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.

Difficulty as Narrative Design – The Emotions That Might Happen When You Fight Sans

I’ve had some stuff on the brain lately, in regards to difficulty’s place in design, which is what tends to happen when you play Elden Ring for so many hours straight. I’ve also been replaying Toby Fox’s Deltarune with a friend, another game that uses difficulty in interesting ways. I’ve had this thought for a while, to do a write up about how difficulty can be, and is, deployed in design to affect the greater experience. This article contains major spoilers for Undertale and mild spoilers for FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.

To be unambiguous here – difficulty is a very nuanced and at times personal subject in design that touches on a host of other things such as game balance, technical depth, general play enjoyment, and of course accessibility. These are very complex subjects that deserve their own discussions. What I’m specifically focusing on in this article is how difficulty can be deployed with purpose, and often has more relevance to the overall design than is often attributed to it, as a simple measure of player competence for the purposes of challenge. I wanted to look at an example of a game where difficulty is an intimate part of its narrative design, where the reactions it illicit is very much a product of how difficulty is utilized.

The idea that difficulty in gameplay can be a narrative tool should be fairly straightforward to grasp when looking at a couple of examples. In Elden Ring, all of your primary boss characters are demigods, children of gods, who once fought over the shards of the titular ring. The demigod Radahn fought his half-sister Malenia to a standstill. Radahn is oft touted as the strongest of all demigods – he holds the stars in stasis by his own power – he takes an entire platoon of elite soldiers in gameplay just to take down! This assertion that Radahn is the strongest remains more or less unchallenged for some time. There are harder bosses, but none that require so much backup to defeat, nor any nearly as hobbled with injury as poor Radahn.

There is a secret and hidden boss, however, another demigod called Malenia, who is still alive. When Radahn is found, Malenia’s power, the same power that has scarred the landscape around Radahn has left him ‘divested of his wits’, and fighting like a wild animal. Malenia, however, is more or less totally lucid, angrily awaiting the return of her missing twin brother and liege lord, Miquella. Malenia has never been in better form – there was nothing stopping her from taking Radahn’s shard of the Elden Ring and yet she did not, so clearly she has no interest in ruling. Indeed her dialogue reinforces the notion that she fought only for loyalty to her brother’s ambitions.

Two warrior women face each other in a lush cavern filled with white flowers. One has red hair and is in golden Valkyrie garb, with a sword. One is in a blue hood, with a spear. The Valkyrie ascends into the air and swings her sword with such ferocity it creates white-hot slashes of air in a blurring flurry around her. The blood-hooded woman runs and rolls around the attacks. — I can practically feel the hairs being shaved off the back of my neck.

Any who’ve fought Malenia will tell you, the idea that Radahn could stand a chance against Malenia in combat, is laughable. They could tell you entirely because of how demanding of a boss she is, how difficult she is tells you the entire story. There’s no possible way she left her encounter with Radahn in defeat, or even in a draw. Her swordsmanship is deadly and near insurmountable, and she hides an even greater power beyond that. She defeated him, and he was left without his senses. She must have left because her brother, the real aspirant to the Elden Ring, went missing. The player will know this intuitively, through experience. They lived it. They will feel it in their bones. Radahn could not have defeated Malenia, and the rest of the story follows. Without Miquella, there would be no reason to collect Radahn’s shard. If you’ve explored the world of Elden Ring thoroughly, this line of thinking is vindicated, as you’ll know Miquella underwent a sudden and shocking disappearance, followed by an extended and secretive absence.

A woman in a blue hood runs her spear through the chest of a taller woman with red hair and golden Valkyrie garb, the stabbed Valkyrie falls onto her back in a pool of blood as the spear is removed. — Difficulty is a marker of power in games, and examining power is essential in stories of conflict

If you’ll indulge me to invoke the first of two quotes from Bennett Foddy, designer of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, a notoriously difficult game.

“The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game its flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything.” – Bennett Foddy

All that said, difficulty is not just a mechanical gameplay consideration. Like all aspects of a game, it is an essential part of the cumulative experience. I am of the opinion that if an obstacle within your narrative is meant to be threatening, formidable, out to kill our dear player character, then the player should get the sense that this force is threatening and formidable. To trivialize it, or deny the sensation that there is an opposing force trying to halt the player’s forward motion, is to render the narrative dishonest, and rob it of its power. If conflict is about power, than difficulty is one of the most genuine ways power can be communicated in an interactive system. This isn’t to say that every game needs extreme challenge, or even that every game with conflict is necessarily trying to create the aforementioned sense of opposing force. This is but one type of experience you might seek to create, a goal your art may aspire to. In fact, this is just one way to deploy difficulty as a mode of narrative design. That brings us to Undertale.

