every aspect of the game’s design focuses on encouraging creativity , freedom, and exploration. The fact that weapons break doesn’t just make you try creative stuff, it also makes you explore, because even if you already have a good item, it’ll break, and then you would want another. The fact that all the systems react intuitively with each other means that you don’t just have to think creatively in combat, but all the time. You wanna get up that cliff? Climb up a nearby waterfall with cryonosis, or make stamina fixing food, or set the grass on fire and use the updraft of hot air to float up. It’s constantly engaging and making you think critically and creatively.
@@themagicpencilanimations192 your synopsis is spot on, and honestly I think even if that was the only thing about BotW that was fantastic it would still deserve awards. The way the game's systems encourage you to be creative and logical are perfectly executed
@@kjj26k Here's a tvtropes page, should have a source: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered Personally, though, I prefer Waterburned (curse rotpar's name): tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LetsPlay/Waterburned
In Kingdom Come, people react to even the clothes you wear, like wearing all black and a hood in broad daylight sulking around corners, my eyes filled with tears when a guard stopped me and asked what i was planning to do and started to search me for stolen items. If only more games were like this.
I get stopped by guards in clean set of full plate armor with 16+ charisma and 100 reputation all the time. Rattay guards are kinda on edge, I guess. It is a great game anyway.
As much as I love this channel for amazing game discussion I find my self appreciating more and more then INCREDIBLE ways that you use editing and symbols and diagrams to explain concepts. Like the use of circles to explain inputs and outputs is just so clever and wonderful and aesthetically pleasing. I don’t know how much work goes into planning these things but the work pays off in dividends because your videos always impress. Keep up the awesome work!
Empowering the player. Like Warren Spector said about Deus Ex: "It was designed, from the start, as a game about player expression, not about how clever we were as designers, programmers, artists, or storytellers." It's great to see that more developers are catching on to what Ultima Underworld, Thief and System Shock were doing decades ago. Looking Glass Studios truly were way ahead of their time. Same goes for Ion Storm Austin and Origin Systems of course.
Something I noticed when I was playing dungeon and dragons with my friends (as dungeon master) was that making ennemy incredibly strong but also describing a lot the environment they would immediately think about ways to beat the monster but using their imagination rather than the rules of the game. The best moments are when I get away from the game's rules and just react to all the crazy plans they want to make. And I always try to make them dramatically fail while still letting them react
Gta4. Hit a cab. Cab drivers are extremely violent and will always choose to fight. Square up with him, dodging and dancing around his moves. If a cop witnesses him assault you, he will be detained. Or if the same cab driver swings at you, you dodge it, and he hits a random npc, said npc will respond either with retaliation, or fear. Experiment on
GTA lacks an extra layer to become a true systemic game : NPC almost never interact with each other unless you force them to. And overall you feel that most of actions are scripted and triggered around your current character, and nothing would happen if you were just a spectator.
6:54 I have an entire video on this, its so important to be able to find your own solution in a game rather than finding the one pre-determined solution that is offered. So much more rewarding. Fantastic video as always Mark!
I was actually writing down the cat-killing example in Dwarf Fortress just before you mentioned it. God, what a brilliant game. It's even more ridiculous, because it's not that the dwarves spilled the alcohol onto the cats, it's that they spilled it onto the floor, and walking through liquids gets that liquid on your feet. Also, obviously, everything in Dwarf Fortress has a temperature and a melting point. This includes rain and flesh. So, for a while, rain used to melt the fat off of your dwarves. And that's not all. Almost _everything_ in Dwarf Fortress is systemic. Even the world generation doesn't just decide "let's put a desert here, and a forest here". Instead, it simulates rainfall, erosion, all that stuff and depending on those variables, deserts and forest just naturally come to be. Even the history is emergent, as it contains hundreds of years of competing factions fighting over land or artifacts, a dragon might come along and just wipe out an entire civilization, or an elf might grow up with such a loathing for elves that he later becomes a king of dwarves. And that's not even getting into all the mad stuff that players have come up with, be it mechanical marvels, traps, or just an apparatus to consistently harvest mermaids.
2:20 Oh my god. I never knew you could light the thorns of fire. Every time I went to that shrine I went up a cliff really far away and paraglidded all the way there.
It's worth noting that a good level designer can (and should) have some ideas for how the player can creatively use the various systems in ways that feel unexpected. Say, putting contacts _just_ close enough for a metal weapon to reach between them, or lining up enough archways and whatnot to create a sniping window which happens to line up with the head of a guard in a vital location. These shouldn't be telegraphed _too_ hard, and the player should be able to see a "correct" path which doesn't use them; that way, when somebody notices and takes the opportunity, they feel like they're breaking the game and not just following a different plotted line. Game design is a subtle art.
Great video! You nailed all of the points we love to see in games that embrace emergent gameplay and highly interactive systems. Keep up the great work!
when are we gonna get some news on system shock 3? I love that you are reviving this franchise and also ultima underworld. the og immersive sims. i cant wait
Hi Mark. Huge fan, I'm an avid gamer and i love breaking them down to understand what i love about them. I'm not a game designer, but i am a DM, which i guess sort of is a game designer, just without the computer. Your videos are extremely helpful with designing a world and campaigns for my players, and my DnD games have only gotten better since i started watching your videos. I'd just like to thank you for putting out what is probbaly some of the best content on youtube, as it is genuinely interesting, passionate, and well-informed. I also wanted to let you know that your influence stretches past video game developers, and your critical analysis of video games can help in other creative mediums.
I was reminded of the similarity, too. One of my favorite parts of GMing is the ability to go beyond the scope of a typical pre-built adventure, laying out basic rules for the behaviors of NPCs and monsters, how local laws work and are enforced, and other larger-scope details about the world. That way, when the PCs inevitably veer from the sensible or obvious path, I can just apply what I know about the world to this new set of circumstances and allow the adventure to continue relatively seamlessly.
Man, I've been watching games videos dissection videos to get me thru not currently having a rig for a while now, and for some reason it never occured to me to apply the lessons learned here to my Sessions. I suppose in a passive way it did, but in the future I'm going to do my best to construct my sessions while actively incorporating what is talked about in these sorts of videos. A game is a game, and there's no reason rules a lessons learned can't apply across the board.
I mean, the earliest RPGs and things like Ultima, Zork, Quest for Glory et al. were essentially people applying the new-fangled world of video games to tabletop RPGs like D&D. Mark's lectures on game design aren't always the most applicable to it (stuff on visuals and sound mainly) but all his principles about design and immersion are great. Hell even the stuff on AI is handy.
Not just the advice found in this video, but all of mark's videos, particularly the ones talking about narrative creation and side quests. I also take into account his videos on level design, applying it to dungeons. It might not be perfectly transmutable 100% of the time, but i certainly draw a lot of inspiration from his videos when im designing my campaigns. For example, the idea of using one idea or concept and developing it, and creating a whole game around it, can be applied to a dungeon. Have a magic item, or one type of enemy, or maybe just some magical aura effecting the whole area, and make that thing be the focus of the dungeon, and build everything around it. In the spirit of non-linearity, and player choice and expression, not binding the player to one specific playstyle or predetermined path, i have significantly cut back on the rails in my adventures. I now give the players a starting point, a world, and a goal, and say "figure it out", which is so much more fun than "go over there, do A, so you can do B, and rinse and repeat."
A game that i feel that should be mentioned is Crusader Kings 2 where elaborate stories happen to every npc like intrigue between feuding brothers to incestuous bastards. As an example of something small i found that has stuck with me is when I checked through one of my vassals family tree and found a man that had committed suicide because he was depressed. Why was he depressed? Because the year before he had to execute his wife for some wrong doing. That little story i found completely randomly made the world i played in feel som much more alive, even tough it's just a map with 2d portraits. I think that giving npcs personalities and traites that defines what they do is another step towards the same goal described in your video.
Cracked editor David Wong said the best moment for him in Skyrim was seeing a giant and a dragon fight *each other,* while they ignored the player character completely Made him realize that the playable character was just a tiny element in a massive ecosystem that didn't care whether he existed at all. It made the world feel large and realistic. Compare that to other games that throw wave after wave of obstacles and enemies specifically at the player.
Well it's a tradeoff at the end of the day. You can have a finely-crafted custom experience or a bunch of systems that might produce greatness. Sort of like the world's finest chef making a work of art on a plate, and an all-you-can-eat rib buffet. And sometimes it's like Skyrim where some of those ribs are a bit meatless and you swear this restaurant was better a decade ago.
This is also what I hear stated as the best thing about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The game just simulates itself whether or not you take any action. Mutants attack bandits, bandits make camp, adventurers get attacked by bandits because they got too close, etc. Because of this, you feel like you're an inhabitant like any other, as opposed to "the hero." It worked REALLY well.
Gothic was one of the earliest systemic games. people follow a daily routine, some take cover when it's raining, different NPCs(wild animals, humans from opposing factions, orcs etc.) have specific relations and always act accordingly, often attacking each other. When you kill a boar, wolves might be attracted by the corpse and feast on it, ignoring you if you dont come too close because they already got what they wanted.
dwarf fortress isnt't that hard though, its just the controls being very overwhelming and nonsensical at first. The underlying simulation is so cool though!
Great analysis, but I wish he'd talked about Don't Starve, from Klei, as it's incredibly systemic (survival/crafting/roguelike). Here's one of many features: Rain decreases your sanity, makes your gear wet and slippery, makes the character colder, and makes torches, campfires, and wildfire sizzle out. You can stand under the branches of a tree or craft several different types of items to lessen the effect, but you have to acquire the resources. Rain also makes crops and wild plants grow faster and is the sole trigger for the sanity-increasing mushrooms to grow. It's prevalent in the spring, rare in the summer, and perfect in the autumn. In the winter it turns to snow, which has its own set of mechanics. The NPCs have more complex relationships with each other, the world, and the player than Far Cry, as well, and the player is heavily incentivized to figure out how to use them against each other. What I like about the game is that, as a seriously uncoordinated player, I'm able to use the systemic mechanics to my advantage. I'm unable to fight many of the monsters, and it's pretty easy for me to screw up and lose 8-10 hours of gameplay because of the limited number of lives. But I can devise elaborate systems to pit the NPCs against each other. I vividly remember the lightbulb moments when I figured out how to defeat an NPC using the environment or other NPCs, as well as the times I didn't!
Interesting video. It's perhaps also worth mentioning that games can rarely rely solely on systemic structure. Shadow of Mordor has an amazing nemesis system, but the game struggled to develop beyond that system, leaving me feeling like I'd seen it all only a few hours in. On the other hand, Just Cause 3's addition of the wingsuit provided more opportunities than in JC2, but made it too easy to rely on hovering above-ground, gunning down foes, instead of finding creative solutions. I'd definitely be interested to see how a systemic multiplayer game would work, where quick wits would play a larger part. This video was good food for thought, cheers.
+Game Revo Minecraft has some systemic variables, they are generally very simplistic and scenario specific but they do exist. Sheep eat grass which can regrow their wool, wolves actively hunt for sheep, dogs are afraid of creepers and won't help fight them, creepers are scared of cats and will leave your home alone if you are a crazy cat person, cats lounge on beds and chests making them unusable, when a source of lava is touched by water it turns into obsidian, and when a stream of water and a stream of lava (not the sources) touch one another they generate cobblestone, villagers actively search for doors at night for safety, zombies attack and break doors on hard mode, and the core fundamental of the game is how the day/night cycle affects the player's operations and decisions because while monsters spawn in the dark, most burn when exposed to light. Combine these elements in multiplayer and you get a pretty awesome tool set to aid or hinder your friends. There are plenty of other multiplayer games like this as well, it was just the first to come to mind.
Mm, good point! I never realised just how many systemic elements they've added to Minecraft since I last played it. It works especially well there due to the game being construction-based. Without those elements, it'd probably feel a bit flat.
I remember in MGS4, in one of the penultimate levels, on the ship, finding out the tranquilizer works on the gecko's. You could put the mechrobots to sleep! It was so well hidden, but essential to MGS game mechanic. It was amazing. Love finding neat ways to use game systems.
Esther "How dare you question the establishment, I will call you the insult the establishment taught me to call all dissenters!" Ironically, you're acting like what liberals think the nazis were like.
Streets of Rogue is pretty much entirely a systemic game. It makes the multiplayer experience really wild. I hope that it does continue and grow into more genres.
Breath of the Wild took the ideas immersive-sims were trying to leverage from decades-old Looking Glass designs, and both elevated the number of possible meaningful interactions while bringing it to a mass audience. It felt fresh, where other games of that ilk felt like they were exactly in line with player expectations.
I was waiting for Rain World to show up. That game is phenomenal; its environments are beautiful and distinct, its music sublime...but its procedural animation and artificial intelligence systems are what set it apart. It's not just "different" from other games in this regard - it's strictly better. It represents the evolution of those systems and i'm interested to see how the technology is adopted.
Some Looking Glass devs were tabletop rpg players so I wouldn't be surprised if D&D is one of the biggest inspirations of the systemic interaction you see in their emergent sims like Ultima Underworld.
