Mento + The Mechanics: Part 1

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Mento

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Edited By Mento  Moderator

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.

Spiraling into the opposite of madness, if you have analog controllers.
Spiraling into the opposite of madness, if you have analog controllers.

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.

We got 'em on the ropes now!
We got 'em on the ropes now!

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.

Grandia 2. Still has perhaps the best battle system with this feature, if not one of the top five systems of all time. (Note the bar on the bottom right.)
Grandia 2. Still has perhaps the best battle system with this feature, if not one of the top five systems of all time. (Note the bar on the bottom right.)

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.

This is what's on my screen every 15 minutes while playing Might and Magic.
This is what's on my screen every 15 minutes while playing Might and Magic.

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.

No health? No problem!
No health? No problem!

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 1Part 2Part 3
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@mento said:

Skies of Arcadia and The Last Remnant immediately spring to mind for me.

Not for me, they don't. Phantasy Star III and Xenoblade more readily come to mind.

Case #003: Turn Order Manipulation

I've wanted to make this into a concept page for some time, but could never think of a good enough title. It's oddly common yet uncommon, appearing in stuff like Treasure of the Rudras, Produce games, Resonance of Fate, and Chrono Cross. (By the way, I'm blogging about those last two and should really get back to it.)

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Justin258

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#2 Justin258  Online

@mento said:

Skies of Arcadia and The Last Remnant immediately spring to mind for me.

Not for me, they don't. Phantasy Star III and Xenoblade more readily come to mind.

Case #003: Turn Order Manipulation

I've wanted to make this into a concept page for some time, but could never think of a good enough title. It's oddly common yet uncommon, appearing in stuff like Treasure of the Rudras, Produce games, Resonance of Fate, and Chrono Cross. (By the way, I'm blogging about those last two and should really get back to it.)

My mind is just screaming "Why isn't anybody mentioning Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne!?" You've got four turns, you can get up to eight by attacking weaknesses, or you can skip a party member for the cost of half a turn. That last bit turns into something that I found myself considering often in the latter half, considering that most bosses can be pretty hard and you need to consider skipping guys to keep your buffs up or your health up.

As far as post combat rejuvenation - well, let's return to SMT for a minute, this time the fourth game. That game gives you 10 "app points" per level, which you can use to buy "apps" (it doesn't make sense in context either) that have certain effects. One of them is HP regeneration as you walk, kinda useless. Another is MP regeneration, first for you, and later in the game for your entire party. This makes the last ten hours or so of this game very easy, compared to the ridiculous difficulty of the first third and the pretty harsh challenge of the middle third. I'm just afraid that "post combat rejuvenation" will end up being like regenerating health in shooters, where it sucks out the challenge of hitting dudes without getting hit yourself.

Anyway, it's great to see someone focusing on mechanics and talking about them in a blog post of decent length. We don't see enough of that, and I look forward to seeing more!

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Slag

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I liked Beyond Good and Evil. I'm not sure I can go all the way to Transcendent though. I think what I appreciated most, even more than Jade, was just how different a cultural feel the game had.

I totally forgot about typing wheel,you're right that was great.

I love mechanics 2,3 and 5. I can't stand 4.

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It would be cool to see one of these on mechanics in more gameplay heavy games. Maybe Dodge Offset from Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising?

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#6  Edited By Mento  Moderator

@slag: Well, my point with #4 is that we need something more interesting than the usual Tetris grid. Having a hard inventory limit is sometimes inextricably linked with the game design, but it wouldn't hurt to have a system that makes managing the inventory more enjoyable. I certainly have no issue with a bottomless inventory if a CRPG wants to go that way, or something like Torchlight's little courier buddy. I wish I had some better examples for that one, my mind went blank.

@corruptedevil: With character action games and fighter games in general, a lot of the fancier mechanics are deeply technical and require a lot of experience with the genre to fully comprehend their importance. I'm not saying that isn't also the case with some of these RPG-focused mechanics, but I'm out of my depth with a lot of this combo/air-juggling/dodge-offsetting business, or the hundred different gauges in something like Persona 4 Arena. I do find that stuff fascinating though, and it goes back to how a lot of the best mechanics emerge after having been endlessly tested and tweaked, occasionally over several generations of the same franchise (or one very similar, as is the case with DMC/Bayonetta). I'll do a little research and come up with some interesting cases from those types of gameplay-focused genres. God (of War) knows I must've picked up a few things listening to 2BFP discuss those games over and over.

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@mento said:

@slag: Well, my point with #4 is that we need something more interesting than the usual Tetris grid. Having a hard inventory limit is sometimes inextricably linked with the game design, but it wouldn't hurt to have a system that makes managing the inventory more enjoyable. I certainly have no issue with a bottomless inventory if a CRPG wants to go that way, or something like Torchlight's little courier buddy. I wish I had some better examples for that one, my mind went blank.

I got your point man, sorry I was being too pithy. Sometimes I'll leave a comment on a blog/thread I find worthwhile even if the comment is substandard just to bump the thread so that others can see the blog. Especially with notifications being busted. I really enjoyed this one and didn't have too much too add though.

