Nathaniel Chapman Interview is here

[Nathaniel Chapman]

By the way, speaking of PvP games, if anyone wants to play some Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike Online, add me on XBL.

[Wombat]

Not as such, but I do think that to some extent you can intuit how people will approach puzzles based on how they approach learning generally. And, in many ways, good content design is about teaching the player how the mechanics of the game work. Obviously the other part is designing deep and engaging mechanics, but without sufficiently training the player it's unlikely that they will be able to properly apply the mechanics of the game.

Yea, you seem to pay good attention to the designers' part of the responsibility in how to form the learning-curve of the players. Personally, I was impressed by the tutorial system of Assassins Creed series, which lets the players to repeat tutorials and practice them by their own. It would be better if the system gave a hint to direct to a specific tutorial when they are stuck, though. For, as you said, giving the players a basic "recipe" or "map" to tackle with the current problem given should be minimum standard. You must have played studied many more games than I did in my spare time, though.

[WorstUsernameEver]

So, uh, any news about when the next part of the Q&A is going to come out?

[Walsingham]

It's actually one reason why I personally am a big fan of "difficult" games - it's not that I'm sadistic towards the player or masochistic when I play difficult games. Instead, what I really are games that provide clear feedback as to whether or not I am successfully mastering their mechanics. Often that means providing serious consequences for failing to properly apply the mechanics. In many cases, standard difficulty levels in games don't require you to fully engage with the mechanics in order to win, and that's a lot less interesting to me, personally. It's also part of why I enjoy PvP games quite a bit - there's very clear feedback as to whether or not you are getting better at the game (you either win more, or don't).

 

Understood. My next question arises from my fairly whimsical reading around the topic in recent years. A lot of work has been done on how fast people realise the rules of a game have been changed, without being told.

 

The reason I bring this up is because generally difficulty curves exist on a basis of decreasing room for error. You just apply normal behaviours faster and with more diligent attention to detail. But real difficulty comes from appreciating the raw foundation principles at work in a problem space, and then adapting when learned behaviours are no longer appropriate.

 

Of course, precisely BECAUSE that would be hard for most people to get their heads around, it might not be commercially justified, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

 

If there were to be a game medium which could cope with some effort in this area it would probably be combat. The rules of winning in most combats are pretty simple. Application of range, or firepower, for example. High difficulty would subvert those rules, either by adjusting combat system variables or by altering the environment (cramped spaces, fog, and so forth).

 

A crude example of this would be Lonesome Road. Normally I take a 'fists of fury' approach, but at high difficulty that just got me killed. I had to learn and adapt, with a 'fighting defence' approach, safe havens of mines in a level, ammunition and equipment caches, creative use of companion etc. For me, highly enjoyable.

[Wombat]

Actually, Chapman covered that part already in one of his blog entries. However, I don't think his intention is dragging the players from the core-game play but gradually giving additional dimensions to it.

Anyways, in my opinion games tend to offer the most interesting difficulty options when they rely on tweaking or even adding new core challenges without invalidating the core gameplay. A great example of this is Thief. Thief's difficulty options added new challenges to their already existing stealth gameplay. They didn't choose to increase enemy health (at least, as far as I remember) because that runs at cross purposes to their core stealth gameplay. Instead, they force you to not kill anyone. This makes the game's environment navigation and perception/awareness challenges much more complex, but doesn't really alter the core balance of the weapons and tools.

 

The reason why more blunt instruments, like just increasing health and damage, tend to fail IMO is that they don't actually make the game more challenging, they just mess up the pacing. I played an ARPG recently that scaled damage and enemy HP and rather than really being more challenging at higher difficulty levels, it just turned into a massive slog. That's something you really want to avoid at all costs... pacing is key to the game being fun, and hard doesn't mean frustrating or boring, it should mean challenging.

 

So for instance, if I were designing difficulties for GTA I would probably make the guns more differentiated and single purpose in harder difficulties (IE less general purpose, innacurate guns become more inaccurate, short range guns become more short range, etc.). I might make ammo more scarce, though that can risk hurting your pacing. I might even change the handling profiles of some of the cars to make them more swervy, and a little easier to lose control of. What I wouldn't do is reduce your car's HP or increase enemy HP. I feel like those changes would just make the game more frustrating/dull, not harder.

Throwing some additional factors to the core game-play, or, what the player has learnt so far, gradually to form a steady learning curve seems to be his policy. Personally, I think this should be all the designers policy since, as it is often said, it's a bad design if a game force the players to follow how the designers think. Either through tutorials or natural flow of game-plays, the players should be able to figure out, using given utilities.

 

The reason why I brought up Assassin's Creed series is: in Assassin's Creed's case, the basic tricks players need to learn to deal with challenges can be trained through tutorials independently till the players' content, which was nice for someone who are not confident with action games like myself. However, of course, they are just utilities, not the final answers to the obstacles in the game.

 

For example, the players need to learn tricks such as multiple counters (quite absurd but it reminds me of old hack and slash movies)/double jump to deal with puzzles and combats in the game but still they need to figure out how to apply them to "win" the game. Gradually increasing additional moves needed and giving the players opportunities to learn additional moves to the core game-plays were quite nice touch, I think. That said, I'm far from a hardcore action game fan and I wonder how hardcore players like Chapman see that.

 

PS Oh, and just to avoid misunderstanding, I don't think AC and Thief series are similar...simply, no way.

[WorstUsernameEver]

Final part of the Q&A with Nathaniel.

 

He's now allowed to punch me for the questions!

 

 

 

 

 

 

...if he can reach Italy

[Walsingham]

Cool. Thanks for spotting that, Wombat.

[Wombat]

Cool. Thanks for spotting that, Wombat.

No problem. I just cannot stop putting my nose into game design discussions.

I wish my English would be as clear as his, though.

 

From the interview

Horror RPGs are tough because one of the things that makes something terrifying is our reaction to things that are unknown and that we don