Category: Uncategorized

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.

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!

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…

Door Key Mechanics

It’s been a short, busy month, so this time I wanted to talk about something that might be of particular concern to me, specifically. One of my pet peeves. A real bee-in-my-bonnet moment. I’m going to get into why this particular design pattern bothers me so much in a moment, but first what am I talking about?

You ever find yourself at the heart of a deadly dungeon, having just slain a cursed demon dragon of darkness? Of course you have. You open up the chest he was guarding, and viola! A super cool, exciting, new weapon, spell, or other tool. You’re so hyped to get back out in the field and use this thing, but first you’ve got to figure out how to use it to make your way out of here. You start playing around with it, but pretty quickly you find that its use cases are rather… limited. Maybe it’s a whip that doesn’t really damage enemies – but it’s sure useful for hitting distant switches to open doors! Maybe it’s a freeze gun. It’s cool – I mean it can’t freeze enemies or bodies of water, but it can freeze waterfalls, to unblock doors. Maybe it’s a grappling hook! You can’t control the grapple or decide where to use it – it just pulls you to fixed targets so that you can reach previously inaccessible… doors.

You have just encountered, what I like to call the Door Key Mechanic. It’s a game feature masquerading as a fancy new play mechanic, but it’s not really. When you zoom out, and take a high-level top-down look at what all these mechanics actually do in the context of the play space… they just open doors. Maybe they pull specialized switches that then open doors. Maybe they disable electric fences so you can get to the doors behind them. Maybe they transport you to doors you couldn’t get to before in a predefined way, but that’s it. Above all it is interactivity that makes game mechanics compelling to me, and these are interactive in the most rudimentary way possible – do the thing, and a door opens.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having features in your game that specifically exist to remove some gate to the player’s progress. These sorts of items are all over the place. I mean, literal keys, for one. It’s an important purpose to fill. The presence of an inaccessible door is inherently tantalizing to the player, and finding an appropriate key gives a sense of puzzle-solving or excitement. The trouble comes in when it’s something a lot more complicated than a key or a special inventory item pretending to be more important than it is. Need some examples? Let’s do some examples.

I think the most egregious example I can think of is the last game produced by Sonic The Hedgehog creator and indicted insider trader Yuji Naka, Balan Wonderworld. It’s a great instance of what I’m talking about, because it also highlights the crux of the problem. You see, this game had several marketing angles, such as Naka’s involvement, the visual and stylistic echoes of cult classic games like NiGHTS Into Dreams, and most relevantly here, the fact that the game would feature EIGHTY different costumes! Each with unique abilities! Or in other words, game mechanics. Ignoring that several of the costumes are just variations or upgrades of others, we have to interrogate how meaningful and interactive these costume mechanics actually are.

A child in a pig costume runs over to a silver piston in a grassy field and slams the ground with its bottom, forcing one piston down and causing a different piston to shoot up. The child jumps onto it and grabs a gem.

Well, we have a ground slam for a start, the Pounding Pig, which doesn’t do anything except hammer posts and break blocks – basically just opening specific doors. There are jellyfish and dolphin costumes, which do little else but allow access to water terrain that otherwise gates you. There’s a spider costume that allows you to climb webs, which are also just simple obstacles – doors in other words. The Itsy-Bitsy Elf costume “Allows the wearer to pass through tiny doors” and nothing else. Lickshot Lizard sounds like a grappling hook, but it only works on stationary targets that are trivial to target – it’s just opening a door with extra steps. Happy Horn activates an event when stepping onto a pre-placed stage. Functionally the same as a key item. Gear King allows you to use specific gear switches, to open doors. Hothead lets you light torches to open doors.

A child in a rock star costume runs over to a stage in a grass field and plays a short concert to some monsters, and they turn into gems.

Riveting Stuff.

Important to note that ‘door’ here proverbially means any simple gate preventing player progress, but a gate of minimal player interactions. Flipping a switch causing a bridge to appear. Destroying a block to reveal a staircase. That’s all the same as opening a door. Like, there’s Balan‘s Laser Launcher costume…

“A robot costume that shoots a laser from its chest. Use the laser to break blocks and flip switches.” -Official Website Description

I can use the robot to open doors, OR open doors you say!? Okay granted, a lot of these very simplistic costumes in Balan can also be used for combat, but that is such a bare minimum. Doorkey Mechanics make one wonder ‘why is this even here?’ Like, why do you need a spider costume to climb webs? Most game characters can just do that, like on their own.

A small armored alien, Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank, traverses a small gap in a broken bridge amidst a futuristic sci fi metropolis. He does so using an energy tether thrown into a rift portal.

“Does it do anything?”

“It allows you traverse this door bridging a very small gap.”

“Yeah but does it do anything??”

It’s easy to criticize Balan. Door Key mechanics pop up in some of my favorite games too, though.

I adore A Hat In Time. It’s a delightful, fully-featured, cute, and compelling indie game in the style of classic 3D platform games. It feels great to control, it’s pretty to look at, and it’s just an overall fun time. We need more games like A Hat In Time. That said, of the six hats available in the game, which each provide unique abilities, I couldn’t help but wish the Ice Hat and Brewing Hat were more generally useful. The sprint hat makes you dash at breakneck pace, allowing you to bound over great distances – it’s super fun and super useful. The Kid’s Hat helpfully guides you where to go if you ever lose your way. The Time Stop Hat does what it says. However, the Ice and Brewing Hats flip switches and break barriers, respectively, only in hyper-specific scenarios. They can technically be used in combat, but I never once felt it was prudent to do so next to just, say, smacking enemies with my umbrella.

The Door Key Mechanic is a sliding scale, too. Game mechanics can be more or less door key-like. Hi-Fi Rush, a game I should really talk more about sometime, has mechanics that are Door Key-adjacent in the form of your party’s assist moves. Macaron’s punch assist breaks down hyper-specific walls and Peppermint’s gun assist shoots switches, but they can both be used in combat. The difference between Hi-Fi and say Balan, is that Hi-Fi Rush has very robust combat mechanics where that addition is not a footnote. Assists can be woven into combos and used in a variety of ways, defensively or offensively, to uniquely color each player’s experience. That’s interactivity, and that’s what makes a Door Key Mechanic less noticeable. The Legend of Zelda series has been occasionally guilty of making legacy items more door keyish. For instance, take the hookshot / claw shot item.

When first introduced in A Link To The Past, the hookshot was a metal spike on a spring loaded chain that could latch onto blocks, chests, rocks, and pots to pull Link rapidly to the target location. Not only that, but it can grab distant items and pull them to link, hit switches, stun some enemies, and outright defeat others. It’s used for unlocking doors, sure, but also for combat and traversal in interesting ways. Its uses are fairly prescribed, but not so much that it doesn’t feel generally useful.

In the sequel, Ocarina of Time, the hookshot was brought into 3D and it became even more generally useful. It still activates switches, pulls in items, stuns some enemies at a distance, and defeats others, but now in three dimensions. In addition, the list of things it can latch onto has been expanded to include most wooden or soft surfaces, like climbing vines, tree branches, rooftops, and rafters. The hookshot doesn’t just latch onto specific predefined targets, it also lets you grapple to anything it can stick into around the world! And there’s a logic and consistency to this general use that makes it feel like an organic part of that world. That kind of flavoring and context can also help alleviate the sense of artificiality that Door Key Mechanics invoke.

Later Zelda games would not be so magnanimous with the use of their hookshot analogues. The hookshot in The Wind Waker feels noticeably more limited, with fewer viable targets. Where in Ocarina of Time there were a lot more organic environmental targets to hit, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess lean somewhat heavily into literal bullseye targets, and floating targets, obviously specifically placed for Link’s benefit. The difference is stark in Skyward Sword, where the clawshot is used for little else other than clearing gaps to reach brightly colored, artificial bullseyes that exist in the world without context. The interactivity of the clawshot in Skyward Sword is severely limited.

My point is not that the more limited hookshots make these games bad – but rather that it makes specifically the hookshot item in those games a lot less compelling. Compare it to the Shieka Slate spells in Breath of The Wild, which can be employed almost anywhere, and used for almost anything – crossing gaps, attacking, blocking projectiles, climbing cliffs, retrieving items, escaping… flying, if you use them just right. That’s interactivity.

Here’s another Zelda example. In Majora’s Mask for the N64, the ice arrows allow you to shoot projectiles encased in freezing magic. Shooting the arrow at any body of water. *Any* body of water, an icy platform is produced, that Link can walk on. I’m sure you can already imagine the applications of that. This is in addition to the arrows being useful for stopping waterfalls, freezing enemies to use as platforms, or freezing them just to more easily defeat them.

