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The best implementation would be in a sandbox type game filled with lots of factions, each with its own agenda. The player has also its own agenda, and its actions are not labeled by the game itself as being good/evil, but by the factions the player interacts with. This way the player can play the game as it sees fit, without being compelled to go all the way good or all the way evil. I personally think the Mount & Blade game series provide an environment that implements a concept similar to my conclusion.
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Ever since the Dungeons & Dragons rule system, players could chose the alignment of their character as part of the game’s “Morality” system. Back then it was a combination of factors leading to about 9 possible combinations, sometimes even more.

In the first D&D installments on the PC, the best games at the time were coming from a single great company: BioWare. Titles like Baldour’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment are still considered today some of the best RPGs out there.

Over time, the great minds of Bio Ware thought that it is pretty dull to have your alignment set in stone at the start of the game, so they designed a new morality system in which your alignment is established during gameplay, based on your choices and decisions. They also found the perfect setting for this: the Star Wars universe, and so the Knights of the Old Republic series was born. For the ones who didn’t play these great games, based on your good or evil actions, you would lean more towards one of the two sides of the force, slowly becoming a Jedi Knight or a Sith Lord, gaining more and more powers specific to one of the two possible paths.

However, there is an inherent flaw in this system.The more powerful abilities of either side of the force were at the end of the spectrum, so in order to get them, you would have to choose one side and stick with it, and choose early. This was not a hard choice because most players would start the game with a clear target in mind, to either become a great Jedi or a cruel Sith, but this is because of the setting (Star Wars) of the game, not of the game’s design itself. If you would not decide early which way to take and do both good and evil actions and decisions along the way, you would soon find your character overpowered by pretty much any enemy in the game. You would have a bit of both sides, but a weak efficiency overall, and you would have to rely mostly on the other, more specialized, party members to all the job for you. By having to choose early on which path to take, this system becomes useless, collapsing into the D&D alignment choosing style we saw in BioWare’s early games.

A lot of developers realized these problems and tried to deal with them in various ways.

I was playing Sucker Punch’s Infamous these days and they have a similar system too. You are forced to choose one side and stick with it, no matter your personal opinions regarding one decision or another, if you want to get either Champion or Infamous rank and get the most badass abilities. While this adds to a bit of replayability and adds to the attitude of the citizens around you, it makes the game more impersonal. Once you go one path, you are forced to stick with your decision to get the best out of it. If you would play with balanced decisions (like a normal person would if it would be in the character’s shoes), you would completely miss two or three of the most important attacks in the game, as you wouldn’t be able to get neither the good side version, nor the evils side one.

So overall I think it was a bad decision to implement the system into the game this way. Sure it is not a big problem if you miss two abilities, you can still finish up the game as it is, so it is not as important as the system built in KOTOR games, but still, better just keep the citizen’s attitude and look of the character and drop the gameplay stuff that depends on it. The player can chose what it feels right in a certain situation, not think “OK, now I desperately need that ability, so I have to let all cops in the police station die”, that won’t cut it.

BioWare guys evolved the system even more in their Mass Effect series (great games by the way). Now the system is way better in these games. It measures the good side and evil side independently, so the player can take any decisions it feels are right for the given situation. More than this, the impact of these measurements is not game breaking anymore. What they do is they unlock more dialog options that allow the story to progress in a more varied fashion, but you can go through without them. I think this is the best implementation so far for such a system, as it is considered a bonus over all the other gameplay elements, not a core system of the game.

What do you think about it and how would you implement such a system?

Although I do love software development in general, and game development in particular, there is one thing I like more than both: playing games. I am an avid gamer for more than 15 years now, played on a lot of platforms, sometimes all day long, with only some fast meals between gaming sessions. Unfortunately nowadays I have a lot of time constraints that limit my ability to try/play all the games I want. So what I do is just buy them by the bunch (hooray Steam sales) and give them a try when I have some spare time. I don’t necessary finish them, but at least try them out.

Due to these time constraints, I am very picky when it comes to choose what to buy. I carefully choose console titles, as they are usually more expensive and I usually have a wish-list that I consult often during sales seasons. On PC I have a lower barrier in terms of quality, but even there I won’t get any crappy game I find. Overall I play games that would get reviews of 8+/10, or maybe 7+ if they are indie games (hey, supporting the community).

Recently, I have tried a lot of indie games. I would only name a few: Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Breath of Death VII, Bastion, Terraria and a few others I can’t remember the name. On the other side, I also played Red Dead Redemption, an AAA game which I’m waiting to play since a few months ago but didn’t have time for it. I also want to mention that I regulary play a few of my favorite games: Demon’s Souls, Minecraft and Starcraft 2 (and yes, I’m planning to get Dark Souls too). I will also mention here a Chrome Web Store game called Monster Dash, which is a blast if you haven’t tried it yet and I also play it quite often as a casual game.

