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The problem with your ninja gaiden example is more the implementation of the feature. Enemies would be specifically placed in location where they'd knock you back off screen over an open pit far enough away they'd respawn as soon as you moved forward inevitably sending you to your death.

Also, i'm fairly certain it had more to do with the way the nes held the screens and enemy objects in memory than an intentional choice. Most games on the nes had respawning enemies once you returned to a screen. And after going through the source code for metroid, it's simply because of memory limitations.

https://www.metroid-database.com/source-code/

The ninja gaiden developers took advantage of this by placing enemies in the most frustrating positions possible. I've beat all three of the originals a few times and i grew up playing the hell out of ninja gaiden 2, but that enemy placement is sadistic for the sake of it.

> The fundamental problem is "player benefits from minimizing risk", which is usually boring.

I remember playing the entirety of Doom, and IIRC, Doom II, in a careful, methodical manner, and I never found it “boring”.

Ditto quake, and quake II, in my case.

Same here. For reasons which now escape me, I decided to play through the whole [1] of Quake II without ever getting hit or otherwise taking damage. I don't remember it making the game easier, just differently difficult. I spent a lot of time reloading.

I get very irritated by game designers who decide that I'm just not having the right kind of fun. Enemies spawning right behind me in an area I've just cleared, or infinite spawns, usually trigger an immediate uninstall. The Deus Ex games got this mostly right, mostly. (Those abysmal boss fights being the exception; I gather they were done by a completely different team, and my god it showed.)

[1] Right up until the final boss fight, anyway. I think I made an exception for that. I think I swore off consumables like the Quad Damage too, but don't recall the details.

> I spent a lot of time reloading.

Mike, the saveaholic:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080106232309/http://archive.ga...

Ha! Firstly, that's spot-on. Secondly, you have remarkable powers of recall when it comes to 18-year-old observational humour.

In my defence, it was only that one playthrough. Most games I approach more normally (albeit with a sneaky-snipey style wherever possible).

> you have remarkable powers of recall

I’ll tell you my secret. It’s called… <whispers> Bookmarks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15574890#15575460

That doesn't really help, it just replaces the intimidating powers of recall with equally-intimidating powers of managing twenty years of bookmarks without drowning under them.

I currently have 1324 bookmarks, many of which are obsolete and/or dead. One might reasonably argue that I am drowning under them.

> (Those abysmal boss fights being the exception; I gather they were done by a completely different team, and my god it showed.)

Those were indeed done by a different studio that was otherwise not integrated into the development at all. The Director's Cut somewhat works around these areas.

It's called "playing to win". Staying safe behind a chokepoint might be unexciting (usually not boring, given the satisfaction of aiming and hitting and the sense of accomplishment of clearing enemies), but rushing forward and getting shot is on a different level: it's simply a mistake, and players learn to avoid it.

Personally, I tend to play Doom cautiously, engaging as few enemies as possible, retiring eagerly, and often running through exposed areas instead of stopping to shoot. Other FPS games, particularly PvP ones require a different approach: if the main challenge is to keep moving to find enemies and ambush them, or to aim and dodge well enough (or better than the opponent) during brief one on one encounters, the "door problem" simply doesn't exist.

> Staying safe behind a chokepoint might be unexciting

I didn't understand the main solution the article offers. We'll solve the problem that the door is a safe chokepoint by putting another safe chokepoint "inside" the arena, right in front of the door. Now everything is fine, because you have the same gameplay, but you've labeled the floor the player is on "good" instead of "bad".

What did I miss?

(I also didn't really understand why this was supposed to be a problem in the first place, but I put that down to the fact that I hate the entire genre under discussion. As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, roguelikes can suffer from a similar problem. Angband gets very repetitive:

1. Some monsters appear in groups. At low levels, you need to fight them in a hallway. This is basically fine with me. Later versions made group monsters unwilling to leave rooms, which made them no more dangerous than before, but much, much more tedious.

2. Some monsters can summon other monsters. If you fight one of these in a room, you'll die. The solution is one of two things:

2a: If the monster moves, dig out a corridor and wait for the monster to come to you. With no empty spaces around you, summoning can't do anything.

2b: If the monster doesn't move, use wall removal effects to open a path that allows you to target it with ranged attacks while staying out of its line of sight. In general, it will also be out of your line of sight, so this means memorizing a few common flight patterns for ranged attacks.

