No Showstoppers, Please

[Dracos]

I'd like to talk a bit about when game experiences go into a halt state that all too often these days tends to be ignored.  All game experiences are a sequence of theoretically interesting and entertaining events, some more challenging than others, some more relaxing, all put together in the intent to provide an entertaining experience worth a player's time.  So what happens when one gets to a point in the sequence that cannot be passed?  The show stops there until the player figures a way around it, by means fair or foul or quits the game experience entirely.  I'd label these instances showstoppers for the purpose of discussion, in the same fashion bugs which halt the game experience consistently are called.  How they do this varies from game to game, but I find to be largely synonymous in the nature of the issue from game to game and thus able to be analyzed at a more general level.

Before I go into analysis and solutions, let's define the problem at this general level.  In a game a player comes across a challenge that upon their first attempt to overcome it, they find no success.  This challenge could be anything from a boss to a difficult puzzle to a rhythm challenge; the specifics that make it up are largely irrelevant to the nature of the showstopper problem.  Generally, an energetic and engaged player will not be swayed by a single failure in the game.  They'll charge right in another time, attempting to utilize their experience the first time to overcome it and that might be the end of the problem or they could find it still halting the experience.  From here, players tend to go into training to attempt to solve the problem.  This can take many forms, from repeatedly throwing themselves against the problem and analyzing each time what works and didn't, to practicing on simpler parts of the game to fine tune their skills or increase their in-game powers, to exploring to find more information within the game world or abilities they missed that are necessary in the solving of the problem.  At this point, most gamers will continue a cycle of training and experimentation within the game rules for a bit, sometimes three to five iterations, some dedicated ones might put up with tens to hundreds, largely based on how much they're enjoying the game prior to the sequence, how much they're feeling that they're indeed making progress against the challenge, how short an iteration time needs to be, and their own personal mentality towards such issues.  A player may also explore the possibility of other routes to circumnavigate the challenge that they find themselves unable to surmount, which in rare cases solves the problem.   Usually, at some point before totally abandoning the experience, they go to external means of getting past this halt point, whether searching for solutions on the internet, contacting friends also playing the game, or simply utilizing some manner of cheating.  At this point, one could largely consider that the experience has failed to offer them enough effective way within its own structure to continue enjoying the experience, but as most players are completely willing to accept this as an acceptable element at points, it's usually not the end of it.  From here, having utilized generally every method within and external to the game structure that they find available and acceptable to themselves, the player circumnavigates or surmounts the challenge or stops playing the game experience, leaving in a usually frustrated manner and generally either blaming themselves or the game for a very miserable ending experience.  The show has stopped for them and regardless of the quality of prior or future events in the sequence they're leaving on a sour note.

This is often not perceived as a bad issue, or indeed a showstopper, to a  game experience because the assumption is often made that if a given player cannot solve a certain challenge, they would inevitably find the very next challenge completely impossible as it would be harder to provide a  continually rising level of challenge to experience.  Fortunately though, this assumption rarely seems to be the case.  In adventure games, where I first witnessed it being a common and discussable trait, the puzzles were often unrelated to each other in difficulty and style, and more often than not, a halting instance would be a result of either missed information, or some other element, or far more commonly simply thinking differently.  Most find it easy to accept that people will approach puzzles in different fashions and therefore puzzles certain people find very easy, others will find extraordinarily difficult based often on elements that are largely unrelated to the intended difficulty of the problem.  Through discussion and my own anecdotal experience, I've witnessed enough instances to believe that this issue is actually general throughout most game designs in a precisely the same fashion, largely due to the admirable desire of designers to provide variation in challenge design versus simply a case of the challenge being exactly like the previous challenge but twice as long and requiring more precision.  Even when the case is that it is an intended leap in difficulty, rarely it seems to be the case that failure to be able to pass the given event in the sequence is at all related with inability to be able to handle the remainder of the sequence.  Therefore, analyzing the specific instance can be done almost within a vacuum to the other game events as they do not often necessitate it's solving in any other sense than the that the sequence was set that this challenge came before that challenge and the design required that the player surmounted challenge A before proceeding to challenge B.