#4 is actually major turnoff for me with CRPGs and WRPGs and why I don't often play them these days. The problem isn't the item fitting into the backpack/encumbrance micro puzzle, it's the opportunity cost in terms of time. In theory it sounds like a potentially fun mechanic, decide what to carry and leave behind lest your movement speed be slowed too much by greed in a major encounter.

I just don't find it fun to endless grind for drops and then having to constantly make loot runs back to a town or whatever to figure out what to store or pawn. Or worse yet just constantly dropping items and getting nothing of value for the time spent acquiring them. Especially if it's a game that involves a crafting subsystem as well where you likely need to hoard ingredients to make really anything useful.

I want to find cool stuff, enjoy great combat, go on an adventure, not basically do housecleaning for 60%+ of the time. It turns the game into work. Instead of travel going out for loot and adventure it becomes a commute of filler backtracking. Start the adventure with empty pockets, fill up your bag, go back to base, empty your bag, go back out a little further, fill up your bag, go back to town etc. It can takeover the whole experience.

I'm sure you are right there probably could be a way to make it fun, but I've yet to see anything close and I've played a whole mess of these games.

I haven't played Torchlight though, but that courier does sound promising in at least alleviating the worst part of the experience for me.

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#8 Mento  Moderator

@slag: You've just given me a good idea for a sequel for that particular item. Something I've encountered that's far more palatable to those of an anti-inventory management persuasion. #3 is filling up already.

And don't worry about being too pithy -- especially when commenting on one of my blogs, which are ~85% pithy on a good day -- you have a good point that this shit can take up too much precious time that could be used for bashing things or, I dunno, reading a book. Fortunately, not all CRPGs adhere to a strict inventory limit. Thanks for the bump(s)!

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I forgot all about the BGandE radial text input. That thing was great.

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#10  Edited By ArbitraryWater

I recall the Suikoden series having the novel battle mechanic of having a party of 6 but only allowing 3 commands. At least, that is how I remember it in Suikoden 3. Might be different in other ones.

Another one that comes to mind is leveling up all characters by class instead of individually, something that happens in Valkyria Chronicles and the Tactics Ogre remake. Makes things a lot less grindy.

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Might and Magic VI-VII had such great inventories.

The earliest turn based manipulation I can think of came from a certain class in FF Tactics, which could use an ability to speed up a person's turn order directly. For a long time, I didn't understand how much more effective it could be under certain circumstances, but having played it earlier this year for the umpteenth time, I finally get it.

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#13  Edited By EVO

I played through Beyond Good & Evil recently and although I didn't like it anywhere near as much as you do, I completely agree on the text input. It's easily the most intuitive and elegant method I know of for a controller. Is it a mechanic though? I mean, it doesn't really affect the gameplay. But then again, after studying game design I'm still not entirely sure what a game mechanic is.

Nonetheless, good thread dude. Looking forward to more of these.

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#14  Edited By Mento  Moderator

@evo: "Transcendent" is probably pushing it, in retrospect. I enjoyed BG&E a lot and occasionally find it hard to articulate precisely why, and I think it's as much for the minor stuff as it is the major. A lot of my favorite games give you some clear story goals to chase and then a lot of little optional tasks, many of which are mini-games governed by their own rules. Dark Cloud 2's another fine example, and I'm usually content to call that one my favorite console game of all time due largely to its versatility.

As for what constitutes a mechanic, you're right in that it's a gray area. Infrastructure like pausing, menus and stuff like text input all falls under a different stage of the development process, but they're all conceived by game designers and implemented by coders like everything else. (Once you're in game development, there'll be a fun task where you'll have to visualize the entire menu system of a game all expanded out like a flowchart, making sure there's always a function to go back one level and so on.)

For me, the mechanics of a game encompasses everything that allows it to function as intended by its designers, including perfunctory things like saving the game or turning on subtitles. Also, you could always argue that inputting your initials is an important end stage of the classic Arcade gameplay experience, or how writing a character's name along with the rest of the character customization process is an integral part of any role-playing game with player-made characters, but those are definitely debatable.

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#15  Edited By EVO

@mento said:

the mechanics of a game encompasses everything that allows it to function as intended by its designers

That's a pretty good definition. In fact, much better than anything I was taught at uni.

I've always thought of mechanics as anything that is integral to the gameplay, but I guess that's just core mechanics.

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Good job on this, always fun to see someone who quite obviously enjoys non-pretentiously waxing lyrical about game design.

I'll play Beyond Good and Evil one day, I swear it.

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#17  Edited By thatpinguino  Staff

I love turn order manipulation as well. You should check out the 3rd and 4th Penny Arcade games; they use a similar turn system to Child of Light and managing turns is key in that game as well. There are entire classes whose only real function is delaying opponents' turns.

The game design ramifications of post-fight recovery is also fascinating to me. I would love to see a game where every fight was tuned like a boss fight, since your party will be at full strength for every fight. You could make the fights non-random for further control of the order of battles and make the game really challenging.