Reply With QuoteI think I get what you're saying. Game design is a balance between immersion in the world and affordances to allow the player to engage with the mechanics. If you lean too far into helping the player, the world feels less immersive.
It's not the features that were the problem. It's the fan service attitude of the world.Originally Posted by Brethren
You can disable features, but you can't give a world a different attitude.
I mean like in Prey, you wake up in your apartment and there's this big reveal. Obviously the whole thing is constructed for the story, and they even embed the opening credits into the world during your first helo ride as more than a big wink. But still in the gameworld, your character really (falsely) believes they're just a guy in their apartment, and it's played straight.
jRPGs or Souls games have this thing where it's like you're basically just playing a series of Super Smash Brothers boss fights that happen to be scattered out in an pretty open world, and it's not going to even try to pretend you're an actual warrior or bandit that was born in this world and found their way here. It's a little thing, I guess, but... I get into the former more than the latter. That's all. Or, I like it too, but like I like those card based RPGs. It's not like a proper adventure game for me but a nice fighting game.
Edit: I know I'm off the rails here, so I'll shut up about it. I like this game like I like Deathloop. That's probably a better example, since that's brought a lot of the world-winking tropes from jRPGs into our own backyard so to speak (Arkane), and it's still a super fun game. It just doesn't have "that old magic" I'd want for a GOTY for me.
Last edited by demagogue; 29th Dec 2022 at 14:59.
I think I get what you're saying. Game design is a balance between immersion in the world and affordances to allow the player to engage with the mechanics. If you lean too far into helping the player, the world feels less immersive.
I... don't agree with that at all, actually. The Souls games don't treat you like a Takeshi's Castle contestant explicitly, because they do take pains to situate your character in the world. (In DS, you're the 'Chosen Undead', and there's lore and whatnot around it.) Implicitly, sure, they're not going to integrate you into the warp and weft of the story, because it already happened before you got there, most of the time.
If what you're saying is that the connective tissue is missing to lead you along to each battle, I guess that's a matter of perspective. It's passive integration of the protagonist vs. active integration via an ongoing narrative, and sure, whether you like one method over the other isn't right or wrong, just preference. I'm not seeing the connection that makes the world design fan service-y, unless you mean by dint of ER being yet another souls game, so I guess I am probably missing something.
For me there are a lot of little things in the Soulslike games that keep me from feeling immersed, and I can see how Dema would characterize it as fanservice. There are the ghosts reminding me that this is a game that other people have gone through before. There's the core gameplay structure of needing to make it to the next save point in one 'run', otherwise the enemies all respawn exactly as they started, that feels more like a game show gauntlet than exploring a real world. There's the deliberate predictability and consistency of enemies, where learning their moves and tells through trial and error is core to the experience. And the gameplay leans hard into the concept of learning from dying, with certain bosses and traps that are virtually impossible to survive on a first blind playthrough, but that isn't incorporated into the narrative at all.
While I do really like the environmental storytelling itself, particularly how Dark Souls conveys that you're in the aftermath of the 'real' story, the gameplay is so disconnected from it that I find it hard to care while actually playing. I don't know if fanservice is the right term, but it definitely feels like there's a core gameplay loop that defines the game and then everything else is ignorable window dressing.
Yeah I'd agree with that - I feel like Dark Souls games would still be 90% as enjoyable in a greybox setting - the enjoyment comes from the gamified challenges not immersing yourself in a setting, despite the settings themselves being very good-looking.
It's definitely a matter of perspective -- the vast majority of deaths in Dark Souls don't come from the traps and enemies being designed to kill you the first time, but from player carelessness, bad stamina management, and greed. Just turtling behind your shield and examining your surroundings for suspicious features or hiding enemies will save your hide most of the time. There are not many attacks or traps that kill you outright and I've seen blind playthroughs where, once the player gets the hang of the game, they do start one-shotting the bosses and surviving the traps and ambushes with a few notable exceptions *cough*capra demon*cough*.