Now with that exhaustively defined, what can or should be done about these types of challenges within games?  I think it is an interesting design challenge to be able to provide flexibility such that a single poor mapping of player to challenge within a game experience does not stop the experience as a whole and there's a few ways that I've seen or thought of that do just that.

One that deserves notice is Capcom's Resident Evil 4 which utilized a hidden difficulty feature which modified itself based on player capabilities in order to attempt to minimize the likelihood that a player would perpetually be stopped while meanwhile rewarding continued success with a more difficult challenge to overcome.  Because of this, the amount of iterations they could ensure that the player would attempt was likely increased as the game secretly ensured that the player would have a strong chance of making greater progress against the challenge in repeated attempts alongside the player's own experience.  This naturally greatly reduced the likelihood of a showstopping event without a need to go outside the game structure.  I am told that Spiderman 2 utilized a similar method, secretly reducing the number of enemies in accordance with how the player had been doing recently and thus attempting to ensure that a player would find themselves making greater progress towards surmounting the challenge after each failed attempt.  Both of these methods particularly help expand the range of players which can map well onto the challenge, but have the issue that they can reduce a hardcore player's enjoyment of the experience when their skills don't get to grow to the challenge that they originally saw.  This type of player wants to get to reach the harder challenge and is saddened when they find that the interesting challenge they first saw is replaced with an easier one.  An easy, if not seamless to the experience, way around this issue would simply be to ask first on the death screen if the player would like help or an easier time of it.

Another style of sidestepping the issue is acknowledging it exists and providing alternate routes or minimal traversals that do not involve solving everything.  The latter case works particularly well in mission based experiences where the progress through the game can be separated more easily from a specific level by level layout and instead offer the next chunk of segments upon certain minimal completion amounts, such as allowing a player who has finished one of three stages to move on to the next area, while at the same time offering them the chance to play the other two and experience more fun gameplay or narrative.  Similarly, though often more expensive, is simply always attempting to include two or more routes through any sequence of events such that it is not inherent that the challenging event must be passed.  Often this is a clear possibility in many action game levels that is neglected, such as making a puzzle centric route through and a more battle focused one, to allow skill in one area to circumvent the issue.  Both of these methods do inevitably involve content that isn't used, which is often too expensive in both designing and creation to be ideal solutions for development.

Another methodology used by certain adventure games, notably Torin's Passage, is to provide assistance based on time of frustration.  By maintaining a running timer that is reset between the solving of challenges, it's possible to know that a player is running into trouble and offer in game assistance to them in the form of hints or other increased aid.  In Torin's Passage this was an optional hint system that enabled itself after a certain time span and gave the option of asking for a hint when the timer ran out.  These hints would get more specific at a cost of score in the game, giving both an advantage to not taking them and ensuring they were constantly provided to prevent showstoppers in what was a largely linear puzzle solving experience.

A method I haven't seen used before but should certainly be possible within any game structure is a simple bypass option upon defeat.  Most players would say no to it, except when they personally feel halted by the challenge, though it clearly could be varied based on the game design and studies into how much or little frustration the experience is supposed to accept.  By allowing a simple bypass, no extra content would need to be added and it'd be very simple to reduce rewards for players accepting it while at the same time keeping the game flowing well.  How does one figure out what elements might need such a bypass?  Well, I'd say a good rule of thumb is if a designer has to actually spend more than a few minutes on designing it, it probably could utilize such a system.  Anything that makes an entire challenge section is probably a good candidate for this type of work around and by doing it in game, it reduces the likelihood of the player stopping or breaking the game rules with some kind of cheat device.

There are likely others, but those are the few I've seen or come up with.  In conclusion though, show stopper events can be a definite impediment to a more satisfying game experience that game designers should strive to overcome in the same fashion that we'd strive to overcome a bug that crashes the game at the same point every time.  These don't simply appear in bad games, but often fantastic games which aside from one or two events are well within a player's capabilities, so at all points they need to be watched out for.

