This is called the wargame problem. New players are tasked with memorizing every special rule, stat, option, stratagem, weapon, and ability for every unit in their army plus their opponent’s. This either causes the game to end quickly as the new player is just outclassed by the more experienced opponent that has memorized everything, or the game slows to a crawl as the new player has to pour over every stat, ability, and interaction at every decision point to avoid walking into a trap. It’s also a game where both sides start at full strength with every unit on the board, exasperating the problem and front loading all the game info.
This is why I always burn out so quickly whenever I return to chess or yugioh. I can memorize the windows of interaction for the one or two combo decks in an mtg format but memorizing a dozen openings in chess or the windows of interaction for every meta relevant engine in yugioh is too much for me.
@@guksungan1267 Limited does not exist in YuGiOh, it used to wayyyyy back over 10 years ago now but at this point Forced Variance through a Draft format would require Konami to upend how they do sets and card design. YGO's Memory Problem is because of how often that knowelge changes, not just how much there is.
I was introduced to a playing card game called "Mao" that epitomizes this difference. You have to learn by playing because "The first rule of Mao is that you don't discuss the rules." It plays like Uno, but the people who know the rules penalize the people who don't know the rules by giving them cards. Then, if ever you win a round, you get to add a rule and the cycle continues. And without this step, it's just a memorization game. But, because players get to step into the role of game designer a little bit, there's layers to it. Once everyone knows the rules, it's a game of trying to come up with a new trigger for a rule, and paying attention to what's happening. It plays into human flaws, but has enough luck and player participation thrown in to make it a fun game for a camping trip.
I love Mao! Definitely a camping highlight trip when I was a kid. Of course being kids, the made rules were always incredibly ridiculous but somehow the people I played with never made a rule that was straight unfair (every new rule applied equally to every player).
I love Mao. Some people enjoy it just because they want to see the pain of new players failing to figure things out, but I just find the idea of like... trying to deduce rules and systems from within to be fun. If the game had no way to add more rules, there would be no point in playing once you learned everything.
A friend tried to have the rest of our friend group play Mao We all got fed up and started doing random shit like trading cards and just picking up the deck lol
I think it's worth noting that the issue with Chess is more technological than anything. Chess players in the 50s and 60s (i.e. "The Queens Gambit" era) didn't have immediate access to the best move in any given position, nor could they jam through thousands of tactics puzzles in a day with zero effort. In a post-Stockfish world, however, you can beat lots and lots of players simply by having consumed more Chess content on Twitch than they have.
.. lots of weak players, maybe. The stockfish thing is vastly overrated in this regard. It has other implications (cheating, possible decrease in interest in a game computers play better than you etc, less room for "suboptimal" but exciting/characterful play), but it has actually been an amazing boon for both optimising existing lines and evaluating new/less well-studied, creative lines. If you think strong players didn't do deep analysis in the 60s.. High level play has always been about taking your opponent past his analysis and putting tension on him where you thought you had an edge. All that has really changed is the availability of a really good training partner who is always available and doesn't drink all your vodka.
When I look at Starcraft Broodwar, the memorization process took place while you enjoyed the campaign, a good story is like a good book. I always told people who wanted to learn the game that they should start with the campaign and afterwards I could help them. Afterwards there's different builds and strategies, actually way more than there are in Starcraft 2.
It would be so great to hear your guys talking more about Twilight Imperium. It is really interesting to me that it is a game that have so many "toxic" design elements (e.g. king making, races are 100% unbalanced, player elimination, extremely lengthy games, secret objectives, extremely random combats) and still (most) players have an awesome time playing it. Anecdotally, in the last time I played, ALL five players had a shot at winning in the final round.
I think fighting games are a perfect example of this. Take anyone brand new to fighting games and put them against even the average intermediate player. They are not playing the same game. The intermediate player will win almost every single time. There are so many little things to learn and memorize from frame data to neutral to optimal punishes and combos that the knowledge gap is way too wide. But once you know all of the techniques and options and systems, a lot of top players wind up complaining that the games fall down to pretty much glorified rock-paper-scissors. That's reductive, but it's not that far from the truth at the highest levels of play.
Same thing goes for MOBAs. It takes a _long_ time to understand how the dozens of champions work, what all the items do, and what items to buy for which champions in different situations.
to some degree All a fighting game really is is rps But only with the simple games this starts to become a problem Also if you put someone who never played a fighting game before even against just someone with general fighting game experience they will lose almost every time
The impact of opening theory on the results of games is very low on the level of ordinary players, its a myth that there is a barrier of entry where you have to memorise a lot of opening moves. Skill beats knowledge.
And it's also a myth that most beginning players don't like memorization. Most beginning players actually do like that they can learn some concrete jumping off point for their strategy.
10:50 very good take. I hate game that obscure information intentionally or unintentionally. Tooltips have become so good by now, there really is no excuse not to have nested tooltips that explain the consequences of your actions. There is also a bunch of RPGs that have a similar problem, where the dialog options are written so weirdly, that you sometimes have a hard time knowing what will happen when you pick one. Being forced into "save-scumming" (stupid term to begin with) because of the game being really unclear about what the different buttons do is very frustrating.
The RPG dialogue being unpredictable problem is actually a different problem: dialogue is a means to roleplay your character as well as a means of making story choices. It's perfectly valid to have unpredictable things happen - happens in the real world as well - but it ruins your ability to roleplay the character. *That* is the core tension in that case. Providing partial information can be part of a good design, it's a way to produce uncertain outcomes without resorting to RNG. It's only a problem in cases like, say, complex grand strats where info isn't elided deliberately, but is an implementation shortcoming, and directly contradicts the design of the game.
The conversation reminds me of when my family played a lot of a game called Star Wars Outer Rim for a week. It has a bunch of events and hidden information like the mountain pass example. I had a lot of fun playing it and seeing all the new stuff in it. Once I played it enough though, it stopped being fun as I mostly remembered what everything did and that element of discovery was gone. I know you guys talk a lot about what experience a game is trying to provide, and I think that's part of the issue here. Personally, I really enjoy the experience of hidden information leading to discovery. A focus on that can lead to a lack of replayability, though that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I think there is a big overlap of this idea with the other ideas on min-maxing and optimizing the fun out of a game. The idea of having a wiki open to know all the stuff is one of the reasons I can't get into hardly any games anymore. The first time I was asked to make a decision in FTL like "Go try to save the outpost from being attacked or leave them?", I realized that just experiencing all the iterations to learn and try to remember everything...it was something fun but at the same time, there exists a database with all of this stuff already experienced by everyone else (or compiled on a wiki from players or even datamining). The "going through the motions" on my own to experience it all myself just doesn't sound that fun in context because something in my brain is constantly telling me that I'm wasting time because I can just look up the fastest way to "win".
I much preferred when random STS-like or I guess FTL-like events have clear, stated outcomes so the choice is just based on weighing the benefits rather than an exercise in memorization/unknown information, unless it's a story-based game, which I'd argue FTL flirts with narrative but isn't a story-based game.
By that logic, playing any story-driven game is wasting time because you can just read a summary of the plot. I do agree that it is difficult to force oneself not to look things up. I had the worst of times with that in Witcher 3, where I knew there were multiple outcomes, had a strong preference for one, but there was not a foreseeable sequence of decisions to arrive at it given only in-game knowledge.
This video needs to be shown to every Yu-Gi-Oh player, about why the game is failing to attract and keep players. Not only is 90% of your strategy in the game knowing your own deck and the opponent's deck, and knowing exaxtly what sequence of cards you want to play and your opponent wants to play, the game makes it even harder and more painful making every card played and ability activated a decision point. In those decisions, usually there's 1 to 2 correct answers among 8+ possible options. Add to that the first turn advantage is so high, you might as well be playing rando-chess where you answer Yu-Gi-Oh trivia.
