Final Fantasy XIV, Rules, and Playful Design

I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV! Yes, I’m one of those! Blame my friends, they got to me at last. I had an interesting thought, the other day. If you haven’t played Final Fantasy XIV, hereafter frequently referred to as FFXIV, then you might not understand that its combat feels very different from the likes of more “standard” MMOs of the years’ past like World of Warcraft. There’s a number of certain somethings in the nuances of its design that piqued my interest, made me question what makes them tick. What’s more, the more I thought about these little nuances the more I found surprising parallels in other games that you might not expect. So, if only to satisfy my own curiosity, I’d like to try and break down what about FFXIV’s combat sets it apart, in my estimation, and what can be learned from how XIV does things. 

Now, if I describe aspects of Final Fantasy XIV that come from different expansions that were released years apart, please do not be dissuaded. The entire development history of the game is characterized by slow and highly iterative adaptation to its changing goals and aspirations. Even the game’s own narrative reflects this, but all that’s a story for another day. Suffice to say, even though FFXIV took about a decade to come out, in a drip feed, it is presently very much a complete and cohesive product worth investigating on the whole of its merits, in addition to the individual merits of its expansions.

The Core Mechanics

First, to understand how Final Fantasy XIV becomes ‘playful’, as the title up there indicates, we need to understand, like all newbie players, the baseline that the game expects of you during combat. To start, each player has a combat job, who fills some sort of role. The primary roles are tank, who absorbs most of the damage and the enemies’ ire, the healers, who provide healing support, and the damage dealers, whose specialty is obvious, and are further divided into ranged, melee, and magic damage dealers. Each of these jobs need to maximize their effectiveness to get through the most difficult encounters. Managing their resources correctly, pressing the right buttons and casting the right spells in the right order, is all essential.

There is an optimal way to do this. There is not room for much personal expression through play in the combat of Final Fantasy XIV. I think that’s fine, as this MMO concentrates much of its avenues of personal expression elsewhere. The playfulness of its combat lies elsewhere than in the individual players, as well. But back to the subject, if a player is experienced, their performance will more and more approach this optimal sequence of player actions, that deal the maximum damage, absorb damage most efficiently, or heal most efficiently. This is their ‘rotation’. Players are expected to constantly be tending their rotations in combat for maximum efficiency.

However, the enemies in this game have special attacks that can hit multiple players, and not just the tanks. These are called Area of Effect attacks, or AoEs. These are (almost) always indicated by bright orange volumes on the flat 2D surface of the ground. Some players might humorously say “there are lines on the floor” when ribbing each other’s performance. And indeed, to dodge an AoE, one must step out of the bright orange shape, before it resolves. The orange AoEs are a rather ingenious way of injecting some more engaging movement to the otherwise rather static tradition of “tanking and spanking” enemies as was often said in World of Warcraft. The AoE markers are calculated server-side, meaning their mechanics must be communicated to the greater online sphere before they resolve on an individual player’s client, as AoEs are by definition meant to affect multiple players. If an enemy were to just swing his arm without such a warning in real-time, the differential between client and server could make for a rather inaccurately timed and unpleasant experience. So instead, the developers opted to essentially slow down the process of dodging attacks a lot.

A muscular lizard man with brass knuckles strikes an intimidating pose. A bright orange rectangle appears on the ground in front of him. After a moment, he strikes at the air, sending a shockwave over the highlighted area.

These bright orange “danger” volumes become go-to shorthand in combat.

This, obviously, makes FFXIV a whole lot easier than, say, a real-time game like monster hunter (at least at first, but we’ll get there), and itself not quite an action game. The developers were aware of this too, of course, so instead of relying on players’ reactive abilities, they test players’ predictive abilities. AoE attacks come out slowly. Usually. And they have very clear indicated boundaries. They always resolve a static amount of time after appearing. So what happens if there’s a large AoE, leaving only a small safe zone… but then, another AoE appears, a couple seconds later but before the first resolves, and covers that safe zone? Now you are tracking two timers, splitting your attention.

Remember this is all happening while players continue to triage their rotations. FFXIV is a game that demands multitasking as a core skill. You might have heard this, but the human brain is actually exceptionally bad at engaging in several activities at once. When you ‘multitask’, what you’re really doing is rapidly shifting attention from one activity to the next, and back, ensuring no one activity becomes too neglected, like spinning plates. In the example I provided, you must manage your rotation, but also be aware of the first AoE’s timer, and not be distracted by the fact that a second AoE is overlapping your safe zone. Because as soon as that timer goes off, you must concern yourself with the second, delayed AoE’s timer, and vacate from the initial safe zone. Oh, and don’t forget to keep up with that rotation. Don’t want to fall behind on damage.

So from what at first seems like a rather basic combat design basis, we get some versatility with basically… messing with player cognition to a great degree. Imagine barrages of AoEs, all different sizes and shapes, all slightly offset from each other in space and time. Maybe some AoEs that respond to player movement, and some that depend on player facing direction. Pretty quickly the demands of multitasking become quite frantic. I don’t have to imagine it, I’ve lived it. It doesn’t end there, though. With these basic rules in place, Final Fantasy XIV, instead of only intensifying the existing mechanics, constantly introduces entirely new ones, with their own demands of the player’s time and attention. So how can they keep the constant barrage of new information from overwhelming the player? If the rules are constantly changing, how does the encounter design stay intuitive?

“Intuitive”

To figure that out, we need to decide what’s “intuitive.” using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive. Thanks Oxford, but, hm. Okay, that doesn’t help us much. How do we know what our players will feel to be true “even without conscious reasoning”? Let’s hone in on that last word – instinctive. We can start by using signifiers that relate to general knowledge the average player in our demographic would bring with them into the game. This often translates to relying on real world “common knowledge” as a basis for gameplay mechanics. If there are two towers, one taller than the other, and lightning is about to strike, which tower should you stand under?

An army of adventurers pelt a giant flying centaur with weapon strikes and bolts of magic. The centaur throws two spears into the air, which land on either side of a large platform. One spear is much taller than the other, and this one is struck by lightning.

As you can see, in the chaos, following simple instructions can be challenging.

FFXIV is, once you’ve acclimated to the basis of its combat system, rather consistently good at this. Most of the time, it is possible, perhaps even feasible, to discern most of what an enemy might be capable of based on this sort of “common knowledge” intuition. When an enemy raises their right hand, it is likely unwise to stand on their right flank. A dragon will probably breathe fire in a cone in front of itself. If a boss is charging a massive attack, with tons of energized particle effects to accentuate, and a rock that is roughly the size of play character falls onto the ground, then it is probably advisable to put the rock between yourself and the enemy boss. 

That last one is intuitive on a “common knowledge” basis, but it also overlaps with another kind of gameplay intuition, which is pattern recognition. Generally, human brains are very very good at recognizing patterns. When FFXIV introduces a new mechanic, it can be considered to be establishing a paradigm. As that mechanic may appear again, sometimes very frequently! In addition to the “core” mechanics of FFXIV combat discussed earlier, the game deploys additional mechanics with a particular kind of consistency of logic. For example, eventually a player working their way through the main story of FFXIV will find themselves fighting an ancient dragon. This dragon will use an ability called ‘Akh Morn.’ Prior to its activation, this ability is foreshadowed by the standard ‘stack’ mechanic indicator, meaning players must huddle together to split the damage. Akh Morn, however, hits multiple times – so if players scatter after the first hit as they’re used to, they must react to reconvene, if they’re to survive. Later, they will fight a dragon again, and Akh Morn will once again occur, and work the very same way. At this point, it will become clear that Akh Morn is an ability specifically associated with dragons, and players will be prepared for it any time they see one, even before the ability is used. This is also a kind of intuition, based upon a sense for the shape of the gameplay’s design and intentions, in recognition of established patterns. One might even call it gamesense. 

FFXIV overlapping its mechanics makes players more predictive than reactive.

That’s all well and good, but this is all kind of fuzzy, isn’t it? Indefinite terms like “common knowledge”, and even pattern recognition will not be consistent across all players – each individual learns at a different pace. So how can you tell what is intuitive? There’s no real definite approach outside of using best judgment, and then playtesting. Playtesting playtesting playtesting. You’ll never really know how players will react to certain gameplay decisions until you see players react to those gameplay decisions. Seeing your players engage with your systems will inform your approach. This can be seen in how enemies and combat mechanics in FFXIV change gradually, but significantly over the course of its story quest – through many iterations across several expansions that came out over the course of a decade. 

Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale Are The Same Game

I am especially fond of how FFXIV uses that “common knowledge intuition” to introduce its new combat mechanics. I have a history of playing MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft. I was even a rather hardcore raider – or in other words, a participant in high-end end-game content, the most challenging stuff saved for the most dedicated players. The way WoW designed its encounters was interesting, chaotic, engaging, and often quite complicated. However, I rarely felt the sense of intuitive sensibility I feel playing Final Fantasy XIV. The narrative and aesthetic building blocks of combat in Final Fantasy are all abstractions of actions one can make some sense of in the context of the fiction. WoW, at least when I played it, had some of that, but its more difficult encounters leaned much further into abstraction, with status conditions upon gameplay modifiers upon unique interactions disconnecting, at least for me, the experience of engaging with those systems from the experience of being in the fantasy world. 

I have been playing quite a bit of Undertale and Undertale-adjacent content, lately. Such as Toby Fox’s other brilliant game Deltarune, and the charming fan-made Undertale prequel, Undertale Yellow. While dodging bullets shaped like flexing muscles, representing a monster’s outgoing personality, it occurred to me how starkly similar these two games – Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale actually are, at least in terms of their combat systems. 

Okay hear me out, I’m not insane, I swear. 

Both games are RPGs that represent enemy offensive actions with abstract shapes that denote areas on a 2D plane of danger, and safety. Entering a “danger zone” causes the player damage. The shapes these danger zones take abstractly denote the kind of action the enemy is taking. In Undertale, these danger zones are called bullets, and if they’re shaped like water droplets, they might denote the enemy crying, or causing it to rain. In FFXIV, these danger zones are called AoEs, and if it’s a cone extended from a monster’s front, it might denote the monster breathing fire. 

I can see you’re not sold. Alright, consider this; both games feature two prominent methods by which tension, challenge, and surprise is weaved into gameplay. In Undertale you might run into a monster who cries tears down on you from above that you have to avoid. Then, you might run into a monster who sends a fly to slowly follow you, which you must constantly move away from. Neither bullet pattern is especially difficult to dodge. But then, you may run into both monsters simultaneously! Suddenly, you must multitask and interweave devoting attention to both bullet patterns at once. In Final Fantasy XIV, boss mechanics are deployed in a very specific way. Every boss will start by using one of its signature abilities – perhaps a simple barrage of AoE attacks at random locations around the players. Then, they’ll introduce a new mechanic, maybe forcing the players to a certain quadrant of the arena while looking in a certain direction. Neither pattern is especially difficult to dodge. But then, the boss will begin using both moves simultaneously! Suddenly, you must multitask and interweave devoting attention to both patterns at once. 

The undertale character Asgore, a large horned furred monster in a warrior king's outfit shoots many bullets of flame out at areas indicated with a "!". He then swings a blue, then an orange trident.

Oh HMMM sure looks *exactly* like AoE markers and color-coded attacks with special rules, HMMM!