[Anastasia]

I dunno.

A large part of my gutshot reply to this is 'Oh shut up and stop sucking at the game'. Assuming a game is decently playtested and balanced, if you can't beat a game it's your own fault/lack of skill at the game. The entire overblown mindset of quantifying 'it's too hard, we have to bail the player out!' really tends to irritate me.

Yes, yes, cranky old gamer checking in.

[Dracos]

*shrugs* It's different mentalities and I've seen enough games where it goes "having a blast, having a blast, hitting a wall...hitting a wall...hitting a wall... okay, fine, end of game.'  I've seen enough gamers and game designers that care tons about the challenge and that has it's place.  I'm not really one of them.  I also think game experiences are moving in a better direction by having multiple acceptable clear conditions for various things rather than a single strict one ("have fought 500 times or beaten x boss"-SoulCalibur 3) and further rewards for those who are climbing the mountain.

 To me if the entertainment experience ends 12 hours into a 50 hour experience, then 38 hours of developed game were wasted on that person.  Sure, you got their money, but odds are you don't have  them for the sequel and they're not walking away with any sense of closure on it.  Also game balance is a tenuous and oft distributed thing.  Even on extremely polished titles, I've seen instances where one level or section is abnormal.  It's a side effect of the fact those critical sections tend to be done by entry level workers.  To me, we can go 'look, we're giving a massive chance for a fiero moment by them overcoming this challenge!' and there's a lot of good in that or we can go "sure, let's do that, but can we widen the number of folks that continue to play that?"

I didn't talk about it there, but the inspiration for this article was actually elite beat agents, with its multiple level chunks that got me thinking on it. I haven't written my thoughts on it down but I came at it as a novice in that genre and willing to accept that I probably wouldn't get very far.  What happened there though was very exotically different from my expectations and it's part of what got me thinking this way.  Frankly, there are some bad levels on there.  Not just taken on my count, but separately confirmed with a fair number of other players who 'warned me of them' during initial excited talks on it rocking and others explaining it when I hit some of them.  When I hit the first blocking point (aka one I lost at repeatedly more than 3-4 times while learning), I hammered at it, occasionally going back to other levels to practice and try things.  Eventually, I got by it...  and promptly demolished without thought the next four levels after it.  That felt..really wrong to me.  The next block was actually the last level of normal, which other fans assure me is, of course, a terrible level and it's hard version is far more fun and balanced.  To me, it was just out of my reach but I hammered at it for a good while.  Then I watched another player play and beat that level, moving on to hard mode.  This is brought up three observations:  
A)I could reasonably easily beat most of the hard levels and would in fact enjoy doing so.  Except that rather than play them at all, I was stopped at beating this extraordinarily hard (to me) level.
B)Clearly, I couldn't suck as much as I'd been believing in that game because as a game that scored on how well you played, I had more than twice the score of this player who was at hard mode (which gives way more points per level cleared anyway).  Having the capability to demolish perfectly most of the game while not being able to beat a choice level made me blink and ask 'why does it need to stop there?'
C)There's probably another block point for me somewhere down the line in here.  I'll go play another game rather than climbing the mountain in hopes of more fun.

To me, as a game that was largely a collection of unrelated levels, EBA provided interesting thought material.  Similar to old puzzle games, they could've allowed all the puzzles visible and it wouldn't have hurt much ...man I'm sleepy.  more another time.

and sleepy enough not to have hit submit last  night..woozy =D

Dracos

[Halbarad]

The "skip this level if it's giving you trouble" mechanic is a fairly rare one, but rather nice when it does show up. The one game I've been playing of late that follows this pattern is Shoot the Bullet, one of the games from the Tohou Project (a series of highly patterned shooting games from Japan, which I recommend that everyone play - contact me for more info! ahem.)