In a dark interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Link shoots two magic ice arrows into the water, creating two ice platforms, which he hops across.

In the remake, the developers opted to instead restrict how these arrows can be used. There are shiny blue sparkles on the surfaces of water where the ice arrows were intended to be used. Shooting them there creates the usual ice platforms, however… they also opted to prevent the platforms from ever being created elsewhere, severely limiting the interactivity of this item, and risking the player engagement. Originally, the ice arrows were a tool – a new avenue of possibilities that gets the player thinking and invested in what they’re doing. The latter version makes them a prescribed door key to access only a very specific planned path, with no engagement required on the player’s part. I find game mechanics most exciting when they expand possibilities, not limit them.

In an interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, there are some conspicuous sparkles on the water. Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, shoots magic ice arrows at each sparkle, although misses his target once, and the ice arrow fizzles on the water.

Heaven forbid anybody be required to do some lateral thinking while playing a video game.

When developing a new mechanic or feature for your game that might be a significant undertaking, ask yourself some questions; does this feature open up interesting interactions or decisions? Does it expand the play space? What are its use cases? How does the player interact with it? What does it accomplish? If the conclusion is that the feature accomplishes a similar level of interaction to simply unlocking a door with a key – if its use is no greater than removing a proverbial gate to the player’s progress, consider whether the feature is even worth developing, especially early on. Some of these features, such as the Balan Wonderworld costumes offer very little interactivity or engagement, but would have cost a huge amount of development resources for character models, bespoke animations, sound effects, and program implementation. The decision to add a feature is not one that should be done without forethought. Think about what each of your new features actually adds to the experience.

Link from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time runs up to an ornate golden chest in a dank dungeon. Light pours forth from it, and slowly, dramatically, Link holds aloft a golden key inset with a red skull jewel.

A key opens doors…

Video Games Vs. Ladders

Welcome to ‘Video Games Vs.’, what I hope to be a series of pieces written about the many little inexplicable hangups that video games, historically, seem to struggle with for some reason. I’ll go over some interesting examples of implementations, problem areas, and interrogate why these weird little oddities are so difficult to get right, and how to possibly address that. You could call this series my personal crusade against extremely petty irritants. For example, we’re going to start out discussing ladders!

They help you ascend. They help you descend. They are an almost mystical force in video games, capable of violating all of the regular rules of a game world, turning preconceptions of movement and space on their head, and tearing through the very fabric of reality itself. Yes, ladders.

Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time was one of the earliest truly 3D adventure games, and set the standard for a lot of things we take for granted in that space. For one, Zelda had ladders. Lots of them. There’s a ladder in the first dungeon, in fact, by why? The very same dungeon contains a lot of ivy Link can climb in similar fashion, with the added bonus of being able to move laterally one it. Why was a ladder also included? I don’t know for certain, but if I had to guess, a ladder was placed alongside the ivy to prime the player for the though that they can ascend the wall they were facing. A ladder is an excellent visual shorthand for ‘the above area is indeed accessible’. It would lead a curious player to investigate the ivy that notable also runs up the wall, suggesting they can climb it. So ladders are just good visual language. Long before the ambiguities of 3D space were introduced, the ladder acted as a near-universal icon that meant ‘your player is going to enter a space above or below to this, relative to their current position.’

A camera pans down on a wooden ladder leaned against a wall in the foreground. Young Link from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has just entered the scene from a lit passage in the background.

So how did they work? Pretty well, but I’d like to break that down in exacting detail. For all intents and purposes the protagonist, Link, exists in one of two states at all times – on a ladder, or not on a ladder. Art reflects life. While not on a ladder, Link can run, roll, backflip, attack, block, use items, all that good stuff. While on a ladder, Link suddenly loses all control of his arms and becomes incapable of wielding a sword, boomerang, shield, or anything else. Link’s verbs become severely limited on a ladder, reduced to only ascend, descend, and let go – in which case Link’s body goes limp as he falls to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

Here is set a precedent that will follow the course of game design, probably until the end of time – ladders exist primarily as a method to bridge point A to point B at different elevations. They are not, themselves, play spaces for a game’s usual mechanics. There are of course exceptions to this, and games that break the mold, but in nearly every case of a 3D space featuring a ladder, your game character will be restricted in what they are allowed to do. There are a number of reasons for this. For example, a truly robust play space on a ladder would require such an upscaled set of art and animation assets that it might balloon out of scope, in proportion to how much ladder-climbing actually takes place in your game.

If the player can dismount a ladder anywhere along its length, you need an animation for that. In the case of Zelda, it’s just falling. If the player can be harmed or die on a ladder, you need a contextual animation for that. If the player normally reacts to damage based on the angle of attack, you need animations for each angle an attack can come from on a ladder. Attacking from a ladder. Defending from a ladder. Using a special item on a ladder. Etc.

Link is, however, still in a vulnerable state whilst climbing a ladder. Enemy attacks and other hazards can still deal damage to him. If Link is damaged by an attack of significant force, he will be knocked from the ladder and fall to the ground, screaming, like a very loud sack of potatoes. However, grounded enemies, such as terrestrial monsters, the walking dead, fire-breathing dinosaurs and the like, are incapable of climbing ladders.

This sets another precedent that will be common in video games’s long and storied campaign against the concept of ladders – ladders represent a space that, conceptually, has a different relationship to the environment around it than normal play space. By this I mean, usually, when Link is threatened by, say, the bloodthirsty undead stalfos, he has the option of attacking it with his sword, or subduing it from a distance with one of his many ranged items. If the creature is too far from Link in the vertical axis whilst he is on a ladder, though, although he has no way to fight them, they also have literally zero recourse and are incapable of harming him. The ever-present risk-and-reward factors of game enemies are often negated by ladders. Rare is the enemy, especially in earlier games like Ocarina of Time that themselves commands the awesome power to utilize a ladder.

Link from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time climbs a wooden ladder up a wall to reach a door.

One last note here – for a kid, Link can ascend and descend ladders at a pretty reasonable clip. However, as climbing ladders is often an extremely uneventful prospect, for the aforementioned reason of their existing outside of the usual risk-reward rules of their world, a player’s awareness of how slow or fast a ladder is being navigated is heightened, as compared to other contexts. So, developers will often include the optional ability to clear large sections of ladder in some extreme, exaggerated manner. Link can’t do this in the ascending direction, but his ability to fall enables this in the descending direction. Overall the transition period between walking and ladder-ing is very snappy and quick for Link, something Zelda has always been pretty good at for contextual animations.

Fromsoft

Fromsoft games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne have a rich history with ladders that embody some of the most bizarre aspects of their implementation in games. For instance, these games, well known for their intricate, complex and deep combat systems, become awkward slap-fights if a player ever occupies the same ladder as an enemy. For these games, ladders are simple transportation and any interaction they have with the game’s infamously difficult enemies are kind of an afterthought. Ladder climbing is implicitly tied to the player’s stamina resource, normally spent on dodging and attack. If they take damage whilst on a ladder, they’ll plummet to the ground with a bespoke animation. I suppose the rationale was that even if the ladder is only somewhat tied to regular gameplay systems, it would be better than existing completely apart.

Another example of ladder weirdness in Fromsoft’s games is the ladder interact button. Unlike Zelda, which activated the ‘ladder-climb’ state automatically based on the player’s proximity to the ladder and their movement vector, Fromsoft ladders are generally mounted via dedicated button press when the player gets close to one. There is a reason one might vie for this method. Aside from the complicated contingencies involved in Zelda‘s proximity-based ladders, tying the action to a button press removes ambiguity. A player is less likely to accidentally press a button than accidentally wandering into a ladder climbing animation by walking, especially in a game with a lot of movement.

Still, the button-press method is not without its drawbacks. Once the button is pressed, control must be taken from the player so that their character can be placed upon the ladder. Any situation where player control has to be shifted away is liable to be fertile ground for bugs. In Dark Souls II in particular, player characters attempting to mount a ladder enter a sort of sidling animation where they inch towards the specific spot where they can mount. If some object blocks the way during this transition, they can be stuck in a lengthy loop of trying to sidle toward the ladder, with no way to stop them. The game contains a band-aide solution for this, in that characters will cancel their attempt at a ladder climb if they are blocked for too long, and control is returned. If this solution were not in play, a player could theoretically enter a perpetual loop of approaching, but no mounting, the ladder, leaving the game in a soft-locked state.

In a gothic-Victorian city, a man in a black cowl slides down a metal ladder until he is stopped by an invisible object. He kicks at it, producing blood, rapidly several times, until both he and the object fall to the ground limp. They get up, and the invisible object is revealed to be a second cowled man with knives. He tries to attack the first man, who scampers back up the ladder.