When it comes to these interconnected systems, I'm reminded of classic Black Isle Fallout games, which I have a few interesting examples of them, one going right, and two that are more examples of not thinking these interactions through, but fun to mess with anyway. 1. Doors could not only be lockpicked open, but also lockpicked to lock them again. If you get all the keys and lockpick a door locked, enemies will not be able to open the door. The most effective use for this, which I'm not sure was planned, is a house owned by a bunch of slave traders in the second town. Normally, they're much too strong for a beginning player, serving as something to "come back to", but you can lock yourself in the lead guy's bedroom, which has an internal window, and thereby put yourself in a situation where you can, turn by turn, duck out of cover, shoot one of the enemies, and get back into cover, and basically pick them off behind the safety of a door nobody but you has keys for. A good deed and some great weapons and armour, that now you don't need to come back later for! 2. You can use healing items on anyone, not just yourself like Bethesda Fallout. This is nice for keeping your companions and reckless NPCs alive, but you can also kill people this way! The Super Stim is a kind of stimpack that does much greater healing, but on a delay, will do a small amount of damage. The small amount of damage can be stacked up as high as you like by using more of them, and since you technically didn't perform a hostile action on an NPC you do this to, you can use this to kill quest targets and the like who might make people hostile by overdosing them on Super Stims, and nobody will blame you for it... Unless people are scripted to turn hostile if this NPC dies for any reason at all. Whoops. 3. The game keeps track of who put items on the ground, and if you put an explosive item somewhere near someone, and it blows up and hurts them, obviously, they'll blame you for it. If an explosive is left in a container or someone's inventory or anything like that, it'll still explode. Basically, set the timer, and there's no way to trick the game into not blowing the thing up. There's an item which is a backpack, which you can put things in, and can also put on the ground. The game doesn't track who put an item inside of a container, so if you put explosives in the backpack, and put it on the ground, the game will effectively forget that you're the one who set the explosives, and you won't get blamed for the consequences. And, if a pickpocket steals those armed explosives you just happened to be carrying around, nobody will blame you when they explode, although I think that one's less of a broken instance.
Deus Ex was so much fun to play for me because it felt like I was trying to outsmart the developer. You have the tools, and now you come up with a solution.
Federico Porcel oh undoubtedly - I'm just saying that things like the flame shield setting oil on fire are an extra little cherry on top of the core gameplay. Sonic 3 had traces of this, but they really took it to the next level in Mania.
I was waiting for the Dwarf Fortress mention, that game always surprises me and it's all emergent gameplay from the interaction of systems that I doubt Toady ever intended to interact. The tiny mention it got doesn't do the lengths it takes this concept to justice. It's a hard pill to swallow, it's a punishing and tedious game to play at times, but I've never had two games go the same and it always surprises me.
yeah making Enemies Friendly Fire each other and get angry about it is always something entertaining in games. using the Enemies to my advantage! i've really enjoyed that over many hundreds of hours in Killing Floor, among **many** other games.
+Soul-Burn The problem is that with the smaller density of hitboxes (especially taking into account the verticality of that game's levels) chances of monsters hitting each other are sadly very slim. I've seen monster infighting in the new Doom maybe two times.
RIMWORLD!!! I've been anxiously awaiting the day it would make an appearance on your channel, and even though it was only a brief cameo this time, I'm still thoroughly pleased. I'd love to see you talk about it more in depth, perhaps in a video where you delve more deeply into your research on systemic games. The unique stories I have experienced in that game are more compelling than most books I've read, and perhaps that's because they were both completely unscripted and something I could interact with. That, to me, is the unique beauty of video games: interactive (and, in some cases, unscripted) stories.
Im genuinely happy to have learned what an immersive sim is through your videos. I always knew there was a word for it but I never was able to find it. Now I know the name of my favorite type of game.
Kind of a nitpick, but the fact that not all wooden objects catch on fire in Zelda is, to me anyway, a bit more realistic than if everything wooden did. Spiky brush catches on fire fairly easily in real life compared to the trunk of a tree. Obviously there are many more factors at play than just that simple observation in real life, such as the dampness of the thing you're trying to set on fire, but the point is that not everything wooden should catch fire from something as simple as a flaming arrow or sword, while other things should nearly immediately. That being said, I love these videos. I'm no designer but this is all extremely interesting to me, and has helped me open my mind towards newer games whereas before I pretty much exclusively played older games, and I really appreciate that. Thanks a ton for what you do here.
There's a difference between "realism" and "believability". He's talking about the latter in the video, where the media corresponds not with the real world, but with the audience's common sense notion of how things should be.
This is a breath of fresh air. So many people criticize modern gaming and talk about “the good ol’days”. Sure, many tropes are annoying, such as micro-transactions and releasing unfinished games. But there are also so many things that are getting better; graphics are only improving, developers are getting more ambitious with story, scope, and spectacle, combat and gunplay in many modern titles is as refined as ever, and games are feeling more alive. Systemic game design is a great example of this. I’m not saying games now are better, but there are undeniable improvements that should be noted.
You should make a full video on why BotW's weapon breaking mechanic is necessary and actually pretty clever because most of the critics of this game don't seem to understanding it
My friend showed me your channel yesterday since im studying game design in college. Since then, I have been watching your videos non-stop and for the first time ever will now be a paying patreon. The caliber of quality in your videos are unmatched. Thank you for your work!
I also recommend you check out Errant Signal if you haven't yet already. Frankly one of the reasons I didn't like Game Maker's Toolkit initially is because he covered topics already covered by Errant Signal much earlier, so much that it initially felt like a rip-off to me. The production quality of GMT is a lot higher, though. Anyway, it's a good idea to watch both, though, as it's not all the same. There's of course also Extra Credits but you surely already know them.
*Watch_Dogs 2* is the most un-Ubisoft Ubisoft game. It felt like playing Splinter Cell : Human Revolution It's heavily reliant on Systems interactions. Your gadget are built mainly for all sorts of environmental interactions, rather than combat. And these environments are filled with all sorts of variables for the player to mess around with. I mean, in the sneaking missions, almost felt like I was playing MGS5. Not just that, the map marker get discovered after you've actually go to that place, not by scan on towers. And speaking of, those towers instead hold upgrades for the upgrades tree, and reaching them is actually a puzzle to solve (like where to climb or how to unlock a door etc.), so they are actually meaningful. Another thing is how much less reliant you are on mini-maps. In most openworld games, your attention is mostly on the mini map to see where all the stuff is. In WD2, you have to actually scan the environment and look for hackables. It's a small thing, but it greatly enhances the dynamics and immersion.
I just saw this video -- excellent job! (And thanks for the shout-out in your video links.) This is a fascinating and difficult to explain topic, and you've made this much easier. Thanks again!
Mark, I just took a look at your Patreon, and while I don't have the finances to really actively support anyone right now, I'm really proud to see how well you're doing for yourself nowadays. Your videos are so thoughtfully crafted and your diligence and commitment to your work is commendable. Keep up the good work. As an aspiring developer myself, your content really makes me think. I'm so glad to see this "Game Design Analysis" genre of RUclips content taking off the way it has this past year or so.
I love this. For instance, when playing Postal 2, during the third day of the week (in the game), all I have to do is to walk into the grocery store and the whole block will shortly be transformed into a civil war zone, just because I stole a pack of milk there the other day. Really, few things beats the feeling of casually tossing a scissor across the shoppig mall and "accidentally" hit Gary Coleman in the neck; moments later the whole complex is an inferno.
I just realized. One of the reasons I like moding so much in Bethesda games is because all of the mechanical and immersion mods essentially allow you to craft your own systemic game, but also pepper it with premade gear and quests.
Man, I've found many channels dedicated to making video essays on movies or tv series, but this is probably the only channel dedicated to making video essays on gaming that I found really good and elaborate. Many other gaming channels only talk mainly about "why this is the best" or bla bla. This channel is great!!
2:19 Oh shit, that's how you're supposed to do that? I just spend 20 minutes trying to use the Paraglider to get in. Does show how good of a job Zelda did of making sure the systems worked if something as simple as getting in a shrine has numerous solutions though.
Minecraft does it. Enemies react to being attacked by fighting back. Skellettons got a ranged weapon and can hit other skelletons (and other monsters) mid-fight. Alsi it reminds me of a case in Skyrim: I was travveling towards a cave and infront of it was qute a big fight. A bunch if skelletons was fighting a group of vampires when some wolves hit the scene and started going into the fight. Then a dragon descended as one of the skelletons noticed me. We had a nice 5-way fight.
Very interesting, always been a big fan of immersive sims. I think the thing you don’t mention that likely puts studios off is the complication of testing such things.
That point about MGS5 and the silenced pistol making the game boring is why I like BotW's weapon breaking. If that didn't happen, I'd have used the same weapon for the whole game. The weapon breaking makes me adapt constantly, even in the middle of combat, and also gives value to any fight just because it might give you a good weapon for the future.
(Wall of text warning) Honestly, I hear a lot of people say this, and while I do see their point (and it is a good point), I feel it's somewhat lessened by the fact that the weapons All Play The Same. Sure, two-handers might be a bit slower than the others, one handers might be short, and spears might be lacking in damage, but within a class it's the exact same weapon. they don't even have differing lengths, as far as I could tell. The only real exception is wands, which shoot various projectiles that behave differently (ice rod shoots a cloud, fire a projectile that obeys gravity and bounces a bit, lightning a projectile that ignores gravity). Beyond that, what? The boomerangs come back when thrown... The Eightfold longsword and Windcutter have a unique charge attack (but they just do the same damage as a regular attack, so, unless you're planning on hitting with the Windcutter's projectile, there's no reason to use them). The Master Sword has a beam. The Korok Leaf fires wind with crazy knockback. Certain bows can fire multiple arrows at a time, or draw faster, or have less drop off, does that count? The Lynel shields (though they're not really weapons and are honestly pretty shitty) deal damage when you parry. And the Ancient Shield auto-parries Guardian beams. (I'm noticing a bit of a theme here... every unique weapon (except the eightfold longsword, kind of) (and the shields)has something to do with projectiles...) But the important thing is that they can distinguish themselves from other members of their class in a way that isn't just "oh the damage is higher" or "there's a different durability." Honestly, I think the best example is probably the wands which, unlike every other "melee" weapon, deal little damage with direct hits, and instead encourage you to be a bit farther from enemies than usual. Compare to the boomerangs; which are ridiculously common (at least, the Lizal ones) so that you can "use the same weapon for the whole game" (technically three, but they only differ in damage so w/e) and are still just as good if you ignore their ability to be thrown (so there's no real reason to use a "regular" weapon over them), the Windcutter; which is late game enough that you already have an undless supply of "normal" weapons and will never "need" to use it (and even if you do, the projectile only does partial damage (unless you charge it) so you might as well use it as if it was a normal weapon), or the Korok leaf; which only deals 1 damage, so it can only be used for it's knockback. Yet, I rarely ever use wands. Why? This is probably an instance where the weapon durability actually HURTS variety. In my experience, wands are pretty rare, to start with. They're only found being dropped by wizrobes, which are not only less common than other enemies dropping more standard weapons, but also a right pain to fight, what with their floating and teleporting and what-have-you. Beyond that, they don't drop anything besides the wands (which aren't particular good as a main weapon, and as a utility can mostly be replace by elemental swords/spears), so there's no real reason to hunt one down. And once you do have a wand? It breaks, REALLY quickly. A lot quicker than many of the "normal" weapons, I feel. So, usually my melee inventory is just Master Sword, Fl.blade/G.Fl.blade/Fl.spear,Fr.blade/G.Fr.blade/Fr.spear, two or three lizal boomerangs, and then a random assortment of 2handers, 1handers, and spears, none of which have any distinguishing properties. But my bow inventory tends to have at least one of each of *a high powered "regular" bow, *a bow that shoots multiple arrows at once, and *a bow with high accuracy at long range (usually a Swallow/Falcon bow, since they also draw quicker). And those bows all get used but in different situations, as opposed to melee weapons which get used based on either "which one does the most damage" or "which one is closest to breaking."
The Zekenator Well it really comes down to what you make of it. I had fun completing every mission in MGSV with a S - Rank and doing the bonus objectives and while doing so quickly realized that the silenced pistole is not the most efficient or fastest way to complete the mission in most cases...
DreamsDragon98 I completely agree with you. I see all these people talking about "adapting" constantly but I just don't see it. When I got a ton of weapon spaces it became a case of "oh my weapon broke again. I'll just use another similar weapon". But as the Rokkxl said, it comes down to what you make out of it. I have friends that don't increase their weapons slots, or simply don't use strong weapons in order to have more of a challenge. But I would honestly prefer if they made it an option. Let those who want their weapons to break to have that while also letting those who don't want their weapons to break have that too.
Cheeky Cunt The problem with just making that stuff optional is that almost nobody is going to choose to have their weapons break because such a design choice is hard to swallow, and something that can only be appreciated in hindsight. Many games have "hard" or "challenge" modes that aren't a test of player skill but just frustrating and unbalanced, requiring cheap tactics to progress. Many would assume that a "choose whether your weapon breaks or not" is just that and not pick it, and so have no concept of the benefits that such a system would bring to many players, such as promoting experimentation. But if it's the sole way to play, nobody has to second guess that maybe they're making things too hard for themselves, or on the flip side, play without weapon breakages for half a game and then wonder if the game would've been more interesting if they'd chosen the alternative. Simply throwing in a bunch of options isn't going to solve everyone's perils because upon starting the game the player doesn't know what to expect, and something that they might struggle with at the start might be something they come to appreciate down the line. In Until Dawn, if you make a mistake, be it a character getting injured or killed, that's it. Your save file is overwritten so if you want to rectify your mistake you need to start the game from the very beginning. If upon a character dying the game put up an option for A: Try that again or B: Carry on with them dead, virtually nobody's going to choose the second option. I mean, why? Most other games have a retry option so might as well use it. So in the end everyone just experiences the same story, and any sense of fear or tension (in a horror game, no less) is completely gone. The threat of an unfortunate outcome is simply meaningless now, and players conversing about "What happened when you played it? What ending did you get?" won't happen. The unique experience the game has just wouldn't happen at all, regardless of the fact it was "just options" that started it. Dark Souls 2 started the trend of letting players warp freely between all bonfires which many fans found to negatively impact the feeling of exploration and learning the layout of the world, or the terror of getting to the bottom of a dungeon and hoping to see the light again soon in a safe place. But everyone still used the warp function because it was an integral game mechanic, because if you want to get somewhere, you take the easy route. Plus, the game wasn't designed for you to do it without warping, and would just make for a frustrating experience and added artificial difficulty for those who tried to "discipline themselves" into playing the preferred way. Options are necessary in all video games but sometimes restricting certain options for the sake of an intended experience can be a huge benefit, even to the players who would never have chosen that option if there was a choice. It won't please absolutely everyone, but then, nothing will.