3. OK, some monsters can hit to cause earthquakes, opening empty spaces where you were expecting the safety of walls. And some monsters can move through -- and incidentally destroy -- walls, completely wrecking the idea that you might not get surrounded.

The answer to this one is to use a Destruction effect to automatically kill summoning wall-destroying monsters as soon as you see them, because even for a maxed out character, they're too dangerous to fight. So the game is about luring uniques into special diagonal-only corridors and grinding it out against them there (Hit! Hit! Hit! Heal! Hit! Hit!), carefully conserving all your healing potions for the fight against Morgoth, who causes earthquakes and summons everything.)

I think the article's abstraction of the problem was overly mechanistic.

Similar to parent comment, fighting from the hallway is a legal and strictly dominant strategy.

The MGS-style counter was to have enemies notice you, communicate your location to other enemies, who would then approach from behind your location, mooting your advantage.

The Half Life et al. counter was to have enemies telegraph an attack strategy shift, which would again moot your advantage. E.g. "He's hiding in the hall, tossing grenade!"

I think this is the fundamental difference between Doom-likes and HL-likes. The former sees level design as a primary focus, and the latter sees AI behavior as a primary focus. Borderland-likes probably fall somewhere in the middle.

Also, re: "playing to win", Sirlin's masterpiece, for those who haven't read it.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

> What did I miss?

Well, the player would still presumably have to cross the door's threshold to trigger the checkpoint. The article's problem case is that the player doesn't even have to move through the door. The article's solutions (a dividing wall, hiding enemies) would actually work with your proposal. And having a mechanism like the door closing behind the player is more of a blunt, niche solution than one that makes the game feel dynamic for the player.

Another problem is that putting a checkpoint in the middle of action isn't always what you want. By ensuring there are multiple viable approaches to an encounter (instead of one overpowered cheesy solution), you're solving a more general problem that now doesn't depend on checkpoint location. In fact, now you can place the checkpoint in the spot with the most decision-branches for the player instead of the spot that forces their hand.

Angband gets very repetitive

One of my favourite roguelikes is an Angband variant called Sil. It cleverly manages to overcome the door problem in myriad ways:

1) Corridors are dark and the player's light radius is small, so being in a corridor surrounds the player with hidden information at all times.

2) Stairs spawn groups of enemies who travel in a circuitous path before exiting the level by a different set of stairs. Since there are multiple stairs up and down in each level, this creates the sense of being in the middle of an enemy supply line.

3) Enemies communicate with one another and employ group tactics. If enemies stumble upon the player in a corridor, they'll retreat to the safety of an open room and lay siege to the doorway. Additionally, since Sil's levels are full of loops and branches, there is almost always another way in/out of the room where the enemies are; they will send some orcs around behind the player to drive him into the open.

4) Some enemies are territorial (leashed to a pole, as described in the article) while others are aggressive, ignoring group tactics and blindly charging at the player. All of the enemy behaviour types concord perfectly with the creatures that employ them. Spiders, wights, and dragons are territorial and usually guarding treasure. Trolls, giants, and balrogs are aggressive and will relentlessly pursue the player into danger. Orcs communicate with one another, have scouts all over the place, are cowardly alone but bold in large groups, are attracted to strong leaders such as captains or named uniques, and love to press in on the player as soon as they know he's under attack from behind.

5) The player's stealth score is calculated based on the number of adjacent walls around the player. This makes corridors the best source of concealment (6 adjacent walls), but the concave corners of an open room are almost as good (5 adjacent walls). Of course, with the aforementioned enemy patrols, corridors are a high traffic area whereas the corners of large rooms are low traffic. This creates an unbelievable sense of tension when the player is hiding in the shadowy corner of a room, waiting for the huge orc patrol to pass, hoping none of them will wander into the corner and bump into him.

Of course, none of that would be fair without some positive incentive to fight in the open and Sil provides for that in spades. Your character can learn a number of abilities that let him move and attack at the same time. Combat in Sil gives large penalties to the player's evasion when multiple enemies are adjacent, so the player is further encouraged to keep moving in order to avoid getting surrounded.

All in all, I think Sil is a fantastic roguelike which solves the door problem in an elegant fashion.

> but rushing forward and getting shot is on a different level: it's simply a mistake, and players learn to avoid it.

Or you are good enough to rush and kill everyone before they kill you, which is quite satisfactory.

A clever thing Doom (2016) does is rewarding the player with health and ammo for engaging enemies in melee combat.

They also made it look really cool, which I think is also a factor.

