Some of the most memorable moments in gaming are the emergent gameplay or when designers have anticipated/iterated for players getting around things. I got to play Dishonored 2 at a gaming convention, pre-release, and there's a section where a villain comes out to monologue but if you're quick enough you can teleport in to the crawl space between the walls. Then when the villain comes out to monologue instead he laments that the player isn't there. And given the context of a convention, it was an unforgettable moment. Most developers would 'fix' that at the QA stage rather than design around it.
Troika Programmer: Done, I hard coded the transition to the Void and there is no way the players will get back to the mainland once they cross the portal. So yeah boss, there is no need for "Aftermath Content" anymore :) Players: Hold our Charm Spells. >:3
There's a great second answer in this video i really enjoyed Q: How do game developers account for every player choice? A: If your setting is rich enough and your game designed well enough, you shouldn't be able to
I feel like I screwed up by watching the holodeck episodes of next generation long before I ever played video games.. for some stupid reason in my head space and I still think this way, the goal was to get to that.. The goal was the dungeons & dragons campaign but we got to do all the things, like we're there doing the things.. And watching that philosophy both explode and almost become a norm for PC gaming for a minute there, at least a lot of aspects of it.. and then just immediately shrink to nothingness when the seventh generation hit.. oh that that's still really bites a bit.. It really wasn't until I started watching a lot of RUclips though that I started to understand why these things were the way they were.. well maybe not why.. but that a lot of the things I liked about video games that I thought were the objective positives, as it turns out would have been considered maybe a nice touch, or even just something that never even processed in their brain.. and the things that they liked were the things that I was going further and further out of my way to never ever come across, I remember a convo interview with one of the heads that Infinity Ward, and he was talking about how ragdolls were stupid.. and that open non-linear gameplay was a fad.. this was right around the same time far cry came out so, the idea that call of duty formula where you basically hold a forward button down in a rail shooter.. it was going out of Vogue real fast... I'm just sitting here like.. dude.. You're actively trying to encourage all of the things that I don't like, stop it boy! And just you know what a joke obviously.. There's people have a real short memory, usually you've got a defeat a a design trend that's competing, but haven't it just fizzle and having it fizzle into nothingness without even a mention and just kind of get retconned out of existence like JJ Abrams got involved in the plot... Ow that that definitely hurt. You definitely got weird vibes that things were going in a weird way and that perhaps there had been a reality shift where that PC gaming of the '90s and early 2000s actually no longer existed when Bioshock came out and people were calling it an immersive SIM, especially like a year or two after SWAT 4 had come out. . It's just it's so weird, you feel like you're in the same space everybody wants the same things, in certain genres especially with RPGs cuz RPGs are so wide in the vehicles for it... And the labels of RPG now basically apply to everything whereas kind of usually just applied to role-playing, and I remember my own personal was drafted from dialogue in PC gamer and whatnot.. r PG is a game where you can interact with the story and the characters and affect them, like dungeons & dragons, your actions as a character that a role you were playing as if you were them... An action RPG, was a game where you didn't do any of that.. but you still got to do character classes and stat boosts, and and all that fun shenanigans.. but you pretty much you know you didn't really get to make any real decisions about the story you were just going to go through it... I don't ever remember the term immersive some entering the lexicon until a few years ago so.. Go figure that dark Messiah was more of an RPG than Oblivion ever was.. and it had almost no consideration for plot dynamics, there wasn't what it was trying to do.. it just happened to do it more than a game that actively didn't lol.. Also at gameplay too and that was kind of kind of nifty not going to lie, and then you get something like chivalry where you basically have that last component of dark Messiah that would have made it the utter greatest thing of a melee combat fantasy system.. and. Yeah there's still some multiplayer games in that style.. but for some reason All of the hack and slash fantasy games, have Target lock Dodge roll health bar... And the best ones of those to me at least are the ones that actually created a gameplay loop outside of that... And then next thing you know... Games are in playable if they don't have target lock! And I'm sitting here like you mean that button that I had to unbind because it kept screwing up my gameplay? Like it's bad enough I can't manually aim.. but if we're doing the character action game thing which is what I thought it was at the time before it became the souls gameplay thing... And one of the things that cracks me up the most, it's the things that dark souls doesn't bother with at all.. that makes that game completely unappealing, the details.. they seem to miss the most important ones to me anyways.. but they have all the other ones that get missed by the people that do understand the kind of details that that matter to me... And I'm just kind of at a point where how did things get so stupidly rigid? Cuz you can solve a lot of this just by having options.. which is a point of contention cuz apparently having options is.. who wants options? And then I'll watch a streamer desperately try to figure out what the controls are to a game when there's an options menu and then complain that the default bind was bad when they could just change it.. and it doesn't even process in their brain. . So you have an entire generation of people that not only never process the idea that there are options don't want the idea that there are options but are actively inconvenienced by the idea that there are options and absolutely need things to be along the same lines as the things before and if you're going to do something new you have to actively remove something else instead of trying to make it work.. Even on a mouse and keyboard it's bad, even on the 2/3 of the keyboard that we have now as the standard lol... Like you'll have developers actively remove things like leaning from a game because they want to use e as the interact key, and I'm just sitting here like.. how was that the solution to removing one of the more important aspects of gameplay interactivity in a three-dimensional shooter game? And of course, I come from the days when Raven would bind them to something like g and h or something like that... And I bound them to c&v, cuz I can hit them with my thumb and I needed to use e for the interact button lol and that's just what you did, I don't know how the default developer control schemes came into being because some of them were real wacky and I would love to know, But I mean people didn't really start getting into the WSAD thing with control in space and whatnot until quake multiplayer custom binds became a popular thing to try to emulate for all the pros and whatnot.. it's not to say it didn't exist, but this was also a game where they really wanted it to be mouse dependent but absolutely could not release it in a state where you were just expecting them to look around with the mouse.. I'll stop now before it gets even further into rant land.. I'm trying to back everything up with some more context, but that just makes it worse of course And this is the problem in that anytime I find myself trying to have a conversation about gaming, I'm realizing that I have to explain the concepts that I'm talking about as things, cuz there's it's it's not even not a guarantee so much as it's almost as a rule pretty much that I'm coming at this from a headspace that was a far far divergent evolution from where they did... It's kind of like one of those moments where you get people talking about how you should just switch to console instead of playing on PC cuz it's expensive.. and then to me it's like that's not even a remote option.. everything that like a PC isn't just a fancy console, but it kind of is now, it shouldn't be and it doesn't have to be.. but that's how people treat it and that's a developers treat it... Which is also why people are okay with streaming, then the biggest issue to them is the latency and the quality of the stream not the fact that they're literally playing through a game like they're binging Netflix.. and the idea that they would be doing anything other than consuming the the fruits that were provided by the developer, or something different with the same thing, no that's that's not how games work you you turn game on and then you play game, well sort of The game plays for you most of the time.
I'm currently writing a video essay about Emergent Gameplay so thank you so much for this video Tim! The insights with your developer perspective is absolutely amazing to hear about. I hope it would be okay to share your perspective in said video essay (I will obviously give you full credit for any clip I use).
@@THExRISER it'll be uploaded on this channel which is my main channel (I'm too lazy to move my playlists from my first channel). Hopefully the video will be out soonish (maybe like a month from now is what I'm aiming for). Working on the visuals has been a lot for me sadly. I've had the script done for almost a year, just need to put myself in gear and push through to finish it.
I remember when I was playing D&D with my friends long long time ago module had bandits that arrived to a scene from a specific city. It was fairly irrelevant background information written in the module. Coincidentally one of my players was playing a character who had in his bio that thief's guild from the same specific city was hunting him. Unexpectedly bandits were captured by players and interrogated. Without thinking much about it I as a DM revealed information about their city of origin. The player with a backstory was like:"Why are you here?! Have you traveled this far just to murder me?!" Not gonna lie, as a fairly new DM at that time I've panicked there😄 Love the emergent gameplay, can understand why some developers/designers might dislike it
Emergent gameplay: There was a streamer doing BG3 as a solo character run. They fought the golem in the adamantine forge, which has a big hammer you can slam down to deal huge damage... But the golem only goes adjacent to your character, so they had to stand in the killzone too. So how did they win? They dropped a potion on the ground. The hammer broke the boss, then the character, then the potion, which spilled out and healed the character so they weren't downed anymore. Even Larian didn't know that would work that way. And it's beautiful.
Is putting a basket or a bucket on a shop keeper's head in Skyrim, in order to rob the shop, "Emergent Gameplay"? If so, I love it. Thanks for your videos!
yes! the ai has a view cone that triggers detection, a bucket is a solid object that the game rightfully recognizes as opaque (trust me, for a physics object you don't see that all too often) and the stealing mechanic depends on them having you in their viewcone at the time of the crime. Those are all individual elements and i dont think it was ever intended or even though of that players could use physics objects to block that viewcone this is a prime example of emergent gameplay
Otoh, if I pick up a "Philter of the Phantom" from a barrow in Ivarstead and just happen to think, "What if my character downs this 'Philter of the Phantom' before reentering the Inn. I wonder how the NPCs will respond? Will they shreak in terror and try to attack him? What?" Then, of course, they don't. They don't respond at all when the "ghost" walks into the Inn. lol Nothing to get upset or angry about, but I was expecting *something* to happen in that event and nothing did.
Skyrim is very bad in terms of emergent gameplay. Whenever you approach mission creatively, it eighter crashes the game or you plainly can't do what you are trying to do.
Emergent, perhaps in game mechanics abuse. Complete guff in the sense that NPCs cannot react to you clearly being a douche canoe specifically to steal from them.
@@jashloseher578 that is by definition emergent. not everything has to involve quest designs or npc reactions. Halo is known for having immense offerings of emergent gameplay because of its complex sandbox vs enemy type in various environments. similarly titanfall (more specifically 2) is known for its emergent gameplay due to its vast array of toolsets that goes beyond weapons, and movement mechanics inside its diverse environments. Pray 2 and half life 2 use their sophisticated physics systems to create emergent gameplay (halo does that to an extent as well, one only has to watch mint blitz do literally anything in that game), the new zelda games are equally big on this with their interconnected physics sinulations and material sandbox, specifically 2 with its building mechanic. you dont need npc reactions for it to be emergent, and emergent absolutely can mean to abuse something that was designed on one way, to function a different way without breaking any of the games actual rules
I love games that are rules-based and less scripted! One of the worst feelings in games, I think, is when the player realizes the game world is inconsistent with the rules it already established. Not just because they player couldn't DO something in that moment, but because it instantly downgrades the quality of the simulation in the player's mind. Meaning, they will likely tend to NOT try things that the game might support because the curtain has already been pulled back on the fact that this is "just a game". I think the best word for this is "verisimilitude" as it refers to the "believability" of the game in its own setting and not "realism" or "immersion" which cover different feelings.
