I've spent the past few weeks kind of hopping back and forth on comics and LPs, so I figured it's about time to get back to my usual weirdly wordy worldly musings. One of the core aspects of any game, and very close to my heart as a (*former*) game designer, are game mechanics. Mechanics are the building blocks working behind the scenes of every game, from video to board to card, and range from hundreds of tiny, imperceptible tweaks to a game in development to make it feel just right, to the big, brash and obvious features that tend to show up as items on a bulletpoint list on the back of the game's case. Somewhere in the middle is the really novel and interesting stuff, the mechanics that seem like genius ideas in retrospect but were so often a gamble borne of convenience or desperation.
These are the mechanics that I'm fascinated by. Every now and again, I want to compile a group of five in particular and discuss their implementations in the game(s) in which they appear. Specifically, I want to focus on those that don't get used too often, because with some of these I feel the only reason they aren't as ubiquitous as something like cover mechanics or regenerating health is that they were simply overlooked by the critics and focus testers of the day. (My crusade of late, if the Legend LPs weren't evidence enough, is to raise the profile of things that deserve it.)
So here we go, the first five:
Case #001: Radial Text Input
Beyond Good & Evil was a transcendent experience that many to this day can't quite articulate to those who have yet to play it, who may well be apprehensive about jumping into a game that's over ten years old at this point. They might point to the way the game jumps around from platforming to puzzle-solving to stealth to hovercraft races to shoot' em ups to photography, but while the game's eclectic personality and great characters and plot were definite pluses, the game was also filled with lots of little ingenious mechanics that enhanced peoples' experience in ways they might have not even consciously observed.
One of these was admittedly a very minor touch, but whenever the game required that the player input some text, it did so with a radial menu of characters that the player would twist the analog stick to select between. It was fast, it was easy to figure out and it was an intelligent means to get around the usual problems of inputting text with a controller rather than a keyboard.
Now, I'm crediting Beyond Good & Evil, but I'm sure I've seen this text input system in earlier games, perhaps stick- or trackball-based Arcade titles that let triumphant players input their initials in the same manner. What still confuses me to this day is how it never caught on, even after being featured in a game as high profile as Beyond Good & Evil (though it seems only critically so, as the game itself didn't sell too well initially). Previous gen consoles had their own built-in functionality for inputting text that would be summoned whenever a game deemed it necessary, but they were the same old virtual keyboards that were ideally suited for a pair of hands to navigate rather than a controller, which seemed like a failure of design. (Well, "failure" is perhaps harsh, how about "missed opportunity"?) That the new consoles persist with the same tools is discouraging, but perhaps to be expected.
Still, I can always hold out hope that text input tools more germane to an analog-stick controller will emerge at some point, whether they're radials or something even more inspired.
Case #002: Empathetic Battle Music
A staple of any RPG soundtrack is the battle theme, which are usually quite busy little numbers that need to be catchy or at the very least tolerable due to how often a player is likely to encounter it accompanying the various foes their party is forced to fight. Most games tend to have a few themes that get shuffled around depending on where you're at in the game and who you're fighting (bosses, and especially story NPC bosses, tend to have their own themes too). What's slightly less usual, and might require a bit more work from the sound designers and contracted musicians, is having multiple battle themes that the game switches between mid-fight, to highlight how the fight is going.
Empathetic Battle Music is when the music changes to reflect the player's status in a battle. It might suddenly get triumphant and jaunty when the player is clearly winning, or very tense and dramatic when they aren't. This not only has the benefit of making every fight feel more cinematic and eventful, but also serves as a useful heads up for just how well/badly a battle is going and that perhaps the player ought to go all out/heal up. The challenge for designers is how to determine exactly when a player is in trouble or about to win, and will usually draw from certain variables like the total party health and that of the enemy forces. If a player character goes down, it's bad news. If the boss takes a knee and looks haggard, it's time to celebrate a little. You might also have different themes depending on if you initiated battle with a sneak attack, or were ambushed by enemies instead, but this isn't quite as dynamic.
This type of soundtrack enhancement isn't actually all that common, though I'm sure everyone (that is, everyone who regularly plays RPGs) has come across it before. Skies of Arcadia and The Last Remnant immediately spring to mind for me. The Last Remnant even subverts it in an interesting way, changing the final boss music when he powers up to signify that he now has the advantage. Skies is probably the Ur example though, and having it seamlessly switch from tense to normal to uplifting made every battle feel momentous.
Case #003: Turn Order Manipulation
Sticking with JRPGs for a little while longer, I was momentarily thrown off during Giant Bomb's recent Quick Look of the new UbiArt RPG Child of Light when they gushed over its clever turn interruption system. It occurred to me that while such a system is a common sight for a guy like me who plays more JRPGs than is probably healthy, it's yet to really break into the mainstream.