> it's especially bad in roguelikes, where luring enemies to doors is a common tactic.

Ah ha yes my thoughts exactly while I read the article. I'm not throwing away an hour of procedurally generated airplane time-wasting fun by walking all the way into that room, doorway is just fine for me.

The other thought I had was that old America's Army game. When actually played "correctly" it was extremely slow paced and "boring". It wasn't usually doorways (honestly doorways were more exciting because you actually had some suspense about the doors &corners hiding aspect). Rather it was just hiding in bushes and waiting to move until someone far back told you where the sniper(s) was looking and if it was safe to bolt to the next bush. For like 20 minutes, which was an eon considering if you died at the beginning of the round you had nothing to do, and e.g. CS rounds were like 2 minutes.

Welcome to modern (i.e. post-WW1) infantry tactics.

I didn't read it but I saw an article the other day about an army sniper getting a medal for spending 3 days crawling across a field to get a shot at a high value military target and then another 3 days crawling back out.

Nobody would play that game. (also when did he poop?)

> (also when did he poop?)

Probably before heading out and then once or twice during the week he was out there. It's not a big problem.

The more urgent question is, how did he get water?

Camelbak?

I don't know specifically, but before (days?) launch astronauts will eat a "low residue" diet that decrease bowel movements.

I'd imagine in such a case as you described, a similar strategy c/would be employed.

The Onion did an amusing parody a few years back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTkgi7scKo

We really still haven't done much to make the bad guys act like they have any intelligence at all. It's just swarms of unintelligent bad guys which cannot be faced head-on. Essentially because earlier generations of gamers kited, now most PC builds require kiting.

At the beginning of my career I toyed with the idea of specializing in game AI but decided I didn't want to write games for a living. I didn't entirely like what games were doing to my friends.

I recall that Halo 2 made a big deal out of the fact that part of compiling the game maps included putting metadata in about terrain and cover, which is why some of the mobs would hide behind crates when wounded. You had to play hide and seek with them the same way they had to do with you. I'd really like more of this. In theory these bad guys have been in this area for a long time. Of course they should use the terrain to their advantage.

And as you mentioned about lobbing grenades around corner, the reverse should also be true. If one grenade blew up in this spot nothing is stopping another one from coming. You should avoid that area for a while, and move to where you can shoot anyone who comes into it.

But I think the real problem is this Rambo model of games. In reality, a single assailant against a large number of armed defenders should never be able to attack their way into a base. They should be pinned down by the occupying forces until the ammo runs out. You could sneak in, but you can't just show up with a rifle or machine gun and get anywhere. But aside from the possible solution of harvesting comedy gold from this trope, this reality based model would be really, really boring.

> We really still haven't done much to make the bad guys act like they have any intelligence at all. It's just swarms of unintelligent bad guys which cannot be faced head-on. Essentially because earlier generations of gamers kited, now most PC builds require kiting

Most people don’t find actually smart AI fun to play against. It’s why modern online games have ranked matchmaking, because it’s the most fun to play against someone who is a little bit worse or better than you.

> But I think the real problem is this Rambo model of games. In reality, a single assailant against a large number of armed defenders should never be able to attack their way into a base. They should be pinned down by the occupying forces until the ammo runs out. You could sneak in, but you can't just show up with a rifle or machine gun and get anywhere. But aside from the possible solution of harvesting comedy gold from this trope, this reality based model would be really, really boring.

The Metal Gear Solid games (especially 1,2, and 3) are exactly this. It doesn’t take long to learn to be quiet; if you cause an alarm, teams of enemies with way better guns and armor than you show up and kill you.

>Most people don’t find actually smart AI fun to play against

This is a common myth that has basically never been tested. I know devs (particularly of stealth games) claim as much from their playtests, but I hope I don't need to point out the troubles with the approach of playtest-driven game design.

At the end of the day nobody has ever actually given an actual shot and released, say, a stealth game with guards that are similarly good at their jobs as real guards would be and have a vision range of more than 5 meters.

It's one of those super common game design wisdoms like 'let your your player jump a few frames after they've left the platform, otherwise it'll feel bad' and it's applied in most jump and runs because it's the right thing to do and then you get one of the most critically praised jump and runs of all time like super meat boy which uses exactly zero of these common wisdoms and instead just works with proper and tight game design.

There are too many games in this world that I don't think you can make that statement. Have you really played all of them?

