Depth vs Complexity - Why More Features Don't Make a Better Game - Extra Credits
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- Опубліковано 30 січ 2013
- More complex games aren't better--deeper ones are. Design choices like well-crafted tutorials and appropriate play pacing can make the difference between a needlessly hard game and an enjoyable one that still retains rich gameplay.
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(Original air date: January 16, 2013)
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So, basically, complexity is how many options/tools you have, and depth is how much you can do with those options/tools. Is that right?
Exactly. A perfect example is Minecraft. WASD controls, two buttons and fairly simple rules, yet you can do an unimaginable range of things with them.
Steve Neiman
Minecraft:
Complexity = easy to understand (the most complex thing is redstone, which applies the basics of electronics)
Depth = Essentially infinite
Yeah, let's put that in the "awesome games to play for forever" list.
It's never going out of style.
Steve Neiman Cool. Thanks!
Steve Neiman At least until the Adventure Update ruined the game
For level designer's perspective, it works on puzzle games where complexity and depth is more on level designer's tools which player needs to figure out.
"the most complex games have the worst tutorials."
"Oh yes." said by paradox
"Oh yes." said Tarn Adams.
Complex games *tend* to have bad tutorials. 3:17 explains.
@@ililililili5968 As a HOI4 and Kerbal Space Program player, this could not be more true. Kiiiiilllll meeeeee.
Their explanation kind of reminds me of Fullmetal Alchemist. I think that Ed's Alchemy in that show is like the greatest superpower ever. All it does it change the shape of stuff he understands the molecular composition of. He can't make it bigger or smaller, and he has to be touching it to manipulate it. And yet, it was an incredibly versatile power the way he used it: he would make a wall of rock/dirt to block attacks, he could repair broken objects, he could instantaneously forge weapons or make seamless garments, he could recycle and salvage materials and make something new with them, he was like MacGuyver if MacGuyver had superpowers. That's a great example of minimal complexity having incredible depth.
And that's the reason the show is so great. It doesn't rely on basic fight scenes to keep you entertained but rather the depth of the story which is balanced by other aspects such as humor or some crazy fights
In theory, he could probably also rearrange/redistribute splatters of color into actual works of art or separate mixed colors. Instant painting!
On a side note, one of the things that makes the Green Lantern franchise so great is how versatile the rings powers are. When the Guardians of Oa said its use is only limited to your imagination, they meant it pretty literally. It's generally used for instant physical constructs that are as strong as the user's willpower, but I saw one guy use it for a crude reanimation of a recently deceased corpse.
Well he can make it bigger if he has more of that material and he can make it smaller if he throws away some of the material
"Macguyver"
Best example of this is Minecraft.
Not very complex, but with so much depth.
Sandboxes usually have so much depth with a VERY small amount Of complexity
Conway's Game of Life is the most simple yet deep game I know.
@@userjay4 yeah that's usually like really good
Extra Credits Drinking Game: Drink every time GO is used as a positive example of anything.
TheKiss it is a good game
Portal (the first one) I think might have one of the best depth to complexity ratio, as you only have 1 major and 5-9 minor game elements, and it creates endless possibilities and mind blowing new mechanics. Not the mention the "tutorial" is basicly the game itself with seemless transition. It's a genius design...
Rules in portal:
Player:
1 WASD, 2 Jump, 3 blue Portal, 4 orange Portal, 5 Move Objects (Cubes, Turrets), 6 keep Momentum through Portals,
Environment: 1 Places where you can place a portal, 2 places where you can't. 3 Turrets shoot and kill at you at sight and 4 through portals, 5 Particle Fields will destroy cubes and all existing portals, 6 Lasers kill the player, 7 Lasers activate things, 8 Lasers kill Turrets, 9 Lasers are reflected by Mirrors, 10 Lasers can be blocked with cubes, 11 Buttons activate things, 12 buttons deactivate things when released 13 you have to get to the elevator to finish a level, 14 light bridges are there to walk on, 15 cubes can be placed on light bridges, 16 light bridges go through portals, 17 you can't place a portal on or through glas, 18 Turrets can't shoot through glas, 19 fire kills you, 20 fire kills turrets, 21 fire destroys cubes, 22 cubes respawn when destroyed
That are just 6+22 --> 28 Rules I can think of right at the Moment, and Portal 1 only has like 20 levels xD
I know this is an old post, and I don't disagree with your answer, I just wanted to break it down for analytical reasons, tho the first rules, specially the one about momentum, create 90% of it's total deph, because it's (besides killing turrets) the only one you can play around with. Glas for example is just there, without any real interaction.
Programmers put elegance on a pedestal as well. I wrote a program to find prime numbers, and it was less than 20 lines long. Almost half of that was asking the user for an input. I showed a friend of mine, who also programs, and she was amazed at how simple it was.
It was easy to follow, fairly fast, and worked. I'm sure if I went further into mathematics, I'd have a better way to do it. But the way I did it was elegant, none the less.
darkdudironaji What did you need to use prime numbers for exactly?
Walrusman523 Nothing. It was just a quick thing I did to keep myself sharp.
darkdudironaji Alright
+darkdudironaji
Could you share the code with me? I'm having problems with making my code way too long. Thanks.
+darkdudironaji
Could you share the code with me? I'm having problems with making my code way too long. Thanks.
I think the battle system in Final Fantasy X is a great example of high depth at low complexity.
On the surface, it looks like a completely simple and straightforward turn-based battle system. Your turn comes and you pick a move. Heck, it may even look like a step backwards from the battle system of FF4-9. But if you spend a significant amount of time in that battle system, you'll see that it is actually WAY deeper than it appears on the surface.
Essentially, every move in the game takes a different amount of "time" to pull off (normal attacks, for instance, take an average amount of "time"; defending or using an item takes a short "time"; and something like an overdrive takes a long "time"). The games takes how much "time" each move takes in addition to the "speed" of your party members and the "speed" of your enemies, and puts it all together to generate a turn order. The best thing is that you don't need understand how it all works because the game displays a window in the corner of the screen that shows you who will be acting for each of the next 16 turns or something (I don't remember the exact number, but you can see well ahead), and you can even see how a move will affect the turn order BEFORE you make it! And that fact that (unlike almost any other FF) there's NO time pressure means that the doors are blown WIDE open for potential to strategize. In fact, of all the FF games I've played, X had BY FAR the most necessity for strategy in its battles.
I think the smash bros series is a great example of low complexity and good depth look at competitive melee circuits
I love finding melee players on non melee videos
:D
Smitty Yagermanjenson I'm not a big melee player but their competitive circuits are still running I believe then again smash 4 plays closer to melee than brawl so I think it will get more tournament play
Randy Johnson I think competitive melee is a completely different story. There are so many little maneuvers that you have to master to execute combos, etc.
Jakob Huels-Elliott well wave dashing is gone but isn't the basic comboing similar in all smash games?
Randy Johnson Basic combo is very simple, the neutral state, where nobody is comboing anyone that is the complex part (usually). Its still not as complex as you may think (but then again, I do play falco, so I can just laser rape them out of neutral). I highly encourage melee over 4, because its more likely to stand the test of time
This is why I can't really get into MMOs compared to RPGs. Too many cluttered menus and chatboxes with news announcements and notifications, a baffling economy and crafting system thrown on you once you reach the main city... It's a nightmare.
I'll use Blade and Soul as an example, though it's by no means the biggest culprit. All I wanted to do was enjoy the combat system, which is surprisingly quite nuanced once you face tougher enemies. And I made it my personal quest to get good gear for my character. But I hit the hub town and all the clutter just turned me off.
I stopped feeling like I was on an adventure training my warrior and had entered the Accounting department, with pretty icons instead of numbers.
I recently had an MMO urge.
..."cluttered" interface and mechanics indeed, just to pretend having depth where there is none.
Urge cured.
Yeah, I enjoy RPG elements in many games, but too many stats is just confusing and a disguise for lack of depth.