The Zekenator It also makes weapons feel useless. Recieving a weapon becomes less exciting when you realise they're all glass and it's easier just to stick pile shit weapons to burn through.
Thank you so much, Mark. I hope you will keep on talking about these kinds of subjects in gaming (simulation, interconnected systems, emergent gameplay. etc.), they're the sort of stuff that I find most fascinating. Don't shy away from going as in-depth as you can. Also thank you for your "find out more" list, I'll be sure to check those links. EDIT: Funny that you mentioned the rain in BOTW... I was watching a streamer play that game the other day, and he was really upset with the fact that while it's raining, cliffs get slicker and you have to spend more time and stamina trying to climb it up. So his solution was just to wait for the rain to go away, doing absolutely nothing, just letting time pass. Having not played the game yet, I got curious as to what would the rain do in the game, besides being an annoyance for someone that wants to climb a stone wall. Your video shed some light for me on that, thanks for that too.
I remember once i was playing Breath of the wild and entered a shrine for which you need arrows, however i didnt have any, i managed to beat it by using bombs, boomerangs, cryonis, stasis, magnesis and many, many spears, i won though
As an aspiring game developer that's designing and writing/typing out two MOBA concepts and a boardgame, I've unintentionally stumbled upon how various effects/abilities and status ailments are an important part of how game mechanics can work together. This was a great video and now I've got even more things I need to learn on this journey of mine.
Good video, as always. Incidentally, being unable to climb in the rain was the ABSOLUTE WORST thing to happen to BotW. It murdered the joy of exploration and forced us to either take sub-optimal approaches to solutions or set the controller down for five minutes.
I've recently begun studying how to make games like this in my spare time. If you're interested in understanding how one of these "systemic games" works differently from a regular game, read on! The first thing you must understand is that when communicating with a computer, you must understand that it has its own language, and way of structuring thought- however, there are different ways to explain your concept of a game to the computer- some that make it easier to understand. These are called software patterns, or game design patterns. The reason it's even possible to do systemic games is most likely because the developers of these games are steering away from the traditional way of programming software (and games), called Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). OOP is where the developer tells the computer to not just think of the objects in their world, but also the concept of the object (called a class). The game's logic is essentially arranged in a rigid hierarchy, where you must first explain the concept of an object before actually coding the object itself. This makes them robust yet inflexible, and while great for keeping software code clean, it is not good for what Mark Brown calls "systemic games". What he calls "systemic games", developers call games arranged in an Entity-Component System (ECS), in which all game objects, whether renderable and non-renderable, are called entities. Unlike regular games, the game objects (entities) have no code in them at all. Their only task is to point to the components in the system. An arrow from BoTW may look similar to the following. fire_arrow : entity { attackable, flammable } Words like "attackable" and "flammable" refer to components of the same names, which keep the numbers for the damage done, and how much fire is allowed on the arrow. Then game systems, such as a health system, will read the list of the entity's components, read them, and operate on them. The end result is that if I want to make an object interact with a game's sytem, I just have to add the word for the component to the object. After all, the player should be able to swallow swords. In this way, the developer can also think of their game world in systems and game rules instead of objects and abstractions of objects. MMORPGs are beginning to use the ECS pattern because it allows developers to add tens of thousands of items without significantly growing the complexity of their code. In the past, and even today, developers using OOP have to envision the entirety of the future of their game before committing the first lines of code. Now with an ECS pattern, they can just add components to entities to create new feature of code. So if a developer comes up with a new school of magic in an MMO, and they want to add the new spells to old items, it's as easy as adding the relevant component to the preexisting objects. By the time a programmer is three years into supporting an OOP MMO, the codebase has grown so complex and dirty that adding a single feature or bugfix will take exponentially longer than when the project first began. With the new ECS MMOs, they will have a consistently complex codebase- and be able to support the MMO for far longer, with far more systems and items and play. And let's not forget, a playre should be able to eat a sword.
Another reminder that i am young and that people way before me made super impressive stuff with way more primative software than i have available to me.
Coding is way easier than it used to be, thankfully. And it will only continue to get easier. Whether developers are optimising themselves out of their own jobs is up for speculation. I'm not sure what level you're at, HASE, but you can learn programming much easier than ever before, and a solid knowledge of computer science concepts (and game design concepts), as well as just trying shit until it works, will make you into a programmer that can sometimes pull off impressive results.
+Vlad Korabelnikov I'm not exacly a newbie anymore, but i'm a lot more comfortable around the more high level stuff than the low level stuff, which frustrates me to no end.
I mostly work in high level stuff to- but it definitely helps to at least have a rough idea of what's going on down below. I'll leave a few beginner concepts you can study if you'd like. Studying these should make you extremely comfortable with the way computers work- they may help you wrap your head around difficult concepts that build upon these. Each idea builds on the last. 1. Understand the idea of state, and code as data, by looking into the Turing Machine. 2. Understand how the idea of state translates into computer, by looking at the Von Neumann architecture. This is a high level model of a CPU, useful for us to understand how it thinks. 3. Look up how to count, add, subtract, multiply, and divide in binary. You should be able to do this on paper like you would regular mathematics. 4. Next, look into logic gates, download an app to simulate them. Understand that logic gates are the fundamental building block of programming languages (they are Boolean operators), but actually occupy a physical space on the circuitboard! You can purchase logic gates to make your own CPU, but it's much nicer to simulate it- so I recommend downloading an app. Using NAND gates you can build RAM, using other logic gates such as ORs, NOTs, ANDs, XORs, and others, you can build a whole CPU and run it! The feeling of doing this is so amazing, but takes some patience. I was able to model mine in about a week. 5. Look into hexadecimal, and how it's a really cool way for programmers to remember nibbles of binary easier. Understand that you can code binary in hexadecimal. 6. Understand that programmers created a basic instruction set called assembler. Each instruction is a very basic function of the cpu, such as add, subtract, bitshift (multiply or divide), comparison, and others. This language is the building block for every proceeding part of computing. You may write python, but the computer translates it into this.
9:35 - One of the risks of "giving the player a goal, and not caring how they achieve it" is that the system may present a means to trivialize the challenge, giving the player a moment of feeling "clever" but ultimately robbing them of a more interesting gameplay experience.
I think the way to avoid this is to keep players from being able to use that same solution every time. This channel has a really good video about puzzle design that kind of touches on that.
This is exactly how I felt when beating breathe of the wild. It was neat that I could climb over mountains, take my glider over great plots of land to quickly defeat all 4 divine beast and the ganon.... but then I robbed myself of just enjoying every other cool aspect of the game. I literally didn't know you could stable horses until after I beat the game. I understand not wanting to force the player to play a certain way, but I feel if you dont encourage the player to play in a way you as a developer believe is "fun", you are missing a big opportunity. I think this is what I loved about doom eternal. They were absolutely confident that you would enjoy the way the game they designed over doom 1, so they designed it to encourage you to play it your way.
Well, STALKER was a very systemic game. I made it more systemic by installing a mod (the STALKER Complete mod specifically) that altered how the emissions worked. One of the options was that if an NPC was out of shelter when the emission hits, they are turned into a zombie instead of killed. This led to neat moments where I would take shelter at a town and some of the NPCs would be caught out close to the town. When the emission passed the NPCs in the town would go out and immediately enter combat with the zombies. This was fun to watch but also served to encourage the player to use less popular safe areas to shelter from emissions and thus visit areas of the map they wouldn't otherwise.
Have you played Crusader Kings II? That game is a massive sandbox of self-interested entities. This is the series that got me into the game: www.pcgamer.com/sept-12-dontpost-crusader-kings-chronicle-part-1-1066-1076-a-d/
Yeah, though the AI character's decisions don't often make sense from a "game" perspective, I really like how they make choices based on their own personality. Like how the arbitrary trait causes the AI to make event decisions randomly, or how a counselor will go against a decision that's ultimately good for the realm if they really hate your guts. EDIT: Great article on CKII's AI: www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/11/11/crusader-kings-2-characters/
By far my favourite thing about CK2 is that with... I want to say Conclave they put Councillor personalities in, which will affect how they vote for laws, wars, succession changes etc. Which means that you finally get into the mindset of a medieval king who decides "No I won't appoint that perfectly competent man who hates me to be marshal, instead I'll appoint a loyal half-wit." Because it's no good having men who will do a great job if they don't obey you.
I absolutely loved when they started to bring systems into games that create randomness. My first experience with this was in Oblivion when a friend and I found ourselves inadvertently in a murder mystery. We had to backtrack why two of the townsfolk had been killed by guards. We had some strong theories, but we could never be completely sure. Even something small like this was so much more thrilling than a scripted event.
I think systemic games are going to have a really hard time connecting to a narrative. It opens up a complex can of worms of what a game is a able to say, and I don't think we understand it yet. It also brings up some tone and pacing control issues that make narratives inherently tricky.
I think the main problem is the fact that these games sometimes feel like they play themselves, that they'll happen whether or not you do anything. In a linear game, the game stops and refuses to do anything until you actively take part in it, and so it's easier to make a more tightly-knit experience centered around the player. But in systemic games, the whole "you do your thing, I'll keep doing mine" approach can lead to a feeling of "why should I bother?" from the player. In fact, as a new player with an unfamiliar game, the experience can be compared to being invited to a party where you don't know anyone, and so you just sort of wander around, sip your drink, and maybe do a bit of small talk here and there, before heading home with a very lukewarm feeling about the whole thing.
Yeah, "lukewarm feeling" is a good description. I mean, they're not bad--I enjoyed Zelda a lot, and have enjoyed many similar games. They just have a really difficult time conveying some kind of meaning beyond self-expression, like in your stranger party analogy.
Raph Koster writes a good article about the unique thing that games bring. "Ontological interactivity" in his case is the 'you do your thing, I do mine' thing you're talking about. From my perspective, it's the only thing that games do truly uniquely well, everything else is borrowed from film, writing, etc. So in this regard, I'm super stoked to see the rise of said systemic interactivity in larger budget games. That said, there's a lot to be said about using it well. More doesn't always mean better. For example, Citizen Kane exploits the one thing that film does really well (editing), and it made its mark on history as influencing modern film-making. But the bonkers and often overbearing cuts and camera angles are off-putting to a lot of people. Citizen Kane is amazing for pushing the envelope of editing to its logical conclusion, but not really for being an accessible and cohesive bit of entertainment. It's worth studying, praising, and loving on... but other movies that use techniques established in Citizen Kane can easily be better movies in general. Applying that concept to games with this ontological systemic creative style of interactivity, we'll eventually have (if it hasn't been made yet) an equivalent to Citizen Kane. It'll be a generally well made systemic game that pushes its systemic nature to the absolute limits. It'll be bonkers and kinda overbearing but will leave a massive impact on the industry. And future games will learn to use that kind of system well, rather than singly. I'm looking forward to that time. :) And here;'s the article I mentioned at the beginning: www.raphkoster.com/2014/07/09/interactivity/
Thank you for this lovely response! You're absolutely right that a game will most likely come along at some point to singly spearhead the development of what Raph in a general way calls "ontological interactivity" and help other games be better at it. I think there have already been some games that have done that to a degree, like Deus Ex or OG Fallout, and I'm pretty sure Ken Levine is trying to do something like this but it a new way. What I'm getting at is what Marie-Laure Ryan says about her four combinations: "Each of them is characteristic of different genres, and affords different narrative possibilities." That's key, and the result is that depending on what itch you need scratching, different games will be adequate or not. Take external-ontological and internal-ontological interactivity as an example. The first is the modern XCOM games, where you decide the properties of the characters and make their decisions. This lends for a certain type of emergent narrative where you start to care about your virtual soldiers and ascribe them personalities that don't exist beyond your phenomenological interpretation of your own actions through their avatars--and it's really fantastic the game can do that, in a way. Basically any city- or otherwise building simulation fall into this category as well, but have different themes. The second is games like Breath of the Wild. These types of games seem to lend themselves to a story where there is an objective and the player's job is to answer the question "how will it be achieved?" Part of the reason games in this mode of participation use the Propp/Campbell construction of narrative is that we want to not only affect the world, but affect it on a grand scale. Ultimately, maybe the internal-ontological mode is better suited to smaller narratives about affecting things which are only relevant to the character which we embody while the external-ontological mode is better suited to affect on a grand-scale. That was kind of a tangent, but it does show that this becomes incredibly complex quickly. It's important besides to realize that all games have some degree of ontological interactivity. But like Raph points out, "games like The Sims, Eve Online, Minecraft, Universalis, Dwarf Fortress," are what's really being talked about. These games also illustrate my point that they have difficulties conveying meaning beyond self-expression; Raph also notices this when he says they have the power to "express, create, and even innovate." When it comes down to it, I'm excited about big budget games exploring systemic interactivity too, but I think the discussion around it lacks the acknowledgement that the mode is best suited to certain narrative constructions. You helped me put this into better words, so thanks a lot! On a side-note, I think XCOM is overlooked critically, and that it does a lot of interesting things. It's not perfect, but it DOES stake a pretty bold claim. On a second side-note, Eve Online is fucking nuts, right?