The skeleton Sans stands in a black void, above a battle UI overlay. He says "ready?" then suddenly unleashes a barrage of bones and laser beams to attack the player, represented by a red heart-shaped cursor. — “No.”

In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. Death and resetting is diegetic, meaning the player character is literally dying and coming back to life at a previous point in time, within the game’s fiction. In this way failure is kind of inherently tied to the narrative. Undertale comes packaged with a few predefined paths to play that present themselves based on how the player tackles obstacles. Killing monsters casually as they come to confront you will result in one of several ‘neutral’ endings, in which the player’s human character escapes the world of monsters, which is left in varying states of disarray as a result. The ‘pacifist’ run will see the player avoiding lethal violence, and reaching out the hand of friendship to major characters to achieve the best world for everyone. The ‘no mercy’ run is the third and most obscure path, in which not only is lethal force deployed against all obstacles, lethal force is deployed against every potential obstacle, wiping out all monsters in the underground.

To do this, the player has to spend an inordinate amount of time trawling around for enemies to fight. Every single one needs to be killed for the No Mercy ending to hold true. This process is long, repetitive, somewhat dull, and even grueling at times. And yet, it remains an immensely popular way to play this already immensely popular game. There is a purpose to all this consternation, though. I think it pretty noncontroversial to say Undertale‘s ultimate message is one of nonviolence – that the best way to solve conflict is through open communication and a curious, empathic heart. The No Mercy run exists as a counterpoint to this message, to prove its efficacy. Killing everything in Undertale is a pain, frankly. It takes a lot of effort but not necessarily the kind of effort a player seeking challenge might be after. More of that exists along the less violent story routes. No, Undertale is instilling through the avenue of frustration that ‘the easy way out’ isn’t always easy, and while ‘the high road’ isn’t always easy either, it’s a heck of a lot more fun than willful cruelty, which is a continuous and conscious effort on the part of the abuser.

And yet, most playing through will persist. They have buy in, and as Undertale expects, most will be curious enough to want to know what happens next, not in spite of the frustration, but perhaps even because of it. One of Undertale‘s most infamous features is the normally comedic, friendly, and jovial character Sans, who is a bit of an internet meme. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of them has to be his sudden transformation into the game’s greatest and most stubborn challenge. The boss battle against Sans, with one other exception, is the only real challenge in the No Mercy run, with all other opposition crumpling like paper before the player. The player has not had a ramp up in difficulty in this point, and Sans comes out of the gate swinging with one of the most demanding gameplay experiences in modern popular interactive media. No punches pulled here, Sans is meant to be a brick wall of a boss, one that will have to be worn down with patience if it’s to be cleared at all.

Sans the skeleton stares you down from a black void with a battle UI overlay, as the player's heart-cursor, now blue, jumps across platforms littered with bones. — I have SO MUCH patience right now, you wouldn’t believe. Oh god the patience I have.

Fans of Undertale have such a personal relationship with it, and given its immense popularity that is quite impressive. The player at this point, is acting as an agent within the narrative, separate and apart from their controlled character, Frisk, who ambiguously is either mind-controlled by the player, or influenced by the player subtly to act or fight. Sans tries everything he can to appeal to the player to start over, to do anything but follow through on the path they’re on. He pleads, he appeals to humanity, he threatens, and he even cheats. After each failure, Sans comes up with some new unique dialogue with which to taunt and belittle you for trying. The player can come back as many times as they want to try again, so words and his ability to act as an immovable object are Sans’s only real forms of power over you. The ironclad stubbornness of this encounter, the unerring, unflinching confidence in its unreasonableness makes it feel real, like Sans is a thinking actor specifically trying to get under your skin, and make your goal unreachable, and that is what makes it feel personal.

Sans the skeleton says, "sounds strange, but before all this i was secretly hoping we could be friends. i always thought the anomaly was doing this cause they were unhappy. and when they got what they wanted, they would stop."