This! This 100%. I haven't played an MMO in so long but I hopped into one recently because it had similar mechanics to my single player game. God, the UI gave me a headache right away. How do people even read the tiny text and keep track of all those tiny icons. Windows would popup all over the place and while I could move them around, they were annoying as all hell.
Your videos are so deep yet not very complex. Hence their high rate of retaining my engagement! :D
4:30 --> That picture illustrates SO perfectly how is to play a Paradox grand strategy title!
You nailed it there guys! Props to the art team.
SO... depth is how much the player CAN think,what variables they can use. Ware as complexity is how much they HAVE to think and on what caliber.
Pretty much. I like to use the Guild Wars series as an example; in the original game you had absolutely massive amounts of depth. Each player could assemble a “build” of eight skills from a list of over two hundred for each class, and could even multi-class if it suited them. This created insane levels of depth as there were easily thousands, even millions of possible builds that could be completely viable for any given zone or quest. You just don’t see that in MMOs anymore. But at the same time it was extremely complex; requiring players to have a firm grasp of the rules and a high understanding of each of those 400+ skills they had access to at any given time and how they all interacted with one another in order to create truly optimal, or even functional, builds.
Guild Wars 2 tried to reduce the complexity by a wide margin by simplifying combat rules, reducing the number of variables like mana levels and damage types, packaging weapon related skills together in preset bundles, and reducing the number of freely selectable skills by more than half. This did indeed reduce complexity, but it also negatively impacted depth because players no longer had the same range of options or the same level of customization over their build and their character. So, in essence, the relationship of depth to complexity is a balancing act. And one that is very easy to get wrong and go too far in either direction.
Arkham Creed other people play guildwars also ? kappa
The best example of great depth at low complexity that you never heard of: Reassembly.
+Ian Fitchett I had to look it up. I can see what you mean.
+Ian Fitchett ive heard it!!! gimme a cookie!!!!
One thing you touched on here, that the video game industry seems to have forgotten with all of their buttons, is what I like to call, "easy to play, hard to win."
What makes all those 80s game so great? Simple controls, but ramping difficulty. All you need to know to play Sonic or Mario is: up, down, left, right, and ABC. That's it. No left trigger, no right bumper, no which stick-click is which - four directions and a few buttons is really all you need. These games are easy to play and thus, inviting to the player.
Sure, maybe you'll fall into pits or get hit by fireballs, but once you know the hazard, you instantly know how to defeat it, because the controls are simple and intuitive. This make the player think: "Yeah! I can do this," not "WTF?! How do I even?!!"
The more complex the controls and the steeper the learning curve, the more likely that the player says "fukitall." This is why I've always liked Street Fighter more than Mortal Kombat. It's all about that stupid block button. If I'm retreating, clearly I'm going to take a defensive stance - Back = Block. It's intuitive and easy. The block button however, has always just made a hard game harder, with all it's up-left-right-down-A-X-Y-B to do your fatality moves. Just let me half-circle and punch for my Hadoken.
Why punish the player for not memorizing every twelve-button move for every character? Why not make a simple interface with ramping difficulty, so you know what to do, and you just have to get better at doing it. That, I believe, is what they call, "skill."
+John Bainbridge In some genres, I agree with you-- like the one you're discussing-- but in others, not so much. The number of control buttons available these days is mostly because that's what's required for a lot of games to work at all.The variety of things you can do in games has gotten more complex, and I'm not just talking fighting moves: Mario just went forward, backwards, up and down, jumped and shot from his flamethrower hands. Now in pretty much any game I go forward, backwards, up and down, jump, shoot from my left hand, shoot from my right, block attacks, sprint, change my camera angle, change between first and third person perspective for my own comfort sometimes even, interact with the environment and also therefore need the option to cancel those interactions. Wow, lookit, there's two sticks and eight different buttons down just for the barest bones of interactions that most games can do. Not to mention "access inventory" or "access quest logs", or at least some sort of pause menu.
+MegaKaitouKID1412 Even Super Mario 64 represented a great deal more complexity, with three dimensional movement, but that complexity added way more than it's weight in depth
Zachary Fontes Yes, exactly.
The more I think about it, easy-to-play can be done with more more buttons. Halo is a good example. It was the first geme I played on an X-Box controller and I picked it up easily. Why? The key is to make things as intuitive as possible. Triggers as gun triggers? That makes sense. However, analog stick to move the character and d-pad to go through menus is cumbersome and awkward. Start to pause, but right bumper to access inventory - which also pauses the game - is unnecessary.
My first piece of advice is, anything that pauses the game can be done from the start menu. If I hit pause, then figure out how to access the inventory, I have all the time in the world, but if I forget what button inventory is mid-game, I might get shot. Tying similar abilities together makes things easier. This leads into my second point...
You don't always need to use EVERY button. I feel like a lot of games use all the buttons, just because they're there, without really thinking about why the button is being used. Do you need different buttons for jump and climb? No. Just tie collision detection into the button code. If hit wall, climb, if not, jump. The less buttons you need to use and the more sense the controls make, the easier the game is to play.
+John Bainbridge Yep, this is why Derek Yu is a genius and adapted such early concepts in Spelunky. Then you go to the extreme and you have Dark Souls, but still the same idea. (Except a lot of DKS is complex, you can still play and enjoy it without much knowledge)
A slight counter argument: a very complex game can be highly satisfying, especially in competitive multiplayer. You have outsmarted your opponent by simply being able to do more careful processing of the jungle rules, calculations, and causes.
+DoctorPC pelailut I think that just comes with experience. A complex game requires a greater learning curve than that of a game that relies on depth. In your example, you beat the other person because you simply knew more of the rules. It's far more satisfying if both you and the opponent know/ have knowledge of the same set of rules, but you beat them because of your mastery/ manipulation of them.
125prabhjot absolutely, I never meant that the rules were hard to learn, but rather that there are many of them and their interactions allow for a wide array of kneet tricks to outsmart your opponent. here complexity, as long as the game can manage to 'stuff it' inside the players' heads, helps.
Yeah that makes sense. Knowing all of the rules and then knowing what to do in certain situations is always great, and this skill obviously comes though familiarity/ more time invested in the game (i.e. with the tutorial being split up, verses front logging everything). But something must be there for less experienced players to stay (idk, that they feel that they have mastery over the current set of rules that they are familiar with).
125prabhjot True. here a good set of FOS' will be a big help, and potentially matchmaking to roughly the same skill level.
What's FOS? Also, it was good talking with you
Yes, there are few fans of Dwarf Fortress, but my oh my how much they do love it. Go read the forums. It's almost like the UI's severe barriers to entry are seen as initiation rituals that create a new identity for you once you go through them. And since it's not a triple-A all-at-once maybe-with-DLC release, those players can be drawn into the long term development process where every feature upgrade is a possibility to re-experience the wonder that first got them hooked. I'll admit to having been bitten by the DF bug and chipping in to its funding model, but eventually the author's total refusal to improve the UI did start to wear a bit thin for me.
+HebaruSan The UI sure could use some improvement. ^_^
You can grow to like it and even ignore it. Like knowing the beaten paths of a deep jungle. But still could use something more organized.
+HebaruSan they are like hipsters. good UI's are too conformist I guess.
we should add depth by designing better maps, making more solutions to 1 problem instead of one, or even better, letting the player create those solutions while playing. We dont need 100 weapons or 50 different enemies to add depth.
Exactly. The catch is that this is hard to code and harder to test.
This video is so true, and I have experienced this myself from not only playing games, but working on them as well. I figured out as well, that pacing new content out, and teaching it to the player, works overall more depth.
I'm constantly coming back to and pointing people toward this video. There are so many people, even those who have played and reviewed many games, who fail to understand this concept. So thank you very much for making this!
This should be a required watch for anyone who ever intends to post anything on any message boards for any game.
These videos are actually shown in my Game Design class, just goes to show the quality of this show.