That is not where the similarities end, though. The other prominent method by which both games influence their interest curves is through the introduction of new rules, as previously mentioned. Think about it; The first time Undertale deploys the “blue heart” mechanic, the player is shocked, possibly confused, as their schmup-style 2D grid of bullet dodging suddenly becomes a 2D platformer complete with gravity and jumping controls. It completely upends the paradigm of how one must think of the spatial relationships of all entities in play. I really think the “blue heart” moment is undersold in how instantly it establishes Undertale’s playful nature, and the breadth of  unique variety it is willing to explore. Meanwhile, in FFXIV, the first I remember of an equivalent “blue heart” moment is when I was introduced to the “ice floor” mechanic in the story content leading up to FFXIV’s first expansion. The ice floor forces the player to move a set, (large) minimum distance, if moving at all, most often coinciding with other, damaging mechanics that need to be dodged. This, and other mechanics like, “forced march”, which, as the name implies, forces your character to march in a straight line, changes the paradigm of how you relate your character’s spatial relationship to all other entities in play. 

A decaying giant robot puppet spins like she is dancing, in an opera hall. A much smaller android in a black dress dexterously bounds over and around a stream of energy orbs unleashed from the puppet, then strikes her with a sword.

But perhaps I give Undertale too much credit. I am not, after all, extremely familiar with the shoot ’em ups and bullet hells which inspired it. In fact, it feels as though bullet hell-like mechanics have been infiltrating other genres for a while now, much like RPG mechanics started to do some years ago. I’m always in favor of that sort of diffusion, as it leads to a lot of cool new ideas that couldn’t exist otherwise. It reminds me of Returnal, or its inspirations like Nier and Nier: Automota. I do, however, think there is a certain something to how FFXIV and Undertale/Deltarune play with their rules, that *does* set them apart from other similar games. I just can’t shake the feeling that these two seemingly disparate experiences have a strong link between them.

Rules

A rather flamboyant character with shoulder-length hair and an official-looking uniform. He is "roulx kaard" from the game Deltarune. He is lying down, propped up on one elbow, rocking his foot and a finger-gun gesture back and forth in rhythm. His hair is sparkling.

Image unrelated.

These “paradigm shifting” moments are essentially the introduction of supplementary rules to the basis upon each respective game is built. Games are made of rules, so when you add rules, you change the game. Both Undertale and Final Fantasy XIV do this with some regularity, to the point that adapting to the addition of new rules is a prominent part of both games’ core skillset and identity. A combination of pattern recognition, rote memorization, and intuitive anticipation replaces the twitch-reactive mindset you might find in an action game. This settles both games into a certain mood, where anything can happen, because any new rule can simply be dropped in the player’s lap.

By utilizing intuitive design, presumably through extensive testing, FFXIV dodges the obvious pitfall of such an approach in most cases. That being, if a player settles into the loop of a comfortable and reliable ruleset, a sudden disruption can feel jarring and unfair – a new rule kind of implies that the player hasn’t been prepared for it, yeah? So that’s why it’s so essential to this sort of playful design that things always be intuitive. FFXIV has several vectors to achieve this – not just in its flashing indicators, AoE warning shapes, monster designs, and monster animations, but also through the text displayed on enemy UI when they use a special attack. “Forced March” sort of implies what it does, and those words are visible to you before you have to react. All these things form the language by which FFXIV communicates information and teaches you each new rule without teaching it to you. Undertale’s language for communicating new rules is through shapes. When the player’s heart turns green, the game becomes a bit of a rhythm-adjacent directional timing game. This is indicated by all the enemy bullets becoming arrows, and moving in regular intervals with the music. 

A floormap with large, complicated orange "AoE" markers layered overtop. The entire map rotates counterclockwise, and two quadrants of the map are highlighted in red.

As you can see, once this stuff starts to stack up, it can really get quite taxing. Gif from here.

In both cases, if players are ever confused, they are never confused for long, and even may discern the nuances of a new rule before it’s engaged! Understanding game rules becomes a skill in itself, and experienced players are encouraged to discern the shape of the design through intuition. I find something so fascinating and appealing about this because it goes in the opposite direction of the typical wisdom that the hand of the designer needs to be invisible. The players play along as the designer plays – it creates a sort of Calvinball mentality, where the game can be anything you imagine, and every encounter can feel fresh. So many other RPGs I’ve played get so wrapped up in what the design of their encounters must be that they feel stifling.

I think this is what makes me distinguish Undertale and Final Fantasy XIV so closely in my mind, even compared to similar games in the MMO or Shoot ‘Em Ups genres. It’s the playfulness, the bending and manipulating of the very fabric of the game by bending, reimagining, or supplementing the very building blocks, the rules. This allows the designers so much freedom in what they can convey simply through combat mechanics, and if you’ve read anything of mine or spoken to me for five minutes, you may know that I love when gameplay and narrative synergize or better yet supplement one another. Undertale uses shapes to communicate gameplay obstacles, but also the shape of the opposing monsters’ emotions. The blue heart mechanic only appears while fighting the skeleton brothers, two fights that happen worlds apart but are connected by this, emphasizing their relationship to each other. When a character repeats the use of a forbidden power in Final Fantasy you hadn’t seen for a very long time, you understand their desperation. And so on.

A closeup of an elderly elf man. He looks contentedly into a blazing light that grows to encompass him and then the entire image.

All that aside, you’ll still find me looking like this standing in a basic-ass AoE

What Was I Talking About?

Anyway, I think I’m finally satisfied with what was causing an itch at the back of my brain while playing Undertale Yellow. It’s that the exact same parts of that brain, the same reflexes, pattern recognition skills, and adaptability I had trained in Final Fantasy were carrying over. And I think I’ve been able to suss out what about the two games feels so familiar to me. Playfulness in design, the willinging to recontextualize and reorient the ruleset has been employed often in games, but rarely is it such a central pillar as it is in Undertale and FFXIV. Wario Ware and Mario Party are games about playing smaller, bite sized game experiences, and I’ve heard FFXIV players joke that they’re essentially the same as their favorite MMO. I can remember a number of arena battles in Ratchet and Clank that randomly swap out your weapon, or give the enemies some absurd advantage, rotating rules in and out over time. I think I’ve found a lot to take away from this exercise, and it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the very different approaches there are to making combat in games both fun and engaging. Not everything has to be about fast and snappy reactions. There are a myriad of reasons a person might enjoy a game and a thousand avenues to accentuate that. So experiment with your design and your rules, and see what speaks to you.

Ifrit the fiery god from final fantasy XIV is shown in closeup, a horned burning lizard-like beast with skeletal claws and stony scales.

So – let us be about it, hero.

Boss Breakdown: Dark Mantis from Mega Man X8

Boss breakdown again! It’s been a while. What’s a boss breakdown? It’s a design exercise. I try to break down, to the fundamental particles, what makes up a boss fight, how its design operates under the hood, and analyze the result. Design goals, what the design accomplished, the whys, the hows, and everything between.

For this boss breakdown I want to do something a little different. I’m going to compare two versions of the same boss fight. The boss I’m going to break down is Dark Mantis from Mega Man X8 for the Playstation 2. Interestingly, one of the versions is a fan-made recreation, meant to be evocative of the 16-bit classic Mega Man X games. This ‘demake’ in question is being developed by one AlyssonDaPaz. I played a lot of this game when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of it. On balance I’d say it’s a pretty good game, but it is far from the best of the Mega Man or even the X series. It was the first game in the series following the less-than-fondly-remembered Mega Man X6 and Mega Man X7, which are both… extraordinarily flawed, each in their own way. Maybe I’ll talk about those one day. My point is that X8 was a case of the franchise trying to re-find its footing after a rough patch, and as only the 2nd ever 3D game of the main series Mega Man games, it was still experimenting on how best to leverage these new capabilities with a classic formula. The ‘demake’ Dark Mantis has no such baggage nor extant goals. The fascinating thing about fan remakes and demakes like these, I think, is how they are inherently made with the benefit of hindsight, and the added context of being made by someone a fan – a distinct perspective that colors how the design is approached.

Dark Mantis, narratively, is an assassin-type robot modeled after a praying mantis with blades attached to his arms. He skulks about in the dark for a quick, clean kill. So, a lot of his design is going to reflect that. He has a lot of fast, sudden movements to reflect this. In the original, he has two basic behaviors – hopping back and forth a short distance on the ground, from which he will react with an attack based on player-proximity, and his second behavior; jumping back and forth across the top of the screen, from wall to wall. In the demake, his hopping behavior, which characterized Dark Mantis as very cautious and careful, looking for the opportune moment to strike, has been removed. In the practice the hopping behavior slowed the pace of the fight, leaving the player more room to breathe. This reflects the design philosophy of most of the bosses of Mega Man X8, none of which are extraordinarily fast pace. In the demake, Dark Mantis is basically always attacking, with very little downtime between each attack routine. This characterizes him more as a merciless, vicious killer that dispatches his opponents quickly and efficiently. If you want my opinion, the demake does, with the benefit of hindsight, characterized the mantis better through his design – more accurately matching his written dialogue and descriptions as presented.

He still bounces between the top corners of the screen by clinging to walls, but this has been altered in the demake. In the original, this behavior would keep the player away of their relative position on the ground and discourage abusing the walls to avoid attacks too easily, and Dark Mantis would otherwise have trouble hitting players hiding in those top corners. Forcing the player to the ground also encourages them into close proximity – appropriate for this more melee-oriented boss fight. The demake version fills this some purpose, but also includes the fan version’s first new attack not present in the original. Dark Mantis will, after one or several hops, drop straight vertically out of the air, bearing his blades down when he is exactly above the player. So the player must not only be aware of their relative position on the ground, but the number of hops Dark Mantis has done, and otherwise be prepared to react with a dash to dodge out of the way. This adds a sense of tension to the behavior that the original did not have. While in the original you did not know when Dark Mantis would drop from the wall, you could always preemptively move to the opposite wall. There is no such option with his plunging attack, so the player must always be prepared to react.

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. On the left, Dark Mantis hops from wall to wall, then plunges his blades into the ground. On the right, Dark Mantis hops back and forth on the floor, then throws a black energy projectile.

Left: Plunging Attack, Right: Shadow runner

Shadow runner is an attack that is in the original and not the remake. Which is ironic, seeing as how in the original, Shadow Runner is one of the attacks the titular X can copy from Dark Mantis after he is defeated. What it does, is produce a shadowy arrow projectile that travels horizontally, then spins outward when it reaches a close proximity to the player. This gave Dark Mantis an extra ranged option, to cover for his more melee-focus. It’s easily dodged though, by jumping over or dashing under it. It’s removal from the demake makes sense, as Dark Mantis is given an even more keen melee focus, and he much more aggressively forces the player into close proximity with him, making Shadow Runner kind of redundant. 

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. On both sides, Dark Mantis attempts to grab X, who moves out of the way at the last moment.

Aside: The animation and sprite work on this fan game is just gorgeous.

