A Complete Toolbox: What Devices Make Any Game Better?

[JademusSreg]

When I play first-person "gunsplosgasm" games or third-person over-the-shoulder adventures, I eventually get to thinking "This game doesn't have [awesome thing]? Every game should have [awesome thing]!" I mean, I can't throw a grenade without wondering how much better it would be if I could use a portal gun to deliver it with a bit more style, how infinitely more interesting firefights would be if you could take away the enemy's cover or even take it for yourself.

The question, "what tools/powers make any game better?", is great discussion fuel, never ceases to provoke an entertaining conversation. I invite you to list your favorite game tools, those special devices whose novel gameplay mechanics found a special place in your heart (or organ of comparable value).

• Portal Gun
  
• Grappling Hook
  
• Jetpack
  
• Blink/Teleportation
  

[LazDude2012]

OK, seems like an awesome topic to discuss. I love to play real time strategy games. They are amazing. Everybody knows the standard RTS economy system, kindly provided by StarCraft. You collect X amount of resorces from a pile of X resources, and units cost Y amount, instantly, to make.

My favourite game mechanic is a different type of economy for RTS games. Supreme Commander, and its expansion Forged Alliance, had a better system. There were limited resource collection points, but once you had collectors there, they would collect something like 1 mass per second. You could of course upgrade this, but it never ran out. Building units and structures, of course, cost mass. But here's how it worked. It didn't take all your mass away when it started building; it instead spread out the mass cost over the period of time it took to construct. Same applies with its other resource, enrgy. The point being, its economy was about rates, not quantities. As long as you were taking in more than you were putting out, you were fine. (also, artillery took mass to fire, shields and radar took energy to use, etc)

After a streaming economy, all the other RTS games seem, well, lacking. Go ahead, try it for yourself. (Supreme Commander 2 ditched this in favour of a StarCraft economy)

[theprolo]

Just generally having an inventory full of assorted weapons for every eventuality is my dream. Unfortunately, most games follow the same kind of toolkit(MG, shotgun, some sort of CQC, usually a knife, Rocket Launcher etc.), and I just wish there was more imagination when it came to weapons. HL2s Gravity Gun is a great example of this, and the way that the game is set up to give you as many opportunities to use it just awesome.

[Neowulf]

OK, seems like an awesome topic to discuss. I love to play real time strategy games. They are amazing. Everybody knows the standard RTS economy system, kindly provided by StarCraft. You collect X amount of resorces from a pile of X resources, and units cost Y amount, instantly, to make.

My favourite game mechanic is a different type of economy for RTS games. Supreme Commander, and its expansion Forged Alliance, had a better system. There were limited resource collection points, but once you had collectors there, they would collect something like 1 mass per second. You could of course upgrade this, but it never ran out. Building units and structures, of course, cost mass. But here's how it worked. It didn't take all your mass away when it started building; it instead spread out the mass cost over the period of time it took to construct. Same applies with its other resource, enrgy. The point being, its economy was about rates, not quantities. As long as you were taking in more than you were putting out, you were fine. (also, artillery took mass to fire, shields and radar took energy to use, etc)

After a streaming economy, all the other RTS games seem, well, lacking. Go ahead, try it for yourself. (Supreme Commander 2 ditched this in favour of a StarCraft economy)

Supreme Commander was better when it was called Total Annihilation...

[LazDude2012]

better? Psh. I love SupCom. (granted, there's not been a computer built yet that can handle FA on max graphics and 10000 unit cap, but hey)

[Neowulf]

Unit cap, unit cap...

Oh yeah, TA did have something like that. But we played with a mod that increased it substantially.

I remember hitting it a couple times when playing it in the college computer labs, those 5-10k units/buildings nearly pegged the 350mhz single core processors at 50%!

[JademusSreg]

To be fair, rates are equivalent to discrete values with an additional dimension, like time.

Unit caps, time limits, invisible level barriers and such are arbitrary limits. When a designer imposes these sorts of lazy limits, it's for lack of imagination, a creative lapse that compromises the experience.

Imagine you're the lead developer for a real-time asymmetric strategy game, Veneris Defense. The setting involves two factions in an intractable conflict, the Vanguard of planet Veneris repelling an orbital siege by The Host hivemind. You have the age-old problem of strategy/war-game development; to limit or not to limit the asset quantity a player may possess. Traditional real-time strategy answers include unit caps (employed by Blizzard's RTS titles), squad caps (employed by Dawn of War 2), power supply caps (employed by most all C&C titles, Dawn of War, Supreme Total Commander Annihilation), and hard caps (employed for special units, like the Cyborg Commando, Death Knight, Mothership). Turn-based strategy answers include upkeep costs (employed by Civilization titles, many Magic: The Gathering cards), adjustable supply costs (employed by Civ games that allow you to set unit combat readiness), uniqueness attribute (Legendary Creature — Wall of Text).

That was terribly dull, just enumerating all those. But it's a significant issue in the design; it must be solved. Otherwise you may get stuck in a match where your army is so enormous that its movement dilates time (which is to say throttles your RAM and CPU). Fortunately, there is an alternative to imposed limits.