I just discovered your videos, I don't play too many video or board games, but I play a lot of tabletop RPGs. Almost every video I've watched has sounded like a tutorial in how to be a better Game Master, thank you for this.
I've long watched this program, and I have to say, this one was one of the best for me personally; I've recently begun doing rules design for a gaming company, and this video was able to put into words something I've been trying to wrap my head around for months. Thank you -so- much for making this!
Great depth at low complexity: chess
Debatably. Knowing how to move all the pieces is an irreducible complexity though as you can't really have more than one game without knowledge unless you get checked in 5 moves (fools check, I think that's the name?). Then there's things like en passant, castling, and converting pawns to other pieces, along with understanding end game, when it's literally one sided most of the time as the side with more pieces can force a check regardless.
TeCool Mage
En passant and castling aren't really required for the game although they do change certain situations, so I don't think you should count them because you can have just as good a chess game without them (well that applies less for castling). Converting pawns to other pieces is just a consequence of them otherwise essentially becoming useless (other than as takeable barriers) when they get to the end of a column, plus promotion is very easy to understand. Tactics are a different matter, due to there being a lot of tactics and a lot of said tactics being very essential to the game, but this just adds to the game's depth and potential strategy without making the game much more "fundamentally complex". Said tactics are for the most part simply a complex consequence of simple rules.
Flumpanor Beginning is has quite a bit of depth, when pieces start being taken it's a ton of depth, but tactics practically don't exist in end game, where you just have to understand how to move pieces to check the enemy king until you corner them. At some point a win HAS to be confirmed, otherwise it's practically a dice roll, but sometimes chess just gives too much time where you know who's going to win.
But of course, that only applies if the enemy never forfeits, otherwise chess is a very deep game.
+Flumpanor Go is far superior in this.
MrHaganenoEdward
I don't really understand Go (I tried to learn it and played it with my friend a few times but I can't get my head around the rules for how taking stuff works...) so I can't really judge it
Paradox games may have some rules to learn... but they are the best startegy games around... who cares if you need to study them a little... it's FUN!
Yeah, this is something computer gamers are a little spoiled with... you wouldn't expect to be able to play a boardgame without reading the rules.
The computer handles the bookkeeping for you, allowing stuff in turn based games that would be WAY too fiddly in a boardgame. But "irreducible complexity" is just about what kind of game you expect.
Mnnvint As someone who plays a lot of both board games and computer games and design board games, both lighter and heavier ones, no, this isn't about being spoiled; few board games have nearly as complex rules as even quite basic computer games, because when you design board games the complexity is much more apparent since you don't have a computer that can keep memories etc.
As an example, take Dominions 4. Now, this isn't a simple game, but it's not really more rules-heavy than most paradox wargames; I take it as an example because they actually provide a manual with basically all rules in the game. It's about 400 pages long.
Very few board games, apart from some pen and paper RPGs and a few of the heavier wargames like Warhammer, have rules 400 pages long. And when it comes to P&PRPGs and those wargames, the game is a hobby itself; it's not like a computer game that is one among a dozen similar that you play for a while and test out etc. When you play one of the rules-heavy wargames or RPGs, that single game is treated like a hobby by itself.
Nearly all decently popular board games, including most wargames and plenty of RPGs, have rule books of a 100 pages or less. More often than not, 30 pages or less. The game I'm designing currently is a medium-weight wargame that I make for the explicit purpose of providing an easier-to-learn mecha game than Battletech, since it's hard to find players for a game as complex as it. I aim for maximum 20 pages of rules, with perhaps 10 pages of extra "advanced" rules. And that's still not considered a "light" game.
Twilight Struggle, the currently top-rated wargame on BGG, is 32 pages.
RISK is 10 pages.
Axis and Allies is 40 pages.
Terra Mystica is 20 pages.
Lords of Waterdeep is 13 pages.
Memoir '44 is 17 pegaes.
And again, the Dominions 4 manual/rulebook is 397 pages.
If you can make a computer grand strategy game and describe it in less than a hundred pages, I'd be very impressed.
Mnnvint As someone who plays a lot of both board games and computer games and design board games, both lighter and heavier ones, no, this isn't about being spoiled; few board games have nearly as complex rules as even quite basic computer games, because when you design board games the complexity is much more apparent since you don't have a computer that can keep memories etc.
As an example, take Dominions 4. Now, this isn't a simple game, but it's not really more rules-heavy than most paradox wargames; I take it as an example because they actually provide a manual with basically all rules in the game. It's about 400 pages long.
Very few board games, apart from some pen and paper RPGs and a few of the heavier wargames like Warhammer, have rules 400 pages long. And when it comes to P&PRPGs and those wargames, the game is a hobby itself; it's not like a computer game that is one among a dozen similar that you play for a while and test out etc. When you play one of the rules-heavy wargames or RPGs, that single game is treated like a hobby by itself.
Nearly all decently popular board games, including most wargames and plenty of RPGs, have rule books of a 100 pages or less. More often than not, 30 pages or less. The game I'm designing currently is a medium-weight wargame that I make for the explicit purpose of providing an easier-to-learn mecha game than Battletech, since it's hard to find players for a game as complex as it. I aim for maximum 20 pages of rules, with perhaps 10 pages of extra "advanced" rules. And that's still not considered a "light" game.
Twilight Struggle, the currently top-rated wargame on BGG, is 32 pages.
RISK is 10 pages.
Axis and Allies is 40 pages.
Terra Mystica is 20 pages.
Lords of Waterdeep is 13 pages.
Memoir '44 is 17 pegaes.
And again, the Dominions 4 manual/rulebook is 397 pages.
If you can make a computer grand strategy game and describe it in less than a hundred pages, I'd be very impressed.
Mnnvint
3 years ago
"Yeah, this is something computer gamers are a little spoiled with... you wouldn't expect to be able to play a boardgame without reading the rules."
I disagree, console games have the most over simplified most mind numbing functionality. People who use them often complain computers have "too many buttons" to learn, and want everything to immediate plug in and function with free pointers to every step of everything they do.
Might I just say that this is some of the best art an Extra Credits episode has ever had. You look at it and you can understand what is being said. It's brilliant.
Another great episode! I don't remember how I found this show in the first place, but I'm so glad I did.
Heres a great way of thinking about this:Complexity is how much you need to know to play the game. Depth is how much you can learn to become better at the game.
+Ragnorok x Good one. Depth is like 'gradual complexity'. At the surface it's simple, but if you want to explore more there are a lot of different rules, options, enemies, etc.
MyVanir i love the Paradox games though ....
I hope someday you guys do an episode on complexity in game writing. For the love of god, Ken Levine. Complicated IS NOT THE SAME THING as COMPLEX
This show is so awesome, I don't really have a lot of interest in making games but just knowing the amount of thought and debate around it is really fascinating. Thanks!
That was a very concise bit with a huge amount of information in it. Thanks for doing that.
Dark Souls basically has a heavy attack, a light attack and a roll button and manages to captivate your attention for dozens of hours.
Other RPGs sometimes make me so preoccupied with keeping in mind quests, skills, stats, dialogue etc. that after a while I just lose track and get burned out.
I shall now link this video to all of the LoL/DotArds out there that criticize HotS for not being very deep because it's not complex. Thanks for this.
Nah it's mostly Dota players and their 'turn rates'. LoL is fairly simple in a lot of regards.
I like the ideas in this video a lot. I liked the ending credits song to.
5:11 "or trying to figure out what is going on" Perfect.
Dwarf Fortress is hard to get into for sure, but once you know how to play, it becomes the best and most realistic game there is~
I recommend the effort to get into it and you'll be well rewarded!
Notch also got inspired by it during Minecraft's development plan.