This is fascinating! Emergent gameplay is such a fascinating concept, and it's amazing how it can lead to such unexpected and creative gameplay experiences. Although I don't make videos about roleplay games, this concept can be implemented in the other games as well!
There's this talk from more than 10 years ago by Jonathan Blow about it, it's called truth in game design or something like that. He says you can do it more like a "style" of directing a game where instead of you having a vision of all the systems working together, you just visualize the basic systems and as you play it, you find these emergent interactions and start designing your game around them, almost as if you let the game design itself. I think it's easier to do it on puzzle and action games, on RPGs where the focus is on exploration and writing it probably gets harder but emergent gameplay always comes up.
Back in 04 there was a player called Larryr in RuneScape. She basically ran a business in RuneScape soon after the Runecrafting skill was released by essentially hiring players to help her train it faster than anyone else, and in an MMO, she was not only rank 1 in the (at the time) slowest skill to grind, but also around 5 times higher than the player in rank 2 (in exp for the skill), which was unheard of for anything in RuneScape. She was later immortalized in the game as a similar named NPC was made as the Master of Runecraftnig.
I'm a software engineer, not in the games industry, but have been binging your videos the past few days because they're interesting insights into the games industry and game design. This video is particularly interesting to me not only because I'm interested in emergent gameplay, but also because the way you talk about the independent general game mechanics that can be combined in interesting way is paralleled by Ken Thompson's Unix philosophy, the idea that you should build sets of simple, clear, and modular tools that can be combined to perform actions that weren't necessarily intended by the tools' creators. And that led me in turn to realize that, in a way, players who engage with these game systems can be considered to be doing a form of programming, combining various operations into an algorithm to achieve a certain outcome or solve a particular problem.
And the worst part about dragging this body back was that it was really heavy. I have also tried to raise this guy from the dead. Then realized that i cannot and that my characters were not strong to pick him up without getting encumbered, so i had to run and get Minsk.
@@SpectorCorp If my intuition serves me, he is speaking of the game Baldur's Gate, where at the north of the Friendly Arm super pub you will find a rundown farm with a very old man concerned about the whereabouts of his son. Long story short, his body weighted a TON and only the strongest member of your party could carry the body.
Baldur's Gate it sounds like. Bioware had a bad habit of quietly ignoring the common uses of certain Dungeon-and-Dragons 2nd Edition mechanics for their own convenience of coding. You had several spells that could bring the dead back to life, but all of them were really only coded to work on your Party members. That NPC your were escorting and got killed six seconds ago? Nope, it's dead and you lose the quest. Find the dead body of a boy who died just hours ago? Nope. Worst of all, the spell descriptions DON'T emphasize that the spells won't normally work on NPCs other than your own party, so you could burn a lot of expensive magic on an NPC's corpse trying to be clever and the game just says nope. @@SpectorCorp
That must be it, I wasn't sure what game Tim was talking about. Adding salt to the wound, the ankheg cave has a ton of good loot, including armor, and the ankheg shells are super heavy, and valuable. But that's the area where the player has to haul out a body...
There is a quest in Bloodlines that sadly is hard-coded. You need to destroy paintings and the only weapon you can use for that is a knife, no other weapon works...
I remember in school, that the people that wanted specific method executed in particular way to be the ones in charge. The people are trained to execute known strategies and not figure out stuff. To some people that's definitely a character trait, and for some that's just laziness. Maybe everyone is in a hurry to some particular place, maybe if you do all the "correct" decisions you get to heaven or something. Maybe there's a high score screen at the end of the tunnel.
Prey 2017 was the last game I played with a good set of options, it's not perfect but you tend to have a good mix of options. I relay hoped we where going to get more physics based interactions after Half-life 2, it never relay happened.
How they went from near perfect first person perspective in dark Messiah, to a game where somehow they made every possible option to give the impression that the pistol was pointing to the corner of the screen, Even managed to change the position of the crosshair, which if they had gone the other way and moved it in the other direction it might have helped.. but they moved it in the direction that made it worse lol.. There were so many cool things about that game.. and I still don't understand why.. like like the shotgun more or less points like it feels like the bullets are going in where they're supposed to be going you know... But that pistol gas lights me every time, and it's not the only weapon that has problems like that.. and I still don't understand where that studio just has this dynamic shift from again just genuinely one of the best first person perspectives ever, like a game that platforming was not a problem on on account of how good the body awareness was. And then you get dishonored where, clearly some some things have changed.. but let's pretend your arms and legs just kind of retract as as to how they are needed but they're still coming from your shoulders and your hips... And then.. they made a really brilliant game, that I couldn't play because in no possible way were any of the things I would do I was doing half the time actually things that I could have possibly been doing based on what it was showing me... And all they would have had to do is a little you know.. maybe don't lock down the developers console, so I can just adjust the view model, but no.. no.. we need to lock every single option out of that thing, the only people that will know our secrets are the hackers that have to use memory scanning and we're going to make that hard too.. Good God can you imagine if somebody tried to adjust the The field of view? Can you imagine! They'd be able to look around and be comfortable and move around with such speed and coherency, we'd never be able to balance around that.. and this is.. this is pray 2017, I feel like maybe there's a few too many parts that don't really get together and sync up in some cases.. or something I don't know.. whatever happened to like that direction we were going where the things that you did looked like you were doing things.. And why has full motion video ideas started to make a comeback in my 3D games, cuz the ones that actually do make it look like I'm doing the thing are basically movies at that point because they're so desperately obsessed with trying to make it look like it's doing the thing realistically that I don't actually get a play.. looking at you calisto lol
Hi Tim, great video as always. I was waiting for the right moment to ask this question: Don't you think that emergent gameplay and extreme hand holding in quests are somewhat at odds? Ok, probably I should refrase the question: Don't you think that the way that quests are presented in many modern RPGs (via super detailed log entries and omniscient quest markers) discourages players experimentation? After all, why bother to find an "unorthodox" solution to a problem that the game has already solved for me?
I love this topic! Thank you for these great insights! You are talking about Baldur's Gate 1 aren't you 😀 The resurrection spell/ability/item has become an increasingly frustrating pet peeve of mine especially given how little thought is put in how it could be used in a world with actual people. Even some of the best games do little to handle such elements...Rant over Thank you again for this very fun video! Have a great day 🙂
Great tip about how to write NPC reactions or quests that work harmoniously with emergent gameplay. Like Tim said, it can be hard to track down and ensure every little possibility exists, so how does one know when to write extra lines? Would love to hear more tips in this vein, since I really do enjoy emergent gameplay and/or mastery of mechanics through exploring emergent gameplay. What I would find most helpful would be like having a collection of reliable go-tos to use in an (informal) auditing process, or a "lens" as Jesse Schell may put it. I know I am asking for the moon here, and I'm not expecting Tim or anyone to provide it; just that it would be nice to have or develop one as you make the game.
My favorite emergent gameplay comes from bugs or crazy mod combinations. When I first played Oblivion (release patch), the count of Skingrad was hilariously bugged for me. I was a vampire, and wanted to do everything vampirey the game offered. I thought of the count as an ancient wise vampire to teach me the ways. His introduction is grandious and serious and he's an intimidating character at the start. Then he bugged for me. He was stuck trying to engage me in conversation, and would follow me and start random dialogue from the quest. This continued when I left the castle, and even when I left Skingrad. He followed me literally everywhere and anywhere. Fast travelling only delayed the issue, as he would slowly walk across the world to make his point. Thing is, he's a level 4 vampire. He's absolutely cooked in daylight, but as an essential NPC, he's immortal. So I would be in a field killing a bandit in the daytime, having forgot about the count, then hear a distant "OFFF... URGHHH... AHHHH" and see the count running after me, dying several times in his sprint, to talk to me, then die again as soon as I closed the window. It was like It Follows meets Karate Kid. He was my weird companion for the rest of the game. Only possible because Bethesda generalised all those systems. He was a vampire that had no special specific rules, so had the same attribute changes a player would, he could travel across the map, people reacted to him as a vampire etc.
the earliest versions of Metroid Prime (for the Gamecube) allowed players to break the intended sequence of events in order to progress through the game in an order the developers had not intended. each new version has patched out more of these creative sequence breaks and that has always disappointed me
I had pretty much that exact resurrection scroll problem in Baldur's Gate 3 when you find Lae'zel. I thought I'd clever and let the two people that wanted her dead kill her and then when they leave I'll just resurrect her, but the scroll didn't work on her.
There used to be a similar thing with Karlach but it worked. Felt like a cool loophole with the devil contract. Idk what problems it could cause but it was cool while it lasted
I feel the situation described at 9:15 is particularly frustrating. Because in my opinion they don't need to do all that much to sufficiently explain why that's not option for this situation. I can think of several narrative justifications for that not to work. Instead of "invalid target" it could pop up a dialogue that says "He's missing his left hand and the spell will only work on intact bodies" or "there's a competing high-level magical spell preventing resurrection" or something / anything along those lines to explain why that doesn't work here. The problem isn't with the fact that they didn't allow you to do it, just with the fact that there was nothing to account for the player's understandable impulse to attempt to use that scroll they found. I'd much prefer that they find a way to make it work, but if worst comes to worst and it is absolutely vital that the sequence of events happens in that specific way (or there's not enough time to implement it), just provide a reasonable explanation for why. That's all that truly needs to be done. This isn't about emergent gameplay, more like preempting the natural emergent combinations in the genre, but I played a point and click adventure game called Hiveswap that wowed me by having a specific dialogue reaction for *every* possible interaction. Despite the fact that it was just a normal point and click adventure, that still stuck with me. So no matter what key items you rubbed together, it would have something to unique to say about it, even when it doesn't progress the story or puzzle any further. Instead of saying "I can't use that right now" or "I don't think that will work here" or some other generic response, someone actually wrote something specific for that combination. And I think something like that could have worked for the situation with the resurrection scroll. The problem for me is not so much that they don't want you to solve it that way (though, I do obviously prefer if it just works), but rather the lack of any kind of consideration for the player's desire to attempt that.