AI is also always prone to bugs in special contexts like ladder-climbing. Enemies mounting ladders in Fromsoft games enter a sort of fugue state, in which all semblance of an anchor to reality is lost. For them, there is only themselves and the ladder. No world exists outside this dichotomy, and their powers of object permanence dissolve completely, until they dismount the ladder, and after a moment of gathering themselves, are brought back down to earth both literally and figuratively. The simplicity of ladder AI is likely to avoid bugs, as well as them often being an afterthought, as mentioned.

Because of the nature of ladders as a sort of perpendicular space to the regular game space, both literally and figuratively, AI often has these sorts of issues in navigating them. Common problems for game ladders include two AI entities trying to traverse the ladder in two different directions, causing a blockage. This can be circumvented by removing collision for AIs on ladders, but that has the knock on effect of looking cheap and awful. These are just some of the issues you will face by employing ladder-capable AI, and why games often forgo this feature altogether. Negatives aside, there is still something satisfying about luring a hapless zombie up a tall tower then kicking them into oblivion, though.

Mass Effect

A little discussed feature of Mass Effect is how its ladders are gateways to an askew plane of existence in which the player has no control of their character. Once a ladder is engaged with, the character will execute an elaborate pre-baked ladder climbing animation, complete with directed camera action! It’s quite the spectacle. Problem is, enemies are still more than capable of shooting at you while trapped in this ladder dimension with, y’know, their guns. In the original Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer mode, this became infamous as a way to very efficiently drop dead. So much so, that is was lampshaded as an in-joke in Mass Effect 3‘s lighthearted Citadel DLC.

A blue alien woman (Liara from Mass Effect) looks over her shoulder to snark at the camera while she climbs a ladder.

Sometimes this problem, when it crops up in other games, is circumvented by making ladders into closed tunnels. Or in other words, disallowing any form of interaction at all between mount a ladder at its bottom and dismounting it at its apex. During the pre-baked ladder climbing animation in such games, the player will be immune to enemy attack. It might as well be a Super Mario warp pipe. Which is all well and good, but what is the point of using a ladder as opposed to, like, a teleporter again? One would think it allows for a bit more organic interactivity with the world, a bit more realism and verisimilitude. That’s one angle. As previously mentioned, though, ladders are also just good visual shorthand for ‘this intractable brings you up and down.’

The Source Engine

Unstoppable engines of destruction, the source of ultimate power, or perhaps the manifestations of capricious gods sent to spite those of us that bought The Orange Box on Xbox and not steam. Whatever the case, ladders in Valve’s Source Engine and its derivatives are rightly feared far and wide.

Source Engine games, being largely games of a first-person perspective came up with a very odd solution to the implementation of ladders. They work more like… vertically oriented pathways that realign the player’s sense of gravity. By hugging one with your face, the player character will stick to the ladder, essentially. From there, the camera can be pointed up or down to cause the player to move in that direction as if they can fly, but only so long as they continue touching the ladder. The system is infamous for being rather finicky. It’s proximity based like Zelda, but even more ambiguous. Whereas in Zelda once a ladder climb was initiated, Link was in a clearly illustrated ‘ladder’ state, there’s no real state transition in, say, Half-Life, and the ladders in that game are a lot more finicky. The ambiguity might lead a player to go running off a great height to their death.

The grimy metal rusted ladder of a Half Life 2 map is shown from a first person perspective. The player is holding a crowbar.

While climbing, Link can only go up or down. In Half-Life, the full range of 3D motion remains open. Ladders are not ‘on rails’ in the same way they are in other games. This means you can easily dismount the ladder anywhere along its length, but it also means you can accidentally slip and fall pretty easily. These games being in a first-person perspective also means it’s not always clear where the player is standing, relative to the ladder.

Rather hilariously, Half Life: Alyx has some of the most realistically-executed ladders in video games, should you choose to engage with them. This is on account of, as a VR game, your hands are free! These ladders can be climbed manually with your actual grip, or teleported across as is standard for VR locomotion.

Death Stranding

Death Stranding is an interesting case because movement is such a central and overriding aspect of its gameplay. Near all of the game’s verbs are nuanced aspects of movement and traversal. It’s also an interesting case because ladders form a core part of the early game’s relationship to these verbs. For example, the ladder item can be placed nearly anywhere to enhance the player’s traversal.

Interestingly, since ladders in this game are a physics object which can settle in near any location, they might often be deployed horizontally or in a ramp configuration. There is a certain inflection point for Death Stranding‘s ladders where if they are not arranged steeply enough, they operate more like bridges than like ladders.

I just wanted to bring up that Death Stranding, despite the rather central importance of ladders to its gameplay, utilizes the same ‘press button’ method as the Fromsoft games. I think the reason for this is likely due to the game’s movement mechanics. In Death Stranding, careful movement is essential. One false step, and you can trip over a rock, tumble down a cliff, and lose half your cargo. So it was likely decided that the reduced ambiguity of button activation would be important so players know exactly when and how they will transition to climbing the ladder.

Nier: Automata

Alright I’m just going to come out and say it. Nier: Automata is my Holy Grail of video game ladders. I mean just look at this:

Beauty. Grace. Poetry in motion. A ladder that serves as an extension of the play space rather than a partition of it. A ladder that doesn’t involve a weeks-advanced scheduled commitment. A ladder whose animations and state changes blend seamlessly with regular gameplay’s animations and state changes. 2B can just jump at it and grab the thing. Not just from the top, not just from the bottom, but at any point on the ladder. You can still attack, and defend yourself while on ladders.

The way ladders feels so seamless and effortless in this game really highlights how inexplicable and irritating they can be in others, although there are of course reasons this isn’t always easy to do as we mentioned.

Here is a list of things that the Nier: Automata ladder doesn’t do:

  1. It does not required a button press to interact with. Unlike so many other examples of video game ladders, the ‘climb’ state that the player can access in Nier: Automata is not separated in this way. Often, the button that causes a character to begin climbing is a general-purpose interact button, or otherwise double-loaded for other actions, meaning that the prospect of interacting with a ladder can be ambiguous. If the interaction button also causes the player to pick up items, for example, they might accidentally pick up an item where they meant to scamper up a ladder to avoid a foe that is chasing them.
  2. The ladder does not feel like a separate play space, and is integrated into the world. The player character is readily capable of attacking, being attacked, sprinting, and shooting while climbing a ladder. Precious few of the game’s usual verbs are restricted, making ladders feel like an extension of the play space, not adjunct to it.
  3. The ladder is not treated as a closed tunnel which can only be accessed from the top or bottom. The ladder is a ladder. The player character is capable of mounting it, and dismounting it, from any point along its length. A lot of the artificiality of other ladder executions is done away with.
  4. The transition animations between ‘ladder’ and regular gameplay are extremely quick and simple.
A woman in a black dress with two massive katanas on her back, 2B from Nier: Automata, leaps through the air across a rusted metal scaffold to grab a ladder. She hops up the rungs with great speed, then jumps another scaffold to another ladder.

All this is made possible through some borderline excessive attention to detail and eye for contingencies. A lot of very robust and adaptable animations had to be made to ensure it would always look seamless and natural whenever the player character in Nier: Automota interacts with a ladder. The animation tree is equipped to convey interacting with the ladder in every way and from every angle. Nier ladders are heavily proximity based – if the player moves toward a ladder’s collision box, they will grab it automatically. This introduces ambiguity yet, but it’s a lot less intrusive than it might be otherwise because the developers went out of their way to ensure that the player remains fully capable on the ladder, and that dismounting it represents no real time investment. As such, accidentally climbing a ladder in Nier is no big deal anyway. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I really appreciate immediacy in games, especially action games, so the effortless way you can interact with objects like ladders in this game really stands out to me.

It’s not as though this was easy, however. As we’ve been over, though a seemingly simple and pedestrian intractable on the surface, ladders in video games have a lot of pain points and ways to introduce gameplay bugs. A great amount of consideration has to be made for how they interplay with your gameplay systems, how much scope will be required to make that interplay happen. Ultimately it’s a question of relevance – how important is it that ladders function non-intrusively? If your ladders are a bit clunky, are they common enough to be an issue? It seems like a effortless of locomotion was a major priority for Nier: Automata, as evidenced by the many small ways movement is smoothed out in this game across a multitude of terrains, so an extra investment in making alternate methods of movement, like ladders, feel fine tuned to the gameplay.

So the next time you consider adding a ladder to the game, remember to ask yourselves some pertinent questions about how they should be implemented, and how they’ll relate to the gameplay which contextualizes them. We so often marvel at the big ideas and broad strokes of game design that we overlook the mundane building blocks that go into constructing a space. Forget ladders, what about stairs? Or doors!? Perhaps another day. Video games are held together with duct tape and a dream, so at the very least try to use sturdy duct tape. Okay the end card is Nier again, I just really wanted to keep looking at those beautiful perfect Nier ladders.