I wanted to thank you Mark for all the hard work and effort you out into your videos to break down video games and inform us about what happens behind the scenes of the pretty animations and colourful artwork in the game. Your videos have enriched my knowledge of video games by a hundredfold and allows me to delve even deeper into the science behind it.
I was wondering if you'd mention dwarf fortress and indeed you did. now I just need you to play it and break that game down for me cause I'm to scared to dig into it. I dabbled for a day a couple years back and had no idea what was going on.
Two things: Tile sets, and a good guide. Tile sets require some jiggering with the game's files normally but can help immensely with visual comprehension. The wiki is usually the best guide going dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide though feel free to shop around. There's also the Lazy Newb Pack dwarffortresswiki.org/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pack which will manage a whole bunch of utilities and other helpful tools for you.
it is intense for me to see that everything i thought of like 15 years ago is not only possible but at our fingertips with a few clicks...the games, the tech behind them, everything...i love it
I wish more youtube analysis people would talk about Dwarf Fortress, including you as this one mention is not nearly enough. Despite it being influential enough to birth its own subgenre and being adopted by MOMA very few people seem to actually look at it in any depth outside of its own forums. Anyway, my favorite moment was when I started in an evil part of the map and decided to build my fort above ground. I put up a nice wall with some towers with ballistae around my important buildings and stockpiles when some necromancers came and invaded. They killed and zombified every animal outside my walls, but lacked the equipment to get inside and so just stood around until one of my dwarves reached the ballista, shot a huge bolt at a skeleton, the impact causing it to explode pieces of itself all over the place. Some of these pieces happened to land on my side of the wall, and of course being undead still moved in to attack and zombify my dwarves. RIP fort.
My favorite and personal experience of this is from Red Faction Guerilla. Put a bunch of mines on the front of a truck. Fill it with various explosives and run it straight into an enemy base at full speed, jumping off before it hits something. Can level multiple building if done right. And its hilarious every time.
Really was something special, and that makes me wonder where experimenting with physics like that got lost. Its really rare to see a game take that approach to game design now a days.
Man, I’m always anticipating your new games and they always deliver. As a gamer and an aspiring game designer, you videos are amazing. Their well edited, well spoken, and have amazing background music. (Also your voice is amazingly epic. Good job on your voice.)
Thanks to systemic game design A closed problem can become a open ended problem It's not cheating , it's like finding a more efficient solution to puzzle that even developer didn't think of.
It's not a punchy video but it's probably one of your best videos so far, I like how it explores industry-wide trends and developments, which is not something you do often enough in my opinion.
My problem with Zelda was that it never felt like it was really pushing you to find new solutions. Anytime I came across an enemy that was too strong, I found it really easy to run away. I feel like Zelda is great for interacting systems but a player like me would never be forced to make them interact because the game makes it easy to avoid all combat encounters.
Another problem is that once you get a good stack of great weapons, you pretty much can just fight your way through everything. And you have the Master Sword to not have to worry about durability as much.
Yeah, I feel like the durability mechanic was a great idea in concept but the game seemed to give up on it toward the middle by making you nigh-invincible. Once I got the Master Sword I would just use it almost exclusively.
Maybe the reason why GTA V missions are so scripted is because the developers know players already spend most their time in this sandbox open world game with a lot underlying systems, so the missions are just the opportunity to give players scripted sequences that are unique and more spectacular than anything that can occur in the open world. Like the mission where someone gets sucked into the plane engine after chasing them into the airport.
That seems like a fair point, it's an evolution of the mission design of earlier games in the series, where you'd have to make specific use of the various mechanics, thus emphasizing them more directly than in normal play. For instance, racing missions force you to drive intensely, escort missions have you driving an npc to a location without blowing up, other missions force you to chase after and destroy npc's in their own car by ramming them or shooting out tires, and some times you get straight up third-person shooting sections. That being said, GTA V could do with less instant mission failures for obscure reasons.
I definitely agree Dan. I thought the mission design in GTA V was probably the best in the series IMO, save for the infuriating insta failure conditions. If it would have been more lenient, I thought it would have made for an ever sublime game.
+Jumbo Jango The missions in my opinion are well-paced and have enough spectacle to be decent in their own right, but when compared to the openworld sandbox, I'd agree the design of the world is cooler than what you can do for the most part. Out and about, the ridiculous ai accuracy and tire dents/pops make getting away from the cops difficult in an annoying way(not to mention the animations and ragdoll physics that make doing fun things a pain without first person mode some times), whereas getting into a jet or tank makes killing everything easy. It's experiencing the world between missions in the main story that you find real enjoyment.
This was very tricky for me to watch, as I haven't played Breath of the Wild yet and do not want to spoil anything on it. I had to make a lot of fast reactive jumpcuts to evade revelations. But it was worth it - Mark, you're content is gold.
My favourite example of this sort of behaviour, was while trolling Pala in Far Cry 2. I'd kill a guard, then immediately duck through a hole in the fence and leave the cease fire zone by making a beeline for the docks. Normally, when you shoot a gun in the cease fire zone, all soldiers (from both factions) band together to kill you. One time, I got just far enough away for most of the town to reset but not all. I'd taken loner than usual though, so when I escaped the cease fire zone, there was one guard barely close enough to the perimeter to not reset. Normally, when you shoot a gun in the cease fire zone, all soldiers (from both factions) band together to kill you. This time when I entered town, the guard that didn't reset recognized me and started shooting. Every soldier in town ganged up on HIM, trusted allies and bitter enemies alike. Turns out they don't kill the player for firing a gun. They detect a gun was fired in a cease-fire zone, and hunt the perpetrator (the player 99% of the time). TL;DR: I trolled a town so hard, it started murdering itself, and learned more about how the ai think.
I'm pretty sure that was on purpose as a contrast. "Look, here's an obviously scripted animal attack. Now this one emerged as a part of the systemic interactions."
Wow. Old video, but came at just the right time for me as I've started thinking about how to incorporate this type of thinking into board game design. Thanks so much.
The rise of the systemic FPS open world game has killed the old school FPS, where level design was king. Designing systems is not the same as designing a well constructed maze.
Games like DOOM 1 and 2 or the 2d Mario platformers., which don't feature complicated systems and large worlds you can explore in almost their entirety at once, but still give you mechanics and levels to play around with (in contrast to completely linear games like Call of Duty's single player) without railroading you, are more elegant in my opinion than Ubisoft-style open-world games or MGSV (don't care that it got a 95 on Metacritic, found it tedious and rewarding)
This is why I adored the SUBSISTENCE missions in MGSV so much. They force the player to be creative and plan their route. Too bad there were only two of them
Games are so complicated and expensive that gameplay commentary heavy playthroughs and narratives regarding popular games have overtaken them. This is golden age RUclips. I love you.
I've had some good experiences in the brutal and systemic game Rain World. I was making my way east from the outskirts towards the grasslands and I had to pass by a scavenger toll. It so happened as I approached the toll I encountered a lizard. He chased me all the way to the toll, upon which I could retreat up a pole, as he duked it out with the scavengers. He killed a few, and chased off the rest, and I walked by without having paid my due fee.
Your comment about Rockstar really hit for me. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games and when you are just wandering around the world I wouldn't even hesitate to consider it an immersive sim. But then you start a mission and it's like it kicks into a completely different game where everything is tightly controlled and limited. I really hope Rockstar take note of this eventually because as much as I love their games it would really take them to another level if they started being a bit hands off with the missions and giving more room for players to really play.
Something really fun and interesting happened to me in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I was fighting against an Hinox and a Guardian at the same time. I was really struggling and I was expecting to die really soon, when suddenly I had an idea: I tried to trick the Guardian to shoot the Hinox with his laser. It actually worked. What happened next is that the Hinox got mad at the Guardian and decided to grab and throw him really faaaaar away. At that point I was able to fight just against the Hinox. It was great.
Same thing happened to me!! Was the hinox in a little grove of trees across from the ruins of some castle thing? I've found it far too easy to just parry the guardian lasers every time though and kill it that way. This is a good example of what Mark was explaining with the silencer in metal gear: one solution to your issues can't be too succesful or you never get to interact with the system in an interesting and meaningful way like you did by getting the hinox to throw the guardian(:
No, I think it was in one of the earlier zones, not too far away from Kakariko. It was fairly near to a stable which was close to a bridge. There were also a few tiny plateaus around there. I don't know how to describe the location precisely to you, I would actually be able to get there pretty easily in-game. By the way, I was aware of that parry trick when that thing happened, I remember that I've even tried to do it in that occasion, but I'm not really that good at it. Eventually I ran out of shields lol So yeah, that certainly brought me to experiment.
Jun Bird you basically summed up how BOTW dethroned ocarina as my fav game in one comment.
People have even tricked Guardians into shooting Cuccos.
Take a wild guess what happens....
Do the Cuccos manage to destroy the Guardians somehow? That would be hilarious.
This is one of my favorite videos from you. Watched it like 3 times already. All the exact reasons why Ubisoft is kinda killing it when it comes to this stuff (but maybe not some OTHER stuff sadly)
Hey man!
I wonder if you thought of the points in this video when preparing for that red dead 2 video you made
Ayyy, I didn't know you watched these!
This is the most systemic things I’ve ever seen, my favorite two channels interacting with one another.
SnakeBoi!
I've NEVER seen that "when it rains some areas fill with water" thing holy shit.
LaZodiac I'm surprised there isn't a shrine that plays off of it or if there is then no one noticed because of all the ways you can approach a puzzle.
I never noticed either, and I have over 200 hours in BOTW...
To be fair, there's only a few select areas in the game where it does happen. Try going to Akkala, the ruins just west of Tarrey Town, where there are two guardians. That's one of the areas where you can observe this.
You've probably seen it, but just never realized it. It just feels natural, something that the game's verisimilitude makes expected and commonplace. That's one of the things that makes BotW so awesome.
same. i didn't know it either and i've played that game a ton. the more you know.
My favorite moment in Breath of the Wild so far was when I was able to reduce the numbers of a high-level bokoblin camp with a single fire arrow. Ironically, it wasn't the arrow that actually did the damage. It was the campfire they were standing around. The bokoblins jumped up in surprise when my arrow struck (rather uselessly) one of their silver comrades. One of them jumped too close to the flames, however, and quickly caught fire and, being too busy dancing around in pain, neglected to move away from the fire and burned to death. His companions returned to the fire and sat down as though nothing had happened, but one of them sat on top of the dead bokoblin's flaming club and caught fire. He was smarter and ran away, but as soon as he was extinguished, he went right back to that flaming weapon and this time was burned to ash.
I thought this was all very funny and saved a video of it, but it wasn't over yet. I still had to deal with that silver bokoblin and a single black one. I shot a frost arrow at the silver one, thinking to deal with the black one first, only before I could reach the camp the black bokoblin had panicked and, in his haste to run away from the yet unseen threat, bumped into his silver friend and sent him sliding off a cliff. And, so, I indirectly defeated nearly an entire camp of difficult enemies with two arrows, but the game's systems did all the actual work. It was absolutely hilarious ;D
Dear lord, were all of them on stupid pills? 😆🤣xD
One of the great things about botw is that experiences like this are completely unique. No one has the same playthrough. This is compounded by the fact that every aspect of the game’s design focuses on encouraging creativity , freedom, and exploration. The fact that weapons break doesn’t just make you try creative stuff, it also makes you explore, because even if you already have a good item, it’ll break, and then you would want another. The fact that all the systems react intuitively with each other means that you don’t just have to think creatively in combat, but all the time. You wanna get up that cliff? Climb up a nearby waterfall with cryonosis, or make stamina fixing food, or set the grass on fire and use the updraft of hot air to float up. It’s constantly engaging and making you think critically and creatively.
@@themagicpencilanimations192 your synopsis is spot on, and honestly I think even if that was the only thing about BotW that was fantastic it would still deserve awards. The way the game's systems encourage you to be creative and logical are perfectly executed
Every time I hear an absurd Dwarf Fortress story I just love it all the more despite never actually playing it.
Judge The tragedy of "Boatmurdered" was the best I've heard.
It's not a story the Jedi would tell you.
details make the best games
@@coastersplus
Now this sounds like something up my ally, source?
@@kjj26k Here's a tvtropes page, should have a source: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered
Personally, though, I prefer Waterburned (curse rotpar's name): tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LetsPlay/Waterburned
In Kingdom Come, people react to even the clothes you wear, like wearing all black and a hood in broad daylight sulking around corners, my eyes filled with tears when a guard stopped me and asked what i was planning to do and started to search me for stolen items. If only more games were like this.
I get stopped by guards in clean set of full plate armor with 16+ charisma and 100 reputation all the time. Rattay guards are kinda on edge, I guess. It is a great game anyway.
Holy crap that's awesome
Then you'd have to tone down the graphics
Yes & its geting a sqaul
As much as I love this channel for amazing game discussion I find my self appreciating more and more then INCREDIBLE ways that you use editing and symbols and diagrams to explain concepts. Like the use of circles to explain inputs and outputs is just so clever and wonderful and aesthetically pleasing. I don’t know how much work goes into planning these things but the work pays off in dividends because your videos always impress. Keep up the awesome work!
Thanks Alex. I think motion graphics are a really useful way of illustrating a point and one of the biggest advantages of being in video!