Things like emergent gameplay seem like another good reason any game designer should at least play, if not run, one tabletop campaign. Having been both player and game master, you learn quick about how even the most mundane situations can spin out of control through twists and turns you NEVER anticipated being chained together. Game Master: "The white dragon bursts out of the roof of the ice tunnel and gets ready to breath frost." Player: "So, like, the dragon is direct above us?" Game Master: "Yeah." Player: "Holding onto the edges of the hole he dug and hanging above us?" Game Master: "Pretty much." Player: "I cast Tasha's Hideous Laughter." Game Master: *rolls* "...crap..." Player: "It worked?!" Game Master: "Yes... The dragon cackles deeply, slipping free out of the hole, and starts falling." Players cheer. Game Master smiles. Players stare worried. Game Master: "Everyone roll a Dex save." Player: "What? Why? He can't act." Game Master: "Oh, I know. But, he's falling down... directly over you all."
I'm giving this a THUMBS UP before Tim even does his intro! Because... "EMERGENT GAMEPLAY!" The hallmark of all the best types of games. :D (I'm a stallwart fan of games like Thief: The Dark Project, Dishonored 2, etc)
I rescued Virgil from dying in the basement. I intervened and killed the ruffians so fast that he didn't die, but his dialogue for the rest of the game still reflects the idea that he died and you brought him back. I'm not salty about it or anything, I just thought it was funny.
Breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom are masterclass games in emergent gameplay. The system mechanics of those games are absolutely mind boggling
Amazing mechanically but unfortunately TOTK underlines the limits of how they connect it to meaningful world building. BOTW did something fresh at the right time, TOTK doubled down on the sandbox physics much more than anything else, for better and for worse.
For a long time, I was thinking about an adjacent concept of Emergent Narrative. It's when a player is given tools to give importance to game elements(such as naming people, items, events) and from there, those elements can interact into a narrative(for example, one soldier panics in combat and kills your favorite warrior; you can spin a story around that soldier having a redemption arc). Games like XCOM, Dwarf Fortress, and Rimworld provide such tools. I was wondering why more games don't go for Emergent Narrative, especially since sandbox RPGs are all about spinning a story around whatever you want to go for. I feel like older games have more potential for this sort of thing than most of what comes out today.
that reminds me.. how does pickpocketing works in original Fallout ? I mean, how does it calculate the chances of success ? Me and my friends had all this "true and tested" methods to steal despite low steal skill. Like you had to hold the item with mouse cursor for longer time (not just tossing it into inventory) and that improves your chances - looking back at it, it sounds silly, but I could swear that the chances were higher that way :D
If anyone here hasn’t heard of Space Station 13, it’s a great example of emergent gameplay. Tons and tons of systems layered on top of each other in such a way where crazy stuff can happen
Great video, and solid points, the game design stuff about the locked doors was especially interesting. However, I think the example you used is a pretty weak one specifically because you're talking about resurrection. To my mind, ressurect/raise-dead/etc is almost *always* a gameplay mechanic, not a story mechanic. It's there to make the game more fun for the players, it's not something that you can just casually do in the setting, because then the setting would break. It's the same as "Why don't they use Phoenix Down on Aerith?" because Phoenix Down isn't actually something that exists in story, it's something that exists in gameplay. And yeah, FF5 subverts that, and it does get hazy with DnD since Forgotten Realms likes to pretend that Resurrect is something that exists in the world, but it's always been one that I've been okay with letting slide. Obviously you can handle for that and design around "Yes resurrection exists in this setting, how does that affect things?" but that idea is so, so centralising that it now changes huge swaths of the plot. Like you ask why you can't just raise him and bring him back, but if you could do that as a general thing for any given quest or NPC that dies, then suddenly the storyline can't have any big tension moments without explicitly taking resurrection off the table. It's just too centralising, it dominates the narrative and dominates how everyone would interact with that world, especially with high-level adventurers around (and especially in a system that's ignoring spell components). So it's usually a lot less messy to just say "It's there for gameplay only." even if that's not as elegant.
@@avatarname0008 Me too!! Just wanted to say that it's not the only features that make an emergent gameplay, as most people nowadays (even indies) think.
I'm glad you are of the opinion that emergent gameplay should be encouraged. It's sad to see developers take the stance of "this game must **only** be played in the way I intended and nothing more!" because it feels like those developers are doing a disservice to the art of game development. Maybe some people are just in it for the paycheck, but it's still unfortunate.
That's what was cool in Arcanum, what we liked as kids. It was realistic in that it was reactive and there were a lot of things that just made sense, like simulation. FF 20 years - ppl call free to roam maps where nothing you do really matters free open world gameplay :(
Thanks for another great video Tim! Your goal driven, systemic design approach sounds very similar to the design philosophy of immersive sims, like those made by Arkane. Do you play any immersive sims? I’ve always felt that the combination RPGs and immersive sims would give the highest level of player freedom. Weird West is one recent example of this. It was heavily inspired by Fallout 1. Have you tried it?
Speaking of reloading a save and redoing 20 Minutes of Gameplay: What are your opinions on save systems? (Especially older) PC titles tend to have those "save anytime, anywhere" systems that tend to fill up your load menu with tons and tons of save states, whereas games that come from the console-first market have strongly clung to autosaves on a profile or fixed save points, long after those stopped being technical neccessities. Where do you see the pros and cons in terms of play experience, iron man options and is there any more exotic solution people might not be aware of?
Emergent gameplay- sometimes better known as "edge cases you didn't think about, which happened to not throw errors and crash your game, and now you have to think about them." Sometimes the reason to be "mad at your players" over emergent gameplay is that you need to face facts- your players let you know that you need to take some more formal programming courses and become a better programmer before trying to implement so much complexity! Thank you Tim.
How come management can recklessly chase trends and fail predictably but never be held accountable and always the developers are always getting fired? Telltale management is the only one I can think of and it took bankrupting the studio for them to be fired.
You'll have to look beyond the gaming industry for clues about that one. It just so happens, unfortunately, to be among the latest affected, no doubt because it's relatively new in comparison to others.
Related to that: what about not setting main-story NPCs immortal? The player can then easily break the main quest killing them. But there could be always a fallback (finding a note, getting a message, unlocking a passage).
That's funny, explosives to get through doors.. I'm immediately reminded of this basically standard practice that ended up becoming a thing in Afghanistan where you just didn't go through doors anymore but you blew up walls.. it's basically how you you entered an exited things in certain areas... Just remember a bunch of soldiers hanging out outside the wall waiting for a tank so they could go in, and the door is it's not the door it was like a gate but like it's right there.. not to take away from the seriousness of that or or tragedy or anything.. but now I'm immediately thinking of John dies at the end, this door cannot be opened!
I love emergent gameplay as long as it isn't a crutch. For example, I know that Star Citizen is still in alpha (heh) but they lean on emergent gameplay as a way to keep people playing without much in the way of fun, directed content. I'm not sure what the ratio is, but I feel like there should be far more actual content than there emergent gameplay opportunities.
That story about the Raise Dead scroll... y'know, I once tried to cast a Speak With Dead (or sth like that) spell on the dead dwarf that starts the story of Arcanum...
I wonder if generalists help or would hurt the 'chance' of emergent gameplay. If Designe and Code are done by different persons , the designer could be more likely to unknowingly implement possibilitys for emergent gameplay where if its done by a generalist it could lead to them knowing they would be able to do X or Y and design differently , more railed. On the other hand I can see both being the exact opposite.
If players count as generalists, it could be disastrous. I've seen too many examples of a community's "leading lights" essentially design a game to suit them and their interests and playstyles. The heck with what anyone else might appreciate. Example: A RUclipsr notes a controversy about a change in systems or mechanics and tells his "followers" he doesn't see an issue with them and, very likely, honestly doesn't, but only because he's going exactly where he's told and doing exactly what he's told to do by the game in its current state. Of course, if everyone plays the game exactly that way, there would be, in fact, no issue. And...if they don't? In at least one example with which I'm familiar: HUGE issues. Only two, but those two make others in the community think the developers are insisting everyone play a certain way when they're actually just responding to feedback from a very few people.