Yes
I'm gonna say it: League of Legends had a horrible tutorial and on top of that you can't even tutorialize the insanely complex meta that players have developed.
thats exactly why i never played it... I gave it a chance, got into smt, still dont know wtf was going on. They i didnt know where to go from there. When your main page is so badly structured and everything is so poorly explained that someone doesnt know where to go after the first 30 minutes. Then you have a shit game. FUCK LOL
" League of Legends had a horrible tutorial"
Did it? Why do think you had to spend months playing the game against other people before you were allowed to play ranked?
I played for months with friends and alone and I wasn't able to comprehend what I was doing as a whole. The tutorial goes over the very basic mechanics but does nothing to establish how to play any of the 5 roles, the massive trees of items (flavor text/context menus can only do so much) and a bunch of other aspects in the game as well. I don't hate LoL but compared to other team based games like Overwatch it's much less accessible. I figured if I made no visible improvement in the span of 2-3 months that there are other ways to spend my time, I'm not that much of a glutton for punishment.
Jack Pinto you learn most of that stuff from playing with other people.
I didn't have good friends, I'll just leave it at that.
Just found this channel. This is amazingly concise. +1 Subscriber
when i watched this episode, it reminded me of "nintendo land". i played it lately and the versus mode has a great depth/complexity ratio. in mario chase, the only controls you have are the joystick to move and it still somehow has a lot of strategies to find.
I think i'm gonna play Dwarf Fortress now...I've seen it a lot and it seems fun.
Does anyone else think minecraft did it right. Large depth, little complexity.
Right man! All helped by Minecraft's amazing tutorial!
GoldenCookie37 Because Minecraft has a tutorial... xD
Minecraft is very complex at first. I don't think I could have ever gotten into it without the mincraft wiki. I mean I have memerized nearly all the recipies now but there is no way I could have figured all of them out by myself.
The console version of minecraft has MOAR! depth because you don't have to memorize the recipies.
and dont even talk about tekkit or ftb
I don't even remember what made me pick up Dwarf Fortress last week, but after hours of stumbling around and finally having all of my dwarves die from dehydration (from a lack of alcohol), I got the full meaning of what you meant in this episode that I watched a while back.
Don't get me wrong, _I love the game_, and I'm still playing it, but I wouldn't have bothered were it not for the *absurdly high amount of effort* preceding fans made into making the game more accessible for Lazy Newbs like me, like the DF Wiki, the various hacks, and the fan-made applications.
Subbed from this video, alone! (Gee, I hope there's lots more like this, inside!!)
What do you think of Skyrim Cvil War through the scope of Depth vs Complexity? I feel that this story isn't really complex, it can be easily summarised, and it unfolds before the player ever since the beginning of the game. But every discussion or book about the War the player stumbles across adds depth to it, and the answer to the problem isn't easy to choose.
+TheAlamla Absolutely true. While I always kind of leaned toward the Imperial side of the Skyrim Civil War, I never believed they were outright correct. There were arguments for and against both sides, and it was a very fundamental choice to me. Personally, if this wasn't a video game where I want to explore, like, EVERY quest, I would have probably kept out of the conflict entirely, because I didn't feel like either side had a real right to be killing the other. So if someone told me they were more on the side of the Stormcloaks, I would probably accept that and even agree with most points they bring up, because after all the Stormcloaks were fighting for religious freedom, which is a basic right everyone should have (even though I personally don't value it all that much, I understand the necessity of it).
+TheAlamla I think that with the Skyrim Civil War, there's a lot of narrative depth-- depth as one might define it when discussing the depth of a novel or a movie's conflict-- but not a lot of gameplay depth. There's lots of information on it, lots of personality in the conflict, lots of positive and negative on both sides that made it positively human... but the gameplay isn't much different from either side, the outcome of which side wins doesn't really change much except the Jarls and the clothing of the guards in certain holds, the songs available from the bards (which are the same songs with a few different words). Essentially, you can shoot a gun from this "Imperial" position three feet to the left or shoot this same gun from the "Stormcloak" position three feet to the right.Either way, the experience is more or less the same. There's also really only two (though, arguably three if you include "ignoring") choices, and which side you're on is really the only choice that you make in the entire questline. And from there, you play through the same quests, with the exception of two tasks (how you prove yourself is different, and then Whiterun plays out differently). So, I'd say no, it's not very deep.
+Ralf Koneberg I went with the imperials because they were the best bet at keeping the Dominion out
This is a great video, but, in reference to 2:50 or so...
If you remove the needless complexity from Dwarf Fortress, you defeat its purpose. It's _supposed_ to be that complicated to play.
It's a game that serves a niche and quite a small one at that. The people who love Dwarf Fortress (I've never tried it myself but I know several people who really like it) love it _because_ of how convoluted it is, not _despite_ that fact.
Sure, it's not very popular, but are we really going to judge a game by how popular it is? Sure, it's not the only criterion that gets used in EC but I think that it doesn't deserve to be considered very important unless the game has mass appeal as a major goal; niche titles aren't _supposed_ to be popular outside of their niche and if they are then it's usually unexpected.
*tl;dr* - Dwarf Fortress is supposed to be prohibitively complex to play and reducing that complexity would kill it.
The quote is:
"The prime example of this is, clearly, Dwarf Fortress. Great game - Nowhere near as popular as it would be if it weren't artificially complex."
It is used as an example. It is not judged poorly, in fact it is judged well, but Extra Credits does not provide an alternative to the complexity because that's not what they wanted to convey. That would be tangential.
*tl;dr* - there isn't much need to defend the game.
nymersic
Thank you for enlightening us a bit. ^_^
The thing that bothered me about "it could be _more_ popular" was the sentiment that I perceived of popularity being a primary goal in game design and development. I admit that I probably read too much into that line, but I really dislike people who state that a niche game should try for broader appeal since it strikes me as putting marketability before artistic integrity.
I'm sure that the point James and Daniel were trying to make wasn't "it should sacrifice its vision as being incredibly complex and deep to be more popular" but something more like "if it were more approachable more people would appreciate it", but the wording of it bothered me.
Again, though, thanks for the insight. It's always valuable to hear about a work (game or otherwise) from someone who appreciates it.
They weren't even talking about the complexity of the game itself. They were referring to the interface complexity, which requires deciphering in itself.
I bet without changing any of the mechanics, Dwarf Fortress would be much more popular with an intuitive user interface.
It's not about it being complex for complexities sake that makes it fun. There's more to it then that.
(As kind of an epilogue to my part of this discussion...)
I've recently started playing Dwarf Fortress (recently as in a couple of days ago). It's been pretty fun to get into, actually. ^_^
The DF wiki has been a _huge_ help for me. The screen that tells you that there's a wiki says that it's available "as of January 2015", so I'm guessing that it didn't exist when this video was made.
In fact, I would say that the wiki's tutorial has been just about as helpful as an in-game tutorial would have been. However, the wiki tutorial also doesn't get in your way, which (for me) makes it _much_ nicer than an in-game tutorial might be. I'm currently at the part of the wiki's tutorial where you set up a dining hall, but I'm also building an office for a broker (I actually had merchants show up, but I didn't have a broker :( ) and trying to get a hospital set up. An in-game tutorial would likely have prevented me from doing things organically like this, which would have been a lot less fun for me.
Dwarf Fortress is extra complex because of it's awful UI, it would be more playable while losing no depth if it had a superior user interface.
Finally a real espisode, an episode that you guys talk about something you know about.
Great episode, guys. The stuff you said about Grand Strategy and Dwarf Fortress rang especially true for me.
There IS an excuse for the UI of Dwarf fortress. Its made from a single person who had little experience designing the UI. By the time he realized exactly what he did wrong, a redesigned version of the UI would take months out of the final project, and even THEN would have to be redone ANYWAY, once the game got fully complex. Basically, its an alpha game that we're playing. He knows the UI is terrible, so his community stepped forward, and said "WE'll take care of this, don't worry."
Did the community take care of it by modding the game to have a better UI, or by making tutorials?
I've never played the game, but I hear so much about it here that I'm kinda piqued.
Go to the DFwiki and read the guides there, those are pretty good.