Do you think games are silly little things?

A Heartfelt Review of Sonic Frontiers

So this is not a review blog. Reviewing things is not my usual thing. I’m making an exception for this, a very particular game. My relationship to the Sonic franchise is difficult for me to put words to. It is a property I am so profoundly invested in, I will watch all marketing and critical material for each new entry in this monolithic franchise like a hawk, and yet I can’t always bring myself to participate in new Sonic content. Lots of breath has been spent on the bizarre nature of Sonic as a media franchise, but for my part, the simple version is as follows. Sonic The Hedgehog is a franchise with identities as numerous as the stars. It is many things to many people, as it’s consistently accrued new young fans over the years with movies, comics, TV shows, and even games that are each often wildly different in tone, texture, and creative vision. Sonic seems to constantly be in a state of wanting to reinvent itself, and I’ve long been wary of this leading to games that are sometimes of questionable quality, and thus an a deep interest in critical and fan reception, despite my own desperate love of the franchise. I’ve just been disappointed by Sonic a number of times, but I desperately want to love each new game.

I’m pleased to say, Sonic Frontiers was not a disappointment to me. I love much about it, but I can’t say it’s exactly exemplary. Well, that’s for the conclusion. Like I said I don’t normally write reviews, but I don’t really care for letter or number grades on media. Art is just so much more than that could ever convey. So, I’m going to do my best, to give voice to my thoughts on the latest Sonic game.

Sonic Frontiers is the first ‘Open Zone’ Sonic game. What they mean by this is simply that the game is divided into several open-world style maps, with objectives, collectibles, points of interest, and characters to meet in each. These maps are not connected to one another as they might be in a full open world game, thus the distinction. This isn’t really an issue to me – I find I have a fondness for the unique strengths of linear game design anyway, so this is a bit of the best of both worlds for me. You can explore the zones as you wish up to a point, when the story kicks in, unlocking the next area.

You’ll find you need to collect a bevy of different objects to progress the story and proceed to the next map, by ultimately assembling the seven chaos emeralds to fight a big climactic area boss. In the mean time, these objects can be collected by exploring the many, many, small platforming challenges scattered about each island, by playing through the more robust ‘Cyberspace Stage’ platforming/speed challenges, by talking to NPCs in narrative sequences, or by simply interacting with various objects to find collectibles.

The Movement

The beating heart of any Sonic game, where speed is king, how does the movement system feel? This is something I always get caught up on. It’s also something that nobody can really seem to agree on, including the developers at Sonic Team! Sonic’s movement and gamefeel has changed so many times fans categorize the different systems like its a wildlife taxonomy, and there are categories within categories! To give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I think the best character controller in Sonic is Sonic Adventure 2, and I don’t think the games have felt quite as good since! Either too slippery, or too stiff, or some other oddity always throws me off. And of course the boost games which followed some years after the Adventure games had completely different design goals, and as such the character controllers departed drastically from what I had been attached to.

Before I get into, there is one strange thing. There are movement sliders. They feature the ability to adjust and customize things like turn rate, initial speed, boost acceleration, and even top speed! That’s a little wild to me. This may sound appealing to some, but me, I’m not fond. In a game about movement, like a platformer, the character controls and capabilities need to be fine-tuned to the environment to really excel at showcasing what a movement system is capable of. Design is decision-making, and a truly great movement system has to be deliberated on to a certain level of specificity such that it is as suitable to its place in the game as possible – you know, you need to design it. To me this is not of the same substance as, say, camera control options. It’s not even really a set of control options. It’s doesn’t affect the interface, it affects what Sonic is literally capable of as a game-entity. It’s strange. It strikes me as a lack of confidence, to have left your game’s de-bugging variable sliders in the options menu. Thankfully, there was at least some confidence here – the default ‘high speed’ style gives you, in my opinion, the optimal experience by default.

Sonic the blue hedgehog runs around a grassy plateau at twilight, sprinting in circles at high speeds with great grace and agility.
A slider labeled "top speed" is brought to its lowest setting, then the blue hedgehog Sonic runs across a grassy filed in midday at a very moderate speed.
Left: The most responsive Sonic ever, Right: The same but… slower?

The game opens with a prompt to choose your preferred control style – ‘High Speed’ style or ‘Action’ style, with the game noting that ‘Action’ is good for beginners. As far as I can tell, all this does is change where the default of the ‘top speed’ slider rests. All the other sliders remain the same! Action, uh, sets your top speed to the minimum setting. That’s all! High speed does the opposite, starting it at the max setting. I highly highly recommend choosing high speed, even for beginners. Maybe I’m off base here and as a long-time pro gamer sonic master, but I feel as though even someone relatively new to games is going to pick up a Sonic game… expecting to go fast? It’s kind of the main pitch of the character. I don’t really understand the inclination to undermine that for the sake of making the game allegedly easier. Although one would think nerfing the movement speed could also make the game harder. I just feel as though there were better ways to construct a ‘beginner-friendly’ mode.

Okay on to the actual movement. Sonic controls excellently, smoothly, without hitch. Sonic responsively turns nearly one-to-one with control stick input. He can very quickly achieve impressive speeds, while ducking and weaving around obstacles with an engrossing gracefulness. Sonic never slips and slides around, stopping pretty promptly when bid to stop. Sonic is very adaptable, capable of transferring from one activity to the next in short order, like hopping on a grind rail, hopping off midway to bounce off a balloon, then boost toward a cliff side in the distance. The fantasy of seeing a large landscape ahead of sonic and just dashing off into the distance is realized here, with a responsive and blazingly fast hedgehog.

He feels like Adventure Sonic to me. Which is to say I feel in direct control of Sonic. I don’t feel like I’m guiding him with a carrot on a stick, or wrestling against strict movement constraints. When I want Sonic to get to a particular spot, I can get him there, when I want to running around enemies with flourish and style, I can do that. This movement system really accels to me in its ability to directly translate the player’s self-expression through play onto the canvas of the game. The friction between player and Sonic is very low.

From a birdseye view, SOnic the blue hedgehog runs leaving light blue energy trail behind him, in a field of red flowers. Sonic writes the name "Ian" in cursive, using this trail.

Sonic grips the ground satisfyingly as you run. The homing attack is long-ranged and fast, although I feel it has a bit too much hit-pause, making it more disruptive to flow than it should be. Sonic has more options than ever, being able to slide, bounce, dash to the ground from the air, boost, and double jump! The latter really helps with making precision platform jumps, even at high speed.

To get into the specifics, Sonic’s boost ability has been given an overhaul. It is now a regenerating resource, rather that a purely expendable one, more in line with the stamina meter in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. I’m in favor of this change, as it makes the boost more of a strategic tool, a decision to make, rather than just a binary state of ‘holding boost down indefinitely’ and ‘not having enough boost power and walking awkwardly slow’. The boost can also be used as an air-dash to reach distant areas, which is great, because the game does not carry Sonic’s momentum much at all in midair.

It’s something you get used to, but it feels awkwardly wrong to jump out of a full sprint only to watch all of your speed evaporate. Obviously, the maps and levels are not built to accommodate a movement system that heavily transfers speed from one state to another. Every time you light-dash, homing-attack, or bounce, Sonic’s speed is totally reset, and you have to rely on the boost to pick it up again. Luckily, the boost is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution to every obstacle. It doesn’t damage enemies, for one thing, so it is possible to send oneself careening into danger at high speeds. This is the fun part though! Sonic has always been all about know when and how to leverage your speed, and Frontiers captures this through the versatility, though not omnipotence, of the boost function.

The new boost, like the old, effectively replaces Sonic’s spindash move, something I still sorely miss. I really feel as though it would fit quite well in Frontiers especially, given how much its movement seems to be inspired by the Adventure games which featured the spindash prominently. Its advantage over the boost is fine aiming, although there’s no reason the two mechanics could not coexist. Indeed, this is proven by the baffling inclusion of the dropdash, inspired by Sonic Mania. Sonic can spin up, but only in midair, and otherwise it functions exactly like a spindash, perhaps a bit more unwieldy than the one in Adventure and Adventure 2. You can’t use it for fine aiming since you need to jump into it, but the dropdash feels great to use once you get the hang of it, and although it’s by no means necessary to use in the game, it’s cool to have- and I feel the same about Sonic’s most iconic move! Please bring back the spindash. Anyway. The spindash feels like a glaring omission, if only for the sake of completeness, but most of its functionality has been distributed to other moves.