Arcanum follows the conjure spirit rule, and you can talk to Stennar at the crash site. But it's just a generic "Who is here?... It hurts.. Let me go" lines :(
"When I say that I like emergent gameplay and it was in a lot of my games, I'm not speaking for everybody on those teams. There were a lot of people who did not like emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay causes a lot of unpredictability for the designers and for narrative designers who have to write story and dialogue and for system mechanics designers who are trying to plan for things that happen so they can set flags and have reaction to it in the game. Letting the player mix up mechanics and do things that weren't planned for makes all of their jobs much more difficult." It is concerning to hear that a commonly cited argument against implementing emergent gameplay systems stems from team objections based entirely on whether it will make their jobs more difficult. Rather than empower richer player-driven narrative possibilities, this stance favors mitigating potential hassles for isolated developer roles over net value to user experience - an inverted set of priorities given games exist first and foremost for audiences, not creators themselves. Firstly, it is self-serving, prioritizing the convenience of a development role over the quality of the player’s experience. Good game design should focus first on crafting an engaging experience, not an easy job. Furthermore, almost everything meaningful about games involves creators taking on ambitious hard problems because the benefits are ultimately worth it. Dynamic lighting, advanced physics, customizable characters, open worlds, multiplayer support - all make many jobs more difficult. But we willingly take on those challenges because of how much it can improve player agency and immersion. The entire field of game development is built upon tackling complex creative and technical issues in order to enable deeper gameplay possibilities. So citing mere production difficulty alone sells short the aspirational ethos of pushing boundaries that drives the entire medium forward. It makes it seem like the team is unwilling to rise to the occasion and instead just wants to play it safe. Game development complexity arises from the harmony of varied systems pushing boundaries. For example, programmers tackle complex AI and physics systems crucial for enabling gameplay dynamism. Artists depict diverse environments and customizable avatars essential for heightened immersion. Designers craft intricate faction reputation systems that allow for emergent social dynamics. Composers produce adaptive music that better responds to players. By the same logic, almost any desired game element could theoretically be argued as “optional” or “too complicated for someone’s workflow.” But how much would we miss out on if we always took that stance? Open worlds exponentially increase content needs and design complexity, but they grant far more player freedom over structured lanes. Advanced physics enables more spectacular and simulative explosions instead of cheap fakery. Customizable avatars allow for greater representation rather than fixed defaults. All these features involve various disciplines taking on more challenging problems because enabling those magical gameplay moments is part of the creative vision. It is the harmony of many complex, interlinking systems that gives rise to the depth players lose themselves in for hours on end. And it is the unpredictable results when those simulations collide that generates the personalized nostalgic anecdotes we share fondly about our playthroughs. Not only that, but emergent gameplay provides immense rewards for players that are inherently unpredictable and thus difficult to specifically design for. The magic is in those unscripted moments - the anecdotes and shared stories stemming from unexpected results. That is what great memorable games are made of. By the same rationale, those other experts could constrain player experience due to difficulty. Visual artists could advocate for fixed environments rather than ambitious open worlds that demand more asset range. Audio designers may push back on interactive music systems that complicate emotional underscoring. We would lose out on so much magic. Any one member of the collaborative effort could cite difficulty facilitating aspects of that emergent potential. But in isolation that undervalues their importance to the greater goals. Meeting challenges head-on and working in service of rich player interactions is what drives teams to fully realize the atmospheric potential of digital fantasy worlds. Avoiding emergent gameplay solely because it disrupts predictability and controlled scopes seems antithetical to those creating aspirations. In the end, meeting ambitious creative challenges head on is the heart and soul of worthwhile game development. Player-empowering features like emergent gameplay epitomize exactly the types of ideals the team should aspire towards, despite added complexity. Avoiding rich emergent interactivity solely because it makes any single job more difficult is therefore highly frustrating and fundamentally misaligned with the ethos of team ambition I feel games require. No one said this medium would be easy. There's a reason development teams must be ambitious Renaissance innovators utilizing cutting edge expertise. That's why citing merely production convenience as a counterargument rings hollow. We should expect and welcome the challenge - anything less underserves what makes digital worlds special.
I love emergent gameplay. And what is a cherry on top - is when game has a line that acknoleges it somehow. For example, you got to some area using trick - it would be nice to have some specially placed items here and/or note from devs masked as some ingame guy who acknowleges that it is hard to get there. I mean there have to be implemented some ways to legalise those tricks.
My emergent gameplay consists of making rounds of selling loot for hours, it’s terrible. I am so thankful that neither Fallout nor Arcanum had merchant cash limit.
Hi Tim, great video! What do you think about speedrunning as a form of emergent gameplay? It seems like some devs are very against it, while others foster that behavior in their game
"You can't plan for everything the players are gonna do" I'm specifically reminded of people bringing infinite durability armor/weapons out of Operation: Anchorage in Fallout 3 by shoving a corpse in the simulation pod with you and mashing interact during the loading screen 😂 And all of the various methods for escaping with the Gold Bars in New Vegas's Dead Money (that Obsidian TRIED to patch out but players kept finding NEW methods)
Hi Tim, some of my most enjoyable emergent gameplay experiences have been in Star Citizen and I think the nature of it's design lends itself very well to the emergent concept, so I'm interested; have you tried the game? Could you offer an opinion on it? Very interested in your thoughts. Many thanks.
I'm not a huge fan of emergent story telling, but emergent gameplay is great. When most games say they have emergent stories, that usually means they don't have a story at all, and are expecting the player to consume the gameplay as a story. I'm a player that vastly prefers gameplay over story, but I still like to have a story. Unfortunately, emergent gameplay, in my opinion, does not take the place of a well written story. I'm looking at you, Rimworld.
Hi Tim, hope you're well. My friends and I had a decent conversation about creating games with AI. I erred on the side of "this is destroying the humanity behind art and culture" but some of my friends argued the benefits of short-cuts, drafting concept art, and of course, saving money/resources. Any thoughts on this? Any idea how AI tools may impact the industry or process of making games going forward? Take care
It very much is. Here’s some homework: the next time you play your favorite immersive sim, try to identify something you did that almost certainly wasn't explicitly intended by the designer.
I started dismembering non-human enemies for meat because we needed food. We were runaway slaves. So eventually my friend who was a GM made me watch an anime about cooking monsters from the dungeon. It happened after we've gotten madnes from witnessing other god and ate a demonic monkey and hallucinated a bit from it. Now I'm a priest and a cook and I need to convince GM that the food I cooked is tasty.
Also i think you shouldn't be mad for hard on yourself because they didn't find the solution you scripted if it was an option or they choose to do something you didn't expect.
Emergent game play sounds to me like game design bugs as opposed to coding bugs. They're unexpected, but the structure does technically allow for it. There is probably something to be discussed on the topic of making a system, watch it do something unexpected, and then instead of stamping it out you build off of it.
The problem of this concept is that sometimes things can occur that makes the game worse. In multiplayer games: Botting, Chinese gold farmers, GDKP (in WoW), mages selling leveling services, etc. These are all bad. In singleplayer, in for example Skyrim: Putting a bucket on a vendor's head so that you can freely steal everything, exploiting terrain to make a bear move back and forth, abusing bugs to forge/enchant weapons that one-hit everything. Doing any of these can ruin the game, because one may remember that it's not worth playing because one could do any of these things. What is required is for developers to have the foresight (or at least reaction) to fix/prevent such problems.
"Doing any of these can ruin the game" -- If it's a single player game, how exactly does any of that ruin it? The player doesn't have to do any of those things. Just knowing it can be done doesn't mean the player will necessarily want to play that way. If it's a MP game, especially one with a PvP component, I can see why developers would need to be concerned about it and patch out actual exploits that provide some players with unfair advantages over others. Otherwise, what's the problem so long it's not harming the experience for anyone else?
@@lrinfi Given that it is possible, it will always be a temptation. I find myself doing several things in a singleplayer game that are "best to do", even though they are bad game mechanics, exploitative or somewhat cheating. A game that has this is fundamentally flawed, and the intention was that the player either doesn't go that way yet or has to use other means. For example a better path-finding or smarter NPC AIs could solve a lot of these problems. "what's the problem so long it's not harming the experience for anyone else?" - Because players can gain unfair advantages, which may impact the economy negatively. If you find an infinite money source, and then flood the realm with that money, it has a ripple effect. So I can understand how "emergent gameplay" can be a problem. What Tim speaks of is an intentional design choice: Design things in a way they can be solved in multiple ways including unforeseen one - as long as the requirement of that quest are fulfilled, it's good to go. But what he says requires developers to actively make it possible.
I don't see it as problems. Okay, physics bugs are a problem, but not the bucket hat and stuff like that. In online games - yes, abusing bugs is a problem, but usually it's a problem created by devs themselves. If the game didn't force you into pay or grind choice - people wouldn't use cheats and boosting services.
@@LN.2233 And what about putting a bucket on a vendor's head? What about abusing bad path-finding of enemies? What about exploiting a bug in the crafting system? Or glitching to hidden vendor chests for free items? It becomes really hard to draw the line, and the solution is simply to fix these exploitable issues, as to no longer tempt anyone to do them. Skyrim is just a prime example of this. They created what, 10 different versions of it, but managed to NOT fix these known bugs and issues? I am not sure these can be considered "emergent gameplay" at this point... but they are things developers did not plan for, that players can do.
8:00 hate those too thats why i hate these types of puzzles with just 1 solution no freedom of exploring novel ideas but rather hoping u know what the dev thought up during puzzle creation...very yikes
Some of the most memorable moments in gaming are the emergent gameplay or when designers have anticipated/iterated for players getting around things.
I got to play Dishonored 2 at a gaming convention, pre-release, and there's a section where a villain comes out to monologue but if you're quick enough you can teleport in to the crawl space between the walls.
Then when the villain comes out to monologue instead he laments that the player isn't there.
And given the context of a convention, it was an unforgettable moment.
Most developers would 'fix' that at the QA stage rather than design around it.
Dishonored 2 is a true masterpiece.
@@muzboz Dishonored series and Arkane's Prey are just the best games ever made in my mind. Prey is, to me in many ways, the perfect fucking game.
Noita is the epitome of this art.
Troika Programmer: Done, I hard coded the transition to the Void and there is no way the players will get back to the mainland once they cross the portal. So yeah boss, there is no need for "Aftermath Content" anymore :)
Players: Hold our Charm Spells. >:3
There's a great second answer in this video i really enjoyed
Q: How do game developers account for every player choice?
A: If your setting is rich enough and your game designed well enough, you shouldn't be able to
Game Design doesn't form in a vacuum.
I feel like I screwed up by watching the holodeck episodes of next generation long before I ever played video games.. for some stupid reason in my head space and I still think this way, the goal was to get to that.. The goal was the dungeons & dragons campaign but we got to do all the things, like we're there doing the things..
And watching that philosophy both explode and almost become a norm for PC gaming for a minute there, at least a lot of aspects of it.. and then just immediately shrink to nothingness when the seventh generation hit.. oh that that's still really bites a bit..
It really wasn't until I started watching a lot of RUclips though that I started to understand why these things were the way they were.. well maybe not why.. but that a lot of the things I liked about video games that I thought were the objective positives, as it turns out would have been considered maybe a nice touch, or even just something that never even processed in their brain.. and the things that they liked were the things that I was going further and further out of my way to never ever come across,
I remember a convo interview with one of the heads that Infinity Ward, and he was talking about how ragdolls were stupid.. and that open non-linear gameplay was a fad.. this was right around the same time far cry came out so, the idea that call of duty formula where you basically hold a forward button down in a rail shooter.. it was going out of Vogue real fast... I'm just sitting here like.. dude.. You're actively trying to encourage all of the things that I don't like, stop it boy! And just you know what a joke obviously..
There's people have a real short memory, usually you've got a defeat a a design trend that's competing, but haven't it just fizzle and having it fizzle into nothingness without even a mention and just kind of get retconned out of existence like JJ Abrams got involved in the plot... Ow that that definitely hurt.