You can also find some starter packs for DF which come pre installed with tilesets, and other useful utilities.
You know 3 months is nothing compared to 10+ years right?
He hasnt changed the UI cause its not a priority. The game is there for people who like it and want it.
Team Fortress 2 did a good job of mixing complexity and rate of play with their balance of the weapon and class options. In an instant, you have to observe everything around you- where you are, what classes are you facing, what classes on your side are backing you up, what weapons are everyone using because each individual weapon changes how you will deal with that opponent or how that teammate can support you. You have to consider things happening on the other side of the map from you because they will directly impact what you have to do in the next few seconds. You have dozens of weapons over 9 classes used by usually 6-24 players on dozens of maps and you have to be able to evaluate all that information of who can do what with what where at what time instantly as you play.
great video, helped me a lot with my college work
wow, Battle for Wesnoth used as an example for a tactics turn based game. That game is awesome.
A game that's needlessly complex - in my opinion - is Dota 2. Yes, I understand that the developers wanted to keep it as close to the original as possible to cater to "oldschool" fans of the original and people who think LoL is too easy, but some stuff just really feels dated and weird in this game.
I have played the original DOTA. i then played league of legends and then tried dota 2.. and you are right.
Dota 2 has game mechanics that are unnecessarily hard to properly understand from the get go. A very simple example is that you lose money when you get killed. Because of how it is set up, it is impossible to know how much you will lose on death and therefore the game makes it impossible to really assess the value of going in to try and get kills is. League of legends is successful because the difficulty comes from player skill much less than it does from the games mechanics. The mechanics are super easy to get and they are intuitive so right from the start, the player feels in control and knows what is going on. It doesn't make the game less hardcore, just a much more involving experience.
So as much as people would hate for me to say it, League of legends is simply designed better than Dota 2 is.. It learned from Dotas original mistakes...
Lunar Wave
You are aware that you can also try out new items in games where you can just buy the new items and later combine them to better items, right ? You don't need cumbersom mechanics like recipes, you can just make the better item already include the price tag the recipe would cost.
Like, you have "sword" for 500 gold and " big sword", which is triple as strong and combines 2x "sword" and a 700 gold recipe. Instead of having to buy the recipe, "big sword" just costs 700 gold addtional to the 2 "swords". This way, you don't have to click and buy the recipe, you don't have to make room for the recipe etc.
Nr4747 exactly.. a lot of dumb stuff that adds nothing. I do like that there are shops in the wild though.. but they don't utilize the shops in the wild enough.. they should have special items for each side and then force you to take the risk of running to the shop on the opposite side to buy the last ingredients.. it doesn't add too much that the shops are just there.. although it is a cool idea.
***** Hate learning? I hate not knowing is the answer. You can NEVER know how much gold you will lose exactly.. it means that no matter how much you learn, it is practically impossible to keep track of which means making decisions is harder.. but not the good kind.. it just means that you are forever in the dark. That is not coming from someone who hates learning.. it comes from someone who thinks that that game mechanic is flawed when placed in a competitive game.
League players understand it quickly because all the mechanics are explained well and they don't leave anything in the dark. This works WAY BETTER in a competitive game because it puts the games difficulty totally in the players hands (meaning that, as long as the game is balanced any mistakes are always your fault and 100% fault.. not JUST your doing). So in tournaments, player skill is easier to assess.
Dota isn't really outdated as much as it is forever flawed by its mechanics.. it would be made today and still have the same problems.
In league and dota, players fend for themselves.. there is no hand holding in either game.. the difference is that in League, you know what you are getting in to which makes the game automatically more fair because. again, the difficulty is dependant on player skill.
League is not complex. Dota is not complex either. The difference is: you can never know everything about dota but you can know everything in league. In a competitive game, this is generally looked at as poor game design. In a board game, this adds to the fun because everyone is playing according to chance (of course board games are more of an extreme example but the principle stands).
*****
"The only thing that matters in a competitive game is the amount of variables that will separate the good and the bad players not the ease of entry."
What you said before this is wrong and groundless so I am not going to waste time addressing it as i would just be repeating myself. But that last thing there, while correct, seems to be misunderstood by you. A game with a lot of depth is fine.. and both have depth.. but if there are things in the game that you cannot possibly know no matter how much you study and the game's focus is competition (and it is) then that is bad game design because it does not compliment the game. Competitive people hate board games because there are so many random variables.. they work for fun, but they are not good for people only of a competitive nature because a lot of things are out of their control.
Variables are fine for competitive gameplay as long as it is actually possible to know all about it.. but you cannot know exactly how much gold you will lose and therefore you cannot know how much it will impact the game and so your decision (whether to go in or not) is not completely informed. In this case, there is no two sides to the story.. I am right, you are wrong.. that is not arrogance.. that is just how it works.
The complex features of these games that DO work are the things that can be predicted after learning how things work.. like how towers behave and what items would be best in certain situations.. Both share this.. League of legends has cut the fat and gotten rid of ANYTHING that doesn't support the competitive gameplay model.. this ISN'T better necessarily but it does complement the game, where as random variables that are out of the players control do not.
Another example would be the game Dear Esther VS Stanley parable. Both play similarly but Dear Esther has an open world whereas Stanley parable does not. Dear Esther fails because although the world encourages exploration, the story does not.. and so they clash (bad game design). Stanley parable has its focus purely on a liner path that is brilliantly scripted and EVERYTHING in the game compliments everything else.. it all goes together... so, good game design.
In Dota also encourages competitive play as the whole point in the game is to win VS another team over and over... yet the mechanics do not all support this play style which actually makes DOTA the less hardcore game, not League which seems to be what you are suggesting. League is not SIMPLE, it is POLISHED. EASY to understand, DIFFICULT to master. Dota is IMPOSSIBLE (literally) to understand in its entirety and therefore IMPOSSIBLE to master completely.. this definitely does not compliment the gameplay style. This makes neither game better or worse.. but League of Legends has superior game design.. that is a fact.
Case closed.. don't bother replying to make yourself feel better.. because I am right ... again, not arrogance.. but this is simply how things are.. Don't feel bad.. but disagreeing shows either Fanboi syndrome or a misunderstanding of game design. You are perfectly welcome to prefer one over the other.. but one is undeniably sporting a tighter design.
I'd like to see what Extra Credit's opinion on FTL is.
I'm revisiting that game since they released Advanced edition. Forgot how awesome it was.
...and how cruel it is. Poor, poor, Emma the Zoltan...
There's barely any depth in FTL, because the player is highly restricted in the intelligent choices you have, there's barely any decisions you can make that involve strategy. The game is so random, that most decisions are just to basically pull the slot machine arm and hope.
ltflak No, not at all. You have agency. You can still fuck up. The chance element makes it so that there is still a chance at losing even if you play perfectly...and I can see why for some people that would be off-putting...but just because there is an element of chance doesn't mean that your decisions are meaningless.
It just means that it's a game of risk management, and you have to play it knowing that all you can do is increase your chances...victory is never guaranteed.
Yes, but most of the time, it's a choice of mystery door A and mystery door B. There's no real strategy involved. Having the option to play stupid and suicidal, does increase depth, but not by much.
ltflak Those are somewhat simple decisions. The real strategy behind FTL is how you spend your scrap, how you plan your route through the nodes, and how well you you manage your ship's power during fights.
how come you dudes dont get 500k vieuws per video. the quality of all of these are AMAZING, and have so much time spent on them, why havent the masses found you yet??
love your thoughtful videos !
Both are necessary for a story/character driven video game. Recent example that totally envelopes that: The Last of Us. Never actually played it but watched a lot of walkthroughs in order and was blown away by it.
And as someone who has actually played it, I can tell you TLoU's game design is anything but complex and deep.
no...no no I didnt mean its game design but the story, the characters, the plot, the emotions and their personal backgrounds. It was highly complex....maybe you didnt like the game?
I liked the game but mechanically, it isn't special.
