GWJ Conference Call Episode 484

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Oxenfree, Diablo Season 5, Tharsis, Fairness in Games, Your Emails and More!

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Today Shawn Andrich and Sean Sands are joined by Jeff Cannata and Rob Zacny to talk about fairness in game design!

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Comments

UGH I missed the discussion of Oxenfree?
*sets everything on fire*

I haven't listened yet, since I'm going to save this for my commute to work, but rest assured I'm going to grumble to myself about it quite a bit.

A friend of mine just asked me about Oxenfree. I have never heard of it so looking forward to listening to the discussion on the podcast.

It would be good to hear your take on Oxenfree Amoebic.

Great discussions on difficulty and fairness.

We've probably all had the experience of an early area of a game appearing to be brutally difficult then, when we've finished the game, returning to the same area and finding it laughably easy. As a developer it must be tough to keep seeing your game from the perspective of a new player who doesn't yet have the skills needed for playing the game and who has no knowledge of the systems. The temptation to keep ratcheting up the difficulty must be overwhelming at times. Especially when you have fans who, by dint of the fact that they've probably been playing the game for many hours, also seem to be finding the game too easy.

The down side of hard games, from a developers point of view, is that the harder they are the more polished and mechanically sound you game has to be. Glitches and wonky controls that are forgivable, and can even go unnoticed, in an easy game but can be sources of teeth grinding frustration when the tiniest mistake can spell disaster in an encounter. I suspect that's why games have been getting progressively easier in recent times.

I really want to play Darkest Dungeon (when it's out on PS4) but the level of difficulty is putting me off at the moment. If it is, as reported, as hard as nails I wish it had an easier 'normal' mode I could cut my teeth on first. When playing Halo or Mass Effect games I often play through the hardest difficulty but only after playing the game on the lower difficulty tiers. It's much less frustrating to play a hard game when you've completed it once or twice already and are willingly subjecting yourself to a very tough version of the same game.

00:02:33 Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak
00:17:38 Oxenfree
00:24:52 Diablo Season 5
00:34:31 Tharsis
00:50:10 Fairness in Games
01:24:44 Your Emails

That screenshot reminds me of something out of Commander Blood.

The open felt like it was trolling *Legion*.

I've finished Oxenfree, and I have lots of opinions that I can either bring up next show or wrangle up on a spoiler show.

The open felt like it was trolling *Legion*.

Not intentionally. I'd say that was more of a side benefit.

Higgledy wrote:

I really want to play Darkest Dungeon (when it's out on PS4) but the level of difficulty is putting me off at the moment. If it is, as reported, as hard as nails I wish it had an easier 'normal' mode I could cut my teeth on first.

You CAN toggle off some of the more controversial features (I think) but, to be honest, I'm not feeling it's any more or less difficult than it was at launch. It's certainly easier than a lot of rogue-lite/like games tend to be.

Maybe there's some horrible difficulty cliff in the updated version that I've yet to hit, but at least based on my first (early access) 50 hours in the game (which consisted of me clearing the available three dungeons at the time and maxing out most of my mercenaries) I do feel it's reputation is somewhat exaggerated.

That's good to hear pyxistyx. Thanks.

Rob and Jeff were far too harsh on Tharsis given my experience, I've finished the Tharsis story and unlocked a few characters without ever resorting to cannibalism at all. Great little game.
And I disagree with Jeff in that the game depends so heavily on luck, there are a bunch of systems that allow you to turn bad luck into future opportunities if you plan ahead despite the threat sitting right in front of you, you can also buffer yourself against future problems by playing smart.
I think if you're not up for a game that pulls no punches and doesn't mind doubling down on punishing you (sometimes because of your poor decision, sometimes not), then stay away, but honestly all the talk makes it sound tougher than it actually is. It's a good hurt that adds consequence and makes for a refreshing experience in my opinion. I think as gamers we've been coddled too much, sometimes it's okay to lose.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/L1IRxr3.png)

That's what it was!

It's been too long since I've heard Jeff Cannata on a podcast! I was a dedicated viewer/listener of the Totally Rad Show and Weekend Confirmed. I stuck with DLC for a couple dozen episodes, but just can't take the co-host. I did enjoy We Have Concerns, but 3 times a week was so often that I just couldn't keep up, so I probably haven't heard Jeff on a podcast for a year, maybe longer. Maybe I'll give one or both of his podcasts another try again soon. Anyway, I'm definitely looking forward to checking out Oxenfree, and despite the negativity, I suspect I will end up picking up Tharsis eventually--it seems interesting even if it ends up being flawed.