Next, we have Blood Scythe, which works a bit differently between versions. The original  has Dark Mantis travel a set distance forward in a fast dash when the player is close enough in front of him. He may hop into this range, or the player may enter it to trigger. To dodge the player simply has to dash or jump out of the way fast enough, or else be restrained by Dark Mantis. While restrained, the player will take a small amount of damage, but Dark Mantis will have his hp restored slowly in turn, making this a highly punishing attack. This serves the purpose of making the player always away of Dark Mantis’s proximity to them. He is meant to be deadly up-close with those plays, so this attack reinforces that idea. In the original the attack can be ended early by using the assist mechanic, in which one of the player’s two controlled heroes assists the other to escape, and takes his place in the action. The demake understandably removed this mechanic, and multiple playable characters in general, presumably for simplicity and scope reasons. There is another notable difference to the demake’s blood scythe and that is its movement. Its lateral movement is now slower, but will travel however far is necessary to reach the player, before initiating the grab.

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. Dark Mantis lifts his scythes up and dashes at X, grabbing him and sucking out his energy. On the right, another android appears to free X.

Ah yes, praying mantises, well known for… sucking blood? Robot blood?

This ties into another new attack added in the demake. When Dark Mantis is on the ground and detects the player is also on the ground, he may choose to initiate one of two attacks and move him across the entire arena from his current position until he reaches the player or a wall. In the first is bloodscythe, the second is close-ranged a slashing attack. Relatively, bloodscythe has a lot more startup time and moves slightly slower than the slash. He assumes two very different poses depending on which he will initiate – raising both blade arms for bloodscythe, and moving one blade to his hip in a low stance for the slashing attack. In many cases in Mega Man X game it is the player’s instinct to dash and jump to dodge attacks – as most attacks do not cover a wide area, this offers the most vectors of escape; up and away. It takes a good amount of discipline and conscientiousness to resist this impulse, which is what the slashing attack demands. Dark Mantis propels himself with the slash just high enough into the air that it can be dodged if the player is in a dash state, in which their hitbox is shorter. If they also jump, obviously they will be struck. Dashing and jumping is the optimal strategy to avoid bloodscythe, but not the slash. This new dynamic introduced to the fight ensures the player has to keep their eyes on Dark Mantis and watch for his tells.

A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room, all rendered in 16-bit pixel art. Dark Mantis readies an arm blade, and dashes across the enter length of the arena floor, then jumps and slashes X as he approaches. X ducks and dashes at the last second.

This animation on this attack is really well done – dynamic and threatening.

This forms a new core identity to the demake version of Dark Mantis. The slashing attack and bloodscythe become two of his most common attacks, and thus represent an ever present threat that demands skills of reflex, observation, and control. The slashing move is then followed by a short-ranged projectile that can be dodged easily enough, but adds to the complexity of the move as something you still need to be aware of.

Finally there’s the attack black arrow. It’s a spray of projectiles that launch up, and in an arc, spreading out as they go, then coming down on the position the player was in when they were launched. To dodge, anticipate where the arrows will fall, and stand in the safe gaps between them. The in demake, this further serves as a sort of misdirection. Because Dark Mantis has so little down time between attacks, his black arrow becomes a kind of provurbial smoke screen to draw player attention away while he prepares his next move. Black arrow is very similar between the versions, but demake Dark Mantis’s black arrow attack is a lot easier to see, in general. That makes it easier to dodge, but also less frustrating to deal with in general. 

Something black arrow draws into focus is the fight’s readability. Readability is essential for fast-paced action games like Mega Man. If the game is all about spatial relationships, reaction, and timing, the player’s got to see what they’re reacting to and time, and where it’s coming from, right? Now, the intentional obscuring of information like where a projectile is at any given time can be leveraged for an extra change of pace and challenge, which I presume is what the original X8 was intending, but this can very easily become frustrating. You see, each level in Mega Man X8 has some sort of unique level mechanic or gimmick, to distinctify the stage. This could have been done for any number of reasons. It’s possible it was just to give the game its own signature style compared to other Mega Man games, or it could’ve been done to broaden the game’s appeal to a more general audience, or for any other reason. In Dark Mantis’s stage, the gimmick is a generator that, when activated, turns on all the lights in the dark, shadowy level. This includes a light in Mantis’s own boss room. In light, he’s much easier to see. 

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. Dark Mantis throws several black arrows up. They then arc as they fall, leaving behind purple trails. X walks out of their trajectory.

Side by side like this, its easy to see which version is *much* more readable.

Even with the light though, demake Dark Mantis is just a lot easier to see. This is a side effect of him being a 2D sprite. 2D sprites are a lot easier to make readable than 3D. The artistic techniques necessary to make 2D art readable are less system-dependent as well. 2D sprites can have definite outlines without need of external program scripts, for instance.  For a further example of what I mean, consider that 2D Dark Mantis is not lit by any particular source of light in the room. He has shading, but it is general purpose – meant to look good from any position in the room in which he appears. His body catches light as illustrated, but not from any particular angle. With this in mind, 2D sprites do not have to have the same relationship of color and light to their background as 3D models do to look natural. Demake Dark Mantis is actually a lot brighter on the screen than his shadowy background may imply – he actually consists of mostly mid-tones – but it doesn’t look jarring. That contrast does make him highly readable at a glance, though. 

Original Dark Mantis, on the other hand, has to “blend” more with his environment, or his 3D model would stick out in a jarring way that would seem amateurish. A 3D model’s poses also have to be manually puppeteered, and a 3D model’s anatomy cannot easily be exaggerated the way a 2D sprite’s can to convey the artist’s intended look and feel. 2D drawings can be contorted in ways 3D models can’t to be more readable. 

At this point the difference in direction here is definitely starting to come into focus for me. One of the main things, I think, is difficulty. Mega Man x8, particularly in comparison to other Mega Man games, is not extremely difficult. It’s no pushover, on the harder difficulty settings, but the most critically beloved Mega Man games can be some real killers. The series kind of has a reputation for it, actually, and that sense of intense challenge is a big appeal for a lot of its core audience. 

I’m about to engage in some protracted speculation here.

Something to understand about Mega Man as a franchise: It’s never been a blockbuster seller. Mega Man the character is one of the most famous video game icons, period. Everybody knows Mega Man. The people love him. Thing is, that popularity never especially translated to sales. However, it’s a series with about 50 or so entries, even if you’re counting conservatively. My point is, these are highly technical games with a huge skill ceiling, and an often unyielding skill floor. Some niche, fairly hardcore games, for a niche hardcore audience. They inherently don’t have the same mass market appeal as a Mario, or even a Sonic. This was never a problem for a long time, because these games typically did not cost a great deal to make. Each sequel made extensive use of art assets recycled from the one previous, was made in a fairly short amount of time, and introduced only moderate iteration along the way. 

Mega Man games were fast turnaround, low risk, with a loyal and devoted audience of hardcores. That is, until 2D games started to temporarily lose popularity in the advent of 3D graphics. It didn’t seem temporary at the time, though. Here’s the speculation: 3D games are comparatively very expensive to make. If Mega Man were to survive, it’d need to establish a broader market appeal. And so, the two 3D games in the main Mega Man series of platformers, are also known for being quite a bit less refined in terms of skill investment, and a bit less difficult than the other games. All this to say, I speculate a reprioritization to make these games more generally appealing coincides with their transition to 3D, to make up for the cost of production.

That tangent out of the way, the demake version of Dark Mantis holds no such priorities. This version of the insectoid assassin was clearly made to be more evocative of the very difficult bosses of older Mega Man games, with their zippy movements, narrow dodge windows, and rapid fire attacks. And when I say ‘difficult’ I mean specifically designed to better reward full understanding and leverage of the player’s movement capabilities. This is what the demake version of Dark Mantis has two dash attacks, and a much faster desperation attack. These are meant to further push the player’s understanding of how much distance they can clear quickly, and in what directions that distance can be covered, along with a bit of reaction time testing. 

Finally, both versions of the boss share a mechanic whose archetype appears in several games. I tend to call this a ‘desperation attack’, although I believe the official Mega Man is ‘overdrive attack’. It’s a special, rare, extremely powerful and high-spectacle move that fully shows off the boss character’s power, and in theory fully puts the player’s skills and knowledge to the test, as one final high-tension show stopper. This is a new addition with Mega Man X8 and I have to say it’s a brilliant one. These sorts of things offer a lot of opportunity to characterize boss enemies, from their dialogue to their design, and make a fight a lot more memorable, by giving it a real signature and identity. I do have to say though, Dark Mantis has one of the easier overdrive attacks in the original game to deal with. He jumps to, and floats at the top of the screen and arena, then winds up a glowing scythe over one shoulder. A second later, he slashes one half of the arena entirely, dealing massive damage – always the side opposite the windup. He then repeats the attack on the opposite side. This is a really cool attack, conceptually, and from sheer spectacle I really think it does its job of characterizing Dark Mantis and making him very memorable.

The same scene plays two times, side by side. The left is a pixel-art version, the right is a PS2-era 3D version. A dark robotic mantis fights the blue android Mega Man X in a dark generator room. Dark Mantis jumps up to and floats at the top-center of the room, before extending an arm blade to a great length behind his shoulder. He then slashes more than half of the room in one swipe, then alternates to the other side. On the left, he does this several times.

“I wanna see you CRY!”

The demake version once again ups the ante in terms of difficulty and challenge. The attack is basically the same, except the slash is now *even larger*, encompassing more than half of the arena, requiring a well-timed dash jump at a specific angle, and memorization of the attack pattern. That, and he will alternate slashing the left and right halves of the screen several times before his attack is done. This all makes the move much more menacing, and Dark Mantis as a result a lot more impressive, so I have to praise that. I would say it is perhaps a little less reasonable to be able to dodge this move the first go around, compared to the original, and while the enormity of the slashing effect reads perfectly well after the fact, it’s a little tough to predict that will happen if you haven’t seen it before. This is a little harder to work around, as part of the point of this assassination attack is that it has only a very subtle warning compared to its monstrous effect.

As a longtime and very hardcore action platformer(and Mega Man in particular) fan myself, I have to admit my bias for the more challenging, fast-paced Dark Mantis of the demake. I do have to reiterate that remakes and remasters, especially fan-made ones, have very different circumstances and context to the original design. I in no way mean to disparage the very talented folks behind Mega Man X8, they did not have the hindsight and their own game and future games to draw on. I do have to praise AlyssonDaPaz for his impressive work in re-adapting this boss fight for the kind of fan it’s clearly intended for – that is, longtime hardcore Mega Man fans. I think X8 was likely aiming for a broader audience and many of its design decisions reflect that. I hope you found this interesting. I know I always find boss analysis fascinating, and this sort of comparison is a rare and very educational opportunity. I feel like I was able to learn a lot from this.

Your actions are those of a Maverick!

Paper Mario and Elegant Design

You’ve heard it before. I’ve said it, she’s said it, we’ve all said it – those of us who’ve played it anyway. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is the best Paper Mario game. The best Mario RPG in general, in my humble opinion. That’s pretty astounding for a series that’s been going on for more than two decades. Sure, plenty of people still mark games like Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as the best of their respective series, but there have been many more contenders for both since then. Some from as recently as now, more or less (Time of writing: 2023). My point is, rare has a single entry in a series as The Thousand Year Door been so universally beloved, over and above its peers.

I think there’s a lot of reasons. The Thousand Year Door offers a rare interpretation of the bizarre Mario universe in a more grounded and holistic way, with a narrative bent. It introduces new, named characters and puts iconic Mario characters in novel and interesting situations. The world and narrative design went out of its way to be weird, surprising, and gripping in ways the more straightforward Mario games prefer to be safe, familiar, and general-purpose. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. Paper Mario: The Thousand Years Door is not only funnier, more dramatic, and more rich with character than every Paper Mario that came after it, it also plays better than every Paper Mario that came after it. The Thousand Year Door has some of the most elegant systems I’ve seen in a video game.