I can definitively say that in some games the stealth is so difficult that you need to use exploits just to complete it at all instead of taking the simple combat route of just killing everything. In Warframe all guns instantly alert all enemies, melee weapons and thrown weapons are silent but in reality they produce sounds too. If the AI was alerted by them then the only way to do stealth would be to just use permanent invisibility (most players don't even bother because it's too difficult).

I am wondering if there is any games on the market where the visibility of the player is modelled on their projection upon the eyes of the enemies.

The more frame-by-frame difference there is of that projection, the more visible you are.

Seems like possibly quite a resource-hungry solution. Or maybe not?

> It's one of those super common game design wisdoms like 'let your your player jump a few frames after they've left the platform, otherwise it'll feel bad' and it's applied in most jump and runs because it's the right thing to do and then you get one of the most critically praised jump and runs of all time like super meat boy which uses exactly zero of these common wisdoms and instead just works with proper and tight game design.

Can you give examples of games that implement this, where jump and run is also a core mechanic?

I've only seen this in Dead Cells, co-creator of which argues that the game wasn't supposed to be a jump and run in the first place.

It makes sense SMB wouldn't implement these crutches as it's literally the whole challenge of the game.

> But I think the real problem is this Rambo model of games. In reality, a single assailant against a large number of armed defenders should never be able to attack their way into a base. They should be pinned down by the occupying forces until the ammo runs out. You could sneak in, but you can't just show up with a rifle or machine gun and get anywhere. But aside from the possible solution of harvesting comedy gold from this trope, this reality based model would be really, really boring.

Deus Ex ducks this trope. It's technically possible to shoot your way through, but it is much easier and quicker to talk or sneak your way through.

> But I think the real problem is this Rambo model of games. In reality, a single assailant against a large number of armed defenders should never be able to attack their way into a base.

On that note, I wish more shooters weren't just Rambo. Some of my favourite battles were ones where it felt like I was part of a larger offensive (I think Call of Duty 1 and 2 did this a lot). Unfortunately, the gaming industry completely ignored that design and went on to make one-man army games instead because of the power fantasy, which I find boring. I want to be part of an army. I want to be part of a war. I want to see dropships fly overhead. Artillery smashing the other side of the ridge. Fellow soldiers being gunned down as we push on an entrenched position.

If you enjoy multiplayer games, the Battlefield games could scratch that itch

Your point on time limits reminds me of XCOM 2, where Firaxis added turn limits to most missions to combat this same problem. They ended up doubling back a bit in the expansion by adding more untimed missions and a setting to ease the timer, because a sizable amount of players complained that they were being forced to make bad decisions. I personally agree with you on this and think that needing to optimize a bad situation is more interesting than always being able to use the boring but effective strategy, but it's clearly not for everyone.

I think the XCOM 2 example is a good illustration of the kinds of invisible lines that gradually get drawn around a long-running series over time by players' expectations. People expect the next game in the series to play fairly similarly to the previous ones, so if the designers take it too far in a different direction, the players recoil. It doesn't even really matter if the new direction is objectively better. It's just a "New Coke" problem -- people expect Coke to taste a certain way.

In the case of XCOM 2, I don't think timed missions were by themselves a bad idea. It's just that they were different enough from what people expected from an X-COM game that they didn't fit. They pushed the design of the game across one of those invisible lines.

The time limit was a bit too arbitaray. I think instead of failure, a time limit on extra rewards is more favourable. The Xcom enemy within expansion did it right by making a time limit hidden (with sound clues) for the extra "meld" reward. You could split your team and hunt for the reward, but risk trigger multiple enemies, or forfeit the reward for safe play. The player is in the control seat, not the game.

> It happens in most genres, e.g. it's especially bad in roguelikes, where luring enemies to doors is a common tactic.

This is something I've really struggled with in my own roguelike where despite spending a ton of time on interesting procedural level generation and somewhat sophisticated monster AI, the gameplay often devolves to:

1. Peek out of a corridor until one monster notices you.

2. Retreat back into corridor where monster follows.

3. Dispatch.

4. Goto 1.

It's just not that fun. I think the real core game design issue this highlights, that crops up in a lot of places is when the optimal play style is not an enjoyable play style. It puts players in an unfun position of having to deliberately play "worse" to have more fun, but they feel like they're "cheating" the game or forced to do more meta-cognition than they want.