Sonic jumps into a blue spinning ball, and lands on the grassy hill as such, rolling down across the landscape at high speed, before unrolling into a jog.

Sonic plays mostly the same in the Cyberspace Stages, except his turn rate is more strictly throttled, as the stages are more racetrack-like. Interestingly, it seems as though the movement sliders don’t affect Sonic in these stages, at all. It seems there was confidence in how he moved in this context. And well-earned too! I honestly think Sonic handles better in Cyberspace than in any other ‘boost’ game that came before. Sonic still feels like a person, rather than a runaway car. Stopping, turning, readjusting for fine precision, is all intuitive and not a roadblock to some of the more platform-heavy stages. I do have one quibble, which is that Sonic has far less air control than in the Frontiers overworld, even while stationary. This is not ultimately very important to the core gameplay of Cyberspace, which wants you to go fast. The lack of air control while jumping at high speed is meant to be evocative of momentum, ironically, since the game doesn’t really express momentum in many other ways, and that makes sense. At low speed it doesn’t really make sense and feels awkward. It wasn’t a common issue for me, but occasionally, whether I wanted to look in every nook and cranny of a level, or was backtracking to grab a missed collectible, sometimes I’d miss a platform entirely because Sonic can barely move in the air in these stages.

Although this game lacks momentum, the way one can string Sonic’s various moves together to achieve a similar effect can be very satisfying. You might backflip off of a grindrail to air-boost right across an enemy that would’ve slowed you down, and you get through the level a couple seconds faster. It’s amazing how well the systems can interact like this in subtle ways, and leaves a lot of essential room for mastery. Though I wish there was some measure of greater momentum, which would go a long way had the levels also been designed to accommodate it, I still think this is going to be a very repayable game. It’s one of the most immediate, smooth, and frankly playable Sonic movement systems we’ve had in a long time. I’d love to replay all of the old Sonic boost stages with this new movement system.

The Combat

It’s fluff. It’s style over substance that involves a lot of stopping and starting that feels quite at odds with the otherwise very free-flowing and fluid movement gameplay. Eh. I’m not happy to say that. I didn’t want the combat to bounce off of me. I don’t think an added focus on combat is totally incompatible to a Sonic game. I just think to make it work, the systems would’ve had to better play to its strengths. What we got, feels oddly disconnected from the movement systems whereas I had hoped for a pair of systems that interlinked in some way. What we got is rife with simplistic dominant strategies, and an apparent lack of depth. Suffice to say, for a Sonic combat system, I’d hope for an intricate dance of momentum, all about constant movement, situational awareness, and yeah, speed. This is not that.

I want to be clear; the combat is not a chore. It’s not egregious, or irritating, or even too frequent. It mostly just confuses me as to why it had to be there. It’s never challenging nor interesting to me in the way that combat depth usually is. Its best qualities are the spectacle, which seems to be the primary motivator behind the design of this combat. It is indeed very,, cool,, when Sonic kicks the air so hard it shoots laser crescents at his enemies. It is very,, neat,, when Sonic zigs and zags around in a finishing flourish to dispatch an enemy. It’s pleasant enough to watch enemy robots explode, and the combat never lingers long enough to feel like too much of a disruption.

Sonic’s combat options essentially include your standard series of punches chained together, and, in the style of other genres like fighting games and beat-em-ups, the option to string in alternate button inputs in the middle or end of a combo to extend the assault an deal more damage. The wrinkle is that Sonic can chain his homing attack into the beginning of one of these combos. The homing attack is ubiquitous in 3D Sonic and allows the hedgehog to zoom to a nearby enemy’s location whilst damaging it. It’s snappy, smart, and fits in perfectly with a game all about moving. Now though, with enemies gaining larger health pools to accommodate a larger-scoped combat system, Sonic can’t just zip by his defeated foes anymore. There’s a lot of stopping, wailing on a guy with lots of health, rinse and repeat. I found myself just bypassing a lot of enemies actually, because I always felt like that’s what I wanted to be doing as Sonic. The prospect of taking two minutes to button mash some randos to death never appealed to me here. Credit where it’s due though, the decision to change the homing attack from an air-only maneuver to one Sonic can perform from any state, including running on the ground, assigned to the same button as his punchy combo attack, was pretty clever. It essentially means Sonic will always zoom to an appropriate target when starting a combo. I just wish the act of building those combos was more fun.

Sonic repeatedly punches, kicks, and spins at a red light affixed to the back of a giant robot beetle.

Enemies caught in one of your combos will be mostly stunned until you finish. Other enemies can intervene, but all the AI in the game seems placid enough that I never really found it too much of a problem. Really I found Sonic’s defensive options- a dodge and a parry – nearly unnecessary. I say parry, but it’s more like a block with a reprisal attack. There’s no timing window. By holding the block input, Sonic stops in place (ugh), and prepares for an enemy’s blow. Once he takes the hit, the offender is stunned, and Sonic can follow up with his own attack. To block another hit, you must re-input the block, but after that it can be once again held indefinitely. It’s a little wild to me, that this system gives me no sense of speed, seeing as I’m playing as Sonic The Hedgehog. The parry and it’s stationary, time-agnostic nature is a prime example.

Not that you’ll need to be very defensive to begin with. As is expected by this point, Sonic’s life meter is his ring count. Rings being the common collectible in this game, the equivalent of coins. When you get hit, you drop some. If you’re hit with zero rings, you die. Same problems as always apply. There’s not much tension if I know I can always just pick up the rings I dropped, except in very specific situations. This knowledge makes a savvy player basically invincible, and draws into question the necessity of Sonic’s upgradeable defense level, which only reduces how many rings vanish from Sonic’s inventory when hit, as opposed to how many hit the ground. No matter your defense level some always do drop, and you can just pick them up.

Sonic is cut by a robot with blade-arms, and knocked onto the grassy ground at night. He drops some rings behind him as he falls on the ground, but quickly picks them up and beats up the robot.

Sonic has a good amount of brilliant blue eye-popping moves to use, and it’s all very impressive looking, but for me, to feel invested in a game’s combat I have to feel present in the shoes of the player character. I have to feel like I’m making decisions as though there are enemies attacking me. I think the primary problem here is that I don’t feel any of that. I feel like watching some pretty nice, but altogether non-interactive animations. Even then, some of the camera choices are pretty questionable. One camera animation in particular, during one of Sonic’s moves, I could easily see giving someone motion sickness. The whole framing feels off, too. Often you’ll see a reverse shot of Sonic, as if your perspective is meant to be from the target of the attack. But that is so incongruent. I’m meant to be playing Sonic, shouldn’t the camera frame me as Sonic, not a third-party observer?

The combo system seems to be catered specifically to stringing together Sonic’s various new tricks to maximize damage in one combo, with very little emphasis on ducking and dodging enemies, which are, in the majority, woefully unequipped to pose a threat to Sonic. Though I always enjoyed the nice crunchy audio-visual feedback of smashing robots, that was all underlined by my misgivings. I rarely found myself making interesting decisions when dispatching enemies. With the exception of one new mechanic.

I did mention that the combat mechanics and movement mechanics do not interlink in a way I find satisfactory. Well, that’s mostly true. Besides Sonic’s punches and kicks and dodges, there’s also the new cyloop. The cyloop is allows Sonic to leave behind a trail of energy as the player holds the cyloop button. If the player navigates Sonic into drawing a closed shape with this energy trail, he whips up a damaging whirlwind to lift and harm foes. This is fantastic. This is a combat mechanic, which is also a movement mechanic. This synergizes with what Sonic is about, and this tiny little thing has such great room for mastery and interactivity. You can run Sonic as fast or as erratically as you please while doing it – you can even combine the cyloop with Sonic’s new boost, for some insanely agile and stylish loops.

Sonic runs a ring around a group of robots so quickly, he whips up a whirlwind that knocks them into the air. He then dashes from one robot to the next in a series of homing attacks, bashing them to pieces.

One maneuver, that never got old for me was rounding up groups of enemies as they spawned. The most basic enemies usually teleport in, in groups of three or four. If you’re quick, Sonic can boost into a full sprint, cyloop around them, launching the enemies into the air, where they are helpless to stop Sonic from using his homing attacking to blast through each of them in turn. It’s great, and feels like a real execution of skill and strategy – it requires an understanding of how two disparate mechanics (cyloop and homing attack) interact, as well as the execution of a cyloop at a high, unwieldy speed. As enemies got stronger, it became apparent that I could no longer defeat them with just a cyloop and a single homing attack. It was kind of disappointment, to be honest, to use the rest of Sonic’s sluggish arsenal. Having to repeatedly wail on a robot to defeat it feels so much less smooth and flowing than a one-two punch of cyloop to homing attack. The enemies still rarely put up any opposition to me doing this, which I would’ve liked to see, but I enjoyed the cyloop so much more than every one of Sonic’s other offensive options that I’d use it whenever I could. This is a mechanic I hope to see return in the future, and expanded on.

Honestly, even the bosses I feel could’ve been designed largely the same way just without the combo system at all. All of them boil down to -do some Sonic related activity like run fast or jump over something, until my weakpoint is exposed, then wail on it-. Why the wailing though? Why not just expose the weakpoint and hit it, then we get on with doing Sonic related things. The following would work basically the same without a combos system. Run up his arm, sure, avoid the red rings, got it, then just homing attack the weakpoint. Why stop in place for all the extra punching?

A giant three-armed robot slams the ground in front of Sonic with its hand. Sonic boosts and dashes up the arm, before slimming into the hinge that connects the arm to the top of the robot, and punching it until it explodes.

For all of my complaining I want to reemphasize that the combat is a minor enough part of regular gameplay, or otherwise inoffensive enough, that I never felt like it was really disrupting my good time. It helps that so many of the encounters are so easy. I obviously care a lot about combat design, and I tend to have a lot more to say about a subject when I do really like it, the subject being Frontiers in this case, but it has just a few niggling problems that I can’t quite ignore. So if you’re wondering how I went on at such length about a supposedly ‘not that bad’ subject, that’s how.

The Levels and Spaces

One of the collectibles Sonic needs to complete the game are obtained by doing Cyberspace levels, which are bite-sized chunks of intense gameplay reminiscent of “boost” games like Sonic Generations and Sonic Forces. In these stages, Sonic’s movement is more restricted, and there’s a focus on completing them fast. In fact, there are several objectives in each, and you receive more of the required collectible the more challenges you complete. One such challenge is to beat the level in a minimum required time.

Most of these times are pretty generous, but some of them really push the movement system to its limit, demanding the player squeeze every last second they can out of Sonic’s ability to cut corners, boost over obstacles, and bounce off baddies. It’s really quite exciting, and the smaller levels had me a lot more invested in trying to get good times than more open-concept levels in past Sonic games might have. I still miss Sonic Adventure style stages, but the refocus on speed running is a good fit for these narrower experiences.

The Cyberspace levels lack the spectacle and narrative context of boost games from previous games, using only a short list of visual elements, recycled across many stages likely for the sake of development scope. That aside, this may be the most I’ve enjoyed boost-style long-corridor Sonic levels in a long time. With the updates to Sonic’s movement, I find them a lot more approachable, and my playstyle a lot more freeform.

The reduction of level themes to a rather sparse and measly handful certainly there’s a lot less visual variety than I might be used to in a Sonic game. For what it’s worth, I can’t honestly say that I got tired of the repeated patterns by the end of the game, as the levels themselves are engrossing enough as bits of challenge and play. They’re pretty sizeable, too. They’re not primarily what you’ll be doing in the game, but nor are they purely optional side-content. You do indeed have to play at least some of them, but they are fun, and I found it pretty breezy to complete every single one. The levels are fun to play, but that’s all. I will never have the same sort of visceral, emotional connection, or immersive sense of place to these nearly context-free spaces as I do to some of Sonic‘s classic locations. Speak of which…

For many of these cyberspace levels, the physical platform layout, obstacle placements, and overall design is borrowed largely or in-part from existing Sonic levels from previous games in the franchise. While this may seem off-putting to some, it’s actually kind of refreshing, to retread familiar ground with Sonic Frontiers‘ new and frankly quite competently put together movement system. Some of these stages haven’t been in the spotlight for literal decades. While you do need to do at least some minimum number of cyberspace stages, you do not need to do even nearly all of them, so the presence of reused content doesn’t feel like much of an imposition to me. Their presence is largely explained away by cyberspace being ‘constructed of Sonic’s memories’ or somesuch, even though certain stages that are present such as Radical Highway are not levels that Sonic himself ever ran through. It’s neither here nor there.

Ultimately, a curated list of tried and proven stage designs alongside a handful of originals and remixes makes the Cyberspace level design quality feel quite consistent overall. The stages also being bite-sized allows the designers to explore gimmicks for the levels that might be tiresome otherwise, like a series of suspended boost rings you have to jump between, for example.

When it comes to the overworld, we have a repeating pattern of context-free grind rails, bounce pads, and booster pads littering a mostly naturalistic environment dotted with high-tech ruins. The ‘context’ to these is that they are bits and pieces of these ruins, but they don’t really read as that. Their presence faded into the background for me as I simply began seeing them as gameplay items, though I wish they could be that and a more natural part of the world. The open zones themselves to me feel pretty uninspired. Grass place, volcano place, desert place, etc. I’ll remember the Starfall Islands well for a number of reasons- the events that took place here, the fun I had running around with Sonic, the conversations I had with his friends – but I won’t remember them because of my sense of place while visiting them. They feel honestly, kind of generic.

The Music

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but Sonic Frontiers‘ soundtrack is out of control. It’s bursting with levels of palpable passion and energy such to be bordering on unreasonable. The way I feel when listening to some of these songs is how I should be expecting to feel listening to a sold-out rock concert in a stadium. To experience the same sitting in my living room playing a video game for children about a cartoon hedgehog feels almost surreal, but this has always been the case. The consummate strangeness of this franchise is a feature, not a bug. You can’t quite replicate this exact experience elsewhere. This is the kind of energy that got me invested in the hedgehog in the first place.

The high-energy stuff is kept close to the chest, for a bit though. The overworld is rather ambient, chill music just capturing the vibes of nature. It seemed in marketing to me like it would be an ill-fit for sonic, but the overworld really is more about vibes than action and adventure. The heart-pumping electronic stuff starts to kick in with the Cyberspace levels, which utilizes some short-looping but very catchy and cool tracks.

It’s pretty much tradition at this point, Sonic’s got good music. No matter what you think of any given Sonic game, there is a weird, infectious bug at Sega that convinces each and every person on their audio staff that they need to compose and perform music like they’re going to die tomorrow. The energy flows, and every Sonic soundtrack inexplicably has a song powerful enough to crack a mountain in half. Lesser game soundtracks would settle for a profoundly powerful endgame boss theme that rolls with a thunderous buildup of swelling instrumentals before awashing you in a tidal wave of heartfelt lyrics which tie together the themes and the game and steps along the way the characters had to complete this journey together with you. Sonic Frontiers has at least four. Four lavishly produced lyrical tracks that put most of what I hear in other games to shame. The Metal Gear Rising: Reveangence comparison early was foreshadowing. There was clearly some inspiration here, these songs kick ass, and in similar fashion, blast you in the face with some of the most earnest lyricism you’ve heard since you first discovered what music was when you turned fourteen, just as each boss enters their climactic final stage. Blaring guitars accompany dual vocalists utterly convinced they’re creating the coolest thing of all time – and they’re right. I feel like I could crack a mountain in half with my fist listening to these.

Weird side-note: The main credits theme for this song, Vandalize, which is also very good, has an original edit not featured in the game. This original edit pretty heavily features the F**K word, in the context of its traditionally 1st definition. Kind of funny, having that officially closely associated with a Sonic The Hedgehog game. Y’know I’m not a prude for that sort of stuff, not at all. Just crossed my mind that actual children will probably be googling this song once they finish the game. It’s nothing that’s gonna ruin anybody’s life or anything, just. Funny? Strange? I dunno. Side-noteworthy, I guess.

Sonic is sliding across a grindrail, offset from a cliff overlooking the sea. He jumps off the rail to reach the cliff, but in midair, the camera shifts perspective to focus on a distant menacing robot labeled "Tower". This shift in perspective has killed Sonic's momentum, and he falls into the ocean like a sack of bricks.

The Narrative

Sonic fans made a big deal about the new head writer for this game, Ian Flynn. He’s been heading up the new run of Sonic comics lately, and apparently is much beloved for that. I don’t read the comics, and video games are a very different medium, even aside from the fact that game development is often messy and solid writing can get mangled for any number of unforeseen reasons. I was cautious going into the story of Frontiers.

Narrative for Sonic has been as divisive and chaotic as his gameplay, for much the same reasons. Seems like no one can decide what Sonic really should be, or if he should even be anything. Maybe Sonic can occupy any tone or style at any time. Who’s to say? Before Frontiers Sonic’s games have given up on much of the melodrama and outlandish plotlines that defined him for some years, focusing more on child-skewing comedy and such silliness.

