Jake

Idle Thumbs 254: Welltris and Wetrix

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Oh man, Welltris! 

 

I was more of a fan of "Block Out" which was like Welltris, but with 3D Tetrominoes.

 

I had both of these games as a kid, and was never particularly good at either! I played them way before I played Tetris, which may be why I bounced off them, but I think I was a bit young for the kind of spatial reasoning required.

 

 

I've been playing NBA 2K16 recently after hearing Nick talk about it, despite having basically no basketball knowledge. My experience of playing through the career story was much the same as Nick's; I made my player my own height, 5'8", so he was basically the shittiest guy, constantly being blocked and fucking it up for the whole team because I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing (Which is hilariously at odds with the story). After the story ends you move into the second year, where you play every game in a season (You only play 9 NBA games in the story), and I haven't really been doing much better. 24 games in, I'm finally getting the hang of how to deal with situations I find myself in, and I've purchased enough upgrades to get my rating up from 55 to 66, but I'm still lucky to get more than 10 points and 4-5 assists in a game. So when Nick returns and says he's scoring 60 points in a game, I'm wondering how far behind I am in terms of play time, if at all. Or did I just get dunked on by Nick Breckon?

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The low initial stats and the slow progress practically guarantee that your rookie year will be a huge disappointment. Focus on getting a good teammate grade and spend your upgrade points wisely. I gradually became the highest scoring player in my team during the second season despite being simply awful at the beginning of the season.

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Only briefly in a reader mail! But it made me want to play it.

 

 

You definitely should!  The first company I worked at had a culture of playing Tichu at lunch.  I was there for around a year, and played for an hour to an hour and half every day over lunch.  It was the best.  It never gets old.

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Yeah, this is probably especially relevant when it comes to strategy games (in the broadest sense of the term) where there are so many complex systems at work it is really hard for developers to even understand their own game. When Civ 5 came out there was this kind of infamous piece of criticism about the design decisions of the game from a former Civ 4 playtester by the name Sullla (link here: http://www.sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html ). There was a lot of push back at the time from defenders of the game, but by the time Jon did a post-mortem of Civ 5 his criticisms ended up being about the same.

Yeah! That Sulla piece is really genius insight, I read it back in the day and then totally forgot about it.

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You guys can have your welltris, I'll still be playing Ketzal's Corridors, AKA Super Hypercube 3DS 2011

 

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I literally turned up to mention that game. Big difference is that in Super Hyper Cube, the shape grows after each wall. I doubt that's enough to make the concept fun for more than half an hour.

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43:32 ~ 44:00

 

Steve [about Nick Breckon Stardew Valley and resemblance to clinical depression]

 

"Listen to that genuine laughter... yeah, it's like he means it!"

 

Ahem, I couldn't stop laughing for at least five minutes 8).  I miss Steve, but my gawd at least we get doses like this.  And sorry Nick, it's just hilariously apt comparison.

 

Oh yeah and the rest of the episode was just great too!  Ahaha, nice to hear developers sometime appreciate the obsessive patchnote/roadmap readers who go to bat when communities go mad over planned updates.  Oh, and the battle armadillo hacks of PC games in years gone by ahahahahaha.  Good stuff, good stuff.

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I've never been to GDC so maybe my perception is way off base, but aren't the majority of atendees game developers? I wouldn't think that game developers would be up on the controversies of other games (they are too busy managing the communities for their own games). I imagine a more general audience you would feature more people familiar with the corpse problem.

 

I think dismissing the vocal minority is potentially a mistake too. They might be a minority, and they might be complaining about things in a stupid and over-the-top way, but they are also probably the segment of that community that is most engaged with that game. I see developers talk about this all the time, always listen to feedback because even if people can't articulate a criticism sensibly it does probably mean there's something wrong with your design.

 

Certainly my own personal experience playing Darkest Dungeon in EA was I put a couple of hours into the game, they made the changes with the corpses, and then the combat felt a lot more tedious to get through. I understand wanting to combat a degenerative strategy, but their solution was heavy handed and, for me at least, eliminated the basic enjoyable loop of the game. I don't have an issue with difficult or challenging or even slightly unfair games, but if the game feels boring I'm going to drop out and that's certainly what happened to me with Darkest Dungeon.