Here's some ideas I've had for my roguelike to try to address this (most of which I haven't had a chance to implement yet):

1. Put more cover and interesting decor inside rooms so that there are more interesting tactics available in there than in corridors and so that heroes don't get surrounded as much. In particular, half-cover tiles that can't be walked through be permit range weapons to go over aid the hero if they have a ranged attack and monsters don't because then they can pick off monsters while not being attacked in return.

2. Give monsters the ability to pick up or destroy loot. So if you see some treasure in the room the clock is ticking to get it before the monsters do.

3. Give monsters a "home" tile that they try to stay near. So they won't chase you too far into a corridor.

4. Make monsters wake up other nearby monsters.

5. Make monsters smart enough to not pursue the hero if other monsters aren't also chasing.

6. Give the hero more area effect attacks. This means they are less effective in corridors. This is one I really like and have implemented. In particular, I gave each weapon category a special attack that will hit multiple monsters across a couple of tiles. But that only works if there is enough open space to take advantage of it. The good thing about this is that instead of preventing (through smarter AI) or punishing (through things like closing doors before the player) the corridor strategy, it instead rewards going into open spaces.

> Here's some ideas I've had for my roguelike to try to address this

Also consider making some monsters lie in ambush, where they try to stay hidden until the hero is in a good position (for the enemy).

In real life, I'd rather explore the rest of the corridor when there are no more monsters around, and even more importantly I would exploit the stupidity of monsters that forfeit their positional advantage. Why should I do something different in a game?

Because games are supposed to be an alternative to real life.

> when the optimal play style is not an enjoyable play style

Reminds me of the old line about pudding farming in Nethack: "The DevTeam has arranged an automatic and savage punishment for pudding farming. It's called pudding farming."

Another technique is to provide limited ammo, forcing the player to figure out how to move forward without killing everything, which means there are enemies pursuing from behind as well. Open map designs (such as Doom II) were great for that, because an enemy you woke up at the beginning of the level could end up almost anywhere on the map, providing pressure from behind and creating tension when you had to backtrack. It's less interesting when you can afford to sweep through a level exterminating everything you see.

There’s a school of design thought that enumerating a bunch of stuff is itself to blame for dull gameplay.

As an alternative, consider that many of the best maps in games (1) were authored by the players/community and (2) had a competitive market (like choosable servers). Eg Dust 2 and the original DoTA map.

A poor comparison, yes, but you’ll learn from the design of big community competitive FPS maps. There are lots of ways to improve encounter design in “classic” FPSs. Or maybe just the process of building the level needs to change.

A recent interesting example of a way to fix this is CrossCode, an RPG/maybe Action RPG. The way they do it is you heal to full quickly out of combat, but if you remain in combat and get longer and longer kill streaks, it increases your odds of getting rare drops (and might improve exp/money gains as well, I haven't tested that portion). You have to weigh the risks of continuing to push on at red health vs going for more high end drops.

> "player benefits from minimizing risk", which is usually boring.

If the player is enjoying themself exploiting these attributes, then how is it boring? Is it boring to the spectator? If so, what does that say about the act of playing a game?

> If the player is enjoying themself

Well, sure.

But the issue is that optimal gameplay isn't always fun for the player, but it may be too strategically effective to ignore.

The game in the article isn't likely to maximize fun for the player if the player feels obligated to abuse the door in every single combat encounter. Or use the same overpowered weapon and always have enough ammo to ignore the rest.

Save-scumming often suffers from this as well where the advantage of getting a good RNG roll (like which item will appear in the chest) is so good that the player can feel obligated to reload the game 20 times every time they encounter a chest. You could fix this by making a chest contents deterministic, like based on some global seed. Or replace save-files with an autosave-only feature.

Good game design can save the player from themself and force them to have fun, so to speak.

Making games fun is hard.

> which are IMO an underrated method of punishing boring play

On the other hand, most games with time limits these days, the time limits drive me away. They can be done well, but IMHO its rare and typically I prefer boring gameplay to being artificially limited by a timer. To me, timers are less fun and an overly long combat slog. Having said that, you can create less artificial-feeling timers, which I'm largely ok with (for example, an NPC buddy's health bar is essentially a timer, although NPC buddies have their own problems).

> it's especially bad in roguelikes, where luring enemies to doors is a common tactic.

> Ninja Gaiden also has time limits, which are IMO an underrated method of punishing boring play.

Have you by chance played One Way Heroics? It's a roguelike that adds a time limit. There is a black wall of death that moves east at a constant pace, effectively setting a time constraint for you: keep moving, or perish. You extend your time limit by simply moving forward.