While playing a game I constantly ask myself what make it better (or worse) than the others I play and why some of them have become my favorites while some, although considered very good games, have not. Surprisingly, I have reached a conclusion: it is not the overall quality of the product in terms of execution, polishing, art and so on, it is the fact that some are boring and some are not. I will try to explain myself by using the games I’ve mentioned above, while asking you to keep in mind that a game is only as good as its mechanics are, and the fun part usually turns into boring part when the player masters those mechanics.

1. Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Amazing game. It creates one of the scariest environments I’ve ever encountered in a game or movie all together. Even if the game requires the player mostly to stay out of sight and out of darkness, the feeling I had when playing it was amazing. I rarely played such an immersive game. However, the core mechanics are not too many. You can walk throughout the environment and pop up lights here and there, you can interact with various objects (mostly useless), and you can manipulate others to hide from monsters or drive them away. That’s pretty much it. The puzzles are there, but not too complicated, and I dare to say the game is much more interesting while anticipating enemies in the beginning of the game than after you actually encountered them and learned how to avoid them. So about half of the game is fun, then it turns into a boring game in which you do the same thing over and over. The story is the only thing that keeps you going on, but not enough for me to finish the game.

2. Breath of Death VII

Very interesting indie title. I cannot appreciate its value as it deserves, and that is because I haven’t played JRPG style games before, so it is something completely new to me, and I cannot look at it in a nostalgic way, like most older gamers do because they have played the old school JRPGs out there. The game is incredibly fun and refreshing. It was designed for the XBox console, so you have to use keyboard for all input on PC too. Now that is not so bad, but it starts to become hindering when you fight a lot of stuff with the same mechanics over an over again. Easier encounters turn into spamming the “Return” key until all enemies are dead, and you get a lot of easier encounter after you level up a few times while roaming around. So basically the game is great, but you get to fight too many encounters, many of them without a challenge, and that made me abandon the game after about three hours of play. It was a combination of repeating the same thing over and over without being able to skip it and without being challenging all the time, while not having the best controls to handle it either.

3. Bastion

This game is a state of the art in terms of art style and execution. It features impressive, painted style, visuals, very fast paced combat, lots of strategies and such. At least this was my first impression. You get contextual story telling (which makes you feel very proud about your actions) a lot of weapons, jumping and fighting with tons of enemies. And the music is a blast, I cannot stress enough how good it is. It features two kinds of game play. One is normal, standard play, where you fight monsters and connect all kind of shards and fragments to rebuild the bastion, and the other one is a series of challenges, specific to certain weapon classes, and by beating those challenges you get all sort of bonuses to use in combat. I have played the game for about six hours. During this time, I enjoyed the challenges a lot, but the main game play mode became quickly a boring and repeating stuff to do. Fight the same enemies over and over, kill the turrets, get the shards, and that’s pretty much all of it. After scrolling the campaign map a bit and seeing that I would do the same thing again and again for a long time judging by the size of that thing, I quit the game all together. Reason? The same, the game had cool mechanics but became boring quickly because the mechanics are easy to learn and easy to master, and the game has too much content to be played with the same mechanics without getting boring.

4. Red Dead Redemption

Great title, in which you get the play the bad ass cowboy, riding horses, shooting stuff, playing cards and getting to do pretty much everything a man could do during those times (or at least what the western style movies make us believe he could do). The game has a main story mode, plus about 12 to 15 minigames (don’t know exactly) which you can play, varying from various betting games, precision games, hunting, riding, taming horses, gather cattle and so on. The game was voted game of the year on GameSpot.com for 2010 and overall it is a great game, well executed, with lots to offer and very fun too play with all those subtle movie references. However, the mechanics are straight and simple, very easy to learn, the AI is not too good and the game overuses its mechanics a lot. Most of the minigames and the main game use the same mechanics over and over, and the game it’s pretty long. Now I’m close to finishing it, but I’m already bored to death and I’m finishing it mostly for the story than the mechanics, which I can perform blindly. Rockstar also ignored here the fact that this game is basically a GTA with a western skin, so most of the mechanics are already known to hardcore gamers, making them even easier to be mastered so making the game even less interesting. I have played GTA San Andreas so much, that when I saw this game I got quite fast bored about everything you could do in it. If the game would have been 30% shorter, or if it had more mechanics to try out, or have the same small set of mechanics but be more challenging and require some more brain power from the player, I would have loved it. But the way it is, the missions come and go one after another, without any reason to do all the minigames available, and the game can be resumed to “ride to location, unmount, draw your guns, kill everything, ride some more”, almost like a rail-style game. Of course it has train capturing, robbing stuff, wagon driving, etc, etc, but they are all performed in the same boring way. Enemies are just popping card boards in a training field, nothing more, nothing less.

Question

So I guess the question is: what makes Diablo games better than Bastion? What makes Game of the Year 2009 (Demon’s Souls, GameSpot.com) way better than Game of the Year 2010? Why I cannot stop playing Starcraft 2 on Battle.net and why Minecraft is so fun when I have time for it? And why all the other games I play seem like a waste of my time?

Answer

I think there is not one single right answer, but multiple ones.