+Mark Brown (Game Maker's Toolkit) Mark, is It possible to know wich software do you use for adding graphics? Thanks a lot!
I use Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, and Apple Motion
I love Mark Brown's videos because of the classy presentation :)
One of the reasons I love this channel, top-tier production value
Empowering the player. Like Warren Spector said about Deus Ex:
"It was designed, from the start, as a game about player expression, not about how clever we were as designers, programmers, artists, or storytellers."
It's great to see that more developers are catching on to what Ultima Underworld, Thief and System Shock were doing decades ago. Looking Glass Studios truly were way ahead of their time.
Same goes for Ion Storm Austin and Origin Systems of course.
@Jay Arre Breath of the Wild isn't shit.
Something I noticed when I was playing dungeon and dragons with my friends (as dungeon master) was that making ennemy incredibly strong but also describing a lot the environment they would immediately think about ways to beat the monster but using their imagination rather than the rules of the game. The best moments are when I get away from the game's rules and just react to all the crazy plans they want to make. And I always try to make them dramatically fail while still letting them react
Gta4. Hit a cab. Cab drivers are extremely violent and will always choose to fight. Square up with him, dodging and dancing around his moves. If a cop witnesses him assault you, he will be detained. Or if the same cab driver swings at you, you dodge it, and he hits a random npc, said npc will respond either with retaliation, or fear.
Experiment on
Yeah, just played for hours making cabs and other bots (these aren't npcs tho.) fight each other.
It was my fun after beating story.
Donald dollar Trump what are they if they aren’t Npc’s. They ain’t pc’s
@@LOCKEYJ They're real people captured by Rockstar and added into the game. What have we done...
Lol gta system sucks, hit a cop car get 2 star and shot at.
GTA lacks an extra layer to become a true systemic game : NPC almost never interact with each other unless you force them to.
And overall you feel that most of actions are scripted and triggered around your current character, and nothing would happen if you were just a spectator.
There really is a Link between all the different systems in BotW.
I see what you did there :-)
BA DUM TSSSSSSS.....
booooooooo
Link... Hehe
Machete Lucius pls kill me
6:54 I have an entire video on this, its so important to be able to find your own solution in a game rather than finding the one pre-determined solution that is offered. So much more rewarding. Fantastic video as always Mark!
How has no one replied to this legend yet? Love your psych of play BTW
Four years and one simp replied to you. Sad.
I was actually writing down the cat-killing example in Dwarf Fortress just before you mentioned it. God, what a brilliant game. It's even more ridiculous, because it's not that the dwarves spilled the alcohol onto the cats, it's that they spilled it onto the floor, and walking through liquids gets that liquid on your feet.
Also, obviously, everything in Dwarf Fortress has a temperature and a melting point. This includes rain and flesh. So, for a while, rain used to melt the fat off of your dwarves.
And that's not all. Almost _everything_ in Dwarf Fortress is systemic. Even the world generation doesn't just decide "let's put a desert here, and a forest here". Instead, it simulates rainfall, erosion, all that stuff and depending on those variables, deserts and forest just naturally come to be.
Even the history is emergent, as it contains hundreds of years of competing factions fighting over land or artifacts, a dragon might come along and just wipe out an entire civilization, or an elf might grow up with such a loathing for elves that he later becomes a king of dwarves.
And that's not even getting into all the mad stuff that players have come up with, be it mechanical marvels, traps, or just an apparatus to consistently harvest mermaids.
God I love the mermaid bone trap.
Pity Toady nerfed mermaid bone to be worth garbage.
Enter the SEA MONSTER TRAP/SPAWNING CHAMBER! New and improved!
Bless dwarf fortress, every now and then i remember the salt golem dissolving in a puddle and i burst out laughing.
How would you know all that tho isn't the whole game in Ascii?
@@uwnbaw iirc there's a detailed log somewhere in that labyrinth of an interface
2:20 Oh my god. I never knew you could light the thorns of fire. Every time I went to that shrine I went up a cliff really far away and paraglidded all the way there.
It's worth noting that a good level designer can (and should) have some ideas for how the player can creatively use the various systems in ways that feel unexpected. Say, putting contacts _just_ close enough for a metal weapon to reach between them, or lining up enough archways and whatnot to create a sniping window which happens to line up with the head of a guard in a vital location. These shouldn't be telegraphed _too_ hard, and the player should be able to see a "correct" path which doesn't use them; that way, when somebody notices and takes the opportunity, they feel like they're breaking the game and not just following a different plotted line.
Game design is a subtle art.
Timothy McLean yeah. Hitman is great at this. Having balconies to snipe from, ways to trick NPCs to go near ledges, etc.
unfortunately, the gaming industry is in desperate need of more level designers. they've become the unicorn.
If breath of the wild was a person Mark Brown would marry them
true dat
I thought that was Spelunky.
But then they'd rain on the wedding and ruin everything.
Achyut Dwivedi i thought the same
I think we would all try to marry BOTW.
Thanks for watching! To mark the occasion, I'll be streaming some Hitman on RUclips at 8PM tonight.
Uh, 8PM GMT that is.
Will be watching
Real man timezone
GMTK time?
"Mark" the occasion huh? :P
Great video! You nailed all of the points we love to see in games that embrace emergent gameplay and highly interactive systems. Keep up the great work!
when are we gonna get some news on system shock 3? I love that you are reviving this franchise and also ultima underworld. the og immersive sims. i cant wait
We'll show work when it's ready :) It'll be worth the wait!
i've no doubt about that. and patience is a virtue after all ;)
Hi Mark. Huge fan, I'm an avid gamer and i love breaking them down to understand what i love about them. I'm not a game designer, but i am a DM, which i guess sort of is a game designer, just without the computer. Your videos are extremely helpful with designing a world and campaigns for my players, and my DnD games have only gotten better since i started watching your videos. I'd just like to thank you for putting out what is probbaly some of the best content on youtube, as it is genuinely interesting, passionate, and well-informed. I also wanted to let you know that your influence stretches past video game developers, and your critical analysis of video games can help in other creative mediums.
I was reminded of the similarity, too. One of my favorite parts of GMing is the ability to go beyond the scope of a typical pre-built adventure, laying out basic rules for the behaviors of NPCs and monsters, how local laws work and are enforced, and other larger-scope details about the world. That way, when the PCs inevitably veer from the sensible or obvious path, I can just apply what I know about the world to this new set of circumstances and allow the adventure to continue relatively seamlessly.
Man, I've been watching games videos dissection videos to get me thru not currently having a rig for a while now, and for some reason it never occured to me to apply the lessons learned here to my Sessions. I suppose in a passive way it did, but in the future I'm going to do my best to construct my sessions while actively incorporating what is talked about in these sorts of videos. A game is a game, and there's no reason rules a lessons learned can't apply across the board.
I mean, the earliest RPGs and things like Ultima, Zork, Quest for Glory et al. were essentially people applying the new-fangled world of video games to tabletop RPGs like D&D. Mark's lectures on game design aren't always the most applicable to it (stuff on visuals and sound mainly) but all his principles about design and immersion are great. Hell even the stuff on AI is handy.
I'd really like to know how you'd put these systems into play with D&D.
Not just the advice found in this video, but all of mark's videos, particularly the ones talking about narrative creation and side quests. I also take into account his videos on level design, applying it to dungeons. It might not be perfectly transmutable 100% of the time, but i certainly draw a lot of inspiration from his videos when im designing my campaigns. For example, the idea of using one idea or concept and developing it, and creating a whole game around it, can be applied to a dungeon. Have a magic item, or one type of enemy, or maybe just some magical aura effecting the whole area, and make that thing be the focus of the dungeon, and build everything around it. In the spirit of non-linearity, and player choice and expression, not binding the player to one specific playstyle or predetermined path, i have significantly cut back on the rails in my adventures. I now give the players a starting point, a world, and a goal, and say "figure it out", which is so much more fun than "go over there, do A, so you can do B, and rinse and repeat."
A game that i feel that should be mentioned is Crusader Kings 2 where elaborate stories happen to every npc like intrigue between feuding brothers to incestuous bastards. As an example of something small i found that has stuck with me is when I checked through one of my vassals family tree and found a man that had committed suicide because he was depressed. Why was he depressed? Because the year before he had to execute his wife for some wrong doing.
That little story i found completely randomly made the world i played in feel som much more alive, even tough it's just a map with 2d portraits.
I think that giving npcs personalities and traites that defines what they do is another step towards the same goal described in your video.
Cracked editor David Wong said the best moment for him in Skyrim was seeing a giant and a dragon fight *each other,* while they ignored the player character completely
Made him realize that the playable character was just a tiny element in a massive ecosystem that didn't care whether he existed at all. It made the world feel large and realistic. Compare that to other games that throw wave after wave of obstacles and enemies specifically at the player.
Those obstacles are usually more well designed
Yeah Skyrim is... hmm.
Well it's a tradeoff at the end of the day. You can have a finely-crafted custom experience or a bunch of systems that might produce greatness. Sort of like the world's finest chef making a work of art on a plate, and an all-you-can-eat rib buffet.
And sometimes it's like Skyrim where some of those ribs are a bit meatless and you swear this restaurant was better a decade ago.
No, it's fun but overall kind of shite.
This is also what I hear stated as the best thing about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The game just simulates itself whether or not you take any action. Mutants attack bandits, bandits make camp, adventurers get attacked by bandits because they got too close, etc.
Because of this, you feel like you're an inhabitant like any other, as opposed to "the hero." It worked REALLY well.
Gothic was one of the earliest systemic games. people follow a daily routine, some take cover when it's raining, different NPCs(wild animals, humans from opposing factions, orcs etc.) have specific relations and always act accordingly, often attacking each other. When you kill a boar, wolves might be attracted by the corpse and feast on it, ignoring you if you dont come too close because they already got what they wanted.
Yay, I was scrolling for a while before I found Gothic :D
Dwarf Fortress: Oops! All Systems
hah!
Roguelikes have excelled at this for a while! But they aren't very approachable generally. thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/
dwarf fortress isnt't that hard though, its just the controls being very overwhelming and nonsensical at first. The underlying simulation is so cool though!
I approve of your taste in internet media critics.
Not that hard... It's literally the most complex and difficult to learn game that exists.
Great analysis, but I wish he'd talked about Don't Starve, from Klei, as it's incredibly systemic (survival/crafting/roguelike). Here's one of many features: Rain decreases your sanity, makes your gear wet and slippery, makes the character colder, and makes torches, campfires, and wildfire sizzle out. You can stand under the branches of a tree or craft several different types of items to lessen the effect, but you have to acquire the resources. Rain also makes crops and wild plants grow faster and is the sole trigger for the sanity-increasing mushrooms to grow. It's prevalent in the spring, rare in the summer, and perfect in the autumn. In the winter it turns to snow, which has its own set of mechanics.
The NPCs have more complex relationships with each other, the world, and the player than Far Cry, as well, and the player is heavily incentivized to figure out how to use them against each other. What I like about the game is that, as a seriously uncoordinated player, I'm able to use the systemic mechanics to my advantage. I'm unable to fight many of the monsters, and it's pretty easy for me to screw up and lose 8-10 hours of gameplay because of the limited number of lives. But I can devise elaborate systems to pit the NPCs against each other. I vividly remember the lightbulb moments when I figured out how to defeat an NPC using the environment or other NPCs, as well as the times I didn't!
Interesting video. It's perhaps also worth mentioning that games can rarely rely solely on systemic structure. Shadow of Mordor has an amazing nemesis system, but the game struggled to develop beyond that system, leaving me feeling like I'd seen it all only a few hours in.
On the other hand, Just Cause 3's addition of the wingsuit provided more opportunities than in JC2, but made it too easy to rely on hovering above-ground, gunning down foes, instead of finding creative solutions.
I'd definitely be interested to see how a systemic multiplayer game would work, where quick wits would play a larger part. This video was good food for thought, cheers.
+Game Revo Minecraft has some systemic variables, they are generally very simplistic and scenario specific but they do exist. Sheep eat grass which can regrow their wool, wolves actively hunt for sheep, dogs are afraid of creepers and won't help fight them, creepers are scared of cats and will leave your home alone if you are a crazy cat person, cats lounge on beds and chests making them unusable, when a source of lava is touched by water it turns into obsidian, and when a stream of water and a stream of lava (not the sources) touch one another they generate cobblestone, villagers actively search for doors at night for safety, zombies attack and break doors on hard mode, and the core fundamental of the game is how the day/night cycle affects the player's operations and decisions because while monsters spawn in the dark, most burn when exposed to light. Combine these elements in multiplayer and you get a pretty awesome tool set to aid or hinder your friends. There are plenty of other multiplayer games like this as well, it was just the first to come to mind.
That's what all the multiplayer survival sims are.
Mm, good point! I never realised just how many systemic elements they've added to Minecraft since I last played it. It works especially well there due to the game being construction-based. Without those elements, it'd probably feel a bit flat.
Have you heard of a game called Fracture on 360? They had some of that with weapons designed to deform terrain to provide or eliminate cover.
I've not, actually. That sounds really cool. There's something I just love about weird 360/PS3-era shooters.
I remember in MGS4, in one of the penultimate levels, on the ship, finding out the tranquilizer works on the gecko's. You could put the mechrobots to sleep! It was so well hidden, but essential to MGS game mechanic. It was amazing. Love finding neat ways to use game systems.
Wow, didn't know Mafia III did that with the police response. Ballsy.
Justin Hurowitz yeah they talked about that in press and it was kind of intriguing
It's so ballsy to parrot establishment narratives.