You definitely got weird vibes that things were going in a weird way and that perhaps there had been a reality shift where that PC gaming of the '90s and early 2000s actually no longer existed when Bioshock came out and people were calling it an immersive SIM, especially like a year or two after SWAT 4 had come out. .
It's just it's so weird, you feel like you're in the same space everybody wants the same things, in certain genres especially with RPGs cuz RPGs are so wide in the vehicles for it... And the labels of RPG now basically apply to everything whereas kind of usually just applied to role-playing, and I remember my own personal was drafted from dialogue in PC gamer and whatnot.. r PG is a game where you can interact with the story and the characters and affect them, like dungeons & dragons, your actions as a character that a role you were playing as if you were them...
An action RPG, was a game where you didn't do any of that.. but you still got to do character classes and stat boosts, and and all that fun shenanigans.. but you pretty much you know you didn't really get to make any real decisions about the story you were just going to go through it...
I don't ever remember the term immersive some entering the lexicon until a few years ago so.. Go figure that dark Messiah was more of an RPG than Oblivion ever was.. and it had almost no consideration for plot dynamics, there wasn't what it was trying to do.. it just happened to do it more than a game that actively didn't lol..
Also at gameplay too and that was kind of kind of nifty not going to lie, and then you get something like chivalry where you basically have that last component of dark Messiah that would have made it the utter greatest thing of a melee combat fantasy system.. and. Yeah there's still some multiplayer games in that style.. but for some reason All of the hack and slash fantasy games, have Target lock Dodge roll health bar...
And the best ones of those to me at least are the ones that actually created a gameplay loop outside of that... And then next thing you know... Games are in playable if they don't have target lock!
And I'm sitting here like you mean that button that I had to unbind because it kept screwing up my gameplay? Like it's bad enough I can't manually aim.. but if we're doing the character action game thing which is what I thought it was at the time before it became the souls gameplay thing...
And one of the things that cracks me up the most, it's the things that dark souls doesn't bother with at all.. that makes that game completely unappealing, the details.. they seem to miss the most important ones to me anyways.. but they have all the other ones that get missed by the people that do understand the kind of details that that matter to me...
And I'm just kind of at a point where how did things get so stupidly rigid? Cuz you can solve a lot of this just by having options.. which is a point of contention cuz apparently having options is.. who wants options? And then I'll watch a streamer desperately try to figure out what the controls are to a game when there's an options menu and then complain that the default bind was bad when they could just change it.. and it doesn't even process in their brain. .
So you have an entire generation of people that not only never process the idea that there are options don't want the idea that there are options but are actively inconvenienced by the idea that there are options and absolutely need things to be along the same lines as the things before and if you're going to do something new you have to actively remove something else instead of trying to make it work.. Even on a mouse and keyboard it's bad, even on the 2/3 of the keyboard that we have now as the standard lol...
Like you'll have developers actively remove things like leaning from a game because they want to use e as the interact key, and I'm just sitting here like.. how was that the solution to removing one of the more important aspects of gameplay interactivity in a three-dimensional shooter game? And of course, I come from the days when Raven would bind them to something like g and h or something like that... And I bound them to c&v, cuz I can hit them with my thumb and I needed to use e for the interact button lol and that's just what you did, I don't know how the default developer control schemes came into being because some of them were real wacky and I would love to know,
But I mean people didn't really start getting into the WSAD thing with control in space and whatnot until quake multiplayer custom binds became a popular thing to try to emulate for all the pros and whatnot.. it's not to say it didn't exist, but this was also a game where they really wanted it to be mouse dependent but absolutely could not release it in a state where you were just expecting them to look around with the mouse..
I'll stop now before it gets even further into rant land.. I'm trying to back everything up with some more context, but that just makes it worse of course
And this is the problem in that anytime I find myself trying to have a conversation about gaming, I'm realizing that I have to explain the concepts that I'm talking about as things, cuz there's it's it's not even not a guarantee so much as it's almost as a rule pretty much that I'm coming at this from a headspace that was a far far divergent evolution from where they did...
It's kind of like one of those moments where you get people talking about how you should just switch to console instead of playing on PC cuz it's expensive.. and then to me it's like that's not even a remote option.. everything that like a PC isn't just a fancy console, but it kind of is now, it shouldn't be and it doesn't have to be.. but that's how people treat it and that's a developers treat it... Which is also why people are okay with streaming, then the biggest issue to them is the latency and the quality of the stream not the fact that they're literally playing through a game like they're binging Netflix.. and the idea that they would be doing anything other than consuming the the fruits that were provided by the developer, or something different with the same thing, no that's that's not how games work you you turn game on and then you play game, well sort of The game plays for you most of the time.
@@JackWsecongratulations you have posted the longest comment ever on RUclips!
I'm currently writing a video essay about Emergent Gameplay so thank you so much for this video Tim! The insights with your developer perspective is absolutely amazing to hear about. I hope it would be okay to share your perspective in said video essay (I will obviously give you full credit for any clip I use).
Certainly! I look forward to your video.
Where will the video be posted?
@@THExRISER it'll be uploaded on this channel which is my main channel (I'm too lazy to move my playlists from my first channel). Hopefully the video will be out soonish (maybe like a month from now is what I'm aiming for). Working on the visuals has been a lot for me sadly. I've had the script done for almost a year, just need to put myself in gear and push through to finish it.
@@naughtylink6838 I already have plenty of tabs open so I'll leave your channel open and check on it from time to time, looking forward to your video!
I remember when I was playing D&D with my friends long long time ago module had bandits that arrived to a scene from a specific city. It was fairly irrelevant background information written in the module.
Coincidentally one of my players was playing a character who had in his bio that thief's guild from the same specific city was hunting him.
Unexpectedly bandits were captured by players and interrogated. Without thinking much about it I as a DM revealed information about their city of origin.
The player with a backstory was like:"Why are you here?! Have you traveled this far just to murder me?!"
Not gonna lie, as a fairly new DM at that time I've panicked there😄
Love the emergent gameplay, can understand why some developers/designers might dislike it
Emergent gameplay: There was a streamer doing BG3 as a solo character run. They fought the golem in the adamantine forge, which has a big hammer you can slam down to deal huge damage... But the golem only goes adjacent to your character, so they had to stand in the killzone too. So how did they win? They dropped a potion on the ground. The hammer broke the boss, then the character, then the potion, which spilled out and healed the character so they weren't downed anymore. Even Larian didn't know that would work that way. And it's beautiful.
Is putting a basket or a bucket on a shop keeper's head in Skyrim, in order to rob the shop, "Emergent Gameplay"?
If so, I love it.
Thanks for your videos!
yes! the ai has a view cone that triggers detection, a bucket is a solid object that the game rightfully recognizes as opaque (trust me, for a physics object you don't see that all too often) and the stealing mechanic depends on them having you in their viewcone at the time of the crime. Those are all individual elements and i dont think it was ever intended or even though of that players could use physics objects to block that viewcone
this is a prime example of emergent gameplay
Otoh, if I pick up a "Philter of the Phantom" from a barrow in Ivarstead and just happen to think, "What if my character downs this 'Philter of the Phantom' before reentering the Inn. I wonder how the NPCs will respond? Will they shreak in terror and try to attack him? What?" Then, of course, they don't. They don't respond at all when the "ghost" walks into the Inn. lol
Nothing to get upset or angry about, but I was expecting *something* to happen in that event and nothing did.
Skyrim is very bad in terms of emergent gameplay. Whenever you approach mission creatively, it eighter crashes the game or you plainly can't do what you are trying to do.
Emergent, perhaps in game mechanics abuse. Complete guff in the sense that NPCs cannot react to you clearly being a douche canoe specifically to steal from them.
@@jashloseher578 that is by definition emergent. not everything has to involve quest designs or npc reactions. Halo is known for having immense offerings of emergent gameplay because of its complex sandbox vs enemy type in various environments. similarly titanfall (more specifically 2) is known for its emergent gameplay due to its vast array of toolsets that goes beyond weapons, and movement mechanics inside its diverse environments. Pray 2 and half life 2 use their sophisticated physics systems to create emergent gameplay (halo does that to an extent as well, one only has to watch mint blitz do literally anything in that game), the new zelda games are equally big on this with their interconnected physics sinulations and material sandbox, specifically 2 with its building mechanic.
you dont need npc reactions for it to be emergent, and emergent absolutely can mean to abuse something that was designed on one way, to function a different way without breaking any of the games actual rules
I love games that are rules-based and less scripted!
One of the worst feelings in games, I think, is when the player realizes the game world is inconsistent with the rules it already established.
Not just because they player couldn't DO something in that moment, but because it instantly downgrades the quality of the simulation in the player's mind.
Meaning, they will likely tend to NOT try things that the game might support because the curtain has already been pulled back on the fact that this is "just a game".
I think the best word for this is "verisimilitude" as it refers to the "believability" of the game in its own setting and not "realism" or "immersion" which cover different feelings.
This is fascinating! Emergent gameplay is such a fascinating concept, and it's amazing how it can lead to such unexpected and creative gameplay experiences. Although I don't make videos about roleplay games, this concept can be implemented in the other games as well!
Bro, your vids lit 🔥 Subscribed! Can't wait to see from you this concept in your games!
Reverse pickpocketing has become an rpg mainstay. It’s one of the funniest thing to do in Baldurs Gate 3.
Hi Tim! It's me, everyone.
I clicked on the video about to comment this, hahah
@@Jefrejtorbeat you to it lmao
Nice try jugg6576, you’re not who you say you are
There's this talk from more than 10 years ago by Jonathan Blow about it, it's called truth in game design or something like that. He says you can do it more like a "style" of directing a game where instead of you having a vision of all the systems working together, you just visualize the basic systems and as you play it, you find these emergent interactions and start designing your game around them, almost as if you let the game design itself. I think it's easier to do it on puzzle and action games, on RPGs where the focus is on exploration and writing it probably gets harder but emergent gameplay always comes up.