I don't think anyone disagrees but it's not up to the players to actually... do anything about this. Yugioh needs better rules or on boarding or set design and nothing the players have tried works. Konami has to do it
Ive been talking to a friend about this. It made me realize why games like Brass are so liked. Before i played it, i thought it was likely overhyped and being in the #1 spot in BGG was a fluke (dont get me wrong, it doesnt mean its the BEST GAME EVER but it helps contextualize). Much to my chagrin, after playing it, i understood the hype. The decision tree is actually super small and theres really not much memorization, but the strategic depth is incredible. I think many game creators add complexity in an attempt to add depth, but the foundations of their game design just dont allow for it, leading to many red herrings, and the “correct” decisions that you have to memorize, as you guys put it. In effect, it all comes down to the Queen problem again, they just make it harder to find the Queen, but once you do, thats all ypu really need
I can't imagine anyone trying to get into League of Legends nowadays. There is just so much stuff to know and if you don't know it all, you get berated by everyone on your team (especially because the people you're initially paired with are likely previously banned toxic players on lower level new accounts). It's pretty gross. And even if a new player can slog their way to be able to play Ranked games, now there's a whole new level of entry imo. I know all the "Silver players" are absolutely terrible in relation to Diamond players, and Diamond players are absolutely terrible in relation to Challenger players, but people playing in Silver are MUCH better and more knowledgeable than they were 5-10 years ago. I just don't know how anyone new joins the game at this point.
I think the team aspect is the real "problem" that I don't know how to solve other than having enough friends to make the whole team without randoms. I don't seem to have trouble getting into new-to-me deep 1v1 games no matter how much experience the top players have as long as they are popular enough to still have other beginner level players (eg. most recently Go).
This is the problem I tapped into when I came back into Modern after years as an 8-rack player. So much cognitive load remembering cards (I started writing them down), and proactively disrupting the oppo’s gameplan while keeping into account eventual topdecks. All while getting used to new cards as I got back along with MH2.
That's a different kind of memorisation. When you study chess lines, you're not just memorising, you're learning the game and the art of its analysis, developing an intuition and a taste, and generally speaking accessing a different strategic level - weak players memorise 'optimal' lines, strong players find interesting lines to play that allow them to take the opponent where he doesn't want to go because you have an edge there (might be positional play, might be calculation, etc). If you've memorised the optimal strat in limit hold'em, you play/calc it and that's it (it all depends on chance and you have an advantage over any flawed player given infinitely many hands). If you've memorised the optimal build order in most RTS (or a few where they are situational), that's it, you play it and APM takes over (and maybe you need ways to decrease partial info if it has rock-paper-shotgun mechanics). In chess, the more you study lines, the more ideas you get, the better you become at analysis and the deeper your analysis goes - there's serious levels to be had there. Another way is to look at it in terms of combinatorial complexity. The search space is still very high in chess once you cut off all of the unviable branches in the tree.
This problem compounds with mechanical skill in video games. When your game has too much to memorize up front, the players who have played longer have both the advantage of memory _and_ the advantage of mechanical skill. It makes the barrier to entry scale even faster. It's a big part of what makes fighting games and mobas feel so hard to learn. You're against players who understand the matchup against all of the 20+ characters, have memorized the optimal combos or item builds for every situation, and have the execution skills of someone with months or years of practice. With the internet being what it is, this information is figured out in the first couple months of the game. A player coming in 6 months after a game launches is at a massive disadvantage unless the game has managed to maintain a steady influx of other new players.
The best examples of games that require both, memory and mechanical skill are fighting games. You need to memorize a ton of framedata and you need to be able to execute special moves and combos.
I feel you're overestimating the knowledge level of fighting game players and MOBA players while learning, I do agree about the general dynamic but most people get good enough to have fun and stick with it long term by learning a passible patchwork with a significant amount of those people not actively pursuing knowledge once they're at a comfortable point
I think this is why I find the combat in M&L brothership engaging despite its simplicity and repetitiveness . When you encounter a new type of enemy, it’s a learning task because each enemy does relatively little damage, but if you don’t learn the counter you get death by a thousand cuts. Then when you encounter a higher level version of that enemy later in the game, you know they counter but it becomes a test of dexterity/consistency because missing a single counter will result in taking a big chunk of damage
GoT has a solution I adopted to the board game im developing: At any moment, including at the start of a battle, each player can see the oponents hand. This way, there is no advantage for players who memorize all the cards of each house/faction.
One consequence of this is how much time (and potentially choice paralysis) this adds to the game for new players. Now they have to look at their hand AND the other player's hand when deciding a play. I also thought about adding this element to one of my designs, but ultimately thought it was a net negative for new player experience.
@@zigeif777 I don't know how familiar you are with GoT, but just in case: Each player controls a house. Each house has 7 different battle card. On a battle, each player chooses one card in secret, then both reveal, do what the card says and after that, whoever has more force wins the battle. Without being able to look at the opponent's hand, players that memorized the cards would have a HUGE advantage. So instead of forcing every player to memorize all the cards of each house, just let players look at the opponents hands. PS: You could also give a list of the cards to each player instead of that. But then players would need to constantly check the discard pile or have to memorize wich cards each player already used.
Might as well play with face up hands to save time, but either way unless certain mechanics can top deck effects you're going to run into good players knowing they won / lost long before the game actually ends. Hidden information is a blessing not a curse but can you link me a ruleset this sounds like it could be fun.
@clarkecreates There is no deck. You have 7 unique battle cards at the start of the game specific for your house/faction. When you use all, you get them back.
I may be misinterpreting what you would consider memorization, but I feel like fighting game combos may be an example of it that has stood the test of time. Without an incredibly deep understanding of the game mechanics, most of which aren't even visible outside of practice modes, the only way to discover a combo is through trial and error or looking it up, and then once you find a combo you just have to memorize it in order to perform it in game. This certainly has a cost and makes it very difficult for new players to get into the genre, and I'm sure it's why games like SF6 added an alternate control scheme that can automatically execute some small combos, but from what I understand it's a mechanic that while it doesn't add depth, it adds a sense of achievement when you do successfully perform the combo. It becomes a very tangible feeling of progression of "I am getting better at this game," and I at least find that rewarding.
I would think that satisfaction comes more so from skill of execution than skill of memorization. Also, the rock paper scissors mechanics alleviate problems from a pure memory game.
Combos contain a bit of memorization in that you're not likely to figure out your highest damage combo in the middle of a match. But they're more complex than just memorization, I'd say in two essential ways. One: Just knowing the inputs isn't enough. You have to practice the execution of a combo. That isn't just being able to nail it from the same starting position in training mode every time. That's also accounting for different hit confirms, spacing, screen position, counterhits, anti airs, etc. Player expression emerges from where players decide a standard bnb is enough and where they choose to practice a more specialized combo that may only work in specific scenarios, or from how difficult a combo they're willing to implement in their gameplay. If you drop the optimal combo 20% of the time then it's often going to be a better decision to do a slightly worse one, but you also have the option of practicing the optimal combo to be more consistent. Execution gives rise to a lot of complexity. Meanwhile, in a strategy game, memorizing something generally means you just know the correct play and there's no reason to do anything else. Two: Even supposing you've memorized every combo and can execute them flawlessly, the decision of which one to use isn't clear cut. You haven't memorized the definitive, correct solution. You've just developed one of many tools available to you. Combos can be optimized for damage, stun, meter gain, corner carry, oki, etc. In selecting a combo, you're choosing to prioritize some of these things over others. I'd make the argument that as fighting games have eased up on execution with increasingly generous cancel windows and longer input buffers, they've deliberately made this part of the game more complex with additional resources like SF6's drive gauge.
You make a good point about discovery being part of progression. In fighting games, the real time element makes this different than turn based strategy. I would lean on the side of providing a list of all combo moves and leaning on execution for the sense of progression rather than having some players who know the moves. Otherwise your new players won’t stand a chance.
@@distractionmakersThankfully most modern fighting games compensate for this in many ways. Most of them have combo trials, aka "here are some sample combos and room to practice them." They will also have alternate control schemes, along with characters that reward combo execution and memorization more or less. Some games, like Blazblue for example, are aware that their 30 hit combos are very intimidating compared to the much shorter ones in sf, and will compensate by giving universal tools to most characters (i.e., in blazblue, ABCD, aka pressing the buttons in order, is a combo on almost every single character. Its not optimal but it gets you playing the game quickly). I think sometimes combos are a heavily overstated problem in fighting games, I get why they can be intimidating, but also a lot of the time theyre the easiest to recognize element of skill, which overshadows all the other elements of actual depth in the game. I personally am a diamond sf6 player and my combos are absolute garbage, I learned the bare minimum I needed in 30 mins (admittedly this would take longer for other people) and immediately jumped into ranked to learn the stuff I actually cared about learning.