Frontiers sticks more to the old dramatic model. Sonic’s friends are in real trouble, trapped in Cyberspace, and he’s got to rescue them. A new antagonistic force in the form of the mysterious AI-hologram girl Sage has appeared. I have to say, the plot of this one is rather thin. It feels as though Flynn was brought on quite a ways into development, to post-hoc fill out the narrative beats to fit in with Sonic’s adventure across a series of islands. Not much happens other than Sonic getting beat up by big monsters repeatedly as he slowly gets closer to his friends’ release. Then you fight a bigger monster at the end.

That said… though the plot didn’t do much for me, there’s a lot more dialogue and character writing going on here than Sonic has had in a long time. You know, there’s like, some real growth and personal introspection on the part of these cartoons between some of their conversations. It seems Ian Flynn has a real talent for character voice, as Sonic, Knuckles, Tails, and Amy haven’t felt so much like fully fleshed out characters for a long, long time. They have opinions of each other, senses of humor, dreams, and desires. They aren’t caricatures. Where the plot feels thin, the story is consistently carried by these character interactions, and I constantly felt compelled to find the next story cutscene, because I just wanted to see these bozos interact with each other more. There’s a lot of one-on-one dialogues between Sonic and one other character, and I would’ve liked to see more group interactions, or interactions sans Sonic, and perhaps a more robust plot would have been able to accomodate that.

Another highlight is the subplot of series archenemy Dr. Eggman, which happens mostly off-screen, but is recorded in a series of obtainable voice recordings from him. Eggman as an example here, we really see some new takes on these characters, sides that logically work, but have never really been explored before. How does Eggman feel about the, like, by all accounts, actually alive machines that he’s created with his own hands? Maybe Tails, though he values Sonic as a best friend, has feelings a bit more complicated than that. What does Amy think of Sonic, having chased his affections for so long, but been rebuffed at every turn? There’s a lot here.

That’s to say nothing of the new character, Sage. She’s adorable, entertaining, and even packs a bit of a pathos punch. I wouldn’t say she’s terribly deep, or anything, but she’s obviously got some emotional complexity to her, and her relationships to the other characters are super interesting. Her visual design is really cool too. I really, really, hope we get to see more of her in the future.

Another fun quirk of the writing is that is seems almost religiously committed to reaffirming the canon of Sonic The Hedgehog as a series. Nearly every game is referenced in some way, its story being incorporated into Sonic’s personal history, no matter how absurd or bizarre the events would seem to be in retrospect. I honestly have to respect the hustle. For a long-time fan like me, I found it amusing, and even somewhat compelling, the persistent callbacks and connections.

The storytelling technique and presentation, as far as games go, is nothing you haven’t seen, for the most part. You go from game objective to game objective and occasionally trigger a cutscene conversation between Sonic and an NPC. As I’ve mentioned, it did keep me continuously motivated to find the next one though, it’s certainly not bad! In terms of presentation, when the game wants to build excitement, it delivers, with that insane music and some absolutely gorgeously boarded animated action scenes.

The plot, like it begins, ends somewhat underwritten, with a dearth of real context or answers for what’s happening. There are bits and pieces that suggest a grander narrative that may follow, but I could see this leaving people cold in some respects. And yes, I got the real ending. Still, the character writing remains strong-throughout and I’d be excited to see what this new writing team can do with perhaps more leeway.

Conclusion

Sonic The Hedgehog once felt like every creative involved through they were creating the coolest thing in the goddamn world. For a long time I didn’t quite feel that anymore. Maybe it was a sign of growing up, or maybe something was lost. It’s hard to say. From the music, to the visuals, the ambition and scope of the story, the style you’re capable of in gameplay. It was all just so cool. And you know what? Sonic Frontiers is far from a perfect game, it’s full of baffling decisions and strange inconsistencies that feel as though someone should’ve been on top of, stuff that feels obvious to me in hindsight. And yet, I feel shades of that same feeling again for the first time in maybe a decade. Sonic is cool. Sonic has always been cool but this is different. This is like, advanced cool. This feels like every creative involved is convinced that they are creating the coolest thing in the goddamn world. The passion is palpable. And it’s fun! I breezed through the game 100% with basically no desire to stop. The gameplay may not have as much ‘momentum’ as I hoped, but there’s momentum in the energy of this game. Like it’s the first step of a mountainous surge of creativity. Sonic Frontiers is good. Go play it.

The blue hedgehog Sonic runs at high speed through a field of red and white flowers, wind whipping past him as he goes. He hops over a rail, and ducks to slide beneath another one.

They’ll Know Your Name, Burned Into Their Memory…

The Ink Must Flow: How Splatoon Gets You In a Rhythm

Splatoon is my favorite multiplayer shooter series right now. There’s a lot of reasons for that, from the inimitable youthful aesthetic, to the novelty of its premise, to the breadth of self-expression available to players. I think what most draws me back to this game again and again is just how effortlessly it induces the Flow State. The Flow State is a psychological concept that you may have come across by many names in different fields. It is being fully immersed and cognitively absorbed with a task. It is being ‘in the zone’, so to speak. It is associated with a certain energy, a joy, in the act of doing. As applied to games, it’s what happens when you become so involved in with the game, so in sync with its rules and systems that you feel time slip away, when effort becomes so natural it feels like no effort at all. It’s the kind of thing I make games for, as opposed to any other medium, and Splatoon pulls it off beautifully in the way its most basic gameplay is structured.

In a peaceful urban sidewalk patio, a purple octopus repeatedly bounces around in a circle on the pavement, before transforming into the purple silhouette of a young girl.
This is how I express myself

You’re a Kid Now You’re a Squid Now

Like many great games Splatoon is a system built on mobility and positioning. However, its breakout idea is that the players have agency not only in how they move, but in what areas of the game space are available to them to move. Most shooters’ main actions are move and shoot. Splatoon adds move, shoot, and claim turf. Your team claims turf on any playable surface they shoot with their ink-based weaponry. At any time, players may shift from their ‘kid’ form, in which they can shoot to claim turf or defeat opponents (‘splat’ them) to their ‘squid’ or ‘swim’ form. In the swim form, shooting is not available as an action, but mobility options are greatly expanded. While swimming, a player is significantly faster on the ground, while also gaining the ability to scale sheer walls that have been claimed by allied ink.

Splatoon has a created an inherent meaningful decisions layered on top of the typical scenario in a competitive shooter. Like in other games, players have the option to take cover, spray suppressive fire, focus down single targets, and the rest, but they also have the omnipresent option to forego offense entirely for the swim form, making them more mobile, and harder to see. The last essential wrinkle is that ammo (ink) is limited, the player can only load so much at one time. To reload, the player needs to swim through allied ink that has already been laid down. This also quickly heals any damage you’ve taken, acting as a catch-all resource renewal action.

Your two modes now create a feedback loop. Shooting can accomplish two things. One: splatting players which gives you and your teammates safe space to advance the game’s main objective, which is usually to claim turf. And two: claiming turf, which is the metric by which the winning team is judged, but also provides a tactical advantage in allied ink’s utility to evasive maneuvers, ambushes, and advantageous positioning. The more angles you have on your opponent, the more limited their options as opposed to yours. Swimming accomplishes two things as well. One: The increased swim speed, decreased visibility, and healing of the swim form makes a swimming player a much less vulnerable target than a shooting one. Two: A swimming player is restoring ammunition, which must be done to continue shooting.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt runs across a shipping dock, drenching the ground with purple ink from a giant paintbrush she carries as she goes. Every few seconds, an ink tank on her back becomes visibly emptied, and she turns into a small octopus that sinks beneath the ink on the ground. When she emerges, the ink tank is full. She continues this pattern rhythmically.
It’s rhythmic, comfortable, almost, therapeutic. Yeah! Ink that turf!

Here Splatoon has through incentives solidified its gameplay loop to where shooting gives you more space for swimming, and swimming enables you to continue shooting. After getting used to the unconventional systems, it quickly becomes intuitive how they relate to each other, and thus players will naturally begin to fall into a pattern, which typically looks like this:

Lay down plentiful amounts of ink to claim turf, including a path to your next desired, probably tactically chosen, location. Then, swim to that location to reload your ink. Engage the enemy team either though frontal assault or ambush tactics, utilizing your own turf for advantage. Whether the enemy is splatted, or you or pushed back, you’ll relocated using your own turf, renewing your resources at the same time, and repeat. Ink and swim, ink and swim.

The Simple Pleasure of Splatter

Splatoon is a crunchy, colorful, game with lush audio-visual feedback. A lot of care was clearly taken to making the act of laying down ink very satisfying. There’s a simple joy in seeing color overtake the environment, permanent marks of your activity. The wild shapes and pathways carved across the terrain, as seen from above in the final score tally screen of each match, leaves evidence of every assault, flank, retreat, and regroup each team took part in.