Esther
Ask the Mafia III devs.
Esther
How is it racist to disagree with a point made by OP? The whole discussion is about racism wtf
Esther "How dare you question the establishment, I will call you the insult the establishment taught me to call all dissenters!"
Ironically, you're acting like what liberals think the nazis were like.
Streets of Rogue is pretty much entirely a systemic game. It makes the multiplayer experience really wild. I hope that it does continue and grow into more genres.
Endyo Yes! I was just about to comment that!
Endyo
I was thinking about that while watching the video
Oh thanks!
I just found a cool new game! :-)
Breath of the Wild took the ideas immersive-sims were trying to leverage from decades-old Looking Glass designs, and both elevated the number of possible meaningful interactions while bringing it to a mass audience. It felt fresh, where other games of that ilk felt like they were exactly in line with player expectations.
I was waiting for Rain World to show up. That game is phenomenal; its environments are beautiful and distinct, its music sublime...but its procedural animation and artificial intelligence systems are what set it apart. It's not just "different" from other games in this regard - it's strictly better. It represents the evolution of those systems and i'm interested to see how the technology is adopted.
"Making levels for systemic games is more about giving the player a goal, and not caring how they achieve it" - Mark Brown
Sounds a bit like Dungeons and Dragons.
Some Looking Glass devs were tabletop rpg players so I wouldn't be surprised if D&D is one of the biggest inspirations of the systemic interaction you see in their emergent sims like Ultima Underworld.
Good quote.
just like the hitman games
"Oof, I like that. I should steal that"
-me
dwarf fortress is the most extreme example of a systemic game.
Noita is the 2nd. Top if you exclude god sims.
@@swordofstabbingold really?
@@swordofstabbingold isn't noita the first anyway?
@@nicohatesyoutubehandlers it's nt. Dwarf Fortress was initially released in 2006, Noita is very recent
@@LostStylus i didn't mean release date. "most extreme example"
When it comes to these interconnected systems, I'm reminded of classic Black Isle Fallout games, which I have a few interesting examples of them, one going right, and two that are more examples of not thinking these interactions through, but fun to mess with anyway.
1. Doors could not only be lockpicked open, but also lockpicked to lock them again. If you get all the keys and lockpick a door locked, enemies will not be able to open the door. The most effective use for this, which I'm not sure was planned, is a house owned by a bunch of slave traders in the second town. Normally, they're much too strong for a beginning player, serving as something to "come back to", but you can lock yourself in the lead guy's bedroom, which has an internal window, and thereby put yourself in a situation where you can, turn by turn, duck out of cover, shoot one of the enemies, and get back into cover, and basically pick them off behind the safety of a door nobody but you has keys for. A good deed and some great weapons and armour, that now you don't need to come back later for!
2. You can use healing items on anyone, not just yourself like Bethesda Fallout. This is nice for keeping your companions and reckless NPCs alive, but you can also kill people this way! The Super Stim is a kind of stimpack that does much greater healing, but on a delay, will do a small amount of damage. The small amount of damage can be stacked up as high as you like by using more of them, and since you technically didn't perform a hostile action on an NPC you do this to, you can use this to kill quest targets and the like who might make people hostile by overdosing them on Super Stims, and nobody will blame you for it... Unless people are scripted to turn hostile if this NPC dies for any reason at all. Whoops.
3. The game keeps track of who put items on the ground, and if you put an explosive item somewhere near someone, and it blows up and hurts them, obviously, they'll blame you for it. If an explosive is left in a container or someone's inventory or anything like that, it'll still explode. Basically, set the timer, and there's no way to trick the game into not blowing the thing up. There's an item which is a backpack, which you can put things in, and can also put on the ground. The game doesn't track who put an item inside of a container, so if you put explosives in the backpack, and put it on the ground, the game will effectively forget that you're the one who set the explosives, and you won't get blamed for the consequences. And, if a pickpocket steals those armed explosives you just happened to be carrying around, nobody will blame you when they explode, although I think that one's less of a broken instance.
Deus Ex was so much fun to play for me because it felt like I was trying to outsmart the developer. You have the tools, and now you come up with a solution.
Great vid. This was by far my favourite thing about Breath of the Wild. Also what made the elemental shields so fun in Sonic Mania.
I'd say Sonic's physics in general the main system that makes the classic games fun.
Federico Porcel oh undoubtedly - I'm just saying that things like the flame shield setting oil on fire are an extra little cherry on top of the core gameplay. Sonic 3 had traces of this, but they really took it to the next level in Mania.
I was waiting for the Dwarf Fortress mention, that game always surprises me and it's all emergent gameplay from the interaction of systems that I doubt Toady ever intended to interact. The tiny mention it got doesn't do the lengths it takes this concept to justice. It's a hard pill to swallow, it's a punishing and tedious game to play at times, but I've never had two games go the same and it always surprises me.
Never saw your video this quickly since your thumbnail is Big Boss...
I'm so glad you showed rain world, it's such a sleeper
Personally, my absolute favourite mechanic in original Doom is enemy infighting.
It happens in Doom 2016 as well! Certain enemies are more prone to infighting. Less than in the original, but it was a nice throwback.
yeah making Enemies Friendly Fire each other and get angry about it is always something entertaining in games. using the Enemies to my advantage!
i've really enjoyed that over many hundreds of hours in Killing Floor, among **many** other games.
+Soul-Burn The problem is that with the smaller density of hitboxes (especially taking into account the verticality of that game's levels) chances of monsters hitting each other are sadly very slim. I've seen monster infighting in the new Doom maybe two times.
RIMWORLD!!! I've been anxiously awaiting the day it would make an appearance on your channel, and even though it was only a brief cameo this time, I'm still thoroughly pleased. I'd love to see you talk about it more in depth, perhaps in a video where you delve more deeply into your research on systemic games. The unique stories I have experienced in that game are more compelling than most books I've read, and perhaps that's because they were both completely unscripted and something I could interact with. That, to me, is the unique beauty of video games: interactive (and, in some cases, unscripted) stories.
for me this is best seen in rain world, where all the enemies attack each other and run away from more dangerous predators and the rain
Im genuinely happy to have learned what an immersive sim is through your videos. I always knew there was a word for it but I never was able to find it. Now I know the name of my favorite type of game.
Kind of a nitpick, but the fact that not all wooden objects catch on fire in Zelda is, to me anyway, a bit more realistic than if everything wooden did. Spiky brush catches on fire fairly easily in real life compared to the trunk of a tree. Obviously there are many more factors at play than just that simple observation in real life, such as the dampness of the thing you're trying to set on fire, but the point is that not everything wooden should catch fire from something as simple as a flaming arrow or sword, while other things should nearly immediately.
That being said, I love these videos. I'm no designer but this is all extremely interesting to me, and has helped me open my mind towards newer games whereas before I pretty much exclusively played older games, and I really appreciate that. Thanks a ton for what you do here.
Although I agree with you, I think for the sake of gameplay making all wood easily flammable is better because emergent gameplay > realism
@Jay Arre But like, yes? Games are meant to be played
There's a difference between "realism" and "believability". He's talking about the latter in the video, where the media corresponds not with the real world, but with the audience's common sense notion of how things should be.
This is a breath of fresh air. So many people criticize modern gaming and talk about “the good ol’days”. Sure, many tropes are annoying, such as micro-transactions and releasing unfinished games. But there are also so many things that are getting better; graphics are only improving, developers are getting more ambitious with story, scope, and spectacle, combat and gunplay in many modern titles is as refined as ever, and games are feeling more alive. Systemic game design is a great example of this. I’m not saying games now are better, but there are undeniable improvements that should be noted.
You should make a full video on why BotW's weapon breaking mechanic is necessary and actually pretty clever because most of the critics of this game don't seem to understanding it
My friend showed me your channel yesterday since im studying game design in college. Since then, I have been watching your videos non-stop and for the first time ever will now be a paying patreon. The caliber of quality in your videos are unmatched. Thank you for your work!
I also recommend you check out Errant Signal if you haven't yet already. Frankly one of the reasons I didn't like Game Maker's Toolkit initially is because he covered topics already covered by Errant Signal much earlier, so much that it initially felt like a rip-off to me. The production quality of GMT is a lot higher, though. Anyway, it's a good idea to watch both, though, as it's not all the same. There's of course also Extra Credits but you surely already know them.
*Watch_Dogs 2* is the most un-Ubisoft Ubisoft game.
It felt like playing Splinter Cell : Human Revolution
It's heavily reliant on Systems interactions. Your gadget are built mainly for all sorts of environmental interactions, rather than combat. And these environments are filled with all sorts of variables for the player to mess around with.
I mean, in the sneaking missions, almost felt like I was playing MGS5.
Not just that, the map marker get discovered after you've actually go to that place, not by scan on towers. And speaking of, those towers instead hold upgrades for the upgrades tree, and reaching them is actually a puzzle to solve (like where to climb or how to unlock a door etc.), so they are actually meaningful.
Another thing is how much less reliant you are on mini-maps. In most openworld games, your attention is mostly on the mini map to see where all the stuff is. In WD2, you have to actually scan the environment and look for hackables. It's a small thing, but it greatly enhances the dynamics and immersion.
I just saw this video -- excellent job! (And thanks for the shout-out in your video links.) This is a fascinating and difficult to explain topic, and you've made this much easier. Thanks again!
Still waiting for a game where I can stick a fork in an outlet to trip a fuse.
i'll add something like that to my game.
Mark, I just took a look at your Patreon, and while I don't have the finances to really actively support anyone right now, I'm really proud to see how well you're doing for yourself nowadays. Your videos are so thoughtfully crafted and your diligence and commitment to your work is commendable. Keep up the good work. As an aspiring developer myself, your content really makes me think. I'm so glad to see this "Game Design Analysis" genre of RUclips content taking off the way it has this past year or so.
I love this. For instance, when playing Postal 2, during the third day of the week (in the game), all I have to do is to walk into the grocery store and the whole block will shortly be transformed into a civil war zone, just because I stole a pack of milk there the other day.
Really, few things beats the feeling of casually tossing a scissor across the shoppig mall and "accidentally" hit Gary Coleman in the neck; moments later the whole complex is an inferno.
Damn, every video of your is my new favorite thing for that week. Mad props!
I just realized. One of the reasons I like moding so much in Bethesda games is because all of the mechanical and immersion mods essentially allow you to craft your own systemic game, but also pepper it with premade gear and quests.
Man, I've found many channels dedicated to making video essays on movies or tv series, but this is probably the only channel dedicated to making video essays on gaming that I found really good and elaborate. Many other gaming channels only talk mainly about "why this is the best" or bla bla. This channel is great!!
2:19 Oh shit, that's how you're supposed to do that? I just spend 20 minutes trying to use the Paraglider to get in. Does show how good of a job Zelda did of making sure the systems worked if something as simple as getting in a shrine has numerous solutions though.
One thing I really love about your channel is the typographical design of your thumbnails... Always a good font choice with the perfect background
Minecraft does it. Enemies react to being attacked by fighting back. Skellettons got a ranged weapon and can hit other skelletons (and other monsters) mid-fight.
Alsi it reminds me of a case in Skyrim:
I was travveling towards a cave and infront of it was qute a big fight. A bunch if skelletons was fighting a group of vampires when some wolves hit the scene and started going into the fight. Then a dragon descended as one of the skelletons noticed me. We had a nice 5-way fight.
Very interesting, always been a big fan of immersive sims. I think the thing you don’t mention that likely puts studios off is the complication of testing such things.
That point about MGS5 and the silenced pistol making the game boring is why I like BotW's weapon breaking. If that didn't happen, I'd have used the same weapon for the whole game. The weapon breaking makes me adapt constantly, even in the middle of combat, and also gives value to any fight just because it might give you a good weapon for the future.
(Wall of text warning)
Honestly, I hear a lot of people say this, and while I do see their point (and it is a good point), I feel it's somewhat lessened by the fact that the weapons All Play The Same. Sure, two-handers might be a bit slower than the others, one handers might be short, and spears might be lacking in damage, but within a class it's the exact same weapon. they don't even have differing lengths, as far as I could tell.
The only real exception is wands, which shoot various projectiles that behave differently (ice rod shoots a cloud, fire a projectile that obeys gravity and bounces a bit, lightning a projectile that ignores gravity). Beyond that, what? The boomerangs come back when thrown... The Eightfold longsword and Windcutter have a unique charge attack (but they just do the same damage as a regular attack, so, unless you're planning on hitting with the Windcutter's projectile, there's no reason to use them). The Master Sword has a beam. The Korok Leaf fires wind with crazy knockback. Certain bows can fire multiple arrows at a time, or draw faster, or have less drop off, does that count? The Lynel shields (though they're not really weapons and are honestly pretty shitty) deal damage when you parry. And the Ancient Shield auto-parries Guardian beams. (I'm noticing a bit of a theme here... every unique weapon (except the eightfold longsword, kind of) (and the shields)has something to do with projectiles...)
But the important thing is that they can distinguish themselves from other members of their class in a way that isn't just "oh the damage is higher" or "there's a different durability."
Honestly, I think the best example is probably the wands which, unlike every other "melee" weapon, deal little damage with direct hits, and instead encourage you to be a bit farther from enemies than usual. Compare to the boomerangs; which are ridiculously common (at least, the Lizal ones) so that you can "use the same weapon for the whole game" (technically three, but they only differ in damage so w/e) and are still just as good if you ignore their ability to be thrown (so there's no real reason to use a "regular" weapon over them), the Windcutter; which is late game enough that you already have an undless supply of "normal" weapons and will never "need" to use it (and even if you do, the projectile only does partial damage (unless you charge it) so you might as well use it as if it was a normal weapon), or the Korok leaf; which only deals 1 damage, so it can only be used for it's knockback.
