Dota – Parry Everything

Dota 2’s Dark Willow: Effective Audio-Visual Feedback, and Mechanical Synergy

Dota 2 is a game of the genre MOBA, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. In simpler terms, it’s a team-based game with a focus on combat and strategy. It’s played from a bird’s eye view, and features a number of colorful fantasy heroes to choose from. Dark Willow, the mischievous, slightly sadistic thieving fairy is my personal favorite, and I wanted to just jot down my thoughts on how effectively her abilities are communicated through audio-visual feedback.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy glides down a pathway.

Text chat:
Someone says "usually pick turbo just to dark willow"

I respond "That was my plan" — “Let’s have some fun, shall we…”

Audio-visual feedback is as it sounds; the fairly basic concept that important information should be communicated to players implicitly through their senses, and that things like affirmations of success or confirmations of failure should be communicated in this way. For example, if a player character swings a sword, that sword swing should make a distinctly different sound whether it misses its target, strikes an enemy, or strikes a wall. It should probably look distinctly different in each of those cases as well.

Dark Willow has five abilities. Bramble Maze allows her to sprout a circle full of equally spaced bramble bushes at a distant location. Enemies will have only a narrow space to squeeze between the brambles, and if they touch one they are rooted to the spot and damaged. Shadow Realm allows Dark Willow to hide in a shadow form, immune to most attacks, then burst out with a powerful shadow attack. The longer she is hiding, the stronger the attack, so long as the ability does not wear off first. Shadow Realm can later be upgraded to fire a barrage of shadow attacks. Cursed Crown is a curse Dark Willow places on a target, causing it and nearby allies to be stunned exactly four seconds after the curse is cast. Bedlam causes Dark Willow’s wisp minion to orbit her, firing destructive magic at nearby enemies. Terrorize projects the wisp to a distant location, causing any enemies at that location to be terrified and sent running toward their base.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A number of heroes do battle in a river. A series of blue concentric circles indicates where a bush full of brambles is about to sprout. When the circles are lined up with enemy heroes, the brambles rise up and capture them. — Here you can see me line up exactly where the brambles should be placed, so I can catch multiple targets, thanks to the handy previsualization UI.

A lot of Dark Willow’s power as a hero comes from the synergy between her various ability mechanics. Bramble maze does a great deal of damage and holds foes in place, but they have to touch the brambles for this to happen. Luckily, Dark Willow has the ability to force enemy movement in the form of Terrorize, clever of use of which can cause enemies to flee in terror into her brambles. Cursed Crown is a strong stun that can disable multiple opponents but only if they are standing together, which is why Terrorize, in conjunction with Bramble Maze, is so effective at sticking enemies together. Dark Willow can dish out immense damage with Bedlam, but only if she gets close, and she is not very durable herself. Luckily, Shadow Realm renders her immune to most dangers, which she can use in conjunction with Bedlam. The fact that Shadow Realm can cap off this combo with a burst of damage is a nice compliment to the more sustained damage of Bedlam, which can be more easily reacted to.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy sneaks up from the trees on a man made of lightning. A bramble sprouts beneath him and captures him. The fairy flies up with her wisp, which tears him apart. — Clever use of synergized game mechanics can make your player very powerful

Because it is so important to coordinate your various abilities together like this, it is essential the player can develop a seamless feel for how the various timings, cast ranges, and nuances of her abilities work, without having to look at a detailed explanation. That’s where audio-visual feedback is essential for making gameplay mechanics like this synergize in an effective way that’s satisfying and fun for the player. Dark Willow’s Shadow Realm is an excellent example of this.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy is surrounded by shadows before a red circle begins to glow around her feet. It becomes more distinct over time. — The red aura around Dark willow becomes more and more distinct as the shadow realm attack becomes ‘ripe’ for unleashing.

First off, Shadow Realm is kind of a complicated ability when you break it down. When its button is pressed, Dark Willow becomes subsumed in shadow and immune to most enemy attacks, which is easy enough to understand. However, during this period Dark Willow is also charging up an attack. This shadow attack reaches the peak of its potency after 3.5 seconds of charging, but the ability itself ends after 5 seconds. So there is a period of 1.5 seconds in which it is optimal to use Shadow Realm’s attack competent. That’s a little unintuitive, or rather it would be if not for the audio and visual considerations. After 3.5 seconds of Shadow Realm, Dark Willow is surrounded by an additional visual effect: a red circular aura that surrounds her and gives the impression of peak power. As soon as Shadow Realm begins, a distinct and almost melodic humming sound begins to emanate from Dark Willow, it gives a sense of building power and changes over time. Its intensity crescendos after exactly, you guessed it, 3.5 seconds. The humming then peters out for the remaining 1.5 seconds, giving a strong impression of when the attack should be dealt.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy becomes surrounding in shadows as a wizard is caught in a bramble patch. A wisp flies around the fairy and attacks the wizard, before the fairy throws her own projectile, but it fails to kill the wizard. — Here, I crucially missed the shadow realm cue, and my attack fails to kill my target. Entirely my own misplay, but emphasizes the importance of those cues.

