Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - Nicholas Feinberg
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- Опубліковано 19 вер 2016
- From the Roguelike Celebration: roguelike.club
The eternal war against the Hypothetical Optimal Player: how to avoid players' worst instincts and make a game that's fun to play well. Nicholas Feinberg is an obscure independent game developer (best known for Manufactoria), Nicholas joined the Stone Soup team in early 2014. He's since become one of the most active developers. Likes: elegant, minimalist designs, non-traditional settings, and long walks on the beach.
This is a great video. This brings to mind even trivial actions in games which can be exploited and thus leave me wondering why it wasn’t done differently. For example, in Mafia 3 you can call a mobile weapon shop to your location and purchase guns or refill ammo. There are a select number of guns that are “free” in game (whether unlocked or because of the [now free] DLC) and when you switch to them you get full ammo for the weapon. It costs money to refill your ammo for these guns, but if you simply switch to another free weapon in that category and then back to the gun you want to keep, you’ve gotten your refill for free. If I were a designer or play tester it feels like it would be the first thing I noticed: why not make ammo refills for free guns be free? It’s trivial in that it only takes a few more button presses, but it is the same type of energy as any of these examples mentioned, where x amount of effort achieves something without real danger or detriment to the player/run.
I know a game with a very elegant solution to this problem: One-Way Heroics.
It's a traditionnal turn_based rogue-like but also a side-scroller: You have to keep moving on the right, because the left edge of the screen is advancing and will kill you (when i think about it now, it's a bit like the army chasing you in FTL)
It's a way to force the player to move from location to location that doesn't feel as bad as hunger IMO
One-Way Heroics has hunger though.
This is so cool!
What a brilliant collection
of designs and ideas!!!!!!
Love it!
This is awesome!!!!!
Good public speech too!
ROCK ON SIR!!!!
Good Job!!!!!
seems like a pretty fun guy
What a great day... LoL
as far as version 0.23 is concerned, you'll easily have at least 50 ration of food by the end.
My knowledge of stone soup is shitposting on 4chan about considering everything useless clutter and removing all fun by streamlining everything.
According to this talk, seems like an accurate description.
This logic is immensely flawed, and probably the single biggest problem with the direction Crawl's development has been taking in recent years. In NetHack, the punishment for pudding farming really WAS pudding farming. Pudding farming was far, far from necessary to complete the game, and if someone didn't like pudding farming, but was doing it anyway, it really was a matter of, "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!"
NetHack was, for experienced players, ultimately relatively easy, but this was a problem easily solved by, for example, simply deciding not to pudding farm. Furthermore, when the skilled players died, there first thought is almost never, "Damn, I should have pudding farmed some more!" If a genuinely skilled player who is playing the game to have fun ends up thinking that, then the problem is not the existence of that hypothetically optimal play, it is the fact that there is no other option.
I very much think it was a net negative that pudding farming was removed from the game for this reason, and also for the fact that some players actually liked to do it! Removing something some players like to do from the game because other players don't like to do it is a horrible design decision, and a player who asks for such a feature to be removed is inadvertently saying, "I don't enjoy this thing, so nobody should be able to enjoy it."
Tedium is as subjective as fun is, and between keeping fun and removing tedium, _keep the fun._ Humans are loss-averse creatures. Don't remove things everyone enjoys just to get rid of something that some people are annoyed by. When I played DCSS, I was never annoyed by the fact that I had to dispose of dangerous weapons. For that matter, I was never annoyed by Elyvilon or Nemelex's sacrifice mechanics, nor was I annoyed by ballistomycetes (at least, not back when they gave you experience for your trouble), nor by victory dancing. Hell, I _liked_ victory dancing. Not as in the EXP pool mechanic -- the actual act of victory dancing was fun for me, especially when doing so pleased my dear Sif.
Fuck you, fungus; you're a moron. You're all morons.
Well, I actually like the game a lot more. I've tryed playing old versions to exploit some of the mechanics and is a much worse game, full of optimal but boring decisions.
From my own perspective, I completely disagree with this. In fact mainline crawl doesn't actually go far enough in this regard - there is a fork called Hellcrawl that is a lot more aggressive at fixing these problems and it's a significantly tighter, more strategic and more tactical game to play as a result. For me it's the best version of crawl.
There is a fundamental divide here between people who want a game of tactical and strategic challenge, with a tightly designed and coherent system powering it, and who play for mastery; and people who are more about exploring the edge cases of this big open toy dungeon simulator. A system which is possible to master by circumventing the tactical and strategic layer is flawed by definition from the first perspective - the pursuit of mastery is pointless, because 'mastery' just involves learning a bunch of cheap exploits. On the other hand, the toy people always want 'more stuff' because that means more play space to explore, with more combinations and interactions to discover, and they don't really care as much about the relative value of those things within the system, or even whether that system is coherently and purposefully designed at all.
Crawl was originally somewhat in both camps, but over time has moved towards camp 1. That is just how the game has evolved, and it's not because of stupidity, nor has it made the game 'worse' in any objective sense - this is a deliberate move that has made it a better camp 1 game, which for me (and many others) is great. Unfortunately this direction is fundamentally opposed to camp 2 players so they all hate it.
are you seriously saying that victory dancing is better than manual training lmao
Nobody plays the old versions of Crawl, which shows the direction is correct. Plenty of games do what you're asking for, but none do what Crawl delivers.
The logic is fine.
Given these premises:
1. Some actions are optimal, but a set of players finds them tedious and repetitive.
2. There is a set of players who want to play optimally, but do not want to engage in actions they find tedious and repetitive.
3. We want to retain these players.
Then the conclusion:
1. Remove the 'optimal, but for some players tedious and repetitive' actions
follows naturally.
Beyond that, logic doesn't have much to do with it. It's really about what group the majority of players fall into, and what weighting the devs put on the enjoyment of those groups.