Now, this changes in the sequels where they have made the games explicitly more challenging, but for the first one at least it's quite possible to go through it with only a handful of deaths. I'd even argue that part of the immersion in Dark Souls actually comes from the dangerous environment and slow, deliberate combat. It's not a world that you can hack and slash your way through, but have to actually pay quite a bit of attention to survive and learn how to deal with the various challenges through careful observation. At least based on the blind playthroughs I've seen, this helps you more than any trial and error and throwing yourself at the so-called gauntlet over and over again.
As for the exact enemies respawning in the exact spots they were previously, it certainly feels kind of game-y. Although, it only happens to trash mobs when you rest at a campfire -- kind of a time-honoured RPG trope in and of itself. And depopulating the game world, as it happens in Dark Souls 2 where the mobs stop spawning after a while, can also feel kind of anti-immersive.
Respawning (non-boss) enemies in the exact same location after the player stops to rest at a designated location basically started with the Souls games. Other games then picked up on that idea afterwards and ran with it. Before Demon's Souls in 2009 RPGs tended to rely on random encounters, timers or event based resets if they wanted to repopulate the world. I'm sure you can find examples of something similar to the Souls series "Rest at location, respawn (non-boss) enemies in the exact same spots", but it wasn't standard enough to be considered a trope by any measure.
When I first got into Dark Souls what punched me into the face was all the gamey stuff that pulls you out of immersion. All the numbers popping out of enemies as you hit them, weapons going through walls, body parts not being severed, the character not being able to climb not even a waist high ledge, items being these orbs of light instead of actual items. Two things caused this for me:
1. Having played Severance, I had expectations.
2. People praised DS for being such an deep game. Ahead of its time. Doesn't hold your hand. Boldly defies console game norms.
It just wasn't what I expected. Sure it was hard, but it was also very gamey. And it felt like it was very much holding my hand, because game design that is "gamey" and isn't seriously designed for immersion, to me that is the game holding my hand. And the story really isn't there, just random pieces of lore that people over-analyze. Why would the player character suddenly know a piece of text when he picks up an item? Is the text inscribed on it? That was my initial experience and reaction.
But once I accepted this and started looking at DS on its own terms, I saw more:
Items aren't items. You pick up pieces of text that open up aspects of the world. That is why they are orbs, because they are, in the DS world, spiritual by nature. This is why you can't do a moveset with any weapon. Movesets aren't skills of the character, they are a part of the weapon and the text, which are a part of the one who carried them.
The entire game is a frozen moment in time, between the fading of the flame and its linking. When you rest at a bonfire, you return to that moment, which is why everything resets. As to why bosses don't, and the player doesn't, beats me. I just think this interpretation is beautiful.
In the end, I truly believe that the devs simply didn't think about this stuff because they didn't consider it important. Maybe they got the respawn model from old NES games where when you re-entered a screen enemies respawned. I mean of course they considered this important from a game mechanical perspective, but not from within the game world.
Btw Dema, I think your thoughts on the performative aspect of many games are spot on.
I wasn't saying this exact thing of spawning the exact enemies at the exact spot was a trope. I was saying that enemies respawning when you rest was a trope. As for whether it ruins your immersion, I imagine it depends on the player for a large part and how they play the game. In the end, it all comes down to whether you accept the conventions of the game. While you could argue that From has moved away from some of the more immersive aspects of their games since they stopped making their first person dungeon crawlers that were kind of but not really immersive sims, all games are game-y to some extent by their very nature and the immersion still mostly takes place in the player's head. That's how text, one of the least immersive mediums on its face, can so effectively transport the reader into another world.
Now multiplayer, on the other hand -- the glowing messages that urge you to do things to orifices, all that jolly cooperation, and unbidden visitors interrupting your game -- that's something I can agree is shoved in fairly jarringly. But that to me seems fairly different from hollowed enemies respawning in the same spots and doing the same things over and over again, which is backed up in game lore and fits the overall post-apocalyptic theme of the game.
And that's still a trope that was brought to the table by FromSoftware. Once again, you might be able to find a few examples of something similar from other developers, but it was so far from the norm back before Demon's Souls that calling it a trope before 2009 is disingenuous.