He then fires a bevy of skull-shaped laser cannons at the player's red cursor. — Oh. Kind of makes me feel bad I’m trying so hard to kil- OH GOD LASERS

Sans isn’t trying to kill you – he knows that is beyond his power. He’s trying to wear you down, to frustrate you, to bore you, whatever it takes to make you give up on your killing spree, and maybe start over, or even give up. The story was very carefully set up to make this a legitimate way to cap off the narrative. In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. In Undertale, giving up and starting over is a legitimate and designed-for chapter of the narrative.

The skeleton Sans sends an onslaught of bones and laser beams at the player's heart-shaped cursor, turned blue now. After a moment he sends the blue heart careening into a deadly maze of bones as it flies against its will to the right side of the screen. — What a reasonable amount of garbage that can instantly kill me, on the screen, all at once

Giving up can mean a new beginning, a world where the player is not a force for destruction and misery, but a force for change and friendship. Whenever I play Undertale, I love to play the part of the sinister player destroying the world and its inhabitants for callous entertainment (and in a way, I truly am that), but then our protagonist, Frisk, overtaken by sorrow after killing Sans, is able to wrestle back control and ease me into a more peaceful, and ultimately more fulfilling world. I’ll play a No Mercy run just up until I’ve killed Sans, and no further. I’ll then roleplay the regretful monster, the powerful demon whose lost everything, and has no more mountains to conquer. From there I return, back to the beginning of the game, anew with a desire to learn and try again. Undertale makes failure an avenue for learning and improving at the game yes, but also a potential narrative moment of fulfillment.

I love this scenario. It creates a full arc for me, as the will and intention of the player character Frisk, to go through. It’s a rich narrative that unfolds entirely through gameplay that I get to be a part of. That’s the real magic of difficulty in games for me, it’s something entirely unique to the medium, a level of interactivity other forms of art simply cannot achieve. Sans is blisteringly difficult, to the point that he may even feel antagonistic to the human behind the screen. But the game isn’t trying to punish you, nor look down on you, it’s trying to play with you. It is a game, after all. It is interactive theater, a stage show where you are the star. And maybe just maybe you’ll get something valuable out of the experience.

“Death and rebirth, trying and overcoming—we want that cycle to be enjoyable. In life, death is a horrible thing. In play, it can be something else.“-Hidetaka Miyazaki

You are meant to be along for this emotional ride through joy, through sorrow, through fear, through love, through distress, and yes, through frustration. It’s a frustrating thing to be denied passage, to face an opposing force that’ll do everything in it’s power to stop you. If the art is to be evocative, it may be necessary to instill that sense of frustration. I will deploy the second of two Bennett Foddy quotes, as I admire the way he puts it;

“What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far, feeling frustrated. It’s underrated. An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. It’s coffee, it’s grapefruit, it’s licorice.” – Bennett Foddy

Sans the skeleton sleeps, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI. A red heart-shaped cursor moves over to the UI button labeled "FIGHT". A slashing effect moves toward Sans, but he slides out of the way and begins to speak, but is cut off by a second attack, which leaves a violent gash across his chest. — Frustration and loss isn’t just a roadblock to joy and catharsis, it’s an essential part of the whole.

Frustration is not the opposite of fun. I think the runaway success of games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Undertale, games that very much use frustration as feature of their storytelling, are strong evidence of this. There are hosts of games that follow similar patterns. When you play and watch people play difficult games as much as I do, you begin to notice that not only is frustration not a deterrent to the fun for most, it often accompanies the highest highs of player’s positive emotional reactions. Art is not a vehicle for merely delivering joy and nothing else. Life is a rich tapestry of a variety of emotions, and if art is to speak truth, then I think it’s worth considering how best to accurately reflect that. I’ve been talking a lot about feelings and emotional reaction, and I can’t overstate how subjective such things can be. You’re walking a fine line when utilizing traditionally negative emotions such as frustration to tell a story. As I said before, difficulty is a very nuanced and complex topic and this is just one aspect of it, one feature of difficulty to consider when configuring the shape of the experience you want to create. Difficulty can be used to tell and legitimize interactive narrative in a very profound way. That said, not all games need to, and by no means should they, take the same shape. Knowing how best to achieve the goals of your design starts with understanding your goals, and understanding the tools at your disposal.

Sans the skeleton sleeps soundly, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI overlay.