I could ramble for hours about how great Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, is but as you’ve no doubt seen many others do so elsewhere, so I will spare you. The focus here is going to be on the gameplay and systems that make the first two entries of Paper Mario so great, even isolated from all other elements. These systems which, in subsequent entries preceding The Thousand Year Door’s 2024 remake like Color Splash, and Origami King, were altered in specific and fascinating ways that had a profound effect on the gameplay of those games.

A ghost in a party hat sits on a recliner next to a fridge. He complains in text "What are you doing, interrupting my 'ME' time?"

Oh shoot, wrong image. This is a picture of me remembering I have to write this blog post. How’d that get in there?

Elegance In Design

So what do I mean by elegant? To me, elegance is all about approachability, and applicability. To create an elegant system, you need an interface that is welcoming, intuitive, and easy to understand, which interacts with each game system in ways such to produce an engaging experience. A sentence, to me, elegant design means systems which find depth in simplicity. Simplicity. This is, paradoxically, a rather difficult thing to achieve – systems that appear simplistic yet offer a lot of depth. 

The first Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 tackled this problem by stripping down the turn-based RPG genre to its barest essentials, which I think is often a good step to take when trying to really take stock of the high-level, fundamental building blocks of your game. What about turn-based, party-based RPGs is fun or engaging on a ludic level? The turn part of that formula allows for infinite time to consider decisions. So, high-level, low-stress decision making. Overcoming stronger opponents by utilizing party members’ unique abilities in combination, feeling clever. Customizing character loadout for unique abilities to reflect individual playstyles. Collecting rewards when defeating strong enemies, to become stronger. 

The game goes through each of these, one by one, and strips them down. Decision making is straightforward and boiled down to immediately obvious causes and effects. More on that later. What’s the minimum needed to accomplish skill combination with multiple player characters? Only two, so Paper Mario only has two active player characters at a time. Any more would add complexity. Character loadouts are represented by the badge system – a very simple point-buy system that allows unique abilities to be chosen, but these choices are non-binding and instantly reversible. The RPG convention of experience points is included, but XP totals never exceed 99, and each level up in Paper Mario reduces the traditionally dense cascade of numbers many other RPG level ups have to just one single bonus, chosen by the player from a suite of only three options.

Crucially, however, these simplifications take nothing away from the way their systems interact with one another. Leveling up still incentivizes battling. The limited choices in character progression still affect your strategy going forward. The wrinkle of the action command mechanic – real time inputs that enhance combat abilities – adds a natural point of divergence for different players. Those less skilled in the commands will find battles taking longer, and therefore will benefit more from having a greater health pool, etc. The mechanics which are simplified, still interact with each other in meaningful and impactful ways, experientially. 

A grid of orange, blue, and yellow badges are arrayed on a menu. There is a green caterpillar at the top left of the screen. At center-top, a description reads "Action Badge. Floating High Jump. Jump higher than usual and momentarily float." A red cursor highlights one of the badges.

The badge system was *so* successful, they basically copied the premise for the newest mainline Mario game!

I think it would be helpful to contrast this with a newer Paper Mario game like The Origami King. The boss battles in that game employ a special, proprietary set of game rules (presumably because it was realized that the depthless turn-based combat borrowed from its predecessor Sticker Star could not support an interesting boss fight on their own. cough). The rules are as follows. The boss enemy sits at the center of the play space, which is divided into three rings circling the boss. Each ring in turn is divided into a number of spaces. These spaces can be empty, have a movement arrow facing one of four directions, or have some other action-triggering item. On the player’s turn, they are given a limited amount of time to select the angle at which mario will approach this play space. They can also rotate each of the individual rings to line up the spaces as desired. He enters the outer ring, then travels until he hits a movement arrow, then changes direction. If he hits a contextual or action space, he executes the associated trigger. The goal is to reach the boss enemy at the correct angle to hit their weak spot. However, the boss can also affect the rings, “pushing” them outward, causing each inner ring to become the subsequent outer ring, and creating a new innermost ring. 

Now that sounds like a lot of information, and it is, not just intellectually but visually. The game boards for these Origami King boss battles are very noisy to look at. So the set up is like a turn-based RPG, but there are no interesting decisions to be made. The game has a very clear optimal solution which it is funneling you toward. To obfuscate this, Mario’s turn during this boss battles is on a timer, creating an artificial sense of tension, because the decision making of the gameplay has none. There is no substantive way to employ risk for greater reward, nor complex goal to accomplish. The systems at play appear very complex, but the goal is quite simple. The opposite of The Thousand Years Door, in which the player is presented with very simple tools to accomplish a relatively complex goal – defeating enemies with their own suite of tools that you must act and react upon accordingly. 

Mario stands on the center of a series of concentric circles, surrounded by origami crabs.

The Thousand Year Door makes something incredibly large from very few, very small parts. Origami King makes something incredibly small from many parts.

Decision Anti-Paralysis

This is a fairly well known phenomenon, so I’ll give the quick version. When presented with too many choices, even if all choices are compelling – perhaps especially so in that case – it actually becomes more difficult to make a choice. What constitutes “too many” choices is highly subject to the individual decision maker and the greater context in which the decision is made, but the phenomenon has an observable effect on how people engage with games. RPGs that drown the player in too many options for play or character customization can easily drive people away, or dissuade them from engaging with the nuances of the RPG systems entirely. 

But I think in a strange way, the opposite is also true. If given a selection of options, but a very limited selection of options, each possible choice can feel much more significant, and therefore confer a greater feeling of power and control to you, the player. There is a balance of course. If choices are too limited the player doesn’t feel the freedom of expression inherent to compelling decision making. They feel dragged along, dissatisfied. The three level up choices of Paper Mario represent a good, strong selection of paths to choose for the respective context. Health for durability, staying power, and a safety net. Flower power for those who wish to make liberal use of powerful special abilities. Badge power for those who desire a greater pool of more varied strategic options to choose from. 

In The Thousand Year Door Mario, at the outset, only has two attacks – hammer and jump. Even fewer in the first Paper Mario. The two attacks do two very significantly different things. The jump can damage any enemy Mario can touch from above. It can deal two instances of 1 damage. The hammer can damage any enemy on the ground that Mario can reach by walking, and deals a single instance of 2 damage. These very simple rules make every choice feel pivotal. It’s not a question of dealing fire damage vs. ice damage as in the case in many RPGs, it’s a question as to whether your attack will be effective at all, and as the player gains knowledge of how the game works, that knowledge becomes a skill in knowing when and how to deploy their limited choices.

The Value of Low Numbers

Paper Mario prioritizes being intuitive and readable for players of all ages. A lot of RPGs involve a lot of math. Paper Mario isn’t interested in that. Again, we ask the question – what is the bare minimum level of complexity necessary to make an RPG system functional? Do you need to be able to deal 9999 damage? Do we need four digits to account for meaningful measurements of battle power? Super Mario Bros. only had eight worlds, and 64 levels, to make a comparison. That is the number of significant demarcations of difficulty. So maybe an RPG only needs two digits to represent damage? For most of Paper Mario only one digit is needed! 

Does the difference between 4882 damage and 5121 damage really matter all that much? Think about it, I mean really think about it. If an enemy has 26000 health, how many times do you have to hit it with one of those four digit numbers to defeat it? The answer is six. Six for both, actually. The ~300 damage between the two is totally irrelevant. White noise. It is actually very unlikely that an enemy has *exactly* enough health to make such a small difference matter. And even then, the difference is only one turn. These number values might as well be 5 damage, and 26 health. Now those stats resemble a Paper Mario enemy, come to think of it. 

Several windows indicating character status are displayed, with a lot of 5 or 6 digit numbers. The closeup face of a knight cuts in center-screen, then the camera pulls back as this knight strikes some monsters several times with a sword. Each strike showers the screen in incomprehensibly large and frequent number values.

I could not possibly tell you what on earth is even happening here.

Following a pattern here, although there is a narrower scope to the information density, that can actually be an advantage. Low numbers accomplish two major things. One: the line of causation between player decisions and outcome are clear. When you succeed at an Action Command in Paper Mario, you deal two damage. When you do not, you only deal one damage. In games with higher numbers, the numbers will naturally change more gradually, and constantly, and thus players will not be able to immediately recall what is and is not ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’. This allows players, with minimal investment on their part, to make meaningful decisions that have an immediate, tangible, visible effect.

Of course, it’s not as if smaller numbers are universally better. Larger values offer more granularity, and specificity. There’s more resolution to store information in the integer 1000 than in the integer 10, but practicality isn’t the only consideration here. There’s also just an undeniable appeal to big numbers on their own. Something in our lizard brain loves to see those values biggify. Sometimes reigning in that instinct toward preposterous numeric exaggeration is worth considering, though.

Mario stands on the center of a series of concentric circles, with four origami shy guys standing before him. An origami fairy next to Mario says "And they're lined up perfectly, so your attack power went up by 1.5X! I'll, uh, let you do that math."

Ahh, yes, every young Mario fan’s favorite leisure time activity: math.

Depth And Intuition

Paper Mario in its original incarnations took a step back and looked at what made up a satisfying progression system in an RPG. What are the barest essentials? Experience points, earned when defeating enemies and stored up by the player, represent progress towards leveling up and getting stronger. In Paper Mario star points take this role. They are likewise earned after battle, but rather than the traditional system in which XP requirements for each level becomes greater and greater to accommodate the leveling curve, a level up in Paper Mario always requires only 100 star points, at acquisition thereof, the player is returned to a count of 0 star points, and works toward earning their next level. This does not negatively impact pacing or the level curve however, as star point yield from defeated enemies scales with the player’s level. The weaker an enemy is in comparison to Mario, the fewer star points he will get. By hiding the mechanism of the leveling curve like this, Paper Mario removes an inherent mental calculus, easing the player’s mental tax, so they can focus on more central aspects of the game. Hiding information like this can be just as impactful as taking it away. RPGs at the time soon started to realize this fact as more and more RPG level progress is being represent as visual indicators like bars that fill up, rather than just overlarge numbers. The immediacy of being able to see one’s progress simply has an undeniable benefit. 

And yet, leveling up in Paper Mario is no less satisfying nor compelling for this simplification. This is an example of simplifying without removing core appeal. 

Intuition is a key target for those wishing to make games that feel simple to play. Common sense is not common, and appealing to a general or even niche demographic’s natural tendencies is hard. I think it’s one of the most important duties of a designer though: anticipating what your players are thinking. But it is essential that you do – when a game is intuitive, the more naturally play comes. The less you have to explain in detail of your game systems through exposition to the target audience, the better off you are.

Mario stands on the center of a series of concentric circles, surrounded by origami goombas with wings. A text pop up at center-screen reads "Line them up!"

Uh… Yeah, kind of the opposite of this.