What do you mean?Like the way Naughty Dog laid out the mechanics visually? the inventory?
***** What does the story have to do with Depth vs Complexity of the GAME MECHANICS?
Dwarf Fortress is the most unbelievably deep game I've ever played. I was sad that nobody I showed it to even gave it a chance.
Its for people willing to put in work to get a reward. Use it as a filter for lazy people .
I love your explanation. Very well done.
Old video yeah, and I know you are on a break, but I'd LOVE to see your take on Zachtronics games.
But smart people can play complex games like dwarf fortress, and experience its complexity, greater than any other game. unless you have a game that makes you consider how a carpenter personally dislikes olive wood before making him build an artificial hive from it.
It's a little off-topic, but I've noticed a bit of competetive smash player bashing down here, and I think I'll talk about it from the pov of this video. SSBM, relative to most older fighting games, has a pretty amazing depth to complexity ratio. There are advanced techniques you must learn, but they are less intensive than complicated special inputs and such. The things you must know to be a top player in Smash are enormous, but it's such a slow ride to the top that playing with friends, then in locals, and then losing in areas of the highest play standard are all acts of learning.
Smash Bros Melee is astoundingly deep, one of the deepest competitive experiences out there. Items and Stage Hazards add an aspect to the game that is not entirely learn-able and instead utterly random, destroying this beautiful depth in certain situations. Brawl lacks both part of the depth and part of the complexity of Melee, but the same sentiments /mostly/ stand.
It's useful to remember, /everybody/ plays video games to have fun( or another immersive experience). No matter how competitive you are. A high level match of Marth vs Falco on Fountain of Dreams is amazingly fun (which is more realistic than the old, tired FOX ONLY FINAL DESTINATION joke, though that matchup can be fun too, believe it or not). Criticizing people for how they play a game is antithetical to the growth of the medium, and I find it a very disappointing fact that somebody who does so would be a fan of a such an intelligent UA-cam series as this one.
Back in 06', Melee actually embodied part of what this video series outlined as what games would need to do to be considered a mainstream sport. It was missing a few vital things, but it was such a good and interesting scene. Anything set on destroying that is either misguided or maniacal, whether you be Nintendo or a random youtuber.
I'm a smash 4 player and have no interest in Melee. But when you watch them play, it's incredible and imo more complex than most mainstream fighting games.
Basically, I agree.
9!
A while back, in one of the Games You Might Not Have Tried episodes, Knights in the Nightmare was brought up. What with being a turn-based real-time shooter-tactical-RPG the game has incredible complexity, and it mitigates it using a relatively simple UI (a bit less so on the DS since the Wisp is touch-controlled and everything is on the top screen pretty much) and introducing new unit classes relatively slowly, in addition to having the tutorials accessible just about any time. Just thoughts.
from the moment I saw the title I was thinking "he is going to mention Go at some point."
the point about engagement vs elegance is a really good point. I should have considered it more before this. I played Go a good bit but i do not feel all that compelled or engaged by it. The most engaging part of Go is the opponent you play against. Why is that?
He sounds constantly at 1.5x playback speed
This makes me think a lot on how league of legends and dota 2 are pretty different. When you compare league of legends vs dota, league has a better Depth to Complexity ratio then dota 2. Which is a good reason why league has more people playing it then dota 2. But dota 2 does have more depth then league but it has a lot more complexity then league which reduces people who play it due to harder learning curve but when you get through the curve then their is more engagement in dota 2 then league bc their is more depth just it has alot more complexity. Both games are wonderful in their own way and style.
Hail the only person on the entire internet that is neither a DotA or LoL fanboy. You win, sir.
I enjoyed this presentation thank you ☺
While I agree with the conclusion in general, I also think some of us actually like the challenge of trying to learn and understand a really complex rulset and can see that struggle as part of the enjoyment of a game. Maybe not true for most people, but a still a few.
Boy that was complex.
Think of the board game Go.
+Classix you mean the one mentioned in the episode?
+Mr. Dapper No, the other one.
Awesome video, very smart. Excellent points.
3:45 Battle for Wesnoth!!! Great turn-based strategy game!!!
Depth in D&D = INFINITE!!!
Jakub Przybylski This is true, but D&D also has quite a lot of complexity behind it as well. You hand a first-time player a stat sheet with a rule book and tell them to make a character, they'll probably get very frustrated. Especially if the party or DM doesn't take the time to help them understand it al.
3.5 is certainly more complex, while not really giving new players added depth that they can actually use and taken literally the rules for 5e are definitely more balanced. In my, both as a DM and as a player, experience, I have reached a point where I prefer 3.5 but I never start new players on 3.5, instead starting them on 5. While yes, you can use your own imagination and skills to create your own added complexity or depth to 5, that is literally what a group of game designers were paid to do and they created something probably a lot better than you or I or any single person could come up with in a few years, and I prefer to use my time designing the world, stories, and characters than sitting down to think of some random gameplay errata (which like any DM I also create new custom options for players, but I devote far less time to that). I would also like to turn your point on its head, because balance is FAR easier to modify on the fly as a DM than adding more options is, plus nitty gritty of gameplay balance is less important at the core of most long term campaigns. In my opinion, 3.5 gives a far more personalized experience to each player, making every player character completely unique and have a unique play-style. Of course it is a sliding scale of benefit vs complexity, your opinion is as valid as mine and its up to personal taste, but maybe don't include a passive aggressive insult to people with differing opinions. THAT turns off people from playing D&D more than any rules change ever could.
are you spirit science?
I'd say no, because the Extra Credits guys are actually smart.
Mario Oddysey's movements have an incredible amount of depth too them, they have 3 buttons and a metric shit ton that you can do with those 3 buttons and in my opinion has made the game incredibly fun
Yes, I'd say that's an excellent assessment. EVE is a game you take with you for sure. I find that sometimes at work when there's a down moment my mind will wander and I'll think about which star system I want to go explore the next day, or which skill needs training next.
I'm not sure but I think MMO's in general are like this, as a way of encouraging people to continue playing (read: paying subscriptions).
Smash is super deep, and it's nowhere near complex in any way. Melee is probably the most amazing accident I've ever seen. Anyone can pick up and play once they know what button does what, and yet it has a growing competitive scene and a meta that is still changing over 10 years later.
Just look at Minecraft! Low complexity and rather high depth.
don't forget Kerbal Space Program, high depth AND high complexity, there are literally millions of ways I could get to orbit, but each is interesting and complex in its own way.
WarriorServent009
That's just the thing. KSP is too complex for me. It needs me to learn more than I'm willing to just for a game. ^^
As they say in the video: Complexity doesn't make a game good. Depth does.
I would say that KSP is a game that lets you set the complexity and pace you want to play at, getting to orbit for example is easy and not very complex, going to one of Kerbins moons is sort of complex depending on how you do it, and going to other planets is very complex depending on how you do it, and you need to put a lot of forethought into it. Really, it just has a set of very simple rules, hands you a ton of parts and then lets you determine how complex you want to make it.
relgukxilef
You nailed it there. 'too complex FOR ME'.
It's important to remember that different people have different strengths. Some people might find a game too complex, others might find it just right and still others may find it too simple.
By making a game more complex you may lose some potential customers, but what is often ignored is that by making a game less complex, you lose customers from the other end of the scale.
Unfortunately, high complexity games are more difficult to make well so the games industry is saturated with dumbed down crap. IMO.
Actually, I'd say that Minecraft has really high complexity now. Most of us have been playing so long that we've slowly built up all the rules, but the PC version really needs a tutorial for newcomers because of how complex it is.
Something I've noticed is that complexity can vary from one player to another.
For example, look at Minecraft: one player could only focus on the basic aspects of the game, creating a very simple experience. On the other hand, another player could focus on the game's inner workings and mechanics, making their experience orders of magnitude more complex.
