Frustration-based Competitive Games vs. Evolution · 3:53pm Feb 11th, 2018
Bit of a different sort of blog this time, just a random pondering, writing it as I go along, so bear with me.
You're probably aware of a games like Warcraft and Starcraft; Real Time Strategy games. Biggest one is probably Starcraft at the moment. Simple premise: you have a base of operations from which you deploy workers who then harvest resources allowing you to build structures that then produce military units. You play against another human opponent, the range of units and playstyles is determined by the 'race' you play as. And of course, there's a ladder system.
Problem: once competitive players figure out the best strategies and perfect their tactics, it gets a little stale. Look up Warcraft 3 replays and you'll find that Night Elf vs Orc will almost always devolve into Demon Hunter vs Blademaster, and Druids of the Talon vs whatever dispels are available. Same with Starcraft: units need to be tweaked and reworked or the ladder experience becomes stale.
Players no longer wish to play if the human element in their opposition no longer provides any variety.
Oh, you know what game I'm gonna bring up next, dontcha? That old addiction, obsession, or simply annoyance, Hearthstone.
Hearthstone claims to be a digital collectible card game. You play matches during which you play cards. You open cards from packs, you win them at random. And herein lies a major difference with Starcraft: you are not on a level playing field with everyone else, and a match lost is time wasted. Hence my perpetually repeated and ignored contention that Hearthstone is more of a dungeon crawler, not a card game, just with the dungeon building outsourced to other players.
Other than that, it's the same principle and same problem: you have certain strategies that emerge, certain cards that become popular. Except that because cards are made into rewards, there's more incentive to play for maximum wins over time, rather than focus on deploying good strategy or tactics, or even to play what you enjoy. A new player in Starcraft will be able to build Battlecruisers, if the game goes long enough and if she remembers her build orders. And she can win with Battlecruisers, if the opponent is caught unawares. In Hearthstone, you have to play for three months to craft a Battlecruiser, when you do there's no guarantee you will ever manage to eke out a win with them.
Both games have an element of frustration to them, a human element. You need to get better at Starcraft to rank up, get more actions per minute, learn the timing. Your opponent can be a total jerk, and either cheese you or insult you or drag the game out long. In Hearthstone, similar concept except the frustration is used as a dangling carrot: oh, look at this card, isn't this is an awesome card? Don't you want to build around it? Wouldn't that be fun? Well, get to playing, get to winning, and eventually we'll let you have this bit of fun. Except fun means reducing your win rate compared to the optimum, meaning the next fun card will take longer to acquire.
And that's a real shame from a design perspective, because the fact that it is PvP means cards need to be balanced around not just your enjoyment, but your opponent's too. If the developers mess it up, then the fun gets cut in half, basically. You don't get to play overpowered combos or supercool cards because the meta either doesn't let you or the cards themselves were nerfed at their inception.
Two games have caught my attention on YouTube recently: They Are Billions and Slay The Spire. The latter, especially, I've been binge-watching for hours the past few days.
They Are Billions has a simple concept: you have your base of operations from which you build structures that get you resources which lets you build military units. These military units then go out and clear surrounding areas of enemies (zombies, which have taken over the whole map), and eventually defend from the enemy's final big push. It is Starcraft, but without the human opponent.
Slay the Spire puts you in the role of an Ironclad or a Silent (a brute and a poison rogue), with probably a mage character coming. You progress through a series of randomised events and combats, choosing cards to add to a deck and eventually go up against boss monsters. It is Hearthstone without the human opponent.
"Well, duh, Cracker, all this is obvious," you might say. And sure, it is, but consider the circumstances in which we find these games. Both are nearly direct copies of major representatives of genres, but without the human element. In both cases, if there's any balancing to be done, it will always affect the entire playerbase - in the sense that if you buff Protoss, Zerg players are not as affected, and the recent nerf to Patches doesn't affect Pirate players the way it does people who hate Pirates - and it will always be in comparison to something controlled completely by the developer. You get to pull of crazy combos in that game, blow up bosses or get blown up. And nobody whines about it, because it's not another person getting their enjoyment reduced in the process. Sure, there can be cards or relics that get too commonly used, but that's easily tweaked because it's always a drafted deck (so far; still hoping they add a Constructed variant to it sometime).
Moreover, and this is the major point that got me thinking...
These are games that cater to gamers who are sick of having to deal with other gamers.
Have we really gotten to the point that there's a demand from gamers to get away from their fellow gamers? And if so, whose fault is it, really? Is it a natural consequence or something that we should fear?
We have something similar for Magic: the Gathering, but it's nowhere near as developed yet, and it obviously still requires multiple people to play; Buck Legacy, the pony card game.
I could see this being the next big thing, though. Card games with a digital angle that are based around PvE instead of PvP. I mean, Magic is dying, from what I can tell, there's certainly room for alternatives. I'll probably get around to buying Slay the Spire while it's in Early Acess, get it on the cheap, though it would be somewhat against my principles to do so, it's at least looking like something I'd enjoy and can run on this rattling machine.
Anyway, that's that ramble done, what do you think? Which multiplayer games that drive people crazy might get their own PvE versions?
Please don't say League of Legends or any other MOBA, those already exist and they're called MMORPG's
Cracker out, song unrelated.
I'm starting to think that randomness is a good thing to mix in to ultra competitive games. I got pretty good at sc2, but it got to the point where if I did anything other than the three strategies I knew, I would execute them less than perfectly and probably rank down.
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It is a strange thing to consider, indeed. How much of the success of a player should depend on their skill, how much should depend on the raw power of their strategy (units or cards used) and how much should depend on luck, entirely separate from a player's decision making?
I mean, you say that, and I can totally understand the sentiment, but on the other end of the spectrum you have people winning World Championships based on a dice roll that they got by adding in a one-drop minion, or losing because their opponent high-rolled an outcome.
I only ever play pvp games against bots, because even before everyone goes meta, pvp is always really samey.
And hasn’t single player always been more popular? Just more expensive to cater to.
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Single player RPG's, sure. Darkest Dungeon and the like, Big Pharma, city builders, not arguing that. Single player in and of itself has always been big.
But we're talking two clearly inspired games with a PvP base that are transitioned to PvE. Maybe it is overthinking it, but... I don't know, is it a sign of the times, perhaps?