This sort of feedback is also helpful for those opposing Dark Willow. Without having to count, any player can get a pretty good idea of when Dark Willow is most likely to release her shadow attack. Giving easy access to this sort of information is conducive to a healthy competitive game, allowing complex strategies to form. Knowing what your opponent is capable of, if not necessarily what they intend to do, you can act and react to game events as they occur. Acting and reacting is the core of competitive gameplay. If each player doesn’t have the right information to available for them to utilize, there is no counterplay, there is no game.

Curse Crown is a very interesting example of this concept. It counts down, loudly and with a visual timer represented by four icons for each of the four seconds in the countdown, but this countdown is a strategic benefit to both Dark Willow and her victim. The victim will know that standing near allies when the countdown pops means putting those allies in danger. Dark Willow will be eagerly awaiting for her victim to become stunned and helpless, so she can unleash her most powerful offense. The strong visual feedback makes for a better experience for both the victim and user of the spell. By giving both parties this important information as a readily apparent graphic and audio cue, they can both formulate plans to deal with the respective obstacles to their goals, which is itself the fun of the game.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A fairy sends a wisp out to scare a giant lizard man, who flees in terror. Where the lizard man stood, a zombie comes back to life, and chases the lizard man together with the fairy. — With terrorize, enemies are driven off of my allies, and with shadow realm, I can further pursue and subdue them.

As the victim is stunned, Dark Willow may try to line up a Bramble Maze on them, to further damage and disable them. Typically, you’d want to place the brambles in the enemy’s path, so they move into the bush themselves. If they are stuck in place though, one can carefully line up the bramble to appear beneath your target’s feet, thanks to a convenient target-preview interface that will shadow the Dark Willow player where exactly they brambles are going to appear. For the opponent’s part, the brambles are distinctly shaped, leaving little ambiguity as to where it is and is not safe to walk.

As you may have gleaned, Dota 2 can become fairly visually loud, with ten individual heroes all throwing out impressive and explosive spells like this. That’s why it’s so important to keep a distinct visual not only for each ability, but a distinct visual style for each hero as well. It should be unambiguous when it is Dark Willow in particular using her spells, so that enemies and allies have a fair amount of information with which to react. Dark willow’s visual effects are uniformly composed of dark violets and maroons, evocative of shadowy undergrowth and wild flowers, which is also thematically relevant to her character as a dark fairy. Big and important abilities that can completely shift the tide of battle, such as Terrorize, tend to be louder and more immediately noticeable, in proportion to their power.

Birds eye view of a tropical rain forest. A large number of heroes do battle. A fairy throws increasingly powerful projectiles at a lightning man. When the lightning man falls, a friendly zombie is frozen in ice, and his allies are forced to attack him. This ends when a fairy sends her wisp to terrorize nearby enemies. Afterward, the fairy turns to throw her projectiles at a fleeing wizard. — In an extended battle, there’s LOTS to keep track of, so knowing the visual and audio cues becomes an essential skill. It’s better to make that learning curve as painless as possible. It may be hard to track Dark Willow in all this mess at first, but look out for her midnight color scheme.

Audio-Visual Feedback is one of those things you really have to nail, if you’re game’s to be any good, honestly. If a lot of important information is moving around in your game and it doesn’t reach the player in a prompt and unintrustive way, it can severely hamper the experience. Dota 2 is pretty good at it, considering all the challenges of keeping things clear and readable that comes with the MOBA genre. Dark Willow is a particularly strong example, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to her and her playstyle.

The aftermath of a green explosion in an open plain is overlaid with the words 'Radiant Victory'. In response to someone asking 'why did you mid' I respond 'so wed win, like this', to which someone responds 'like milk'.

A scoreboard follows.

You thought you were winnin’?