Games that respawn enemies on death or at checkpoints go back to Diablo I and II and games prior, and you can hardly call DII a minor or non-influential game in the genre. You could call every single roguelike and Rogue itself the direct predecessors that defined the trope, and DS borrowed those elements including the corpse run from them. It popularised the design by transposing it to a non-procedural space, among other things, but there's enough precedent that it can't lay claim to being /the/ game to make it a trope. It certainly made it more common, for sure.
Death != Rest.
If you really want to bring up Diablo, the equivalent of resting in Soulslikes would be teleporting back to town which most certainly does not reset enemies in Diablo or the myriad of Diablo clones.
Anyway, I've been thinking about how this argument is essentially diegetic game design vs. 'game-y' game design, and I have to say, as a fan of imsims and everything else, I don't think I care for making it so that all games are so carefully contrived that every element is accounted for as reasonably explainable within the game space.
It probably makes sense for a game grounded in reality, like an Agatha Christie detective story or Sherlock Holmes, but even those present gamified interfaces to construct a communication channel between you and the game. Sure, there's usually some explanation for it, like a 'mind palace' to serve as a space to stitch clues together, but if your game isn't necessarily tied to earthbound logic, I don't think it has to ground every element of its design within the constraints of its lore or world construction. At least, it's not as important to do that as it is to get the basics of making your game fun or entertaining to play. Is it important to explain why you suddenly got a gun that fires three-headed poodles that breathe three different breath attacks at enemies? Probably not as much as just being able to have fun with it.
But again, it really depends on the kind of game you're making, and I posit that Souls games need that to only a limited degree, beyond which it's merely a good to have element, and something that's IMO diminishing returns in that kind of gamespace. And grounding the experience would, I imagine, actually change it a fair bit into something that feels quite different.
Last edited by Sulphur; 31st Dec 2022 at 12:27.
Sure, granted. Still a pretty minor point considering it has to be separated from the far more prevalent occurrence of dying, and there aren't many games that use Souls' exact rest mechanic.
Technically the games that feature camp points to rest that were common enough to consider for tropes are old jRPGs, and they respawn enemies either at random or with a per-screen counter that resets when you move away. The challenge remained at a similar plateau as Souls games because you were resource-restricted for the same reasons.
Last edited by Sulphur; 31st Dec 2022 at 12:29.
I was specifically thinking of Wizardry 8, which came out a whopping 8 years before 2009 and belongs to a series that's hardly unknown, but resting having enemies come back or time based respawning due to it has definitely been a thing. You could say From Software popularised it, especially in this particular form, but games having some sort of enemy respawning based on certain checkpoints reached or time passed has always been there.
Here's my faves from 2022:
Elden Ring - Undisputed #1, put nearly 200 hours into this.
Dying Light 2 - Not as good as the first one, but still a lot of fun, and a huge city to navigate and explore.
Sniper Elite 5 - These games have become Hitman clones (not a bad thing at all), but I almost prefer this to that because of the big outdoor levels.
Tunic - This one surprised me, it looks like a cute Zelda clone, but it turned out to be a (somewhat) difficult Souls like.
Red Matter 2 - In a year of meh VR releases, this one stood out a bit.
Plague Tale Requiem - Good story and characters, much like the first one.
The Quarry - Played this on PS5, it's kind of dumb but somehow still entertaining.
Teardown - Never had more fun destroying things.
Half Life 2 VR Mod - This was excellent, made the game feel like it was designed for VR.
Somerville - It was kind of wonky, but worth it for the visuals.
Other stuff I liked (or could):
Ghost Song - Seems like a cool metroid clone, need to play some more.
Gloomwood - Incomplete but looking good.
Signalis - Just barely started it, but it seemed to ooze with atmosphere.
Ghostwire Tokyo - Bought it, played the first chapter, then loaned it to a friend, he thought it was great and our tastes line up pretty good.
Thief FMs - The best were Ravensreach, Legacy of Knoss, House of the Architect, Intertheft, These Unfortunate Ones, and Alterna Crystallis.
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