Back in 04 there was a player called Larryr in RuneScape. She basically ran a business in RuneScape soon after the Runecrafting skill was released by essentially hiring players to help her train it faster than anyone else, and in an MMO, she was not only rank 1 in the (at the time) slowest skill to grind, but also around 5 times higher than the player in rank 2 (in exp for the skill), which was unheard of for anything in RuneScape. She was later immortalized in the game as a similar named NPC was made as the Master of Runecraftnig.
I'm a software engineer, not in the games industry, but have been binging your videos the past few days because they're interesting insights into the games industry and game design.
This video is particularly interesting to me not only because I'm interested in emergent gameplay, but also because the way you talk about the independent general game mechanics that can be combined in interesting way is paralleled by Ken Thompson's Unix philosophy, the idea that you should build sets of simple, clear, and modular tools that can be combined to perform actions that weren't necessarily intended by the tools' creators.
And that led me in turn to realize that, in a way, players who engage with these game systems can be considered to be doing a form of programming, combining various operations into an algorithm to achieve a certain outcome or solve a particular problem.
And the worst part about dragging this body back was that it was really heavy. I have also tried to raise this guy from the dead. Then realized that i cannot and that my characters were not strong to pick him up without getting encumbered, so i had to run and get Minsk.
Which game?
@@SpectorCorp If my intuition serves me, he is speaking of the game Baldur's Gate, where at the north of the Friendly Arm super pub you will find a rundown farm with a very old man concerned about the whereabouts of his son. Long story short, his body weighted a TON and only the strongest member of your party could carry the body.
Baldur's Gate it sounds like.
Bioware had a bad habit of quietly ignoring the common uses of certain Dungeon-and-Dragons 2nd Edition mechanics for their own convenience of coding. You had several spells that could bring the dead back to life, but all of them were really only coded to work on your Party members. That NPC your were escorting and got killed six seconds ago? Nope, it's dead and you lose the quest. Find the dead body of a boy who died just hours ago? Nope.
Worst of all, the spell descriptions DON'T emphasize that the spells won't normally work on NPCs other than your own party, so you could burn a lot of expensive magic on an NPC's corpse trying to be clever and the game just says nope.
@@SpectorCorp
That must be it, I wasn't sure what game Tim was talking about. Adding salt to the wound, the ankheg cave has a ton of good loot, including armor, and the ankheg shells are super heavy, and valuable. But that's the area where the player has to haul out a body...
@@genericpersonx333 thank you for such a detailed answer.
There is a quest in Bloodlines that sadly is hard-coded. You need to destroy paintings and the only weapon you can use for that is a knife, no other weapon works...
To be frank you're one of the people who inspired me to start modding and consequently also smudge the industry. Keep the good work Tim!
I remember in school, that the people that wanted specific method executed in particular way to be the ones in charge. The people are trained to execute known strategies and not figure out stuff. To some people that's definitely a character trait, and for some that's just laziness.
Maybe everyone is in a hurry to some particular place, maybe if you do all the "correct" decisions you get to heaven or something.
Maybe there's a high score screen at the end of the tunnel.
Prey 2017 was the last game I played with a good set of options, it's not perfect but you tend to have a good mix of options.
I relay hoped we where going to get more physics based interactions after Half-life 2, it never relay happened.
How they went from near perfect first person perspective in dark Messiah, to a game where somehow they made every possible option to give the impression that the pistol was pointing to the corner of the screen, Even managed to change the position of the crosshair, which if they had gone the other way and moved it in the other direction it might have helped.. but they moved it in the direction that made it worse lol..
There were so many cool things about that game.. and I still don't understand why.. like like the shotgun more or less points like it feels like the bullets are going in where they're supposed to be going you know... But that pistol gas lights me every time, and it's not the only weapon that has problems like that.. and I still don't understand where that studio just has this dynamic shift from again just genuinely one of the best first person perspectives ever, like a game that platforming was not a problem on on account of how good the body awareness was.
And then you get dishonored where, clearly some some things have changed.. but let's pretend your arms and legs just kind of retract as as to how they are needed but they're still coming from your shoulders and your hips...
And then.. they made a really brilliant game, that I couldn't play because in no possible way were any of the things I would do I was doing half the time actually things that I could have possibly been doing based on what it was showing me...
And all they would have had to do is a little you know.. maybe don't lock down the developers console, so I can just adjust the view model, but no.. no.. we need to lock every single option out of that thing, the only people that will know our secrets are the hackers that have to use memory scanning and we're going to make that hard too.. Good God can you imagine if somebody tried to adjust the The field of view? Can you imagine! They'd be able to look around and be comfortable and move around with such speed and coherency, we'd never be able to balance around that.. and this is.. this is pray 2017,
I feel like maybe there's a few too many parts that don't really get together and sync up in some cases.. or something I don't know.. whatever happened to like that direction we were going where the things that you did looked like you were doing things..
And why has full motion video ideas started to make a comeback in my 3D games, cuz the ones that actually do make it look like I'm doing the thing are basically movies at that point because they're so desperately obsessed with trying to make it look like it's doing the thing realistically that I don't actually get a play.. looking at you calisto lol
This reminds me of the baskets in Skyrim. You just put them on people's heads and rob them blind. Since they draw line of sight from the forehead lol.
Hi Tim, great video as always.
I was waiting for the right moment to ask this question: Don't you think that emergent gameplay and extreme hand holding in quests are somewhat at odds?
Ok, probably I should refrase the question: Don't you think that the way that quests are presented in many modern RPGs (via super detailed log entries and omniscient quest markers) discourages players experimentation?
After all, why bother to find an "unorthodox" solution to a problem that the game has already solved for me?
Thank you for explaining it so clearly. I've always struggled to explain emergent gameplay to people, but now I have a video to point to.
I love this topic! Thank you for these great insights!
You are talking about Baldur's Gate 1 aren't you 😀 The resurrection spell/ability/item has become an increasingly frustrating pet peeve of mine especially given how little thought is put in how it could be used in a world with actual people. Even some of the best games do little to handle such elements...Rant over
Thank you again for this very fun video! Have a great day 🙂
Tim, you are a ray of sunshine in a cruel and meaningless world.
"Let players be smart" . Omg, thats so rare to hear and I love It!
Great tip about how to write NPC reactions or quests that work harmoniously with emergent gameplay. Like Tim said, it can be hard to track down and ensure every little possibility exists, so how does one know when to write extra lines?
Would love to hear more tips in this vein, since I really do enjoy emergent gameplay and/or mastery of mechanics through exploring emergent gameplay. What I would find most helpful would be like having a collection of reliable go-tos to use in an (informal) auditing process, or a "lens" as Jesse Schell may put it. I know I am asking for the moon here, and I'm not expecting Tim or anyone to provide it; just that it would be nice to have or develop one as you make the game.
My favorite emergent gameplay comes from bugs or crazy mod combinations.
When I first played Oblivion (release patch), the count of Skingrad was hilariously bugged for me.
I was a vampire, and wanted to do everything vampirey the game offered. I thought of the count as an ancient wise vampire to teach me the ways. His introduction is grandious and serious and he's an intimidating character at the start.
Then he bugged for me. He was stuck trying to engage me in conversation, and would follow me and start random dialogue from the quest. This continued when I left the castle, and even when I left Skingrad. He followed me literally everywhere and anywhere. Fast travelling only delayed the issue, as he would slowly walk across the world to make his point.
Thing is, he's a level 4 vampire. He's absolutely cooked in daylight, but as an essential NPC, he's immortal. So I would be in a field killing a bandit in the daytime, having forgot about the count, then hear a distant "OFFF... URGHHH... AHHHH" and see the count running after me, dying several times in his sprint, to talk to me, then die again as soon as I closed the window.
It was like It Follows meets Karate Kid. He was my weird companion for the rest of the game.
Only possible because Bethesda generalised all those systems. He was a vampire that had no special specific rules, so had the same attribute changes a player would, he could travel across the map, people reacted to him as a vampire etc.
The popular 90s RPG with the dead body example was Baldur's Gate, wasn't it?
In Arcanum, there is a dead woman near a crashed ship. Tried to resurrect her in every way possible, nothing...
The soul needs to be willing to return to its body.
Bullshit excuse @@jashloseher578
the earliest versions of Metroid Prime (for the Gamecube) allowed players to break the intended sequence of events in order to progress through the game in an order the developers had not intended. each new version has patched out more of these creative sequence breaks and that has always disappointed me
I had pretty much that exact resurrection scroll problem in Baldur's Gate 3 when you find Lae'zel. I thought I'd clever and let the two people that wanted her dead kill her and then when they leave I'll just resurrect her, but the scroll didn't work on her.
There used to be a similar thing with Karlach but it worked. Felt like a cool loophole with the devil contract. Idk what problems it could cause but it was cool while it lasted
Great to see a legend speak about this. We talked about it at length in the narrative in gaming course I took.
I feel the situation described at 9:15 is particularly frustrating. Because in my opinion they don't need to do all that much to sufficiently explain why that's not option for this situation. I can think of several narrative justifications for that not to work. Instead of "invalid target" it could pop up a dialogue that says "He's missing his left hand and the spell will only work on intact bodies" or "there's a competing high-level magical spell preventing resurrection" or something / anything along those lines to explain why that doesn't work here. The problem isn't with the fact that they didn't allow you to do it, just with the fact that there was nothing to account for the player's understandable impulse to attempt to use that scroll they found. I'd much prefer that they find a way to make it work, but if worst comes to worst and it is absolutely vital that the sequence of events happens in that specific way (or there's not enough time to implement it), just provide a reasonable explanation for why. That's all that truly needs to be done.
This isn't about emergent gameplay, more like preempting the natural emergent combinations in the genre, but I played a point and click adventure game called Hiveswap that wowed me by having a specific dialogue reaction for *every* possible interaction. Despite the fact that it was just a normal point and click adventure, that still stuck with me. So no matter what key items you rubbed together, it would have something to unique to say about it, even when it doesn't progress the story or puzzle any further. Instead of saying "I can't use that right now" or "I don't think that will work here" or some other generic response, someone actually wrote something specific for that combination. And I think something like that could have worked for the situation with the resurrection scroll. The problem for me is not so much that they don't want you to solve it that way (though, I do obviously prefer if it just works), but rather the lack of any kind of consideration for the player's desire to attempt that.
Oh hey! Thank you! Insightful and thoughtful answers! Hope you are well and enjoying whatever you are working on!