ANYWAY! Shoot the Bullet is a rather unique form of shooter. Rather having a ship that fires at enemies to kill them all (or even a magical girl firing at various spirits, etc as in the rest of the Tohou series). Instead, you play a karasu-tengu reporter whose current project is to go out and take pictures of the various residents of Gensokyo (the world in which Tohou is set). No one likes the paparazzi, though, so most of them tend to greet you with a flood of danmaku ('bullet hell') patterns. Fortunately your camera has the ability to remove their shots from the screen, and so you set out to get your picture collection!



The game is broken up into ten levels plus an "Extra", each consisting of anywhere from six to nine separate scenes. Most levels are devoted to either two or three separate characters from the other Tohou games, and each scene involves a different shot pattern and requirement for number of pictures you need to take. The game starts off with a set number of levels unlocked already (I believe four), and a certain number of scene successes (visible in the upper-right hand corner of the screenshot above) will unlock later stages of the game - I don't have all the requirements on hand, but I do know that Extra requires 66 scene successes, for example.

Understandably, some characters are more difficult than others to deal with, and part of this is taken care of in the level design - you fight two of the other games' first-stage bosses in Level 1, and levels 7, 8, 9, and 10 all consist of other games' penultimate and ultimate bosses. Even within that pattern, however, it's not always a given; after only a few tries last night I was able to capture scene 7-4, while I haven't touched anything else on any level past 6.

That said, since these patterns are specific to each boss, some are easier and some are harder just based on who you're fighting. Stage 3-1 with Alice Margatroid presented a HUGE stumbling block to me for a long time, and it's pretty widely considered to be the hardest of the game's early stages. This can be compared to a few other bosses in stages 5 and 6, who are incredibly easy to beat scenes for once you realize their patterns.

Thanks to the scene skipping option, however, no one scene needs to block you from completing anything else. I personally ended up wasting about 140 shots on 3-1 (the scene requires you to take 5 successive shots without dying to beat it) before quitting it in disgust and moving on - where I managed to beat all of level 3 and a good chunk of 4 before coming back to finish off 3-1. If I really hated the scene that much, I could theoretically finish the entire remainder of the game without ever coming back to see 3-1 at all - successes on other scenes would have met the unlock requirements for later stages, and the skills I picked up working on some of the much more difficult scenes later in the game would make 3-1 a joke on returning to it - which is more or less what happened.

In general, Tohou is a very well-designed series in terms of showstoppers. While the games and levels are difficult, it's very rare to play through any of the games and not be able to say at the end of a run "okay, I didn't quite make it this time, but here's where I can improve the next time." It can take weeks to beat a particularly difficult Extra stage, but since there's always a sense (or illusion >_>) of progress it never becomes so frustrating that you quit the game permanently in disgust.

[Anastasia]

*shrugs* It's different mentalities and I've seen enough games where it goes "having a blast, having a blast, hitting a wall...hitting a wall...hitting a wall... okay, fine, end of game.'  I've seen enough gamers and game designers that care tons about the challenge and that has it's place.  I'm not really one of them.  I also think game experiences are moving in a better direction by having multiple acceptable clear conditions for various things rather than a single strict one ("have fought 500 times or beaten x boss"-SoulCalibur 3) and further rewards for those who are climbing the mountain.

 To me if the entertainment experience ends 12 hours into a 50 hour experience, then 38 hours of developed game were wasted on that person.  (Snip)

Urgh.

If the player can't get to 'all the content', as you guys put it, it's their own fault. That's pretty much my stance on it, the designers should make the game they want without ensuring that everyone sees everything. Challenge isn't so bad.

This is an overgeneralization, but I'm really getting irritated enough to where it would be better if I let thisg o after that.

[Bjorn]

If the player can't get to 'all the content', as you guys put it, it's their own fault. That's pretty much my stance on it, the designers should make the game they want without ensuring that everyone sees everything. Challenge isn't so bad.