 

Interestingly enough, I put Darkest Dungeon down because I simply found it kinda boring, and the concept of losing my characters or an entire playthough to just have to start over and do more boring to get back to where I was also made it disproportionately stressful. At the same time, I can't imagine what the game would be like without corpses. I guess you'd just alpha strike position one as hard as you can, so that would lead to them putting real monster tanks in position one, which would slow down combat even more.

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Interestingly enough, I put Darkest Dungeon down because I simply found it kinda boring, and the concept of losing my characters or an entire playthough to just have to start over and do more boring to get back to where I was also made it disproportionately stressful. At the same time, I can't imagine what the game would be like without corpses. I guess you'd just alpha strike position one as hard as you can, so that would lead to them putting real monster tanks in position one, which would slow down combat even more.

 

Before corpses, it was certainly a dominant strategy to drop the lead rank, but not invariably the right call. Sometimes, hitting the second rank would be more effective to shuffle the ranks, or you might not have time to wait and so you'd hit the back instead. Honestly, I think of Darkest Dungeon's development as an excellent example of a developer designing a very specific kind of system (positioning determines character abilities) without fully apprehending the optimal player reaction to such a system (disrupt enemy positioning, through skills if possible and raw damage output if not) and then putting a Big Fairy Wall of Nope in the way of that player reaction (the corpse mechanic, effectively a delay timer) instead of expanding the game with actual mechanics that respond to the reaction rather than flatly prevent it (give every type of enemy abilities that they could perform in every rank or make certain damage types more effective on different ranks or different enemies that usually appear in different ranks).

 

I've found that it's the natural reaction for many developers making their first deep-dive strategy or roleplaying game to design this way, by knocking down optimal strategies until nothing's optimal—but it's never actually that nothing's optimal, it's that the optimal strategies are now too time-consuming and tedious for most players to use... and the game's less interesting as a result, because there's less of an arc of player competency. Red Hook Studios has done this repeatedly with Darkest Dungeon, unfortunately: they also changed Sanity from a bar that would fill up over and over, giving the character worse and worse quirks, to a bar that would fill up once, give a character a quirk, then fill up again and kill them. It turned Sanity into just another health bar because a few high-level players were able to push too deep into the larger dungeons too early by ignoring Sanity, letting their characters become crazy piles of shit, and then dismissing them. Instead of making the system reactive, they dumped roadblocks into it instead, which is disappointing.

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Interesting. at the start of the game, i actually found sanity to be a more threatening life bar than HP, so I optimized around keeping sanity down and now I routinely leave dungeons more sane than when I come in. Since it carries over mission to mission and HP doesn't, I'll often let my adventurers get almost to death's door (not all the way of course, that's a major sanity hit) and still pick a sanity heal at camp. At the same time, I've never found playing with enemy positioning to be all that useful, since it feels like most enemies can attack effectively from most positions, and they also seem to move further than my folks, quickly unscrambling from any pushes or pulls I do try. It sounds like maybe I would have liked it better in early access as well :(

 

Also interesting thoughts about Paradox games. At one point I was putting 20 hours a week into CK2 and it was my favorite game for more than a year. Then I played EU4, didn't really like the way it was designed, then slowly watched as mechanics from EU4 bled back into CK2. It was especially hilarious since the changes in EU4 were sold as fixes to make multiplayer more balanced, but multiplayer in CK2 doesn't work right even today. *shrug* Yet I'm setting myself up for more suffering when Stellaris comes out.

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Also interesting thoughts about Paradox games. At one point I was putting 20 hours a week into CK2 and it was my favorite game for more than a year. Then I played EU4, didn't really like the way it was designed, then slowly watched as mechanics from EU4 bled back into CK2. It was especially hilarious since the changes in EU4 were sold as fixes to make multiplayer more balanced, but multiplayer in CK2 doesn't work right even today. *shrug* Yet I'm setting myself up for more suffering when Stellaris comes out.

 

You and me both, with Stellaris. I'm trying to take heart that the lead dev is Henrik Fåhraeus, the original lead for Crusader Kings II up until "phase one" of the DLC ended with The Old Gods. It's not like he doesn't have his own missteps, like the entirety of Sword of Islam, but he's certainly not part of Johan Andersson's faction in the Paradox that's all about multiplayer and hardcoded "fairness."