Turn Order Manipulation is when a game puts much greater emphasis on manipulating the turn order of the player's characters and those they fight. Usually, we see cases where there's a specific turn order (that may or may not be revealed to the player) based on variables such as stats that govern alacrity or the amount of effort expended with that character's previous attack. Sometimes spells and special attacks need charging up, sometimes people have status effects that slow or increase their turn speed and sometimes you just have cheap enemies who seem to act twice as often. However, while those are fairly regular occurrences, what's less common is giving players direct control over their turn order, willfully choosing to delay their own turns for some later benefit.
There's many games for which this is applicable. Child of Light uses a similar system as Grandia and the Atelier Iris games in that there's a brief window between selecting a special action (like a spell or a strong charge-up attack) and performing it that can be interrupted by a fast character with a regular attack. Radiant Historia lets the player queue up turns by allowing them to postpone their attacks (or using a special ability that removes an enemy unit's turn), allowing for chains of combos that increase a damage percentage modifier with every hit. Xenoblade Chronicles will occasionally reveal the deadly outcome of a particularly brutal enemy attack via the protagonist's innate precognition, and leaves the player to figure out how to prevent it from happening. We're seeing these new turn dynamics more and more often in games, but it still feels like there's further realms to be explored.
Case #004: Unusual Inventory Systems
Switching focus to Western RPGs now, because in JRPGs your inventory is almost always bottomless, there's usually that moment every now and again where you have to pause what you're doing and manage the crap you've let accumulate in your inventory. Most Western RPGs insist on an encumbrance or flat item limit, and hitting that limit is usually a good sign that you should probably return to a safe area with vendors to resupply and regroup. Most systems like these are governed in such a way to give players ample breaks, even if they're not cognizant that they need one, as well as an opportunity to touch base with NPCs who might have additional quests and vendors who might have new stocks of equipment for the player to peruse.
However, as functional as these limits actually are, it can sometimes be a little tiresome to frequently stop play to juggle items around. The best instance of turning inventory management into a mini-game of sorts is with the common "Tetris inventory" variant, with larger items requiring additional room forcing the player to find some way of twisting items around to ensure everything fits. Diablo's probably the most vivid example of this, as players frequently find themselves moving around 2x3 armors and 1x4 swords to delay the next town portal for as long as possible.
Unusual Inventory Systems appear when a game is keenly aware of the amount of time players will be spending in their inventories, and trying to either alleviate the hassle or make the whole micromanagement aspect more palatable by finding an interesting way to spin it. Games like Dungeon Siege and Torchlight, both of which owe more than a little to Diablo and its inventory puzzles, provide additional animal members of the party whose job it is to ferry extra loot around. Currently, though, enough isn't being done to find a truly novel inventory system that would actually make it fun to micromanage one's spoils. At least, out of the games I've played already (I hear the later Mega Man Battle Network games take an interesting jab at it). As this aspect is something so ubiquitous to loot-based RPGs, an interesting new approach is overdue. I mean, people take chances with lockpicking mini-games all the time, right? (And stay tuned for more on them as this blog series continues.)
Case #005: Post-Combat Rejuvenation
This is a nice and simple one to see us off. Sometimes the issue with random encounters in JRPGs is that not only are they tiresome for the player, they're equally enervating for the player's party. It often feels as if the goal of these random encounters is to grind the team down so that they're unprepared for the boss. A lot of games made after the NES era addressed the problem by adding more conveniences for players, such as pre-boss save points and items which can fully restore the party at save points (for a moderate fee), or just make it so that certain save points provide the same benefit for free.
The fact is, it's hard for a designer to balance the difficulty of encounters when you have no idea if the particular assortment of monsters you're configuring will be met by a party at full health or one that is worn down and at a strong disadvantage. Often, the difficulty of normal battles has to be lessened so the player can survive them in a compromised state. This just adds to how tiresome most random encounters are, as a healthy party can simply tap the attack command over and over to get through them without much hassle.
When you have Post-Combat Rejuvenation, a mechanic that always fully heals the player's party once combat is over, the designers can start balancing every enemy encounter knowing that the party will always face it at their full strength. This means they can make the game more difficult, creating more tactically challenging scenarios without damaging (and in fact enhancing) the player experience. It's even more subtle than it seems, because many players will see a full restore after every battle as some sort of amelioration of the game's difficulty, and believe the game is being more generous when the reality is probably anything but.
The Bit At The End
I'll be following with a Part 2 later in the week, with additional entries whenever I find myself with a quintet of gameplay mechanics I'd like to see more often. For now though, I'll leave the floor open to you duders: What are some of your favorite less-utilized game mechanics, perhaps unique to a single game?
I'm really only talking about those that have yet to truly take off that you'd be happy to see in more games. My next five are already set in stone, but if I end up agreeing with any of your submissions, I'll add it to a future entry in this series with a credit.
At any rate, my thanks for your views and responses and I'll be back with Part 2 soonish. (And yeah, I promise I'll make the next one less RPG-focused. Gotta love those RPGs though, right? Man, I want to play some Divinity: Original Sin already.)
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
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