"I think a lot of game designers are so tight-assed and want everything to be so balanced and so super under control — I think that’s a bad instinct. We’re making games. We should allow them to go crazy sometimes."
This goes to blizzard
This goes to blizzard
I'm playing Baldur's Gate 2, and the things you can do as a player in that game are just absurd. You can stop time. You can be permanently invisible and kill bosses without ever being detected. You can summon extremely overpowered monsters.
It's honestly so refreshing to have unique abilities. World of Warcraft ruined a generation of RPG design because devs believed that everything had to be "balanced", whatever that means. So we have a bunch of uninspired game mechanics in a pretty shell.
I'm glad to see there's people still acknowledging that games do not have to be fair or sane or balanced. Their beauty is in their madness.
And yes, a wizard who can cast Project Image, Spell Immunity: Abjuration, Spell Immunity: Divination, Improved Invisibility, Time Stop, Abi Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Power Word: Stun and Power Word: Kill is not comparable to a Fighter with a big sword, and he shouldn't be. Attempts to make the two "balanced" just become absurd, as World of Warcraft has shown.
I think the main thing as pointed out is that in seeking balance a lot of 'fun' or 'interesting' elements have to be thrown out.
This makes sense, as mastery of the Weave grants powers that are physically impossible to perform within the world's natural laws.
Magic by definition is bending/breaking the rules of the universe, and as such it should feel like it if you spend the countless hours needed to master it and persevere to the end. It took me dozens of hours of reading the spell descriptions from scrolls to just understand how spells interacted and worked together. It would have been far easier to say "screw it" and go with a fighter or paladin that focuses on disrupting enemy magic users. But I stuck with it, and am glad I did because using the magic system in BG2 is immensely satisfying. It requires an absurd amount of knowledge and expertise. It rewards future time orientation, patience and planning over impulsive "give me whats best right now".
Fighter and wizard wouldn't be very different if they were equally as effective from level 1 to level cap. They'd just be the same class with different variations of the same skills...which is exactly what happened in WoW.
Furthermore, unless you're soloing BG2, you have a party of six consisting of a variety of classes. Therefore, you'd never have to re-roll as a mage, because there would be a mage in your party ready to make up for any magical shortcomings you may have as a fighter. Your role then becomes keeping him safe and taking care of the less magically inclined enemies.
The MMOification I mentioned also has this issue of only allowing you the control of one character. This means all characters must be jack-of-all-trades, because otherwise someone will have to be stuck doing the less sexy roles such as tanking, healing or buffing/debuffing. Or in the case of the BG2 wizard, being completely useless for half the game.
Multiplayer game design has a long way to go before it reaches the wonders achieved in the past decade in single player games.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that enemy wizards also turn all of your strengths against you, because the player does not have any particularly special powers that enemies are denied. In fact, the player is at a far lower level for most of the game than enemies encountered and must rely on wits alone to survive most fights. There's a mod (Sword Coast Stratagems) that enhances enemy AI, and it is universally acclaimed as making BG2 into one of the most difficult games in existence. Every fight becomes a high stakes chess match...one small mistake leads to instant death. Aside from Dark/Demon Souls, I don't know of any games that come close to this level of tactical difficulty. I find these experiences to be immensely rewarding, and have a hard time playing mainstream games because they seriously lack this element.
But again, the fact that they allow you so much freedom in creating your character is incredible. You can even triple class! I sincerely miss this kind of freedom combined with the incredible depth of the AD&D 2nd ed rules.
I'm looking forward to Pillars of Eternity, but I'm quite sure that mechanically it won't be nearly as fun as BG2. Those developers just know better than to implement such insane mechanics again. Which is why it won't be nearly as entertaining.
For example, in the MMO I am creating, you can catch bats, hold them for a while, and then they become your pets (if you don't hold them long enough, they remain wild). Some people gathered up hundreds of bats, then released them in a small room. When other players came into that room, they were swarmed and die. After letting the trap sit for a while, they would return, cast a fear spell to disperse the bats, and then collect the loot.
It was a cool trick, and probably super fun for the players involved. But, if I left the exploit in, it would be happening all the time, and would wreck the game for everyone else. In single player games, the worst a player can do is beat the game using an exploit, which is not necessarily bad.
It seemed like in classic there were all kinds of hidden tricks, and bugs to exploit. Most of which were pretty harmless.