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Just because this is specifically in my wheelhouse, there absolutely are ways to track some amount of data for podcasts. Yes, there's 3rd party apps that are also listeners but podcast stats basically hop on your pod's feed and track data that way, as far as I know. We used Blubrry, which had a Wordpress functionality that plugged into our dashboard and then set up things via an account on Blubrry's site. We were not a paid account, so our stats were limited but we absolutely knew how many people were listening to our specific podcast episodes, what method they used to listen to those episodes, as well as the median amount of time people listened. There's also stuff built into the back-end of things like Simplecast now that handle that. 

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I've found that it's the natural reaction for many developers making their first deep-dive strategy or roleplaying game to design this way, by knocking down optimal strategies until nothing's optimal—but it's never actually that nothing's optimal, it's that the optimal strategies are now too time-consuming and tedious for most players to use... and the game's less interesting as a result, because there's less of an arc of player competency. Red Hook Studios has done this repeatedly with Darkest Dungeon, unfortunately: they also changed Sanity from a bar that would fill up over and over, giving the character worse and worse quirks, to a bar that would fill up once, give a character a quirk, then fill up again and kill them. It turned Sanity into just another health bar because a few high-level players were able to push too deep into the larger dungeons too early by ignoring Sanity, letting their characters become crazy piles of shit, and then dismissing them. Instead of making the system reactive, they dumped roadblocks into it instead, which is disappointing.

This is interesting. So would responding to that optimal strategy (of allowing the characters to become more and more insane) by adding a new system that makes the results of that strategy more difficult to deal with be a good design process? Or is the idea to have many optimal strategies?

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This is interesting. So would responding to that optimal strategy (of allowing the characters to become more and more insane) by adding a new system that makes the results of that strategy more difficult to deal with be a good design process? Or is the idea to have many optimal strategies?

That's a hard question to answer, honestly. Mostly, I have found, there are always going to be optimal strategies in high-complexity games, with one of those optimal strategies being even more optimal than the rest. I think it's a natural consequence of Sid Meier's "interesting decisions" school of design: it's perfectly normal to expect that the moment-to-moment dilemmas of gameplay are going to have better and worse options to them, else player choice is irrelevant, but for some reason it's not expected that a series of better choices than others should coalesce at the highest level into a better strategy than others. Player choices should matter, but not to the point that one strategy is appreciably more effective than the other.

I think that this is probably an insoluble tension in high-complexity game design. There is always going to be at least one best way that a system should function, whether or not it's known to its designer, and trying to make it otherwise generally just produces a system that doesn't function well, period. If they want to avoid this latter case, in my experience, game designers have the choice between making the optimal strategy knowledge-intensive or time-intensive. Knowledge-intensive optimization is satisfying all along the curve to mastery, because a player's facility with the game grows as their understanding of it does, but it seems to be a boring end-state once you've reached high-level mastery and "solved" the game, leading to restive forum communities like the Paradox forums. Time-intensive optimization has the advantage of being equally inaccessible to beginners and experts, but it rewards boring and dogmatic play instead of expertise, understanding, or inspiration, which usually loses players with high-level mastery anyways.

If I had to answer, I'd say that the Civilization series handles the above tension the best: have multiple success conditions that permit each optimal strategy to have its own developer-recognized end-state. Sure, Civilization as a series also has the problem of "infinite city sprawl" being an optimal meta-strategy for all success conditions, as Sulla points out in the review that Sclpls linked, but when a game supports multiple paths to victory, the fact that one path is slightly more effective while also being less thematic and more tedious is mostly acceptable, absent a more specific fix. Honestly, even if there is only one success condition, I'd like more developers to be tolerant of an optimal strategy resolving around their design, because it is the sign of a functional system that's accessible to player agency. The most important things are i) the optimal strategy does not involve bypassing core mechanics, unless those core mechanics are broken and/or boring and need to be redesigned anyway, and ii) the optimal strategy doesn't violate the aesthetics of the game or the themes they create. In the case of Darkest Dungeon, which imagines its own version of small-scale neo-medieval combat, it's perfectly thematic for two opposing companies to bash into each other until the front line falls and the rest run or are slaughtered. It's fundamentally the expected result of a system based on the inspirations at hand. The problem is that its solution wasn't what the developers envisioned, so instead of programming responses that validated that player strategy with reactive and thematic effects, they tried to prevent the strategy entirely — sinking the thematic resonances somewhat, in the process.

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