Yet, I rarely ever use wands. Why? This is probably an instance where the weapon durability actually HURTS variety. In my experience, wands are pretty rare, to start with. They're only found being dropped by wizrobes, which are not only less common than other enemies dropping more standard weapons, but also a right pain to fight, what with their floating and teleporting and what-have-you. Beyond that, they don't drop anything besides the wands (which aren't particular good as a main weapon, and as a utility can mostly be replace by elemental swords/spears), so there's no real reason to hunt one down. And once you do have a wand? It breaks, REALLY quickly. A lot quicker than many of the "normal" weapons, I feel.
So, usually my melee inventory is just Master Sword, Fl.blade/G.Fl.blade/Fl.spear,Fr.blade/G.Fr.blade/Fr.spear, two or three lizal boomerangs, and then a random assortment of 2handers, 1handers, and spears, none of which have any distinguishing properties. But my bow inventory tends to have at least one of each of *a high powered "regular" bow, *a bow that shoots multiple arrows at once, and *a bow with high accuracy at long range (usually a Swallow/Falcon bow, since they also draw quicker). And those bows all get used but in different situations, as opposed to melee weapons which get used based on either "which one does the most damage" or "which one is closest to breaking."
The Zekenator Well it really comes down to what you make of it. I had fun completing every mission in MGSV with a S - Rank and doing the bonus objectives and while doing so quickly realized that the silenced pistole is not the most efficient or fastest way to complete the mission in most cases...
DreamsDragon98 I completely agree with you. I see all these people talking about "adapting" constantly but I just don't see it. When I got a ton of weapon spaces it became a case of "oh my weapon broke again. I'll just use another similar weapon". But as the Rokkxl said, it comes down to what you make out of it. I have friends that don't increase their weapons slots, or simply don't use strong weapons in order to have more of a challenge. But I would honestly prefer if they made it an option. Let those who want their weapons to break to have that while also letting those who don't want their weapons to break have that too.
Cheeky Cunt The problem with just making that stuff optional is that almost nobody is going to choose to have their weapons break because such a design choice is hard to swallow, and something that can only be appreciated in hindsight. Many games have "hard" or "challenge" modes that aren't a test of player skill but just frustrating and unbalanced, requiring cheap tactics to progress. Many would assume that a "choose whether your weapon breaks or not" is just that and not pick it, and so have no concept of the benefits that such a system would bring to many players, such as promoting experimentation. But if it's the sole way to play, nobody has to second guess that maybe they're making things too hard for themselves, or on the flip side, play without weapon breakages for half a game and then wonder if the game would've been more interesting if they'd chosen the alternative. Simply throwing in a bunch of options isn't going to solve everyone's perils because upon starting the game the player doesn't know what to expect, and something that they might struggle with at the start might be something they come to appreciate down the line.
In Until Dawn, if you make a mistake, be it a character getting injured or killed, that's it. Your save file is overwritten so if you want to rectify your mistake you need to start the game from the very beginning. If upon a character dying the game put up an option for A: Try that again or B: Carry on with them dead, virtually nobody's going to choose the second option. I mean, why? Most other games have a retry option so might as well use it. So in the end everyone just experiences the same story, and any sense of fear or tension (in a horror game, no less) is completely gone. The threat of an unfortunate outcome is simply meaningless now, and players conversing about "What happened when you played it? What ending did you get?" won't happen. The unique experience the game has just wouldn't happen at all, regardless of the fact it was "just options" that started it.
Dark Souls 2 started the trend of letting players warp freely between all bonfires which many fans found to negatively impact the feeling of exploration and learning the layout of the world, or the terror of getting to the bottom of a dungeon and hoping to see the light again soon in a safe place. But everyone still used the warp function because it was an integral game mechanic, because if you want to get somewhere, you take the easy route. Plus, the game wasn't designed for you to do it without warping, and would just make for a frustrating experience and added artificial difficulty for those who tried to "discipline themselves" into playing the preferred way.
Options are necessary in all video games but sometimes restricting certain options for the sake of an intended experience can be a huge benefit, even to the players who would never have chosen that option if there was a choice. It won't please absolutely everyone, but then, nothing will.
The Zekenator It also makes weapons feel useless. Recieving a weapon becomes less exciting when you realise they're all glass and it's easier just to stick pile shit weapons to burn through.
Thank you so much, Mark. I hope you will keep on talking about these kinds of subjects in gaming (simulation, interconnected systems, emergent gameplay. etc.), they're the sort of stuff that I find most fascinating. Don't shy away from going as in-depth as you can.
Also thank you for your "find out more" list, I'll be sure to check those links.
EDIT: Funny that you mentioned the rain in BOTW... I was watching a streamer play that game the other day, and he was really upset with the fact that while it's raining, cliffs get slicker and you have to spend more time and stamina trying to climb it up. So his solution was just to wait for the rain to go away, doing absolutely nothing, just letting time pass.
Having not played the game yet, I got curious as to what would the rain do in the game, besides being an annoyance for someone that wants to climb a stone wall. Your video shed some light for me on that, thanks for that too.
I remember once i was playing Breath of the wild and entered a shrine for which you need arrows, however i didnt have any, i managed to beat it by using bombs, boomerangs, cryonis, stasis, magnesis and many, many spears, i won though
As an aspiring game developer that's designing and writing/typing out two MOBA concepts and a boardgame, I've unintentionally stumbled upon how various effects/abilities and status ailments are an important part of how game mechanics can work together. This was a great video and now I've got even more things I need to learn on this journey of mine.
8:21 Prey (2017), 8 minutes in I was afraid this game wasn't in the video.
Good video, as always. Incidentally, being unable to climb in the rain was the ABSOLUTE WORST thing to happen to BotW. It murdered the joy of exploration and forced us to either take sub-optimal approaches to solutions or set the controller down for five minutes.
I've recently begun studying how to make games like this in my spare time. If you're interested in understanding how one of these "systemic games" works differently from a regular game, read on! The first thing you must understand is that when communicating with a computer, you must understand that it has its own language, and way of structuring thought- however, there are different ways to explain your concept of a game to the computer- some that make it easier to understand. These are called software patterns, or game design patterns.
The reason it's even possible to do systemic games is most likely because the developers of these games are steering away from the traditional way of programming software (and games), called Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). OOP is where the developer tells the computer to not just think of the objects in their world, but also the concept of the object (called a class). The game's logic is essentially arranged in a rigid hierarchy, where you must first explain the concept of an object before actually coding the object itself. This makes them robust yet inflexible, and while great for keeping software code clean, it is not good for what Mark Brown calls "systemic games".
What he calls "systemic games", developers call games arranged in an Entity-Component System (ECS), in which all game objects, whether renderable and non-renderable, are called entities. Unlike regular games, the game objects (entities) have no code in them at all. Their only task is to point to the components in the system.
An arrow from BoTW may look similar to the following.
fire_arrow : entity { attackable, flammable }
Words like "attackable" and "flammable" refer to components of the same names, which keep the numbers for the damage done, and how much fire is allowed on the arrow. Then game systems, such as a health system, will read the list of the entity's components, read them, and operate on them. The end result is that if I want to make an object interact with a game's sytem, I just have to add the word for the component to the object. After all, the player should be able to swallow swords.
In this way, the developer can also think of their game world in systems and game rules instead of objects and abstractions of objects.
MMORPGs are beginning to use the ECS pattern because it allows developers to add tens of thousands of items without significantly growing the complexity of their code. In the past, and even today, developers using OOP have to envision the entirety of the future of their game before committing the first lines of code. Now with an ECS pattern, they can just add components to entities to create new feature of code. So if a developer comes up with a new school of magic in an MMO, and they want to add the new spells to old items, it's as easy as adding the relevant component to the preexisting objects. By the time a programmer is three years into supporting an OOP MMO, the codebase has grown so complex and dirty that adding a single feature or bugfix will take exponentially longer than when the project first began. With the new ECS MMOs, they will have a consistently complex codebase- and be able to support the MMO for far longer, with far more systems and items and play. And let's not forget, a playre should be able to eat a sword.
Another reminder that i am young and that people way before me made super impressive stuff with way more primative software than i have available to me.
Coding is way easier than it used to be, thankfully. And it will only continue to get easier. Whether developers are optimising themselves out of their own jobs is up for speculation. I'm not sure what level you're at, HASE, but you can learn programming much easier than ever before, and a solid knowledge of computer science concepts (and game design concepts), as well as just trying shit until it works, will make you into a programmer that can sometimes pull off impressive results.
+Vlad Korabelnikov I'm not exacly a newbie anymore, but i'm a lot more comfortable around the more high level stuff than the low level stuff, which frustrates me to no end.
I mostly work in high level stuff to- but it definitely helps to at least have a rough idea of what's going on down below.
I'll leave a few beginner concepts you can study if you'd like. Studying these should make you extremely comfortable with the way computers work- they may help you wrap your head around difficult concepts that build upon these. Each idea builds on the last.
1. Understand the idea of state, and code as data, by looking into the Turing Machine.
2. Understand how the idea of state translates into computer, by looking at the Von Neumann architecture. This is a high level model of a CPU, useful for us to understand how it thinks.
3. Look up how to count, add, subtract, multiply, and divide in binary. You should be able to do this on paper like you would regular mathematics.
4. Next, look into logic gates, download an app to simulate them. Understand that logic gates are the fundamental building block of programming languages (they are Boolean operators), but actually occupy a physical space on the circuitboard! You can purchase logic gates to make your own CPU, but it's much nicer to simulate it- so I recommend downloading an app. Using NAND gates you can build RAM, using other logic gates such as ORs, NOTs, ANDs, XORs, and others, you can build a whole CPU and run it! The feeling of doing this is so amazing, but takes some patience. I was able to model mine in about a week.
5. Look into hexadecimal, and how it's a really cool way for programmers to remember nibbles of binary easier. Understand that you can code binary in hexadecimal.
6. Understand that programmers created a basic instruction set called assembler. Each instruction is a very basic function of the cpu, such as add, subtract, bitshift (multiply or divide), comparison, and others. This language is the building block for every proceeding part of computing. You may write python, but the computer translates it into this.
+Vlad Korabelnikov well you certainly are quite the helpful fellow.
REALLY loved this video! I hope every developer on the planet watches every single video you put out!
9:35 - One of the risks of "giving the player a goal, and not caring how they achieve it" is that the system may present a means to trivialize the challenge, giving the player a moment of feeling "clever" but ultimately robbing them of a more interesting gameplay experience.
I think the way to avoid this is to keep players from being able to use that same solution every time. This channel has a really good video about puzzle design that kind of touches on that.
This is exactly how I felt when beating breathe of the wild. It was neat that I could climb over mountains, take my glider over great plots of land to quickly defeat all 4 divine beast and the ganon.... but then I robbed myself of just enjoying every other cool aspect of the game. I literally didn't know you could stable horses until after I beat the game.
I understand not wanting to force the player to play a certain way, but I feel if you dont encourage the player to play in a way you as a developer believe is "fun", you are missing a big opportunity.
I think this is what I loved about doom eternal. They were absolutely confident that you would enjoy the way the game they designed over doom 1, so they designed it to encourage you to play it your way.
It is quite impressive that you have consistently quality game analysis.
Educational, utilitarian, well arranged and edited, and balanced.
reminds me of the STALKER’s A-Life system
me 2.
Well, STALKER was a very systemic game. I made it more systemic by installing a mod (the STALKER Complete mod specifically) that altered how the emissions worked. One of the options was that if an NPC was out of shelter when the emission hits, they are turned into a zombie instead of killed. This led to neat moments where I would take shelter at a town and some of the NPCs would be caught out close to the town. When the emission passed the NPCs in the town would go out and immediately enter combat with the zombies. This was fun to watch but also served to encourage the player to use less popular safe areas to shelter from emissions and thus visit areas of the map they wouldn't otherwise.
And don't forget the bandit radio. Cheeki breeki.
Your voiceover over quality is unbelievable, I don’t know how you do it
Have you played Crusader Kings II? That game is a massive sandbox of self-interested entities. This is the series that got me into the game: www.pcgamer.com/sept-12-dontpost-crusader-kings-chronicle-part-1-1066-1076-a-d/
Efithor Such a great game. The AI still doesn't get how to play it half the time, though.
Yeah, though the AI character's decisions don't often make sense from a "game" perspective, I really like how they make choices based on their own personality. Like how the arbitrary trait causes the AI to make event decisions randomly, or how a counselor will go against a decision that's ultimately good for the realm if they really hate your guts. EDIT: Great article on CKII's AI: www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/11/11/crusader-kings-2-characters/
Like real life I'd say. Ignore the best for your own selfish reasons
Certainly more "human".
By far my favourite thing about CK2 is that with... I want to say Conclave they put Councillor personalities in, which will affect how they vote for laws, wars, succession changes etc. Which means that you finally get into the mindset of a medieval king who decides "No I won't appoint that perfectly competent man who hates me to be marshal, instead I'll appoint a loyal half-wit." Because it's no good having men who will do a great job if they don't obey you.
I absolutely loved when they started to bring systems into games that create randomness. My first experience with this was in Oblivion when a friend and I found ourselves inadvertently in a murder mystery. We had to backtrack why two of the townsfolk had been killed by guards. We had some strong theories, but we could never be completely sure. Even something small like this was so much more thrilling than a scripted event.