What makes MTG interesting is say my opponent is in blue. I cast a spell while they have mana open. There are a billion counterspells in blue they could have. But do I really need to know every possible permutation of a counterspell to know whether or not I want to avoid having my spell countered? I would say no. The same can be said with boardwipes or kill spells. There are a lot of permutations but the "base" effect will be very similar in most cases. It's really only the truly novel cards (likely creatures, enchantments, and artifacts) to be afraid of. In those cases however you're talking Sorcery speed. So once you see the threat you can answer it even if you weren't trying to predict it before it arrived.
I am surprised you guys didn’t bring up Lorcana. It has a huge memorization problem in that you aren’t allowed to take game notes in tournaments. Between what cards are inked and trying memorize what’s in the opponents hand when you get to look at it, memory plays a huge part in picking up the last percentage points in a match.
This conversation makes me think a lot of fighting games and the mental stack and the arguments for fighting games having a level of complexity to obscure that depth. yes, there is just a wall of learning characters, their combo routes, their special move inputs and the properties of both their specials and normals and how that goes into the matchup, and the fighting game you are playing during discovery vs. the fighting game you are playing at mastery are fundamentally two different games, BUT! where that complexity becomes depth is when that knowledge level is understood by both opponents and that RPS can properly be established. There is inherant risk to going for a special move even if you have it committed to muscle memory because there is time you are spending to do the inputs, information you are giving to your opponent to help them inform their imperfect information that they make their decisions with... and that battle of real time chess where people have to make their decisions at that wild pace fighting games move at is so peak.
And it's even different among different fighting games. I love SF6 and don't think it requires much memorization because I have a lot of experience but Tekken just seems like a game where knowledge checks are the only thing that matters until you are a pro.
Even the eventual decision-making that a player makes after having grasped all of the basic information of the game is still just a test of pattern recognition. A player who has played the game more is usually going to see the the more effective line and play it, and the other player will lose because either they've got less experience or they have a brain which isn't conditioned to be as efficient at recognizing the patterns. This is fairly apparent in a game like chess, and most people find that kind of thing boring which is why we've included as much "randomness" into our games such as the variance between deck archetypes, random card drawing, etc. so that something unexpected might happen. But then, when there is enough randomness, there is no longer the interesting expression of a player's skill. That's why nobody bothers to play competitive rock-paper-scissors, because if the game is operating properly then any two players should have the same win rate and that makes the outcome of any match is not a representation of any player's skill at the game.
Curious what you think about Cole Wehrle’s new game Arcs if you’ve played it. IMO it does what you were talking about at the end (players have a general idea of what each other can do but there’s variance to create meaningful decision space) exquisitely.
I find myself thinking that so much of ARK, the dinosaur survival game, but for player input and RNG is just memory issues. Like there's an entire website/app for want to tame a Rex? Look in this area. For a level 150 you'll need this many tranquilizer shots, and this much time and resources to make it through the entire taming process. Or like base dino stats for breeding purposes are somewhat obscured. But can be guessed at from an app on tame. Just put some of this in the actual UI. And without requireing advanced items in the tech trees.
This is exactly why I burned out of one of my favorite competitive card games (Netrunner) back in 2016 or so. A lot of the skill in Netrunner is being able to predict the opponent's move based on hidden information, and without memorizing all the cards, I felt like I was at a disadvantage against the players who did. I keep wanting to get back into Netrunner and they actually made a new starter set specifically for learning the game and practicing building decks, and I'm actually excited to try it! I just have to find people who are willing to play it and build decks out of it with me without destroying me (or me destroying them) haha.
You guys focus a lot on multiplayer games and it might give people the wrong idea. Memorization is a great and very natural tool for progression, as the inherent risk and fear of the unknowns turns into planning and opportunity after amassing enough knowledge. Competitive games have to keep it in check, of course. But it's because it's a long-term out-of-match progression that gives an advantage, same as having more time or money spent on clash royale.
You guys ever play Starcraft? Im curious on your thoughts on a game like that. Many people say there really isnt much strategy in RTS and its all mechanics
RTS games are a bit interesting. For one thing, 'strategy' is really the wrong word for them. They're mostly about tactics and logistics. Strategy is just a convenient catch all for people who don't know the distinctions. Though there is Some strategy to it. The thing is, there are layers to how it all plays out. When everyone's just starting out and has no clue about anything, there's a bit of clever strategic decision making to be had. Then players start Memorising things, learning all the information there is to learn about what is and isn't optimal, what doesn't and doesn't work, what decisions are and aren't sensible at which part of the game... and it's not who came up with the clever strategy or did a cool thing that wins, it's whoever builds things in the optimal order as dictated by how the game, and (where applicable) their faction works. There aren't any real decisions to be made once you've figured that out... until multiple, or all, players have figured it out, at which point you hit the next layer: Whoever clicks fastest wins. To the point where pro players will just click constantly even when not clicking ON anything so as to be sure that when they Are clicking on something they'll click as fast as possible... and in some games they'll just constantly send new move orders to the same units as a result... which lets them optimise pathing for best movement speed or to prevent things clumping up or whatever is optimal at the time (particularly useful in games with bad path finding), or to engage in tactical shenanigans (in age of empires: ranged cavalry doing what they did historically: riding into range at speed, firing, then riding away before the enemy can move forward to enage them, repeat until the enemy is dead... or drawn entirely out of position so the rest of the army can win a fight without whatever unit was sent after the ranged cavalry being involved) Thing is, there's a cap on that past which it stops mattering too. The game can only accept meaningful input so fast, the human body caps out, and also everyone reaches sufficiently similar levels that it's not really mattering anymore. At which point actual strategy, and decision making, and clever tricks, and figuring out what your opponent will do based on who you opponent is (and what faction they're playing) and the specific nature of the map and all that sort of thing start actually being relevant and you can start doing clever and interesting things, rather than only the Optimal thing, again and it will actually be meaningfully impactful. Functionally, RTS games are only really fun when either no one knows what they're doing or everyone involved has essentially mastered it.
@SenkaZver SC2 yes to some degree, though that has more to do with design decisions like 6->12 workers and some unit designs affecting design for the entire race (the Sentry basically made all Protoss units worse in SC2 compared with their BW counterparts). In BW I'd argue this is not true, due to map design and the mechanical execution being so high. The limited economy in BW also means that your decisions do matter, and we see new strategies crop up all the time and older strategies being brought back in. The level of surprise and catching people off guard, abusing "standard" knowledge to do something weird that works, happens far more in BW than SC2. As someone mentioned, BW players have been playing the game for a LONG time, and Remastered definitely helped with some of the micro execution, so the mechanical skill level of everyone is so high that tactics and decision making often come back into being significantly important to winning games.
@SenkaZver yeah i bring it up because Arty's view is severly disputed. In the context of the video, which made think of sc2 in the first place was about memorization in strategy games. Take cannon ruah or a similar strategy for instance. Theres a lot of information you must know to be able to beat a cannon rush and in effect it is a knowlege check. In a way if you boil all strategies down to this idea, then appropriate responses to certain strategies gets known, and execution and high level mind games becomes the important factor. Its somewhat like chess where opening theory is pretty deep nowadays
Where would you put "knowledge of potential future events"? The events could be perfectly explained when they show up, but knowing what could show up is still knowledge you have to memorize.
This epitomizes the all famous phrase “players will optimize the fun out of games”. Its why i have no interest in playing something like multiplayer civ. I really dont have the time to memorize the meta
.. and why would that even be fun? Honestly, I don't get where the fun is in having to play a very small subset of strats/build orders/etc and competing on APM/exactness of execution.
