It was recently announced that there would be downloadable content for the game BioShock. This prompted me to write to a coworker about the newly available ability to disable the "Vita Chambers" that bring you back to life whenever you die. There has been much debate over the implementation of these chambers because when you are regenerated, enemies you had previously wounded (most importantly, the hulking "Big Daddies") retain the same level of damage as when you died. This left a lot of people feeling that the game didn’t have any sense of danger or threat because even a poor player could simply keep regenerating and would eventually defeat even the most (in theory) imposing enemies.

Here’s the transcript:

Jason:

Disabling the Vita Chambers is cool and all, but I wonder if it is going to be any different then what I already did, which was using quicksaves instead. It would be nice if the game used the chambers more like auto-saves, so you wouldn’t ever have to leave the game and go to a menu to record your progress.


Rick:

Yeah, just simple checkpoints would be cool. I like how AC and Uncharted do it, where pretty much anything you do creates a save, so when you die, it’s usually about ten seconds back. It does sap from the challenge, since there’s no real punishment for failure. I’m comparing here to Tenchu, where messing up and getting killed meant having to redo the entire mission. It just made you not mess around with enemies, because you had at least two minutes or so that you could lose if you died. Still, this seems like an improvement. I guess the improvement from Vitas to Quicksaves is that you don’t get healed while your enemies remain wounded. But I really hate when games encourage players to do the save-every-five-seconds thing, as that basically devolves into an unlimited-lives version of Dragon’s Lair very quickly.


Jason:

I think we’re entering a transitional era of game design. There’s going to be (and kind of already is) a lot of debate whether you should present your game as an "experience" that everyone can play through (i.e. not hard) or retain the challenge of "beating" the game, and making reaching the end more of an accomplishment. I think there’s room for both approaches in the same game, but I do worry that the quality of people’s experiences won’t be the same across the board. For example, when I played through BioShock the first time I refused to kill the Big Daddies, but then I started a second run through in which I was saving the girls and accruing powers. They were two different game experiences. The first was tense and slower paced because I had to be careful (because I wasn’t building up powers very much), while the second run through was much looser and ‘fun’ because I had more room for error (enhanced health/strength) and could experiment and play around more. Honestly (strangely?) I kind of enjoyed the first run through more because it seemed to fit the theme better. Then again, it was my first time experiencing the story and environment so you can’t expect the second run through to pack the same punch.


Rick:

Yeah, I feel like that too. Basically, it seems like some old games, like Metal Gear, Metroid, Zelda (especially the second quest), and Castlevania 2 (just to stick with old NES examples) were just brutally hard, pretty much to the point of sucker-punching players constantly. I think there’s been an overcompensation where a lot of games have become way too easy, and the real interactive "gameplay substance" element has been weakened.

I think that hard games are inherently more fun when players are actually primarily playing the game (e.g. not party games, as those players are primarily hanging out with friends; nobody plays Mario Party alone…I hope) because the difficulty means that the player is forced to examine the intricacies of gameplay and balance and learn the core skills of the game. If the player cannot lose, then there’s no mental or visceral engagement; why should I learn to aim well and fire really fast and get those headshots if the AI is slow, there’s a strong auto-aim, and my character can take tons of damage? There’s no motivation for me to get into the game and up my skill level because I’m going to win anyway, thus there’s no reward for doing well. So to get players into the game, I think you have to offer a reward/punishment scheme of some sort.

Of course, there’s also the line between "hard" and "mercilessly punishing" that old NES games frequently crossed…but I don’t think that most modern games are anywhere even near to that line, with the exception of stuff like Ninja Gaiden.

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I think possibly the best solution for balancing challenge while offering a fun experience to people of different skill levels can be found in the Half-Life games. Of maybe I should say the Half-Life 2 games because I don’t fully remember if the first one did this. Anyway, what I noticed in those games is that the difficulty fluctuates dynamically during gameplay to make you feel like you’re always in more danger than you really are. In other words, enemy attacks do more damage when you are at full strength and less damage when you are weakened. This provides some exhilarating moments when your health is low and you think the next hit is going to kill you, yet you manage to survive (you can still die, of course, but the design generates close calls). It also serves to make the player feel like his skills miraculously saved him. The only downside to this technique is that I am aware of it, or more importantly, I can feel it. Sometimes when I survive an attack that my gut tells me should have killed me, I feel like I’m being coddled. Also, there is little sense of pride/status for getting one’s health and shields all the way up to 100% because that level cannot be preserved - any attack will knock those values down drastically (especially the shields).

Still, I think this approach does wonders to broaden the range of experience levels players can possess and still enjoy the game. If anyone has other techniques they’ve seen (or used) that they are fond of, I would love to hear about them.

-Jason