In Paper Mario, jump attacks are for the air, and hammer attacks are for the ground. However, jump attacks can be used on grounded enemies, many of which react to jumps specifically. Hammer attacks can only hit the nearest grounded enemy. But that also means… Mario can just run underneath flying enemies to reach grounded ones on the backline. Enemies attached to the ceiling aren’t grounded… so a hammer won’t reach them, but there’s no space above, so you can’t jump onto them. However, several of Mario’s partners have projectiles or other attacks that approach from the side. Mario himself can learn a quake move that shakes even the ceiling! All this is obvious to anyone observing, these rules do not assert themselves in big text-heavy tutorials. Combat in Paper Mario is complicated… but it isn’t. It’s all intuitive. Many of its rules speak for themselves. Don’t jump on spiked enemies. Don’t hit exploding enemies with a hammer. Do jump on koopas to flip them over. Use the hammer on more defensive foes. Use the jump to bypass enemies to those on the backline. You can tell just by looking.

The Complexities of Simplicity

On a stage with an audience, Mario runs up to a fuzzy creature with crazy eyes, and slams it with a wooden mallet.

Now, a game that is elegant is deep yet simple on the player’s end. It doesn’t mean making such systems work harmoniously is a simple task. An enormous amount of thought was clearly put into Paper Mario. The key is the way in which different systems interact with one another, which takes a great amount of planning. Badge points drive the player’s acquisition of unique abilities, which drives their expenditure of flower points, which drives their ability to get through battles without taking damage, which drives their desire to increase their health points, which drives their desire to obtain star points to level up, which drives their desire to battle enemies, for example. In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, a caustic pattern is established wherein rewards for battle are simply not worth the time and effort (because the combat in that game is boring, you see.) Instantly any inter-system cooperation is cut off, and does not matter to the player. They are no longer compelled to do battle and engage with your combat system, so they simply won’t. 

Speaking of making combat engaging and intuitive, I want to comment on the extensive care put into the action commands of Paper Mario. Almost without exception, each of the Action Commands in The Thousand Year door are meant to be abstractions of the actual diagetic action the commanded character is executing. For example, Mario is easy to break down: When Mario uses his basic jump attack, he kicks off of his target with a single, precision strike at just the right moment to get a second jump up successful Action Command. Appropriately, this jump Action Command is a single, precision, well-timed press of the ‘A’ button, or the button already associated with jumping. When using a hammer attack in The Thousand Year Door, the command is a little different. The player must pull the control stick away from the target while Mario is building power, then let it go. This mirrors the motion of applying pressure to pull back a heavy hammer, and then letting its weight carry you into a full overhead swing. Every action command in the game follows a sort of logic like this, but I want to mention one more. One of Mario’s allies is a koopa who attacks by withdrawing into his shell, and spinning up to launch himself at opponents. The action command is to press A, not just as he hits an enemy, but as a constantly scrolling marker overlaps a target point on a bar. Why does it take this form? It represents the spinning! Your PoV is the koopa spinning in his shell, trying to align his target. So clever. 

Princess Peach stands in a computer room full of terminals, screens, and readouts. She says in text "Uh... OK then. Good night." with a nonplussed expression, the leaves.

Yes, The Thousand Year Door Is Actually That Good-

-and you should play it when the remake comes out. Seriously though, the purpose of this post is not to convinced anyone of how great The Thousand Year Door Is. I actually approached this from the assumption that the game is indeed effective at fulfilling its design goals, and I wanted to make the case for my observation of how that was accomplished. The genius of the first two Paper Mario games was in how they opened up an extremely storied and nuanced genre for young people. I basically learned to read by playing Paper Mario. It was formative for me, and it practically built the foundation of my understanding of how elegance and intuition in gameplay mechanics worked. I’ve revisited it many, many times and learned a little something about design every time I go back to it. I hope I’ve been able to impart some of that to you. 

Mario, flanked by a goomba with glasses and a goomba with a ponytail and pit helmet stand before an ornate, ancient door. Mario holds a map aloft, which glows with magic.

It HURTS to be this good!

Taking a Break For Ludem Dare

Hey, sorry for the late notify, but I’m taking a break this week for a semiannual game jam. I do still make games ;P. Maybe I’ll post about it here at a later date. I just didn’t have the time this weekend, which is a shame because I really wanted to talk about another of my favorite games of all time, which just got a remake announced recently. So look forward to that, before the end of October. Thank you all readers and perusers for your patience, and I appreciate each and every one of you.

Baldur’s Gate 3 and Motivation: Why You Can’t Stop Playing Baldur’s Gate

You know it, I know it. I’ve spoken to strangers on the street in the past few weeks who know it. Baldur’s Gate 3 is on fire in the twilight of summer of 2023. The game has been extensively praised for its AAA quality that does not include any (as of this writing) in-game purchases or microtransactions, things which in their respective games, tend to replace motivating factors or worse, leverage motivating factors away from player enjoyment to encourage spending. I find it the height of irony, and extremely hilarious, that even given all of the breath, incalculable dollars’ worth of research, and man hours devoted to trying to make the perpetually playable game, to become the perpetually profitable game vis a vis microtransactions, Baldur’s Gate 3 has manage to break records of concurrent players and shatter sales expectations simply by being competently designed, with a respect for the established fundamentals of how game design manages player motivation. How about that.

A zoom in on the eyes on a monstrous, tentacled face, looking panicked. The next shot is from their perspective, seen through the windshield of a vehicle, falling through the air, about to crash into the side of a mountain.

Footage of me about to crash into yet another hundred-hour long RPG I don’t have time to play.

And speaking of motivation, it got me thinking about the game’s balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. If you’ve studied game design for any amount of time, you may have run into these terms ‘intrinsic and extrinsic motivation’. I was particularly interested in how Baldur’s Gate 3 leveraged the concepts in concert with one another, and what specific gameplay aspects map to which form of motivation. The game has made some headlines for its huge numbers of concurrent players on PC – breaking the all time top charts. Clearly something is motivating players to keep coming back, and often, to the point of being notable even in comparison to other games.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

So what are our vocab words for the day? Each are a form of motivations that encourages people to do stuff. Extrinsic means motivated by a consequence that exists outside of the action you are being motivated to do. In game design terms, this usually means rewards. Points, gold, gear, are all extrinsic motivators. They give a reason to adventure into the frontier and fight monsters, as opposed to intrinsic motivations – in which the promise of adventuring and fighting monsters is the only motivation you need. An intrinsic motivator is an action which is itself compelling. You might run on a treadmill just to work up a sweat, but you might play a sport just because you enjoy the sport. Both actions lead to a similar result, but in the former case you’re motivated by the result – the reward of the health benefits -, and in the latter case you’re motivated by the act itself.

This applied to Baldur’s Gate in a lot of pretty obvious ways. The game dolls out fairly regular rewards for exploration, dialogue choices, monster fighting, and general adventuring. You clear out a cave of gnolls, you get a cool magic pendant. This makes you stronger, which makes you better at fighting monsters, which you are now more motivated to fight because you can find more magic treasure. Do this enough, and you level up, earning more tools to play with, yet another reward. And so on, forming a feedback loop. But then, why is it that you consider those new tools a reward? The promise of enhanced power could mean faster extrinsic rewards, but it’s also likely you simply relish the idea of getting to use new spells are abilities. That’s intrinsic motivation at work. If you enjoy the strategy and planning involved in a combat encounter, you’re intrinsically motivated.

The Reward In The Labyrinth

A quintessential example of extrinsic motivation is the rat in a maze. If you put a rat in a maze where it can smell cheese hidden in the center, it will follow the scent to the treat, solving the maze. Why does it do this? What’s motivating it? Obviously, it is the promise of reward. It thinks of nothing but that reward in the labyrinth at the center. A game, especially a linear narratively driven one like Baldur’s Gate can be thought of as a labyrinth. It’s a designer’s job to lead player’s willingly through the labyrinth, and so extrinsic rewards are some of the most powerful tools in accomplishing this. What Baldur’s Gate 3 uses as its rewards system is not unique to it, but the results are leading to praise and critical reception the likes of which a western AAA RPG of this type hasn’t seen in a long time, so it’s worth examining. The player is given two major things regularly over the course of regular gameplay, which I would consider rewards – player power, in the form of gold, magic items, and experience points… as well as interactions with, and revelations about the player-controlled characters which make up their party of adventurers.

A rat, straddling a piece of hempen rope says "Follow me. But be ready for anything."

I am not ready for anything.

In other words, Baldur’s Gate uses its characters as a primary source of extrinsic motivation. You improve their attitude toward you enough, you find interesting encounters out in the world that the characters have things to say about, you progress the main narrative along its course, you are rewarded with more interactions with your party. This only works, of course, because the characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 are written so damn well, and are so compelling. A fair number of games have boring characters, to be frank. A fair number of games have boring characters that talk, a lot. Unless your player wants to get to know your characters, and hang out with them, the threat of more content involving interactions with them will not be very enticing.

Now, I’ve got a lot of opinions on the subject, but this isn’t a writing tips blog, so I’ll try to be pretty succinct, broad, and clinical about this. What makes the characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 work so well for people? Or at least, what do they have in common that’s making everyone want to smooch them, making fan art of them, and play hundreds of hours of a deeply involved role playing game to get to know them better. One obvious key, they all share, is an interesting hook. There’s a weird little fact about each of them that instantly draws you in. The hook is the promise of something interesting that could happen – the seeds of intrigue being planted in your audience’s head. It’s something that raises questions and teases answers. Literally every party member, and many NPCs, in Baldur’s Gate 3 share this quality.

Shadowheart’s hook is – well, it’s already there, isn’t it? Why is this young woman named Shadowheart. That’s a little strange, isn’t it? Does she come from some obscure culture that names people as such? Is it a religious thing? She is a cleric, after all. Maybe it’s just a title. These kinds of questions keep your player guessing, and motivate them extrinsically to want to progress their relationship with these characters until the interactions themselves become enjoyable, and the practice becomes intrinsically motivating. Then you’ve got them. We got all that from dear Shadowheart, and she hasn’t said a word of dialogue. All that before we even discover she worships a dark goddess of pain, in contrast to her very amicable and friendly demeanor. More questions. Another hook. Then we learn she had her memories willingly wiped. Then we discover she is afraid of wolves. Etc. All the Baldur’s Gate characters have a lot of these little secrets about them that get hinted at gradually as the game progresses, and many of which are inter-related. Before you learn about Astarion’s personal problems, he tries to make nice after holding you at knifepoint. Before you learn about Karlach’s heart condition, you learn she fought against her will in a blood war in hell.

A raven-haired woman with pointy ears in intricately decorated chainmail speaks casually to someone just off-screen. Onl the listener's shoulder can be a seen. There are cobblestone walls in the background.

I would die for you.

Again, without going too much into the nuances of to write compelling characters, a topic way beyond the scope of this blog post, I will say that this cast all have consistently engaging presence. This is something I notice in a lot of media that loses my interest. You can have the ‘deepest’ most ‘complex’ characters in the history of literature, but if A: Their depth is not conveyed (with those hooks, and subsequent payoffs) or if, more importantly in my opinion, B: They are not compelling to spend time with, your characters are not going to move people. Characters are more than just the hooks and the big reveals and the huge dramatic shifts and the larger-than-life inner turmoils. Think about your friends, your family. The people you love. Most of the time, assuming a healthy relationship, you’re not spending most of your time with people in high-intensity emotionally fraught confrontations. Most human interaction is just… shitting around.

An elf with red eyes and white hair speaks in a sultry manner into the camera. Beneath his lips, sharp fangs can be briefly seen.

You are a consummate loser, but you’re my consummate loser.