This is the biggest difference between FTL and ITB. They are both great but ITB is a better game imo because it doesn't rely on memory. The game happily will tell you whatever you want to know because the core game play is so strong it doesn't have to obfuscate anything.
@@dj_koen1265 I like FTL more than into the breach, it's definitely worth it. ITB wins in terms of elegance and lack of memorization, but FTL has more immersion and just pure fun factor for me.
This whole discussion focused on competitive games with two or more players, but what about a single player game? It seems that the main concern cited throughout is disincentivizing new players due to creating a skill gap. In a single player game, couldn't memory be used to add challenge to various parts of the game?
You guys are fantastic, but have to disagree on this one. To kind of tie it to your skill video, I think there are real advantages to memorization in certain genres. In games where character builds matter, for example, having a deep memory system is very rewarding to me. It also gives me a role to play in a social setting (I'm the guy who learns the builds so my friends can ask me about it). I get huge satisfaction from the sense of mastery of the corpus of items or skills and their interactions, to the point where it vastly outweighs the struggle of learning it. So I'd say you guys might be correct in head to head competitive games, there are definitely times when memory based systems are good - and further, where they unlock complexity (additional dimensions on a matrices for builds, for example).
It’s definitely possible. Build orders are extremely important and new players don’t even understand they exist. If we look at the evolution of the genre, MOBAs remove this element for the most part.
I would argue strat-anything has massively declined in popularity. It's not even to do with anything they do, most people just don't have the ability or desire (say, after a hard day's work) to play games that demand focus, intellectual effort, lengthen the feedback loop increasing effort required for mastery, and offer relatively far delayed gratification. Quick and frequent dopamine hits win with the majority. Back in my/the day, strats/tactics were big because they were a good match for the limited machines of the day. Now that you can haz UE4/UE5 FPSes/slash action/whatever, their audience has shrunk to people who genuinely want what they offer as games, but this is not a mass market, so it can't support the budgets that would let them match production values of AAA action games, therefore can't compete on visual appeal, therefore don't get marketed as hard, therefore don't get pop culture pull, therefore vicious circle. There's a reason why only the franchises like Civ which have pop culture relevance are still relevant in mass market terms, and they had to neuter it to get there and increase first-look visual appeal at the cost of legibility and a wagonload of cash for no gameplay benefit
It's not exactly the same, but I'm generally in favor of small knowledge/execution checks at the beginning of a players journey so they can feel some quick improvement and possibly get hooked. It's one of the successes of motion inputs in fighting games or the entirety of Tekken's character design. Getting knowledge-checked doesn't necessarily feel good, but there's joy in exploring, and finding a small set of viable answers to a situation.
It looks like the thing that happens in RTS's and MMORpg's, or any kind of game that has an "endgame". In some cases one can argue that the "endgame" is the game and the full campaing or questlines that you did as playing the game to level up to level cap or whatever is the learning experience, where you are exposed to the mechanics and to several possible strategies you can use later on or where you found the archetype or build you want to play, and so on. Also classic roguelikes play with the idea of memorization when they randomize everything and the first time (on that run) you encounter a scroll or a potion you can't tell if it is a healing potion or a poison one, because they change colors and nicknames. Also I think that instead of memorization one can say in some games that you have a feel of wonder or discovery when you encounter a new mechanic or rule or strategy you didn't knew before, even when that discovery means you lost this game to a rival (Mark Rosewater related that experience on a recent episode of his podcast). I mean there is an aspect of games that is profoudly connected to learning, from kids or animals playing with their companions in order to "train" habilities needed for survival to great scholars discussing abstract concepts where one is trying to defeat his oppositor with words and arguments. What I am saying is that even the "memory" part is not just a memory game because sometimes it connects concepts, mechanics and lore in a game in a meaningful way.
I disagree with this to an extent. Memory I believe is very valuable to the repayability of a game and rewards players who want to improve at something
I think it just varies in each application. For example, in Slay the Spire, having memorized all of the card pool and relics gives you extra context for every decision you make, more cognizant of future potentials and opportunities. Memorizing details about mechanics like encounter chance on Question Marks and what special events might be available when give you more information to make informed decisions at any point in time. Additionally, this knowledge is not essential to playing the game effectively. You can beat Ascension 20 without total memorization and knowledge, but it can help. It serves replayability by pushing the skill ceiling up for those that really want it just for the sake of mastery. The Bazar, as noted in the video is egregious in its memorization. If you really want to win ranked, you need to know every item that each NPC encounter can drop. ~10 items + skills for each one, not all of them very memorable. You often need a wiki to determine if you can beat one. Losing to an NPC can be run-losing and start a downward spiral. It's not a cherry on top, it's the difference between playing competently or throwing your run like a total noob. It's not rewarding because it's not adding "special bonus context" or future possibilities, it's a knowledge check just to be able to see what's directly in front of you. This memorization doesn't serve replayability, it just hurts usability.
RPS is a bad example for this. It only appears to be a good design, since you have only 3 possible things your opp can do. Imagine it instead being a game of 100000001 different moves each beating and losing to 50000000 moves respectivly. And just as in RPS your opp has free choice each round. That is basically a shot in the dark. There is no rule that limits the possible choices so nothing to go by while making your own choice.
The WarioWare analogy is pretty thin. You neglected to incorporate the fact that interacting with the various silly scenarios is a key part of the game. Simply reducing the experience to "figure out the objective", then "react to achieve the objective faster than your opponent" fundamentally excludes the core emotive reasons behind why those games are developed with that type of gameplay.
You're talking to game designers who consider games to be something like a series of meanginful decisions with clear feedback. Under that lens, warioware can be reduced to those phases if seen as a game where the objective is to win. You're thinking of it as something like an experience, which you can argue should be better incorporated or accounted for in the definition of a game, but could also be considered as looking at it as something other than a game. An experience, or a toy.
Cribbage is the example that immediately comes to mind where memorization is the game. If you just kept the rule card in front of you it's essentially chutes and ladders.
Chutes and ladders doesn't have any decision points compared to cribbage where what you throw and the order you play your cards affects who wins. Looking at the rules should always be allowed.
Magic is exactly the example of a complex game with very little depth. Both at the beginner level and at pro level it comes down to matchup and luck of the draw. Strategic back and forth only happens in the middle between beginners and pros. You could also say Mtg is about metagaming, but then the game is won by either gathering statistics on what people play or wild-guessing about the meta.
Also, disagree completely on the partial information bit. The deepest strategy game overall is probably Go - a game with full information, with an enormous number of choices in every move. It also happens to be not purely an exercise in memorization, but a combination of tactical memorization with strategic insight. Whoever sees the board better wins. It's dynamic pattern recognition. I would say rock-paper-scissors is not a strategy game at all.
This is called the wargame problem. New players are tasked with memorizing every special rule, stat, option, stratagem, weapon, and ability for every unit in their army plus their opponent’s. This either causes the game to end quickly as the new player is just outclassed by the more experienced opponent that has memorized everything, or the game slows to a crawl as the new player has to pour over every stat, ability, and interaction at every decision point to avoid walking into a trap.
It’s also a game where both sides start at full strength with every unit on the board, exasperating the problem and front loading all the game info.
This is why I always burn out so quickly whenever I return to chess or yugioh. I can memorize the windows of interaction for the one or two combo decks in an mtg format but memorizing a dozen openings in chess or the windows of interaction for every meta relevant engine in yugioh is too much for me.
I wonder if forced variance as in chess960 or draft (does yugioh have draft like mtg?) would essentially solve that issue
@@guksungan1267 Limited does not exist in YuGiOh, it used to wayyyyy back over 10 years ago now but at this point Forced Variance through a Draft format would require Konami to upend how they do sets and card design. YGO's Memory Problem is because of how often that knowelge changes, not just how much there is.
Have you tried Go? Basically only 4 openers.
I was introduced to a playing card game called "Mao" that epitomizes this difference. You have to learn by playing because "The first rule of Mao is that you don't discuss the rules."
It plays like Uno, but the people who know the rules penalize the people who don't know the rules by giving them cards.
