What do you think about the concept of a game having one form of gameplay that is intentionally less desirable/involved than another with the design rationale being that the less desirable gameplay is used as a way of motivating the player to achieve the goals necessary to keep playing the more desirable form of gameplay?

For example: You've signed up with a futuristic navy and PART of the gameplay involves getting to control a small patrol craft. The normal course of upgrades (rising through the ranks) would have you move up to larger, more complex and more interesting ships with greater and greater autonomy. But failure in combat or the OTHER parts of the game (displeasing a political officer, angering a powerful aristocrat) would affect these chances.

So normally you'd be able to choose where you fly, who you engage and what weapons you fire. If you failed enough times, though, you'd be demoted to a #2 spot which would deny you the ability to roam the game map freely (the newly promoted captain's picking tasks and targets now).

Fail further and you'd be only in charge of firing weapons (busted down to tactical). Further failure would be an abstraction of the futuristic equivalent of swabbing decks until finally you're introduced to the airlock, marooned or expelled (depending on the professionalism of the service).


The potential charm I see is that, as a player, you might have a real connection to characters and events in the game and the story you made would be your own. Telling the political officer what you really think about the incompetent ruler or refusing to babysit the aristocrat's bratty daughter now potentially means something at a visceral level, and you might strategize how to buffer or protect yourself from these possibilities.

Of course, it could also mean that you just quit the game.

Thoughts?

I'd like this. When failure leads to realistic, dramatic, longer-term outcomes, the player appreciates success much more, and is much more in touch with the in-game world, leading to enhanced immersion.

Edit: I'm talking about MMOs in the like of Eve Online.

[Edited by - Konfusius on June 2, 2010 9:42:25 AM]

What happens when "player expectations" aren't in line with "developer expectations"? Sounds like you got yourself a deck swabbing simulation from what little you've mentioned.

I'm not too keen on it. Bad gameplay seems like a poor choice of stick to me, and there is no carrot to encourage the player to abide by the failure, as opposed to just reloading a previous save.

Failure is a frustrating experience. In my opinion this would compound it further by punishing the player with a period of reduced enjoyment. I might tolerate it up to a point, but I suspect I would most likely revert to an earlier save rather than experience a degradation in the gameplay.

It also seems to me like a potential waste of developer time. Do you really want to spend time and resources developing intentionally un-fun deck scrubbing gameplay which only a handful of players will be bad enough, and masochistic enough to ever actually experience? And even those few who do stick through it probably wouldn't thank you for it.

I'm all for doing something more interesting with failure than ignoring it, or reloading the last save, but in my opinion, designing intentionally poor gameplay to punish the player is not the way forward.

In principle something like this could work, providing motivation and a greater sense of depth - although having "demoted" gameplay which isn't actually fun in and of itself raises red flags for me.

I also have some reservations about the practical implementation of something like this - how do you present meaningful choices to the player and give them some way of gaining an insight into the likely affects of their actions? I don't think being demoted for choosing the wrong response from a multiple-choice dialogue list would be appropriate.

If you take a situation which has a stick and find a way to make everything uniformly more enjoyable, you end up with a carrot instead. Ordinary gameplay, which used to be boring, would now be enjoyable, as ordinary gameplay should be - and what used to be a merely enjoyable aspect of gameplay (piloting the craft) would now be awesome. Screw up enough times and it reverts to a merely enjoyable level of gameplay; do well and it will become more awesome.

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Original post by lithos What happens when "player expectations" aren't in line with "developer expectations"? Sounds like you got yourself a deck swabbing simulation from what little you've mentioned.

It's possible, although "deck swabbing simulation" implies a totality of experience I tried to ward off by bolding "PART". I've been crossing an open-ended space exploration game with a stats heavy life sim. It's so odd it may just not work, but if it does the time management aspect would have lower tasks as a penalty / obstacle to character development and opportunities to excel. In terms of time management, if you're stuck cleaning radioactive waste from the ship's fusion core shielding for the majority of the day/game turn you miss out on chances to hobnob with the brass for special missions or flirt with the influential ambassador's pretty daughter.

Clearly the absolute lowest state you can reach must be interesting in and of itself. But I'm stuck wondering if it has to be AS INTERESTING as the higher ranking gameplay.

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Original post by Wavinator Clearly the absolute lowest state you can reach must be interesting in and of itself. But I'm stuck wondering if it has to be AS INTERESTING as the higher ranking gameplay.

I think there is plenty of precedent for lower ranking gameplay which is less interesting - consider most MMOs and many RPGs where the player starts with combat options amounting to little more than "attack or flee". The problem is that there is usually a strictly upward progression in gameplay complexity and interesting-ness - falling back to a markedly less interesting style of play after having "earned" the interesting stuff may aggravate some players. Part of this frustration would be due to the fact that the player's skill level has grown as more gameplay options have been introduced: being put back to a point where you are ahead of the learning curve is bound to kill engagement, but maybe if you can change the gameplay style while keeping a similar level of difficulty the player will accept the change more readily - we all know rank and job difficulty are not always entirely in line with each other...

There are systems in place which are somewhat similar to your idea - some MMO games have a "prison" area where a PK-ing player spawns after being defeated and has to "serve time" by doing simulated menial activities before they return to the game proper. The difference here is that the prison is ostensibly a punishment for the benefit of the other players (reducing the incentive to PK and preventing griefing chaos) and certainly isn't any fun. I believe that in Oblivion the player could also go to prison but would not be forced to "work", but could escape instead. This is something quite different as it adds some depth to the experience and a sense of punishment without involving menial labour - perhaps there is something analogous to this which could work in your game?

Making the game un-fun as a penalty for being bad at it doesn't sit well with me, but the flipside, the idea of unlocking the most rewarding gameplay types through achievement, is great.

I'll work my butt off to get a grappling hook or acrobatic robot suit in a game, because the transformation of gameplay is a fine reward for me. At the same time, having that suit revoked when I try to do fancy stuff that's unlikely to succeed would make me feel bad, and would cause me to play conservatively in order to maintain the status quo, effectively reducing the enjoyment I get from the rewards.

So if I'm captain of a starship and I play it like James T. Kirk, but my hare-brained risk-taking causes me to spend a month manning a comms station every time it doesn't pan out, then I'd wind up playing as a boring, bean-counting, by-the-book commander, with adventure supplanted by reasonable returns.

Konfusius mentioned EvE Online, which is an example of the good and bad of this idea. If I invest a billion isk in a Tech-3 Strategic Cruiser with a sweet setup, that represents weeks of effective flying and earning and training in lesser vessels. On the one hand, I'm now rocking crotches in a sweet Loki-class ship, which is fast and powerful and sexy, and that makes me feel like I'm winning at EvE. On the other hand, if I screw up in it and it explodes, I'm right back to flying a Tech-1 battlecruiser or *shudder* a mining barge, and it's dozens of hours of hard work to get in another Loki.

The difference between that situation and what you describe here is the mandatory change in gameplay. When my Loki pops, I have a choice between flying a Hurricane battlecruiser (which works a lot like the Loki, just not as rad) or getting into my Covetor mining barge (a totally different game) or parking myself in a station, opening up the market window and managing orders for a few days without even seeing the stars in order to regain my lost glory. If I get demoted to a different role on the same ship, as you suggest, then I'm stuck doing that undesirable job until I pay my dues and get back int he saddle. That rankles.

How about introducing that Hurricane/Covetor/Desk Job mechanic into your system? Give the player a rank, and have that slide up and down with performance, with doors opening and closing in accordance with rank. So if you're a Lieutenant Commander, you can apply for the command of a corvette-class ship, with all the sweet rewards and gameplay that entails, or you can serve as first officer on a frigate, doing the appropriate duties there, or you can get a job a ways down the chain of command on a destroyer. If you excel in any of these roles, you get promoted to Commander, and can choose either to move up the chain of command on your current ship (or a ship of the same class) or keep you job, but on a bigger vessel. If you screw up and get busted down to Lieutenant, you can either bounce down a job level on your ship or just go do your job on something smaller.

If I love being the Tactical Officer on my Frigate, but get promoted, I can just go be a Tactical Officer on a destroyer, which is the same gameplay, but more of it. If I suck at it, but really enjoy it, I can get busted down and go be a Tactical Officer on a Corvette. If I love my ship and crew and want to stay around, I can move up or down the ladder on the same vessel.

That's an example for military vessels, of course. If I'm a pirate captain and I botch the job, I might find myself in the airlock right away, or I might just have to kill a couple mutineers before resuming my command without further accountability for the errors.

I'm not sure about this. It sounds like an attempt at realism, but Realism Isn't Always Fun.