You have something called ‘determination.’ So as long as you hold on… so as long as you do what’s in your heart… I believe you can do the right thing…

Undertale: Combat Where Nobody Has To Die

Much ado has been made about the prevalence of violent combat in games, how it is a much-trodden space with an overabundance of focus on the damaging and killing of enemies in games. It’s worth interrogating how we make games and what the systems we put in place represent. ‘Combat’, as a gameplay system takes the form of abstract tasks meant to represent a conflict. Conflict doesn’t have to be violent, or even involve fighting. When you think about it, a lot of the standards and practices that are common for designing ‘combat’ conflict in games can be abstractly applied to a wide variety of real-world situations that don’t directly involve violence. There’s an adage that action or fight scenes in narrative is like a conversation, and I think this broadly applies to all sorts of interpersonal conflict. All this to say that Undertale takes extremely familiar RPG combat design traditions in an extremely nontraditional way to represent its conflict, which can take the form of violent struggle or extremely peaceful, yet tense conversation. I want to talk about this, in particular, the space where the bulk of Undertale‘s gameplay can be found, in the peaceful ‘pacifist’ style of playing Undertale.

A similarly large quantity of ‘ado’ has been made of Undertale‘s underlying morality system, which allows the game to read and react to player actions across save files to drastically alter the story and how characters react. I’m sure there’s not much more I could add to that well-worn conversation, but what I don’t see talked about near as much is the actual mechanics that make up Undertale‘s combat system. Undertale is ostensibly a turn-based RPG, and it has many of the trappings you’d expect of traditional RPG combat. The player and AI take turns taking actions, there are character statistics such as health or defense, and there are the usual available actions such as attacking or fleeing. Compared to the traditional turn-based RPG formula, however, Undertale leans a lot less on strategy, which is to say forethought and formulating a plan of attack. Success in combat in Undertale is much more contingent on one’s ability to navigate enemy attacks, which take the form of ‘bullet’ patterns in a shoot em’ up or shmup styled dodging sequence. Now, that all sounds rather violent, but all this really means is the player must move around a little icon representing themselves (in this case a heart) so it doesn’t collide with any objects on screen. In this way, Undertale works to make defending, in other words passivity, a more engaging and fun mechanic than attacking. Undertale also loves to borrow from genres outside of RPGs to accomplish this, like incorporating elements of text-based adventure games.

Have fun fighting and/or dating a skeleton, no explicit violence involved

When monsters randomly encounter the player, as they’re wont to do in RPGs, the monsters will be naturally on the defensive around you, a human, a member of the vile people that attacked and banished monsters underground. The goal for a pacifist player will be to simply exit the encounter unharmed so they can reach their next story chapter. You see, when it comes to the player’s form of ‘attack’, their agency in all of this, the problem Undertale faced was making the act of de-escalation as interesting and satisfying as the act of chopping dudes in the face with a sword. The solution to this problem was found in three ways. First, the act of defending is made into a compelling game in and of itself. Secondly, the player is given short-term and long-term goals in every encounter. Finally, the incentive for the player to not perform acts of violence is made to take the form of exploration into interesting characters.

We’ve touched on that first item. Undertale’s defense or ‘bullet hell’ sections involve dodging the magical attacks of your opponents. The conceit here is simple, but a time-tested one, utilized in tons of classic games like Galaga or Space Invaders. The player is represented by a small heart, and obstacles will move around the screen which the player has to avoid by moving freely in two dimensions. It’s among the barest, simplest forms of spacial and temporal awareness as gameplay one could think of, but that’s why it’s so effective. Some of the best games are those that start with an extremely simple base that can be built upon, and Undertale certainly builds upon it. Bullet patterns become increasingly elaborate and difficult towards the end of the game. Bullet patterns can take the form of obstacles that are abstract shapes, obstacles shaped like characters, obstacles along vector lines, any of which can move in a variety of patterns. The game will also iterate on these basic designs using new rules and wrinkles that change up the variety, such as adding gravity to the player’s avatar, a controllable shield, or a controllable projectile to destroy obstacles.

These ‘bullet hell’ sections get **very** creative. Here I have to redirect the enemy’s own attacks at them to pacify them!