A bird's eye view of a symmetrical office complex. The upper left section and most of the center is covered in bright purple ink. The lower right is covered in neon green. The two ink colors meet at an uneven border, indicative of splashes, splats, and drips, the purple intruding on the green and vice versa. Two cats appear on either side of a meter indicating the ratio of purple to green. The cats dance and determine that the purple is more abundant than green, as the meter reflects this. The word "Victory" appears.
Sometimes these end screens can look pretty wild, a cathartic sendoff to an intense match.

It is intrinsically motivating to want to just cover stuff in pretty colors. With that desire in place, and the necessity of the swim form for continuing to do that, players are naturally encouraged to tactically engage with the game, and consider their surroundings. No matter what, when you run out of ink, you have to swim for a bit to restore it, so players are given a mandatory bit of space and pause in the action to acknowledge their context. Splatoon trains players to always be considering their next move. You know you have to restore ink, so you know you have to relocate eventually as some ground is ceded to your opponents.

This space to consider is a permanent and mandatory part of the game loop, but is also fun in and of itself. Movement in Splatoon while in kid form isn’t horribly slow, not nearly slow enough to be frustrating, but it is pointedly slower than swimming. The contrast makes swimming through ink exhilarating and liberating. It also makes one feel powerful compared to those not swimming at that exact moment, as a swimming squid has the advantage of wall-scaling and stealth through their reduced visibility. At any moment you can jump out to ambushed an unsuspecting opponent. So while Splatoon is essentially forcing an idealized interested curve through the interplay of its mechanics (moments of high intensity shooting to moments of less intense swimming, reloading, and repositioning), it remains intrinsically motivating throughout.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt summons a fountain of ink beside a bridge soaked in pink and yellow ink. A yellow squidkid, threatened by the pink geyser, retreats beneath the bridge, and uses an inflatable wall there as cover. The octo-girl runs back and forth a bit behind the wall to mix him up, but as she goes in for the kill, the yellow squidkid backs off of a safety girder and falls to his doom.
Tricking this squidkid off a cliff is tangentially related… but mostly I though it was funny

Through this enforced rhythm and tactical engagement, the endless looping of shoot, swim, ink, shoot, swim becomes natural. Before long, it will feel second-nature to veteran players, like skiing veterans effortlessly gliding back and forth across a slope. Ink, shoot, swim, reposition, shoot, ink, swim, retreat, ink, swim, etc.

I really think its the rhythmic nature of this extreme tight gameplay loop that makes Splatoon so engrossing. In some ways it feels almost like a ritual, meant to teach you the inherent interrelations of Splatoon‘s various modes of interaction. For example, knowing that swimming is the best, fastest way to move, and that it restores your ammo, one might realize that swimming with a full tank of ink is a bit of a waste. That’s ink which could be better spent elsewhere. If you know you’re going to be swimming for a bit to get to your next location, it would be ideal if you could spend a great deal of your ink all at once at something productive. And… wouldn’t you know it, there is such a tool, a secondary weapon all players have access to that consume a large amount of ink, but can claim turf at a great distance, create threatened space to keep enemies away, or even outright splat enemies instantly. Indeed, throwing a splat-bomb secondary weapon into the distance before swimming a ways to restore the sunk cost is a powerful strategy.

Push Buttons and You’re Contributing

One thing I want to briefly touch on is how Splatoon goes out of its way to maintain this rhythm no matter what. After all, the point of Flow is its uninterrupted and focused nature. You know, a flow. Splatoon clearly values this flow state greatly, with all of the contingencies it deploys for possible interruptions. There’s a couple of techniques it uses to do this.

First, death and death timers. Sorry, splatting and respawn timers. When getting splatted, you’re put out of commission for some time. There has to be some reward for getting a splat where shooting the other guy is a primary goal, so some space and time is awarded to the successful splatter-er. However, this game wants as little (boring) downtime as possible, and will thrust a defeated player back into the action as soon as possible. Respawn timers never last more than 10 seconds. Lots of shooters have similar respawn timers, but Splatoon‘s super jump mechanic, which lets players immediately jump to an ally’s location makes getting back into the action incredibly quick and breezy. To counteract this, so that every match doesn’t devolve into an immovable, non-dynamic stalemate, the average TTK or time to kill in Splatoon is very low, meaning just a little bit of forethought or even luck can unseat a skilled opponent who’s caught unawares. If ambushed, a squid kid can be taken down in a fraction of a second.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt jumps across a shipping dock drenched in yellow and purple ink. Yellow cephalopod-kids spray yellow ink at her, partially covering her. She sprays purple ink at her feet and turns into an octopus to submerge in it, before retreating. As she does, she spies a yellow opponent spraying ink on her purple turf, sneaks up behind them, and splats them into a burst of purple ink in less than a second.
Here demonstrates the utility of Splatoon’s ink-swim-ink rhythm. I only lived here because I repeatedly swam in my own ink to restore heatlh. It also shows how attainable a good ambush is.

The inherent risk in attacking in Splatoon is reduced in this way. If you can outmaneuver an opponent you might be able to defeat them before they have a chance to hit you with any reprisal. There’s a synthesis of strategy and instinct here that’s very friendly to newer players. If beating someone in a competition is so demanding that a new player can never get one over on their opponent, the game runs a high risk of bouncing off of them. We want those new players to experience that engrossing flow state uninterrupted, so beating even veteran players in shootouts is made a very attainable goal.

Of course, even if you’re not extremely predisposed to shooting opponents in general, Splatoon‘s got your flow state covered. Simply shooting the unmoving ground beneath your feet creates a tactical advantage for your team. Inking turf is how you build up your special weapon, which itself is quite powerful for creating space, inking turf, and splatting opponents. A note on those special weapons, by the by. If a player is splatted, they lose progress towards charging their special weapon, even if it’s already fully charged! I love this design decision, as it encourages liberal use of the special weapons, which is exciting for both sides of the match. Use them with some strategy, sure, but if you don’t use it for too long, you will most certainly lose it. Why is this good? Well it prevents that boring downtime, where players might be encouraged to play passively, waiting for the perfect moment to throw out a bunch of specials rather than just using them so they can charge up the next one.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt sprays purple ink on a moving bit of drawbridge as it goes vertical. She turns into an octopus and swims up the surface, then leaps down to ambush a fleeing yellow opponent. Finally, she doubles back, and inks some more wall to create an escape route.
Play long enough, and everything from using your specials, to nabbing kills, to laying out turf becomes second nature, a continuous stream of consciousness

Anyway, inking turf is the main goal of most gameplay modes, and it contributes directly to your team’s likelihood of success. It also increases your more violently-minded teammate’s options for splatting opponents. If the enemy team’s hard-hitters are simply hitting too hard for your comfort zone, any player can contribute with minimal risk of interruption if they avoid the front lines, and just focus on getting into that flow of laying ink, swimming, laying ink.

Masahiro Sakurai, creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series, recently shared his theory that there is a relationship between the level of a game’s ‘Game Essence’ or ‘Risk and Reward’ and the broadness of its appeal to a wider audience. I think there’s some merit to this line of thinking, and the runaway success of Splatoon, which has implemented so many clever ways to diminish inherent risk so as to maintain the integrity of its gameplay loop for all players, winning or losing, while also allowing greater levels of risk for high-skill strategy and gameplay execution, supports it. One of the many reasons for Smash Bros. success, I think, is a philosophy of risk vs. reward similar to Splatoon‘s. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the former were an inspiration to the latter.

Swimming In Splatoon’s Energy

If there’s three words I’d use to describe Splatoon‘s vibe they’d be ‘youthful’, ‘vibrant’ and ‘expressive’. It’s a game that gives so many unique avenues to accomplish it’s primary goals, but all through a highly tuned gameplay loop that encourages situational awareness and engagement to create an engine for inducing the flow state. Splatoon‘s greater context of youth-dominated urban spaces playing host to the world’s coolest city-wide paintball matches encourages an inviting environment of constant partying, and playing the game feels like that too; a nonstop party, three minutes at a time. It’s a lot of little hidden motivators working in tandem behind the scenes that create this overall vibe. It’s amazing the sense of freedom I get from such a precisely controlled set of parameters. When I really get into a match of Splatoon, I hardly feel as though the space between myself and the world of the game exists at all. It’s like swimming in that exciting space. If I could master one aspect of Splatoon‘s design it would be that.

A girl with octopus arms for hair in a white T-shirt runs through an office complex with floors and walls drenched with green and purple ink. With a giant paintbrush she leaves behind purple ink as she goes. Several ink-bombs go off around her before a countdown timer reaches zero, as a barrier of caution tape with the word "Game!" written on each piece covers the screen.

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