I think the point is: sometimes what the developer wants to do is make a game that is challenging to everyone, good and bad gamers alike.  So the question is: how do you design a game that serious gamers won't dismiss out of hand as boringly easy, and that pick-up gamers won't get a few hours into, stuck, and then be upset at wasting money on a game they can't finish?

Saying "if you can't handle it, don't play this game" is a completely fair attitude.  It's also one that cuts you out of the lion's share of the market, and for better or for worse, that's a big concern for modern developers.  Making everything butt-easy, though, tends to lead to mediocre games.  So the holy grail, I think, is a game in which every player can just barely beat it -- where "just barely" varies depending on the innate talent and effort level of the player in question.

None of which is to try and argue you out of your opinion, Dune: it's a completely valid one.  But from the perspective of game development, it's an interesting question to consider how, technically speaking, you can make sure that players will never find a point in your game at which they'd rather give up than buckle down.

In principle, I like the adaptive mechanism, but in practice, it either punishes you for doing well, has to start off on the hard side of things, or simply never gets hard enough to challenge good gamers.  That's a fundamental problem with a titration approach, though, so no working around.

Skipping levels... there's only a few genres in which this is practical, but when it is, it's great one.

That gets a point, though: the definition of a "showstopper" varies a lot depending on the genre of the game.  RPGs, for example, have a built-in solution: go and level.  Combined with the tactical/rock-paper-scissors aspect of boss fights, as well as the continuous nature of gameplay, there's not really a lot of alternative approaches.  There's a huge possible range of approaches for FPSs, on the other hand.

Don't know, not really saying anything deep or interesting here.  But I think it's an interesting question.  Arguably, an interesting evolution of the console system would be to start keeping track of "how well does this player do in various genres," so that adaptive difficulty schemes start off with an intelligent guess.

[Dracos]

That would be a pretty phenomenially cool thing to work with.  A system that games identify themselves and record various statistics on game capabilities and offer the player the opportunity to adjust themselves to the gamer at start, getting harder or easier as appropriate or simply automatically doing it  (but I'd be wary of such if only because guessing wrong silently could be very detrimental, where guessing wrong openly isn't so much).  It'd though require a really high level being thought of early by the console maker all the way down.

But that's a really neat thought.

Another though is really trusting the player.  A few old games and some modern ones did this by basically letting the player have an amazingly open options screen.  It wouldn't be an issue in a system that has the capability of adaptive gameplay to let the player go:
"I'd like this game to start at the hardest level and do no adaptive gameplay."
or
"I'd like this game to start at the hardest level and do optional adaptive gameplay."
or
"I'd like this game to start at the easiest level and do automatic adaptive gameplay."

Servicing the hardcore, the hardcore who aren't sure if they really are good enough and doesn't want to truly get stuck forever at a point, or the novices that want it to get harder as they get better.

Similarly good tools is labeling better.  I know for a lot of games I'd be hard pressed without playing through all of them (and sometimes even afterwards) to know what's the real difference between difficulty level 3,4,5,6, and 7 (ala some street fighter  games), other than knowing what's supposed to be harder than the other.  It'd be a good question on how one can clearly communicate "This is too easy for you.  This is too hard.  This will push you.  Play it."

Dracos

[Ragnar]

I have to disagree with Ana a bit, for one simple reason:
I suck at most video games.
With the exception of RPGs, I've never been great at them. It takes me a substantial amount of time to get things right, especially in fighting games. Lord knows how many times I played Street Fighter 2 before I was able to move past the "easy" difficulty level.
The thing is, though, it's kind of fun once you get the hang of it. Come at me now on SF II, and I'm a good opponent.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 is the exception to this norm, as I've mentioned (read: ranted about) before. Awesome game, exept for one thing: Bison is a bitch, and he has no continue. Thus, my normal gameplay experience in SFA3 has been "kick people's asses, see Bison, get my own ass back with 5% interest, die, and start over again. From the beginning."
I don't have as much of a problem with Bison being hard; he was a freak in the original SF II as well. The problem is, once I've gotten to the last fight and lost, I really don't want to spend another twenty minutes re-doing everything that that I just did. As a result, I rarely play the game, even though it's pretty awesome.