Baldur’s Gate 3 characters are excellent at shitting around. Astarion’s over-the-top, campy, cynical melodrama is fun, and funny. Shadowheart’s deadpan earnestness is charming and sweet. Karlach’s puppy-like sense of wonder with the world around her and irrepressible optimism is a delightful contrast to her menacing appearance and horrifyingly tragic backstory. Gale’s flighty, overly poetic, and know-it-all manner of speech makes him dorky and affable. All this, of course, bolstered by stellar acting performances. These people are just a good time to be around. It doesn’t feel like wasted time listening to them talk. This is all compelling, entirely aside from any deeper emotional complexity. Mere exposure to them is compelling. The fact that you might like these people, is what makes emotional complexity and the answers to those hooks from earlier mean something. It’s what makes them captivating and moving and effecting. People carry on through massive, hundred-hour-long RPG experiences like Persona or Dragon Age or Final Fantasy or Xenoblade or Baldur’s Gate not just for the carrot on the end of a stick. The interactions with the characters must themselves become an end, not just a means.

A pale elf with white hair looks longingly into the eyes of a cave bear, who returns him a tender expression. It appears as though they are about to copulate. In the corner, a live studio audience is seen celebrating.

Although it’s not a bad idea to keep ample rewards mixed in…

Learning more about these characters is the reward at the center of the labyrinth, but in the process, your player learns to love the process. Players no longer will play the game just to discover their party’s dark secrets, but to hang out with the party. That will keep a player moving through however much content you have to offer them – as the content itself becomes the goal, not just the rewards it can unlock. This, I think, is the secret spice to Baldur’s Gate 3‘s success. How this applies to its characters is a foundational pillar to its game’s design, but this philosophy also finds its way into all aspects of the design.

Combat As Player Expression

On another note about combat being intrinsically motivating. A major part of this Role Playing Game, based on a popular tabletop Role Playing Game, is the role playing. Now, not everyone engages with these systems, but I find it very clever how Larian utilized roleplay as a form of gameplay through its mechanics. If you have bought in to the world of Baldur’s Gate, then you may see the fun in entirely embodying your player character through their actions, dialogue responses, and fighting style. Maybe your character doesn’t kill. Maybe they kill everyone and push people off of cliffs at any given opportunity.

From a birds-eye view, an adventurer is seen shoving a scythe-clawed avian monster off of a giant mushroom, far into a chasm below.

More designers would do well not to underestimate the unfiltered joy of pushing things off of cliffs.

Combat and dialogue in this game is full of intentionally placed opportunities for various decisions with various results. Some players may encounter very clever strategies for defeating tough enemies, where as other players may not fight those enemies at all. Through this clever planning, Larian has made way for roleplaying to be an intrinsic motivator. If you are bought in to roleplay, then when combat and dialogue presents ample opportunities to engage in it, combat and dialogue becomes a lot more engaging.

Bringing it back, this highlights an important aspect of combat in games I feel is often overlooked. High-intensity gameplay like combat can be a source of player expression, as much as it is a challenge of skill. When a player chooses to be a mage instead of a warrior, or on a more micro level, when a player chooses to throw a punch instead of a kick, they are putting a bit of themself into the game. Any veteran player in competitive games will tell you that people develop playstyles – comfortable patterns reflective of their personality. This is true of single player games too. It’s satisfying to see a bit of your creativity pay off in a functional system! So even where roleplay is not directly involved, it’s important to consider a wide variety of viable player choices for solving gameplay challenges, as the creativity and personal expression that affords is also intrinsically motivating.

Player Expression As Player Expression

But combat is not the only way to encourage this behavior! Players are known for doing things ‘just to see what happens’. Getting to see what happens is the extrinsic motivator. Embodying the role of the character as the player conceives and perceives them, is intrinsically motivating – roleplay is a method of play that is done entirely for its own sake, for the joy of embodying a fantasy role. So to Baldur’s Gate 3‘s credit, it opens a lot of avenues to a lot of potential character archetypes. Unique dialogues related to what class, race, and background the player’s character is, kindly or cruel dialogue responses, branching story decisions. That’s all great for this, but it’s also all set dressing. What really impresses me is the avenues available for navigating the world that reflect back on the player character. In the early game even.

For example, there’s a goblin camp. You can run in swords and spells blazing, and fight them all. It’s tough, but doable. OR, if you’re a druid or otherwise have access to the talk to animals spell, you can sneak into their camp and convince their domestic spiders that their goblin masters are good eating, and get some help in the fight. OR, if you talked to some mercenary ogres the goblin leaders hired, you can give them a better offer, and get their help in the fight. OR, you can bypass fighting entirely – team up with the goblin leader and earn her trust. OR, ingratiate yourself with the goblins just long enough to find a storehouse full of explosives, and raze the place to the ground. And that’s just a handful of all the options available. That’s not even to get into all the little micro-decisions baked throughout the goblin camp which greatly vary the experience, and constantly get the player asking what sort of character they are playing. It’s quite impressive, I’ve seen the game turn people who are not super seriously into tabletop-type games, into out-and-out roleplayers.

Four characters from Baldur's Gate 3 are show in four panels. From left to right: Shadowheart, a dark-haired cleric woman in intricate armor. Her expression is blank. Astarion, a white-haired, pale-skinned elf with red eyes and a nobleman's coat. He is smirking, amused. Wyl, a dark-skinned man with cornrow hair and a false eye. His expression is disproving. La'zel, a green-skinned woman with a froggish appearance and facial warpaint. She looks as though she is about to explain something.

The Squad live reaction when you suggest murdering that old lady for her stuff.

I’d Write a Conclusion Here, But I’ve Got To Go Play More Baldur’s Gate 3 ©

So, uh, yeah. I just thought it was really neat how the narrative elements of Baldur’s Gate 3 like the characters are not treated as simple icing on the cake, but rather a material and core aspect of gameplay itself. It’s not the type of game which segregates story and gameplay. I think this is how they keep rocking such huge quantities of concurrent players. The next time you play, which for me will be right after I finish writing this, try and see how the character interactions are influencing your decision-making and how you engage with the game.

A wide panning shot of a group of adventurers in armor carrying torches, climbing down a set of ruined, craggy stone steps suspended over a river of lava. The steps lead to a large, ancient machine.

Gather Your Party And Venture Forth…

Video Games Vs. Horse

Ahh, horse. Strong, graceful, the picture of elegance. Truly one of nature’s most majestic creatures, and a favorite mainstay of the that one medium I like a whole lot. Welcome to ‘Video Games Vs.’ where I analyze the dumbest stuff in video games I can think of which inexplicably follows a pattern of being almost consistently jank and bizarre. And there is no creature in the interactive medium’s menagerie more jank and bizarre than the horse, and riding animals in general. Let’s get right into it.

Simulating a Living Creature

When adding a feature to your game, you always have to ask yourself what it is you’re spending your resources on and why. What’s the goal of having a horse in your game? Does it enable combat? Is it merely for making the player go faster? Are horses just cool? Or, does it need to be immersive, and make the player feel like they really own a companion animal? The goal of the later comes up a lot in small ways, such that it separates the concept of riding animals from, say, a dune buggy. One is a tool, the other is a living thing. In a lot of games, horses are not meant to be mere vehicles.

With this consideration, it makes a lot of sense that often, in games, the movement of horses is not nearly so smooth or precision as the movement of your main playable character. Many games are concerned with just this sort of behavior. For example, the recent Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom, and it’s predecessor Breath of The Wild features horses that do not map perfectly to the player’s control stick, the way link does. The horse does not go slow on a slight tilt of the control, nor does it gallop at a full tilt. Rather, Link must gently heel the sides of the horse, much like a rider does to a real horse, to encourage it to pick up speed. In Tears of The Kingdom, there are several ‘levels’ of speed which the player accesses through a set of states that the ‘kick’ button rotates to, and holding back on the control stick encourages the horse to slow down.

Besides that, these horses do not start out friendly to Link. They’re wild, and must be tamed. They may back and panic before they are tamed. The method to calm them is to simply press a button, yet still the player must be attentive to, and respond to the horse’s needs. These things do not facilitate the gameplay of movement, combat, or puzzle-solving which otherwise dominates Zelda‘s play space. Their purpose to give the illusion of life to these horses – temperamental, disobedient, and willful life. On the flip side, the illusion of life can also be a boon to movement gameplay. The Zelda horses, if set on their course, can follow paths and avoid obstacles automatically, as though the horse has a will of its own, allowing the player to occupy themselves with other activity. In this way, the horse is not an extension of the player, but rather a partner.

Link from Ocarina of Time rides his horse, Epona, over the grasslands of Hyrule field. A meter represented by six carrots slowly drains as Link encourages Epona to speed up.

Zelda has long toyed with this sort of behavior.

However, as I alluded, these considerations can also be obstacles to gameplay. Particularly in early Zelda games, the horse Epona would often get stuck on strange geometry. She’d whinny and complain, and at times refuse to move if one attempted to guide her over large tree routes, cliffs, or rough terrain. Zelda horses can never be commanded to jump, for another instances. Epona and her descendants will only jump if approaching certain obstacles like fences. With such loose rules, divorced from player controls, they are prone to errors and discrepancies, like Epona getting stuck on a gate, because she did not approach it at quite the precise angle.

These sorts of bizarre terrain interactions are terribly common for video game mounts. Agro from Shadow of The Colossus is a lovable and friendly free-thinking horse. However, his AI is sensitive to shifts in terrain, and sometimes can get a little mixed up. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is infamous for the ‘Skyrim Horse’. These otherwordly creatures are capable of scaling near-vertical inclines, and if you were around in Skyrim’s heyday you were no doubt subject to one or two horse-terrain interactions that were so bizarre as to totally shatter the fiction and immersion of the game, at least once or twice. It is, admittedly, rather funny.

A knight on a black and white horse stand on a cliffside in the mountains. The horse is standing nearly vertically on a cliff face.

Charming.

When The Horse Is Only Decorative

There is an inverse to this, where horses are not considered as companions in gameplay, or even as vehicles. It is customary in MMORPGS to collect lots of mounts, and usually, the mount is merely a visual flare. It increases your move speed, and nothing else. No new mechanics are imparted, nor does the mount behave in any way like a living thing outside of its animations. Perhaps the mount even allows you to ‘fly’, but generally the ‘flight’ is just a repurposed swimming mechanic, again with the animations switched out. The horse in this instance appears with a button press, and disappears just as easily. In Final Fantasy XIV, presumably to counteract this sense of one’s chocobo riding bird feeling like a prop, among other reasons, you are able to summon it as a companion in combat, aside from its utility in increasing moving speed. World of Warcraft, in its latest expansion as of August 2023 added in new draconic flying mounts whose motion is governed by a more interactive flight and movement system, to better characterized them as living things, and make travel more interesting.

A woman in blue with a white braid whistles, and a giant ostrich-like yellow bird appears suddenly, her now riding it.

I’m faster, and riding it, but I’m not really riding it, you know?

A Peek Behind The Curtain

In MMOs and games like them, mounts usually appear and disappear out of nowhere as needed. However, wherever a mount is introduced, you have to decide how it’s going to be conveyed to the player. The Horse Delivery System, if you will. For Zelda, traditionally Epona is called on some sort of instrument, but what then? The player can potentially leave Epona wherever they want, travel a few miles, and then… what? Do they have to wait for Epona to make their way all the way across the land? Well no, and in fact the game will sometimes not even bother to remember where Epona was. Rather, she will spawn in off-screen, somewhere nearby. The camera will dramatically swing around to give the impression that Epona did travel across the land at the sound of your call, but this is indeed just an illusion – a visual trick.