Then, if ever you win a round, you get to add a rule and the cycle continues. And without this step, it's just a memorization game. But, because players get to step into the role of game designer a little bit, there's layers to it. Once everyone knows the rules, it's a game of trying to come up with a new trigger for a rule, and paying attention to what's happening. It plays into human flaws, but has enough luck and player participation thrown in to make it a fun game for a camping trip.
Classic
I love Mao! Definitely a camping highlight trip when I was a kid. Of course being kids, the made rules were always incredibly ridiculous but somehow the people I played with never made a rule that was straight unfair (every new rule applied equally to every player).
I love Mao. Some people enjoy it just because they want to see the pain of new players failing to figure things out, but I just find the idea of like... trying to deduce rules and systems from within to be fun. If the game had no way to add more rules, there would be no point in playing once you learned everything.
A friend tried to have the rest of our friend group play Mao
We all got fed up and started doing random shit like trading cards and just picking up the deck lol
Penalty: explaining the rules.
Wow Wario Ware was a really good analogy this is why you're the professionals
I think it's worth noting that the issue with Chess is more technological than anything. Chess players in the 50s and 60s (i.e. "The Queens Gambit" era) didn't have immediate access to the best move in any given position, nor could they jam through thousands of tactics puzzles in a day with zero effort. In a post-Stockfish world, however, you can beat lots and lots of players simply by having consumed more Chess content on Twitch than they have.
The internet definitely made this problem more clear.
.. lots of weak players, maybe. The stockfish thing is vastly overrated in this regard. It has other implications (cheating, possible decrease in interest in a game computers play better than you etc, less room for "suboptimal" but exciting/characterful play), but it has actually been an amazing boon for both optimising existing lines and evaluating new/less well-studied, creative lines. If you think strong players didn't do deep analysis in the 60s.. High level play has always been about taking your opponent past his analysis and putting tension on him where you thought you had an edge. All that has really changed is the availability of a really good training partner who is always available and doesn't drink all your vodka.
When I look at Starcraft Broodwar, the memorization process took place while you enjoyed the campaign, a good story is like a good book. I always told people who wanted to learn the game that they should start with the campaign and afterwards I could help them.
Afterwards there's different builds and strategies, actually way more than there are in Starcraft 2.
Timmy VS Spike: A timeless struggle
It would be so great to hear your guys talking more about Twilight Imperium. It is really interesting to me that it is a game that have so many "toxic" design elements (e.g. king making, races are 100% unbalanced, player elimination, extremely lengthy games, secret objectives, extremely random combats) and still (most) players have an awesome time playing it. Anecdotally, in the last time I played, ALL five players had a shot at winning in the final round.
We’ll have to play it more before talking about it.
Its such a great game when played with the right people
There is memorization in games like MTG. You need to know what opponents may play, the effects, the costs.
I think fighting games are a perfect example of this. Take anyone brand new to fighting games and put them against even the average intermediate player. They are not playing the same game. The intermediate player will win almost every single time. There are so many little things to learn and memorize from frame data to neutral to optimal punishes and combos that the knowledge gap is way too wide.
But once you know all of the techniques and options and systems, a lot of top players wind up complaining that the games fall down to pretty much glorified rock-paper-scissors. That's reductive, but it's not that far from the truth at the highest levels of play.
Same thing goes for MOBAs. It takes a _long_ time to understand how the dozens of champions work, what all the items do, and what items to buy for which champions in different situations.
to some degree All a fighting game really is is rps
But only with the simple games this starts to become a problem
Also if you put someone who never played a fighting game before even against just someone with general fighting game experience they will lose almost every time
This is why Fisher random chess is a perfect strategy game. It eliminates chess's flaw of memorising book openings.
In chess, if all you're doing is playing memorised lines, you're a (relatively) weak player.
The impact of opening theory on the results of games is very low on the level of ordinary players, its a myth that there is a barrier of entry where you have to memorise a lot of opening moves. Skill beats knowledge.
And it's also a myth that most beginning players don't like memorization. Most beginning players actually do like that they can learn some concrete jumping off point for their strategy.
10:50 very good take. I hate game that obscure information intentionally or unintentionally. Tooltips have become so good by now, there really is no excuse not to have nested tooltips that explain the consequences of your actions. There is also a bunch of RPGs that have a similar problem, where the dialog options are written so weirdly, that you sometimes have a hard time knowing what will happen when you pick one. Being forced into "save-scumming" (stupid term to begin with) because of the game being really unclear about what the different buttons do is very frustrating.
The RPG dialogue being unpredictable problem is actually a different problem: dialogue is a means to roleplay your character as well as a means of making story choices. It's perfectly valid to have unpredictable things happen - happens in the real world as well - but it ruins your ability to roleplay the character. *That* is the core tension in that case.
Providing partial information can be part of a good design, it's a way to produce uncertain outcomes without resorting to RNG. It's only a problem in cases like, say, complex grand strats where info isn't elided deliberately, but is an implementation shortcoming, and directly contradicts the design of the game.
The conversation reminds me of when my family played a lot of a game called Star Wars Outer Rim for a week. It has a bunch of events and hidden information like the mountain pass example. I had a lot of fun playing it and seeing all the new stuff in it. Once I played it enough though, it stopped being fun as I mostly remembered what everything did and that element of discovery was gone. I know you guys talk a lot about what experience a game is trying to provide, and I think that's part of the issue here. Personally, I really enjoy the experience of hidden information leading to discovery. A focus on that can lead to a lack of replayability, though that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I think there is a big overlap of this idea with the other ideas on min-maxing and optimizing the fun out of a game. The idea of having a wiki open to know all the stuff is one of the reasons I can't get into hardly any games anymore. The first time I was asked to make a decision in FTL like "Go try to save the outpost from being attacked or leave them?", I realized that just experiencing all the iterations to learn and try to remember everything...it was something fun but at the same time, there exists a database with all of this stuff already experienced by everyone else (or compiled on a wiki from players or even datamining). The "going through the motions" on my own to experience it all myself just doesn't sound that fun in context because something in my brain is constantly telling me that I'm wasting time because I can just look up the fastest way to "win".
I much preferred when random STS-like or I guess FTL-like events have clear, stated outcomes so the choice is just based on weighing the benefits rather than an exercise in memorization/unknown information, unless it's a story-based game, which I'd argue FTL flirts with narrative but isn't a story-based game.
By that logic, playing any story-driven game is wasting time because you can just read a summary of the plot. I do agree that it is difficult to force oneself not to look things up. I had the worst of times with that in Witcher 3, where I knew there were multiple outcomes, had a strong preference for one, but there was not a foreseeable sequence of decisions to arrive at it given only in-game knowledge.
shallow games reward memory and deep games reward decisions
I think deep games reward insight. Games that reward a few decisions are sort of medium depth. Imo.
@ I like the word insight. encapsulates a little more than decisions
This video needs to be shown to every Yu-Gi-Oh player, about why the game is failing to attract and keep players.
Not only is 90% of your strategy in the game knowing your own deck and the opponent's deck, and knowing exaxtly what sequence of cards you want to play and your opponent wants to play, the game makes it even harder and more painful making every card played and ability activated a decision point. In those decisions, usually there's 1 to 2 correct answers among 8+ possible options.
Add to that the first turn advantage is so high, you might as well be playing rando-chess where you answer Yu-Gi-Oh trivia.
I don't think anyone disagrees but it's not up to the players to actually... do anything about this. Yugioh needs better rules or on boarding or set design and nothing the players have tried works. Konami has to do it
Fr most of the battle happens before the match has begun
Ive been talking to a friend about this. It made me realize why games like Brass are so liked. Before i played it, i thought it was likely overhyped and being in the #1 spot in BGG was a fluke (dont get me wrong, it doesnt mean its the BEST GAME EVER but it helps contextualize). Much to my chagrin, after playing it, i understood the hype. The decision tree is actually super small and theres really not much memorization, but the strategic depth is incredible.
I think many game creators add complexity in an attempt to add depth, but the foundations of their game design just dont allow for it, leading to many red herrings, and the “correct” decisions that you have to memorize, as you guys put it.