One system that deals with this a bit is the one found in the great old-and-simple-but-addictive motorcycle game Elastomania. Mechanics-wise, It's extremely simple, and only four buttons are used in it; however, it's one of my favorite games of all time. Although it's fairly simplistic, it can be hard as hell. Enter the "skip level" option.
There are roughly 52 official levels for the game, and you must complete the previous level to move on to the next. Sometimes, though, this proves to be pretty tricky. There is an option to skip levels, and this keeps the game from getting stale, as you can simply go past a level you're stuck on and continue playing (the gameplay isn't consecutive) on a new level. The trick, though, is that you can only have five skipped levels at a time. Once you run out of skips, typically about halfway through, once you get stuck again you have to go back and complete one of the skipped levels to free up the option to skip the new one. This lets you complete the game, then go back and take on the hardest levels after you've mastered the rest. After a while, you finish them all. A good system, but not one that is conducive to any other type of game, really. It'll work for Mario, but not for your fighting games.

[Merc]

I don't like being bailed out from a challenge generally, but I'm going to disagree with Ana as well.

When I get a game, I'll generally not get something that's probably going to frustrate me because it attacks my weak points as a gamer. Not a lot of people would really.

If they get stuck on a challenge then, it's usually not something that's going to be impossible for them to get past, because it doesn't hit their weak points.

In my case, I'll get games that don't depend on quick/timed fights or lots of timed moves for example. I like taking my time with fights and while I can time a single action easily enough, actions that require a longer sequence of moves in a precise timed fashion screw me over.

So for me, showstoppers are usually something that does one of these things in a game that hasn't had any/many of those and thus hasn't given me practice at them.

Case in point, Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. At the very end of the game, you have to get to the final boss before a bell rings three times. In the very room just before this fight you have to fight three darknuts, which aren't generally opponents you can take down quickly.

As mentioned before, I like taking my time with fights. Every single darknut fight before this fight, I've done slowly and taken my time.

All of a sudden, I have three darknuts, a time limit, and no experience beating them quickly because there hasn't been any time limit fights before. Obviously, I found myself failing this fight once.

Not a problem, I'll just keep trying.

Except I've had to try and try and fucking try again and I just can't get past them before the time limit. It's incredibly frustrating when I've invested hours upon hours in a game, only to find myself stuck.

To have this happen right before the damn freaking end of a game I'd almost finished? Ugh.

This has turned a game that I could easily say I had liked into a game that I quite simply dislike because I'm unhappy with the final level design.

I dunno, telling someone to suck it up and stop sucking when they become stuck in a game when they get challenged by something they're not only bad at but haven't had practice at in the game, with no way to continue unless they succeed? That just seams low to me.

[Dracos]

Meanwhile, myself, who probably had the same largely pleasant experience throughout creamed them the first time through and was left with no where near a lasting frustrating experience.  Good example, Merc.

Dracos

[thepanda]

Would poorly placed save points be considered showstoppers or just poor design? I recall an uncle playing Dracula (I think) on the sega cd. They let you save anytime during the day, but if you got caught outside after dark you died instantly. Well, you couldn't retire/go to sleep/whatever it was that let you get through the night without getting caught outside until you completed the day's tasks.

And so he saved his game about five minutes for sundown...

[Dracos]

Bad design, but not showstoppers.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Onimusha 2 gives me another lovely example like Merc's.

The entire game about sword fighting and puzzle solving until... "Rotate your joysticks as fast as you can in opposite directions in perfect parallel.  Oops, it wasn't fast enough 'dead'.  Oops it wasn't parallel enough 'dead'..."
"You know, I'm only playing the game because wonder of wonders I enjoy the swordfighting against demons."

What a brilliant move to toss something that was mechanically unrelated to the whole rest of the game in there as a required 'get right or die' segment.  Was twice the fun with an on it's last legs controller.

Dracos
Damn shipping company!  Get my new controllers out here!