There is a danger to this, though. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, due to how free the camera is at all times, it is very very trivial to swing your camera around fast, just as your horse appears and see what’s really going on; your horse jarringly winks into existence just where the game thinks it’ll be off-camera. I think many a curious or intuitive player might do this, it may even happen by accident, and it is extremely jarring. It underscores the artificiality of Inquisition‘s horses so much that I never saw them as representations of living creatures again. Besides that, while I’m on the subject, the Inquisition horses are so slow, relatively speaking, so as to not even be worth the enormous amount of screen estate that they demand with their huge bodies. If including a mount in your game, consider the trade offs – especially if implementing life-like features that may hamper control.

A woodland ranger kneels down to pick a lock on a wooden door. Their nearby horse rears up, and slides along the front of the door, in glitchy fashion.

Procedural interaction with terrain is prone to uh… a lot of problems

Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom utilizes stables, which always, magically, are able to summon forth horses registered to the stable system, regardless of where in the world they are left. Otherwise, horses can only be called from a fairly short range, not universally, like the Eponas of old. This is more ‘realistic’ in a way, I suppose, but really just feels like a way to further justify the common use of the stables, and the previous solution was a lot smoother in my opinion. So what other ways are there to get a large quadruped into the play space as the player needs it that isn’t disruptive? Stables are a common solution, such as how chocobo traditionally work in the Final Fantasy games- visit a stable or chocobo farm or chocobo forest, and go off with your mount, which is returned to the stable when left behind. I think the most elegant version of a video game horse, would have a very inventive and elegant way to get the horse into the player’s hands, so to speak.

Gaming’s Most Powerful Horse

So I’ve discussed my love of the strongest apex predator of the mounting animal world before, so I won’t labor the point too much. Torrent from Elden Ring is a very satisfying and reliable game mechanic to use, which allows you to traverse vast distances, engage in mounted combat from the safety of a riding saddle, and engage in combat in entirely new and interesting paradigms as compared to Elden Ring‘s on-foot combat.

A woman with a spear rides a horned steed through shallow waters and over large castle ruins to avoid the breath of a fire-breathing dragon.

Mighty is He.

One interesting thing to note, is that Torrent approaches a lot of the problems I’ve talked about so far by just… not engaging with them at all. For example, many games struggle with how and where the player can call upon their mount. Each game’s individual Horse Delivery System, so to speak. Several games, like Dragon Quest, and certain Zelda games, try to brute force this problem by simply teleporting the horse in on command, trying valiantly to hide the seams of this unnatural action, and mostly failing. Some games, like Zelda: Breath of The Wild and Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom try to smooth over this dissonance by having at least the required use of an in-game stable to summon your horse from anywhere. Torrent does not brute force this particular problem so much as he double-jumps over it. Torrent doesn’t have to appear from anywhere besides just under the player, immediately, whenever they want him, so long as they are outdoors. There’s no need for any transition from off-screen. Our only explanation needed, is that he is a magic horse.

This is reflective of FromSoft’s design philosophy as a whole, which favors gameplay usability over simulation. Which isn’t to say they don’t value immersiveness, but rather that they tend toward verisimilitude over realism. Thus why Torrent has the barest minimum of startup acceleration. The lightest touch of clearance needed for him to turn. Torrent has just the hint of a suggestion of more rigid movement, which creates the convincing illusion of riding a horse, which in this specific case is all that’s needed to sell the fantasy. That leaves a lot of leeway to make Torrent feel really satisfying to use, and create very exciting mounted-combat scenarios with a lot of precision movement. However, there are of course drawbacks – if you’re looking for a game that truly simulates the feel of riding an animal, you’ll not find it here.

A woman with a spear rides a horned steed through shallow water, staring down a fire breathing dragon. Just as it starts to spew flames, the woman and steed hop up a nearby stone, and jump up to run her weapon through the dragon's head, vanquishing it.

And yet, how many video game horses can do THAT!?

Plessie

Okay she’s not a horse, but she is a riding animal – it counts, and the lessons we can take from her implementation will be invaluable to our line of interrogation here. As we’ve been over, video game animals often struggle with the Horse Delivery System. Where and how does the horse appear? What space does the horse take up when not in use? For Torrent it’s ‘he doesn’t’ and ‘none’. Usually, it involves spawning the horse in just off-screen to hide them popping it, with the implication that the horse was totally nearby the whole time and just needed to hear the sound of your voice to come scampering in. Personally, I find this all kind of tedious and momentum-killing. Especially in exciting adventure-time games, which is where you’ll usually see horses, the need to drop everything to navigate a menu or perform some special action feels disruptive to me, which is probably why Torrent is my favorite on this list so far, despite his ‘avoiding the problem’ approach to ‘solving’ this problem. It makes Torrent feel less substantial, and more like a game mechanic than an animal, which is probably why they made him a ‘spirit steed’ in the story.

Mario, in a cat costume, standing on an ice pillar. The camera pans over to the nearby water, and a small, orange plesiosaur emerges from under the waves.

Plessie has no such issues.

Nintendo has proven this problem solvable, as far as I’m concerned. The 2021 re-released of Super Mario 3D World is actually Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury. The latter of which is a bundled open-concept mini-adventure in which Mario explores a vast lake or sea type area to stop the titular Bowser and his Fury from rampaging. The game is separated into a number of islands and shores that require navigating not insignificant portions of water. That’s where Plessie, your erstwhile amphibious companion comes in. Plessie’s movement is good, but pretty standard. She’s not as agile or high-jumping as mario, she can’t turn as hard as him, but she is faster, especially in water. What I find so fascinating about Plessie is how she slots into a Horse Delivery System.

The HDS in Bowser’s Fury has the goal of being as frictionless as possible to Mario’s adventuring. While playing this game, if you notice it, it is almost uncanny. Plessie is consistently, always, just where you need her to be. How does she always know? I suspect there is a number of robust processes happening under the hood, invisibly, to ensure that Plessie is constantly ‘aware’ of Mario and what he’s doing.

Having her be an amphibious aquatic creature is a good hack to start with. She can reposition herself by submerging, and popping up in a new location without the player seeing an discontinuity between the two actions. Secondly, the game is very veeery careful to never allow you to see Plessie pop up out of nowhere. She always emerges from the water, giving the illusion of a plausible physicality to her. Sure, she may literally be teleporting, but it never seems that way – merely that she swims very fast underwater without a mountee. Frequently however, the transition is simply hidden, and Plessie is already in her designated location when the player gets there. There? How does Plessie always know where to be, seemingly in the perfect spot for whenever the player would want to make use of her?

Mario, in a cat costume, checks his map near a shoreline. The map obscures the screen. When the map fades, an orange plesiosaur is waiting at the shoreline to pick up Mario for a ride.

Planning to travel to a new island? Plessie is way ahead of you.

I have a couple of theories on this. Firstly, Nintendo is extremely good at crafting specific player experiences. They will playtest a game into the ground until they know every iteration of every kind of action a player may want to do. Based on the large datasets I’m sure they have, alongside decades of sharpened design instincts, I think they were able to narrow down the likely places players would want to use Plessie. The game will detect when Mario is in proximity to one of these, and have Plessie spawn there, always ready to go. This system is very robust, too! Once, while escaping the very scary Fury Bowser’s fire breath, I jumped Mario over a waterfall – woah! What I didn’t expect was that, in perfect action-movie style, Plessie would appear at the foot of the waterfall, just beneath me, and catch Mario in the nick of time for us to make our daring escape from Bowser. Wild! All without any input from me.

The result of having Plessie out and about on her own in the world, showing up only when needed, gives the impression of an intelligent, loyal animal. Plessie feels so much more like a character with agency because she is making ‘decisions’ alongside you, ‘deciding’ where and when to pop up, as though she is protective of Mario. I think the game may even take Mario’s currently situation into account. Plessie could theoretically emerge anywhere from the water, but during some challenges will not, soas to not be disruptive to the flow of gameplay. I would not be surprised if things like active nearby collectibles, whether Fury Bowser is active, what direction Mario is running, are all tracked and fed into Plessie’s spawn system to determine the most ideal time and place to appear. The result is that you don’t have to think about Plessie until she’s needed, but she still feels like a real animal and not just a game mechanic.

A cat-shaped medallion appears atop a waterfall lined with large block-platforms. Mario, in a cat costume, scampers up the blocks. Suddenly, an orange plesiosaur is at the top of the waterfall waiting, as Mario arrives.

HOW DOES SHE ALWAYS KNOW!?

Horse

I don’t think my ideal land horse has yet appeared in a game. Torrent is my favorite video game horse to play with – his mechanics and movement are the most refined, in my opinion. Plessie is also pretty close, and she can run on land. She will not frequently, however, traverse land without Mario. I do think some of the methods employed to make Plessie feel so loyal and convenient could work on a regular old horse. Given the challenges of placing a horse on land-based geometry though, it would requires some finagling, and perhaps some compromises. A combination of methods could be used. Some horses like Agro from Shadow of The Colossus spawn in from off-screen and appear when called, which is less seamless. I think a combination of the approaches could make something that feel extremely smooth to play, but also reinforces the fantasy of having a living animal companion. If a horse were to appear automatically as the situation demands though, it would require a lot of considerations to avoid having its appearance be disruptive or inappropriate to the flow of gameplay, without Plessie’s advantage of being aquatic.

A creature of contradictions, the video game horse is. An animal companion, but also a gameplay vehicle. Made for ease of traversal over vast distances, but also temperamental, and prone to disruptive interactions with the environment. Often controlled by artificial intelligence, but rarely intelligent. I think my ideal land horse is possible in games. A creature as loyal seamless, and frictionless as plessie, but as strong and fun to use as Torrent, yet also with its own personality and sense of presence like Agro. I’m of the opinion that getting to greater heights such as this, in any area of design, requires learning not just from the best, but also from valiant attempts that didn’t quite succeed – It’s a bit of an ongoing struggle in that sense, a conflict, or a versus, if you will. One day, if we should all be so lucky, we will master the concept of Horse. See you next time.

Link from Zelda: Breath of The Wild plummets to his death, comically tumbling over the side of a cliff with a horse.

How did you tame that wild horse right under my nose?!

Inter-System Parity and Persona: A Resource Management Game

Persona 3 is being remade and they’re changing some things about how dungeon exploration works. I presume it’s going to look a lot more similar to how Persona 5 and Persona 4 does things. In my last playthrough of Persona 5: Royal I was struck by a thought regarding how its various systems fit together. I wanted to get it down in writing.

It has been oft refrained that modern Persona combines the appeals of two very different modes of play. This is true to an extent, but a zoomed-out bird’s eye view of the actual decision-making structures of play in the modern Persona series reveals that the differences aren’t as pronounced as you might think on a high level. Ultimately, the entirety of Persona‘s interactive gameplay is a series of resource management decisions.

Three Japanese students in uniform run down a dreary hallway lit with a sickly aqua green light. The surrounding decor is twisted and abstract. There are blood stains on the floor. A staircase is ahead.

Man, this is going to look so much better in HD.