This makes up the player’s short-term goal in every combat encounter. Each turn, the player has to focus on the imminent danger of enemy bullet patterns. Lots of RPGs have incorporated real-time gameplay into turn-based actions. Integrating short-term goals like this sort of action gameplay with longer-term goals keeps the player’s attention engaged and the tension subsequently high. There will always be something in the back of your mind that you’re working toward, while immediate concerns keep you constantly engaged. In Undertale‘s case, the long-term goal for each monster encounter is trying to figure out how to make them passive, and amenable to ending their attack against the player. Each one is different, and like a little puzzle or text adventure encounter where the player has to figure out how to spare their opponents. The need for dodging enemy attacks, is essentially your payment ticket for each attempt made to pacify the opponent. A wrong answer means needing to dodge more attacks. There is some strategy in Undertale’s combat in how you approach multiple opponents. Sometimes more than one monster cannot be pacified in the same turn, so a consideration of the order in which they are tackled is added to the player’s long term goal achieving process.

Not every puzzle solution is a brain-teaser, but they engage you with the monsters’ personalities. Get it? Don’t **pick** on your eyes.

The final and I think most important of how Undertale solved for nonviolent ‘combat’ is its methods of incentivizing the player. The typical pattern for any game with combat is to reward the player for killing or defeating enemies, increasing the player’s power as they accumulate more and more victories. So it is with Undertale, when you choose to kill. When sparing foes, however, the game goes out of its way to makes sure there is no direct material reward of in terms of player power. Undertale did not have to do this. In a vacuum, there’s no reason a nonviolent victory cannot reward and empower the player. In Undertale it was very important that external rewards like player ‘LV’ be tied exclusively to killing. Undertale is trying to justify its thesis of pacifism by making that path entirely implicitly motivated by narrative elements, or in other words the process of pacifism itself. ‘Not killing things can be fun too, no reward needed’ it seems to say.

The ‘bullets’ players must dodge can take a wide variety of forms from the tear drops of a depressed ghosts, to the flexing muscles of a pompous weight-lifting horse. If those sound odd to you, it’s by design. Undertale‘s first boss throws magical flames at you, but very little afterward will ever be so typical. Undertale uses the contrivance of ‘magic’, a power which monsters can use to express their emotions as power, to explore the character of the enemies you fight, as you fight them. In what other game can you expect to be attacked by the excited barks of an overstimulated puppy? These attacks are used as subtle characterization of each and every monster you encounter. The act of play is characterization in and of itself. In the world of Undertale magic is an outward expression of emotion, and this carries through gameplay as well. It’s not always a direct metaphor, and it’s often subtle, as reading emotion is in real life, but the attack conveys the emotional state of the monster which used it. You can get a sense of monster personalities just by playing. The dialogue does heavy lifting in this department as well, through hilariously absurd and weird scenarios. In this way, your ‘prize’ for victory is often a hearty joke, or an emotional catharsis. It can engender an intense curiosity to see more out of these monsters, more you won’t get to see if you kill them.

The player is ideally motivated by the desire to explore interesting and compelling characters. This, entwined with the short and long-term goals I mentioned earlier. The player’s long-term goal is usually discovering exactly how new monsters will react to their various actions. The monster Shyren loves to sing but is too timid, needing gentle encouragement from the player humming along. The monster Woshua is obsessed with washing things, so asking for a cleanup and successfully intercepting its healing water will make it very happy. The monster Aaron will become so swept up in out-flexing you if you try to match his style, that he’ll flex himself right out of combat. Keying in on visual indicators like the enemy’s emotional state, the personality in their dialogue, and the queues of their overall physical appearance all work as hints to solving the ‘puzzle’ of connecting with them socially and deescalating conflict. One can trace subtle changes in expression even, in certain encounters. The game, as it were, becomes one of determining your conversation partner’s wants and needs. It becomes a game that teaches empathy.

Here our hesitant mentor Toriel refuses to kill us, it’s clear here what emotions her gameplay are meant to convey

Combat, as it is typically designed, in all of its many forms, is fun. That’s just simply true, and it’s probably the biggest reason violent conflict remains so prevalent in games, as it’s the most obvious way to explore this form of play. This form of play was invented to represent violence, after all. Undertale is refreshing in how it explores a world where such play can be representative of all manner of other forms of conflict. Lots of conflict occurs in our daily lives every day that doesn’t end in death or grievous injury. There’s clearly a lot of space yet to explore how to adapt our design conventions to the task of representing these nonviolent forms of conflict in fun and interesting ways. I think part of the reason Undertale made such waves is that there’s a huge appetite for that as-yet only slightly explored space.

Even when you ran away, you did it with a smile…