I think systemic games are going to have a really hard time connecting to a narrative. It opens up a complex can of worms of what a game is a able to say, and I don't think we understand it yet. It also brings up some tone and pacing control issues that make narratives inherently tricky.
I think the main problem is the fact that these games sometimes feel like they play themselves, that they'll happen whether or not you do anything. In a linear game, the game stops and refuses to do anything until you actively take part in it, and so it's easier to make a more tightly-knit experience centered around the player. But in systemic games, the whole "you do your thing, I'll keep doing mine" approach can lead to a feeling of "why should I bother?" from the player. In fact, as a new player with an unfamiliar game, the experience can be compared to being invited to a party where you don't know anyone, and so you just sort of wander around, sip your drink, and maybe do a bit of small talk here and there, before heading home with a very lukewarm feeling about the whole thing.
Yeah, "lukewarm feeling" is a good description. I mean, they're not bad--I enjoyed Zelda a lot, and have enjoyed many similar games. They just have a really difficult time conveying some kind of meaning beyond self-expression, like in your stranger party analogy.
Raph Koster writes a good article about the unique thing that games bring. "Ontological interactivity" in his case is the 'you do your thing, I do mine' thing you're talking about. From my perspective, it's the only thing that games do truly uniquely well, everything else is borrowed from film, writing, etc. So in this regard, I'm super stoked to see the rise of said systemic interactivity in larger budget games.
That said, there's a lot to be said about using it well. More doesn't always mean better. For example, Citizen Kane exploits the one thing that film does really well (editing), and it made its mark on history as influencing modern film-making. But the bonkers and often overbearing cuts and camera angles are off-putting to a lot of people. Citizen Kane is amazing for pushing the envelope of editing to its logical conclusion, but not really for being an accessible and cohesive bit of entertainment. It's worth studying, praising, and loving on... but other movies that use techniques established in Citizen Kane can easily be better movies in general.
Applying that concept to games with this ontological systemic creative style of interactivity, we'll eventually have (if it hasn't been made yet) an equivalent to Citizen Kane. It'll be a generally well made systemic game that pushes its systemic nature to the absolute limits. It'll be bonkers and kinda overbearing but will leave a massive impact on the industry. And future games will learn to use that kind of system well, rather than singly.
I'm looking forward to that time. :)
And here;'s the article I mentioned at the beginning: www.raphkoster.com/2014/07/09/interactivity/
Thank you for this lovely response!
You're absolutely right that a game will most likely come along at some point to singly spearhead the development of what Raph in a general way calls "ontological interactivity" and help other games be better at it. I think there have already been some games that have done that to a degree, like Deus Ex or OG Fallout, and I'm pretty sure Ken Levine is trying to do something like this but it a new way.
What I'm getting at is what Marie-Laure Ryan says about her four combinations: "Each of them is characteristic of different genres, and affords different narrative possibilities." That's key, and the result is that depending on what itch you need scratching, different games will be adequate or not.
Take external-ontological and internal-ontological interactivity as an example. The first is the modern XCOM games, where you decide the properties of the characters and make their decisions. This lends for a certain type of emergent narrative where you start to care about your virtual soldiers and ascribe them personalities that don't exist beyond your phenomenological interpretation of your own actions through their avatars--and it's really fantastic the game can do that, in a way. Basically any city- or otherwise building simulation fall into this category as well, but have different themes. The second is games like Breath of the Wild. These types of games seem to lend themselves to a story where there is an objective and the player's job is to answer the question "how will it be achieved?" Part of the reason games in this mode of participation use the Propp/Campbell construction of narrative is that we want to not only affect the world, but affect it on a grand scale. Ultimately, maybe the internal-ontological mode is better suited to smaller narratives about affecting things which are only relevant to the character which we embody while the external-ontological mode is better suited to affect on a grand-scale.
That was kind of a tangent, but it does show that this becomes incredibly complex quickly. It's important besides to realize that all games have some degree of ontological interactivity. But like Raph points out, "games like The Sims, Eve Online, Minecraft, Universalis, Dwarf Fortress," are what's really being talked about. These games also illustrate my point that they have difficulties conveying meaning beyond self-expression; Raph also notices this when he says they have the power to "express, create, and even innovate."
When it comes down to it, I'm excited about big budget games exploring systemic interactivity too, but I think the discussion around it lacks the acknowledgement that the mode is best suited to certain narrative constructions. You helped me put this into better words, so thanks a lot!
On a side-note, I think XCOM is overlooked critically, and that it does a lot of interesting things. It's not perfect, but it DOES stake a pretty bold claim.
On a second side-note, Eve Online is fucking nuts, right?
@Jay Arre * People having civil discussion about Systemic games and narrative *
Sony Fanboy: GoD oF WaR is BeTTeR!
I wanted to thank you Mark for all the hard work and effort you out into your videos to break down video games and inform us about what happens behind the scenes of the pretty animations and colourful artwork in the game.
Your videos have enriched my knowledge of video games by a hundredfold and allows me to delve even deeper into the science behind it.
I was wondering if you'd mention dwarf fortress and indeed you did. now I just need you to play it and break that game down for me cause I'm to scared to dig into it. I dabbled for a day a couple years back and had no idea what was going on.
i literally don't have a clue
Mark Brown well I wish you good luck on you mission then, sir! 🕵️
Watch some tutorials then. For understanding this game, you HAVE TO watch tutorials!
That's why I still not played Dwarf Fortress myself...
Two things: Tile sets, and a good guide. Tile sets require some jiggering with the game's files normally but can help immensely with visual comprehension. The wiki is usually the best guide going dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide though feel free to shop around.
There's also the Lazy Newb Pack dwarffortresswiki.org/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pack which will manage a whole bunch of utilities and other helpful tools for you.
Futhington thanks for this comment! I'll have to check these out!
Just discovered this channel and from my 40+ long subscription list it is my favorite
I think this is the future of games; less scripted and linear games, and more games as systems. Will increase replayability.
it is intense for me to see that everything i thought of like 15 years ago is not only possible but at our fingertips with a few clicks...the games, the tech behind them, everything...i love it
Emergent gameplay is the holy grail for me. I love that. But demands huge budgets and playtesting I guess.
I wish more youtube analysis people would talk about Dwarf Fortress, including you as this one mention is not nearly enough. Despite it being influential enough to birth its own subgenre and being adopted by MOMA very few people seem to actually look at it in any depth outside of its own forums.
Anyway, my favorite moment was when I started in an evil part of the map and decided to build my fort above ground. I put up a nice wall with some towers with ballistae around my important buildings and stockpiles when some necromancers came and invaded. They killed and zombified every animal outside my walls, but lacked the equipment to get inside and so just stood around until one of my dwarves reached the ballista, shot a huge bolt at a skeleton, the impact causing it to explode pieces of itself all over the place. Some of these pieces happened to land on my side of the wall, and of course being undead still moved in to attack and zombify my dwarves. RIP fort.
My favorite and personal experience of this is from Red Faction Guerilla. Put a bunch of mines on the front of a truck. Fill it with various explosives and run it straight into an enemy base at full speed, jumping off before it hits something.
Can level multiple building if done right. And its hilarious every time.
Best game
Really was something special, and that makes me wonder where experimenting with physics like that got lost. Its really rare to see a game take that approach to game design now a days.
Man, I’m always anticipating your new games and they always deliver. As a gamer and an aspiring game designer, you videos are amazing. Their well edited, well spoken, and have amazing background music. (Also your voice is amazingly epic. Good job on your voice.)
Thanks to systemic game design
A closed problem can become a open ended problem
It's not cheating , it's like finding a more efficient solution to puzzle that even developer didn't think of.
It's not a punchy video but it's probably one of your best videos so far, I like how it explores industry-wide trends and developments, which is not something you do often enough in my opinion.
My problem with Zelda was that it never felt like it was really pushing you to find new solutions. Anytime I came across an enemy that was too strong, I found it really easy to run away. I feel like Zelda is great for interacting systems but a player like me would never be forced to make them interact because the game makes it easy to avoid all combat encounters.
Fully agree. I stopped fighting the enemies and going into their camps pretty soon, since there wasn't anything worthwile to gain from doing so.
Another problem is that once you get a good stack of great weapons, you pretty much can just fight your way through everything. And you have the Master Sword to not have to worry about durability as much.
Cool! I feel like I've met so little people that share my opinion on this. It's nice to know I'm not alone lol
Yeah, I feel like the durability mechanic was a great idea in concept but the game seemed to give up on it toward the middle by making you nigh-invincible. Once I got the Master Sword I would just use it almost exclusively.
Agree and Disagree. Double-edged sword.
God this video is so good. We need more content like this. You make me want to abandon my job and pursue game dev full time.
Maybe the reason why GTA V missions are so scripted is because the developers know players already spend most their time in this sandbox open world game with a lot underlying systems, so the missions are just the opportunity to give players scripted sequences that are unique and more spectacular than anything that can occur in the open world. Like the mission where someone gets sucked into the plane engine after chasing them into the airport.
That seems like a fair point, it's an evolution of the mission design of earlier games in the series, where you'd have to make specific use of the various mechanics, thus emphasizing them more directly than in normal play. For instance, racing missions force you to drive intensely, escort missions have you driving an npc to a location without blowing up, other missions force you to chase after and destroy npc's in their own car by ramming them or shooting out tires, and some times you get straight up third-person shooting sections. That being said, GTA V could do with less instant mission failures for obscure reasons.
I definitely agree Dan. I thought the mission design in GTA V was probably the best in the series IMO, save for the infuriating insta failure conditions. If it would have been more lenient, I thought it would have made for an ever sublime game.
+Jumbo Jango The missions in my opinion are well-paced and have enough spectacle to be decent in their own right, but when compared to the openworld sandbox, I'd agree the design of the world is cooler than what you can do for the most part. Out and about, the ridiculous ai accuracy and tire dents/pops make getting away from the cops difficult in an annoying way(not to mention the animations and ragdoll physics that make doing fun things a pain without first person mode some times), whereas getting into a jet or tank makes killing everything easy. It's experiencing the world between missions in the main story that you find real enjoyment.
Jumbo Jango which is why gta online is still making a killing 5 years on
But it would still be much nicer if they could take advantage of the amazing systems during missions, if not basing them entirely on the systems
This was very tricky for me to watch, as I haven't played Breath of the Wild yet and do not want to spoil anything on it. I had to make a lot of fast reactive jumpcuts to evade revelations. But it was worth it - Mark, you're content is gold.
*Breath of the Wild is opening the gates*
With possibly greater systematic games in the future
BoTW isn’t the first game to do this .
My favourite example of this sort of behaviour, was while trolling Pala in Far Cry 2. I'd kill a guard, then immediately duck through a hole in the fence and leave the cease fire zone by making a beeline for the docks. Normally, when you shoot a gun in the cease fire zone, all soldiers (from both factions) band together to kill you.
One time, I got just far enough away for most of the town to reset but not all. I'd taken loner than usual though, so when I escaped the cease fire zone, there was one guard barely close enough to the perimeter to not reset. Normally, when you shoot a gun in the cease fire zone, all soldiers (from both factions) band together to kill you. This time when I entered town, the guard that didn't reset recognized me and started shooting. Every soldier in town ganged up on HIM, trusted allies and bitter enemies alike. Turns out they don't kill the player for firing a gun. They detect a gun was fired in a cease-fire zone, and hunt the perpetrator (the player 99% of the time).
TL;DR: I trolled a town so hard, it started murdering itself, and learned more about how the ai think.
>"This is not a scripted encounter, hand crafted by the developer..."
>Shows a scripted encounter, hand crafted by the developer
I'm pretty sure that was on purpose as a contrast. "Look, here's an obviously scripted animal attack. Now this one emerged as a part of the systemic interactions."
Wow. Old video, but came at just the right time for me as I've started thinking about how to incorporate this type of thinking into board game design. Thanks so much.
The rise of the systemic FPS open world game has killed the old school FPS, where level design was king. Designing systems is not the same as designing a well constructed maze.
Games like DOOM 1 and 2 or the 2d Mario platformers., which don't feature complicated systems and large worlds you can explore in almost their entirety at once, but still give you mechanics and levels to play around with (in contrast to completely linear games like Call of Duty's single player) without railroading you, are more elegant in my opinion than Ubisoft-style open-world games or MGSV (don't care that it got a 95 on Metacritic, found it tedious and rewarding)
I am pretty sure that heavily scriped games like CoD weren't more than partially to blame for this.
This is why I adored the SUBSISTENCE missions in MGSV so much. They force the player to be creative and plan their route. Too bad there were only two of them
"Make plans and see them go horribly wrong" sounds like my approach to life.
Games are so complicated and expensive that gameplay commentary heavy playthroughs and narratives regarding popular games have overtaken them. This is golden age RUclips. I love you.
Emergent Gameplay you say?
You should play Space Station 13.
I've had some good experiences in the brutal and systemic game Rain World. I was making my way east from the outskirts towards the grasslands and I had to pass by a scavenger toll. It so happened as I approached the toll I encountered a lizard. He chased me all the way to the toll, upon which I could retreat up a pole, as he duked it out with the scavengers. He killed a few, and chased off the rest, and I walked by without having paid my due fee.
Rain World is so damn good at this stuff
Your comment about Rockstar really hit for me. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games and when you are just wandering around the world I wouldn't even hesitate to consider it an immersive sim. But then you start a mission and it's like it kicks into a completely different game where everything is tightly controlled and limited. I really hope Rockstar take note of this eventually because as much as I love their games it would really take them to another level if they started being a bit hands off with the missions and giving more room for players to really play.