There’s this concept I like to come back to when thinking about games designed with distinct modes of play such as this. I think it is generally a good idea to look to forming come kind of parity between different modes in a game, even if they’re technically different. For example, the mid-2000s were in love with turret sections. If you know, you know. I always felt like these fit most elegantly in with games that are already about shooting. Firing a stationary gun from a first person perspective *is* a different mode of play than running and gunning in a game like Ratchet and Clank. However, the game is about aiming and shooting big guns to begin with. So even though the rules are little different, the player can more intuitively slide into this different mode of play without it feeling jarring. On the other hand, players may find the addition of the all-too-common fictional card game within the game off-putting because of how different a card-game mindset is to, like, a platformer. Intelligently, most games with card-game minigames keep them as optional side-content.

The main item that unifies all of the game’s various systems is time. When interactive mechanics form a cohesive system, gameplay decisions exist in a hierarchy. Where and how you use your in-game time sits at the top. Persona models the daily life of a sociable high schooler and how the player chooses to use each day is a decision that cascades down across all other systems. Persona breaks down into two primary gameplay modes: the social simulator, and the strategic turn-based combat dungeon crawler. Ultimately though, whether you choose to spend time getting ramen with classmates, working out at the gym, studying for class, or fighting horrific hell-beasts in humanity’s collective unconscious, you’ll be spending a day of in-game time for each instance of each task. Days are a finite resource, and how you choose to spend them is the primary mode of interaction in Persona at a high level.

A stylized manga-like birdseye view of Tokyo. A row of numbers representing dates appear, and they move to the left, centering first "9 Saturday" and landing on "10 Sunday", the latter of which is pierced with a knife.

Time ticks down on your game, just as it does on the summer of your youth.

Persona’s dungeons are bursting with tough encounters with monster designed to whittle away your resources; health, and spirit power, or SP. These are long gauntlets meant to stretch your abilities to endure numerous combats to the breaking point. There is no reliable method to restore SP within these dungeons themselves. The only way to restore your combat resources fully is by ending a given dungeon session, and allowing time to pass to the following day. That means, of course, that you must spend at minimum one additional day of in-game time to complete the dungeon. This limitation of SP restoration is crucial, as it forms a limiting reagent to dungeon activity. It is possible to complete any dungeon in a single day, but only with extremely deft management of SP. This one resource’s scarcity creates a space where skilled play can lead to greater reward, without the implied penalty of inefficient play being too punishing. Losing one day is not a big deal. Wasting a lot of days though, adds up. Failing to manage your combat resources efficiently leads to an inefficient use of your social resources.

It’s this inter-relation that forms the bedrock of the gameplay loop in Persona. You have a limited number of days to complete a dungeon. And beyond that, you have a larger, but still limited number of days before the entire game concludes. Therefor, it is implicitly more desirable to complete dungeons in a timely manner, leaving more in-game days free for the player’s other social projects – fostering relationships, improving one’s social skills, earning money in a part-time job, etc. The latter of which can be intrinsically motivating through appealing character writing that makes the player want to engage in this social simulation. The social sim half of the game forms an extremely important part of this gameplay loop bedrock, but it’s important to note it would be not so nearly engaging without strong narrative context Persona puts forth for the social aspects of its gameplay.

A young silver-haired man in a Japanese school uniform is frames beside a list of character names, each with a rank and meter representing their respective closeness to the young man.

Many choices, but which- it’s Chie. You should pick Chie. Hang out with Chie.

You need to complete each dungeon in a timely manner, so you need to get stronger. Normally, in an RPG, you mostly do this by just fighting. Defeating more monsters means leveling up, means increasing your player characters’ power. This is also the case in Persona, although it is intentionally a lot more limited. When your protagonist levels up, his maximum HP increases, and his maximum SP increases, but that’s about it. His damage doesn’t go up, his defenses don’t go up, etc. It’s a good thing, then, that leveling him up does offer one other benefit – it increases the level of the titular personas that you can create, which, if you didn’t know, are reflections of the inner self that can be summoned to do battle. For our purposes and for the purposes of strictly talking about gameplay mechanics, they are basically pokemon. These personas determine the protagonist’s stats.

The developers do a couple of very clever things in how they handle power progression for personas. Personas themselves can level up, and their stats will increase accordingly, however, there is an effective soft cap to their usefulness. After a few level ups, you’ll notice your persona’s power growth start to kind of bottom out, as they become increasingly more difficult to level up, the acquisition of new abilities becomes scarce, and their old abilities just don’t quite measure up to the stronger monsters you’re fighting. This is the game’s way of always encouraging the player to make new personas as they level up. Each persona is not a lifelong companion, but rather, basically, a stepping stone to ever greater things. This behavior is further encouraged by an experience bonus a persona received upon being fused. This bonus can be massive and is a much more efficient use of your time than leveling up a persona in battle. How do you get this bonus? That’s right, the social sim gameplay mode.

A part of demons are covered in tarp and shoved into magic, glowing guillotines by childlike wardens. When they are chopped, their energy turns into a blue mist that reforms into a red-armored knight astride a horse.

The persona fusion animations can get rather fanciful. I went bowling with my cousin and I am now more proficient at decapitation.

Each persona has a type associated with an arcana of the tarot deck, and each of those arcana is associated with one NPC the player is encouraged through narrative context to form a relationship with. The rub is, once again, you have limited days with which to foster such relationships. So what type of personas you empower, and how efficiently you do so, is entirely up to you. Because there’s a lot of strategic skill involved in the social aspect of these games. Provided you are not simply following an online instruction guide, the social game of Persona involves a lot of forethought, planning, understanding the schedules and exceptions to the schedules of NPCs, how long certain long-term projects like improving your academic stats will take, how all this intersects, and how to balance it all.

The art of a tart deck is displayed, in order of arcana numbered 0 to 20. The art is dark and somber, with extensive use of silhouettes and blue-leaning color palettes.

Here you see persona 3’s lovely arcana artwork, I guess in case you’ve never seen a tarot deck before.

This is, of course, a sort of tongue-in-cheek rumination on the nature of social interaction in real life – how easy it is to foster so many entanglements and commitments that it becomes a game in and of itself to manage them all, but also very compelling gameplay, that some players may not even notice they’re partaking in. The metaphor here is clear in narrative as well; friendships make the heart grow stronger, and your weapons are personas – the power of the heart. You delve into the game’s respective dungeons, and engage in strategically engaging combat one day, then decide whether your time is better spent hanging out with that girl you like, or patching things up with your friend whom you had a spat with the other day. Because even for how difficult it can be, it’s all worth it – just like forming bonds in real life – through the intrinsic narrative reward of getting to know these characters to the extrinsic gameplay reward of increased power in the dungeon, meaning you can complete the dungeon faster, meaning you have more time to play the social game, meaning you grow even stronger. And thus, the gameplay loop.

A group of four phantom thieves square off against two horned horse demons and a fairy. One of the thieves summons a monster in a jar with a swirl of blue energy, and the jar-monster strikes a horse demon with lightning.

There are a lot of numbers and words to look at here, but it’s all in service of maintaining that loop.

Persona‘s combat, similar to its sister series Shin Megami Tensei, is itself primarily a resource management game. As a turn-based RPG units of action are divided into discreet units. The player takes action, then the enemy monster does, etc. Your SP or HP can be spent on more powerful attacks, but can also be costly. However, if you don’t defeat enemies quickly, you may take damage which will require the expenditure of SP or healing items to recover. There are mechanics in place to extend the player’s turn to avoid this. However, utilizing this “Once More” mechanic most often involves the expenditure of SP. And even then, there are more and less efficient ways to spend SP, such as using a screen-wide attack to hit a group many enemies at the cost of significant SP, can be more efficient than using a single-target attack to hit each enemy in sequence. Understanding the balance can be key. Because both action and inaction can lead to loss of HP and SP, when fighting enemies in Persona, you’re really searching for the most efficient path to navigating each battle in terms of resources – weighing the potential losses versus gains in each given scenario, all in service of that ultimate higher level goal – clear the dungeon efficiently. This is the heart of Persona‘s combat system.

What appears to be a giant lizard with camo-print skin is electrified by lightning shot from the ghostly visage of a samurai, commanded by a teenager schoolboy. The text "Weak 19" appears, indicating damage dealt to the monster's weakness.

Exploiting weaknesses is one of the main ways to stay efficient in battle.

Each day, if you choose not to go dungeoneering, you must choose how the protagonist will spend their day. These units of action are divided into discreet days. The player takes action, then a day is expended, etc. Your time can be spent developing a bond with an NPC for those more powerful personas, but maxing out an NPC bond can be a costly long-term use of time. However, if you don’t get stronger personas, that can cost you in the form of excessive SP expenditure in the dungeons later. There are mechanics in play to make the development of bonds more efficient, such as seeing a movie with several friends – which buffs some social stat like charm, while also developing two bonds at once. Timing is crucial, however, because if one or both of the NPCs you bring to the movies is not ready to improve develop their bond, the act may do nothing for you. Understanding the balance can be key. You may also choose not to develop any bond, and simply spend the day working for pay to buy precious healing items, or weapons. Because both action and inaction can lead to loss of time, when developing bonds in Persona, you’re really searching for the most efficient path to navigating each day in terms of resources – weighing the potential losses versus gains in each given scenario, all in service of that ultimate higher level goal – clear the dungeon efficiently, so you can spend more time with your friends.

What we conclude from this, is that the social aspect of this game, when you really look objectively at just what mechanics are in play, is a turn-based resource-management game. Ah-HAH! I fooled you earlier, it turns out Persona‘s seemingly extremely different gameplay modes have almost exacting parity with each other! How about that. That’s right, I am making the case here that both of Persona‘s primary gameplay modes are essentially the same, when you get right down to it. It is the nuances of their execution and, crucially, their narrative context that is their distinguishing factor. The social mode is much more relaxed, with smooth music, good laughs, and little sense of tension or danger, outside the mundane stakes of going out on a date, or whatever. The dungeons and battles have very tense and exciting music, the narrative stakes are that if you lose you die, and you’re surrounded by nightmarish imagery. These contexts, along with the more immediate feedback of failure in battle vs. social situations, whose failure states are more nuanced, make dungeons a state of high excitement on an interest curve, vs. the social situations’ more mellow levels of excitement. With the two modes existing in a mutual loop, Persona quite naturally creates a very compelling interest curve.

Persona‘s themes, every Persona‘s themes have, at their core, the universal truth that true bonds with true friends make a person stronger. This is repeated a number of times in a number of ways in dialogue, but its also rather skillfully crafted into the very fabric of how the game systems inter-relate. The strong your bonds the strong you literally are in the game’s more dangerous situations. What really elevates it though I think, is how that desire to save the world with your buds further motivates engaging with them socially. There are a lot of games which began to ape Persona‘s ‘half combat, half social sim’ conceit following the breakout success of Persona 5. Some of them, though, I think miss the point here. Persona is not two separate systems that somehow fit together like magic, no. They are two very similar systems subtly distinguished in mechanics and narrative context to fit together seamlessly.

A blonde girl with short hair stands on a beach overlooking glistening blue water. She wears what appears to be a metal headband or headphones which cover her ears. Her face is framed by a white metal material that covers her entire neck and the outline of her jaw. She slowly turns to the camera.

The ability to summon a Persona is the power to control one’s heart, and your heart is strengthened through bonds…