Emergent limits are restrictions that are the product of gameplay or narrative elements interacting, rather than rules being imposed on those gameplay/narrative elements. For instance, while The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask features an explicit time limit (3 days), that time limit is a product of narrative elements interacting (the omnicidal moon collides with the world and everyone dies). More importantly, this limit is manipulable in that the game allows Link to time travel, or you can choose to die. You can approach the problem in Veneris Defense by making The Host's units a defined quantity, issued to that faction's players as regular reinforcements to be leveraged, and you could limit the Vanguard by introducing a mechanic representing political corruption and environmental destruction, so amassing structures and units beyond the capacity to manage effectively causes more harm to the player than to the enemies.

Also, shit, I forgot about the Gravity Gun. Hell, I love physics-based mechanics generally, like Trine's Rincewind-esque wizard and his crude-structure conjuring.

[LazDude2012]

There was a minor, B-class game called Fracture. I believe it was only on X360. It had a really awesome mechanic: terrain deformation. You had a gun-ish thing that could raise and lower natural ground on demand, and grenades and stuff that would also do this. It was such an awesome mechanic, but unfortunately the game was subpar.

And BTW, Neowulf: try having every single shot ballistically simulated with 10000 units, and graphics from the modern era.

[freakachu]

Unit caps, time limits, invisible level barriers and such are arbitrary limits. When a designer imposes these sorts of lazy limits, it's for lack of imagination, a creative lapse that compromises the experience.

I stopped here. it is almost never out of laziness or lack or creativity. 99.999999% of the time it is due to technical limitations. truly unlimited units or whatever would potentially require unlimited resources and I'm not talking about in-game resources. levels cannot be infinitely large (even minecraft levels have limits) so there must be walls or barriers. invisible ones are usually there as a failsafe in case the player manages to get past or around the visible ones. would you rather just fall off the map and be stuck in limbo?

time limits generally aren't a technical issue, but a design one. would bejeweled blitz be as popular if you had infinite time? would the scores matter? of course not. time limits are a valid mechanic, not laziness.

now I have read the rest of the post.

the limits you describe as being "better" are not actually any different. they are just as arbitrary as the kind you are arguing against. why 3 days in majora's mask? it's arbitrary. you simply accept it as reasonable because they tied some story and explanation to it. most games actually DO attempt to justify the limits they impose as well. upkeep costs, like you mentioned, or supplies to support your army. what's the difference between "supply" and "corruption and environmental destruction"? the name.

edit: it seems like what you want is to be given enough rope to hang yourself with, instead of the game preventing you from fucking yourself over either on purpose or out of stupidity. (you could let the moon hit the world in majora's mask, corruption and environmental stress being more harm to the player than good eventually, etc) while there is probably something to be said for mechanics like this in certain situations, I think they tend to be more trouble than they're worth unless it is the primary mechanic of the game, like in zelda.

[JademusSreg]

Ah, of course I didn't mean "lazy limits" are a product of laziness, but rather informally, like how "lazy initialization" of a singleton pattern is a simple, resource efficient approach.

The amount of whatever limit is not the issue; gameplay limits are a necessity, because technical limits are a certainty. The point is not that limits are bad, which is obviously nonsense, but rather that limits should preferably emerge intuitively from the interactions of gameplay elements.

For the technical limits of a minecraft world, there is the 64-bit floating-point "double" type and its limits on both bounds and precision that affect a certain bugginess the further one journeys from the world center; Mojang has addressed this with fake chunks, but could have opted for more intuitive solutions, like tinkering with the chunk provider a bit to simulate a spherical world (which could be done by mapping regions to an icosahedron), or could just have the world end abruptly with an endless void (which informs the player more effectively than the deadly fake chunks).

Perhaps I should have elaborated further on my problem example. The difference between a unit cap and corruption would not be merely nominal, but I can see corruption could be needlessly complex system. Instead you could solve the problem with less complex mechanics, such as compounding supply costs, representing the cost of extending and maintaining supply networks; this would affect a "soft limit", where you must invest more and more, to get comparatively less, so the diminishing returns would still offer players choice while also throttling army sizes.

As a designer, you shouldn't need to justify a game abstraction, so much as it should emerge naturally. I mean, why the hell do you harvest gold and gems scattered about in Red Alert games? The world's nations are so broke they need you to loot all the precious materials sprinkled conspicuously around The Alamo? Dawn Of War's requisition economy and tactical asset capturing make more sense for gameplay abstractions of military function. But I don't intend to demean any games here; pointing out incongruities of design is not to say it's bad, but to say we can learn better design by avoiding such incongruities.

And I must say, Left4Dead has a great emergent time limit; the Horde. The Director maintains pacing with the threat of impending doom, so if you don't keep up, the infected will wear you down. And the special infected have a number of novel mechanics I enjoy. Who doesn't love fishing for survivors with a grotesque prehensile tongue?

[Teraku]

A game instantly becomes more fun when you have the ability to jump. Where would Minecraft be if you could only climb, but not jump? I'm certain it would've been a more dull experience, especially back in the Alpha days.

I also really, really liked the way you could manipulate terrain in Populous 3: The Beginning (Especially in Forge World enabled multiplayer games). I wish more games employed terrain manipulation like that.

Out of space to build? No problem! Just turn water into usable land, or flatten that nearby hill!

[JademusSreg]

Yes, jumping is lovely. And more broadly, quality of movement is the most significant aspect of gameplay. An otherwise badass game that handles like shit will turn off most everyone.

Sprinting is almost always good, and necessary in moderately large game spaces; vehicles or other rapid conveyance are similarly needed in larger spaces.