In effect, it all comes down to the Queen problem again, they just make it harder to find the Queen, but once you do, thats all ypu really need
💯 I like “Hide the Queen” as an alternative name for this haha
I can't imagine anyone trying to get into League of Legends nowadays. There is just so much stuff to know and if you don't know it all, you get berated by everyone on your team (especially because the people you're initially paired with are likely previously banned toxic players on lower level new accounts). It's pretty gross. And even if a new player can slog their way to be able to play Ranked games, now there's a whole new level of entry imo. I know all the "Silver players" are absolutely terrible in relation to Diamond players, and Diamond players are absolutely terrible in relation to Challenger players, but people playing in Silver are MUCH better and more knowledgeable than they were 5-10 years ago. I just don't know how anyone new joins the game at this point.
Yeah its the fate of old games no matter how popular
Playing customs in dedicated newb servers is the best way but thats really hard to organize
I think the team aspect is the real "problem" that I don't know how to solve other than having enough friends to make the whole team without randoms. I don't seem to have trouble getting into new-to-me deep 1v1 games no matter how much experience the top players have as long as they are popular enough to still have other beginner level players (eg. most recently Go).
@ ye playing league with a team of premades is a much better experience
This is the problem I tapped into when I came back into Modern after years as an 8-rack player. So much cognitive load remembering cards (I started writing them down), and proactively disrupting the oppo’s gameplan while keeping into account eventual topdecks.
All while getting used to new cards as I got back along with MH2.
Can't believe you got through this whole episode without mentioning chess and it's deep memorization curve
That's a different kind of memorisation. When you study chess lines, you're not just memorising, you're learning the game and the art of its analysis, developing an intuition and a taste, and generally speaking accessing a different strategic level - weak players memorise 'optimal' lines, strong players find interesting lines to play that allow them to take the opponent where he doesn't want to go because you have an edge there (might be positional play, might be calculation, etc).
If you've memorised the optimal strat in limit hold'em, you play/calc it and that's it (it all depends on chance and you have an advantage over any flawed player given infinitely many hands). If you've memorised the optimal build order in most RTS (or a few where they are situational), that's it, you play it and APM takes over (and maybe you need ways to decrease partial info if it has rock-paper-shotgun mechanics). In chess, the more you study lines, the more ideas you get, the better you become at analysis and the deeper your analysis goes - there's serious levels to be had there.
Another way is to look at it in terms of combinatorial complexity. The search space is still very high in chess once you cut off all of the unviable branches in the tree.
This problem compounds with mechanical skill in video games. When your game has too much to memorize up front, the players who have played longer have both the advantage of memory _and_ the advantage of mechanical skill. It makes the barrier to entry scale even faster.
It's a big part of what makes fighting games and mobas feel so hard to learn. You're against players who understand the matchup against all of the 20+ characters, have memorized the optimal combos or item builds for every situation, and have the execution skills of someone with months or years of practice. With the internet being what it is, this information is figured out in the first couple months of the game. A player coming in 6 months after a game launches is at a massive disadvantage unless the game has managed to maintain a steady influx of other new players.
The best examples of games that require both, memory and mechanical skill are fighting games. You need to memorize a ton of framedata and you need to be able to execute special moves and combos.
I feel you're overestimating the knowledge level of fighting game players and MOBA players while learning, I do agree about the general dynamic but most people get good enough to have fun and stick with it long term by learning a passible patchwork with a significant amount of those people not actively pursuing knowledge once they're at a comfortable point
I think this is why I find the combat in M&L brothership engaging despite its simplicity and repetitiveness . When you encounter a new type of enemy, it’s a learning task because each enemy does relatively little damage, but if you don’t learn the counter you get death by a thousand cuts. Then when you encounter a higher level version of that enemy later in the game, you know they counter but it becomes a test of dexterity/consistency because missing a single counter will result in taking a big chunk of damage
GoT has a solution I adopted to the board game im developing:
At any moment, including at the start of a battle, each player can see the oponents hand. This way, there is no advantage for players who memorize all the cards of each house/faction.
One consequence of this is how much time (and potentially choice paralysis) this adds to the game for new players. Now they have to look at their hand AND the other player's hand when deciding a play. I also thought about adding this element to one of my designs, but ultimately thought it was a net negative for new player experience.
@@zigeif777 I don't know how familiar you are with GoT, but just in case:
Each player controls a house. Each house has 7 different battle card. On a battle, each player chooses one card in secret, then both reveal, do what the card says and after that, whoever has more force wins the battle.
Without being able to look at the opponent's hand, players that memorized the cards would have a HUGE advantage. So instead of forcing every player to memorize all the cards of each house, just let players look at the opponents hands.
PS: You could also give a list of the cards to each player instead of that. But then players would need to constantly check the discard pile or have to memorize wich cards each player already used.
Might as well play with face up hands to save time, but either way unless certain mechanics can top deck effects you're going to run into good players knowing they won / lost long before the game actually ends.
Hidden information is a blessing not a curse but can you link me a ruleset this sounds like it could be fun.
@clarkecreates There is no deck. You have 7 unique battle cards at the start of the game specific for your house/faction. When you use all, you get them back.
I may be misinterpreting what you would consider memorization, but I feel like fighting game combos may be an example of it that has stood the test of time. Without an incredibly deep understanding of the game mechanics, most of which aren't even visible outside of practice modes, the only way to discover a combo is through trial and error or looking it up, and then once you find a combo you just have to memorize it in order to perform it in game. This certainly has a cost and makes it very difficult for new players to get into the genre, and I'm sure it's why games like SF6 added an alternate control scheme that can automatically execute some small combos, but from what I understand it's a mechanic that while it doesn't add depth, it adds a sense of achievement when you do successfully perform the combo. It becomes a very tangible feeling of progression of "I am getting better at this game," and I at least find that rewarding.
I would think that satisfaction comes more so from skill of execution than skill of memorization.
Also, the rock paper scissors mechanics alleviate problems from a pure memory game.
Combos contain a bit of memorization in that you're not likely to figure out your highest damage combo in the middle of a match. But they're more complex than just memorization, I'd say in two essential ways.
One: Just knowing the inputs isn't enough. You have to practice the execution of a combo. That isn't just being able to nail it from the same starting position in training mode every time. That's also accounting for different hit confirms, spacing, screen position, counterhits, anti airs, etc. Player expression emerges from where players decide a standard bnb is enough and where they choose to practice a more specialized combo that may only work in specific scenarios, or from how difficult a combo they're willing to implement in their gameplay. If you drop the optimal combo 20% of the time then it's often going to be a better decision to do a slightly worse one, but you also have the option of practicing the optimal combo to be more consistent. Execution gives rise to a lot of complexity. Meanwhile, in a strategy game, memorizing something generally means you just know the correct play and there's no reason to do anything else.
Two: Even supposing you've memorized every combo and can execute them flawlessly, the decision of which one to use isn't clear cut. You haven't memorized the definitive, correct solution. You've just developed one of many tools available to you. Combos can be optimized for damage, stun, meter gain, corner carry, oki, etc. In selecting a combo, you're choosing to prioritize some of these things over others. I'd make the argument that as fighting games have eased up on execution with increasingly generous cancel windows and longer input buffers, they've deliberately made this part of the game more complex with additional resources like SF6's drive gauge.
You make a good point about discovery being part of progression. In fighting games, the real time element makes this different than turn based strategy. I would lean on the side of providing a list of all combo moves and leaning on execution for the sense of progression rather than having some players who know the moves. Otherwise your new players won’t stand a chance.
@@distractionmakersThankfully most modern fighting games compensate for this in many ways. Most of them have combo trials, aka "here are some sample combos and room to practice them." They will also have alternate control schemes, along with characters that reward combo execution and memorization more or less. Some games, like Blazblue for example, are aware that their 30 hit combos are very intimidating compared to the much shorter ones in sf, and will compensate by giving universal tools to most characters (i.e., in blazblue, ABCD, aka pressing the buttons in order, is a combo on almost every single character. Its not optimal but it gets you playing the game quickly).
I think sometimes combos are a heavily overstated problem in fighting games, I get why they can be intimidating, but also a lot of the time theyre the easiest to recognize element of skill, which overshadows all the other elements of actual depth in the game. I personally am a diamond sf6 player and my combos are absolute garbage, I learned the bare minimum I needed in 30 mins (admittedly this would take longer for other people) and immediately jumped into ranked to learn the stuff I actually cared about learning.