Idle weekend is now on my must listen list. 'Tis very good.

Thank you for bringing up difficulty and fairness in video games. Most of the time I can deal with a game being too hard for me to beat it, but what really bothers me is fairness.

The most frustrating and unfair experience that I've ever had with a video game happened when I was playing Final Fantasy XII several years ago. There are four chests in Rabanastre (?), the first city in the game, that you are not allowed to open. OTHERWISE you are not able to get the best weapon in the game 30 hours later that is in a completely different place and which has NO CONNECTION AT ALL to the four chests in the first city. Only if I had consulted a walkthrough before starting the game, I would have known this and this is absolutely bonkers. For the end game I wanted to have the best weapons and as a long-time FF player I knew that getting those might not be as straightforward as you might hope, so only then did I read the first FAQ. But reading about this more than 30 hours into the game wasn't helpful at all, because I knew that - of course - I had opened all the chests that I was able to find. Did I want to start a new game just for this one weapon? NO.

All in all, I really liked FFXII (much more than X), but this left such a bitter taste in my mouth that I haven't touched a new Final Fantasy since then.

Thank you Shawn for bringing up Mario Kart in the racing game part of the fairness discussion. I did notice how Sean quickly brushed that aside and tried to move away. Probably one blue shell too many against him.

In the current version of Mario Kart 8, I've been playing quite a bit as the kids and even on 150cc I've seen only a handful of blue shells total in about 10 cups in the last week or so that I've paid attention (some raced by my wife).

The discussion about Tharsis sounds exactly like the arguments I had with myself when trying to figure out why I didn't like FTL. On the surface it seems like a game like Dark Souls, where each play through is a lesson and you're leveling yourself up. Except FTL didn't feel that away at all. I was making no progress, and it go to the point where failure was due to either dumb luck or a wrong decision made ten turns earlier that you had no way of anticipating the outcome of. Each playthrough just made me more efficient at getting to the part where luck would kill me. The last time I shut it down I had enough, and haven't had the urge to play it since.

I think Roguelike games really turned a corner when they started to allow you to carry over certain benefits from generation to generation. Suddenly, it wasn't just about praying to R.N.Jesus for a perfect run. You could make progress, knowing that if you died you'd at least be better off next time.

Games without a memory have no soul.

Alz wrote:

The discussion about Tharsis sounds exactly like the arguments I had with myself when trying to figure out why I didn't like FTL. On the surface it seems like a game like Dark Souls, where each play through is a lesson and you're leveling yourself up. Except FTL didn't feel that away at all. I was making no progress, and it go to the point where failure was due to either dumb luck or a wrong decision made ten turns earlier that you had no way of anticipating the outcome of. Each playthrough just made me more efficient at getting to the part where luck would kill me. The last time I shut it down I had enough, and haven't had the urge to play it since.

I think Roguelike games really turned a corner when they started to allow you to carry over certain benefits from generation to generation. Suddenly, it wasn't just about praying to R.N.Jesus for a perfect run. You could make progress, knowing that if you died you'd at least be better off next time.

Games without a memory have no soul.

This describes my experience with FTL pretty well. I was able to get to the end one time, was obliterated after fighting one warship after another after another, and just didn't have it in me to try again. I haven't played since.

If getting that far had unlocked a new ship to try I might feel differently, but I'm not gaining anything by repeatedly throwing myself into the meat grinder.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

If getting that far had unlocked a new ship to try I might feel differently, but I'm not gaining anything by repeatedly throwing myself into the meat grinder.

I actually think the Dark Souls method would work well in these kinds of games: drop all your stuff on the ground/in space where you died, and if you make it back to that spot on your next try you get to pick it up from there. Balances the incentive to grind with the desire to keep making progress, and eases the sting of a bad beat.

In my opinion, Tharsis is really tough to like - I don't mind dice based games at all (I really like Elder Sign: Omens, for instance...although a big chunk of that is the art and atmosphere) but Tharsis is WAAAAY too reliant on pure luck to get through to the end. It needs some serious balancing I think.