The thing about Minecraft, though, is that its depth/complexity ratio is fairly consistent, meaning that the more a player knows about the game itself, the more they can do with that knowledge, which is how we get people building full computers or working smartphones in Minecraft.
thanks for this video! helps to be reminded :3
Wow another aspect where Pokemon aces. Easy to get into and hard to master.
Complexity: Catching Pokemon with different stats and movesets, you battle and defeat trainers. Simple to grasp and get into. It is only very complex if you choose to dive deeper.
Depth: How you choose to maximize the stats and movesets to bring out the potential of a Pokemon. Which is practically infinite. This is when the true complexity comes in. With EVs and IVs, Egg moves, Natures and other stuff. You can practically create multiple teams of Pokemon going this way.
This is exactly what I've always disliked about sc2. It's always lauded by its fans as being so skill-intensive but a lot of the things that make it skill-intensive are simply uninteresting chores. 99% of the time there is no meaningful decision being made when, say, injecting larva as zerg because it's basically always correct to inject as soon as it is possible. That just means you have to every 30 seconds look at each of your bases and click on them. I don't deny the multi-tasking it requires but it's just a pointless task added to the game purely for the purpose of making it harder to play. Don't get me wrong, I love difficult games, but I feel a huge amount of the difficulty in sc2 is in the wrong place. It makes sc2 feel like a routine, soulless game to me. I've never disliked such a polished and competitive strategy game so much.
Sc2 is for APM whores....
It's been a while, but I don't think there were any Zerg in Soul Calibur... :P
Such an insightful comment dm9910 and you have put into words what has always turned me away from SC2. Magicka: Wizard Wars is a game with not as much depth as SC2, but close enough and much more simple and elegant. The best feature of the starcraft franchise is the whole play-counterplay system. The issue with this is that it is inherently complex, and often times requires a lot of button presses to accomplish not that much. Although high level players of SC2 have higher APMs than low level players, this is not the main factor in the skill difference, the thinking is. Thus the APM contributes to the irreducible complexity of SC2, and results in a loss of depth for beginning players. It is hard for a beginner to play with the type and amount of units the game has to offer because they just aren't available until you press the buttons fast enough to complete the chores require. Indeed, like previously mentioned, it is like chess in some way but only if chess require you to knot and undo complex knots with one hand over and over again while you played only with the other.
MWW has a similar amount of options, can handle the same amount of APM, but gets so much more done with the each button press. Additionally, high and low level players experience a similar amount of depth and excitement, but it scales at just the right pace so neither is bored. The result feels much more intense, concentrated and fun. The difference between SC2 and MWW is that SC2 requires you to press a lot of buttons fast without much thinking, and the thinking lies outside of the actions, while MWW allows you to press a lot of buttons fast, if you are skilled enough, and rewards you for doing so but does not require you to do so to experience the game.
There are too many SC's, apparently.
It took me a while to realize you were talking about Star Craft, and not Supreme Commander.
skill intensive? Its just a clicking competition, long term strategy is almost meaningless, you cant even make large armies.
how the heck have I not heard of this channel
before today?!
Have you watched any of the tutorial video's on youtube for it? Also, I find that it's easier to learn if you can manage to wall off a small area underground with no access to the outside world with everything the dwarves need to live sustainably, which is basically just a small farm plot with seeds, some pots or barrels to store booze in, a pick, and anvil, and some sort of fuel, probably a muddied up area for growing wood if you want to play it safe and learn slowly.
Wait what? Doom has infinitely more depth than Call of Duty guys.
Absolutely not. I'm talking about the solo campaign here. CoD is a long corridor with scripts. Nothing much to do except walk and shoot. Doom had an exceptional level design, secrets, very different weapons and enemies. And I'm pretty sure I missed some stuff. CoD (and every shooter nowadays) is pretty shallow compared to the old FPS we had before.
Elki C "Doom has infinitely more depth than Call of Duty" says nothing about which features you want to cherry pick to make your argument. Call of Duty is way more deep than Doom as a whole. The single player campaign could be argued to be less deep than Doom's, but that doesn't speak for the entire game. It's overtly obvious that people don't play CoD for it's solo campaign; people buy it for the online multiplayer, which is where CoD has Doom absolutely wrecked in terms of depth. Nothing Doom can offer in it's single player game can amount to the depth of CoD's multiplayer game.
Alexander Jones
We then can talk about Doom's multiplayer which has nothing to be ashamed of in front of CoD. The weapon choice might be greater in CoD but it's a lot of small number changes between weapons of the same type while Doom still has weapons very different from each other. There's only coop and deathmatch available in Doom but you're also telling me that people buy it mostly for the multiplayer (which is VERY debatable). You know what? They buy it mostly for the deathmatch (which is also very debatable, just making you know that argument is not very good). My point is solo Doom has just plain more depth than solo CoD while multiplayer CoD proabably has a bit more depth than Doom because of the poor choice of weapons that is not that amazing and the killstreaks that are unfortunately ruining the balance of the game.
Elki C Doom is a masterful single player experience by any standards.
I suppose the ultimate question is; Can modern shooter progression systems be considered Skinner Boxes and if so can Skinner Boxes be considered depth?
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This is interesting. I think I picked up the general idea on my own before. I was so enthusiastic of what I thought was complexity. It was really depth. I was thinking in terms of having a lot of content. There is a huge variety of attacks to use, enemies to fight, items to gain, quests to do, regions to explore, etc. The kind of complex things I want to avoid is to features that make the game less player friendly. I break up things into optional bits. It is where a player can learn at their own pace at a gentile learning curve. I simplified the calculations which will make game play easier, even if all the math had to be done by hand. I have a habit of making my game turn based. Now I learn it is a better way to go. I can go nuts with intricate strategy and get away with it. Granted I make it so simple strategies can still work, especially in the easier modes.
Irreducible complexity reminds of a term in Intelligent Design. Whether it is in gaming or biology, it is a bad thing. It is much better to gradually develop with one little piece at a time. I came of with two examples. Lets say there is a game where one built and used their own bacteria. One kind of useful feature is a flagella, which can enhance travel abilities. Unfortunately, it is so complicated that a beginner couldn't build one. It would be frustrating. So it is better to have the task of building a syringe first. It requires some but not all of the same parts. It is easier, and gives good practice. Yet the syringe is still useful for poisoning opponents. Lets say there is another game where people can pick and grow their own plants in order to use them. A domestic banana may provide really powerful bonuses, such as lots of health. Unfortunately they may be too difficult to obtain. It is better for a beginner to use wild bananas instead. They are easily acquired by picking them off plants in the wild. There is a huge price of making them weaker. It is okay if the benefit is still there. As a player progresses they can learn how to grow their own bananas in a virtual farm. They can bread them to be more domestic. They become more powerful in the process.It is gradual.
I tend to design very complex games (big fan of D&D and Magic... :D). This helped me a lot to understand what complexity is good (one that gives lots of depth) and what's wrong/unnecessary.
Your terminology is confusing.
"Complex: Consisting of many different and connected parts." - Oxford online dictionary.
What you're referring to is "the *apparent* complexity of a game", specifically, complexity in the viewer's interpretation of the information provided. The only difference between a game that makes its complexity digestible through user-friendly UI design and a game that shows its complexity all at once with encyclopedic UI design is just that: UI design. Just because Minecraft dresses its mechanics in relatable, tactile world elements doesn't make it any less complex; it is more understandable to the player, but the complexity is inherent no matter who's playing it.
Complexity has two meanings; actual complexity, as defined above, and *apparent* complexity (how complex something *looks* at first glance). The latter definition, the definition you are using, simply refers to User Interface and not much more. The former definition - the main definition - just simply refers to how many connected parts can have an effect on each other; which is how you describe the word "depth". Your definition of "depth": "a wide range of meaningful variations" itself implies innate complexity, as if it was just "simple quantity of unrelated options" then a different number of guns would just be more of the same, whereas the complex decision-making regarding the differing dynamics of "deep" game design itself is a form of complexity.