What makes MTG interesting is say my opponent is in blue. I cast a spell while they have mana open. There are a billion counterspells in blue they could have. But do I really need to know every possible permutation of a counterspell to know whether or not I want to avoid having my spell countered? I would say no. The same can be said with boardwipes or kill spells. There are a lot of permutations but the "base" effect will be very similar in most cases. It's really only the truly novel cards (likely creatures, enchantments, and artifacts) to be afraid of. In those cases however you're talking Sorcery speed. So once you see the threat you can answer it even if you weren't trying to predict it before it arrived.
I am surprised you guys didn’t bring up Lorcana. It has a huge memorization problem in that you aren’t allowed to take game notes in tournaments. Between what cards are inked and trying memorize what’s in the opponents hand when you get to look at it, memory plays a huge part in picking up the last percentage points in a match.
Great point. That aspect of Lorcana is very frustrating.
This conversation makes me think a lot of fighting games and the mental stack and the arguments for fighting games having a level of complexity to obscure that depth. yes, there is just a wall of learning characters, their combo routes, their special move inputs and the properties of both their specials and normals and how that goes into the matchup, and the fighting game you are playing during discovery vs. the fighting game you are playing at mastery are fundamentally two different games, BUT!
where that complexity becomes depth is when that knowledge level is understood by both opponents and that RPS can properly be established. There is inherant risk to going for a special move even if you have it committed to muscle memory because there is time you are spending to do the inputs, information you are giving to your opponent to help them inform their imperfect information that they make their decisions with... and that battle of real time chess where people have to make their decisions at that wild pace fighting games move at is so peak.
And it's even different among different fighting games. I love SF6 and don't think it requires much memorization because I have a lot of experience but Tekken just seems like a game where knowledge checks are the only thing that matters until you are a pro.
Even the eventual decision-making that a player makes after having grasped all of the basic information of the game is still just a test of pattern recognition. A player who has played the game more is usually going to see the the more effective line and play it, and the other player will lose because either they've got less experience or they have a brain which isn't conditioned to be as efficient at recognizing the patterns. This is fairly apparent in a game like chess, and most people find that kind of thing boring which is why we've included as much "randomness" into our games such as the variance between deck archetypes, random card drawing, etc. so that something unexpected might happen. But then, when there is enough randomness, there is no longer the interesting expression of a player's skill. That's why nobody bothers to play competitive rock-paper-scissors, because if the game is operating properly then any two players should have the same win rate and that makes the outcome of any match is not a representation of any player's skill at the game.
Then some games find the perfect balance between meangingful decision making and randomness and you get Slay the Spire.
I'm really curious to hear more about twilight imperium's design
Curious what you think about Cole Wehrle’s new game Arcs if you’ve played it. IMO it does what you were talking about at the end (players have a general idea of what each other can do but there’s variance to create meaningful decision space) exquisitely.
7:05 Wait, are you just knocking on Outer Wilds?
I find myself thinking that so much of ARK, the dinosaur survival game, but for player input and RNG is just memory issues. Like there's an entire website/app for want to tame a Rex? Look in this area. For a level 150 you'll need this many tranquilizer shots, and this much time and resources to make it through the entire taming process. Or like base dino stats for breeding purposes are somewhat obscured. But can be guessed at from an app on tame. Just put some of this in the actual UI. And without requireing advanced items in the tech trees.
This is exactly why I burned out of one of my favorite competitive card games (Netrunner) back in 2016 or so. A lot of the skill in Netrunner is being able to predict the opponent's move based on hidden information, and without memorizing all the cards, I felt like I was at a disadvantage against the players who did. I keep wanting to get back into Netrunner and they actually made a new starter set specifically for learning the game and practicing building decks, and I'm actually excited to try it! I just have to find people who are willing to play it and build decks out of it with me without destroying me (or me destroying them) haha.
I play it with friends and we have prebuild decks that we made ourselves so we kinda know what we are up against everytime we play
Does the video seem blurry to people, even on 1080p?
No. You're going blind. Seek help.
Try setting the resolution to something else, I have a similar issue when the connection is temporarily spotty
It is, sorry! I forgot to fix the focus.
Very important distinctions!
You guys focus a lot on multiplayer games and it might give people the wrong idea. Memorization is a great and very natural tool for progression, as the inherent risk and fear of the unknowns turns into planning and opportunity after amassing enough knowledge. Competitive games have to keep it in check, of course. But it's because it's a long-term out-of-match progression that gives an advantage, same as having more time or money spent on clash royale.
You guys ever play Starcraft? Im curious on your thoughts on a game like that.
Many people say there really isnt much strategy in RTS and its all mechanics
Yeah and those people are wrong lol
RTS games are a bit interesting. For one thing, 'strategy' is really the wrong word for them. They're mostly about tactics and logistics. Strategy is just a convenient catch all for people who don't know the distinctions. Though there is Some strategy to it.
The thing is, there are layers to how it all plays out.
When everyone's just starting out and has no clue about anything, there's a bit of clever strategic decision making to be had. Then players start Memorising things, learning all the information there is to learn about what is and isn't optimal, what doesn't and doesn't work, what decisions are and aren't sensible at which part of the game... and it's not who came up with the clever strategy or did a cool thing that wins, it's whoever builds things in the optimal order as dictated by how the game, and (where applicable) their faction works. There aren't any real decisions to be made once you've figured that out... until multiple, or all, players have figured it out, at which point you hit the next layer:
Whoever clicks fastest wins. To the point where pro players will just click constantly even when not clicking ON anything so as to be sure that when they Are clicking on something they'll click as fast as possible... and in some games they'll just constantly send new move orders to the same units as a result... which lets them optimise pathing for best movement speed or to prevent things clumping up or whatever is optimal at the time (particularly useful in games with bad path finding), or to engage in tactical shenanigans (in age of empires: ranged cavalry doing what they did historically: riding into range at speed, firing, then riding away before the enemy can move forward to enage them, repeat until the enemy is dead... or drawn entirely out of position so the rest of the army can win a fight without whatever unit was sent after the ranged cavalry being involved)
Thing is, there's a cap on that past which it stops mattering too. The game can only accept meaningful input so fast, the human body caps out, and also everyone reaches sufficiently similar levels that it's not really mattering anymore.
At which point actual strategy, and decision making, and clever tricks, and figuring out what your opponent will do based on who you opponent is (and what faction they're playing) and the specific nature of the map and all that sort of thing start actually being relevant and you can start doing clever and interesting things, rather than only the Optimal thing, again and it will actually be meaningfully impactful.
Functionally, RTS games are only really fun when either no one knows what they're doing or everyone involved has essentially mastered it.
Love StarCraft and agree with what others have commented.
@SenkaZver SC2 yes to some degree, though that has more to do with design decisions like 6->12 workers and some unit designs affecting design for the entire race (the Sentry basically made all Protoss units worse in SC2 compared with their BW counterparts).
In BW I'd argue this is not true, due to map design and the mechanical execution being so high. The limited economy in BW also means that your decisions do matter, and we see new strategies crop up all the time and older strategies being brought back in. The level of surprise and catching people off guard, abusing "standard" knowledge to do something weird that works, happens far more in BW than SC2.
As someone mentioned, BW players have been playing the game for a LONG time, and Remastered definitely helped with some of the micro execution, so the mechanical skill level of everyone is so high that tactics and decision making often come back into being significantly important to winning games.
@SenkaZver yeah i bring it up because Arty's view is severly disputed. In the context of the video, which made think of sc2 in the first place was about memorization in strategy games.
Take cannon ruah or a similar strategy for instance. Theres a lot of information you must know to be able to beat a cannon rush and in effect it is a knowlege check. In a way if you boil all strategies down to this idea, then appropriate responses to certain strategies gets known, and execution and high level mind games becomes the important factor.
Its somewhat like chess where opening theory is pretty deep nowadays
Where would you put "knowledge of potential future events"? The events could be perfectly explained when they show up, but knowing what could show up is still knowledge you have to memorize.