However the best players knew all the tricks and used them to their advantage. If you wanted to do some of the top tier content you essentially were required to know tons of little tricks to min/max the game.
Now everything is super streamline, no tricks, everything is documented. But the game is a little less fun. Instead of finding fun, we now have to be handed it. Plus the game is orders of magnitude easier... When was the last time you died in a 5 man?
I don't think balance ruined WoW, I think it was that Blizzard just kept dumbing it down.
Once they decided that every single player gets to do every single thing in the game it was ruined because you have to make everything so accessible. I remember killing C'Thun... we had a diagram on where to stand, responsibilities for which stalks to kill and in which order, hell, even running into the room wrong could wipe the raid. We were the only guild on the server who could clear AQ40. It was challenging and it was fun. Now 25 strangers can queue up in raid finder and just mow down every boss, usually without even knowing a strat. Just move out of the fire and cycle your 3 buttons.
All of the complexity has been relentlessly striped out of Wow. What's left is a game where you can logon, join a raid, kill the biggest boss in the game, and logoff all within an hour or so.
They took chess and turned it into tic-tac-toe.
My big problem with WoW is the reduction of classes to three roles (tank, healer, DPS) where class is really just a skin on the role, and the reliance on repetition. (We must have cleared some 40-man raid zones over fifty times.) Scripted technical boss fights are, in my opinion, the equivalent of shooters where you need to memorize where every enemy will appear -- it's "challenging" but it's not interesting.
Welcome to the golden age of Entitlement where everyone thinks they deserve a trophy no matter how badly they perform.
This is the attitude of a generation of kids raised on participation trophies who expect rewards just for showing up rather than for accomplishments.
Of course, things go quickly sideways when your fighters that are spawn camping the trolls get knocked out...
Minecraft?
The internet has a role to play in this, for good or ill. One person's emergent gameplay is another person's exploit. Especially in multiplayer games this makes it a huge risk. In MMOs any unusual gameplay is quickly swept away by a horde of minmaxers - everyone insists on following the optimal path, whatever it might be.
It seems that emergent and scripted mix very badly. If you want emergent gameplay the game has to be built entirely around that, like Minecraft or KSP.
It's been awhile since I played Dwarf Fortress, maybe it's changed a lot since then, but I didn't find a lot of emergence there either. Once you get survival down, you have to make your own challenges. That to me is the exact opposite of emergent gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is the ultimate fantasy simulator, but as a game it's quite flat. A game should be able to hold your interest using nothing more than its mechanics if you want to say it has emergence.
The classic example of emergent behavior is Conway's game of life. The mechanics you see when you start playing the game, are exactly the same mechanics that keeps you playing the game years later. There's a depth to the flatness. But it's not a game. It doesn't present you with hurdles to overcome and a path to winning. It's emergent, but it's not emergent gameplay.
The other example is Nethack. There emergence seems to arise from the sheer combinatorial magnitude of the interactions that are possible. Kill a cockatrice and swing it's body around as a weapon, stoning all in one hit. Make sure you're wearing gloves. Don't descend stairs while you're holding a cockatrice and are burdened, or you'll fall down and the corpse will land on you.
There's also Angband. Here strategy and tactics plays the largest role. You spend a lot of time dying learning different ways of handling the games many, many, many ways of killing you. You learn the finer points of when it's okay to use a teleportation staff or when that's too dangerous and you have to use a scroll of teleport level. The actual difference between the two escape devices is very fine, but having one or the other, and the knowledge and experience to know which to use, provides a hurdle any budding player will have to jump before they can become a good player. There are dozens of these hurdles to learn, all evolved over decades of development.
Roguelikes have been the traditional bastion of emergent gameplay, with simulators and world-building games providing a different kind of combinatorial experience, another sort of emergent gameplay arises in fighting games. Huge depth of gameplay dynamics arise from little invisible boxes moving across the screen. Changing the amount of time an attack lasts by a single frame can make a huge difference in how that character fares against certain opponents.
It appears to me that each form of game, be it the top-down roguelike, RTS, fighting, FPS, has to find its own way to be interesting. MMOs come in many shapes and sizes, people play them for different reasons. I think the ultimate reason why you don't find emergence in MMOs is because combinatorial effects don't work as well when you're compounding human intelligence rather than algorithms. You can strike a careful, delicate balance game design-wise when all you have is one source of intelligence to contend with as opposed to thousands.