Let The Player Break The Game Already; Inscryption, Isaac, and Others

While on break for the holidays I found myself finally taking a look at a little indie card battler game I’d heard much about. Daniel Mullins’ Inscryption is a 2021 roguelike card battler in which you build a bestial-themed deck of cards to traverse a table-top adventure scenario game-mastered by a mysterious shadowy card dealer, who seems to be keeping you in a spooky woodland cabin. You may have heard the game is rife with compelling mystery and secrets, and it is, so rest assured I won’t be spoiling anything about the game, merely talking about its combat mechanics sans any story context.

A stone altar is placed on a wooden table immersed in shadow. A set of cards featuring the likeness of beasts is lined up before the altar. A card with a cat is sacrificed on the altar and disappears, but a stoat card is granted the cat's sigil, a special power in the form of an infinity sign on a dagger. — Yeah, you look very honored.

Specifically I want to talk about this concept of ‘breaking the game’, or employing a strategy so overwhelmingly power it almost seems to throw off the difficulty balance. Here’s the thing though, well-designed games like Inscryption and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth want to create this feeling in the player of overwhelming power, which is why they tend to be so brutally difficult at the start. Roguelike games, by their nature, are games designed with the players’ repeated failure in mind, and thus repeated replaying. With each of those failures, generally, new inherent advantages are collected, as well as new knowledge of the game. By game’s end, the player will have accrued a large number of mechanical advantages and game knowledge, allowing them to plow through challenges that once seemed insurmountable. The game designer’s fear of the ‘Dominant Strategy’ is the trivialization of their game mechanics.

Isaac from The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth runs around a burning basement. A purple ring of laser beam moves around the room, contorting and destroying nearby enemy spiders. — This is a combination of three rare items

Isaac from The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth runs around a dingy basement. A purple ring of laser beam moves around the room, contorting and destroying nearby enemies. — This is a combination of three rare items

What’s clever about a lot of the more popular roguelikes, is that they leverage powerful strategies as a way to engage the player with their systems. Knowing exactly what the most reliable and powerful combinations of weapons and items in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth takes time, effort, and exploration, so by the time you’ve ‘broken the game’ so to speak, you’ve already gone through a lot of the game’s interest curve just getting there, and a well balanced game can tilt that power scale back at you. Often in the roguelike Hades I’ve found myself achieving a combo that can absolutely demolish early content, but I’m then brick walled by later enemies, and have to change up my approach, keeping the game dynamic and interesting. These games make the opposition an overwhelming obstacle, so that overwhelming power is not only incentivized in the player, but almost demanded.

I’m tending more and more towards designing the opposition in a combat game to be more powerful, rather than limiting the powers and options of the player. Finding wacky solutions to the problem of ridiculously deadly enemies is fun! Isaac allows you to reach such absurd levels of power that it’s comical, and yet Isaac is so vindictively engaging. Every time I fail in that game I’m just reminded of how much I want to taste that overwhelming power again, I think about all the little ways I could combine and recombine the disastrously large number of powerups existent in Isaac, and I dive right back in. The same is the case for competitive games with deckbuilding elements such as Dota 2‘s Ability Draft, in which one drafts the ability for their player hero from a pool of powers that don’t normally go together in Dota 2‘s base game modes, but can combine to create some ridiculous effects. The possibilities are just so tantalizing, because the designers went out of their way to insure the various elements all meshed with each other in interesting ways, without much need for exceptions or limitation. Dota 2 also has its own roguelike mode that utilizes design sensibilities as I’ve described. Enemies are monstrous, lethal, and oppressive, but clever power up allocation can render what once seemed impossible, routine, and it’s an exciting climb to that point.

A child cries stylized tears that shoot from his body like bullets in a dingy basement. The tears spray out in a shotgun pattern. — Just a couple shot upgrade items..

A child cries stylized tears in a burning basement that shoot out from his body like bullets. The tears are orange, and split into smaller bullets on contact with anything, then those split bullets split again on contact. — Just a couple shot upgrade items..

No matter how overwhelmingly powerful one might become in these games, the games generally stay extremely lethal throughout. That is, even if you can crush your opposition with a flick of the wrist, a couple mistakes may still lead to a loss, especially later in the game. Pulling a bad hand in Inscryption, all of your overpowered cards aside, can still be disastrous if you don’t have a plan to stall the game until you can pull your winning cards. This is a pattern games which employ the concept well have in common – their core gameplay is still reinforced even as the player becomes ‘overpowered’. In Hades and Isaac, you still have to be able to dodge attacks, or you’ll most likely be toast very quickly. In Dota‘s Ability Draft, you still need to have a feel for the game to make the advantageous plays. In Inscryption, you still need to think through your strategy in case of unfavorable scenarios, as described above.