First, lets take Diablo vs Bastion. Diablo has only a few very simple mechanics in there, which you get to quickly learn and master, just like in Bastion. Both games are long and both are hack and slash RPGs. So why Diablo is so addicting while Bastion is boring? I think in this particular example it is the pacing and the complexity of the game related to how long it takes to complete it. Diablo is built in with hardcore gamers in mind, features tons and tons of items, tons and tons of monsters to kill, flawless pacing and a lot of progression in terms of character customization, while not being a too long game. In all of these aspects Bastion slacks behind. It has the same flaws as most modern games. It is easy to pick, easy to master, it has some fun in it but it is not challenging enough and it feels like a casual game all the way, but it is a very very long game I would have been much happier to get the game finished in the six hours I’ve played instead of having to play countless hours. A game has to have something hard and challenging about it, and if those are not the core mechanics, than at least make it complex and don’t over-stretch it. If the game is easy, don’t make it long, and find a way to keep the challenge level growing along with the mastery level of the player over the game’s mechanics. If Diablo 1 would have been as long as Diablo 2, it would have been the most boring game ever because of the simple mechanics of the game. However, some games like Bastion and Torchlight pick up the same core mechanics and are much longer games without any more depth added, failing to understand that Diablo’s success does not stand only in its core mechanics, but also in its complexity and overall length and pacing, which feels just perfect. A bit more longer or a bit less complex and Blizzard’s game would have been very boring. The way it is, by the time you master the game mechanics, the game is finished and you get to start at another difficulty level, always keeping the challenge level up for more fun.

Then, lets take Game of the Year winners I’ve been writing about. Red Dead Redemption gives you a moderate challenge that gets close to nothing over the long course of the game. Demon’s Souls, on the other hand, gives you a huge challenge but in a much shorter game. If you get to master the game, you can start again facing an even higher difficulty level. It keeps the player always engaged, always willing to beat the game over and over again to prove how good it is, while Red Dead Redemption has only the story to keep the player engaged, and that only for the first playthrough. As you can see it is the same thing that makes Demon’s Soul and Diablo great games. They are not longer than their mechanics allow and they keep the challenge level up as the player gets more skilled at them.

Monster Dash, a great casual game you can get for free on Chrome Webstore (and I think as payed app on some phones) has the same qualities written all over it. It is a side scrolling shooter while the character runs by itself, the player just has to jump over gaps and monsters or just shoot them. Now instead of making a long and boring platformer with just these two mechanics, the developers made a smart choice. The game never ends, but you get to switch levels after running for a certain distance, and each level is harder because your character runs faster, and at some point you will die. A very very simple concept but that keeps me playing for hours, trying to beat the game again and again. Because so few mechanics, the game is very short, again, don’t over stretching the game and keeping the challenge level high.

Finally, I want to emphasize why Starcraft 2 is so good. It is so good because it is both hard to learn and hard to master, and because games are so short (10-45min) it allows you to iterate again and again your skill learning, allowing you to become better and better at the game, but surprisingly, as demonstrated by the professional players out there, it never stops being challenging. This game doesn’t have a perfect length according to the complexity of its mechanics, it is even shorter than that. You never get to master too many things during one match, so you have to keep playing it again and again, and it never feels boring.

Conclusion

Don’t over stretch your mechanics, especially if you are an indie developer! More and more games do this. It is like developers feel they have to put in more content to justify their product’s price, when in reality, it’s the quality that matters not the quantity. Even worse, even if you have some good quality in your game (mechanics) you risk to dilute it, by stretching them over too much quantity and passing the critical point where the player masters the mechanics and starts to get bored of them.

Why especially indie developers? Well, AAA games have certain advantages when dealing with boredom.

First, they cost $60, so the player is more inclined to finish the game, as they already invested a lot of money in it. If it payed $5 for an indie game, and it becomes boring at some point, it is much easier to abandon than the AAA game. Compare the time spent in a game with other entertainment forms. If I pay $10 for a movie ticket and I’m OK with being entertained for two hours, I think I won’t be disappointed if I pay $5 for a game and I’ll be entertained for the same amount of time. Don’t put content in there just for the sake of having it there so the “reviewers” won’t complain the game is too short.

Second, AAA game teams have a lot of man power and budget, allowing them to actually sneak in a lot of meta game stuff like minigames and all sort of side stuff that wile not being very interesting, it keeps some of the players busy. An indie developer on the other side cannot afford to do all that stuff, so the core mechanics are everything it has. If those stop being fun, there is nothing to keep the player playing their game.

There is absolutely no reason to produce more content than would keep the game challenging and the player engaged. The lesson we can learn from successful games out there is quite simple: Keep things easy to learn, hard to master, keep the game challenging at all times. All these things cannot be achieved if there is too much content thrown at the player after he/she learned to master the game mechanics at a specific difficulty level, so it is better to carefully balance the complexity of the game mechanics with the amount of game content for any given game.

Thank you for reading!

Here is some rough concept art for the power-ups that will appear throughout the game, done in MyPaint: