Why aren't games more "aware" of the player's choices?

[gurugeorge]

Query re. game design, thought it related more to this sub-forum than the others.

I was just playing Encased there and vaguely thinking, "Man there's not much ammo for sale in this game, I guess they just assume that you'll be crafting some - but I haven't gone down crafting at all hardly."

I don't know whether that's right or not (I'm not far into the game and haven't really looked at it, maybe ammo is simple enough to craft with just a low level of the relevant skills and I just have to look into it more carefully, or maybe it's balanced right and I'm just being too profligate with ammo), but it got me thinking something I've often thought.

When you create a character, why don't developers have it so that the game has more junk related to the build you've made, instead of cluttering up the game with stuff that's potentially relevant to all choices, often leading to pointless searching for stuff that you have to lug about and sell, which then (I should think) puts weird constraints on the economy, plus also takes up inventory space that could more fruitfully be taken up with stuff that's relevant to your gameplay style, thereby forcing you to make relevant choices at that level.

A game is after all merely an illusion of a virtual world, a Potemkin virtual world, it isn't itself (or can't be without a hell of a lot more work, I should imagine) an actual simulated world that notionally goes about its business even when you're not interacting with it. Why isn't the illusion more dynamically tailored to your build choices (and even story choices too, to some extent, as per the intention behind Daggerfall), to your interaction with it at point of contact?

I mean, sure, being disappointed sometimes is part of overall gameplay, it has to be, at all levels. But I often feel there's a lot of waste and irrelevancy in RPGs. The game could be streamlined in good ways around this, so that you "get to the bit" without having to labour through irrelevance so much.

e.g., if you build a character a certain way, why can't the loot tables instantly be tailored around your choices, the percentages shuffled behind the scenes (as it were)?

Or does that happen already in some games, and I just don't notice it?

 

[MF]

It's the level scaling argument. Do you want a persistent world or a world that shapes itself around the player?

More of a design choice than a limitation.

What I did with Titan Outpost is only have the generation of the world cater to the build, and then be persistent from then on, barring simluationist aspects. For example, the companion you're most likely to get first has skills that are complementary to yours at chargen. I still think that's a nice way to deal with this, but your mileage may vary. I don't think CRPGs can get away with shaping the world around the player like a live DM could. The cracks would show. Even level scaling tends to piss me off because it's such a transparent mechanism.

 

[spectre]

why can't the loot tables instantly be tailored around your choices, the percentages shuffled behind the scenes (as it were)?

The most obvious answer would be: that's more work and ain't nobody got the time for that.
If someone were to be more philosophical about it, what's the point of doing extra work if it only hides content from players.
Also, your typical casual only ever plays the game once so nobody will really appreciate this.

Finally, items are rarely completely useless in an rpg; at the very least, you can always sell it, or do other things if there's a crafting system to allows it.
All in all, I don't think it's productive to second-guess the player too much, muh freedom is one thing,
but I think it can lead to the gameplay being skewed towards the designer's favorite way of playing.

Or does that happen already in some games, and I just don't notice it?

I recently played Inquisition: Martyr and the drops are skewed towards your current class, i.e. you won't drop weapons unique to other classes.
It does reduce the clutter, but it's not a typical choice for this genre, because of the shared stash everything is potentially useful.

So there's a more in-depth answer to your question right there.
If a game is loot heavy and makes constant use of customized drop tables, adding a few variables is usually no biggie, so it's natural for games like this to have mechanisms you suggest.
Also you want replayability, so people will actually notice and appreciate this. So, roguelikes are a natural fit.

You get this in ADOM, for example, some character classes have slightly fudged drop tables. If you play a spellcaster, the game generates more spellbooks. As a priest, you'll never see a wizard spellbook and vice versa.
If you play a shopkeeper, the game now spawns an increased number of shops, if you have the food preservation skill, you will find more edibles (corpses), and if you have Gemology, you'll start finding gemstones among the debris.
etc. etc.

 

[Angelo85]

Another example of a game that uses dynamic loot would be Resident Evil, which tracks how much ammo for which gun you have (and I think healing, too) and adjusts spawns accordingly.

In general though it seems like spectre said: extra work for the devs to create special loot tables is deemed financially ineffective. It's not over by just creating the tables, you have to iterate with game design, balance, bug testing etc. this costs time/money which could be spent in other departments for more bang per buck.
A better way to spend development time/money is for flashy features that get noticed by the majority of consumers at first glance, thus increasing perceived value. Better to invest in another artist for flashy GFX, not a professor of economics or neuronetworks.

Or as the old saying goes better graphics = better sales. Sad but reality of the market.

 

[gurugeorge]

Yeah I suppose, knowing nothing about programming, I have the layman's view, "Well, can't you just program it, *huff puff?*" But I forget particularly the point that things will always go wrong and it all needs to be tested, which takes time and money.

Also the point of tailoring it to the likely audience - I'd forgotten that ARPGs sometimes do do that with loot, because that is one genre where a substantial percentage of players are going to be playing the game again and again, whereas with RPGs most people will only play maybe a couple of characters at most, and mostly once with the character they usually play.

I guess it's just a wistful ideal. Maybe in the future when developers can use AI in some way to help them design more complex games at not much cost, some of the busywork relative to that kind of design could be handed off to the AI. (Skynet smiles )

(It's funny how I didn't see the analogy with level scaling, which I loathe. Somehow the idea of loot-appropriateness doesn't seem so obnoxious to me.)

 

[Maxie]

Query re. game design, thought it related more to this sub-forum than the others.

I was just playing Encased there and vaguely thinking, "Man there's not much ammo for sale in this game, I guess they just assume that you'll be crafting some - but I haven't gone down crafting at all hardly."

I don't know whether that's right or not (I'm not far into the game and haven't really looked at it, maybe ammo is simple enough to craft with just a low level of the relevant skills and I just have to look into it more carefully, or maybe it's balanced right and I'm just being too profligate with ammo), but it got me thinking something I've often thought.

When you create a character, why don't developers have it so that the game has more junk related to the build you've made, instead of cluttering up the game with stuff that's potentially relevant to all choices, often leading to pointless searching for stuff that you have to lug about and sell, which then (I should think) puts weird constraints on the economy, plus also takes up inventory space that could more fruitfully be taken up with stuff that's relevant to your gameplay style, thereby forcing you to make relevant choices at that level.

A game is after all merely an illusion of a virtual world, a Potemkin virtual world, it isn't itself (or can't be without a hell of a lot more work, I should imagine) an actual simulated world that notionally goes about its business even when you're not interacting with it. Why isn't the illusion more dynamically tailored to your build choices (and even story choices too, to some extent, as per the intention behind Daggerfall), to your interaction with it at point of contact?

I mean, sure, being disappointed sometimes is part of overall gameplay, it has to be, at all levels. But I often feel there's a lot of waste and irrelevancy in RPGs. The game could be streamlined in good ways around this, so that you "get to the bit" without having to labour through irrelevance so much.

e.g., if you build a character a certain way, why can't the loot tables instantly be tailored around your choices, the percentages shuffled behind the scenes (as it were)?

Or does that happen already in some games, and I just don't notice it?

space rangers 2 already exists and other gamedevs feel threatened by it

 

[Viata]

Another example of a game that uses dynamic loot would be Resident Evil, which tracks how much ammo for which gun you have (and I think healing, too) and adjusts spawns accordingly.

Wasn't it dynamic difficulty in RE? Like the better you play, the hard the game gets with more bullet-sponge zombies(or whatever it's called in the recent games of the series), less ammo, etc.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

because I don't want to play a game with a world that's magically tailored to my character

 

[darkpatriot]

Adjusting loot to be more relevant to the player's class/build isn't that hard, and many games do it. But it is a design decision that some developers like and some don't. It is generally considered a form of streamlining since it reduces how much time you may have to spend dealing with junk you won't need or use while also letting them provide a wider range of useful loot for you to choose from. But like most streamlining, it is also considered more casual and something that lowers the difficulty of the game while also making the world/setting feel more artificial.

 

[gurugeorge]

Adjusting loot to be more relevant to the player's class/build isn't that hard, and many games do it. But it is a design decision that some developers like and some don't. It is generally considered a form of streamlining since it reduces how much time you may have to spend dealing with junk you won't need or use while also letting them provide a wider range of useful loot for you to choose from. But like most streamlining, it is also considered more casual and something that lowers the difficulty of the game while also making the world/setting feel more artificial.

But the normal method just clutters your mind and your inventory up with irrelevancies. Sure, you can sell irrelevant junk as someone said above, but as I pointed out, doesn't the economy of the game (which is also an illusion of an economy) have to be adjusted to that? (For example, without the junk, chests could be filled with actually psychologically rewarding amounts of moolah instead of 1gp here and another there.)

Better to have your mindshare taken up with choices that are actually relevant to your gameplay, no?

because I don't want to play a game with a world that's magically tailored to my character

When it comes to level scaling, sure, I want to have the sense that these creatures are what they are, and I can take risks or avoid them. But it seems to me that what you pick up in the world (from mobs, crates, etc.), is a different thing. In that context you don't know from "tailored." If the situation were comparable, then every single box and item in the world would have to be filled with random realistic, context-relevant items of some value. But that's a waste of mental and inventory space.

 

[darkpatriot]

Adjusting loot to be more relevant to the player's class/build isn't that hard, and many games do it. But it is a design decision that some developers like and some don't. It is generally considered a form of streamlining since it reduces how much time you may have to spend dealing with junk you won't need or use while also letting them provide a wider range of useful loot for you to choose from. But like most streamlining, it is also considered more casual and something that lowers the difficulty of the game while also making the world/setting feel more artificial.

But the normal method just clutters your mind and your inventory up with irrelevancies. Sure, you can sell irrelevant junk as someone said above, but as I pointed out, doesn't the economy of the game (which is also an illusion of an economy) have to be adjusted to that? (For example, without the junk, chests could be filled with actually psychologically rewarding amounts of moolah instead of 1gp here and another there.)

Better to have your mindshare taken up with choices that are actually relevant to your gameplay, no?

I am not personally against it in most cases, unless the game is trying to present something closer to a simulated world, but there is definitely a perception of that being a casualization and streamlining of a game, which many gamers and game designers state that they dislike. I do think if it is too blatant it is lame because it feels like the game is just handing you unearned things, but it can be done in more subtle ways that aren't as obvious without multiple playthroughs.

I think a better approach is to design your itemization so there are fewer things that are junk in the first place and/or to create additional gameplay systems that allow you to make use of that junk.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I feel like games that generally do this don't announce that they do.

That said, it seems like survival horror games do this a bit. Someone above mentioned Resident Evil, I think the spinoff RE:Outbreak series did something that too. I remember reading somewhere that Left 4 Dead does something along these lines, except that whenever you have a lot of ammo and low health, the game spawns more ammo, and vice versa. Sort of a cruel way of doing this.

 

[gurugeorge]

I thought of one positive side of omni-loot - as you play the game, at some point you've eventually read what all the bits and pieces are, which might make you think up other types of builds. That would be optimistic on the part of devs though

 

[Tyranicon]

I often find it funny that enthusiast forums can get into these comparably ivory tower discussions, when the devs actually making the games can't get basic progression right, or even in some cases understand dice math.

 

[Norfleet]

e.g., if you build a character a certain way, why can't the loot tables instantly be tailored around your choices, the percentages shuffled behind the scenes (as it were)?

Or does that happen already in some games, and I just don't notice it?

They are. And you do notice it. Every time you get the perfect item for the wrong build? Yeah, we did that on purpose.

I think a better approach is to design your itemization so there are fewer things that are junk in the first place and/or to create additional gameplay systems that allow you to make use of that junk.

Honestly, while I can see why games are flooded with low-effort junk, what baffles me is the junk that developers clearly put a lot of time and effort into making. That are still junk.

 

[Ravielsk]

Because depending on the complexity of character stat system it would be either pointless or too much work to deliver a potentially broken game mechanic. If you have a simplistic stat system like in Dark Souls or Gothic then a "adaptation system" is pointless because there is so much overlap between builds that adopting the game to them would literary change nothing. Alternatively if you go for a very complex system like the ones in Arcanum or Fallout you inevitably run against a wall of "well what even is the players build?", what would the adjustments be based on? The highest starting skill? The highest three? What if the player just buffed the attributes they do not intend to level? And so on and so on.

Its just not a endeavour worth the time investment because best case scenario its will end up invisible to the player and worst case scenario it sabotages the character creation right from the get go.

 

[Krice]

Creating detailed role-playing with classes that are starkly different is hard. It's much easier to focus on stats (etc.) alone and leave game world more generic for everyone. Role-playing in mainstream (and indie) games is not that deep. You can mainly choose warrior vs. magic characters (and everything between them); the choices are focused on the type of combat.

 

[tritosine2k]

A better example here is not loot but ordering companions. Let's say you always use certain companion to clean up certain trash mob. Then it's natural to expect things in response, disdain or unsolicited something something. Just like there should be such response if you ask for certain loot to be gathered instead of getting down and dirty yourself.
And this is a natural expectation/occurrence because (...) and devs are more of a computard than figuring (...) out really.

 

[Norfleet]

Then it's natural to expect things in response, disdain or unsolicited something something. Just like there should be such response if you ask for certain loot to be gathered instead of getting down and dirty yourself.

Who actually does that, though? The real reason anyone asks companions to loot is because there is so much loot that you need everyone to haul it. What would impress me more is not companions that make snarky responses to common actions, but companions that actually learn procedures, so that if you commonly have them pillage everything not nailed down, they'll come to recognize it as standard and start doing it without being prompted.

 

[Metronome]

A game is after all merely an illusion of a virtual world

It's just fundamentally the abstractionist vs simulationist issue. There are some games that go pretty extreme in your direction. I remember Loop Hero having each class only have drops relevant to class and no junk. It worked alright there because the gameplay was very abstract.There are also games like Cataclysm DDA which are very heavily into simulation and so the loot is attempting to reproduce what you would find in everyday life, and leaves you to find creative uses for it if possible. Then there are games which fall in between or go even farther.

I have not had great experiences with games being streamlined for the sake of streamlining though. They might throw the baby out with the bathwater in the process like what happened with Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. There isn't an absolute advantage to something being optimal as it can lose the spirit of what it was in the process.

 

[gurugeorge]

A game is after all merely an illusion of a virtual world

It's just fundamentally the abstractionist vs simulationist issue.

Is there really a "versus" there though? Simulation can be abstract too, as you point out.

[Bloviating on - don't expect that you read or respond if tl;dr ]

If you think of full concrete simulation being something like the Holodeck, where you're simulating camping (on the way to the dungeon) by actually virtually camping, that's one extreme, then something like Chess as the other extreme, where you've abstracted away everything but some bare oppositionality of forces with simple rules, both are in essence full world simulations, because conflict can't be conducted in a vacuum, it's always part of a world (e.g. the black and white squares represent, or initially represented, "friendly" or "unfriendly" parts of the territory).

IOW, simulation is the "master" concept, abstraction is in service to it, and you have as much or as little of it as may be required by a) player preference, convenience and QOL, b) technological, energetic and ROI limitations. All games are simulations to some degree, or start off like that (and then "art for art's sake" things are hived off from that initial simulationist intent, and become things-in-themselves - people get interested in creating puzzles or mental challenges or exercises for their own sake, that no longer need to simulate anything, and there's a fuzzy boundary there, a transition from simulationist intent to self-contained intent, parallel to the similar movement in art generally after the camera was introduced).

This goes to the larger point that art is (at least initially, as above) mimesis, because the mind is mimetic (an ongoing internal modeling of the world, which is necessarily selective and abstractive). Reading a book describes (mimics) a world, and your imagination fills in lots of concrete detail that's impressionistically suggested by the text. Games do a similar thing with small objects on a table, or images and text on the screen, except in the case of games you become the protagonist(s), you're not just reading about him/her/them, and the abstraction is as much or as little as required by a) and b) above.

CRPGs are adventure simulators, and saying they're about combat/encounters, or about builds, or about story, or about roleplaying, or about C&C or whatever, is like saying, "I like the cherry chocolates in the box of chocolates, not so much the minty chocolates or the nutty ones." The primal adventure template they're simulating (the classic "mediaeval fantasy" ones) is that feeling of adventure as Frodo is getting out of the Shire, meeting up with his companions, and encountering evil for the first time with the wraiths. They capture that feeling, that exhilarating moment of transition from the cheerful, sunny homeland to the dark, danger and evil of the outland, when I'll wager just about everybody who ever read LOTR fell in love with it, and wanted to relive and repeat that moment, in some form. Hence the popularity of the tabletop games and then the computer games. (The other main variants are the solo adventurer and the s-f context, but let's face it, it was really LOTR that kicked the whole phenomenon off, that combined with the inspiration of scaling down wargaming to represent it.)

 

[Jugashvili]

The illusion of an internally consistent world that exists beyond the player can make games more engaging and enjoyable by helping players suspend disbelief. YMMV, of course.

 

[Tavernking]

I often find it funny that enthusiast forums can get into these comparably ivory tower discussions, when the devs actually making the games can't get basic progression right, or even in some cases understand dice math.

The single upside of my life becoming too busy for game dev is that now I get to sit in the ivory tower!

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

Because it takes a lot of time to account for everything especially since a game has to be finished before you run out of money or end up spending too much money and not being able to make a profit. I too hate spending money.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Because persistence is difficult and requires a good understanding of database design.
Because game engines are designed to only process what the camera can see, outside of that it's all custom implementation which applies to my first point.
And then there's trying to make it all work as fast as possible.

 

[Tavernking]

Because it takes a lot of time to account for everything especially since a game has to be finished before you run out of money or end up spending too much money and not being able to make a profit. I too hate spending money.

Exactly if you're going to spend an extra month adding lots of C&C you need to be sure that extra C&C will increase your profits accordingly to make up for the time you just spent. Most gamers just don't care too much about C&C