The key is to make things dramatic. The game can quickly swing in either direction based on the player’s performance, and if the player ultimately becomes an unstoppable force, it should be as a reward for a good performance, and therefor not feel cheap. The rug can still be pulled out from under you if you underestimate opposition that is designed to itself be powerful, and lethal. Inscryption‘s particular health system resembles other card battlers, but takes the form of a scale, so the winner is determined by who has dealt more damage as weighted by a literal scale, and the threshold of victory is not much. So in other words, even with your most powerful cards, things can swing quickly. If the purpose of combat in a game is to be an easy vector by which to create conflict for the player to overcome, and the purpose of conflict in a narrative sense is to be dramatic, then combat should be dramatic. I’m personally pretty tapped out when it comes to power ups the likes of “Increases critical strike chance by 0.5%”. Sure, such things have their place, but I think I’m over entire skill trees and player progression systems being centered on the low-numbered variety of powerups. They’re often barely noticeable in practice, even if they add up over time. When a player gets a new card, or a new weapon, it should dramatically shift the balance of power, or change how the game is approached. Really play up that drama. Otherwise, what’s the point of the new element even being added?

In dark cabin a rustic card game is set up on a wooden table, seen from first-person perspective. The player attacks with two cards marked 'wolf' and 'stoat', causing teeth to be loaded on the opponent's end of a scale. The opponent attacks with their own wolf in kind, and the scale swings back toward the player. — Danger in this game is swift and intense, but it swings both ways

Inscryption embodies this philosophy with how its death cards and sacrificial altars work. Death cards are essentially custom cards, created by the player, utilizing elements of their own deck to combine into one card. The player is given a random assortment of cards from their deck, from which they can choose one card’s play cost, one card’s power and health, and one card’s special effects aka sigils. The result is more often than not something far and away more powerful than what can be normally obtained. The sacrificial altars are similar, allowing you to sacrifice one card to permanently transfer its sigils to another, making a powerful card. This system greatly rewards understanding of the game’s mechanic, and is inherently explorative in nature. Player’s are invited to use the game mechanics as a form of personal experession, so they can leave their own mark (in this case literally, as you can also name the card) on the game. A personal favorite of mine was a card with a medium level of power and health, but no play cost, the ability to attack three times, and the ability to return to my hand when killed on the play field. I called him ‘The Immortal Mantis’. Needless to say, getting this card into play was a reliable way to end matches in my favor. And yet, I never felt as though I was cheating the game, or robbing myself of a more compelling and challenging play experience, because Inscryption like Hades, like Isaac, like enemy players in Dota‘s Ability Draft, and like many other roguelikes, because it took a lot of effort on my part to make this power happen. Either effortful forethought, or playing through a challenging game with little power to start, or both. My ability to swiftly end combat encounters feels earned, and misplays can still lead to a loss by virtue of how lethal a game Inscryption is.

From a first person perspective, a map is unrolled on a rustic wooden table, along with a board game figurine. The figurine lands on a card icon, and three cards are dealt in the map's place. One card features a silhouetted figure and the name... Explodia — Ahh yes. Explodia, the Foreboden one.

A stone altar is placed on a rustic wooden table. Several cards are lined up along it, and two are selected. One is sacrificed and disappears to empower the other, Explodia — Ahh yes. Explodia, the Foreboden one.

I think making the player ‘too powerful’ is more a question of how you design their environment, or high you contextualize that power, than it is something to be altogether avoided. Inscryption is one of the most compelling play experiences I’ve had this year, all other advantages it has such as its narrative and world-class aesthetic presentation aside. Inscryption certainly allows you to become ‘too powerful’! Power in a combat game often means a wide breadth of possibilities, and that power can translate directly into a sense of ownership of, and self expression within the game mechanics. There are many ways to ‘break’ Inscryption and Isaac and Hades, but no two players are likely to do it in exactly the same way.

In dark cabin a rustic card game is set up on a wooden table, seen from first-person perspective. The player draws a card featuring a silhouetted figure with the name... Explodia — This card right here is dopamine, in auido-visual format

In that fashion, ‘breaking’ the game, is the game. Outmaneuvering and outwitting your opposition is the essence of conflict. Building systems where breaking free from their perceived constraints is the point of those systems seems somewhat counterintuitive, but I think the continued explosive success of the roguelike genre, especially in regards to games that operate this way, speaks for itself. There is a market for this specific flavor of power fantasy, and there are ways to give the player that overwhelming power without trivializing the game.

Sacrifices must be made…