I enjoyed the fairness discussion a great deal, some excellent points in there.

In an early 2nd edition D&D game, I had a D&D character die on what was essentially a single bum roll. I remember being very upset by it - like losing sleep upset (I was young) because I had this sense of PCs being the protagonists in an epic fantasy story, and this particular death wasn't really remotely narratively compelling. There was quite literally no action I could have taken to prevent it. The story basically had the party on plot rails - so it isn't like I made a bad strategic decision about where to go and what to do. The roll happened prior to combat, so it wasn't the result of escalating bad tactical choices or even a run of bad luck. A random die chose my character to targeted by an ambush spell (it could have been anyone) and then I failed a roll. End of character.

Obviously, that's a bit of a 2nd edition's brutal and unforgiving rules at fault, mixed with poor DMing choices (he was young) but it definitely had an effect on how I ran games when I took up the DM mantle on my own. I've killed many a player, but only when there was a reason beyond randomness. And never off of a single bad roll - unless it is Call of Cthulhu, where you accept random, meaningless protagonist deaths as part of the premise.

Which brings me (finally) to a point. It is interesting to me how much premise matters in regards to fairness. D&D is heroic high magic fantasy. Even brutal settings like Dark Sun or Ravenloft come with an implicit understanding that though protagonists will die way more often than other settings, they should still have "cool" and "meaningful" or at the very least "thematically resonant" deaths. I Call of Cthulhu the premise is the main characters WILL die OR go insane. Maybe not this session, but eventually and inevitably. Somehow this makes the brutality more fair.

I think the rise of brutal games also is connected to the popularity of Twitch and other game streaming. Watching someone beat their head against a difficult game can be quite entertaining.

I was reassured by the Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak discussion. As discussed on the pod, I also really enjoyed the ambient space sounds and radio transmissions from the ships. I'm looking forward to playing!

The NFL jokes at the beginning of the show were also awesome. I definitely laughed out loud in my car.

To the couple people who commented about Tharsis and anyone interested in the game, instead of adding my thoughts about the game here, I made a Catch-All.

Tharsis sounds horrible.

Difficulty is one thing and it's just fine. An element of randomness is another and that's also fine. But when the chance is effectively loaded so there's a 50/50 chance of something going wrong every time you roll the dice and often that has permanent consequences for subsequent rolls that leads to a snowball effect that sounds like the stuff of nightmares.

That's not difficulty. I don't like to use terms like "good" or "bad" because there's an implication of objectivity, but I can't imagine the thought process that leads to that decision seeming like a good idea. It's almost a definitive example of unfairness.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

But when the chance is effectively loaded so there's a 50/50 chance of something going wrong every time you roll the dice and often that has permanent consequences for subsequent rolls that leads to a snowball effect that sounds like the stuff of nightmares.

Which is fine, except Tharsis doesn't do this. The game has a number of strategies the player can use to mitigate both a bad roll AND snowballing consequences. In the end I think Jeff and Rob didn't actually realise all the options available to them in game. Which could be a problem with the game not drawing more attention to these options perhaps, but they presented themselves to me pretty quick.

Great episode, and I particularly enjoyed everyone relating their "comfort" game. Mine is definitely Guild Wars 2, even though I haven't played it long (it launched what, four years ago?), but I've played it so much, and it feels so familiar and comforting, and natural. It's probably the only game I regularly go back, because most of the time, I'm working on the Pile and hardly ever go back to older games.

All this talk about Tharsis and random difficulty made me want to try FTL again.

Immediately upon warping to the second map I was informed that I had intruders on board. Two mantids then proceeded to murder my entire crew.

Yeah. Screw that game.

Your probably not going to like Tharsis 2: Meet the Mantids

Finally got to this ... this week.

Loved the discussion about fairness, especially regarding multiplayer. I avoid most multiplayer because I just feel like it's such a mine field. The problem with the proposed solution of user ratings (positive and negative) is that internet miscreants love a challenge. If there's a way to game a voting system, they're gonna game it.

I think probably things can be done to avoid the discussed scenario, where someone just isn't playing the game, or is actively trying to lose in a ranked environment. Some sort of game intelligence might be programmable to detect that kind of situation and let the player know that maybe they shouldn't be playing a ranked game right now. But a user-directed system is just too easy to abuse. It'd never work.