The examples that Tim mentioned are only scratching the surface. Emergent gameplay in Stalker or Zelda are on a whole another level.
Things like emergent gameplay seem like another good reason any game designer should at least play, if not run, one tabletop campaign. Having been both player and game master, you learn quick about how even the most mundane situations can spin out of control through twists and turns you NEVER anticipated being chained together.
Game Master: "The white dragon bursts out of the roof of the ice tunnel and gets ready to breath frost."
Player: "So, like, the dragon is direct above us?"
Game Master: "Yeah."
Player: "Holding onto the edges of the hole he dug and hanging above us?"
Game Master: "Pretty much."
Player: "I cast Tasha's Hideous Laughter."
Game Master: *rolls* "...crap..."
Player: "It worked?!"
Game Master: "Yes... The dragon cackles deeply, slipping free out of the hole, and starts falling."
Players cheer. Game Master smiles. Players stare worried.
Game Master: "Everyone roll a Dex save."
Player: "What? Why? He can't act."
Game Master: "Oh, I know. But, he's falling down... directly over you all."
I'm giving this a THUMBS UP before Tim even does his intro! Because... "EMERGENT GAMEPLAY!"
The hallmark of all the best types of games. :D (I'm a stallwart fan of games like Thief: The Dark Project, Dishonored 2, etc)
I rescued Virgil from dying in the basement. I intervened and killed the ruffians so fast that he didn't die, but his dialogue for the rest of the game still reflects the idea that he died and you brought him back. I'm not salty about it or anything, I just thought it was funny.
Breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom are masterclass games in emergent gameplay.
The system mechanics of those games are absolutely mind boggling
Amazing mechanically but unfortunately TOTK underlines the limits of how they connect it to meaningful world building. BOTW did something fresh at the right time, TOTK doubled down on the sandbox physics much more than anything else, for better and for worse.
Throwing shade at Baldur's Gate 1 - Farmer Brun's Missing Son, killed by Ankhegs.
That was my first guess too. Also it might be the guy's brother in the spider forest.
For a long time, I was thinking about an adjacent concept of Emergent Narrative. It's when a player is given tools to give importance to game elements(such as naming people, items, events) and from there, those elements can interact into a narrative(for example, one soldier panics in combat and kills your favorite warrior; you can spin a story around that soldier having a redemption arc). Games like XCOM, Dwarf Fortress, and Rimworld provide such tools.
I was wondering why more games don't go for Emergent Narrative, especially since sandbox RPGs are all about spinning a story around whatever you want to go for. I feel like older games have more potential for this sort of thing than most of what comes out today.
that reminds me.. how does pickpocketing works in original Fallout ?
I mean, how does it calculate the chances of success ? Me and my friends had all this "true and tested" methods to steal despite low steal skill.
Like you had to hold the item with mouse cursor for longer time (not just tossing it into inventory) and that improves your chances - looking back at it, it sounds silly, but I could swear that the chances were higher that way :D
If anyone here hasn’t heard of Space Station 13, it’s a great example of emergent gameplay. Tons and tons of systems layered on top of each other in such a way where crazy stuff can happen
Great video, and solid points, the game design stuff about the locked doors was especially interesting.
However, I think the example you used is a pretty weak one specifically because you're talking about resurrection. To my mind, ressurect/raise-dead/etc is almost *always* a gameplay mechanic, not a story mechanic. It's there to make the game more fun for the players, it's not something that you can just casually do in the setting, because then the setting would break. It's the same as "Why don't they use Phoenix Down on Aerith?" because Phoenix Down isn't actually something that exists in story, it's something that exists in gameplay.
And yeah, FF5 subverts that, and it does get hazy with DnD since Forgotten Realms likes to pretend that Resurrect is something that exists in the world, but it's always been one that I've been okay with letting slide.
Obviously you can handle for that and design around "Yes resurrection exists in this setting, how does that affect things?" but that idea is so, so centralising that it now changes huge swaths of the plot. Like you ask why you can't just raise him and bring him back, but if you could do that as a general thing for any given quest or NPC that dies, then suddenly the storyline can't have any big tension moments without explicitly taking resurrection off the table. It's just too centralising, it dominates the narrative and dominates how everyone would interact with that world, especially with high-level adventurers around (and especially in a system that's ignoring spell components).
So it's usually a lot less messy to just say "It's there for gameplay only." even if that's not as elegant.
I hope this gets watched by all those people who think an immersive sim is when you have stacking boxes and 0451 door codes.
Real immersion is having to stack 451 boxes to get the door code.
Hey man I like stacking boxes and getting 0451 door codes
@@avatarname0008 Me too!! Just wanted to say that it's not the only features that make an emergent gameplay, as most people nowadays (even indies) think.
No, we are not at all joking when we say that it's about crate stacking. No crate stacking, no ImSim!!
Great video for table top GMs too.
I'm glad you are of the opinion that emergent gameplay should be encouraged. It's sad to see developers take the stance of "this game must **only** be played in the way I intended and nothing more!" because it feels like those developers are doing a disservice to the art of game development. Maybe some people are just in it for the paycheck, but it's still unfortunate.
That's what was cool in Arcanum, what we liked as kids. It was realistic in that it was reactive and there were a lot of things that just made sense, like simulation.
FF 20 years - ppl call free to roam maps where nothing you do really matters free open world gameplay :(
Thanks for another great video Tim!
Your goal driven, systemic design approach sounds very similar to the design philosophy of immersive sims, like those made by Arkane. Do you play any immersive sims?
I’ve always felt that the combination RPGs and immersive sims would give the highest level of player freedom. Weird West is one recent example of this. It was heavily inspired by Fallout 1. Have you tried it?
CRPGs and Immersive Sims are like brothers, same father, that being the Ultima series
Speaking of reloading a save and redoing 20 Minutes of Gameplay:
What are your opinions on save systems?
(Especially older) PC titles tend to have those "save anytime, anywhere" systems that tend to fill up your load menu with tons and tons of save states, whereas games that come from the console-first market have strongly clung to autosaves on a profile or fixed save points, long after those stopped being technical neccessities.
Where do you see the pros and cons in terms of play experience, iron man options and is there any more exotic solution people might not be aware of?
Emergent gameplay- sometimes better known as "edge cases you didn't think about, which happened to not throw errors and crash your game, and now you have to think about them." Sometimes the reason to be "mad at your players" over emergent gameplay is that you need to face facts- your players let you know that you need to take some more formal programming courses and become a better programmer before trying to implement so much complexity! Thank you Tim.
How come management can recklessly chase trends and fail predictably but never be held accountable and always the developers are always getting fired? Telltale management is the only one I can think of and it took bankrupting the studio for them to be fired.
You'll have to look beyond the gaming industry for clues about that one. It just so happens, unfortunately, to be among the latest affected, no doubt because it's relatively new in comparison to others.
Thank you for this video. Very informative and interesting at the same time.
Getting close to 100k!
The Shady Sands Shuffle.
Adding a granade to an inventory and having it blow up seemed like done in purpose, as a granade in inventory does not explodes...
Related to that: what about not setting main-story NPCs immortal? The player can then easily break the main quest killing them. But there could be always a fallback (finding a note, getting a message, unlocking a passage).
There is another recent video from Tim about that, titled Non-linear progression or something like that
I love how New Vegas handled this
That's funny, explosives to get through doors.. I'm immediately reminded of this basically standard practice that ended up becoming a thing in Afghanistan where you just didn't go through doors anymore but you blew up walls.. it's basically how you you entered an exited things in certain areas... Just remember a bunch of soldiers hanging out outside the wall waiting for a tank so they could go in, and the door is it's not the door it was like a gate but like it's right there.. not to take away from the seriousness of that or or tragedy or anything.. but now I'm immediately thinking of John dies at the end, this door cannot be opened!
I love emergent gameplay as long as it isn't a crutch. For example, I know that Star Citizen is still in alpha (heh) but they lean on emergent gameplay as a way to keep people playing without much in the way of fun, directed content. I'm not sure what the ratio is, but I feel like there should be far more actual content than there emergent gameplay opportunities.
I guess the natural follow-up would be, what do people think devs can do to better highlight or lean in on emergent outcomes?
I love pointing out that in Arcanum dynamite can solve any problem.
Hi, Tim.
That story about the Raise Dead scroll... y'know, I once tried to cast a Speak With Dead (or sth like that) spell on the dead dwarf that starts the story of Arcanum...
And it worked and you had a great time? 🙂
I wonder if generalists help or would hurt the 'chance' of emergent gameplay.
If Designe and Code are done by different persons , the designer could be more likely to unknowingly implement possibilitys for emergent gameplay where if its done by a generalist it could lead to them knowing they would be able to do X or Y and design differently , more railed.
On the other hand I can see both being the exact opposite.
If players count as generalists, it could be disastrous. I've seen too many examples of a community's "leading lights" essentially design a game to suit them and their interests and playstyles. The heck with what anyone else might appreciate.
Example: A RUclipsr notes a controversy about a change in systems or mechanics and tells his "followers" he doesn't see an issue with them and, very likely, honestly doesn't, but only because he's going exactly where he's told and doing exactly what he's told to do by the game in its current state. Of course, if everyone plays the game exactly that way, there would be, in fact, no issue. And...if they don't?
In at least one example with which I'm familiar: HUGE issues. Only two, but those two make others in the community think the developers are insisting everyone play a certain way when they're actually just responding to feedback from a very few people.
Arcanum follows the conjure spirit rule, and you can talk to Stennar at the crash site. But it's just a generic "Who is here?... It hurts.. Let me go" lines :(
"When I say that I like emergent gameplay and it was in a lot of my games, I'm not speaking for everybody on those teams. There were a lot of people who did not like emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay causes a lot of unpredictability for the designers and for narrative designers who have to write story and dialogue and for system mechanics designers who are trying to plan for things that happen so they can set flags and have reaction to it in the game. Letting the player mix up mechanics and do things that weren't planned for makes all of their jobs much more difficult."
It is concerning to hear that a commonly cited argument against implementing emergent gameplay systems stems from team objections based entirely on whether it will make their jobs more difficult. Rather than empower richer player-driven narrative possibilities, this stance favors mitigating potential hassles for isolated developer roles over net value to user experience - an inverted set of priorities given games exist first and foremost for audiences, not creators themselves.