I believe what you are attempting to say is:
"It is better to have deeper, complex mechanics that affect each other to give the player meaningful decision-making agency - *BUT* you need to be careful that the UI is digestible enough for the player to contextualize and manage that complexity. When the UI provides raw information, it's putting the responsibility of consolidating and contextualizing that information *squarely on the player's shoulders,* which can lead to physical exhaustion, confusion, even frustration for the player. Dwarf Fortress being a prime example of this problem. But apparent complexity in the UI doesn't have to be this way. Some of the most popular games are the ones with a UI that takes workload off of the player; providing the player with only the information that is immediately relevant; this way you don't even need to take complexity out of the game; you're just simply keeping some of the complexity in the background until the player has direct need of it. Of course some players like to deal with more of the complexities in their own brain, and enjoy seeing *literally everything* at the same time; but more often than not, as a designer it's better to err on the side of caution, and make sure that everything important in the game is clarified in a way that doesn't overwhelm the player. That way, the player is free to devote all that brain-power into *exploring,* *discovering,* and heck, maybe even *enjoying* your game's complexity at their own pace." end fake-quote.
If what you're saying is completely different from my interpretation then I'm truly on the wrong page.
This is an amazing comment, and it may never be read by most. I have almost the same thought when I watched the video. The depth from what I understand from the video, is that depth in games is where players may have different choices that leads to varied outcomes. (this can happen with our without complexity, and it is important to note that, there is no single outcome that is advantageous by a huge margin for every situation.)
And you also have identified two different types of complexity, *apparent complexity* and *actual complexity.* In the video it also mentioned "mental calculations per second", and what I used to understood from the complexity ExtraCredit team is trying to convey, and this is also a term I often hear Chinese developers mentioning. Apparent complexity, i.e bad UI forces players to exert extra thoughts per second on meaningless/non-engaging mental calculations. Where as *actual complexity* allows players to make *meaningful choices* (depth), or *meaningless choices* (no depth).
- Dwarf fortress is a good example for *apparent complexity with depth.*
- WoW's old talent system is *actual complexity* with *no depth* (there is pretty much only one optimal talent choice for each spec).
- Dota's creep block and creep deny are *actual complexity* with *no depth* (deny creeps and block creeps, or you won't do as well in game, no choice)
*Depth* may exist without *actual complexity,* for example, to unlock a door in a horror game, should i break it and risk the monsters hearing it? or try to lock-pick it wasting valuable time, or use the one-time use only key? Not complex, but provides choices that leads to different outcomes where players may learn from.
The video combined with your comment is very thought invoking, hopefully this conversation may continue on with more people pouring in their own ideas and understanding. *Thank you ExtraCredit &SamWallace Artisan.*
*p.s.* So is it possible to lower complexity?
I think the lowering complexity or lowering the "cost of understanding" (Chinese developers loves using this, the cost here is the mental cost of the players) is a very important topic worthy of its own video.
The video mentioned "complexity limits depth" where as "depth is bought with depth", the two complexities are different and thus needed to be treated differently.
" *(apparent)* complexity limits depth" where as "depth is bought with *(actual)* complexity"
and the mentioning of "finite resource" of complexity, is more about the limit of brainpower and attention of the players (attention has reduced greatly, thus the dumb'ed down games). And I think its more adequate to explain it using the *cost of understanding.*
TLDR cause Im feeling lazy, but skimming through what i read looked accurate.
"Artificially complex".... call it what you want, but I'd much rather play Dwarf Fortress than some brain-dead indie game whose developers use the excuse of "depth over complexity" to cut features from the game. Sorry, but I'm not going to spend hundreds of hours playing Braid or Super Meat Boy, it's just not going to happen. Great games, but their lack of complexity makes them 20 hour games. I will, however, spend hundreds of hours in a game like Path of Exile, which is far more complex.
+PiggiesGoMoo People want BREADTH too, not just depth. This is proven by the popularity of complex games like LoL, Dota 2, Path of Exile, WoW, etc.
+PiggiesGoMoo By artificially complex they meant stuff that just increases the learning curve without actually increasing depth like last hits or the large amount of boring perks that must be "gamed," so to speak, in Fallout 4. Things like the currency system in PoE or the items of various mobas or denies in Dota are things that need to be learned, but they are still something that actually adds mechanics to the game that increase the options available to the player without stopping the player from understanding these options. And also, I really hope no one is actually calling puzzle platformers deep as that just doesn't make any sense.
+PiggiesGoMoo How are you even judging Super Meat Boy on complexity? It's a platformer, depth is not the priority in a platformer!
+Kalernor They could have added features to the game to make it much more interesting. But no, the game design mantra these days is "pretty visuals, simplified systems". This is despite the fact that more complex games tend to be more popular. Why is Tales of Mej'Eyal more played than Dungeons of Dredmor? Why are MMORPGs, League of Legends, and Dota played more than FPS games? Counter strike is the poster-boy for "depth over complexity", yet it is absolutely dwarfed in terms of popularity by far more complex games (Dota and LoL).
PiggiesGoMoo It seems that your particular gaming tastes are satisfied mostly by complexity over any other design features, which is perfectly fine. We live in a world of different opinions, but you are overlooking the pleasure and joy found in other games, such as super meat boy per your example, which demonstrate impressive feats not found in many of the games you mentioned, other than complexity. I assure you whatever features you think could have been added, despite you not mentioning them, would mostly take away from the level of quality/effort put into the design and development of game factors more important to a platformer than complexity, such as control fluidity, tutorial design, level design, etc. I would like to add that the point depth vs complexity which you are arguing against isn't "Complex games are bad", but rather good game design should emphasize bringing the MOST DEPTH out the game elements you have, rather than adding needless elements just to increase complexity. The games you mentioned do that. Mostly everything in LoL and Dota has a reason and furthers the depth of gameplay. What these games have achieved is the maximum depth out of the games complexity. It's an issue of ratio.
Love the reference to Go! It's basically the perfect example: Simple rules, but a complexity even supercomputers can't solve.
Thank You for mentioning the UI. Ever since I finally broke into enjoying Paradox grand-strategy games Im absolutely certain that you can make a game as complex as possible, if you can make a good enough UI for the player to handle all the information he needs to process at any one time.
Its the reason why was even able to start really playing their games and I hope with time they learn to improve the UI so much that near-casuals can play without resorting to UA-cam tutorials and lets-plays.
You dont need to reduce complexity to make your game appeal to a larger audience, you only need to improve the interface the player is using to make complex systems manageable and enjoyable.
"Dwarf Fortress"
"Artificially complex"
Don't make me laugh.
what do u mean by making you laugh?
Because it IS complex, not artificially.
ghostbusterz Please tell me you watched the full video before commenting.
I did, and he makes valid points, but that doesn't make that statement any less wrong.
what kind of complex is it?
Oh, you know I haven't played too many RTSes before but that's a really interesting point you raise.
I did play a little bit of Age of Empires II years ago, but hardly remember it.. and probably not even worth mentioning (oops). Anyway, I can totally see common overall sequences of actions / strategies becoming 2nd nature after a while in a certain RTS. While decisions may be more complex, the actual clicking or w/e through them doesn't take long if you know exactly what you're about to do, huh?
Hey, a Wesnoth shoutout, nice!
A perfect example of this is king Arthur gold in the alpha it was great each match took hours because it was very difficult to take out a castle but now the archers can climb any wall and the knight can plant an explosive keg which destroys massive wall at once
4:30 best EC drawing!
I felt like I understood what they were talking about as I watched it, but I realized towards the middle that I was more confused on the topic the more I watched. Sometimes less is more, like the simple ending. Maybe sum things up as you go? IDK I don't write games
4:30 Best drawing ever XD
Devil May Cry 3, God Hand and Ninja Gaiden 2. Super easy to pick up, play and easy to understand. Beat up guy with sword or/and fist. But the amount of options you have at disposing of your enemies is some of the deepest out there in the hack n slash and beat em up genre.