This epitomizes the all famous phrase “players will optimize the fun out of games”.
Its why i have no interest in playing something like multiplayer civ. I really dont have the time to memorize the meta
.. and why would that even be fun? Honestly, I don't get where the fun is in having to play a very small subset of strats/build orders/etc and competing on APM/exactness of execution.
This is the biggest difference between FTL and ITB. They are both great but ITB is a better game imo because it doesn't rely on memory. The game happily will tell you whatever you want to know because the core game play is so strong it doesn't have to obfuscate anything.
What do those acronyms stand for?
@dj_koen1265 Faster than Light and Into the Breach. Two fantastic games by Subset Games. ITB is easily my favorite game of all time.
@@raedien ah i played into the breach and its a great game true, havent tried ftl but maybe i should
@@dj_koen1265 I like FTL more than into the breach, it's definitely worth it. ITB wins in terms of elegance and lack of memorization, but FTL has more immersion and just pure fun factor for me.
Love twilight imperium. Played it more times than i can count.
This whole discussion focused on competitive games with two or more players, but what about a single player game? It seems that the main concern cited throughout is disincentivizing new players due to creating a skill gap. In a single player game, couldn't memory be used to add challenge to various parts of the game?
For sure. But keep in mind that is the skill you’re testing. Lots of single player games use memorization. Boss fight patterns being the key example.
I can't believe y'all made a video about memorization in games and said precisely zero words about Scrabble.
You guys are fantastic, but have to disagree on this one.
To kind of tie it to your skill video, I think there are real advantages to memorization in certain genres. In games where character builds matter, for example, having a deep memory system is very rewarding to me. It also gives me a role to play in a social setting (I'm the guy who learns the builds so my friends can ask me about it). I get huge satisfaction from the sense of mastery of the corpus of items or skills and their interactions, to the point where it vastly outweighs the struggle of learning it.
So I'd say you guys might be correct in head to head competitive games, there are definitely times when memory based systems are good - and further, where they unlock complexity (additional dimensions on a matrices for builds, for example).
How does this affect RTS games like Starcraft? And is it this memorisation problem that led to the fall of RTS as a mainstream genre?
It’s definitely possible. Build orders are extremely important and new players don’t even understand they exist. If we look at the evolution of the genre, MOBAs remove this element for the most part.
I would argue strat-anything has massively declined in popularity. It's not even to do with anything they do, most people just don't have the ability or desire (say, after a hard day's work) to play games that demand focus, intellectual effort, lengthen the feedback loop increasing effort required for mastery, and offer relatively far delayed gratification. Quick and frequent dopamine hits win with the majority. Back in my/the day, strats/tactics were big because they were a good match for the limited machines of the day. Now that you can haz UE4/UE5 FPSes/slash action/whatever, their audience has shrunk to people who genuinely want what they offer as games, but this is not a mass market, so it can't support the budgets that would let them match production values of AAA action games, therefore can't compete on visual appeal, therefore don't get marketed as hard, therefore don't get pop culture pull, therefore vicious circle. There's a reason why only the franchises like Civ which have pop culture relevance are still relevant in mass market terms, and they had to neuter it to get there and increase first-look visual appeal at the cost of legibility and a wagonload of cash for no gameplay benefit
Shoutout Bobby Fischer
Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock! 🖖
Exactly 😆
It's not exactly the same, but I'm generally in favor of small knowledge/execution checks at the beginning of a players journey so they can feel some quick improvement and possibly get hooked.
It's one of the successes of motion inputs in fighting games or the entirety of Tekken's character design. Getting knowledge-checked doesn't necessarily feel good, but there's joy in exploring, and finding a small set of viable answers to a situation.
So, rock paper scissors lizard spock?
It looks like the thing that happens in RTS's and MMORpg's, or any kind of game that has an "endgame". In some cases one can argue that the "endgame" is the game and the full campaing or questlines that you did as playing the game to level up to level cap or whatever is the learning experience, where you are exposed to the mechanics and to several possible strategies you can use later on or where you found the archetype or build you want to play, and so on. Also classic roguelikes play with the idea of memorization when they randomize everything and the first time (on that run) you encounter a scroll or a potion you can't tell if it is a healing potion or a poison one, because they change colors and nicknames. Also I think that instead of memorization one can say in some games that you have a feel of wonder or discovery when you encounter a new mechanic or rule or strategy you didn't knew before, even when that discovery means you lost this game to a rival (Mark Rosewater related that experience on a recent episode of his podcast). I mean there is an aspect of games that is profoudly connected to learning, from kids or animals playing with their companions in order to "train" habilities needed for survival to great scholars discussing abstract concepts where one is trying to defeat his oppositor with words and arguments. What I am saying is that even the "memory" part is not just a memory game because sometimes it connects concepts, mechanics and lore in a game in a meaningful way.
I disagree with this to an extent. Memory I believe is very valuable to the repayability of a game and rewards players who want to improve at something
I think it just varies in each application. For example, in Slay the Spire, having memorized all of the card pool and relics gives you extra context for every decision you make, more cognizant of future potentials and opportunities. Memorizing details about mechanics like encounter chance on Question Marks and what special events might be available when give you more information to make informed decisions at any point in time. Additionally, this knowledge is not essential to playing the game effectively. You can beat Ascension 20 without total memorization and knowledge, but it can help. It serves replayability by pushing the skill ceiling up for those that really want it just for the sake of mastery.
The Bazar, as noted in the video is egregious in its memorization. If you really want to win ranked, you need to know every item that each NPC encounter can drop. ~10 items + skills for each one, not all of them very memorable. You often need a wiki to determine if you can beat one. Losing to an NPC can be run-losing and start a downward spiral. It's not a cherry on top, it's the difference between playing competently or throwing your run like a total noob. It's not rewarding because it's not adding "special bonus context" or future possibilities, it's a knowledge check just to be able to see what's directly in front of you. This memorization doesn't serve replayability, it just hurts usability.
RPS is a bad example for this. It only appears to be a good design, since you have only 3 possible things your opp can do. Imagine it instead being a game of 100000001 different moves each beating and losing to 50000000 moves respectivly. And just as in RPS your opp has free choice each round. That is basically a shot in the dark. There is no rule that limits the possible choices so nothing to go by while making your own choice.
i think warioware games are considered "micro games"
The WarioWare analogy is pretty thin. You neglected to incorporate the fact that interacting with the various silly scenarios is a key part of the game.
Simply reducing the experience to "figure out the objective", then "react to achieve the objective faster than your opponent" fundamentally excludes the core emotive reasons behind why those games are developed with that type of gameplay.
You're talking to game designers who consider games to be something like a series of meanginful decisions with clear feedback. Under that lens, warioware can be reduced to those phases if seen as a game where the objective is to win. You're thinking of it as something like an experience, which you can argue should be better incorporated or accounted for in the definition of a game, but could also be considered as looking at it as something other than a game. An experience, or a toy.
Sir your shirt was very distracting
Cribbage is the example that immediately comes to mind where memorization is the game. If you just kept the rule card in front of you it's essentially chutes and ladders.
I disagree since there is still a lot of risk vs reward places in the game especially in a 2 player game
Comparing Cribbage to chutes and ladders is a terrible example.
@3joeylindsey how
Chutes and ladders doesn't have any decision points compared to cribbage where what you throw and the order you play your cards affects who wins. Looking at the rules should always be allowed.
@@styxsksu it's possible I was taught cribbage wrong
Magic is exactly the example of a complex game with very little depth. Both at the beginner level and at pro level it comes down to matchup and luck of the draw. Strategic back and forth only happens in the middle between beginners and pros. You could also say Mtg is about metagaming, but then the game is won by either gathering statistics on what people play or wild-guessing about the meta.
Also, disagree completely on the partial information bit. The deepest strategy game overall is probably Go - a game with full information, with an enormous number of choices in every move. It also happens to be not purely an exercise in memorization, but a combination of tactical memorization with strategic insight. Whoever sees the board better wins. It's dynamic pattern recognition.
I would say rock-paper-scissors is not a strategy game at all.