Firstly, it is self-serving, prioritizing the convenience of a development role over the quality of the player’s experience. Good game design should focus first on crafting an engaging experience, not an easy job.
Furthermore, almost everything meaningful about games involves creators taking on ambitious hard problems because the benefits are ultimately worth it. Dynamic lighting, advanced physics, customizable characters, open worlds, multiplayer support - all make many jobs more difficult. But we willingly take on those challenges because of how much it can improve player agency and immersion.
The entire field of game development is built upon tackling complex creative and technical issues in order to enable deeper gameplay possibilities. So citing mere production difficulty alone sells short the aspirational ethos of pushing boundaries that drives the entire medium forward. It makes it seem like the team is unwilling to rise to the occasion and instead just wants to play it safe.
Game development complexity arises from the harmony of varied systems pushing boundaries. For example, programmers tackle complex AI and physics systems crucial for enabling gameplay dynamism. Artists depict diverse environments and customizable avatars essential for heightened immersion. Designers craft intricate faction reputation systems that allow for emergent social dynamics. Composers produce adaptive music that better responds to players.
By the same logic, almost any desired game element could theoretically be argued as “optional” or “too complicated for someone’s workflow.” But how much would we miss out on if we always took that stance? Open worlds exponentially increase content needs and design complexity, but they grant far more player freedom over structured lanes. Advanced physics enables more spectacular and simulative explosions instead of cheap fakery. Customizable avatars allow for greater representation rather than fixed defaults.
All these features involve various disciplines taking on more challenging problems because enabling those magical gameplay moments is part of the creative vision. It is the harmony of many complex, interlinking systems that gives rise to the depth players lose themselves in for hours on end. And it is the unpredictable results when those simulations collide that generates the personalized nostalgic anecdotes we share fondly about our playthroughs.
Not only that, but emergent gameplay provides immense rewards for players that are inherently unpredictable and thus difficult to specifically design for. The magic is in those unscripted moments - the anecdotes and shared stories stemming from unexpected results. That is what great memorable games are made of.
By the same rationale, those other experts could constrain player experience due to difficulty. Visual artists could advocate for fixed environments rather than ambitious open worlds that demand more asset range. Audio designers may push back on interactive music systems that complicate emotional underscoring. We would lose out on so much magic.
Any one member of the collaborative effort could cite difficulty facilitating aspects of that emergent potential. But in isolation that undervalues their importance to the greater goals. Meeting challenges head-on and working in service of rich player interactions is what drives teams to fully realize the atmospheric potential of digital fantasy worlds. Avoiding emergent gameplay solely because it disrupts predictability and controlled scopes seems antithetical to those creating aspirations.
In the end, meeting ambitious creative challenges head on is the heart and soul of worthwhile game development. Player-empowering features like emergent gameplay epitomize exactly the types of ideals the team should aspire towards, despite added complexity. Avoiding rich emergent interactivity solely because it makes any single job more difficult is therefore highly frustrating and fundamentally misaligned with the ethos of team ambition I feel games require.
No one said this medium would be easy. There's a reason development teams must be ambitious Renaissance innovators utilizing cutting edge expertise. That's why citing merely production convenience as a counterargument rings hollow. We should expect and welcome the challenge - anything less underserves what makes digital worlds special.
I love your videos!
I love emergent gameplay. And what is a cherry on top - is when game has a line that acknoleges it somehow. For example, you got to some area using trick - it would be nice to have some specially placed items here and/or note from devs masked as some ingame guy who acknowleges that it is hard to get there.
I mean there have to be implemented some ways to legalise those tricks.
My emergent gameplay consists of making rounds of selling loot for hours, it’s terrible. I am so thankful that neither Fallout nor Arcanum had merchant cash limit.
Hi Tim, great video! What do you think about speedrunning as a form of emergent gameplay? It seems like some devs are very against it, while others foster that behavior in their game
ruclips.net/video/l-Vuw-qWCgY/видео.html
Ok... Which game was the perpetrator, this waster of a valuable scroll? I want to know.
I spent the last 10 minutes googling, but came up empty
Yeah it sounds familiar but I can't recall
Baldur's Gate (1) probably
Thanks, everybody.
Great examples, thanks Tim. :)
Excellent perspective
"You can't plan for everything the players are gonna do"
I'm specifically reminded of people bringing infinite durability armor/weapons out of Operation: Anchorage in Fallout 3 by shoving a corpse in the simulation pod with you and mashing interact during the loading screen 😂 And all of the various methods for escaping with the Gold Bars in New Vegas's Dead Money (that Obsidian TRIED to patch out but players kept finding NEW methods)
Hi Tim, some of my most enjoyable emergent gameplay experiences have been in Star Citizen and I think the nature of it's design lends itself very well to the emergent concept, so I'm interested; have you tried the game? Could you offer an opinion on it? Very interested in your thoughts. Many thanks.
I'm not a huge fan of emergent story telling, but emergent gameplay is great. When most games say they have emergent stories, that usually means they don't have a story at all, and are expecting the player to consume the gameplay as a story. I'm a player that vastly prefers gameplay over story, but I still like to have a story. Unfortunately, emergent gameplay, in my opinion, does not take the place of a well written story. I'm looking at you, Rimworld.
Huh, I've played Fallout several times and had no idea you could use explosives to get through doors.
Hi Tim, hope you're well. My friends and I had a decent conversation about creating games with AI. I erred on the side of "this is destroying the humanity behind art and culture" but some of my friends argued the benefits of short-cuts, drafting concept art, and of course, saving money/resources. Any thoughts on this? Any idea how AI tools may impact the industry or process of making games going forward? Take care
Artificial Intelligence
ruclips.net/video/7MRx_i9gvWw/видео.html
I think I remember that mission. Find missing son in the tunnels, was it?
If you want a game with great emergent gameplay try Rimworld.
You know I think this has made me realize that emergent gameplay is important to immersive sims as a genre.
It very much is. Here’s some homework: the next time you play your favorite immersive sim, try to identify something you did that almost certainly wasn't explicitly intended by the designer.
I started dismembering non-human enemies for meat because we needed food. We were runaway slaves. So eventually my friend who was a GM made me watch an anime about cooking monsters from the dungeon. It happened after we've gotten madnes from witnessing other god and ate a demonic monkey and hallucinated a bit from it. Now I'm a priest and a cook and I need to convince GM that the food I cooked is tasty.
Love from Australia.
Literally killing Pres. Dick Richardson in Fallout 2 by overdosing him with Super Stimpaks lol
Ian is half blind, but it is canon, he just shoots the Vault Dweller all the time.
The view counts of these videos is proof of the injustice in the world.
Please don't ever stop, Tim.
Also i think you shouldn't be mad for hard on yourself because they didn't find the solution you scripted if it was an option or they choose to do something you didn't expect.
melee is sick
Lmao, you’re talking about that Montaron quest aren’t you 😅
I beccon you as you me long ago and I'm Raheem I need a job really badly
Emergent game play sounds to me like game design bugs as opposed to coding bugs. They're unexpected, but the structure does technically allow for it. There is probably something to be discussed on the topic of making a system, watch it do something unexpected, and then instead of stamping it out you build off of it.
Baldur's Gate
The problem of this concept is that sometimes things can occur that makes the game worse. In multiplayer games: Botting, Chinese gold farmers, GDKP (in WoW), mages selling leveling services, etc. These are all bad. In singleplayer, in for example Skyrim: Putting a bucket on a vendor's head so that you can freely steal everything, exploiting terrain to make a bear move back and forth, abusing bugs to forge/enchant weapons that one-hit everything. Doing any of these can ruin the game, because one may remember that it's not worth playing because one could do any of these things.
What is required is for developers to have the foresight (or at least reaction) to fix/prevent such problems.
"Doing any of these can ruin the game" -- If it's a single player game, how exactly does any of that ruin it? The player doesn't have to do any of those things. Just knowing it can be done doesn't mean the player will necessarily want to play that way.
If it's a MP game, especially one with a PvP component, I can see why developers would need to be concerned about it and patch out actual exploits that provide some players with unfair advantages over others. Otherwise, what's the problem so long it's not harming the experience for anyone else?
@@lrinfi Given that it is possible, it will always be a temptation. I find myself doing several things in a singleplayer game that are "best to do", even though they are bad game mechanics, exploitative or somewhat cheating. A game that has this is fundamentally flawed, and the intention was that the player either doesn't go that way yet or has to use other means. For example a better path-finding or smarter NPC AIs could solve a lot of these problems.
"what's the problem so long it's not harming the experience for anyone else?" - Because players can gain unfair advantages, which may impact the economy negatively. If you find an infinite money source, and then flood the realm with that money, it has a ripple effect.
So I can understand how "emergent gameplay" can be a problem. What Tim speaks of is an intentional design choice: Design things in a way they can be solved in multiple ways including unforeseen one - as long as the requirement of that quest are fulfilled, it's good to go. But what he says requires developers to actively make it possible.
I don't see it as problems.
Okay, physics bugs are a problem, but not the bucket hat and stuff like that.
In online games - yes, abusing bugs is a problem, but usually it's a problem created by devs themselves. If the game didn't force you into pay or grind choice - people wouldn't use cheats and boosting services.
@@brianviktor8212 People have to learn to restrain themselves in those instances. Just don't use an infinite money glitch.
@@LN.2233 And what about putting a bucket on a vendor's head? What about abusing bad path-finding of enemies? What about exploiting a bug in the crafting system? Or glitching to hidden vendor chests for free items?
It becomes really hard to draw the line, and the solution is simply to fix these exploitable issues, as to no longer tempt anyone to do them.
Skyrim is just a prime example of this. They created what, 10 different versions of it, but managed to NOT fix these known bugs and issues?
I am not sure these can be considered "emergent gameplay" at this point... but they are things developers did not plan for, that players can do.
8:00
hate those too
thats why i hate these types of puzzles with just 1 solution
no freedom of exploring novel ideas but rather hoping u know what the dev thought up during puzzle creation...very yikes
AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi Everyone Its me Tim
too late buddy
Here before asmongold lol
emergent gameplay is when you are in public and you get the sh!ts